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How Literature Works

Listen every day at 11:15am and 7:15pm

'How Literature Works' does exactly what it says on the tin. It's a 100-episode guide for the recreational reader - people in reading groups would be a good example - who love reading but may not have studied it in any formal sense. It doesn't tell them what to read, but rather how to get the most out of their reading - and hopefully, by the end will have given anyone listening the confidence to venture outside their comfort zone, take on "Ulysses" and win.

In the coming weeks, the series will feature a potted history of literature from 4000 BC to the present, a brief overview of lit crit, the history of books and publishing, what goes on inside a writer's mind, the genesis and development of storytelling and how readers extract meaning from within a text.

Presenter Paul Kent is also inviting listeners to engage in a dialogue with the series telling him of their own experiences of reading and understanding books, and the most interesting stories will be woven into the series.

The full script will be available here on the Oneword website every week.

To contact Paul, click here.

The Script

How Literature Works

Part 01

Hello and welcome to "How Literature Works" - a series of programmes that will hopefully do exactly what it says on the tin - expose the workings of novels, plays and poems, so that by the end we'll all be able to read as efficiently as possible. By using the word "efficiently", I've no desire to imply that there is a finite amount of meaning in a particular work, and, if you know the ropes, it's perfectly possible to extract all of it. Rather, I hope that everyone listening will be able to fully engage with a text, and enjoy it (or not) with a more complete knowledge of what's going on within it, why the writer created it in the first place, and to have the confidence to push outwards from their comfort zone into more unfamiliar areas of literature. That's the ambition - and if together we achieve it, we won't have done too badly.

There's an awful lot of reading and book-related activity going on at the moment. Book clubs are thriving all over the UK, on TV and the radio. The radio station you're currently listening to broadcasts over six and a half thousand hours of serialized books a year and more books are being published in the UK than ever before. Tens of thousands of people are discovering the joys of reading, and there is now a number of new ways literature can be accessed - on the internet, on CD and by download or podcast. There's government figures to back this up if you can be bothered to find them; but if you can't a casual glance at what other people are up to on public transport will support this the thesis just as well. More and more people seem to have their noses in a book. And if you enjoy reading this is surely a good thing. At the very least, a book can while away a few spare minutes every day, or make the journey into work more bearable. You can read a book to escape into another world that may be more interesting than your own; or, if it's the right book and you're in a susceptible mood, it can engage you at deeper levels of emotional and intellectual attention and actively nourish your spiritual life. In short, just like Lord Reith hoped for from his fledgling BBC on its foundation in 1922, you can be entertained and informed.

So far so good. But there's more to reading than scanning the words and turning the pages. For whatever reason we pick up a book, we each engage with it in a different way. There are as many different ways of reading, and as many possible outcomes to the act of reading as there are readers. This may be dependent on what sort of book we're reading; how it's written; the subject matter; our likes and dislikes; how and where we're reading it; our own expectations; or any or all of the above. It's basically a three-way relationship between us, the writer and the culture we inhabit. And it's this relationship we're going to be examining at in the course of these programmes. Along the way, we'll be looking at the history of storytelling and publishing; how writers write and how readers read.

And how the academics in our universities and colleges, and the reviewers in our newspapers and periodicals try to explain what's going on in a given text.

So we're not necessarily looking at what to read, but how to read - and why we bother reading at all. By which stage, whether you're new to the game or a seasoned pro, you'll be ready to tackle any book, even James Joyce's near-incomprehensible Finnegan's Wake, and be able to get the most out of it.

And I'm interested in your experiences of reading too. Feel free to e-mail me at any point during the series with your thoughts, observations and experiences at [email protected], and we'll incorporate some into the programmes and get a dialogue going. For example in last Sunday's Independent , there was an article bemoaning the fact that the latest crop of literary fiction - Andrea Levy's Small Island and Yann Martel's Life of Pi were singled out - are unwittingly contributing to the degradation of fiction because they're too easy to understand, and yield up their meaning too readily. As you'll find out in these programmes, it's a point of view I've absolutely no sympathy with whatever, but you might. Let me know if you think that the harder we have to work as readers, the more enriching the experience. You might just persuade me to alter my views. Well, you never know. Anyway without further ado, let's get on with exploring How Literature Works.

As we’ll see, that’s not necessarily a bad thing; but it may seem odd that we’re unable to fully account for one of the most significant talents that separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom - the ability to create sequences of words that can, in the hands of those who know what they’re doing, play their readers like pitch-perfect musical instruments. I mean, how do you account for the following experience, which is one I hope we’ve all shared.

You’re reading a book - it doesn’t matter if it’s a novel, a collection of poems or a play. You occasionally nod appreciatively at a well-turned phrase, an apt description, an observation that strikes a chord, a shared opinion. But then, gradually, you feel something more powerful begin to steal over you. Or it may smack you right between the eyes. It’s an involuntary synthesis of the conscious act of attention with a physical urgency that may involve the spinal column, the hairs on the back of the neck, or, in extreme cases, a moistening of the eyeballs.

During these episodes, there’s often an accompanying sense of synchronization between the self, and the worlds both outside and inside the book that is felt rather than understood. The experience also inspires a number of related responses, the two most powerful being joy at the privilege of being able to feel this rush, and wonder mixed with gratitude that there are writers who can produce this liberating and invigorating effect. It’s the closest the brain comes to having an orgasm - that is, assuming the brain plays a significant role in this mysterious onset of nervous stimulation.

And that’s the problem. We can’t pinpoint where it comes from or what will prompt it; it can occur at any time and in the unlikeliest circumstances; it can’t always be called up at will - re-reading the same passage doesn’t guarantee a repeat performance; no-one else may have the same reaction as you, no matter how heartily you recommend that they read it.

The novelist James Joyce used a posher word than ‘orgasm’; he referred to these frissons as ‘epiphanies’, events that can occur at any time, and in the least-looked for places. They can emerge from the essences of practically anything, animal, vegetable or mineral, and are often content to simply announce their presence. What the perceiver makes of them is up to him. At root, they’re “a simple sudden synthesis of the faculty which apprehends,” which have sufficient revelatory power as to make them seem almost religious. Here’s Joyce’s full definition, originally published in ‘Stephen Hero’, a fictionalized autobiography he started writing in 1904:

He [Stephen Hero] was passing through Eccles' Street one evening, one misty evening, with all these thoughts dancing the dance of unrest in his brain when a trivial incident set him composing some ardent verses which he entitled a "Vilanelle of the Temptress." A young lady was standing on the steps of one of those brown brick houses which seem the very incarnation of Irish paralysis. A young gentleman was leaning on the rusty railings of the area. Stephen as he passed on his quest heard the following fragment of colloquy out of which he received an impression keen enough to afflict his sensitiveness very severely.

The Young Lady-(drawling discreetly) ... 0, yes ... I was ... at the ... cha ... pel

The Young Gentleman- (inaudibly) ... I ... (again inaudibly) ... I ...

The Young Lady-(softly) ... 0 ... but you're ... ve ... ry ... wick ... ed .

This triviality made him think of collecting many such moments together in a book of epiphanies. By an epiphany he meant ' a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments. He told Cranly that the clock of the Ballast Office was capable of an epiphany.

Lakeland poet William Wordsworth also had these orgasms, christening them ‘spots of time’ in his long autobiographical poem ‘The Prelude’, dating from the late 1790’s:

There are in our existence spots of time
That with distinct pre-eminence retain
A renovating virtue, whence . . . our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired;
A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced,
That penetrates, enables us to mount,
When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen.
This efficacious spirit chiefly lurks
Among those passages of life that give
Profoundest knowledge to what point, and how,
The mind is lord and master–outward sense
The obedient servant of her will. Such moments
Are scattered everywhere, taking their date
From our first childhood.

So if you get these moments, you’re in pretty exalted company. And there’s absolutely no reason, if we’re reading great literature with our full attention, why we shouldn’t all experience them. They’re one of the things that makes great literature great.

These moments are just one manifestation of Meaning, the term I’ll be using throughout this book to identify the most important ingredient that makes literature work. Meaning is what animates literature - it’s what we bring away from the act of reading, and what, ultimately, keeps us coming back for more. It can take many forms; some totally inexplicable, like the cerebral orgasm, and some instantly and completely comprehensible. And all points in between. Meaning can obfuscate, allude, hint, equivocate or state directly. It can energize, perplex, inform and entertain. It can be spiritual or cerebral; strictly personal or universal; concrete or evanescent; consistent or capricious, compliant or unruly, subtle or obvious. Often at the same time. You can think you’ve grasped the meaning of a piece of writing, then a single word completely undermines your interpretation. Perspectives can change from word to word, line to line. Or not.

It’s a big subject.

However, if we stop to consider for a moment, the idea that meaning can be ultimately ‘knowable’ doesn’t stack up. If it was, a critic could proudly proclaim, “Well, now my book’s nailed Marcel Proust, there’s no need for anyone else to write about him any more.” Which is, of course, nonsense. You would have to be mind-bogglingly arrogant (or seriously deluded) or simply an American academic to make a claim like that. Not only would Proust immediately fail to fascinate if he were to be ‘nailed’, all Proust scholars would be thrown out of a job. And there’s more of them than you’d think. I met one at a party the other night. Honest.

But it would be equally foolish to assume that all attempts at interpretation are a complete waste of time: simple unitary explanations can sometimes help us understand the nuts and bolts of what’s going on in a text, and are often essential to establish a base camp in more difficult literary terrain (modernist novels, for example), as long as we recognize that these are largely temporary explanations, and that the work in question will gradually yield up its riches as we come to understand it on its own terms. And this can take time. We must also acknowledge that every generation will re-invent its own version of Proust based on its prevailing cultural and aesthetic pre-occupations, and anyone who thinks he can halt this process will soon, like Canute, find the tide of history lapping round his ankles. Meaning is constantly undergoing a process of re-assessment and regeneration, which, in the long run, helps literature stay vital and keeps a lot of reviewers, critics and academics on their toes and off the streets.

Part 02

As yet, literary culture hasn’t put as much effort into understanding the literary orgasm in all its degrees and manifestations as we have in trying to probe its sexual equivalent. Walking into a newsagent’s, you might be tempted into thinking that the generative organs held the exclusive franchise on moments of heightened nervous stimulation. There’s no ‘ten-step program to improve your shelf life’ screaming out from practically every publication on display, no advice for those who want to spice up their literary encounters. Yet culture can contribute as much if not more to our spiritual make-up, to our intellectual well-being and sense of self as a satisfying sexual relationship. And it’s not as messy.

The slipperiness of meaning is only part of the problem here; the tools we have at our disposal are a tad on the primitive side, which doesn’t help. Sure we know plenty about the mechanics and the circumstances of writing - scholars have identified and labelled every last element of grammar and syntax that writers use in their compositions; dictionaries provide us with exhaustive and exhausting listings of the definitions of individual words; there’s a huge number of biographies, histories, journals and memoirs we can use to better understand the writer and his milieu. But the deficiencies in our understanding lie not in the availability of context or even literary taxonomy, but a way of examining what mixes these ingredients together to produce meaning. It’s not so much what literature means where we fall down, but our appreciation of how it means it. What holds literature together. Without that knowledge, we’re merely scratching the surface of the subject, unable to account for why we love it.

Granted, it’s often difficult to explain a love for anything, but it’s one of the contentions of this book that we’re not as far down the road with literature as we should be.

Regrettably, the act of reading doesn’t yet have a developed ‘-ology’ to help us.

The closest we come is this mongrel discipline called ‘literary criticism’, which isn’t a science or even an organized body of consensual knowledge. Rather it is a collection of disparate opinions and impressions expressed with varying degrees of confidence and insight that doesn’t possess much sense of coherence. In fact, as we noted right at the start of this book, it’s in one hell of a mess and needs a radical overhauling if anyone wants to take it seriously ever again. You don’t necessarily have to possess a qualification to be a literary critic - you simply have to have views about literature (and that, of course, goes for me too). So while this is potentially advantageous in that anyone can join in the debate, we have tended to confuse conviction with ability, and it’s often the emptiest vessels that have rung the loudest. Or else we’ve allowed ourselves to be hypnotized by polysyllables, or approaches that have promised (but usually failed to deliver) a ‘scientific’ alternative to the polite impressionism that passed for criticism until the 1940’s. So there’s no shortage of ‘-isms’ - just any that transcend theory and are actually useful for the general reader.

That’s not to completely dismiss some excellent work that’s been done in this field, however. For example, the pioneering critic I. A. Richards famously discerned four different facets of meaning: "sense" (what meaning means), "feeling" (the reader's response towards that meaning), "tone" (the author's attitude toward the reader), and "intention" (the effect of the other three, whether conscious or not). It’s a perfectly workable system, and these ideas are still influential over 80 years since their formulation. You’ll find a few of them echoed in this book, and they’re still widely taught in universities. Or you can read practically anything by critics like Frank Kermode, John Carey, Harold Bloom, Susan Sontag, Lionel Trilling, Cleanth Brooks or TS Eliot and come away enlightened about one corner or other of the study of meaning. But it’s all rather piecemeal, and few (OK, practically none) of them pitch their arguments outside the walls of academia, or at best, the extremely well-read.

The most obvious result is that works of lit crit rarely trouble the bestseller lists (at the time of writing, the highest-placed title makes a distinctly unimpressive 503, 840th in the Amazon rankings), and they aren’t the first port of call for fans of literature who want to know more about it.

In my experience even the good ones are too personal or impressionistic to strike a chord, too highfalutin’ for their conclusions to be generally applied or even understood, or else too dry to be engaging. I’ve never seen the word ‘orgasm’ in any of them, certainly not in the context of the act of reading.

Not only is fun missing from the agenda, it’s rare to find a writer who doesn’t straitjacket meaning in his desire to sell you his opinions. Like it or not, criticism tends to work at the objective end of meaning, its major currency being explanation rather than suggestion. And this often builds inappropriate structures within the text, which can seriously interfere with its capacity to resonate with the reader.

So until a) our critical approach can take in both emotion and cerebration, and b) can reconcile the desire to explain while at the same time acknowledging textual richness, our interpretations are likely to remain, at best, partial readings, and we won’t get as much out as literature as we should. Hence this book - these are its twin ambitions. Modest, aren’t they?

There are four parts: in the first, we’ll look at the Big Themes that have dominated the study of meaning over the last three-thousand or so years; the second will examine how recreational readers (i.e. you and I) interact with meaning; the third, what writers understand by meaning and how that understanding influences what and how they write; and the last will consider how successfully lit crit interfaces (or doesn’t) with meaning, and how it can better help us enjoy our reading. In short, it’ll deal with the ways meaning gets into a work of literature, what it does when it’s there, and how we extract it, without letting too much daylight in on the magic that is creativity.

The study of How Literature Works and what it means dates back, in the West at least, about 2,500 years to writers like Hesiod and Pindar in Ancient Greece, who drop the odd literary apercu into their work (usually slagging off other poets), and to philosophers like Xenophanes and Heraclitus, both of whom nit-pick their way through Homer. Heraclitus, in particular took issue with the way we understand language and literature, complaining that we don’t pay enough attention to their meaning. And that much of what passes for literature is philosophically unsustainable. So no change there then. In fact, we’ve been going round in circles ever since, so this section’s going to concern itself with a handful of those Big Themes that just won’t go away.

Before we dive into the discussion, however, it might be an idea to anchor our observations in some solid ground. Let me introduce you to the Meaning Line.

MEANING------------------SIGNIFICANCE

It won’t have escaped your notice that this is a rather simple binary model, owing to the fact it’s currently empty. But, trust me, it’ll expand and develop as the argument progresses. All we need to do for now is define the terms that lie at either end of it, and their relationship to one another. Basically, they’re both aspects of how meaning is ordered within a text.

By ‘significance’, I’ll be referring (as consistently as humanly possible) to textual content that exists in a kind of suspended state. It’s meaning that conveys a portentousness that can’t be defined, rationalized or explained in any structured way, and that is irreducible by logic. It’s almost like a hunch, or a sixth sense that you know exists, but you don’t know what it is or why you’re experiencing it.

This quality of suspension can indicate either of two things: first, that there isn’t enough tangible explanation for the rational part of the brain to work on; second, that there’s too much varied or conflicting data which cannot be prioritized or ordered into sense.

Just because this significance remains frustratingly vague doesn’t necessarily diminish its power or its potential impact - in fact, its very refusal to be reduced to an explanation can render it all the more, well . . . significant. By virtue of its imprecision, it retains an air of attraction and even fascination. Indeed, it lies at the root of the literary orgasm we looked at earlier.

Which brings us to ‘Meaning’ at the other end of our line. Meaning is a rather easier proposition to describe; it’s a more crystallized version of significance, a quantity that can be either partially or completely explained. That explanation can range from being a direct correspondence void of any ambiguity (This means That and no questions asked), to being the vaguest hypothesis or suggestion of what is meant (This could mean That. Perhaps. If that’s OK with you). The absolute extreme of meaning would be something completely unequivocal like an imperative (STOP!!!!) - something it’s impossible to interpret in any other way other than that which is intended.

So what we’ve created is, for now, is like a clothes line we can peg our ideas on. It’ll turn out to be a useful visual mnemonic when things start getting a bit abstract, providing us with a spectrum of possibilities to work within.

But, I hear you say, why choose to work with this particular pair of opposing qualities? Because, quite simply, that’s the trajectory literary criticism has taken from its earliest manifestations, travelling all the way from meaning, where the journey started back in Ancient Greece, to the most meaningless form of significance, which it reached in France in the 1950’s or so when the Deconstructionists came along.

So, conceptually, we’ve travelled all the way from the extreme left of the line to the extreme right. And all points in between. Let me explain.

When WB Yeats asserted that it’s only through the clash of opposites that any progress can be made, he was echoing what had been going on in philosophy for many centuries. Opposing qualities such as objectivity and subjectivity, art and life, soul and body were often paired up, more often than not for the sake of argument. Take Manichaean dualism, for instance - the dichotomy between good and evil. Likewise that between the heart and the brain, Yin and Yang. No matter how contingent the relationship between the two opposing qualities, it does have the desired effect of establishing a set of parameters inside which a debate can take place.

Footnote:

Validity in Interpretation

ordering

Part 03

In Irish folklore there’s a character who steadfastly refuses to tell the truth as a matter of principle. “Why bother,” he asks, “when you can tell a story instead?”. Not only does his remark embrace the origins of the storytelling impulse (to make real life more entertaining), it also opens an enormous can of worms for any student of meaning, namely: How true is it? And this is Big Theme #1 in our list.

This question begs dozens more, and here’s a few of them: if literature is founded on lies, or at best embroidered truth, what relation does it bear to life as we live it ? Is it of any value beyond simple entertainment? Can we learn anything from literature if it has such a dodgy provenance? And here’s the killer - Surely meaning has no meaning if its roots aren’t firmly anchored in actuality? And if you agree with that last statement, what you’re saying is that the whole right-hand half of our Meaning Line shouldn’t actually be there, because all those terms we lined up in the right-hand column in the list incline towards the unverifiable.

This is the basic gripe of all the philosophers who say literature isn’t worth studying because it isn’t ‘real’. What gets their goat is that this form of lying can actually be a lot of fun. And because it’s fun, literature keeps getting away with it, and no-one listens to them - who aren’t, in general, a whole heap of fun. This is why St Augustine refers to “poetic fictions” as “the devil’s wine”. Definitely a case of sour grapes.

There’s loads of disquisitions on this subject, most of them dull, most of them saying the same thing, with a little-read exception from Oscar Wilde, entitled ‘The Decay of Lying’ published in 1905, in which he laments that contemporary novel writers (from whom he singles out arch-naturalist Emile Zola) seem to be losing their capacity for deception. Here’s a representative sample:

One of the chief causes that can be assigned for the curiously commonplace character of most of the literature of our age is undoubtedly the decay of Lying as an art, a science, and a social pleasure. The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction. The BlueBook is rapidly becoming his ideal both for method and manner. He has his tedious ' document humain,' his miserable little 'coin de la creation,' into which he peers with his microscope. He is to be found at the Librairie Nationale, or at the British Museum, shamelessly reading up his subject. He has not even the courage of other people's ideas, but insists on going directly to life for everything . . . The loss that results to literature in general from this false ideal of our time can hardly be overestimated . . . Many a young man starts in life with a natural gift for exaggeration which, if nurtured in congenial and sympathetic surroundings, or by the imitation of the best models, might grow into something really great and wonderful. But, as a rule, he comes to nothing. He falls into careless habits of accuracy . . .

Wonderful stuff. And not without a serious point to make - if you rob literature of its prerogative to play fast and loose with the truth, it will grow dull. And while Zola is far from dull, some of his Realist successors are fantastically prosaic. But they saw it as their duty to record, and not create reality. And some, as we’ll find out later, actually did some good by reporting the day-to-day grimness of people’s lives which might otherwise have been ignored.

In some quarters though, literature remains a rather trivial or even mildly disreputable field to be involved with, or even to study, simply because it’s all ‘made up’. In Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Brideshead Revisited’, the narrator’s cousin Jasper gives his seal of approval to Charles Ryder’s chosen course of study at Oxford;

“You’re reading History? A perfectly respectable school. The very worst is English Literature.”

Back in the 1920’s when ‘Brideshead’ is set, Jasper’s opinion would not have been thought remarkable. The eminent critic Sir Arthur Quiller Couch, speaking in Cambridge in 1917, noted that “ the teaching of our language and literature is, after all, a new thing and still experimental”, and had yet to emerge from beneath the lengthy shadows of the Classics.

At most, a college freshman would have been told to read “two or three plays of Shakespeare; a few of Bacon’s Essays, Milton’s early poems, Stopford Brooke’s little primer, a book of extracts for committal to memory, with perhaps Chaucer’s Prologue and a Speech of Burke”.

In what Quiller Couch calls the “great” public schools, the study of English wasn’t recognized at all. Which makes its current ubiquity seem all the more remarkable.

It’s certainly true that until comparatively recently, the study of English at Oxbridge placed far greater emphasis on the History of the English Language than in analysing texts because, no doubt, the mental discipline was thought to be more rigorous and the results more tangible. Having opinions about drama, fiction and poetry was somehow a soft option. And there was no point having them anyway, because they have no empirical basis and thus do not constitute KNOWLEDGE.

And it’s an attitude that certainly survived into my lifetime.

Although he never said as much, I’m sure my late grandfather was disappointed when I proudly told him I’d won a place at college to study English Literature, as he himself would have absolutely no truck with anything that wasn’t, in his opinion, 100 per cent verifiably true, hence his love of history and biography (which, of course, pose no such empirical problems, do they?) I remember he took me to one side, addressing me in a hushed voice that had the air of someone imparting bad news: “Those stories you read,” (he always referred to literature as ‘stories’), “they’re not true, you know.” After huffily reassuring him I did know the difference between fact and fiction, and coming out with some pretentious guff about art being more real than reality (not knowing what the hell I was talking about), I think I left him wondering whether his grandson had taken leave of his senses. “Well as long as you’re happy,” he said calmly, and the subject was dropped - but not before he’d adopted an expression half way between pity and condescension.

I miss my Grandad. Despite this temporary confusion, he was one of the few Northern men of his generation and class who didn’t automatically think that a love of literature was incontrovertible proof that you were gay.

Of course, all that’s changed now, and in some quarters (as we’ll see by the end of this section), some think that literary meaning isn’t less but more real than reality.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. If we’re going to address such fundamental issues as the status of meaning, we should travel right back to the origins of storytelling to see how ‘honest’ literature really is. Only that way can we be sure that writers don’t simply get their kicks by feeding us an unadulterated diet of lies.

Cue travelogue. . . . . .

. . . . the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They . . . are familiar as the house you live in.”

Arundhati Roy, ‘The God of Small Things’

If it were possible to identify the first story ever told, it was probably motivated by the desire to make sense of some natural phenomenon that defied obvious explanation, like, say the sun, the stars or a range of mountains. The trouble is, we’ll never know, since oral cultures have always, of course, preceded the ability to write throughout man’s long evolution. But if this was the case, (and what does survive suggests it is), our first ventures into literature would have been motivated by the desire to explain something. So meaning at the dawn of man’s literary history could be viewed as honourably educational.

It certainly was for the Australian Aboriginals (thought, at around 40,000 years, to be among the oldest extant cultures in the world). Storytelling was a social event conducted by revered elders of the tribe who were respected for their abilities to explain the surrounding environment, since this was not a gift granted to everyone.

Their stories tell of a "seed power" that exists in the earth. Every meaningful activity or event that occurs at a particular place leaves behind a vibration, like plants often deposit seeds before they die to keep their species alive. And each of these vibrations constitutes a story.

And it’s not just big things like mountain ranges that have their own stories - water holes, animal burrows, even individual trees can too. And, when joined together, these stories form a fabulous (in the literal sense of that word) road map of the local area. The Aboriginals called this potency the "Dreaming" of a place, and this Dreaming constitutes the sacredness and meaning of the Earth.

For example, the Macdonnell Ridge in the Northern Territory of Australia was formed when a line of giant processional caterpillars ran into the back of one another when the leader suddenly decided to stop. And if you gaze on the profile of the Macdonnells, particularly at sunset when they are silhouetted against the luminescent blue of the desert sky, that’s exactly what they resemble. The view is absolutely breathtaking, by the way.

And here’s another: drive for about two hours east out of Sydney, and you’ll come across a set of three massive rocks nearly 1000 metres high which were once three beautiful sisters, "Meehni", "Wimlah" and "Gunnedoo" from the Katoomba tribe. The three sisters fell in love with three brothers from the neighbouring Nepean tribe but their tribal laws forbade their marriage. The three brothers weren’t having any of this and tried to carry off the three sisters by force. This caused a major tribal battle and the lives of the three sisters were put in danger. A witchdoctor decided to turn the sisters into rocks to protect them, intending to reverse the spell after the battle. The only trouble was, he was killed in the fighting and the three sisters remained in petrified form.

Tales like this are still passed down the generations in the form of children’s stories (tourists like Chris and I aren’t allowed to hear the adult versions, as this would violate Aboriginal law). And what better way is there to placate a child’s insistent curiosity than to invent a story for them, when they point at something and ask “what’s that?”, and you haven’t a clue? In the absence of a detailed knowledge of local geological history, how else do you explain how a mountain ridge was formed?

OK, there were no giant caterpillars, but that particular epistemological issue didn’t bother the Aboriginals. And it would almost be churlish to insist that it should.

To the uninitiated outsider, each story not only makes sense of the landscape, it lends it a coherence and vibrancy you can’t find in guidebooks. As you become accustomed to this way of looking at things, the truth or otherwise of the stories is no longer an issue. You delight in other aspects: its inventiveness, energy and fun. You marvel at a culture that actively cherishes an alternative reality, one that resolutely resists received notions of accuracy, definition and classification. It’s peculiarly liberating, and so seductive that you can end up creating your own stories. Meaning, as in the most successful works of formal art, becomes your meaning, meaning that is personal to you. And that, let’s mince no words here, is the most powerful kind of meaning there can possibly be, because it exists within you, and because you’ve had a hand in creating it. So Meaning = Home. Your special place. Furnished by your imagination.

Footnotes:

1. Henry James once famously remarked that there wasn’t much beauty in Zola, but “a great deal of filth.”

2. To actually understand the full implications of aboriginal storytelling is more than a lifetime’s work - a struggle mirrored in Bruce Chatwin’s controversial novel ‘The Songlines’, which was criticized by some aboriginals as over-simplifying their storytelling heritage. In it, the narrator (“Bruce”) meets a Russian scholar, Arkady Volstok, whose job it is to advise anyone proposing to develop areas of the outback whether or not they’re destroying sacred Aboriginal sites while they’re roadbuilding or drilling for oil. In order to gain this knowledge, Volstok has to completely turn his back on his Western cultural and intellectual inheritance and ‘go native’. It’s a flawed but fascinating read.

3. Incidentally, if you’d like to hear some beautifully read Dreamtime stories, visit http://www.dreamtime.net.au/dreaming/storylist.htm, which is part of the Australian Museum website

4. If you visit the Three Sisters, make sure rain isn’t forecast, as they tend to get shrouded in mist. Also, if you walk down to the base of the formation (and you’re not easily frightened) take the funicular railway up. It’s the world’s steepest, and looks like someone built it from Meccano.

5. Thought for the Day: just as Oscar Wilde lamented the fact that realism was gradually intruding on the liar’s art, so some Aboriginals feel that life is getting more ‘real’ as time goes on and that one day, the intellectual climate won’t be conducive to storytelling. Let’s pray they’re wrong - but it doesn’t take a genius to see why, with their numbers diminishing, they might think that. But then Thomas Carlyle was worried by the same thing; as the Industrial Revolution took hold of England in the 1820’s, he was concerned that “the Age of Machinery” would kill off the human imagination.

Part 04

This way of addressing the physical world is something Chris and I first noticed back in the American West several months prior to our Australian visit, when we pitched up in Wyoming at the Devil’s Tower National Park.

The tower itself is the giant monolith that Richard Dreyfuss famously fashioned out of mashed potato as his worried family looked on in the movie ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’. As you may recall, it resembles a huge (1267ft) striated tooth and looks mighty threatening, hence the predictable association with Satan that came courtesy of the white settlers. But the original Native American inhabitants wove stories around this remarkable rock instead of simply dismissing it as the Devil’s work. In fact, no fewer than 5 tribes (the Sioux, Arapahoe, Cheyenne, Crow and Kiouwa) all had a pop at teasing out a tale from it.

The prize for the simplest goes to the Crow.

Once when some Crows were camped at Bears House, two little girls were playing around some big rocks there. There were lots of bears living around that big rock and one big bear seeing the girls alone was going to eat them. The big bear was just about to catch the girls when they saw him. The girls were scared and the only place they could get was on top of one of the rocks around which they had been playing.

The girls climbed the rock but still the bear could catch them. The Great Spirit, seeing the bear was about to catch the girls, caused the rock to grow up out of the ground. The bear kept trying to jump to the top of the rock, but he just scratched the rock and fell down on the ground. The claw marks are on the rock now. The rock kept growing until it was so high that the bear could not get the girls.

The circumstances of the story are often completely different in each tribe’s version, although some share certain details (1). But this wouldn’t have bothered the original storytellers. It’s in the nature of an oral culture - and if you haven’t developed a written language (of all the Native American tribes only the Cherokee managed it) this kind of discrepancy is almost inevitable. There’s no definitive version because every version is true. So everyone is free to personalize the landscape, and may the best story win.

I’d also be prepared to bet there was a simple cautionary purpose to them, such as ‘always listen to your elders and betters’, or ‘don’t stray into unfamiliar territory’ or even ‘don’t play with forces you don’t understand’.

The local tribes seem only too happy to tell these tales to anyone who’s interested - far more so than the Aboriginals who, quite understandably, view their culture as something that can be stolen from them, and that by sharing stories, you’re actually losing part of who you are. The Native Americans don’t appear to have woven the meaning of the tales so inextricably into the fabric of their identity - there’s plenty to go round, and the more the merrier (2).

We then motored on to Bryce Canyon National Park, and where we got caught up in the same kind of storytelling process. Ebenezer Bryce, the Mormon farmer who gave the area its name, once remarked that “it’s a helluva place to lose a cow”, a statement it’s difficult to argue with largely on the grounds of incomprehensibility. Clearly Ebenezer had been alone with his livestock for too long.

Bryce is not strictly a canyon at all, in that it lacks the essential canyon-esque prerequisite of a river running through it. For much of the year it’s a semi-arid terra-cotta coloured wasteland, closely resembling the deserts round Alice Springs half a world away that gave rise to the Aboriginal stories. What differentiates it is the presence of thousands upon thousands of limestone sculptures known locally as “hoodoos”, the products of wind, rain, ice and millions of years of geological upheaval.

Many have been fashioned by the elements into pillars resembling chess pieces, and they’re arranged along ridges, valley walls and sometimes into vast semi-circular amphitheatres.

Through the ages, individual hoodoos have been anthropomorphized, and, as you’re tramping round, you can use their distinctive shapes to navigate (3).

Collectively, however, the hoodoos have had stories attached to them by the original inhabitants, the Paiutes. To the locals, they’re known as “the Legend People”, turned to stone by Coyote, the local God Of Mischief (as in Wile E. Coyote), who got mad because they were decorating their city in gaudy colours that were not to his taste. Once petrified for offending his aesthetic sensibilities, he threw the paint they were using in their faces, resulting in the varied colors visible throughout the formations, whose appearance constantly changes as alternating waves of light and shadow play over them.

And this is but one of many Coyote stories - in fact, of all the local deities, he’s the one who seems to crop up most, for reasons we’ll come to in a moment. Here’s another, this time from the Navajo tribe, explaining the provenance of the name ‘Bear’s Ears Pass’, down the road in Eastern Utah.

These two huge rocky outcrops can be seen from as far as 50 miles away, and were a useful landmark for the early wagon trains that struggled through the region (to give you an idea of how inhospitable the terrain was, the nearby town of Boulder was the last place in the mainland USA to have its mail delivered by mule, as recently as 1941). Anyway.

The story tells of a maiden (“Changing-Bear-Maiden”, whose name, I imagine, sounds beautiful and mellifluous in its native tongue, but hopelessly clumsy in its English translation), who liked to consort with Coyote. Despite warnings from the tribal elders, she persisted with the liaison, and found herself gradually turning into a bear. Coyote thought this mightily amusing, but the elders took a violently different view and killed her, hacking off her bear’s ears so she wouldn’t wander through eternity in ursine form.

The ears were tossed aside and landed where we see them today, just south of the stunning Natural Bridges National Park. Another version has CBM as the origin of the constellation Ursa Major (the Great Bear). (4)

Now contrast this wonderfully playful approach to the landscape with that of the early Mormon settlers. These arrivistes didn’t so much choose to dance with the meaning of the landscape as to disregard it completely as they strove to subjugate the wilderness God had ‘bequeathed’ them.

This new breed of farmer, pitching up in the mid-19th century, was incredibly hard-pressed to scratch even the meanest living from a terrain the indigenous Paiutes and Navajo couldn’t be bothered with. But they persevered, and with some drilling here and some river diverting there, they managed to harness what little water there was to gain a toe-hold in the midst of the wilderness. These were intensely practical people, so when it came to place-naming, they didn’t waste their time with ingenuity or invention.

Some settlements were named for their founders or a prominent citizen, or even after the staple crop - Hanksville being an example of the former and Potato Valley of the latter. Many reflect the Mormons’ religious preoccupations and their love/hate relationship with the spartan topography - the Devil, of course, features a good deal, as in ‘Devil’s Pass’ and ‘Devil’s Backbone Ridge’. Add to these some intensely prosaic names like ‘Green River’ (where, sure enough, there flows a river which is green), and you begin to paint a picture of a stoic race who may well have considered linguistic embroidery and embellishment a waste of energy - or even a tad sinful. These were people who said what they meant, and would probably give short shrift or even a jail term to anyone who claimed their local mountain range had anything to do with giant processional caterpillars, or a canis latrans that could turn maidens into giant bears. It just weren’t natural. Hell fire, they even named one of the most beautiful and magnificent mountain ranges on the planet ‘the Rocky Mountains’. Well what else were they going to be made of? Sometimes, this literal-mindedness gets intensely annoying, and you long for even the slightest shred of evidence that there was something imaginative going on between their ears. But you don’t get it. The philosophers call this ‘nominalism’, where there’s a perfect match between form and meaning with no loose ends or overlaps.

This almost pathological insistence on literalistic interpretations of the landscape has been inherited by the modern-day Park Rangers, many of whom are descended from that original farming stock. Not so much on the grounds of any religious scruples, but reservations prompted by that new religion, science, where accuracy is all, and the imagination is once again shut out. The rangers sometimes go to inordinate lengths to make their factually-based lectures entertaining - one even resorted to singing compositions by Bruce Springsteen, the Beatles, Elvis, and, bizarrely, Peter, Paul & Mary to illustrate his talk on the geological evolution of Bryce Canyon. But try as he might (and I would have given him a pay rise on the spot, he was so enthusiastic), it was still a talk about old rocks. And try as I may, I can’t remember a single thing about it. But I can recall Coyote and what he did to the Legend People.

We can plot the different approaches embodied in these namings and explanations on our Meaning Line:

Meaning--------------------Significance

Nominalism Play

Farmers Indians

The farmers are bang up against the left end of the line. They’re having nothing to do with anything they can’t see. The position of the Indians, however, is more ambiguous: although their stories have a definite visual mnemonic, they’ll play with the relationship between the form and meaning within that mnemonic to create fabulous stories. So, like most fiction, they’re pulling in two different directions at once, both left and right. The forms (the rocks or whatever) are largely unchanging and therefore non-negotiable (which steers them leftwards), while the meaning fluctuates depending on who’s looking at it, whose imagination it’s being filtered through, and how they subsequently shape those perceptions (which tugs them rightwards towards significance).

The currently modish school of ‘Magical Realism’ in fiction (embodied in certain works by Angela Carter, Isabel Allende, Salman Rushdie and Ben Okri) is only really a modern take on this type of consciousness that refuses to differentiate between the real and the fantastic. The more ‘unreally’, or the less objectively reality is depicted, the further right it travels on our line.

So the first conclusion we can draw from this criminally truncated account of two oral cultures is that meaning is born out of a desire to explain something that you don’t understand. But the explanation you’re offering is, of course, a big fat lie (though if we’re being charitable, we might choose to call it a contingent truth). But that contingent truth can be far more entertaining than the actual literal truth.

And here we hit a brick wall. If you want to enjoy your literature, you have to enter an tacit agreement with the storyteller that you‘re going to deliberately turn a blind eye to the deception that may underpin the meaning of his tale (unless, of course, he’s recounting something that actually happened). While some people (like my Grandad) feel uncomfortable with this arrangement, the vast majority of us simply short-circuit the entire issue and get on with enjoying our reading. We even dignify this collusion with the phrase ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ to get over the empirical challenges literature presents us with. Coined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1817, this now famous literary term was first used to describe the editorial vision behind his collaboration with Wordsworth in ‘The Lyrical Ballads’ . . .

in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. (5)

Put like that, the transaction between storyteller and meaning sounds entirely reasonable and respectable: let’s sidestep the reality issue, says Coleridge, because this is by far the least satisfactory way of creating art. But Coleridge was a Romantic Poet and would have overlooked the naughtiness of what he was proposing, which he clearly wasn’t viewing from the perspective of a Mormon Farmer or a literally-minded scientific researcher, who would have had no truck with “poetic faith”.

Footnotes:

1. To read the rest, go to www.nps.gov/deto/stories

2. This, incidentally, might explain their initially puzzling devotion to country and western music, whose lyrics tend to feature stories or a memorable narrative hook of some kind. Tuning to Navajo FM in Colorado, you’ll hear some tribal singing or drumming followed straight away by a chestnut from Merle Haggard or Garth Brooks. The station certainly doesn’t play the hokey sub-Enyaesque floaty New Age CD’s with titles like ‘Passing Cloud’ the rangers put on in the visitor centres, no doubt hoping to evoke the mystical spirituality whitey sentimentally associates with an ancient culture he doesn’t genuinely understand and can never belong to.

3. And it’s a process that’s still going on today - one pair of adjacent pillars was named ‘Marge and Homer Simpson’ by the Park Rangers, until Homer’s head fell off during a severe frost.

4. See www.centennialofflight.gov/essay/Social/ancient/SH1 for full text

Part 05

To those of us brought up in the shadow of Western religion, lying is WRONG. Yet we enjoy it. But before we embark on a guilt trip, let’s take a more detailed look at the figure of Coyote, the arch-deceiver, and see if we can’t figure out what we find so attractive about liars despite any moral scruples we may have.

Coyote’s a trickster, he transforms things, creates trouble, and, as a figure of mischief, he’s one of many in cultures all round the world. There’s also his colleagues Kokopelli and Raven in North America, Eshu and Legba in Africa, the Monkey King in China, Krishna in India, and Brer Rabbit of the American South. These guys (and they are all guys) bring disorder into the world. In every culture that has a trickster god, it’s the other gods who have made the various forms of perfection, but it’s the Trickster who’s responsible for the changes – the mistakes – that have brought about the sometimes deplorable mess and the sometimes joyful muddle that is the everyday reality for most of us.

And guess what? They’re invariably associated with storytellers, but storytellers who lack any real meanness in their lying. They tell porkies just to stir things up.

In his excellent cross-cultural examination ‘Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art’, Lewis Hyde notes that the Trickster figure “feels no anxiety when he deceives. … He … can tell his lies with creative abandon, charm, playfulness, and by that affirm the pleasures of fabulation.” And if that isn’t the definition of what a writer does, I don’t know what is.

So why this worldwide connection between writers and con-men? Because, says Hyde, “Trickster is among other things the gatekeeper who opens the door into the next world” And the next world is, among a host of other things, the Imagination. His mischief is often creative, amusing, attractive, energetic, a deflator of pomposities, and the scourge of the dull; but most importantly, as readers and lovers of literature, we all have a bit of the Trickster in us.

To a greater or lesser degree, we all want to be like him. We admire him, even though, somewhere in the back of our conscience, we know we shouldn’t.

It’s no coincidence, as Hyde notes, that the words artifice, artifact, articulation and art all come from the same ancient root, a word meaning to join, to fit, and to make. To make something fit the circumstances. To accommodate or try to cope with complexities, or that which doesn’t fully make sense. To bring these things within your sphere of understanding, even if you aren’t fully aware of the facts.

And if you look at it this way, lies don’t equal untruth, they equal resourcefulness, energy and the triumph of possibility and invention. Which is what meaning should represent as the animating principle behind great literature. So the teller of stories keeps stirring the pot of meaning using his restless capacity for invention as the spoon, ensuring it doesn’t dry out by constantly adding fresh ingredients. And he makes the recipe up as he goes along.

We can take the argument one stage further if at this stage we introduce the trickster’s close relative and ally the Fool or Jester. And if we look at some famous fools in Shakespeare, they use their art in the form of songs, tales and parables to remind their masters of unpleasant truths, whether it’s in a comedy (‘As You Like It’) or tragedy (‘King Lear’). Although they’re mischievous, sailing perilously close to the wind of their employers’ displeasure, they get away with articulating things none of the other courtiers can. Because, like the storyteller, they have an unwritten dispensation in their job spec to tell the truth as they see it - for which they often receive punishment, because their foolery is usually more real than anyone’s prepared to admit. It also brings home the little strategies their masters use to deceive themselves, those small subterfuges that disguise what’s unpalatable about their personalities or behaviour. As Lear’s fool ruefully notes, “Truth's a dog must to kennel; he must be whipp'd out, when Lady Brach may stand by th' fire and stink.” So the Fool, although primarily a comic figure, tends to know more about reality than those who are nominally in charge.

The same principle can be applied to the madman, for whom storytellers have been mistaken throughout literary history.

When Don Quixote meets the prostitute, Aldonza, he declares, in his deluded state, that she is his Lady Dulcinea, the Virgin Queen of his affections. Aldonza laughs at him, but Quixote continues his adoration, flatly ignoring every aspect of her obviously squalid life as a whore. In the end, Quixote's family hauls him in and subjects him to the cure. When they force him to confront the obvious facts, it kills him. In what I reckon is one of the most poignant scenes ever written, Aldonza approaches his deathbed. In his defeated state (sanity), Quixote finally acknowledges her as Aldonza. "No," she says, "my name is Dulcinea." She has, at last, found the truth within her that contradicts the facts. If Quixote's madness didn't save him, it did, at least, liberate her. The transforming power of lies eventually proves redemptive.

As we’ll see in the following section, poets in Ancient Greece were often thought mad on account of the supernatural inspiration some of them lay claim to. And of course, there’s been artists who actually were mad; the Nobel prizewinner Juan Ramon Jiminez’s prose poem ‘Platero Y Yo’ (Platero and I) portrays a young writer (not dissimilar in height, weight, build and age to Jiminez himself) touring rural Andalucia on his donkey being chased by gypsy children who shout “The Madman!” The Madman!” as he rides through their encampment, on account of his other-worldly appearance and demeanour.

So far then, we’ve gods of mischief, madmen and clowns. To which, of course we must add that fourth category of ‘innocents’ who can get away with expressing things that the rest of us cannot recognize or that we leave unsaid - children.

It’s no coincidence that children’s literature is often described as the most subversive of all genres, since its heroes tend to undermine the mean, dull, platitudinous, money-grubbing, hypocritical adults - and win out every time. They take on the real world - and prevail.

If you’ve got this far, you’ll need no further evidence of the imaginative value of children’s stories. But don’t just take my word for it. The poet Louis Macniece states that “Contrary to what many people say, even now, a fairy story . . . is a much more solid affair than the average naturalistic novel.” And he’s in good company. The novelist Edmund Gosse, in ‘Father and Son’, recalled a childhood without fiction:

Never, in all my early childhood, did anyone address to me the affecting preamble: 'Once upon a time!' ... I can but think that my parents were in error thus to exclude the imaginary from my outlook upon facts. They desired to make me truthful; the tendency was to make me . . . sceptical.

A state from which he evidently recovered. And there are many other eminent examples of those who triumph over the Gradgrinds of this world.

But it’s not just writers and poets who stick up for lying; when Albert Einstein was asked how to cultivate intelligence in children, he advised, “Read them fairy tales. Then more fairy tales.” Similarly, the child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim in his excellent tome ‘The Uses of Enchantment’ analyses the importance of fiction in the educative process. So it’s not just storytellers sticking up for their colleagues - there’s compelling scientific proof that lying is good for you which I won’t re-rehearse here.

And I’ll bet you’ve also noticed that from talking about lying, we’ve now flipped the negative and are talking of truth. How did that happen?

It’s quite simple, despite being a philosophical minefield: it’s the difference between the literal truth and imaginative truth. The latter will always be more powerful because it’s personalized truth, truth filtered through our own perceptions that may owe nothing to any objective criteria of what constitutes ‘reality’. And this imaginative truth is the key ingredient of literary meaning, transcending issues of literal truth and veracity. It’s the salt that gives it flavour, the yeast that makes it rise and the water that bulks it out.

It’s never more powerful than in pre-literary forms, before it’s been recorded, stabilized and solidified, or when it’s in the hands of those whose perceptions have not been dulled by convention - the trickster, the madman, the fool, and the child.

So for the student of meaning, it’s interesting to note this connection between meaning at the dawn of man’s evolution; and the status of meaning at the dawn of each of our lives. The more we grow up, the more sophisticated we get, the more we’d like to hide behind the child in ourselves. Those endowed with imagination grow impatient with realism, which is why literary realism tends to sit uneasily in the canon - it seems merely to rise up occasionally when we collectively get an attack of spiritual nerves in times of civilizational crisis, before shuffling off as quickly as it arrived. We seem to want literal meaning to be more than it is, to believe that there’s something more alive than the surface reality of something. Meaning is therefore aspirational, and even though maturity inevitably dulls our imagination, the recollection of this primal childhood source of energy, of play, of animation, of fun, mischief and transformations not only connects us with a thread of meaning that predates written language, it also stretches into the present day of hard rationality, inflexible systems and unchanging perspectives. And makes them melt away.

Before we travel to Ancient Greece for the continuation of the story of meaning, let’s have a quick read of Robert Graves’s poem, ‘The Cool Web’, that manages to express what I’ve just been arguing more eloquently than I ever can:

Children are dumb to say how hot the day is,
How hot the scent is of the summer rose,
How dreadful the black wastes of evening sky,
How dreadful the tall soldiers drumming by,

But we have speech, to chill the angry day,
And speech, to dull the roses's cruel scent,
We spell away the overhanging night,
We spell away the soldiers and the fright.

There's a cool web of language winds us in,
Retreat from too much joy or too much fear:
We grow sea-green at last and coldly die
In brininess and volubility.

But if we let our tongues lose self-possession,
Throwing off language and its watery clasp
Before our death, instead of when death comes,
Facing the wide glare of the children's day,
Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums,
We shall go mad, no doubt, and die that way.

Footnotes:

1. It is, of course, no coincidence that the fool in ‘AYLI’ is called ‘Touchstone’.

Part 06

Meaning doesn’t often exist in the Pre-Lapsarian state we looked at in the previous section. Sooner or later in most societies LITERACY arrives in the form of written language, bringing LITERATURE in its wake. Storytellers are replaced by WRITERS, who commit their tales to cloth, parchment, vellum or paper. And literary meaning is born, along with its twin brother, literary criticism.

This has its good and bad points, of course - but mainly bad.

Advantage (A): is that by physically recording stories, you can both stabilize and disseminate them, thereby improving their chances of survival; thus, for example, a sizable body of extant plays, poems and philosophy has allowed us to construct a fairly detailed but frustratingly incomplete picture of Ancient Greek culture as it existed two-and-a-half millennia ago. If ‘The Iliad’ and ‘The Odyssey’ hadn’t been written down, they’d have been lost to posterity, and we couldn’t have shared them.

But then there’s three interlocking disadvantages:

Disadvantage (A): Telling stories out loud is a transaction between the storyteller and the listener. While the storyteller retains the same basic plotlines each time the story’s told, a good storyteller will read the reaction of the audience, and alter the tale to their response as he’s going along. The story is adaptable, so the listener can influence its composition, and, maybe without necessarily knowing it, become an active participant in its evolution. This is a connection that’s inevitably lost when the story is read from a text. Like it or not, meaning transmitted from book-to-human can never be as vivid or involving as human-to-human transmission. Now comes:

Disadvantage (B): In his essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, the German philosopher Walter Benjamin explores the effects of replication on the nature of artistic meaning. In the attempt to preserve stories and make them appeal to a wider audience, the writer may try to universalize their meaning by erasing local references, thereby diluting local flavour.

For instance, the appearance of the landscape around Katoomba may not be considered key to the meaning of tribal myths. A writer re-telling the stories of the sisters could use any rocks anywhere. And so a decision may be made to retain key story elements and sacrifice what Benjamin calls textual "accessories," or what we might call ‘local colour’. Meaning is therefore disconnected from the source of its inspiration.

Disadvantage (C): Any meaning suggested by stories is effectively frozen in time when it’s recorded. In this form, the element of play is necessarily removed, as if the creative flame that kept the story bubbling has been taken away from under it during the transition from the oral to the written medium. Robbed of this kinetic energy, it ceases to be a living, constantly-evolving entity, and becomes an artifact. Somehow, seeing something written down makes it look more ‘official’ and even serious, no matter what the nature of the writing might be. And this, put simply, opens the gateway not only to the whole concept of ‘literature’ but to literary criticism, a discipline which the Greeks, with their passion for philosophical disputation, embraced wholeheartedly. So it’s all their fault. It’s the price you pay for writing things down.

Let’s use our Meaning Line in anger for the second time to plot a related set of ideas surrounding oral vs written media:

MEANING--------------------------SIGNIFICANCE

Written Oral

Stability Change

Stasis Development

Official Playful

Form Formless

Permanent Temporary

Study Enjoyment

Enlightenment Pleasure

and so on.

Stories were taking a step leftwards as they gradually emerged from their oral state and were transcribed into a written body of literature. So‘The Iliad’ whose origins we’re almost sure were orally-transmitted stories, was now turned into a book, it’s reckoned, at the command of the Athenian ruler Pisistratos, who feared they were being forgotten. He made a law: any singer or bard who came to Athens had to recite all they knew of Homer for the Athenian scribes, who recorded each version and collated them into what we now call the ‘Iliad’ and ‘Odyssey’. Once the text was relatively stable, it began to be distributed, and we know for certain that ‘The Iliad’ was being taught in Greek schools by the 4th Century BC. So Lit Crate had begun. And by the time Plato arrived, it was reasonably well developed.

Plato (427-347 BC) was the first great literary critic - in fact he’s the daddy of lit crate - and he was a troubled man. Although he was a poet and hence a creator of literature, he was also a philosopher who wrote copiously on the theory and practice of his craft. In fact, he’s wholly or partly responsible for several of the Big Themes we’re looking at now, so his influence is not inconsiderable.

All his chief concerns center on the cultural value of art - he rarely passed any judgment on the subject which removed art from its social context, and his major worry was the fundamental untruth that lay at the heart of his chosen profession. He was worried he was a liar.

If he’d heard the story of the caterpillar pile-up, his poetic side might have praised its ingenuity and the aptness of the metaphor (if he could have traveled to Australia to see for himself, that is), but the philosopher in him (who always seems to win) would not have allowed it to pass unchallenged. It didn’t actually happen, which not only robs the story of its empirical value, but also encourages those who enjoy the metaphor to value fiction over fact, a habit that could not contribute to the overall intellectual health of society. Our innocent children’s story therefore becomes actively dangerous in its subversion of the truth.

So what I was trying to argue away as an innocent pastime in the last section could, in Plato’s view, actually bring down civilization as we know it. Because LITERATURE UNDERMINES MEANING. And a society robbed of meaning quickly find Anarchy banging on the door demanding to be let in. An over-reaction? Perhaps. But let’s look at the philosophy behind it.

According to Plato’s mouthpiece Socrates (who actually taught him, and who features in most of Plato’s works), Literature subverts meaning in three ways:

1) IMITATION. Narration is good, Imitation bad; the former, as Socrates describes it in ‘The Republic’, is when the writer speaks with his own voice. In which case you know who you’re dealing with, and you, as the reader, can agree or disagree as the mood takes you. But when he’s putting words into characters’ mouths, the reader doesn’t usually know who’s actually speaking - the character or the writer. So if a character is based on a figure from history (Odysseus, for example), the reader can’t know whether Odysseus really said what the writer makes him say. Result: confusion, and a dilution of meaning, which, because of this confusion, has been robbed of its authority.

Now put yourself into the position of a writer in Plato’s ideal political set-up. How boring would it be if you could only write in the first person? How dull would your readers find it? The answer is ‘Very’. As Nadine Gordimer notes in her short story ‘Karma’, the authorial creation of character is “the closest a corporeal being can get to . . . living other lives; multiple existence’s that are not the poor little opportunities of a single existence.” So, as a writer, how likely are you to obey Plato’s dictum and swap multiple existence’s for poor little opportunities? The answer is ‘Not Very’. So we arrive at an impasse between literature and philosophy, where Plato decides to park his argument.

So Plato /Socrates (notice he’s not speaking in his own person) knowing the writer’s impatience with reported reality and single perspectives, comes up with his famous cave analogy to trash the idea of imitation, or mimesis.

It’s a hugely long and involved metaphor, and it’s so well-known, we’ll simply summarize it for the record: the problem with art, as we’ve noted, is that imitation is one step removed from reality. Then Plato went one stage further; given that the ‘real’ world we live in is itself an imperfect copy of the ideal world, art is a copy of a copy. And what’s the value in that? Meaning in literature exists at two degrees of separation from the truth.

Then there’s a less familiar argument, which is actually Big Theme #2

2) HIGH/ LOW MEANING

Here Plato starts a discussion that’s still going on today: Does the writer’s choice of subject intrinsically affect the meaning of his work? In short, are there some subjects that are more ‘meaningful’ than others? And the answer is a resolute ‘YES’. Socrates reckons that the writer will always choose emotion (‘”the rebellious principle”) over reason because it not only furnishes more ‘dramatic’ possibilities, it will also appeal to the irrational side of his audience, which is more easily (and cheaply) aroused. And the inference from that is that most theater audiences are only there for spectacle - so they’re actually rather crude and uncouth individuals, because, in Plato’s world view, Rationality, which shuns spectacle, always triumphs over the Irrational, which revels in it. Here’s the crucial passage:

And does not the . . . rebellious principle . . . furnish a great variety of materials for imitation? Whereas the wise and calm temperament, being always nearly equable, is not easy to imitate or to appreciate when imitated, especially at a public festival when a promiscuous crowd is assembled in a theater. For the feeling represented is one to which they are strangers.

Certainly.

Then the imitative poet who aims at being popular is not by nature made, nor is his art intended, to please or to affect the principle in the soul; but he will prefer the passionate and fitful temper, which is easily imitated?

Clearly.

And now we may fairly [say] his creations have an inferior degree of truth . . .being concerned with an inferior part of the soul; and therefore we shall be right in refusing to admit him into a well-ordered State, because he awakens and nourishes and strengthens the feelings and impairs the reason. As in a city when the evil are permitted to have authority and the good are put out of the way, so in the soul of man, as we maintain, the imitative poet implants an evil constitution, for he indulges the irrational nature which has no discernment of greater and less, but thinks the same thing at one time great and at another small-he is a manufacturer of images and is very far removed from the truth.

So literature tends to appeal to “an inferior part of the soul”, such as exists in inferior people who let their emotions get the better of them. Whenever I read this passage, I get rather disappointed that Socrates’ interlocutor Glaucoma seems content to nod like some Pavlovian dog, since I reckon ‘The Republic’ could have been considerably spiced up with a good old ding-dog on this subject. Socrates is such a crusty old snob, he could make a good living on the TV arts review circuit. But the old patsy remains obligingly supine, allowing the Master to make his third point, which is our Big Theme #3 (they come thick and fast with Plato). But that's for next time.

Footnotes:

Part 07

LITERATURE IS INHERENTLY DISRESPECTFUL

It’s taken for granted in ‘The Republic’ that the writer, being a citizen of a city-state, is fully politicized and must therefore play a full and active role in the efficient and appropriate governance of the state. He’d have none of the notion that the artist somehow needs to gain perspective through irony, alienation or whatever, to be necessarily apart from society in order to function: if that was your game, he thought, you might as well leave, since you’re of no use. Meaning should be meant, not distorted by perspective, smoke and mirrors.

So not only was it the writer’s duty to obey the laws of Reason, he should also refrain from any kind of writing that could harm the state’s stability. And that translated as:

a) always portraying the Gods respectfully; and

b) emphasizing only the best qualities in humanity

This is Socrates’ big gripe with Homer - he’s always depicting the deities, from the top down, as all-too human, venal and flawed; and creating characters who aren’t exactly role models for the young. Whether he appreciated this or not, the writer was weakening the state by sowing the seeds of disrespect and focusing on mankind’s sins and foibles. Why not show both groups at their best? (1) And so Socrates concludes:

Therefore, Glaucoma . . . whenever you meet with any of the eulogizers of Homer declaring that he has been the educator of Hellas, and that he is profitable for education and for the ordering of human things, and that you should take him up again and again and get to know him and regulate your whole life according to him, we may love and honor those who say these things--they are excellent people, as far as their lights extend; and we are ready to acknowledge that Homer is the greatest of poets and first of tragedy writers; but we must remain firm in our conviction that hymns to the gods and praises of famous men are the only poetry which ought to be admitted into our State.

For if you go beyond this and allow the honeyed muse to enter, either in epic or lyric verse, not law and the reason of mankind, which by common consent have ever been deemed best, but pleasure and pain will be the rulers in our State.

Great news for the poetry fan, then; an unadulterated diet of hymns to the gods and philosophical biography. But then, you wouldn’t want to be part of the “promiscuous crowd” demanding interesting stuff, would you?

So literature is subversive on these three counts, all of which compromise its meaning. But note, it’s a very different kind of meaning to the quality we were looking at in the last section. It’s suddenly got useful. And not just useful, but politically useful. And if it isn’t politically useful, it’s no good. End of story. Out with the writer. Tricksters not allowed. Responsible men of sobriety in.

But let’s return for a moment to the cave scene, and use our Meaning Line again.

Plato’s triple-Decker concept of reality is a far remove from the sort of oral culture where stories are casually created, embellished and exchanged like cigarette cards. With the advent of literature as a recognizable discipline with sets of rules and regulations attached to it, it’s all got a lot more serious - and complicated. Plato is saying that there are actually three types of meaning: the top layer (the Ideal) is the benchmark against which the other two (the Real and the Artistic) are to be measured, and always to their disadvantage since the relationship is hierarchical. If we plot this model on our Meaning Line, strictly speaking we should have to rotate it 90 degrees so it becomes a vertical axis - thus:

MEANING THE IDEAL Accurate/Truth/Public

___________________________________________________________

THE REAL

___________________________________________________________

SIGNIFICANCE THE ARTISTIC Inaccurate/Lies/Personal

So the story of the girl with the bear’s ears would not be judged on the basis of its entertainment value, but because it never happened - and, more importantly, could not have happened (and this from a man who believed in the Olympian Gods). As such, literary meaning had no place in educating the future guardians of Athens to respect the truth, and was therefore exiled not just for reasons of its mendacity, but for its lack of political utility (which is the standard by which every philosophical concept in ‘The Republic’ is judged). This politically-motivated distrust of literature has proved hard to shake off, and is still very much with us; in fact, it influences how many still conceive of its status and function. I was reading the other day some politician complaining that Jane Austin shouldn’t have been writing fripperies like ‘Pride & Prejudice’ while her country was at was with Napoleon. And he was being serious.

A knock-on argument from this theme is ‘Where does the writer fit in society? Are its practitioners mere scribblers, or, as Shelley described them, ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’? Once again, this is fodder for later in the series, when we look at the way the writer operates. For now, though, it’s worth quoting the adjacent passage from ‘The Defense of Poetry’ to set us on our way:

It is impossible to read the compositions of the most celebrated writers of the present day without being startled with the electric life which burns within their words. They measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and they are themselves perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations, for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age.

Shelley’s impassioned PR job on behalf of his fellow scribes is a clear illustration of his belief that imaginative practice and political activism are inextricably intertwined. Thus far, then, he would have agreed with Plato. Both are convinced that the writer belongs at the very heart of society. Where they would disagree, probably violently, is in their respective conceptions that meaning is ultimately the servant of the state, or an independent barometer the state’s spiritual health (which Shelly argues is the greatest public service you could conceive or perform). So Plato, in ‘The Republic’ argues an absolute loyalty to the state governed by reason (2), whereas Shelley was convinced that the poet should only be loyal to himself and his muse, that shadowy “power which is seated on the throne of their own soul” which even he himself doesn’t always fully understand.

So, to conclude this section of the argument, these first three Big Themes are loosely grouped around the concepts of the historical origins and status of meaning, and we’ve actually covered a whole heap of ground - from oral cultures (and don’t think you’ve seen the last of them) to a society where philosophers have begun to debate the whys and wherefores of literature, what it’s for and how it achieves those ends. We’ve also noted the paradoxical nature of meaning, of lies that can seemingly be truer than truth. For our next few Big Themes, we’ll be moving on to the human origins of meaning within the writer, and the various ways it can be organized within a text. So the first question we need to ask is whether meaning is intentional or accidental.

No one really knows the full story of what goes on inside a writer’s head, least of all the writer - so we’ll never be able to say with certainty how much of his meaning is part of a pre-planned scheme or how much it’s the product of subsconscious influences. But that hasn’t stopped us trying to find out - and that’s Big Theme #4. In fact, it’s a theme that has run and run for well over two millennia, so you can probably gather that it hasn’t been resolved to anyone’s satisfaction - yet.

How you approach the issue depends on your conception of where art comes from - the rational or the irrational bit of the brain. Perspiration or Inspiration. Or, as Aristotle has it, from “a man of great natural ability” or “one not entirely sane”. Let’s plot them on our Meaning Line:

MEANING----------------SIGNIFICANCE

Perspiration ` Inspiration

Conscious Unconscious

Planned Spontaneous

Human Divine

Rational Irrational

Art Nature

So what we’ll be addressing in this section is essentially the image of the writer - do you picture him sitting at his typewriter with a green eye shade, surrounded by balled-up pieces of failed manuscript, sweating and swearing and shaking slightly from the ingestion of too much caffeine, trying to nail down that elusive mot juste? Or is he reclining on the chaise-longue dressed in velvet, the back of his hand raised to his forehead, awaiting the call of his capricious Muse? Does meaning get into literature through a rational struggle, or an irrational effusion?

Footnotes:

1. Plato would have found a sympathetic ear in St Augustine, writing almost 1000 years later, who, in his ‘Confessions’, noted that classical literature tended to make the divide between Gods and men uncomfortably narrow: "These were Homer's fictions, transferring things human to the gods; would he had brought down things divine to us!" Yet more truly had he [Augustine’s teacher] said, "These are indeed his fictions; but attributing a divine nature to wicked men, that crimes might be no longer crimes, and whoso commits them might seem to imitate not abandoned men, but the celestial gods."

Part 08

It’s the old classroom question: “Did Shakespeare really mean to put all that stuff in ‘Macbeth’ about light and dark imagery, sir?” To which the teacher will reply, “For the purposes of this exam, yes. Now shut up.”

Sometimes, writers really don’t know where it all comes from: when Malcolm Cowley presented William Faulkner with the proofs of ‘The Portable Faulkner’, a selective anthology of that writer’s work published in 1945, it enabled him to see for the first time how many of his novels and stories fitted together to form a consistent and coherent body of literature. “Dear Cowley,” he wrote, “The job is splendid. Damn you to hell anyway. But even if I had beat you to the idea, mine wouldn’t have been this good. By God, I didn’t know myself what I had tried to do, and how much I had succeeded.” And on this occasion he genuinely didn’t. (1) It’s in no small measure down to Cowley that we’re now able to navigate our way around Faulkner’s interleaved creation of Yoknapatawpha County, which eventually encompassed 14 novels and numerous short stories. In fact, Faulkner himself got so caught up in the idea he asked permission to write an Appendix to the ‘Portable’, so he could tie up a number of loose ends left dangling after he’d completed ‘The Sound and the Fury’ nearly 20 years before. He clearly wanted to know what his own stories meant and how they finished.

It’s clear that Faulkner had an inkling, if not a complete realization, of what he was doing; in 1936, he’d drawn a map of Yoknapatawpha to accompany the publication of his novel ‘Absalom, Absalom!’, which included several real and fictional places where events in previous stories had occurred. But because the stories don’t form a chronological sequence, and he was inventing new characters and dynasties to populate his County with each subsequent publication, it’s only with hindsight that all the pieces could be assembled by someone with the necessary perspective. And it took a sympathetic critic to do it.

In fact, throughout this section, the work of the writer and critic in establishing meaning will proceed pretty much hand in hand. Because the critic (or the good one that is) can fill in the gaps in the writer’s knowledge of his own output. It follows that a fair bit of the theory we’ll encounter will be applicable to both endeavours.

And so from a Mississippi part real and part imagined, we return to Ancient Greece, and Plato, who would have considered Faulkner’s ignorance of what he was up to as a sign that he was a poor writer.

In the ‘Apology’, the character of Socrates is adamant that a writer needs to know what he’s doing at all times. Otherwise, how can he control his meaning and communicate what he wants to say to his audience? The very idea that writers send out their texts not knowing what people will make of them is beyond his comprehension:

I went to the poets; tragic, dithyrambic, and all sorts. . . I took them some of the most elaborate passages in their own writings, and asked what was the meaning of them--thinking that they would teach me something. Will you believe me? I am almost ashamed to confess the truth, but I must say that there is hardly a person present who would not have talked better about their poetry than they did themselves. Then I knew that not by wisdom do poets write poetry, but by a sort of genius and inspiration; they are like diviners or soothsayers who also say many fine things, but do not understand the meaning of them. The poets appeared to me to be much in the same case; and I further observed that upon the strength of their poetry they believed themselves to be the wisest of men in other things in which they were not wise.

Oh dear. This notion of the irrationality of poets is further developed in the ‘Phaedrus’, where Socrates notes that any meaning that cannot be disputed rationally and consistently is no meaning at all: it needs to be “put to the test by spoken arguments.” Literary studies were, of course, in their infancy at this point, but already critics were displaying worrying traits that he wanted to nip in the bud as quickly as possible. ‘Fanciful’ explanations of Homer abounded, which, Plato notes, are all very nice, but which cannot be tested by any criterion of truth, or used to establish any truth; so they add nothing to the sum of human knowledge. So he was having no truck with any texts that would encourage these people to indulge their flights of critical fancy. So the writer and the critic were both at fault.

It was a sad fact of life, however, that writers of this kind continued to flourish, and Plato renewed his attack on them in the ‘Ion’, perhaps the most complete statement of his aesthetic philosophy extant. (2)

Ion, the eponymous ‘rhapsode’ or reciter of epic poems, is delighted by the notion of being inspired, and acknowledges that he is beside himself when he is performing, his eyes rain tears and his hair stands on end. This is, of course, like red rag to a bull with Socrates, who remarks that a man must be mad who behaves in this way at a festival when he is surrounded by his friends and there is nothing to be sad about. We’re then treated to a wonderful passage of Socratic irony, which is worth a quote:

For all good poets, epic as well as lyric, compose their beautiful poems not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed. And as the Corybantian revellers when they dance are not in their right mind, so the lyric poets are not in their right mind when they are composing their beautiful strains: but when falling under the power of music and metre they are inspired and possessed; like Bacchic maidens who draw milk and honey from the rivers when they are under the influence of Dionysus but not when they are in their right mind. And the soul of the lyric poet does the same, as they themselves say; for they tell us that they bring songs from honeyed fountains, culling them out of the gardens and dells of the Muses; they, like the bees, winging their way from flower to flower. And this is true. For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses . . .

So poets are all essentially mad, the playthings of the Muses. And this can’t be right.

So what’s the answer? Plato reckons it’s ‘organic unity’, which he considers basic to the whole idea of art, and would prove hugely influential both in classical thought and into the present day. And it can apply both to the writer and the critic.

It’s not a line of argument that’s particularly easy to follow, nor is it argued with complete consistency either within the ‘Phaedrus’ or in other works where it appears (the ‘Gorgias’ and ‘The Republic’). But these are the main points as I see them:

- Everything has a natural unity

- But that unity can be split into its constituent parts for the purposes of demonstration or explanation

- In doing so, the natural unity must not be violated (Socrates uses the analogy of someone who’s inexpert at carving meat - so we’ll use a chicken as our analogy)

- If this division is done successfully, it’s possible to see the ‘One and Many’ in nature, which Socrates applauds as the supreme achievement of ‘dialecticism’, seeing something as a whole, and in its constituent parts. Then as a whole again. So once you’ve carved your chicken, you can see how the joints fit together to form the whole. If you’ve just hacked away at it, producing irregular pieces, you won’t be able to tell what part of the animal they’ve come from (this also happens when you buy “chicken steaks” from Sainsbury’s). So when someone asks you for thigh meat only, you’ll just have to guess and risk their disappointment. Or blame Sainsbury’s.

- The writer needs to be aware of the whole, the parts, and how they fit together in order to write truthfully about the chicken. Or else he will be describing some genetically-engineered freak of a chicken.

- You can only perceive the One and Many through a combination of ‘nature’, ‘art’ and ‘practice’.

- 'Nature’ allows you to appreciate the wholeness of something; ‘art’ it’s constituent parts, and ’practice’ will help you see these things correctly every time.

- (We’re going to abandon the chicken analogy at this point) ‘Nature’ is the thing itself; ‘Art’ is what it’s saying to you (what Socrates calls its ‘rhetoric’ or what I’m calling its ‘meaning’)

- So, if Nature is the form and Art is its meaning, it doesn’t do for either the writer or critic to violate their organic relationship.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the 9-step program of ‘Organic Meaning’. No, don’t thank me, it’s my job.

So - it’s the writer’s duty not to unbolt the essential unity of whatever he’s writing about, thereby distorting its meaning. And if, under the spell of the Muse he’s not thinking straight (which he isn’t because he’s temporarily mad), he’ll never be able to perceive that unity, let alone recreate it in his writing. Harmony and balance are all, and, if he guides himself by these lights, he’ll be able to know (and express) what his meaning actually is with little or no equivocation.

OK, Mr Writer, now try doing that.

Plato can be rather prescriptive (as are many of the recommendations we’ll encounter in this section), and his observations on literature most commonly fall under the heading of ‘speculative’ criticism, which deals mainly in theory and not so much with practice (that sort’s ‘practical’ criticism, not surprisingly). But his ideas of wholeness, however abstract they may have been, were destined to exert a powerful influence on subsequent classical literary thought, not least in the writings of Aristotle, who became Plato’s pupil in 367 BC (and subsequently tutor to the future Alexander the Great in 342).

In Chapter 8 of ‘The Poetics’, Aristotle remarks that “whatever is beautiful, whether it be a living creature or an object made up of various parts, must necessarily not only have its parts properly ordered, but also be of an appropriate size, for beauty is bound up with size and order.” He then continues using terminology such as “unified whole”, “consistent” and “wholeness”; in Chapter 10, he insists that action should “develop out of the very structure of the plot” and not be parachuted in. (3) Episodic plots are bad; organic ones are good; he reckons narrative writing should have for its subject “a single action, whole and complete, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. It will thus resemble a living organism in all its unity, and produce the pleasure proper to it.” (4) Back to our chicken, then. And let’s play down the influence of those Muses, or you’ll be thought “possessed”. (5)

Moving on from Aristotle, we can track the idea’s lineage to the poet Horace, writing in Rome in the first century BC. “After all,” he says, failing to anticipate the Surrealist movement two thousand years later, “if you were a painter, you wouldn’t put a human head on a horse’s neck, or represent anything but a bird as having feathers, or give a woman fins instead of legs.” It just wouldn’t be natural. The very idea that you can mix’n’match in this way belongs “in a sick man’s dreams” (which have no place in art),and the net result would be that no-one could “make head or tail of what he is driving at.” The work should be “entirely consistent” within itself, and not assembled piecemeal. In fact, he uses the word ‘consistent’ rather a lot.

Although he believes writers should have a “strong, natural aptitude”, Horace takes considerable pains to point out the degree of craftsmanship that is necessary for great writing (more often than not, it’s “hammered out”), and he satirizes those poets who consider themselves divinely inspired. After all, an athlete, a flautist or even an auctioneer has first had to learn his trade under a strict master. But the poet, with no evidence to back him up, can claim a hotline to the Gods and say “I write marvellous god-given poems, so up yours! So what if I know nothing about what I never learned!” (6)

Although his verses are likely to be wretched, he’ll attract a following, grow vain, and start to believe his own publicity. He’ll haunt solitary places, won’t take the trouble to trim his nails and beard, and become a stranger to personal hygiene. Then he’ll go entirely mad, and believe he is so beloved of the Gods he can leap into a volcano with impunity. Which is what the poet and philosopher Empedocles of Etna did in the 5th century BC. So that’s Horace’s cautionary tale of the muse-driven poet - caveat scriptor. (7)

Footnotes:

1. Faulkner routinely feigned ignorance on where his meaning came from to shut critics up. He was quite happy to let them invent what they wanted. But on this occasion, he allowed his studied disingenuousness to slip. He really was excited by the scope of his achievement.

2. It’s easy to assume that Plato was always down on poetry, but he occasionally gave writers a break. In the ‘Protagoras’ the eponymous character notes that we can learn a lot from poets; and in the ‘Lysis’ they are described as “the fathers and authors of wisdom”. This generosity isn’t characteristic, though.

3. At the end of certain Greek tragedies, the ‘deus ex machina’ (literally ‘the god from the machine’) is winched onto the stage to solve in one fell swoop all the seemingly insoluble problems arising from the plot. In comedies, the appearance of the DEM parodies those plays whose authors are suspected of being too lazy to think of a more satisfactory ending. Of the many examples, Shakespeare’s ‘As You Like It’ is probably the best known, when in Act 5 Scene 4 the god Hymen appears, marries four couples, and Duke Senior’s banishment from court is instantly revoked after his usurping brother has a chance encounter with “an old religious man”. All this occurs in the space of 57 lines.

4. You might be expecting me to introduce Aristotle’s famous theory of ‘The Three Unities’ of Time, Place and Action into the main text at this point,since it would fit perfectly. But I’m not going to, because he never posited such a theory. It was the neo-classical Renaissance critic Castelvetro who, in the 16th century codified Aristotle's discussion, claiming that all plays should follow these three precepts:

Place. The setting of the play should be one location: in comedy often a street, in Oedipus Rex the steps before the palace.

Time. The action of the play should represent the passage of no more than one day. Previous events leading up to the present situation were recounted on stage by the actors.

Action. No action or scene in the play was to be a digression; all were to contribute directly in some way to the plot.

Nothing wrong with these principles - it’s just they don’t all belong to Aristotle. They do, however have a bearing on our argument, and they’re so well-known I’ve included them here.

5. Sorry about all these footnotes. So far, Aristotle hasn’t strayed too far from the opinions of his mentor; but in the following chapter, his conclusion that poetry is superior to history does set him at odds with Plato. For Aristotle, Poetry deals in “universal truths”, history in “particular facts”, a theme which reappears frquently throughout what follows.

6. After this delightful satirical foray, Horace takes on the poetry groupies who encourage the writer in his folly. On hearing one of the master’s odes, he will “turn quite pale with emotion, and will even be so amiable as to squeeze out a tear or two; he will dance with excitement, or tap out his approval with his foot.”

Part 09

A near contemporary of Horace whose name doesn’t unfortunately survive, but who wrote the well-known philosophical treatise ‘On the Sublime’ (1) says much the same thing about unity, only more soberly: “a display of feeling,” he writes, “is more effective when it seems not to be premeditated on the part of the speaker, but to have arisen from the occasion.” But then he continues, “ . . . art is only perfect when it looks like nature, and again, nature hits the mark only when she conceals the art that is within her.”

So here we have another twist on the definition of ‘organic’ meaning. Not only does it reflect wholeness; once you’ve re-assembled your chicken, you shouldn’t be able to see how it’s been done. Writing may be the product of blood, sweat and tears, but it must nevertheless resemble the swan, serenely gliding across the surface of the text as if it’s the product of direct inspiration - while in fact paddling like fury beneath.

This isn’t an unreasonable demand; unless you’re an unreconstructed postmodernist (and we’ll meet a few later) what makes things work should be kept on the inside, not promoted to the exterior in full view of everybody. So our classical writers are in fact making two points: successful art does not parade its artifice, and nor does it benefit from too much planning by its creator. It’s all part of what has now developed into the familiar philosophical distinction between ‘showing’ and ‘saying’. ‘Saying’ something essentially leads its readers by the nose, encouraging passivity. The writer is constantly telling us, ‘look, here is what I’m doing’. In Chapter 16 of the ‘Poetics’, Aristotle complains that in Euripides’s tragedy ‘Iphigenia in Tauris’, “Orestes is made to say what the poet here requires instead of its being done through the plot”. And this is a grave fault, violating the principle of ‘discovery’ that governs the best tragic writing.

A more artistically satisfying route is to give the reader sufficient pointers for him to ‘discover’ what’s going on for himself.

Not only are you trusting the reader to do some of the job for you, you’re actively involving him in the creation of meaning, which usually contributes to a more satisfying imaginative experience. It took Ludwig Wittgenstein (2) to philosophically formulate what fans of horror stories and films have always known - that to suggest grisly events is creepier than graphically describing or displaying them.

So what the writer previously known as Longinus is saying is that it’s possible to know too much about your “art”. If you do, “nature” is compromised. So there may be something to be said for those Muses after all, in that they supply the necessary freshness that stops writing degenerating into a technical exercise (3).

So, to sum up; writing is a difficult balancing act. Too conscious and it’s artificial; too unconscious and it loses its grounding in reality. That puts it pretty much in the middle of the Meaning Line, along with all the other prescriptive aesthetic compromises we’ll be looking at in what follows. So these are the thoughts and recommendations inherited by the Renaissance Humanists of the 16th century AD, when the study of classical models really got going again after the lengthy interlude known as the Dark Ages (4).

Now, imagine 1400 years have gone past, and we’re at the court of Elizabeth I, having a yack with Sir Philip Sidney. Sir Philip, born in 1554, is a prominent aristocrat in (and sometimes out) of the Queen’s entourage, and these lapses in her favour have afforded him the leisure to compose such works as the ‘Arcadia’, ‘Astrophil & Stella’, and, most importantly for our discussion, ‘A Defence of Poesie’, a prose work of ground-breaking erudition. He, being a true Renaissance man, has boned up on his classical writers, and pretty much agrees with everything they recommend, including the need to effect a compromise between conscious and unconscious meaning, art and nature.

Only the writer suddenly takes centre stage in the formulation of meaning - and it’s now a double act between Nature and Human Creativity. And here’s how this seismic shift in perspective occurred.

In Renaissance thought, what happens on Planet Earth is a bit less removed from what occurs on high than it had been in Classical antiquity; in fact, the Victorian poet, critic and philosopher Matthew Arnold characterized the period from the mid-15th century onwards as "that irresistible return of humanity to nature and to seeing things as they are."

So the Gods aren’t off doing what they do somewhere off in the heavens or atop mountains; the idea of immanence is much more prevalent, not simply by courtesy of the arrival of a single Christian deity, but because Humanism tended to bring matters divine within easier reach of us mortals (5). Writers will get their inspiration not from the Gods up there, but from the divine spirit as it’s manifested in Nature down here. This proximity makes a compromise a lot easier to effect, because the writer doesn’t have to give things meaning; they already have meaning in them if only he can see it. God has already made sure of that. So you don’t have to hang around waiting for the Muse to strike to help you identify that meaning, and you don’t have to consciously will that meaning into existence - you’ve just got to look around you. All the writer has to do is to accurately reproduce that immanent deity, and he will create great art. So art and nature are resolved. It’s a wonderfully clever twist on the classical theme, but based on the classical tradition that much of nature has spirits within it. And, unlike in Platonic theory, this doesn’t all happen two stages back from reality. It is reality, even though most Renaissance writers continued to respect Plato for the ground-breaking genius he was.

So now the writer’s much more in the driver’s seat - he’s both a reporter and a creator. Meaning is a joint venture between the divine and the human all the time. If you want to get all philosophical about it, what we’re witnessing is Platonism being supplanted by what’s called “natural Humanism”. (6)

You can find the seeds of this philosophy in the classical writers we’ve already looked at, particularly that bloke we thought was Longinus (TBWTWL): the terms ‘Nature’ and ‘Art’ seem to be used with much the same sense as in Plato, but TBWTWL unites them in what he calls ‘the image’, which is the product of a talent “implanted in man at his birth” and “originally born and bred in us”. Our minds are inspired by the power and appropriateness of the image, and our gaze will then turn upwards in praise of the Gods who created the vehicle for that image. And this is the true “sublime”.

So meaning travels upwards from us to reach the sublime and not downwards from the Muses (7). And of all the classical writers, TBWTWL is more forgiving of a writer who occasionally strays from the path of reason in his pursuit of this sublimity. He’d much prefer reading a risk-taking writer warts and all, over someone who writes perfectly rationally but who is dull and safe with it. In his book, nature will always triumph over art, the imperfectly-crafted over the studiously rehearsed.

And so it is with Sidney. In his “Defence of Poesie”, written in 1580/81, he reverses the Platonic idea that because it can be subjected to rational scrutiny, philosophy will always be superior to poetry. The philosopher deals in precepts but does not map them onto the world in any meaningful way; he lives in a realm of pure theory and supposition that have no practical applications. He’s always dealing in conditionals like “should”, “would” and “could”. But the poet, by finding solid, objective forms for ideas, manages to map "should" onto "is”:

. . . the peerlesse Poet performes [the work of the philosopher], for whatsoever the Philosopher saith should be done, he gives a perfect picture of it by some one, by whom he presupposeth it was done, so as he coupleth the generall notion with the particuler example. A perfect picture I say, for hee yeeldeth to the powers of the minde an image of that whereof the Philosopher bestoweth but a wordish description, which doth neither strike, pearce, nor possesse, the sight of the soule so much, as that other doth.

So you see what’s happened. The poet, who was up in the air with the muses, has returned to ground level by successfully embodying his vision; and the philosopher, who was hugging the Earth with his reasoned arguments, is now drifting in the air by having no compelling earthly form for his meaning. It’s conviction versus conjecture, and conviction wins. A neat reversal, Sir Philip. But you’d expect nothing else from someone who was so well versed in the art of rhetoric.

Footnotes:

1. For many years, the author of this work was assumed to be the Greek rhetorician Cassius Longinus, who lived in the third century BC. But the experts now reckon this was a false attribution.

2. In his ‘Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus’, published in 1922

3. A big danger among writers who’ve also set themselves up as critics

4. ‘The Dark Ages' refers to a decline in literacy stemming from political chaos and social disorder. So there wasn’t much writing going on, and not much meaning to study. The literate Romans were followed by illiterate barbarians, and although the Christian church still had many literate clerics, there are only inconsistent and somewhat fuzzy records from this period, as well as a few acknowledged classics (Bede, for example).

5. Humanism is such a broad movement, it’s impossible to sum up in a general definition. You might say it puts mankind more at the centre of his own universe and in so doing promotes the concept of “vera virtus" ("true excellence") the self-taught development of human faculties and powers to a civilized status. Inasmuch as you can say a movement as big as this ‘began’, it’s generally thought to have originated in Italy in at some point in the 13th century, and quickly spread Europe-wide as printing developed in the late 14th century.

6. And, if you want to get even more philosophical, read the works of the 17th century philosopher Spinoza. Spinoza's rejection of the "Cartesian dualism of mind and matter in favour of a God who is identified with the ultimate substance of the world" (thanks for the translation, Magnus Magnusson) places God firmly in Nature and not in some vague realm beyond the universe. In fact, God’s what holds the universe together. And this, roughly speaking, is the root of the Pantheistic philosophy.

7. Of course, you’d have arrived at this position already if you believed that the Muses or the Gods were only metaphors for human creativity. But most of these guys actually believed the Gods existed, so all we’ve looked at in sections 4 & 5 is being argued from a literal standpoint, as if it were true. So this is not all hairsplitting and angels on the head of a pin stuff. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Part 10

So the poet does know what he’s talking about, and demonstrates it by the felicity of his imagery, which is more striking than the reasoned logic of the philosopher. In short, he’s more honest in the way he understands and uses METAPHOR, in which he “coupleth” form and meaning together. But then Sidney goes further than that: poets are more honest than any rhetorician.

Now writers aren’t the only professionals to use metaphor - as well as philosophers, teachers and theologians do too. But the writer uses it best, because even though it may be an imaginatively compelling synthesis, he’s not using it to prove the truth of anything:

. . . of all writers under the Sunne, the Poet is the least lyer: and though he wold, as a Poet can scarecely be a lyer. . . the Poet, he nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth [bold mine]: for as I take it, to lie, is to affirme that to bee true, which is false. So as the other Artistes, and especially the Historian, affirming [bold mine] manie things, can in the clowdie knowledge of mankinde, hardly escape from manie lies.

It’s the philosopher’s insistence on literality (“affirming”) that is the distortion, because the literal is only metaphor that we have agreed among ourselves to regard as somehow non-metaphorical. [Quick explanation of that: if a metaphor is believed by enough people, it becomes the truth. It’s no longer a metaphor, because the philosopher’s not saying “as if”; he’s saying “it is”. He’s using metaphor to ultimately furnish proof rather than simply to illustrate a proposition.] But, says Sidney, our knowledge of the way the world works is too “clowdie” to be able to make that connection between form and meaning honestly. And, of all the professions, the writer doesn’t make it. So, for example, if everyone’s saying “the sky is blue”, the writer’s the infuriating bugger who chimes in “not always”. It depends on who’s looking at it, and how representative they consider themselves of everyone else’s take on the issue.

This is incendiary stuff. Meaning, as Sidney portrays it, is relative and not absolute. Meaning is as much a part of the “clowdie” world as anything else.

So actually, Sir Philip Sidney may have been the first English deconstructionist. It’s an involved argument, but please bear with me. Let’s take this quotation from ‘The Defense’ as our starting point:

There is no Art delivered unto mankind that hath not the workes of Nature for his principall object, without which they could not consist, and on which they so depend, as they become Actors & Plaiers [bold mine], as it were of what nature will have set forth.

So, Art (and meaning) have their roots in Nature. So far, so classical. But Sidney deviates from his classical forebears by insisting:

a) that the artist doesn’t simply reproduce Nature, but uses it as a starting point;

and

b) he’s not ashamed to be mucking about with Nature for his own artistic ends.

The artist doesn’t just reflect what he sees - he moulds it too. So meaning isn’t a reflection of anything in a cave - it’s a stand-alone creation that owes its final form to the writer’s imagination. But note his use of the words ‘Actors’ and ‘Plaiers’. Plato would have been very uncomfortable with this deliberate and shameless monkeying around with Nature. He would probably have preferred ‘Reporters’ or ‘Witnesses’. But Sidney’s actually proud of what he’s doing. And he goes even further - literature is the architectonike (the key to all disciplines) because it can do this.

If we return to Plato’s idea of ‘organic’ meaning, what Sidney’s proposing is not simply that the meaning of something is like a natural, non-negotiable exhalation from within it; meaning can be whatever the writer, in collaboration with Nature, chooses to find in it. It’s an exhalation given a purpose, or meaning, by the artist, to suit the ends of his art.

Sorry for all these italics, but it’s not the easiest idea in the world to explain. Nevertheless, given it’s one of the most crucial in this entire book, further proof might not be a bad thing. Let’s go round the block one last time:

The sciences map the their objects of inquiry as accurately as they can. But the poet has the advantage over these, says Sidney, in that he doesn’t have to stick to the literal contours of the landscape; in his creative imagination, the mind itself ("first nature") treats Nature ("second nature") as source material only. That way, the poetic imagination creates a model that others may learn from. So if the poet’s describing a bloke called Cyrus, for example, the writer’s aim is;

not onely to make a [i.e. one] Cyrus, which had bene but a particular excellency as nature might have done, but to bestow a Cyrus upon the world to make many Cyrusses, if they will learne aright, why and how that maker made him.

So what the writer’s dealing with is not ‘Cyrus’, but what makes Cyrus the Cyrus he is - the ‘Cyrusness’ of Cyrus as it were. I noted earlier (page 55) that Plato was rather prescriptive on this issue, and it was actually rather difficult for a writer to incorporate his recommendations. Here, Sidney is approaching meaning from a practical or perhaps realistic perspective rather than a Platonic ideal perspective that is unchanging and unchangeable. SO he deserves a resounding cheer from writers everywhere.

Meaning is not, therefore, so much a study of Nature (how things are and must be to preserve stability and order), but of essences and how the individual writer perceives them. And different writers may perceive the same things in different ways. It’s only human, because all us humans are creatures with opinions. And opinions vary. So there’s no ‘real’ Cyrus, only ‘versions’ of Cyrus - but nevertheless versions that emanate from whatever his perceived ‘essence’ is. You can almost hear the literary critic rubbing his hands with glee. The tyranny of Nature is over! Wheel on the era of Interpretation! Trebles all round! Drink a toast to Multiple Meanings! And, ultimately, Deconstruction!

So Nature and the Writer are now equal partners in Meaning. And because they both contribute, it’s still a wonderful compromise between Inspiration and Perspiration, smack dab in the middle of the Meaning Line.

Now in addition to all the above, which represents a huge leap forward from Plato, Sidney is converting what was formerly a weakness into a strength. But also, he really talks up the writer’s status, giving literature extra credibility in so doing (well, to us moderns who aren’t shocked by the idea of plural meaning). As a writer, how much job satisfaction would you get from Plato’s model of meaning, knowing that your task was weaving texts out of shadows of shadows? Not much, I’ll warrant. But now that, under Sidney’s proposals, you’re a co-conspirator with Nature, you’re far more at the centre of the creative process. Literary meaning, despite “affirming” nothing, is much the stronger for that. And your stock as a writer has risen with it. Win/win. You’re not a hireling of Nature; you’re not a medium for a Muse; you’re not a slave to the irrational or a servant of the state. You’re a writer. And you can pretty much go where your imagination takes you.

But then Sidney could say what he wanted, because he was loaded and not bound to income from a patron whose own views on classical models might not be so revolutionary.

But the main inference we can draw from ‘The Defence of Poesie’ is that form and meaning no longer necessarily co-exist as an organic unit; they are now separable. And this is Big Theme #5 - Meaning is Detachable from Form by Varying Degrees. So in a way, it can be argued that as well as being a Renaissance man and all round good egg, SPS tries to set meaning free from its classical shackles through the use of Metaphor, paving the way for those for whom literature represents freedom from tyranny of all kinds.

It’s interesting to look at the way this theory pans out through subsequent critical history. I feel Sidney was so far ahead of his time, not everyone was prepared to run with him for at least a good two hundred years (see page 188 below), and then only part of the way.

Take Alexander Pope, for example, writing in the early 1700’s; if Sidney’s the rebel who went out on an aesthetic limb, Pope was the spin doctor who tried to bring lit crit back into the fold, to pour oil on the troubled waters of classical thought (and like it or not, he was living in what subsequently came to be known as ‘the Classical Age’, so it’s quite natural he should do so).

In his ‘Essay on Criticism’, he comments upon the respect and authority that ought properly to be given to the classical authors who dealt with the subject; and concludes that the rules of the ancients are in fact identical with the rules of Nature: poetry and painting actually reflect natural law. So classical crit isn’t at all out of date. It’s just the way things are, like it or not. The rules of criticism were “discovered, not devised”, so they pre-date the establishment of criticism as a discipline. They’ve always been with us. So Plato’s back on his throne as the King of Literary Theory.

These mental gymnastics either represent a fudge or an elegant compromise, depending on your point of view. But, while paying extravagant lip-service to his classical forebears, Pope also notes the existence of mysterious, apparently irrational qualities (“Nameless Graces," "Happiness", “Freer Beauties” and "Lucky Licence") which permit the true poetic genius, (possessed of adequate "taste") to transcend those same rules. So he’s actually a little farther forward in the argument than is immediately apparent, although he does heavily qualify practically every aesthetic assertion he makes in the poem. In the following passage, the Inspiration/ Perspiration axis of meaning continues as his central theme, but expressed in terms of Freedom and Discipline:

First follow nature and your judgment frame

By her just standard, which is still the same.

Unerring nature still divinely bright,

One clear, unchanged and universal light,

Life force and beauty, must to all impart,

At once the source and end and test of art

Art from that fund each just supply provides,

Works without show and without pomp presides

In some fair body thus the informing soul

With spirits feeds, with vigor fills the whole,

Each motion guides and every nerve sustains,

Itself unseen, but in the effects remains.

Some, to whom Heaven in wit has been profuse,

Want as much more, to turn it to its use;

For wit and judgment often are at strife,

Though meant each other's aid, like man and wife.

'Tis more to guide, than spur the muse's steed,

Restrain his fury, than provoke his speed,

The winged courser, like a generous horse,

Shows most true mettle when you check his course.

Those rules, of old discovered, not devised,

Are nature still, but nature methodized [bold mine];

Nature, like liberty, is but restrained

By the same laws which first herself ordained.

A bravura performance (and he was only just into his 20’s when he wrote it), but amid all this sophisticated fair-mindedness, you do long for a bit of Sidney’s patrician arrogance.

Part 11

Pope is, for the most part, still mired in the classical model of Rational/ Irrational, and there can be no doubt where the bulk of his sympathies lie on the issue - his ideal strategy for meaning is to allow freedom within clearly proscribed boundaries. Given the choice between “wit” and “judgment”, judgment is clearly the superior partner, since without it, wit will almost certainly run amok. But then, just as you’ve written him off as a stuffy young fogey there’s this:

A prudent chief not always must display

His powers in equal ranks and fair array,

But with the occasion and the place comply.

Conceal his force, nay, seem sometimes to fly.

Those oft are stratagems which errors seem,

Nor is it Homer nods, but we that dream.

He seems to be saying “give me a chance to experiment a bit”. And yes, I may fail. But then again, what may seem an ill-judged flight of fancy may point the way to new discoveries. But it’s all a bit of an after-thought, and there’s nothing here as radical as Sidney. The writer’s imagination continues to look rearwards over its shoulder, and to be restrained by the anchor chain of classical tradition; but it’s also held back by an almost neurotic obsession with propriety and the discipline inherent in the 20-syllable rhyming couplet (known among literary types as the “heroic couplet”).

It’s true that the ‘Essay on Criticism’ seeks to defend poetry from the over-zealous or insensitive critic by perhaps making it seem a little more responsible than it needs to be, but Pope himself rarely strayed from his own recommendations. Indeed, in the introduction to his translation of ‘The Iliad’, published in 1715, he virtually excuses the formal conservatism of the age by blaming the overbearing influence of critics, most of whom:

are inclin'd to prefer a judicious and methodical Genius to a great and fruitful one . . . because they find it easier for themselves to pursue their Observations through an uniform and bounded Walk of Art, than to comprehend the vast and various Extent of Nature.

It’s no accident that the early 19th-Century novelist Thomas Love Peacock, in his excellent and entertaining essay ‘The Four Ages of Poetry’ referred to this period in English literature as ‘the age of authority’, built on a classical model whose poetry:

. . . is characterized by an exquisite and fastidious selection of words, and a laboured and somewhat monotonous harmony of expression: but its monotony consists in this, that experience having exhausted all the varieties of modulation, the civilized poetry selects the most beautiful, and prefers the repetition of these to ranging through the variety of all. But the best expression being that into which the idea naturally falls , it requires the utmost labour and care so to reconcile the inflexibility of civilized language and the laboured polish of versification with the idea intended to be expressed, that sense may not appear to be sacrificed to sound [itals mine].

In Peacock’s view, writing in 1820 (over 100 years after Pope), “appropriateness” was the way forward: so an overbearing emphasis on technique would throttle meaning (“sense”) in favour of formal rules. In short, poets were paying too much attention to the craft of writing, and not to developing ways in which form might mirror the meaning they’re trying to communicate. ‘One approach fits all’ was not a sufficiently responsive way to successfully embody the wide range of subject matter literature should be addressing, and so the odds of poetry becoming an agent of intellectual change would be shortened if writers continued to value discipline over investigation. Once more, there isn’t a ‘best’ way’ - it’s simply horses for courses. But if literature doesn’t have the tools, it can’t do the job expected of it.

It’s another one of those aesthetic dicta beloved of Plato, and as to how poets may go about creating this appropriateness, Peacock falls largely silent. But he does know that being a Romantic Poet is most decidedly how not to do it.

In some respects, Romanticism is the very embodiment of the freedom from formal restraint Peacock was calling for. As a movement, it’s a very broad church, among whose English congregation were poets as diverse as Blake, Byron and Coleridge. But some common threads do run through their writings:

the need for a freer, more subjective expression of passion;

emphasis on the need for spontaneity in thought and action and in the expression of thought;

increasing importance attached to natural genius and the power of the individual imagination;

The poet was busy romping around Greece (Byron), the Lakeland hills (Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey) or sitting buck naked in his Lambeth garden (Blake) re-connected to his Muse, and not in a hothouse metropolitan society where inspiration was drowned out by stylistic conformity, the clash of coffee cups and the insistent murmur of literary gossip. Meaning was free to roam wherever the poet thought it should, taking in whatever subject matter, high or low, caught its attention. But there’s no pleasing some folk, and Peacock reserves some of his most stinging barbs for the Grasmere club;

The highest inspirations of [current] poetry are resolvable into three ingredients: the rant of unregulated [itals mine] passion, the whining of exaggerated feeling, and the cant of factitious sentiment: and can therefore serve only to ripen a . . . morbid dreamer like Wordsworth. It can never make a philosopher, nor a statesman, nor in any class of life an useful or rational man. (1)

So once again, writers were being criticized for their sentimental attachment to the Irrational, just as Plato had censured them all those years before. And not only that, their meaning was an undisciplined, unrepresentative exercise in hyperbole. Not enough control. Too personal. And over-dramatized. The German philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who is often described as the father of Romanticism, but who had a foot in both this and the Classical tradition (like Byron), wrote that Romanticism was a form of nervous disorder that placed too much reliance on subjective meaning.

Which is grossly unfair; Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey and De Quincey can easily be accused of being aesthetic tourists, but they represent far more than just a bunch of fotherington-tomases (2) with a naive attachment to pretty places. In Wordsworth’s personal cosmos (at least when he was young), Nature was what breathed life into meaning.

Now this isn’t a bad moment to look at what is meant by the word ‘Nature’, since it has at least three related definitions that have strong influences on what’s going on at this point in the argument, and a lot of what’s preceded it:

1) Nature is, of course, the green stuff between the towns, and that’s where many of the Romantics reckoned aesthetic salvation lay. If you can only move out to where the air is fresh and clear, it will have an automatic remedial effect on your art by uncluttering the mind and freeing the sensibilities. And this is the basis of Peacock’s attack on them; he’d no doubt have got just as much mileage out of the yuppie who thinks that getting back to nature simply involves buying a cottage in the country he only uses at weekends, a Barbour jacket and an SUV that never gets mud on its tyres. Then there’s;

2) What Makes Things As They Are. It’s the essential quality of something, its essence. Which, in part anyway, is deterministic, as in “Human Nature”. That’s the way humans behave, so don’t expect any different. And last we have;

3) A quality of unaffectedness, of something not having been interfered with, something in its original state.

Where Nature has intruded into the discussion thus far, it’s mainly been in guises 2 and 3; Plato’s ‘essences’ are squarely in type 2, a category they share with Pope’s ‘Nature’, which represent a sort of non-negotiable meaning - Nature is What Must Be Like It Or Not. TBWTW Longinus uses Nature to counterpoint Art, so he’s in type 3, in the company of the other classical thinkers who viewed creativity as an organic process - Nature is What Is. But the Romantics’ Nature is an amalgam of all 3; it represents freedom (Type 1) as well as these other two. But, to be fair to Peacock (and Goethe), it is a freedom which is, at base, irrational. And the Romantics, of course, knew it.

In the poem ‘Tintern Abbey’ for example, Wordsworth struggles to give this deeply personal sense of Nature some kind of form; it’s

. . . a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

I always get the feeling (which I can’t necessarily prove) that Wordsworth doesn’t want to dig too deeply into the meaning of the “sense sublime” in case it pops like a balloon never to return. Letting the daylight in on magic isn’t necessarily a good idea, and he deliberately won’t push his luck by analysing it too closely. Or maybe he simply couldn’t. Sometimes, he wanted to keep the feeling irrational.

But at other times he didn’t; one of the perennial complaints about Wordsworth’s scheme, on the other hand, is that the conclusion he does leap to, that Nature = God, is too simplistic, too much of a rationalization, a leap too far that he doesn’t make convincingly enough. We know what he’s feeling is a ‘oneness’ with his muse, but why does that feeling necessarily have a religious character? Because God made Nature, you reply, and it’s a sign of Wordsworth’s essential philosophical conservatism that he makes that convenient jump into Pantheism, a pre-existing doctrine around a hundred years old at that point (3), and then into formal religion. He may not have set out to prove that God is the ultimate validator of meaning and Nature is his rubber stamp, but that’s the conclusion he arrives at. (4)

Coleridge, on the other hand, doesn’t routinely bring God into the argument in the same way his friend and colleague did, although the supreme deity does get a brief namecheck in ‘Frost at Midnight’ in relation to his capacity for binding all earthly meaning together. More often than not, though, Coleridge’s philosophical scrupulousness (or capacity for fence-sitting or simply religious squeamishness, depending on how you look at it) remains secular. In a letter written in October of 1797, he expresses his doubts to a more committed Pantheist, John Thelwall:

I can at times feel strongly the beauties you describe -- in themselves and for themselves. But more frequently all things appear little -- all the knowledge that can be acquired, child's play; the universe itself, what but an immense heap of things? I can contemplate nothing but the parts, and parts are all little! My mind feels as if it ached to behold and know something great, something one and indivisible -- and it is only in the faith of this that rocks or waterfalls, mountains or even caverns, give me a sense of sublimity or majesty! But in this faith all things counterfeit infinity!

So God, or any kind of uniting principle, is proving elusive for him. Whereas Wordsworth would have jumped in with both feet, Coleridge didn’t feel routinely able to make that intellectual commitment to something -anything - that would hold his art together.

So, as far as meaning is concerned, he’s edging towards a Modernist conception of an atomized universe (or perhaps more properly multi-verse), which, like many of the more nostalgic modernists we’ll encounter soon, didn’t exactly make him happy. He wasn’t celebrating this diversity; he was mourning the absence of an overarching Meaning in his life and work that would help him make sense of it. A rock is just a rock, a tree just a tree without it. Its absence is artistically paralysing.

Footnotes:

1. I could quote reams of Peacock’s essay, which is a masterful Philippic not just attacking Wordsworth, but any writer with a scintilla of sentiment in his style. The vehemence of this almost burlesque performance is real, though; Peacock was genuinely worried that as science advanced, literature would become marginalized and even extinct if it persisted in dabbling in what he viewed as childish, superstitious, inconsequential subject matter. So he was with Plato on this one.

2. the lower-case third form poet (and cissy) in Geoffrey Willans’s ‘Down With Skool’ whose perennial cry “Hello trees, hello sky, hello birds” marked him out as “a wet and a weed.”

3. The word ‘pantheism’ first appears in English in 1696, in John Toland's Christianity not Mysterious. A quick definition is that God’s in everything natural. So Nature is a celebration of God.

4. Sometimes, Wordsworth goes for closure a little too eagerly: witness the bathos in the last two lines of ‘Resolution & Independence’. The poet, feeling down in the dumps, meets a lonely old leech gatherer, who, he quite rightly assumes, is financially worse off than himself owing to falling demand for his wares, yet who seems to be fairly chipper about the situation he’s in. Wordsworth leaps to the conclusion that he’s been sent for a purpose - to cheer him up whenever he’s gloomy. You can almost see the light bulb switching on above his head:

"God," said I, "be my help and stay secure!;
I'll think of the Leech-gatherer on the lonely moor!"

A clear case for showing not saying, methinks.

Part 12

Plato is now a distant memory. Secure in his polytheistic intellectual set-up, the irrational was something to be mocked or feared. Two thousand years later, it’s the absence of a World Spirit that’s troubling Coleridge. He’s actually searching for it. But the very thing that would, in his view, validate his art, is a quality that cannot be summoned, explained or proved. So meaning has come on a long journey too.

The very ‘meaning’ of meaning isn’t something that can be dissected by philosophy, or history or sociology, as Plato believed; in the Romantic scheme of things, it’s irreducible. It’s a leap of faith. And you either have that faith or you don’t. No amount of reasoning’s going to help you; you either get it or you don’t. There’s no wonderfully elegant compromises to be had from Pope. And the intellectual poise and rhetorical skills of a Sidney won’t help you either. It’s the triumph of the Irrational.

This Romantic faith can take several forms; God is the obvious one (Wordsworth); faith in the perfectibility of man through art and politics is another (Shelley -‘Ode to the West Wind” is a good example of this); for Keats it was the cultivation of the individual “Soul” beyond both God and Intelligence (1); with Oscar Wilde it was simply Love (2). And Coleridge didn’t honestly know, but he reckoned Soul had to be in there somewhere (3).

So these are all schemes for making sense of things, for uniting perception with meaning in a realm beyond sweat, rationality or empirical philosophy.

But subsequent aesthetic theory was to blow any kind of unity apart as writers began to realize that the world was getting more complicated, or they simply wanted to go out into the playground and muck about with meaning . . .

Big Theme #6: One/ Many - The Writer’s Toolbox

Never again will a single story be told as though it’s the only one.”

John Berger, novelist

Sometimes the world seems easy to grasp, sometimes it’s perceived as being complex. So sometimes, writers want to communicate their meaning simply and unequivocally. And sometimes they don’t. Sometimes, they need to address the reader directly, sometimes they want to suggest a range of possibilities. Sometimes they need to indicate depth, or just to skim the surface of reality. Once again, it’s horses for courses. So what they need is forms of meaning, or, rather, ways of organizing meaning that can deliver both outcomes.

How they achieve these different kinds of organization isn’t our primary concern here (that’ll come in Part 3); rather it’s to acknowledge why they need to do so.

Let’s break ourselves in gently by dealing with single meaning first, simply because it’s the easier of the two.

Certain genres of writing, at certain periods in history, and among certain cultures have demanded that meaning be delivered as efficiently as possible, usually because something important’s at stake. So what you want is exactitude rather than embroidery, authority as opposed to liberalism. The urgency and the perceived importance of the message usually excuses the utilitarian nature of the style in which it’s written, like a box of ‘No Frills’ cornflakes in the supermarket that lacks enticing colour shots of serving suggestions but is quite a bit cheaper.

So, in medieval times, when eternal torment in Hell was the non-negotiable punishment for sinful behaviour, the Church chose not to mince its words. The Devil was abroad and souls were in peril. With this stricture in mind, an anonymous cleric came up with one of the most spectacularly dull books ever written, entitled ‘Ancrene Wisse’ (‘Ancient Knowledge’) - a tome which was a set text on the compulsory Middle English paper at my college, and which may currently be inducing narcolepsy in a whole new generation of students for all I know.

Briefly, it’s a series of lectures given by a priest to a group of female neophytes who are about to be bricked up (yes, you read that correctly) in a nunnery to keep them out of temptation’s way. I suspect the individual who insisted on retaining this literary Mogadon on the syllabus had a lot in common with the work’s narrator, who placed an unnatural emphasis on mortification of the flesh and patient suffering. ‘Ancrene Wisse’ isn’t unique among medieval texts in promoting these values - it just does it with the barest sugaring of the learning pill. In fact, beyond the conceit of the neophytes and their instructor, there’s no added sweeteners whatever, even in JRR Tolkien’s version, and he can usually be relied on to liven things up a bit.

There isn’t the slightest scintilla of irony, humour or doubt, no possible interpretation outside the rigid tenets of the faith which are hammered into the young women (and, of course, the reader) again and again - eternal damnation awaits those who choose to ignore the message of this pompous, omniscient and devout old bore, who, medievalists inform us, is thought to have lived in the Birmingham area.

If we get out our meaning line (returning it to its horizontal orientation) and use it very much in anger, ‘Ancrene Wisse’ would sit at the far left, where there’s a direct equivalence between signifier and signified. A = A - no ifs no buts or maybes, no intercession through metaphor, just unalloyed statement. A spade’s a spade. It’s the reason creative fiction exists, because the imagination would shrivel up and die if all texts were written like this. But then again, when your soul’s in imminent danger of being consigned to Hell and you’re looking for guidance, who you gonna call? A moral relativist?

These days, the only real reasons we need unambiguous communication is in the framing of laws, the writing of contracts and in the instruction manuals for electrical products and flat-pack furniture.

Seems we’ve lost our touch.

So in ‘Ancrene Wisse’, there’s plenty of room for theological discussion, but very little occasion for interpretation. We know what the narrator means, because he makes damn sure we do. But, as I may have barely hinted above, this doesn’t necessarily make for good art. Lectures rarely do, and this is something with which Aristotle would have agreed.

The essence of good writing, he says, is “to be clear without being commonplace.” But, of course, the moment you start deviating from ruthlessly literal parameters of expression, you’re opening the door to ambiguity or even multiple interpretations. Any diversion into the realm of analogy is going to muddy the meaning pool, and this, we might say, is the price you pay for trying to be interesting, to entertain as well as inform and educate.

This particular ambition, which we can trace back to Horace’s ‘Ars Poetica’ and possibly beyond that (4), was given a new lease of life in the 1920’s, when Lord Reith, the first Director-General of the BBC, laid down the definitive blueprint for public service broadcasting. Interestingly, if you look for these terms using the internet, my search engine registers over 186,000 examples where these words are paired, and it’s not just media organizations that have monopolized their use - those who wish to inform, educate and entertain range from schools and colleges to garden centres and manufacturers of kitchen appliances. Not a very scientific sampling method I know, but nevertheless it does reveal that us humans in many walks of life (some of them improbable) are well aware that education and entertainment travel hand in hand, and actively benefit from each other’s company. You could even argue, and I’m sure philosophers and anthropologists must have done, that elements of entertainment or performance are hard-wired into our attempts to communicate with one another. After all, you’re not going to give a bore your attention for very long, and, by the same token, if Robin Williams didn’t have the odd serious thing to say in his interviews, you’d get heartily sick of his incessant clowning. Each impulse exists to moderate and support the other when they’re working well together. And this is partly what Aristotle’s on about in his ‘Ars Poetica’.

The desire to elevate art from the prosaic involves a whole palette of strategies collectively known as ‘style’, or what Aristotle terms ‘unfamiliar usages’ that are used to ‘improve on reality’.

He homes in on two such strategies, “importations” and “metaphors”; the former, I think, refers to what we might call ‘poetic diction’ where synonyms are substituted for words familiar from everyday speech, the latter where one quality or thing is substituted for another. Mixing them in with ordinary language may cause some confusion, but the successful artist will retain sufficient clarity for his intended meaning to be preserved, and not cast the reader entirely adrift. He then gives an example of where even Homer has nodded by failing to carry the reader along with him. In the ‘Iliad’, he uses the word ‘ourenas’, which could mean either ‘lookouts’ or ‘mules’, something you wouldn’t want to get mixed up in the thick of a military campaign.

Most of the time, however, these ambiguities can be resolved by a brief examination of their context; nonetheless, any kind of crux, however small, will provide an opening for the critic, who, according to Aristotle, will tend to make ‘unreasonable pre-suppositions’ about the writer’s meaning from the word go. So caveat scriptor - again.

Yet all Aristotle’s observations are formulated from the point of view that the writer doesn’t deliberately want to create and maintain ambiguity, to effectively abdicate from any discussion of meaning and leave it to the reader to figure out. Such an approach would be the hallmark of a poor craftsman. I’m sure Shakespeare would be both amused and puzzled to find that there’s a whole industry trying to figure out what his works mean, casting their light into the dimmer recesses of his plays to extract more information, to establish fresh connections and build new structures in what he probably felt was pretty transparent writing. After all, during a theatrical performance, the audience only gets one shot at deciphering the meaning before the action or dialogue moves on, and it wouldn’t have been in Shakespeare’s interest to leave his playgoers scratching their heads and thinking “Well what the hell was that all about?” as they strolled out of the Globe. Not good for business.

So we ought to define what we mean by ambiguity before we go any further, to ensure we’re all singing from the same hymn sheet, since it would be rather ironic at this stage in the argument if we weren’t.

And there’s no better writer from whom to steal that definition than William Empson, whose seminal work ‘Seven Types of Ambiguity’ is one of the few ‘must have’ works of lit crit. “Ambiguity,” he writes, “is any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language.”

Footnotes:

1. Keats wrote the following to his sister Georgiana in 1819, two years before his death: “Call the world if you Please "The vale of Soul-making" .... I say "Soul making'' Soul as distinguished from an Intelligence-There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions--but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself. This appears to me faint sketch of a system of Salvation which does not affront our reason and humanity.”

2. see his poem ‘Panthea’.

3. see ‘The Aeolian Harp’

Horace writes; “Poets aim at giving either profit or delight, or at combining the giving of pleasure with some useful precepts for life . . . The man who has managed to blend profit with delight wins everyone’s approbation, for he gives his reader pleasure at the same time as he instructs him.”

Part 13

Empson’s book was published in 1927, when the Modernist movement, which delighted in puzzling the reader with both its erudition and structural dislocations, was in full cry. But the rise of pluralistic meaning and interpretation can’t be laid at the door of any single person or movement - as with any historical process considered retrospectively, it’s the product of a number of related developments, often working independently of one another.

So the war was fought on many fronts: you could point to the Romantic movement, with its emphasis on private, rather than public truth; to evolutionary theory and the body blow it dealt to literalist interpretations of the Bible; to psychoanalysis which explored realms beyond conscious perception or even the rise of popular education, which encouraged individuals to think more for themselves and not rely on received bodies of wisdom. Praise or blame has been heaped on each of these cultural phenomena for breaking down the notion that there was one all-embracing Truth that governed human thought and behaviour, when in reality it was a cocktail of all of them. And let’s not forget Sir Philip Sidney, the proto-Modernist whose theories we examined earlier.

What we can say for certain is that over the last 500 years, a) we have gradually come to acknowledge that truth in whatever field of endeavour can exist in a number of different forms, not all of which are responsive to rational investigation, and b), that literature has not only embraced this development, but, when the cultural conditions are favourable, has revelled in the freedom it represents. The net result is that what was formerly considered a dangerous form of moral relativism was subsequently praised as liberal, democratic, humanistic and broad-minded by those who could accommodate this seismic change in the accepted way of thinking.

John Keats was not necessarily the first celebrant, but his almost casual formulation of ‘negative capability’ has become one of the touchstones of this tendency to pluralism in literature. In a letter of 1817, he wrote to his brother:

. . . at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason - Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

The artist, Keats is saying, does not necessarily have to explain everything to his readers, or even to himself. We must all do the best we can, but if our deliberations reach no tangible conclusion, we can comfort ourselves with the knowledge that artistic truth may remain, as it were, in suspension. It’s the power of the experience that counts, not its conceptual neatness or susceptibility to rational analysis. Soon afterwards, Keats was to write ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ which contains the immortal couplet,

Beauty is Truth,--Truth Beauty,--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

that elegantly embodies his idea. (1)

Nevertheless, the belief that a work of literature didn’t have to have a single, unitary explanation died hard in certain quarters, and is by no means universally accepted even now. Back in the North-Eastern United States in 1854, Henry David Thoreau noted in his masterpiece ‘Walden’ with amused asperity that “in this part of the world it is considered a ground for complaint if a man’s writings admit of more than one interpretation.” In the self-regarding coteries of Boston society, he reported, inconclusiveness was viewed as a form of intellectual weakness. “We are inclined,” he wrote, “ to class those who are one-and-a-half witted with the half-witted, because we appreciate only a third part of their wit.” Whether he actually told any of his neighbours they were bourgeois pillocks isn’t known, but he clearly thought it.

Thoreau famously retired to his home-made shack on Walden Pond to ponder these and other metaphysical conundrums, while a couple of miles down the road in Concord, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau’s friend and landlord, was railing against all forms of mental incarceration in some of the most brilliant essays ever written.

Like William Blake, with whom he shares many aesthetic and philosophical points of view, Emerson really did believe that the universe could be manifest in a single grain of sand, and that within every individual consciousness was the distillation of every shred of human history that preceded its creation. Carrying that weight of super-compressed data around as your birthright means that life almost literally explodes with possibilities, whether you’re an artist or not, and that it’s a crime against nature to try and restrain that energy.

In his essay ‘The Poet’, Emerson remarks that “An imaginative book renders us much more service at first, by stimulating us through its tropes, than afterward, when we arrive at the precise sense of the author.” If you try to tie literature down to single meanings, you’re simply left with “trite rhetoric”; so the artist has to keep mankind’s imagination perpetually alive, to make it “flow and not to freeze . . . for all symbols are fluxional.” Bad art makes the symbol “too stark and solid”, whereas good art not only carries its own momentum, it also taps into mankind’s spiritual inheritance; it is the catalyst that transforms “village symbols” into “universal signs”.

Emerson’s wonderfully liberating arguments represent a small corner of a much broader debate which was loosening the stays of many types of man-made authority, which is why the evangelical fervour of his essays would have caused many a raised eyebrow among the chattering classes when the implications of his ideas were translated into, say politics. The concept that meaning could be democratized and that it was forever changing would be deeply unsettling to anyone who had an interest in maintaining the status quo. What would happen if it spread outside literature? Where would this revolution of sensibility end up? Anarchy on the streets of Concord?

So in times of instability, the sort of imaginative freedom exemplified by Emerson and his ilk could be considered unhelpful or even subversive rather than an exciting new way of seeing the world. And so it proved.

In the early years of the twentieth century, many writers and commentators were beginning to find this non-dogmatic approach to meaning a mixed blessing, and while Emerson and his fellow Transcendentalists took it for granted that our common humanity gave a necessary shape and discipline to all this mental energy, fifty years on, others didn’t share their confidence. In short, the cohesion of society was going to hell in a hand cart.

It’s perhaps difficult for us now to comprehend the enormity of the intellectual dislocations brought on by World War One and the period immediately preceding it, but they effectively blew away any last shards of concensus on how literature should represent the chaos that contemporary reality had become. To many, this was a profoundly disturbing state of affairs, and a number of writers returned to an almost documentary realism to try and put some solidity back into literary meaning.

Perhaps the most celebrated example of this return to realism was Upton Sinclair’s ‘The Jungle’, published in 1906, in which he launched a devastating attack on the Chicago meat-packing industry. As a result of Sinclair’s harrowing exposee of the inhuman conditions some of the workers were experiencing, the Roosevelt administration enacted new food saftey legislation that same year. But though meat preparation was forced to become much more hygienic, the lot of the slaughterhouse employees most certainly didn’t - they still were forced to toil in a sea of blood for practically no money and with no union representation. “I aimed for the public’s heart”, a highly disillusioned Lewis later wrote in his autobiography, “and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”

Urban realism represented a return to the old ways, only they were now describing a civilization whose self-confidence was a much more delicate flower than it had once been, since formal religion (or indeed any framework that represented order and meaning) wasn’t always available to prop it up. Most of these writers were novelists (Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos), but what they were offering was a stylistic response coupled with ‘low’ and localized subject matter that merely served to paper over the cracks of a much deeper underlying problem of perception.

Others looked for more lasting solutions; Ezra Pound, sensing a new dawn rather than a literary apocalypse, told his fellow writers that their “opportunity [was] greater than Leonardo’s” to construct something meaningful and lasting from the wreckage. Many grasped it with both hands, and the years 1912 to 1922 witnessed the most radical re-orientation in aesthetics ever attempted. Depending on your reserves of patience and your level of skepticism, the resulting Modernist movement is either the saviour or the bogey man of art and literature. It either honestly reflected the infinitely more complex world that was emerging, or confused it still further. In what they felt was an era void of traditional forms of authority, the Modernists created an ‘order’ of their own - if society wasn’t going to provide the glue to hold a consensual system of aesthetics together, they’d supply it themselves. They would destroy what was left and re-build it from the ground up using a whole new set of specifications.

Some, like the Imagist poets, believed that the way to rescue meaning was to create art that was hard, clear and exact. Others revelled in the polyvalence of meaning by recording it from every possible perspective, and so we see Picasso painting women with six noses, William Faulkner writing a novel with 13 narrators, and James Joyce gradually turning his art into a giant cryptic crossword.

But in this era of movements and manifestoes, many of which were high on theory and low on results, what we see is each artist seeking to arrive at his own personal armistice with chaos while at the same time often reflecting it in the way his work is presented. That’s my rather charitable assessment of the ‘difficult’ nature of Modernism and I’m sticking to it.

So, without getting too bogged down in literary history, what was happening in the early 20th century was the gradual acknowledgment that, in art at least, unitary meaning was pretty much dead. The artist no longer simply worked within a consensus of meaning, but was at perfect liberty to create his own, which would be just as valid as any received versions (of course, artists had been doing this for centuries - it’s just that now an individual perspective was less likely to be viewed as aberrant or self-indulgent) And this also applied to lit crit; out went the notion that a text meant just one thing, and that there was a ‘right’ way of looking at it. Other perspectives were possible in this new democracy of meaning, and they were vigorously explored as the twentieth century wore on. So the potential meaning in a text began expanding almost exponentially.

Of course, if you take this principle to its logical conclusion (or its reductio ad absurdum) as some critics had by the 1970’s, you abandon the notion of a controlling intelligence altogether and you’re left with a Babel of meaning from which no resolution is possible. Everyone therefore becomes a critic, since everyone’s opinion is just as valid as anyone else’s. There isn’t just one reality, there’s as many realities as there are perceivers of reality. And this, more or less, is Deconstruction, a movement in philosophy and criticism that takes pluralism of meaning about as far as it can go. If everything can mean everything to everyone, it basically means nothing. So let’s all go home. In fact, Deconstruction has become a polite euphemism for intellectual vandalism in its professed aim to think the unthinkable and evaporate all meaning out of literature.

Every train of thought is eventually pursued to its extremes, and, if we return to our Meaning Line, a Deconstructionist perspective would sit at the far right, at the absolute opposite end to A=A types of meaning. It’s a critical approach that has been described as ‘knee-jerk nihilism’ or ‘puerile skepticism’, but has nevertheless found a welcoming home in American universities, where it continues to flourish. Surprise surprise. Because you can write just about any old rubbish and get away with it.

Footnote:

Part 14

To many critics, however, the freeing-up of meaning had come to the end of the road, and it was time to start the journey back to consensus. I remember a particularly impassioned plea from George Steiner in the Times Literary Supplement in 1985 entitled ‘A New Meaning of Meaning’, in which he noted that meaninglessness worked better as an idea than a practical reality, and, although it was fun while it lasted, our holiday from meaning was becoming wearisome. Steiner was not alone in his impatience, and so, by the end of the twentieth century, the pendulum we noted back on page 10 had reached the furthest point on its trajectory and was beginning to swing back where it had come from.

^[1]

So, we’ve travelled from one end of our meaning line to the other in a little over three thousand words to the point where meaning, having been all but blown to bits, is set to make a comeback. But although we may have completed the journey, our arrival doesn’t mean that we’ve covered the entire waterfront. All we’ve done so far is to define the possible extremes of the subject. We’ve all the middle bit to fill in now, which is where the real business of meaning takes place - the tension and the interplay between form and formlessness, between suggestion and statement that keeps meaning fermenting, and our interest levels up.

But before we go down that road, a subject to ponder next time you’re in the pub: a recent newspaper article I read suggested that organized religion has nowhere left to go - it’s now, to quote its writer Don Cupitt “fully developed”. It will cease to surprise us with any substantial new advances, but will gradually dilute and decay over time the more we alter it to suit our needs. As we continue this process of accommodation, and the edges are smoothed and the corners knocked off, familiarity will not so much breed contempt, as a routine complacency. This point of view doesn’t just represent the death of the absolute, but a seeping of energy away from the subject to the point where it’s so successfully internalized and understood, there are no longer battles to be fought or ground left to conquer.

And so in literature. Stylistically, we’ve explored the furthest reaches of both form and formlessness (or Meaning and Significance as I’m calling them) - so is our conception of meaning going to keep oscillating between these two opposites every few generations as we re-rehearse the same arguments and warm over the same underlying ideas? Or will both the creation and analysis of literature break out of this cycle and charge off into new, hitherto undreamed of dimensions?

I would have to follow the example of Morrissey, who, when he posed the leading question “Does the Body Rule the Mind or the Mind Rule the Body?”, answered it with masterly inconclusion “I dunno”. But it would be sad to think, to quote another genius lyricist, Mike Stoller, “Is That All There Is?”

Mine’s a pint.

Big Theme #7: Metaphor: The Individual and the Archetype

[at the Sermon on the Mount]

Man 1: “What was that [Jesus said]?”

Man 2: “I dunno”

Man 3: “I think it was ‘Blessed are the cheesemakers’”

Woman: “Oh, really! What’s so special about the cheesemakers?”

Husband: “Well, obviously it’s not meant to be taken literally; it refers to any manufacturer of dairy products.”

Monty Python, ‘Life of Brian’

“Begin with an individual, and before you know it, you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created - nothing.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, ‘The Rich Boy”

When Apollo 11 landed on the moon in 1969, NASA (who’s sent it there) received an official complaint from, of all people, the League of Iraqi Storytellers. The gist of their protest was simple - they were being robbed of their livelihood. How so?

Well, the fact that the Moon had been proved to exist, and was made of rock, and that it had been walked on, robbed it of its potential to be a metaphor. We now had conclusive proof, for example, that it wasn’t composed of green cheese. So what the storytellers were saying is that Neil Armstong and Buzz Aldrin had stopped them lying about the Moon. How could it be a beacon for lovers any more? It was just another a lump of rock spinning through the galaxy - all the poetry had been stripped from it. The lunar conquest may have been one small step for a man, but it represented a giant leap backwards for art.

Of all the Big Themes, this is probably the biggest because it deals, in part anyway, with man’s enduring need to use metaphor, and this is a subject notorious for flying off in all sorts of directions. And really, the title I’ve given the section only hints at the enormous variety of related themes it manages to cover. Cue Meaning Line:

Meaning-----------------------------------------------------------------Significance

One Many

Macrocosm Microcosm

General Particular

Universal Specific

Reality Myth

Really, any of these pairs would do.

Metaphor, to quote Aristotle’s definition, is “the application to one thing of a name belonging to another thing”, so for example, “all the world’s a stage” (or to quote Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell “the world is just a great big onion”).

Of course the world is neither, but both are interesting conceits; the former suggests that humans are just actors following a predetermined script from birth to death, the second that life is a vale of tears occasioned by the onion’s fumes. Both have made connections between a quality inherent in the original subject (the world) and that same aspect reflected in the second object. So there is a transference of meaning from one to the other - and that’s the definition of metaphor, a ‘carrying across’. Simple.

Well, not exactly. Metaphor is one of the most important contents of a writer’s toolbox, and yet it’s one of those literary terms that’s used almost indiscriminately to suggest any kind of organizing principle behind meaning. Sometimes it has to double as a synonym for symbol, simile, image or even myth and allegory. Now although these structures are all closely related, they in fact perform very different functions using very different areas of our brains, so if you think I’m being a pedantic old git by insisting that we separate them out, I’m really not.

So let’s start by asking why writers use metaphor, which is pretty simple really. First, it stops their writing being boring. In a legal document, you identify your terms at the start and then use those terms consistently throughout, thus minimizing the possibility of misunderstanding. Writers of literature aren’t bound by this constraint, and if they were, it would make for pretty dull reading - even assuming they wanted to try and be this boring. Just dig out your house insurance and compare it with ‘Kubla Khan’. Or better still, get your hands on a BBC contract. I was once producing a serialization for ‘A Book at Bedtime’ on Radio 4, and the necessary contract thudded on the mat one morning. Normally I would just sign the thing and bung it back, but it seemed thicker than usual, so I decided to check it out. Sure enough it had been rewritten. As well as the usual pound of flesh, it demanded that ‘The BBC has the right to transmit the programme using any electronic means currently invented or yet to be invented; throughout the universe or any universes yet to be discovered’.

I refrained from pointing out that, linguistically speaking, there can’t be more than one universe since this anoraky observation would probably fall on deaf ears, and the picture it painted of a bunch of aliens listening to Radio 4 picking over the finer points of ‘The Great Gatsby’ had already given me a good laugh. But talk about covering your arse.

Anyway, artists don’t have to go to these inordinate lengths to make their meaning clear. So why use a word or phrase twice when a metaphor will do? It’s all about variety and richness of expression. Metaphors also serve to illustrate different or surprising facets of the object in focus. If, for example, like Ken Dodd in the song of the same name, you were to remark that ‘Love Is Like a Violin’, you would then go on to show how the two resemble one another. If you made that comparison in a court of law, you’d probably be had up for contempt. Or sectioned.

Basically, there are two organizational principles associated with the metaphor, which we’ll peruse briefly before moving on to a more detailed examination: first, there’s the ‘transference’ we’ve just looked at, which forms a kind of creative tension within the metaphor between the original object and what it’s being projected onto. And so when we’re figuring out why the writer has used a particular metaphor, what we need to bear in mind is how loose or strong the dialectical association is between the two. If it’s weak, something transitory or evanescent is being hinted at, and the original subject retains its individual identity as the text moves forward. If, however, a more involved relationship is implied (which the writer might signal by the repeated use of the same metaphor, or by developing that original relationship using a series of linked metaphors), the importance of the message implied by the metaphor grows at the expense of its original inspiration. So the original subject becomes more of a vehicle for meaning than simply existing for its own sake - it loses some of its individuality the more explicitly the message is communicated.

The second organizational principle works outside the metaphor. When I was at primary school, it was quite common for bored pupils to write imaginary letters addressed to:

Mr Anthony Aloysius St. John Hancock,

23, Railway Cuttings,

East Cheam,

nr. Epsom

Surrey,

England,

United Kingdom,

Northern Hemisphere,

The World,

The Earth,

The Galaxy,

The Universe

Infinity etc etc

So it is with the metaphor - how far will its meaning (or significance for that matter) resonate outside itself? How much, for example, was Bobby Moore

A man

A footballer

The captain of West Ham

The captain of England

The best footballer ever

The best sportsman ever

The best human ever

A god

God

Each new level ups Bobby Moore’s ante, his resonance, a bit like the concentric ripples that grow outwards from a pebble tossed in a still body of water. And as with our first principle of organization, which would simply establish the link between Bobby Moore and football, as we gradually move away from Bobby Moore the man, we begin to focus instead on the ‘Bobby Moore-ness’ of Bobby Moore (the qualities that make Bobby Moore what we perceive him to be); then Bobby Moore the embodiment of all that’s best in football, and then by extension, in man, since all footballers are human (please resist the urge to comment further). It’s an awesome responsibility the lad’s been given, and by the time the ripples reach the edge of the pond he’d most likely to be unrecognizable even to his wife and kids. Drained of his humanity, he would cease to be Bobby Moore and become an icon instead.

Quite how far down the list you think it’s appropriate to travel depends on your sense of proportion, which in turn is governed by your appreciation of the worth of Bobby Moore (and we know that only Eric Clapton made it all the way to God). And this second principle is what happens when a metaphor turns into a symbol, of which more later in this section.

So, to briefly go over these broad brushstrokes: there are two principles that govern the way meaning is organized by the use of metaphor. One that exists within the metaphor that establishes the information carried by the metaphor, and one that propels the information of the metaphor outwards. For the moment, you’ll have to take my word that there are conflicting energies at work within these two principles that either pull the metaphor and its contents in the direction of Meaning, or towards Significance, which will determine where each metaphor will sit on our Meaning Line. And each metaphor must be examined on its own merits, since no two are absolutely alike.

If all this seems a bit cloudy for the moment, don’t worry; now that we’ve laid the groundwork, we need to travel back to the Year Zero of how meaning is organized and start the journey afresh. We will destroy to rebuild – and if that sounds a tad melodramatic there’s a good reason for approaching the subject in this way.

Part 15

So much of the critical apparatus we use to help us understand literature is assumed knowledge, as if it entered our consciousness by some unseen process of osmosis that we had little or no part of. So it’s small wonder our ideas of how meaning is organized within a text are a little, shall we say, diffuse, our terms so interchangeable as to be almost meaningless. Which, as students of meaning, is ironic.

So I vote we take the most useful terms from what we’ve inherited just to keep ourselves vaguely orientated within the critical tradition, and then clarify them with the odd new one that better reflects what’s going on with the actual meaning in the text, if that’s all right with you.

So let’s begin with a neutral coinage, an ecumenical sort of beige term indicating those places in texts where meaning accumulates - let’s call them ‘nodes’.

A node can be a word, an idea, an image, a character, a phrase - any point where there is dialogue between any or all of these four elements: the writer, the text, the context and the reader. How, why and where these events occur cannot necessarily be predicted, nor the outcome of the dialogue necessarily known. And that is one of the joys of literature - its ability to surprise and adapt itself, to be many things to many people in many periods in many places. Both the writer and reader supply the catalytic input: the writer, of course, provides the text, the reader his attention, both of which are filtered through their cumulative experience, knowledge and taste. The writer also brings what he’s learned of his craft. So even the simplest nodes can be the sum of many lesser reactions.

A second point to stress is that most of this chemistry may pass unnoticed by both parties - the writer because he’s too involved with the act of writing, and may be externalizing an experience so intrinsic to himself he doesn’t realize there’s anything remarkable or noteworthy about it; the reader because he may be unresponsive, uninterested, or simply because he’s wrapped up in the forward momentum of enjoyment,/stimulation/education - whatever benefit he’s getting from his reading.

Individual nodes may stand alone, or be arranged in patterns, or be linked in such a way that they form themes and textual structures that reinforce, elucidate or counterpoint what’s going on around them. These patterns may possess an elemental simplicity, or a perplexing intricacy - but simplicity of structure or organization is not necessarily indicative of a simple meaning, nor is a problematic structure a token of a complex message.

Nodes may occur and be forgotten, only to be recalled when reading works entirely unconnected to them, forging links across schools and genres of writing, epochs and continents. Both the writer and the reader therefore have the entire history of meaning at their disposal in creating their texts and informing their reading.

What all nodes share is the capacity to be identified, and thus, to be interpreted. And that’s quite enough theory for now. Tedious I know, but necessary to purge any dogma about meaning that may be hanging on in our systems. So now it’s time to start peering beneath the text, and looking at the various clottings of meaning that occur within literary texts. Because some examples overlap or merge into one another, they’re in a sort of ordered sequence, although it’s not crucial what order we take them in:

a) Adjectives/Adverbs

- Perhaps the simplest nodes are flagged by adjectives and adverbs. By attaching additional descriptors to nouns, the writer is momentarily slowing the forward momentum of the narrative to elaborate on something that’s caught his compositional eye (unless, of course, he’s being paid by the word and will pile on as many as he can get away with). So, for example, instead of just referring to a car, the writer takes the trouble to tell us it’s a red 1957 Chevy Impala with unfeasibly large tail fins, he’s not only helping us create a mental picture of the landscape of his work, he’s making sure we know it’s a particular car. He may have any number of reasons for alerting us to these details: he may simply love the look of that specific model (I’m with him there); if it was driving around the streets of London in 1957, it might be used to contrast the car’s British counterparts which would have been small, boring, black Ford Populars with only three forward gears - which speaks volumes about the respective national characters that produced these vehicles, and the economic conditions that prevailed in both countries at the time; if it’s a crime thriller, the colour might be significant, or one notable feature might distinguish the car as being the one the murderer drove; or it might be used to imply something about the sort of person that would own such a flash set of wheels. It should be reasonably obvious from the context which, if any of these possibilities is the most likely. The most important thing the reader has to decide is what that kind of car’s doing there, and why the writer’s chosen to draw our attention to it. It may be something or nothing. And all that from a few adjectives.

Now I’m not suggesting that everything in a text has to mean something, or is pointing to some quality beyond its literal presence. That sort of ‘meaning paranoia’ the best way to ruin your reading, or the well-trodden route to being a successful literary academic. I’ll never forget the example of a friend’s friend who was giving a university lecture on the theme of ‘Doors in Hamlet’. He’d noticed (and he may be right, I just haven’t picked up on it), that Shakespeare mentions doors a lot, or that doors feature disproportionately in the action. From this, he deduced, doors=concealment; when gays come out, it’s commonly referred to ‘coming out of the closet’; closets have doors, and therefore, ladies and gentlemen, conclusive proof that Hamlet is gay.

If, as a result of reading this book, you start thinking in this tortuous (and downright wrong) way about meaning, I shall be very displeased. I will have provided you with no excuse for doing so and therefore wash my hands of your folly.

Anyway, back to adjectives. As we noted earlier, nodes have long been used to create structures within a text, and the humble adjective is no exception - Homer was the master of the sophisticated use of adjectival repetition typical in cultures where poetry is more often performed than written down. Perhaps the best-known example of this technique occurs throughout ‘The Odyssey’ where the ‘oinopa ponton’ (‘the wine-dark sea’) crops up again and again. Once the modern reader has accepted this stylistic device, he can appreciate how masterfully Homer uses it to perform two basic functions: first, formulaic sections of verse, no matter how short, give the performer (who usually worked from memory) space to gather his thoughts and address what’s coming next; second (and more significantly for our purposes) repetition simply and effectively establishes the sea as a brooding presence behind the immediate action of the plot, a regular prompt that creates a pervasive theme and mood - the sea is forever mysterious and hostile, yet at the same time intoxicating. After a while, what may seem to the modern ear an irritating affectation, seduces you with its alliterative rhythm, underpinning what happens above it. It’s almost like the individual nodes join up, as if the text has been ‘thickened’ by this additional layer running beneath it. Even so, I think I prefer Viv Stanshall’s deathless image of ‘the marmalade fingers of dawn’ creeping across the morning sky (even though he’s indebted to Homer’s oft-recurring ‘rosy-fingered dawn’ for his original inspiration).

And this technique needn’t be confined to a single work; those tireless compilers of concordances are of enormous help in charting the use and frequency of individual words throughout a particular canon, helping to tease out themes and patterns of imagery that reoccur throughout the writer’s imaginative life, creating a sort of lexical biography as they do so.

So what we’re examining here are simply clues and pointers to a writer’s meaning, but useful ones nonetheless. They can also be called motifs or leitmotifs.

b) Similes/ Comparisons

‘How easily and cleverly do I write just now! I am really pleased with myself; words come skipping to me like lambs upon Moffatt Hill . . . There’s fancy! There’s simile! In short, I am at present a genius: in that does my opulence consist, and not in base metal.’

Samuel Boswell, ‘London Journal’

Ah! Boswell the alchemist! A second type of simple node is the comparison, usually signed by the prepositions ‘as’ and ‘like’. It’s usually referred to as a ‘simile’, and as there’s not a huge scope for misunderstanding, we’ll let it keep it’s usual title.

The simile is like a casual sexual encounter; two parties briefly come together on the pretext of having something in common, only to go their separate ways as soon as they’ve had their way with one another. Unlike the previous example, this node is not a compound of noun + adjective(s) where two elements merge; Party (1) and Party (2) remain separate and distinct throughout their brief juxtaposition. If time, for example, is like an ever-flowing stream, it partakes of certain stream-like qualities (inexorable movement in a single direction). But time isn’t only like that (it isn’t wet for a start), and it isn’t necessarily always like that (sometimes time appears to stand still). It’s a contingent arrangement sometimes used to elaborate on an intangible quality using a familiar physical image. It’s like the serving suggestion on a cereal packet; you don’t have to serve it like that, but here’s what it could look like. If you could be arsed.

Which is not to say that nodes (a) and (b) necessarily contribute to any resolution of meaning - they can just as easily travel in the opposite direction down the meaning line into significance.

If, like William Faulkner, I were to liken the evening sunset to a violet dog, you might get the colour reference, but not the ‘dog’ bit - it’s too personal - or perhaps, knowing Faulkner, mischievous for widespread comprehension. But being simple aggregations of meaning, similes can give the author practically limitless scope for play and experimentation; unless they form part of developed sequences or patterns of imagery, their meaning can be both self-contained and short-lived. As such, they can give a lightness, humour and elasticity to prose, adding elements of the unexpected, and of ambiguity and even irony, which is one of the most elegant and economical ways of saying two things at once. And, like the casual sexual encounter, the writer is under no obligation to take the relationship to the next stage, which is . . .

Part 16

The Conceit is basically half way between a simile and a metaphor - the only thing that differentiates it from the latter is the air of wit or intellectual experimentation it brings with it, although this isn’t true in all cases. What does tend to happen within the conceit is the violent yoking together of apparently unconnected ideas and things so that the reader is startled out of his complacency and forced to think through its argument. It’s a bit like an intellectual version of the violet dog except that (eventually) it should all make sense.

Some of the best-known conceits occur in the group of writers who came to be known as ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, the undoubted doyen of whom was John Donne. And perhaps the best known of his conceits was the love/pair of compasses image that he posits in ‘A Valediction Forbidding Mourning’, the last 3 stanzas of which are always worth quoting:

If they [our souls] be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th’ other do.

And though it in the centre sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must
Like th' other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end, where I begun.

There’s allsorts going on in here: love, sex, death, absence, longing and eventual reconciliation. It’s a beautifully compact yet expressive lyric, justly praised for both its tenderness and ingenuity. As we’ll see later, even TS Eliot got worked up about it, describing the poem as a perfect fusion between heart and mind that produced a quality of ‘sensuous thought’ rarely encountered in literature. And I’m not going to argue with that. (1)

The mental gymnastics that often accompanies the creation and interpretation of conceits reminds me of a wonderful Monty Python sketch in which Oscar Wilde, James McNeil Whistler and George Bernard Shaw are all trying to out-conceit each other in their flattery of the Prince of Wales. “Your Majesty,” announces Wilde in full brown-nosing mode, “is like a big jam doughnut with cream on the top.” The POW, not the brightest of creatures, misunderstands the simile, takes immediate offence and demands Wilde explain himself. He can’t, and claims that Whistler said it first. Quick as a flash, Whistler retorts, “What I meant, your Majesty, was that like a doughnut your arrival gives us pleasure, but your absence simply leaves us hungry for more.” The POW is delighted, but then Whistler, seeking revenge on Wilde, counters with, “Your Majesty is like a stream of bat’s piss - it was one of Wilde’s”. Wilde disclaims all knowledge and fingers GBS, who replies, “What I meant was that your Majesty shines out like a shaft of gold when all around is dark.” Amid the generally appreciative noises, he then lets rip; “Your Majesty is like a dose of clap - before you arrive is pleasure, but afterwards a pain in the balls. It was one of Wilde’s”. And so on. Brilliant when it’s done well, but quickly tiring when it isn’t, as in Shakespeare’s ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’, where the torrent of conceits tumble over one another as Berowne and his troupe of young male scholars try to woo the far more sensible Princess Katherine and her female entourage. If you don’t appreciate the dazzling wit underlying this conceit, they seem to be saying, there’ll be another few dozen along in a minute. They merely succeed in making themselves look immature and ridiculous, as they test to destruction the principle that if you throw enough shit at the wall some of it may stick.

‘Wit’ in the time of Shaespeare, and even up to the 18th century was, as Eliot reminds us “something more serious than we usually mean today.” Far from being simply a jeu d’esprit, it was the bedrock of your literary reputation, certainly in the view of Doctor Johnson. Before the IQ test, wit was an index of your intelligence, of your powers of observation and synthesis. So in the world of the Conceit, economy and appropriateness is King.

d) The Metaphor

This needn’t detain us too long, since we’ve already touched on it at the beginning of this section.

The usual antonym for ‘metaphorical’ is ‘literal’. Whereas metaphor is a projection of meaning outside its original package, the literal approach keeps that meaning on a tight leash, confining it to a “natural and customary” usage, according to the OED. Whatever you’re describing remains resolutely itself - so no mucking about is permitted. Quite a watertight definition, yet one that is regularly confused by TV commentators.

I was once watching a live concert by ‘The Hardest Working Man in Show Business’, James Brown, and he was certainly earning this reputation - absolutely drenched in perspiration, he was grappling with the mike stand as if he were trying to teach a dance step to an enormous and unwieldy partner, wrenching it this way and that then resting, exhausted, before trying it all over again. At the end of the song, the TV voiceover announced, “James Brown is literally sweating buckets” - a nice trick if you can do it, and one guaranteed to break the ice at parties. Not even the self-proclaimed “Minister of the New New [sic] Super Heavy Funk” can literally sweat buckets, while practically anyone can metaphorically sweat them. A footballer is never literally over the moon, unless he happens to be an astronaut in his spare time, but he can complete that trajectory through the use of metaphor.

Back to literature: if a character proclaims, “Damn your black heart to Hell!” (as they frequently do in novels like ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel’), he’s clearly using metaphor. Nobody’s heart is biologically black, unless it’s dead and rotting or has been singed somehow - hearts are usually a pinky reddy purple.

What the writer means is that the owner of the heart is a bad person, and we know this because most of us share the cultural conceit that black and evil are synonymous. Which takes me back to my alma mater and a charabanc trip to Stratford to see a performance of our ‘O’ Level set text.

In one of Trevor Nunn’s productions of ‘Macbeth’, he found the interplays of colour to be so central to the play’s meaning, he decided to stage two contrasting coronations: at Duncan’s enthronement which appeared as a sort of Prologue, the entire cast were dressed in white. At Macbeth’s later in the performance, everyone wore red. Visually striking, it was a simple yet effective way of indicating to us spotty fourteen year-olds the counterpoint between the themes of light/dark, good/evil, open/hidden and order/chaos (and others) that all spin off from Shakespeare’s sense of colour. So there’s an example of metaphor not only establishing a theme, but providing an underlying structure, as the play begins its journey from darkness into light culminating in the final battle between Macduff and Macbeth.

But then us lesser mortals regularly use colour metaphors, woven as they are into the fabric of our culture. Metaphorically, people can be green with envy; but if they’re literally green, they’re probably about to throw up. If someone’s literally blue, you wrap them in a blanket and call the emergency services; but if they’re metaphorically that colour, you’ll try and cheer them up. Back to white again - white is good; but it’s also pressed into service to represent innocence, cowardice (as in the white feathers sent to conscientious objectors), and even, in the early years of the 20th century, decency (“That’s very white of you, old man, ending your affair with my wife”).

So what does all this tell us about metaphor? Time for a list:

1) that the literal and metaphorical worlds can be very different places

2) that the metaphorical world contains more possibilities (a heart can be black)

3) that in literature, metaphorical meaning can stand in for its literal equivalent as a form of mnemonic or shorthand (there’s no need to keep telling your audience that Macbeth’s a baddie if you keep associating him with blackness)

4) that metaphor doesn’t just deal with surfaces, but essences

5) that the success of metaphor can be dependent on shared cultural assumptions, and most importantly, because it leads us into the next phase of the argument -

6) METAPHOR CAN BE BIGGER THAN ITS SUBJECT (Macbeth isn’t the only guy who’s bad)

What links these first four types of nodes is that their meaning can exist independently outside their original form, so there isn’t necessarily a large amount of cohesion within them - as such they conform to the first principle of meaning organization we looked at earlier in this section. The form is itself, and then it has meaning thrust upon it, or teased out of it by the metaphor, the adjective, the conceit or the simile. It really is easiest to think of it as a species of emotional attachment, with form and meaning being young free and single, playing fast and loose, delighting in experimentation, moving up and down our meaning line at will to suggest or state or hint or imply or allude or insinuate or assert or pronounce or proclaim. It’s all great fun for the writer with his violet dogs, rosy fingers, compasses and colour palette.

But then form and meaning contemplate settling down together and begin to talk of a more lasting relationship. And it all suddenly gets a lot more serious as we enter the realm of symbol and myth.

e) Symbol

- symbols are all to do with perspective. At the end of the movie ‘Meninblack’ the charm that fits round a cat’s neck is shown to contain an entire galaxy, and we’re encouraged to think that our world is somehow superior to it simply because it’s larger.

But then, in what is the most inventive sequence of the film (which lasts a whole thirty seconds), the shot spins back out from the Earth’s atmosphere into space, through our galaxy and universe, to end up inside a tiny marble which is being tossed around by two aliens. So the Earth, in its turn, is seen as an insignificant speck in proportion to something a lot larger.

There’s plenty of fodder for philosophers in this image (and for Christians too - this one shot provoked a heated debate on an American website that vets films suitable for family viewing. First off, the only one who’s allowed to play around with Earth is God, and not aliens, so the director was accused of blasphemy. Second, marbles is a game of chance, so is the director saying that there’s no Divine Providence? And third, the Bible makes no mention of other universes, therefore there can’t be any. Recommendations on what action to take ranged from not allowing your offspring to watch this ‘disturbing’ film, to lynching anyone involved in it. And these people are presumably allowed to vote).

Anyway, for our purposes, all we need to take away from this is the I

dea that symbols aren’t simply ‘this =that’ sorts of metaphor, but something rather more involved. Like the schoolboy’s address, we’re looking at whole chains of meaning, from marbles to planets to universes to multiverses, from the microcosm to the macrocosm, all of which (and any points in between) can be implied through a simple, compact image - the symbol.

Footnotes:

see Eliot’s essay ‘Imperfect Critics’ for his exploration of this idea

Part 17

It is this potentially enormous range of perspectives that has made the word ‘symbol’ one of the most overworked and incorrectly used in the critic’s vocabulary. In discussions of meaning, the symbol is like a universal adaptor. One size fits all. Anything with a decodable meaning is a symbol.

Well it is and it isn’t. At one end of the argument, a symbol is a metaphor with knobs on, so let’s deal with this uncomplicated idea first. I’m not a huge fan of critics who rush to the dictionary for assistance, but on this occasion, the result is quite interesting. According to the OED, which devotes a column and a half to the word and its various derivatives (and that’s the Shorter OED in microscopic print), at base, a symbol can be a metaphor in the way we’ve already explained it - as a token of something else, a transference of meaning. One root of the word is from the Greek ‘sum ballein’, literally, ‘to throw together’. So you might say that a symbol juxtaposes two related things, one of which sheds light on the meaning of the other, just like a metaphor does.

There’s also what the lit critters call ‘synecdoche’, another simple type of symbolism that substitutes a part of something for the whole of it. So if I’m a poet and I’m bored with using the word ‘ship’, I could refer to an oceangoing vessel as a ‘sail’ (as in ‘our fleet comprised fifty two sails’) or a keel (‘the keels cleft the waves as they passed through the storm’). Unless you’re a painful literalist (“do you mean there’s fifty-two ships, or that the number of ships [which you do not disclose] collectively has a total of fifty-two sails between them? Ha Ha! Got you.), this shoudn’t prove too difficult to accommodate.

But then another definition, which has direct religious overtones, states that, yes, a symbol stands for something else but “not by exact resemblance, but by vague suggestion, or by some accidental . . . relation,” which, is, to say the least, a rather Delphic explanation that opens up a large can of worms for the student of meaning.

One example we might mention is the great religious debate between the consubstantiationalists (who believe that in the Eucharist, bread and wine are symbolic substitutes for Christ’s body and blood) and the transubstantiationalists (who reckon that Christ’s body and blood are literally present during the ceremony) (1). It’s a controversy that’s been raging for 600 or so years, and still shows no sign of going away. But what it hinges on is the basic internal cohesion between form and meaning within the symbols of the bread and wine. The ‘cons’ sect is saying that bread and wine can, in part or in full, stand in for Christ’s body and blood; the ‘trans’ that the ceremony is robbed of its meaning if you adopt this heretical position. In their eyes, Christ’s body and blood have to be there for the Eucharist to be worth bothering with. So the bread and wine are literally what they symbolize.

So. If something ‘exactly resembles’ its meaning, it’s easier to interpret. Bread = the Body of Christ. Wine = Blood. It’s a direct correspondence. But if that meaning is only communicated through ‘vague suggestion’ or by some ‘accidental relation’ (bread is nothing like flesh, and I can’t say I find a glass of rhesus negative particularly attractive), we’re heading down the road to vagueness and even Mystery, which religions are all most adept at using when it suits them (as we’ll see when we deal with myth a bit later), but get rather cagey about if it leads to people questioning that religion’s exclusive franchise to interpret on everyone’s behalf).

As symbolism has developed in literature, that element of mystery has stayed with it. And it undoubtedly retains religious overtones in that it suggests a mystical relationship between the artist and his Muse, like the relationship that exists between God and his representatives on Earth. It stands in for all those aspects of the creative process we don’t understand 100 per cent (which is most of it). So there had to be a literary term which embodied this meeting point between the known and the unknown, and the symbol turned out to be the one that fitted the bill.

So the relationship between form and meaning within the symbol may be transparent - but it may also be so mysterious that even the writer doesn’t fully understand what’s going on. And, as the workings and influence of the subconscious became better understood in the late 19th century, this was an idea which could not simply be attributed to artists getting all precious on us and refusing to explain what they were on about in words of one syllable. Maybe the sources of creativity really were unknowable. In fact a whole literary movement based their philosophy around this idea.

The Symbolist artists (particularly in France and Belgium) sought to express the immediate sensations of human experience and the inner life, since their underlying philosophy was a conviction that the transient objective world is not the true reality, but a reflection of the invisible (usually secular) Absolute. The movement was a revolt against contemporary realistic and naturalistic poetic styles, which were merely designed to capture the transient - something which, in the Symbolist’s view, was of no value.

The symbolists believed that the inner eternal reality could only be suggested: Mallarme, one of the movement’s leading lights (along with Rimbaud, Baudelaire and Verlaine), noted that "to name is to destroy, to suggest is to create", and the resulting poetry of this philosophy was intense and complex, full of condensed syntax and symbolic imagery. Their poetry also emphasized the importance of the sound of the verse, and was described by one fan as "an enigma for the vulgar, chamber-music for the initiated," (no guessing which camp he placed himself in). And, in many respects, it paved the way for the Modernists, who rendered meaning even more complicated by burrowing deeper into the unknown.

So the Symbolists tended to deal in essences rather than specifics. And those essences were not often fully coherent or realizable using standard literary techniques.

So the OED’s definition isn’t being deliberately vague (God forbid this wonderful institution ever would be) - it’s simply reflecting one facet of the way symbols have been made to deliver up their meaning. And so, to cut a long story short) a symbol is far busier part of speech than a metaphor. It genuinely multi-tasks (dread word).

Now let’s get back to our schoolboy’s address/ the essence of Bobby Moore/ the end of ‘Meninblack’, because this is where lit crit tends to lose the plot somewhat.

The farther an interpretation strays from the point of its perceived conception, the more abstract it will become. So at each stage of its outward trajectory (like the ripples in the pool), the symbol loses its particularity and inherits an ever wider application. Hence another OED definition of the symbol is something that ‘typifies’ a particular quality (a usage first noted in 1603, incidentally), and it’s how you define ‘typify’ that has led to some wonderful critical howlers over the years. When interpreting meaning of this sort, you have to continually have in your mind a) a sense of the symbol’s context and b) a sense of proportion. How much is something itself and how much is it a symbol? (Bear in mind it can be an infinitely variable combination of both).

As an example, let’s do the schoolboy letter thing with the character of Macbeth:

Macbeth is an evil man;

Macbeth is a typical evildoer

Macbeth is a stereotypical evildoer;

Macbeth is archetypally evil;

Macbeth is the embodiment of evil;

Macbeth is the apotheosis of evil

All the above are arbitrary descriptions, but they each represent one distinct step on Macbeth’s journey from being one evil man to being the Devil Incarnate, which is a rather long journey. Yet this is the ground the symbol has to cover in much critical thought. So to say ‘Macbeth is a symbol of evil’ is a tad vague and not saying much. How evil exactly?

But what we also need to notice is that at each step on this ladder of notoriety, Macbeth is less Macbeth and more of ‘Evil’, less of a human being and more Satan’s stand-in.

And this is where our sense of proportion needs to click in. How far is it appropriate to travel up this ladder? Macbeth is quite clearly a credible human character as well as being a symbol. He’s not any the less human for all the opprobrium heaped on him, and that is one of the many measures of Shakespeare’s genius, that he doesn’t let his meaning overwhelm the vehicle he’s created to transport it.

Would that certain critics could do the same.

If, for example, you say something is a symbol for something else when you actually mean it’s a metaphor, you’re placing too much weight on a load-bearing surface that isn’t designed to carry it. Not only are you turning suggestion into statement, you’re needlessly complicating the relationship between form and meaning. And it’ all arisen because either there’s a misunderstanding of what a symbol actually is; there’s been a sense of proportion failure; or there’s been a sense of context failure.

Let’s get out our Meaning Line again, and examine four well-known literary symbols to see how they work, ranging from the inscrutable to the downright comprehensible.

One of the most successfully realized literary symbols that conforms with many of the qualities we noted above is the Caves of Marabar in EM Forster’s ‘A Passage to India’.

Within these echoey portals Miss Adela Quested, an English tourist, is allegedly assaulted by local physician Dr Aziz, who is giving her a tour of this famous attraction. In his lengthy description of the caves and their significance, Forster is at pains to point out that they don’t necessarily represent anything tangible, but they do carry enormous, almost palpable portent. They pre-date every other physical feature of the landscape, and are renowned for their ability to scramble the human senses. Add to that Forster’s favourite theme of the sensually illiterate English middle classes and their baseless prejudices, and you’re almost begging Aziz to forego the tour. Adela’s an accident waiting to happen.

Forster’s work is often unjustly maligned for being ‘quaint’, but here is a brilliant symbolic coup de grace whose ambition quietly outstrips many of his high Modernist contemporaries (‘A Passage to India’ was published in 1924, two years after ‘Ulysses’ and ‘The Waste Land’). Many critics have seized on the fact that the caves don’t seem to mean anything to state precisely that - that they are a symbol of nothingness, of the nihilism that was so fashionable in intellectual circles throughout the 1920’s, and that Forster was swept up in this tide of modish ennui.

But the caves are a far cleverer symbol than that; they are actually spiritually neutral.

Footnotes:

1. Of course, as with all religious controversies, it’s not as simple as that, but this’ll do for our purposes.

Part 18

Here’s how EM Forster describes the Caves of Marabar:

The caves are readily described. A tunnel eight feet long, five feet high, three feet wide, leads to a circular chamber about twenty feet in diameter. This arrangement occurs again and again throughout the group of hills, and this is all, this is a Marabar Cave. Having seen one such cave, having seen two, having seen three, four, fourteen, twenty-four, the visitor returns to Chandrapore uncertain whether he has had an interesting experience or a dull one or any experience at all. He finds it difficult to discuss the caves, or to keep them apart in his mind, for the pattern never varies, and no carving, not even a bees'-nest or a bat distinguishes one from another. Nothing, nothing attaches to them, and their reputation-for they have one-does not depend upon human speech. It is as if the surrounding plain or the passing birds have taken upon themselves to exclaim "extraordinary," and the word has taken root in the air, and been inhaled by mankind.

This ‘extraordinary’ quality does not lend itself to pat explanations of its meaning. What this quality of ‘nothingness’ forces visitors to do is confront themselves - there’s no message to read into the caves, so their visitors’ gaze is forced inwards. And in the case of the English, the mirror that is held up to their souls reveals that all the structures they have erected in the name of ‘civilization’ are utterly illusory.

Yet this isn’t an excuse to leap to the conclusion that the world has no meaning. Mrs Moore, the sturdy English matriarch, is spiritually troubled by her Marabar experience, yet she gradually metamorphoses into an embodiment of the potentiality for human love. Her burial, not in a marked grave plot, but in the vastness of the sea, emphasizes the fact that by the end of the novel she is viewed as a force of nature, something the local Indians had already picked up on when they began to chant her name, as they would that of a deity.

So yes, the caves can symbolize emptiness, but only if you have nothing of substance inside you to bring out. It’s much more interesting to think of them as a catalyst, which is what the best symbols are, nodes that hold a web of related meanings in suspension. It’s true the effect of a visit can be explained in terms of culture, history and religion, but all three subjects are subtly subverted to create a unique psychological environment that is far more challenging and troublesome than a conventional interpretation.

One of the hallmarks of Forster’s achievement is that this rich spirituality doesn’t arrive courtesy of some cliched miasmal image of the Mystic East, but takes shape within walls of solid rock - the very opposite of the hippy trippy land of stoned enchantment envisioned by the 1960’s counter-culture. It’s a wonderfully telling, if not altogether comprehensible juxtaposition.

So even a symbol as solid and elemental as the Caves of Marabar can retain an element of mystery, and, in the view of this reader at least, preserves some immunity from critical ingenuity, since every explanation of what they represent seems somehow incomplete and resistant to generalization. And like all the most successful symbols, they act as a sort of beacon within the text, a focus of attention to which the mind’s eye is repeatedly drawn. As such, they are also a structural component, drawing in different strands of meaning and characters around a distinct focal point.

In terms of our Meaning Line, I’d place them way over on the right if they are, as I’m suggesting, ‘scramblers’ of meaning.

Another famous symbol of this type is “Mistah Kurtz” in Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ which once again pitches a fragile rationality against incomprehensible forces born out of our subconscious. Throughout Marlow’s journey, he is confronted by signs that are more and more unrecognizable, because he and the others cannot impose meanings on them, or because the meanings they impose reflect their own anxieties more than anything else. Interestingly, Marlow as a storyteller has a frustrating reputation for fascinating people but never getting at the meaning of things; he keeps asking questions and suggesting mysteries rather than explaining and revealing - a bit like his creator. Kurtz gradually embodies for Marlow this problem of meaning. He never gets to be a flesh-and-blood person: he's a word, then a voice, then a set of ideals: always an abstraction.

So, once again looking at our model of the schoolboy’s envelope, this reading expands Kurtz outwards from an individual human to a universal symbol of (among many other things) man’s problems with the inexpressible; Marlow continually hopes that Kurtz will enlighten him on the topic of meaning only to have his ambitions frustrated.

In some critical accounts, Kurtz has been characterized as an artist figure, one who converses with the deepest mysteries, and there’s something to be said for this - but he turns out to be the guide who has lost his way, leaving Marlow to simplistically conclude that “his soul was mad”.

Unlike, say, Macbeth, who is a flesh-and-blood character as well as a symbol of a specific quality, Kurtz has been deliberately (and appropriately) represented as a void - making it easier for us to treat him as a vessel to fill with our own meanings, so again, he would occupy a position to the right on our Meaning Line. As such, both the Caves of Malabar and Kurtz would satisfy TS Eliot’s demand that art should “simplify current life into something rich and strange.” They are like icebergs, seven-eighths under the water with only the top bit poking out for all to see. As readers, we are left to wonder what lies beneath.

Slightly less rich and strange yet still inhabiting this general area of symbolism is the confectioner’s shop in Joanne Harris’s ‘Chocolat’. The novel as a whole reads like one that has been carefully planned and constructed, and this applies to the deliberateness of the symbolism too. Yet, perhaps in spite of itself, Vianne’s chocolate house doesn’t simply represent sensual indulgence. Again, like the schoolboy’s envelope, it can be attenuated outwards to embody a much less particular liberation from repression of all kinds (as if to emphasize this, the novel is set during Lent, the season of religiously-inspired self-denial).

As with the previous examples we’ve looked at, the symbol can accommodate a ‘top’, while making the reader sense that there are other forces at work which have far broader applications. This interplay between the specific and the symbolic is borne out by the writer herself, who says of her heroine;

Vianne is who you want her to be. You might see her as an archetype or a mythical figure (I prefer to see her as the lone gunslinger who blows into the town, has a showdown with the man in the black hat, then moves on relentless), but on another level she is a perfectly real person with real insecurities and a very human desire for love and acceptance. Her qualities too - kindness, love, tolerance - are very human. She is not supposed to be either a supernatural or a superhuman figure - everything she does exists on this everyday level, and she does nothing which could not be done perfectly well by anyone else.

So here’s an iceberg sticking further out of the water than Conrad’s or Forster’s; meaning isn’t being cut loose (as in the former) or turned in on itself (as in the latter), it’s being drawn out and having its scope extended in a more controlled way. Chocolate is still a symbol, but one that inhabits a position further to the right on our Meaning Line than the other two, since its significance is more easily encapsulated.

This won’t be all we’ve got to say about the Symbol - it’ll stalk the argument again when we deal with Myth in section (g). For now, though, what we need to take away from this bit of the discussion are the two organizational principles at work within the symbol’s meaning - the tension between form and meaning within the symbol itself, and the way the resulting significance radiates outwards. We should also note that in all three of the above examples, the imprecision of the symbol’s meaning exists to draw its readers into a dialogue with it, to open lines of communication with the text. This creative fuzziness at the heart of the symbol, this slightly imperfect match between form and meaning has given literature some of its most haunting and obsessively analysed images, but has also made it the most misinterpreted literary term by those hungry for resolution. And again, throwing forward to Part 2, we’ll see how irresolution can turn a seemingly unremarkable story into a classic.

Allegory

Well, the point of that, Dud, is that Genesis isn’t true in the literal sense. It’s an allergy. Genesis is an allergy of La Condition Humaine. It’s about the whole lot of the human race. Adam and Eve aren’t just Adam and Eve

. They’re the whole human race personified.

Peter Cook & Dudley Moore, ‘Not Only But Also’, BBCTV, 1965

Our examination of the writer’s toolbox continues with yet another variation on the theme of metaphor. If we represent the relationship between form and meaning as two cardboard circles, one placed over the other, the Symbol would have one circle slightly offset in relation to the other. The majority of their surface areas would overlap, but there’d be two crescent-shaped portions out on their own. And this would represent the ambiguity we noted just now.

The structure at work within the allegory would permit no such imprecision; the two circles would overlap perfectly - form and meaning are fully integrated with one another. So allegory is a form of extended metaphor, in which objects, persons, and actions in a narrative, are equated with the meanings that lie outside the narrative itself. The underlying meaning has moral, social, religious, or political significance, and characters are often personifications of abstract ideas as charity, greed, or envy. Thus an allegory is a story with two meanings, a literal meaning and a metaphorical meaning. Simple. Compared with the Symbol, the way allegories work is an intellectual cakewalk.

The main point to note is that an allegory is more likely to have been deliberately constructed by the writer than a symbol, whose significance he may not understand. That deliberate element may imply that the writer’s aim is to educate his audience; by drawing down an abstraction, for example, and giving it physical form, he’ll make it easier for us to understand. Unlike the Symbolist, the drive is to simplify, and not to radiate meaning outwards. The allegorist believes he is taming meaning; the symbolist that he is setting it free. This distinction led the sainted CS Lewis to brilliantly observe that the allegorist starts with the real as the basis for his story, then moves out into fiction to illustrate it; the symbolist starts with real life, which he considers to be a fiction, and moves out into a realm of complex meaning which he considers is more real than real life.

Of course, once the allegorist has got his message across, that doesn’t stop him applying that message to as broad a swathe of humanity as he thinks feasible, but in the establishment of that message, A=B. So if I were to construct a story about a slug, it would more than likely concern laziness. I would then point at my audience and say, “see that slug? That’s you, that is!”.

Allegory can be as unsophisticated as that.

Part 19

In many respects, Aesop’s Fables are allegories, where you would define ‘fable’ as a story with a lesson attached. Same with Christ’s parables. And this is what made allegories so popular as vehicles for communicating complex ideas of sin and redemption in medieval times. But the story vehicle needs to be entertaining enough to stand up on its own, or nobody will listen and the message will be lost.

This drive to educate through simplification tends to deal in essences but again, unlike the symbol, with communicable essences. I remember once interviewing Justin Hayward of the Moody Blues, who released the fabulously pretentious album ‘Days of Future Passed’ in (when else?) 1967. It was one of the first ‘concept’ LP’s , and they dragged in some unfortunate musical arranger to help them orchestrate their songs. Hayward remembered asking the poor bugger if a particular passage could “sound more purple”, thus revealing himself to be a symbolist by inclination. An allegorist would have made up a story to illustrate what he meant by purple - that is, if he was determined to illustrate a quality so abstract, which he probably wouldn’t have been. So a further comparison we can make, courtesy of the Moodies, concerns the compactness of the symbol versus the allegory.

But I digress. In some societies, fables, parables and allegories were grouped together to form a joined-up code of morality or ethics applicable to everyone. The stories were therefore given an added dimension that propelled them outside their immediate cultural context, both geographically and temporally. By implication, again to quote CS Lewis’s ideas, they then belonged not just to one society but any society that contained humans. The stories spoke to mankind, emphasizing shared facets of his experience understandable to all - wherever and whenever. In some respects, most allegories are the bastard children of the Ten Commandments, except that they’re not couched in the form of laws or bald imperatives. Novelist and structuralist philosopher Umberto Eco noted that this web of allegories comprised:

a kind of alphabet through which God spoke to men and revealed the order in things , the blessings of the supernatural, how to conduct oneself in the midst of this divine order and how to win heaven. In themselves, things might inspire distrust because of their disorder, their frailty, their seemingly hostility. But things were more than they seemed. Things were signs. Hope was restored to the world because the world was God’s discourse to man.

Approaching the allegory from a structuralist perspective, he would say that, wouldn’t he? Everything signifies something else, which is the way structuralists see the world. But when discussing medieval allegory, he’s absolutely correct. The questing Knights of the Round Table were continually educated by aspects of their physical landscape, or by small dramas which were laid on within it designed to edify and instruct them as they searched for The Truth. John Bunyan’s ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ uses much the same technique by representing life as an allegorical journey of the spirit towards wisdom, as does Langland’s ‘Piers Plowman’. I could go on.

These days, we like to think ourselves a bit more sophisticated than the average Medieval peasant, so allegory isn’t as popular as it once was. That doesn’t stop critics trying to characterize more recent works such as ‘Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ as an allegory of the struggle between good and evil in man, but there’s a general feeling that to describe something as allegorical may not be doing the story justice - it may have more far-reaching ambitions for its meaning than an allegory can accommodate. Vladimir Nabokov got very shirty about those who branded Franz Kafka’s novels as allegories, which, he said, was tantamount to reducing ‘Metamorphosis’ to an entomological curiosity.

But then there’s ‘Animal Farm’, perhaps the best known political allegory ever written. ‘Animal Farm’ is strongly allegorical, but it represents a finely judged balance between not two, but three levels of meaning: the literal level which houses the immediate story of the animals; the secondary level that comments on the totalitarian politics of Soviet Russia, and a third that argues that these specific men possess the qualities of all leaders who rely on repression and manipulation in order to become successful.

And that, ladies and gentleman, is your allegory. What we need to take with us from this section is the broad application of the allegory’s meaning, meaning that encourages the idea that all mankind is governed by common urges, thoughts and experiences. Which leads us seamlessly into a consideration of:

Myth

- When F. Scott Fitzgerald first arrived at Princeton University in 1913, he was absolutely smitten with the antiquity of the buildings. “Here,” he wrote in 1927, “is no monotony, no feeling that it was all built yesterday at the whim of last week’s millionaire.” And yet it was. In fact, although the paint was scarcely dry on the “great dreaming spires of Holder and Cleveland towers”, he still viewed them through the misty lens of a fin de siecle romanticism that made the buildings appear preposterously old. And this perfectly encapsulates the two most important facets of Myth - its curious relationship with truth, and an assumed universal significance, which, like the towers at Princeton, can quite easily prove illusory.

Once again, I’m afraid I’m going to stray into OED mode for this section, since the literary application of myth differs considerably from what’s commonly conceived when using the word. Most of the time, we understand ‘myth’ by its received definition of “a purely fictitious narrative”, a sense it seems to have inherited during the Victorian era. Prior to that, it was looked on as a story involving gods and goddesses with the emphasis firmly placed on its fantastical elements and not whether it was true or not. Unless you were an Ancient Greek, you’d probably realize that the myth of Leda and the Swan was pure fiction, to the point where this didn’t even need saying. The Victorians, however, being rather anal about these matters, probably didn’t want there to be the slightest possibility that some misguided individual might take it literally, so the word ‘myth’ became synonymous with lying.

Somewhere along the way, however, myth also became involved with the universal truths we were looking at a second ago in allegory, although nowhere in the OED is there any allusion to this shade of meaning, which is rather odd. Collins nods in the direction of myth being involved with social mores and their origins, but proceeds no further.

Yet George Eliot understood this sense of the word, to denote mankind’s shared spiritual inheritance. In ‘Middlemarch’ the aging and ailing Reverend Casaubon is engaged in his lifetime’s work entitled ‘The Key to All Mythologies’, which, when completed, would offer a complete and convincing explanation of why mankind has developed the way it has. A modest proposal, clearly, but pretty much from the word go, we’re given the impression it’s a project doomed to failure, and by the middle of the novel his young wife Dorothea knows it too:

It was clear enough to her that he would expect her to devote herself to sifting those mixed heaps of material, which were to be the doubtful illustration of principles still more doubtful. The poor child had become altogether unbelieving as to the trustworthiness of that Key which had made the ambition and the labor of her husband's life. It was not wonderful that, in spite of her small instruction, her judgment in this matter was truer than his: for she looked with unbiased comparison and healthy sense at probabilities on which he had risked all his egoism. And now she pictured to herself the days, and months, and years which she must spend in sorting what might be called shattered mummies, and fragments of a tradition which was itself a mosaic wrought from crushed ruins--sorting them as food for a theory which was already withered in the birth like an elfin child. Doubtless a vigorous error vigorously pursued has kept the embryos of truth a-breathing: the quest of gold being at the same time a questioning of substances, the body of chemistry is prepared for its soul, and Lavoisier is born. But Mr. Casaubon's theory of the elements which made the seed of all tradition was not likely to bruise itself unawares against discoveries: it floated among flexible conjectures no more solid than those etymologies which seemed strong because of likeness in sound until it was shown that likeness in sound made them impossible: it was a method of interpretation which was not tested by the necessity of forming anything which had sharper collisions than an elaborate notion of Gog and Magog: it was as free from interruption as a plan for threading the stars together. And Dorothea had so often had to check her weariness and impatience over this questionable riddle-guessing, as it revealed itself to her instead of the fellowship in high knowledge which was to make life worthier!

What Casaubon thinks he’s doing is researching a sort of Ultimate History of Man, raising supposition to the rank of certainty as he goes along. Before the possibilities of mapping the brain, or cataloguing every strain of DNA in the human body presented themselves, this was the perhaps the only plausible route to get to know the Meaning of Life - through comparative anthropology, by comparing the rites and customs of different social and ethnic groups from all over the world and determining what they have in common. That way scholars (who, like Casaubon, were often minor clerics with too much leisure time between services) could try and explain why we are as we are.

Strange that devotees of religion should take this task on their shoulders, since any conclusion they might draw from this anthropocentric study were almost bound to lead away from God.

Anthropology was certainly the chosen line of attack for Sir James Frazer, when he began to publish his hugely influential masterwork ‘The Golden Bough’ in 1890. But Sir James wasn’t about to fall into the same trap as the Rev Casaubon - his empirical ambitions are far more modest. In the introduction to his thesis, he wrote:

If we can show that a barbarous custom, like that of the priesthood of Nemi, has existed elsewhere; if we can detect the motives which led to its institution; if we can prove that these motives have operated widely, perhaps universally, in human society, producing in varied circumstances a variety of institutions specifically different but generically alike; if we can show, lastly, that these very motives, with some of their derivative institutions, were actually at work in classical antiquity; then we may fairly infer that at a remoter age the same motives gave birth to the priesthood of Nemi. Such an inference, in default of direct evidence as to how the priesthood did actually arise, can never amount to demonstration. But it will be more or less probable according to the degree of completeness with which it fulfils the conditions I have indicated. The object of this book is, by meeting these conditions, to offer a fairly probable explanation of the priesthood of Nemi [itals mine].

This introduction to one of the later editions of ‘The Golden Bough’ was written in response to critics who thought Frazer had bitten off more than he could chew and that it was, in fact, hugely presumptive of anyone to try and understand the Mysteries of Human Existence. Frazer denied he was doing any such thing (at least in his Introduction), just making a few connections here and there, and drawing some ‘fairly probable’ conclusions. But us students of meaning are always looking for something more than the ‘fairly probable’, and in myth, we found it in spades.

Part 20

Myth is actually the most powerful form of meaning there is, because far from being something that may or may not be credited, it’s really saying THIS IS HOW MEN ARE. THIS IS THE ESSENCE OF MAN. AND YOU’D BETTER LEARN TO LIVE WITH IT BECAUSE YOU CANNOT ARGUE WITH HISTORICAL TRUTH. Myth, paradoxically for those who choose to define it as untrue stories, is Fact. And it’s Fact you can’t argue with. So maybe Casaubon, and not Frazer, had it right all along. Let me explain.

Literature has always treated Myth as a kind of cultural smorgasbord - a collection of rattling good yarns you could nick when you couldn’t be bothered to think up an original plot of your own. It immediately lent your work a historical context and dimension, and, most importantly, an inherited respectability. And that was as much the case among the playwrights of Ancient Greece as it was for the Renaissance writers who in turn took those plays as their inspiration. Whether you’re James Joyce or the Coen Brothers, ‘The Odyssey’ isn’t a bad peg to hang your meaning on (1). After all, it’s been around a long while.

So, over the millennia, you get endless re-tellings of the same story, changing names, dates and places - whatever - to suit contemporary folkways and cultural preoccupations and to make them more ‘relevant’ to their intended audience. They may end up scarcely recognizable from the original ur-plot, but that plot remains in there somewhere, buried under numerous layers of historical accretions.

So the fact that the story has survived immediately gives its meaning a historical justification, and this is Stage One in the creation of a Myth.

Then at some point, (Stage Two) that justification transcends the historical and becomes cultural. This occurs when the someone notices that other stories have a similar meaning. The more geographically and chronologically those examples are spread out, the more universally applicable that meaning can be said to be.

In Stage Three, that broadly applicable meaning coalesces into one Archetypal Story. The formative stories therefore become deracinated, to the point where their origins and immediate settings cease to matter. The original Meaning has now acquired the status of Truth.

Then, in Stage Four, the Truths start to merge together, as common ground is established between them. And what you end up with is critics saying that there’s only nine plots that power the entire Western Canon(2).

It’s like the ‘six degrees of separation’ argument. Only with literature.

So myth is its own justification. It is because it is. It’s a form of eternal meaning whose authority cannot be challenged because it has been borne out by history. Put simply, it’s the “matter” of humanity.

That is a hugely compressed version of a process that can take an incredibly long time. And its often so compressed that you’ll get critics and cultural commentators trying to chase certain mythical motifs back through the world’s cultures to determine their origins, and the route they took on their journey into contemporary culture.

But in literature, myth has been regarded as very much a double-edged sword. According to Philip Larkin, who clearly had TS Eliot and the other uber-modernists is his sights when he wrote this:

I believe that every poem must be its own sole freshly created universe, and therefore have no belief in 'tradition' or a common myth-kitty or casual allusions in poems to other poems or poets, which last I find unpleasantly like the talk of literary understrappers letting you see they know the right people. (3)

He might also have added that when an artist incorporates myth into his work, he’s looking to the past rather than the future, albeit that the meaning inherent in myth, being eternal, is present in everything we do and say.

So the use of myth can, with some justification, be viewed as an exercise in nostalgia. To which William Faulkner, in his acceptance speech for the 1950 Nobel Prize for Literature, might well have remarked, “and what’s wrong with that?” The writer must leave

no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed -- love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

As one of the seminal modernist writers, Faulkner was convinced that things weren’t what they used to be. A spiritual dimension was lacking in the America of 1950, just as it had in the 1920’s, and using myth as his foundation stone was perhaps the only way the writer could do his bit to put some of it back. People were afraid, he noted, and the detonation of the atom bomb had cast a huge shadow over contemporary culture. There were no longer “problems of the spirit” for the artist to wrestle with, only the question “when will I be blown up?” What the use of myth would achieve was to re-connect mankind with those eternal elements in his history and character that had enabled him to make it this far.

Faulkner was, of course, saying nothing new (one of the paradoxes of myth is that it’s nigh on impossible to do anything original, since everything’s only a variation on a theme of what has been done before). Myth has often been associated with the idea of a ‘Golden Age’, and I’m sure that was as true for Edmund Spenser in the 1500’s creating a history for Elizabethan England in ‘The Faerie Queene’ as it was for Hitler when he picked over Germany’s past to manufacture a glorious (and spurious) thousand-year history as he laid the keel for his Third Reich, which was famously going to survive another thousand years.

What artists tend to do when faced with the need to ‘create’ a past, (given that they don’t [usually] have access to tanks troops and guns), is create a sense of a cultural continuum out of which their work emerges, and to which that work contributes. That way, with God having gone AWOL, and philosophy in confusion, there can at least be something underpinning and validating your art.

And no-one, but no-one was better at doing this than TS Eliot, his masterpiece in this genre being ‘The Waste Land’, a collection of “fragments” he “shored against my ruins”.

I’ve already mentioned the romantic sense of ennui that characterized culture in the 1920’s, and, with the publication of ‘The Waste Land’ in 1922, Eliot assumed the role of its high priest. So he got his head down in the library and came up with a dazzling array of fragments, loosely structured round a re-working of the Grail legend as filtered through ‘The Golden Bough’ (q.v.) and Jessie L. Weston’s treatise ‘From Ritual to Romance’. Eliot clearly did his homework, and just so that we know he did, he added (in my edition anyway) five pages of notes citing his cultural references. I think they’re worth listing:

The Book of Ezekiel, The Book of Ecclesiastes, Tristan & Isolde, the Tarot pack, Baudelaire, Dante - ‘Inferno’, John Webster - ‘The White Devil’, Shakespeare - ‘Antony & Cleopatra’, Virgil - the ‘Aeneid’, Milton - ‘Paradise Lost’, Ovid - ‘Metamorphoses’, John Middleton ‘Women Beware Women’, Edmund Spenser ‘Prothalamion’, Shakespeare - ‘The Tempest’, Marvell - ‘To His Coy Mistress’, John Day - ‘The Parliament of Bees’, an Australian ballad, Verlaine - ‘Parsifal’, Goldsmith - ‘The Vicar of Wakefield, ? - ‘The Proposed Demolition of Nineteen City Churches’, Wagner - ‘Gotterdammerung’, V. Froude - ‘Elizabeth’, Dante - ‘Purgatorio’, St. Augustine - ‘Confessions’, Buddha - ‘The Fire Sermon, Herman Hesse - ‘Blick ins Chaos’, the Upanishads, FH Bradley - ‘Appearance and Reality’, Gerard de Nerval - ‘Sonnets’, Thomas Kyd ‘Spanish Tragedy’ and, of course, we must not forget the Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America.

As a smash-and-grab raid on the myth kitty it’s pretty impressive, and up there with Sir Philip Sidney in terms of erudition; that Eliot managed to fashion such a seamless robe from such a catholic variety of source material is an enormous tribute to his (and Ezra Pound’s) poetic abilities and editorial skills. And the presence of the blind prophet Tiresias, who, as a sort of narrator lends an air of historical and mythic continuity, having experienced a sizeable amount of human history. In Eliot’s notes, he’s described as “the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest . . . What Tiresias sees . . . is the substance of the poem.”

Whether to view ‘The Waste Land’ as a showy Cook’s tour of (mainly Western) culture or an appropriate response to a civilizational crisis doesn’t concern us here; what does is Eliot’s conception of myth as lending Value to literary meaning. To look on literature as society’s saviour is to place an incredible burden on its shoulders, but one he thought it could bear.

Or more likely one it had to bear. I suppose it’s the best he could do while he was sorting out his intellectual issues with the Christian faith. (4)

So in a way, our argument has reached a temporary end to its journey: in the opening section, we looked at the issue of whether literary meaning had any value, since it was based on lies. Several thousand words later, we’ve arrived at the position that not only is meaning not a lie but is in fact truth. And not just any old truth, but THE truth. A transcendent truth that can prop up the entire fabric of civilization. A truth that is more real than what is real - and thus a Symbolic Truth.

And so, Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you ‘Literary Meaning’.

Nevertheless, there are a couple of codas to the argument, which we must address for the sake of completeness.

The first thing to emphasize is that there are loads more Big Themes we could look at, and I’m not pretending that what I’ve written above is in any way exhaustive (and the odd additional one will sneak in as our argument progresses). Because what tends to happen is that the law of diminishing returns clicks in just beyond the point we’ve now got to, and we’ll start exploring smaller and smaller offshoots and cul-de-sacs related to the main themes we’ve already established. And this will unbalance the book. So it’s quite preposterous, as one American critic did, to identify 105 different types of meaning; for a start, it makes literature appear far more complicated than it is; there is absolutely no way you can apply them in any consistent way to actual text, as they’ll keep treading on each others’ toes; and besides, it’s bloody boring. So we’re stopping at seven.

So now I want you to forget the contents of this section. You don’t actually need to be aware of any of the above to enjoy reading, but I hope this brief peer under the bonnet of literary meaning will help explain some of its more basic elements. But if you’re going to take anything of practical value away from this section, please let it be these two fundamental ideas:

Meaning is only someone else’s opinion, and your interpretation is likely to be just as valid as theirs;

Meaning does not necessarily have to explain anything; it can exist just as happily as an unformed suggestion as a bald statement of fact.

But these are only my opinions. Nonetheless, I’ll be re-stating them before this book’s finished.

So now we’ve got the bulk of the theory out of the way, let’s return to the factor in the reading equation that matters the most - people. In the next three sections, we’ll be looking at meaning from the viewpoint of the reader, the writer and the critic respectively to find out what we all bring to the party.

Footnotes:

1. In ‘Ulysses’ and the film ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’ respectively

2. Which are, apparently: Cinderella, Achilles, Faust, Tristan, Circe, Romeo & Juliet, Orpheus, the Irrepressible Hero and the Wanderer

3. And Larkin wasn’t alone in his distaste for the mythical. Other writers (Kingsley Amis, John Wain, Elizabeth Jennings, Donald Davie) in what came to be known as ‘The Movement’ chose to address everyday British life in plain, straightforward language and often in traditional forms. It first attracted attention with the publication of the anthology New Lines, edited by Robert Conquest. Conquest saw the group's work "free from both mystical and logical compulsions and - like modern philosophy - is empirical in its attitude to all that comes." So you could usually understand what they were on about.

4. I realize I’ve fallen into the old trap of using Eliot as the touchstone for Modernism in

poetry, but other, less celebrated poets were at it as well; take Edward Thomas, for example, who’ only remembered for the frequently anthologized ‘Adlestrop’. In the marvellous, and beguilingly simple ‘Lob’, the eponymous character, like Eliot’s Tiresias, unites the poem’s meaning through time:

`Do you believe Jack dead before his hour?
Or that his name is Walker, or Bottlesford,
Or Button, a mere clown, or squire, or lord?
The man you saw, - Lob-lie-by-the-fire, Jack Cade,
Jack Smith, Jack Moon, poor Jack of every trade,
Young Jack, or old Jack, or Jack What-d'ye-call,
Jack-in-the-hedge, or Robin-run-by-the-wall,
Robin Hood, Ragged Robin, lazy Bob,
One of the lords of No Man's Land, good Lob, -
Although he was seen dying at Waterloo,
Hastings, Agincourt, and Sedgemoor too, -
Lives yet. He never will admit he is dead
Till millers cease to grind men's bones for bread . . .

He may not be Everyman, but he’s certainly the spirit of England that shone through some of its real and fictional native sons. And you don’t need five pages of notes to understand the poem.

Part 21

First, though, let’s help re-scramble our thoughts with the help of William Faulkner, whose prose interludes in his stage play ‘Requiem for a Nun’ rather elegantly sum up, in story form, what the last 30,000 words of theory have been trying to say.

In the course of our trip around North America, Chris and I passed through twenty-seven states, and noted as we did so that the civic buildings in each state capital tended to look the same. There’d be a columned portico at the entrance, flanked on either side by two classically-influenced wings housing the admin offices, and the whole thing would be surmounted by a dome, usually sheathed in copper or lead, sometimes gilded, often with a bell tower at its apex. Some were far grander than others (the one in Austin, Texas takes some beating, but you’d expect that), they were designed built at different periods in America’s history, but they still conformed to this basic design. I doubt the various legislatures got together and agreed on a single blueprint, so it’s almost as if this is what Americans conceived State Capitols Were Supposed To Look Like. Of course, they may have been influenced by the Congress building in Washington DC, (the dome of which was completed in 1863), but the fierce independence of the Southern states and their unwillingness to copy Yankee models of anything might well preclude that argument. Whatever the explanation, it’s an example of Myth in action, and it’s a process that Faulkner remarks on at the start of Act Two of ‘Requiem for a Nun’, which is subtitled ‘The Golden Dome’.

Mississippi’s State Capital is Jackson which, according to Faulkner, was founded for that very purpose and no other. It didn’t develop at the point of a river crossing or an estuary, a source of water, or alongside a main road. It was decreed to be the centre of the state’s bureaucracy and legislature. Full stop. No other reason.

Faulkner doesn’t describe the building of the Capitol (which, it has to be said, is one of the grander examples - Mississippi was once the second richest state in the Union; now it’s the poorest), it erupts out of the ground like a force of nature (“[T]he earth lurched, heaving darkward the long continental flank, dragging upward . . . this gilded crumb of man’s eternal aspiration, this golden dome preordained and impregnable, this miniscule foetus-glint tougher than ice and harder than freeze . . . “) The dome is an “Idea risen” from the depths of mankind’s subconscious thoughts concerning justice and authority. This is what those qualities look like. So the dome has to be large, imposing, “holding the eyes of all”. But it can’t just be big; it also has to embody the dream of civilization, so it has to be tall, graceful, aspirational, thrusting upwards into the sky, aiming at the heavens.

It’s the symbolic representation of a myth, a graphic depiction of something utterly abstract yet elemental. And it’s also, of course, a symbol of POWER and MONEY. The bigger your capitol, the better your state economy must be doing (which is rather ironic now, since Missisippi seems only to come top of league tables compiled about bad things, like poverty and obesity). It’s what Americans accurately, but not delicately, refer to as “swinging dick” syndrome.

Now contrast this with the courthouse and the jail at Jefferson, the administrative seat of Mississippi’s Lafayette County, and see how they were built - one being an offshoot of the other. Cue one of Faulkner’s best shaggy dog stories set in his (only slightly) fictionalized Yoknapatawpha County.

In the beginning was a shed built of logs when Jefferson was nothing but an insignificant settlement in the northern part of the state. It was used for a variety of purposes, one of which was a jail.

Then, the local militia caught some Natchez Trace bandits - maybe three or four, but the story soon exaggerated it to rather more than that figure. The settlement had never had proper prisoners before, only the odd drunk, so they’d never needed anything to secure the shed. And so, on capturing these particular desperadoes, who were wanted elsewhere in the state, they had to borrow an enormous padlock which they placed on the door. It belonged to the publican, Uncle Alec Holston.

The following morning, they awoke to find a whole wall of the shed had been removed plank by plank, with, of course, no sign of the robbers. The locals found the “bizarre playfulness” of this action “at once humorous and terrifying”, so naturally, it ended up as one of the settlement’s early legends.

But then they noticed the lock was missing, and Holston demanded compensation. But what to do? There was no town, so the settlement didn’t have a fund to pay him for civil expenses. No-one particularly wanted to dip into his own pocket, so the local elders decided they’d create a town and get the state to pay for the lock. And that’s just what they did, and so began “the monster Carolina lock’s transubstantiation into the Yoknapatawpha County Courthouse.” Its “iron and inviolable symbolism” had begun to transcend itself, and stand for something far greater, even though it was no longer there.

The idea arrives courtesy of Pettigrew, an incredibly ancient pillar of the community who is “adamantine . . . impermeable as diamond and manifest in portent” as he delivers the words that will overnight convert Jefferson from an anonymous settlement into a proper town;

“Uncle Alec hasn’t lost any lock . . . that was Uncle Sam.”

Suddenly, “like the rending of a veil”, the settlement’s whole future can be envisioned “like a glorious prophecy.” Jefferson will be a city. All they have to do is repair the jail, and build three more log walls against it to create a second building, which will be the courthouse, “which it had taken them almost thirty years not only to realize they didn’t have, but to discover that they hadn’t even needed.” And to prove it’s a courthouse, they plan to put in an official-looking iron box “that’s been in Ratliffe’s way in the store for the last ten years.”

Everyone chips in to help build it, and when it’s completed two days later, they step back to admire their work and realize that they’re now living in “Jefferson, Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi” - the start of the address on the schoolboy’s letter.

The next phase arrives in short order when civic pride kicks in - a shed simply isn’t grand enough for what it needs to symbolize - so they hire an architect to design a proper courthouse, complete with portico, dome and bell tower - a miniature of the one in the state capital of Jackson. (You can see the actual building Faulkner’s referring to if you visit his home town of Oxford, Mississippi, on which his fictional creation of Jefferson is based). The town now puts on a growth spurt with the site of the new courthouse at its centre; streets radiate outwards like the spokes from a wheel, and bit by bit (remember the image of the ripples on the pool?) the town expands, “thrusting each year further and further back into the wilderness.”

Meanwhile, the new building is rising “course by brick course”, gradually becoming “symbolic and ponderable, tall as cloud, solid as rock, dominating all: protector of the weak, judiciate and curb of the passions and lusts, repository and guardian of the aspirations and the hopes . . . “ So at the same time as it’s projecting its meaning outwards, it’s also drawing peoples’ attention towards itself as “the beacon, focus . . . and lodestar.”

And then, it’s finished. The townsfolk look at each other in amazement, “ for a moment at least capable of believing, that men, all men, including themselves, were a little better, purer maybe even, than they had thought, expected, or even needed to be.” It’s a perfect Symbol.

Then, in 1863, it’s burned to the ground by the invading Yankee armies during the Civil War. But it’s rebuilt to exactly the same design because it is not just a symbol, it’s the symbol. In fact, the symbolism itself has turned into myth - it’s “harder than axes, tougher than fire, more fixed than dynamite . . . immune”, so the symbolism endures even though, for a short time during the post-war construction work, its physical repository may no longer exist.

And that’s the way the courthouse remains. New generations of bureaucrats try to knock it down and put something ‘modern’ in its place. But they can’t. To do so would be to destroy a small part of themselves, their history adn community.

The courthouse, like our opening section, has progressed from being the subject of a folk tale, to being an inescapable truth. You can fill in the other parallels on the way.

Suffice to say that Faulkner completely understood how humans generate and organize meaning.

And this is illustrated in what (I promise) will close this section - the formation of a different type of symbol, that is not so much designed like the courthouse, the embodiment of a pre-existing idea, but one that evolves, as it were, in reverse, as a gradual accretion of meaning, and of history.

You may be wondering what happened to the Jefferson jailhouse after it was repaired:

. . . being older than all, it had seen all: the mutation and the change: and, in that sense, had recorded them . . . (if you would peruse in unbroken - aye, overlapping - continuity the history of a community, look not . . . in the courthouse records, but beneath the successive layers of calsomine and creosote and whitewash on the walls of the jail, since only in that forcible carceration does man find the idleness in which to compose, in the gross and simple terms of his gross and simple lusts and yearnings, the gross and simple recapitulations of his gross and simple heart):

Every year the jail has its new intake of inmates, and every year, they scratch something on the walls before these stories, doggerel, remarks and graffitoes are covered by fresh layers of whitewash. Then there are the layers of the outer walls; the original mud-chinked logs have not been removed, but sheathed in a new layer of brick, preserving all the marks that have been scratched into them.

Over a period of a century or more, these scratched and written marks amalgamate to become a sort of alternative history of Jefferson - certainly not the kind that would be written up in the town’s official records, but one that has actually been lived - with no gloss, no perspective, no rationalization or censoring. These are the raw materials of history which will endure as long as the walls stand, charting the development of Jefferson “from a halting place: to a community: to a settlement: to a village: to a town . . “ - a rather more complete schoolboy’s address than the courthouse managed to symbolize. Because the courthouse hasn’t actually lived so much history as the jail.

And if you’re alert to this living chronicle, you’ll be aware of “the shapes and motions, the gestures of passion and hope and travail and endurance, of the men and women and children in their successive overlapping generations long after the subjects which had reflected the images were vanished and replaced and again replaced . . . “ The jail is nothing less than “man’s incredible and enduring Was”.

And this, of course, is a fantastic resource for writers who aren’t so much interested by formal histories, but something in which they can invest a part of themselves, usually in the form of their imagination (the hoodoos in Bryce Canyon were our starting place for this particular theme). Faulkner finds his own point of departure in the form of a scratched inscription on a pane of glass, etched with a diamond ring which reads Cecilia Farmer April 16th 1861.

And then he’s off, his imagination fired, writing an imagined story about a girl he has never met and knows nothing about. Faulkner makes her the jailer’s daughter (why else would a young girl be in jail?), waiting for the return of her beau from the Civil War. The story itself is “ a bubble, a minute globule which was its own impunity, since what it - the bubble - contained, having no part of rationality and being contemptuous of fact, was immune even to the rationality of rock” because it now exists as an element not just in his imagination but his readers’. He’s almost saying ‘disprove it if you can,’ knowing it’s virtually impossible.

So, from being “paradoxical and significantless”, the story of Cecilia Farmer has been snatched from oblivion, filtered through the artist’s consciousness, and, from that unpromising beginning as an insignificant scratch on a pane of glass, has been transformed into art.

And I can find no better example in literature of how meaning works than this one.

Part 22

Part 23

Dort, wo man Bucher

Verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen.

(“Whenever books are burned, men also, in the end, are burned.”)

(Heinrich Heine, philosopher, ‘Almansor’)

For a start, why does the Recreational Reader want to spend money on another book and not a new T-shirt? Well, let’s go back to Katie Carr; she looks to literature to “teach me the things I needed to know to survive the rest of my life” - which is not an uncommon among readers who look on literature as a branch of white magic. Many of us feel we’re almost duty bound to read books. They’re somehow good for us.

Back in the days of the old ‘Everyman’ imprint, the inside front cover of every title carried the famous quote from John Milton’s ‘Areopagitica’ which states that “a good book [itals mine] is the precious life-blood of a master spirit embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.” And he was far from alone in thinking this; to the essayist Charles Lamb, quality books were “spiritual repasts”, to Thomas Carlyle “a University” and “the purest essence of a human soul”, an attitude that dates back to the era when many of those who were privileged enough to be literate considered themselves duty bound not to squander their skills by reading rubbish or composing trifles.

As such, books, or the best of them at any rate, were, and still are a distillation of what goes on inside the brains of mankind’s most eminent thinkers and creative artists. It’s like Humanity’s Greatest Hits, a physical repository of all that is worthwhile about homo sapiens. So by reading “good” books, we’re engaging in an act of self improvement, connecting ourselves to this ongoing tradition of defining endeavour. And the longer a book has held its own as a vital part of that tradition, the more resonant and resilient its meaning has proved itself to be.

So, viewed in this light, meaning, or rather the perceived survival of meaning, confers an increased value on the text. When buying a book, we’re hooking into the cultural (with a small ‘c’) mainstream almost by default, because books as books come complete with their own history.

This is actually Big Theme #8: Meaning = Value. And vice versa. As such, meaning becomes an aspirational quantity, and we often hope that by opening ourselves up to its influence, we’ll somehow be the better for it. It’s an utterly compelling ambition, but one whose origins are often difficult to pinpoint. It’s as if we’re hard-wired into believing it.

In Philip Larkin’s well-anthologized poem, ‘A Study of Reading Habits’, the narrator equates the gradual loss of his love of reading with the general absence of spirituality in his life, which leads him to famously conclude that “Books are a load of crap”. As his sense of wonder dims with age, so his tastes coarsen, and his opinion of the value of literature diminishes. It’s as if he’s voluntarily (and perversely) giving up his birthright, and if the guy wasn’t such an obvious arsehole you might even feel sorry for him.

But if you’re after less ambiguous testimony to the esteem in which reading is held, look up practically any child-development book or website, and there’s a wealth of unimpeachable and seemingly incontrovertible evidence, both academic and anecdotal, that spiritual impoverishment will inevitably accompany a bookless childhood. To quote a random example, reading “sharpens children's brains. It helps develop their ability to concentrate at length, to solve problems logically, and to express themselves more easily and clearly." And who wouldn’t wish that for their child? Whether you’re a linguistic philosopher like Noam Chomsky or a helper in a kindergarten, you’ll have arrived at the conclusion, albeit by very different paths, that books are good for kids. And with most of us, that’s pushing against an open door because we somehow know it’s true, not least because many of us who now love reading caught the bug when we were young.

And this sense of Value is further reinforced by the fact that books are bound up with ideas of free speech and the dissemination of knowledge, so they tend to be a priority target for those who aren’t enamoured of those two fundamental human rights, or those fearful for the souls of the morally vulnerable. And we have a long and sometimes bloody history of censorship in this country that stretches from the dawning of the English language right through to the present day, which lends books even more meaning; people have actually died that we might continue to read them:

In the 1530’s, William Tyndale was repeatedly lambasted by Sir (now Saint) Thomas More for daring to print and distribute Bibles in English, then strangled and burned at the stake when he wouldn’t recant. The reason usually cited for this act of barbarity is Tyndale’s inclination towards Lutheranism, a heretical creed outlawed by the church in England at the time. And this was the ground of More’s challenge. But there was, of course, a far more fundamental principle at stake: at the root of the clergy’s objections was the fact that they no longer had the monopoly on translating, interpreting and explaining the Bible’s meaning now it was available in the lingua franca. Even though very few people could at that point in history read the new vernacular translation, the church knew its exclusive franchise had been broken, and that this represented the thin end of a very fat wedge which might eventually do them out of a job. Heaven forbid that people should be able to think for themselves and start challenging the status quo.

And so it’s continued up until 1960, when the last big home-grown stink over literary censorship was convincingly deodorized by the ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ trial, with the law once again proving that when it comes to guessing the public mood concerning literature, it is indeed an ass. I know it’s familiar, but I can’t resist quoting the often misquoted prosecuting council, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, who effectively lost the case when he rose to his feet and instructed the jury:

Ask yourselves the question: would you approve of your young sons, young daughters - because girls can read as well as boys - reading this book? Is it a book that you would have lying around the house? Is it a book you would wish your wife or servants to read?

The astonishing revelation that young girls could read, and, what’s more, that their fathers had the casting vote not just in their reading matter, but that of their wives and staff, was only marginally less ludicrous in 1960 than it is now. But what is perhaps not so well known is that ‘Lady Chatterley’ wasn’t the first of DH Lawrence’s novels to attract the censorious attentions of British law. Back in 1915, when his novel ‘The Rainbow’ first appeared, it was (rightly, this time) interpreted as not being entirely supportive of the Great War, and the police seized and burned 1,011 copies (as so often in British history, moronic acts are accompanied by scrupulous paperwork).

And of course, there was the sex: the book was banned by Bow Street magistrates after the police solicitor told them that the obscenity in the book "was wrapped up in language which I suppose will be regarded in some quarters as artistic and intellectual effort". The readers in those ‘quarters’ eventually won the day, and after the publication of ‘Lady Chatterley’ by Penguin (which sold nearly 2 million copies in its first year), it was only a matter of time before the position of the ‘official’ British censor, the Lord Chamberlain, was abolished in 1968 for being both outdated and unsustainable. (1)

Elsewhere in the world, the symbolic and empirical value of books was clearly understood by those who set fire to entire libraries.

Library burning has long been a favourite tactic for those dictators, demagogues and oligarchs who wish to demoralize or destroy entire cultures, and, as with everything else, the Chinese got there first, during the reign of Shih Huang-ti in the third century BC.

At an imperial banquet in 213 BC, a Confucian scholar decided he wanted to talk about historical continuity, and offered his opinion that only by studying the past could China move forward. The emperor's grand councilor Li Ssu angrily responded, "There are some men of letters who do not model themselves on the present, but study the past in order to criticize the present age. They confuse and excite the ordinary people. If such conditions are not prohibited, the imperial power will decline above and partisanship will form below." He was so enamoured of this idea, he ordered that all books in the empire be burned, with the exception of those that dealt with agriculture, medicine, and fortune telling. On top of that, it was decreed that even to discuss the forbidden works was punishable by death.

Then there was the notorious destruction of the greatest library of Western antiquity in Alexandria. No one seems to know exactly whose fault it was, not even Tom Stoppard, who marks the event in his 1993 play ‘Arcadia’, during which the budding (and rather theatrical) genius Thomasina says to her tutor, "Oh, Septimus!—can you bear it? All the lost plays of the Athenians! Two hundred at least by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides—thousands of poems—Aristotle's own library! How can we sleep for grief?" Whoever was responsible owes posterity - and Western culture - an explanation.

And on into the twentieth century. The desire to eradicate the past inspired Hitler's book-burning ceremonies of May 1933. The Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, told the students at the bonfires as they hurled the forbidden works into the conflagration, "These flames not only illuminate the final end of an old era, they also light up the new." So that’s alright then. All in a good cause.

And it’s still happening. In August 1992, in Bosnia, Serb forces targeted Sarajevo's multi-cultural National and University Library with a bombardment of incendiary grenades.

Bosnia's written heritage was consumed—a million and a half volumes, one hundred and fifty-five thousand of them rare books and manuscripts. The library's director said that the Bosnian Serbs "knew that if they wanted to destroy this multiethnic society, they would have to destroy the library”. So they did.

And at the time I’m writing this, the occupying forces in Iraq have determined that one of their top priorities is to restore the looted treasures of the Baghdad Library, alongside the reinstatement of essential services such as water and electricity.

Footnote:

1. Of course, the law still has to participate in the banning of any form of art if it’s judged to transgress the laws governing public decency, which still includes the charges of blasphemy and blasphemous libel. James Kirkup’s poem, ‘The Love That Dares To Speak Its Name’ (1976) was found guilty of blasphemous libel in the UK. It describes a Roman centurion's sex with Christ's corpse and asserts that Jesus had group sex with his disciples. It has been briefly quoted on a few occasions, though it remains an illegal text.

So censorship continues just about everywhere: it’s too big a subject for further coverage here, but a good place to start investigating is at www.onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/banned-books.html, which will set you going in all kinds of useful and informative directions

Part 24

But it’s not just under dictatorships or in areas of the globe ravaged by war that books and reading are stigmatized. In 1953, during the McCarthy-ite witch-hunts that sought to root out all real or imagined Communist subversives within the United States, the American Library Association was moved to issue its seminal document, ‘The Freedom To Read’ in response to what they considered was the threat to freedom of expression posed by the Cold War. Here’s an inspiring digest of it:

The freedom to read is essential to our democracy. It is continuously under attack. Private groups and public authorities in various parts of the country are working to remove or limit access to reading materials, to censor content in schools, to label “controversial” views, to distribute lists of “objectionable” books or authors, and to purge libraries. These actions apparently rise from a view that our national tradition of free expression is no longer valid; that censorship and suppression are needed to avoid the subversion of politics and the corruption of morals. We, as citizens devoted to reading and as librarians and publishers responsible for disseminating ideas, wish to assert the public interest in the preservation of the freedom to read.

Most attempts at suppression rest on a denial of the fundamental premise of democracy: that the ordinary citizen, by exercising critical judgment, will accept the good and reject the bad. The censors, public and private, assume that they should determine what is good and what is bad for their fellow citizens.

We trust Americans to recognize propaganda and misinformation, and to make their own decisions about what they read and believe. Such pressure toward conformity is perhaps natural to a time of accelerated change. And yet suppression is never more dangerous than in such a time of social tension. Freedom has given the United States the elasticity to endure strain. Freedom keeps open the path of novel and creative solutions, and enables change to come by choice. Every silencing of a heresy, every enforcement of an orthodoxy, diminishes the toughness and resilience of our society and leaves it the less able to deal with controversy and difference.

Now as always in our history, reading is among our greatest freedoms. The freedom to read and write is almost the only means for making generally available ideas or manners of expression that can initially command only a small audience. The written word is the natural medium for the new idea and the untried voice from which come the original contributions to social growth. It is essential to the extended discussion that serious thought requires, and to the accumulation of knowledge and ideas into organized collections.

To which one can only add, “Spot on”. But the depressing thing is, the ALA are still having to revise and update the document 50 years after it was first issued. (1) So even those of us living in (nominal) democracies need to be constantly on our guard.

As the hawks on the American Right tend to say, “the price of freedom is eternal vigilance”. Just read the introduction to the UK edition of Michael Moore’s ‘Stupid White Men’, and you’ll see how insidious forms of censorship are very much with us in the 21st century - and how in this particular case, the suppression of Moore’s book was foiled by a group of militant librarians who took on the combined strength of Rupert Murdoch and the US Government. I know Moore over-eggs his puddings a lot, but even if half of what he claims here is true, it still makes for disturbing reading.

So the struggles that writers, publishers and librarians have faced down the centuries and are still facing, all contribute to the special place books continue to hold in our own democratic culture as repositories for man’s creative and intellectual endeavours. It’s the bedrock of what books mean, and that history’s thrown in with the cover price of every book we buy. So books communicate meaning before you even open them. They’ve had a long journey to get here, of which the above is a necessarily small sample of the trials they’ve undergone. (2)

Amid all this special pleading, however, we mustn’t lose sight of literature’s entertainment value. Books are increasingly being marketed using ideas of escape, or as aids to relaxation, and that’s really what our Recreational Reader’s after this particular Saturday morning, which is why he’s not in the T-shirt shop. He’s had a shitty week, and he needs some form of diversion that’s maybe a little more rewarding than vegging out in front of Sky Sports. And he’s not alone: over 54% of readers in the UK reckon their primary motivation for reading is to help them calm down. And the king (or perhaps Queen) of these recreational genres is the Romance.

Most women, it seems, use romantically-inclined literature to unwind - they must, or 49% of paperbacks sold in America wouldn’t be romances (and that’s according to the ‘New York Times’, so that’s a fact, Jack). And romance readers are yet another of those huge underground constituencies of readers that criticism pays little or no attention to, so they don’t show up on the cultural radar that often - except to be patronized, of course.

This is, of course, nothing new. The first romance is generally agreed to have appeared in the fourth century A.D - Aethiopica by Heliodorus. In a plot strangely familiar to today's romance readers and followers of soap operas, the heroine Chariclea falls in love with Theagenes shortly after taking her vows of chastity as a priestess of Diana. They run away together to search for her parents who turn out to be the King and Queen of Ethiopia. Along the way, pirates, robbers and an evil queen create a series of obstacles which Chariclea must overcome before she can confront her father with his abandonment of her at birth, and gain his blessing on her union with Theagenes (who is required to slay a maddened bull to prove his worthiness as a suitor). Eat your heart out, Jackie Collins. And we can trace a line of romances through Arthurian literature through to the 18th century, when the Minerva Press in England was cranking them out like Mills & Boon do now. Nobody remembers the large number of novels by Eliza Parsons, Regina Maria Roche, Elizabeth Helme, the Lee Sisters, Charlotte Smith, Charlotte Dacre and Mary Charlton, but suffice to say, they gave a lot of readers a lot of fun. So Georgette Heyer, Catherine Cookson and Jilly Cooper didn’t just appear out of nowhere - they’re part of a noble tradition of entertainment stretching back over 1600 years.

One of the most interesting facets of the Romance’s history is the composition of its audience. The Arthurian chronicles were enjoyed by both sexes, and there was absolutely no stigma attached to being seen in public with a copy of Sir Thomas Malory’s ‘Le Morte D’Arthur’ about your person. The theory goes that the male reader liked the tales of derring-do, and were comfortable with love that was intellectual and aspirational, (which most of it was in 15th century literature). (3) The knights fought the battles and won the ladies - no marriage, babies, settling down or in fact any sissy stuff whatsoever. But then the emphasis changed.

As more women learned to read during the Renaissance, they demanded (and writers gradually gave them) less fighting and more of a domestic focus, which was the cue for men to desert the genre.

And that’s the way it’s been ever since; on holiday, Mum takes her romance, and Dad picks up a thriller. I don’t know how you prove any of the above two paragraphs, but it sounds as good a theory as any I’ve come across.

And of course, your critic routinely sneers at both Mum and Dad for their ‘low’ tastes in reading matter. But then you look at the statistics for Mills & Boon and wonder how you can so readily dismiss a genre which can boast these figures:

Þ Mills and Boon sell over 200 million books world-wide each year. That's more than six books every second.

Þ their titles are sold in over 100 countries and are translated into 26 languages.

Þ over 800 new titles are published each month (no, that’s not a misprint).

Now that’s a lot of relaxation - and only one publisher’s figures. So are all these people stupid, Mr Critic?

So let’s quickly look where we’ve got to: we all have ambitions for our reading, whether it’s self-improvement, or simple entertainment. These are the two main reasons most of us reach for a book. But what to choose? What’s going to make one book stand out from all the rest in the shop? What’s going to make this book leap out at our Recreational Reader and shout “Buy me!”

It’s actually three things - Money, Love and Longevity, a trio of unlikely bedfellows that confer meaning on any book before a word’s been read. Together (and as you’ll see, they aren’t always easy to separate out), they constitute what I’m going to call the circumstantial meaning of a book, which, it seems to me, is rarely taken into account in lit crit because it doesn’t address the text, but is every bit as important as what’s between the covers in that it gets prospective readers to acknowledge the existence of the book in the first instance.

“I can’t imagine anything more encouraging than having someone buy your work. I never write - indeed, am physically incapable of writing - anything that I don’t think will be paid for.”

(Truman Capote, writer)

"There can hardly be stranger wares in the world than books: printed by people who do not understand them; sold by people who do not understand them; bound, reviewed, and read by people who do not understand them; and now even written by people who do not understand them."

(Georg Christof Lictenberg, 1790’s German physicist)

Of the three bedfellows mentioned above, the inclusion of Money is likely to be the most perplexing to those raised on the notion that a book is the precious life blood of a master spirit (or ‘PLBOAMS’ as we’ll abbreviate it from now on). But it’s money that will give any book its initial leg-up on the ladder of immortality by getting it published in the first place. Simply for a book to exist, to be a physical thing you can touch endows it with meaning. Meaning is nothing without an audience, and without being published in one form or another, a book won’t get to much of an audience. And if we want to go down a short existential side alley (and why not, it reminds me of being a student again), we could apply the tree falling in the forest analogy to it; if nobody witnessed the tree fall, did it actually fall? If Kafka or Vergil’s executors had obeyed their friends’ final wishes and destroyed the manuscripts of ‘Metamorphosis’ and ‘The Aeneid’, we could only mourn their loss, like the contents of the Library at Alexandria. So any potential audience would have been robbed of the chance of discovering their worth, and placing them on the cultural pedestals they occupy today. And while it would be nice to think that there’s some kind of Platonic Realm of Meaning that contains all the lost material ever written, it unfortunately doesn’t exist outside the world of philosophical speculation. Meaning has to survive in an oral or physical form, and not in some vague spiritual miasma to mean anything. Hence the connection between publishing, money and meaning.

Obvious, I know, but sometimes people from both inside and outside publishing can get a tad precious about literature and rail at the cash nexus inherent in any commercial venture associated with it. They’re made uneasy by the juxtaposition of Mammon and the PLBOAMS, while ignoring the simple fact that the production of the book they’re reading represents a considerable financial investment by someone. But the more business-oriented that someone appears to be, the greater suspicion they seem to arouse in certain quarters.

It’s all part of the mindset we’ve just looked at - books are ‘special’ and somehow above all that. Or the worthwhile ones are, anyway.

Take the late James Laughlin, founder and for many years principal editor of the avant-garde publisher New Directions, who, when asked if it was possible to make money in publishing, replied; "It can be done, if you have enough bad taste to do it." The essayist and critic Joseph Epstein also noted this attitude in a 2001 article in ‘Commentary ‘ magazine, entitled ‘Among the Gentlemen Publishers’, in which he examines the consolidation of small family-run publishing companies into giant anonymous conglomerates:

Where once it was understood that commercially popular books would "carry" more intellectually sophisticated and literary books, and publishers could await the slow accumulation of revenues from titles retained in the "backlist," publishing is currently now [sic] said to be a serve-and-volley game, and if a book fails to get to the net quickly, it will not be allowed to make it at all. Good - possibly great - books are being degraded in importance, if not entirely ignored, or so it is argued.

So, in a nutshell; a) only vulgar stuff sells, and b) the huge media multinationals who’ve recently been swallowing those traditional publishers who knew and cared about literature don’t realize that acquiring the taste for a book may take a while - by which time, the company will either have lost patience and deleted it from the back catalogue; or, if they do realize this in advance, it may never get published because it won’t deliver a return on their investment quickly enough. (4) Not only that, but “intellectually sophisticated” books are being made to punch their weight in the marketplace. Imagine! How dare they!

There are those that have argued that commissioning literature using these standards is tantamount to an insidious form of censorship that is prejudicial to the kind of literature that doesn’t fit a proscribed format, or can’t be targeted at a recognized demographic. In other words, those books at the ‘artier’ end of the spectrum. Or, as some would see it, the cutting edge of literature.

So, the concern is that the more money enters the equation, the lower the standards of published literature will fall, and the less literature will ‘mean’, since, in the opinion of many commentators, Meaning is synonymous with a book’s Perceived Quality (this is Big Theme #9, by the way). And Literature (with a big ‘L’), in order to be Literature, must be good. True? Let’s spend the rest of this section exploring this Big Theme. And what “good” actually means.

Footnotes:

1. Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act of 2001 currently threatens bookshop and library privacy following the catastrophic events of 9/11. FBI agents do not need to prove they have “probable cause” before searching bookshop or library records: they can get access to the records of anyone whom they believe to have information that may be relevant to a terrorism investigation, including people who are not suspected of committing a crime or of having any knowledge of a crime. The request for an order authorizing the search is heard by a secret court in a closed proceeding, making it impossible for a bookseller or librarian to have the opportunity to object on First Amendment grounds prior to the execution of the order.

2. And just look at this list: these are all the books that have either been “banned, expurgated or challenged” in the last 50 years in America (I can find no equivalent list in the UK, although we’re as guilty as many. Maybe we just keep quiet about it): Dorothy Allison - Bastard Out of Carolina, American Heritage Dictionary, The Anarchist Cookbook, Maya Angelou - I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Anonymous - Go Ask Alice, James Baldwin - If Beale Street Could Talk, Frank L. Baum - The Wizard of Oz, Judy Blume - Deenie; Forever; Tiger Eyes;Blubber;Wifey, Boston Women's Health Book Collective - Our Bodies, Ourselves, Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451, Edgar Rice Burroughs - Tarzan, William Burroughs - Naked Lunch, Robert Cormier - The Chocolate War, Roald Dahl - Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; Witches, Charles Darwin - On the Origin of Species, Ralph Ellison - Invisible Man, William Faulkner - As I Lay Dying; Mosquitos, F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby, Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary, E.M. Forster - Maurice, Anne Frank - The Diary of a Young Girl, Gabriel Garcia Marquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude, Nancy Garden - Annie on My Mind, Allen Ginsberg - Howl and Other Poems, Nikki Giovanni - My House, William Golding - Lord of the Flies, Bette Green - The Drowning of Stephan Jones, Judith Guest - Ordinary People, Alex Haley and Malcolm X - The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Joseph Heller - Catch-22, Langston Hughes, ed. - Best Short Stories by Negro Writers, Aldous Huxley - Brave New World, James Joyce - Ulysses, Norton Juster - The Phantom Tollbooth, Stephen King - Cujo;The Shining, John Knowles - A Separate Peace, D.H. Lawrence - Lady Chatterley's Lover, Harper Lee - To Kill a Mockingbird, Henry Miller - Tropic of Cancer, Toni Morrison - The Bluest Eye; Song of Solomon, Leslea Newman - Heather Has Two Mommies, Eugene O'Neill - Desire Under the Elms; Strange Interlude, George Orwell - 1984, Katherine Paterson - Bridge to Terabithia, Sylvia Plath - The Bell Jar, Pauline Reage - The Story of O, Luis Rodriguez - Always Running, Salman Rushdie - The Satanic Verses, J.D. Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye, Hubert Selby Jr. - Last Exit to Brooklyn, Maurice Sendak - In the Night Kitchen, William Shakespeare - The Merchant of Venice; Romeo and Juliet, Jane Smiley - A Thousand Acres, John Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath; Of Mice and Men; The Red Pony, Mark Twain - Huckleberry Finn, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five, Alice Walker - The Color Purple; In Love and Trouble, Walt Whitman - Leaves of Grass, Michael Willhoite - Daddy's Roommate, Edmund Wilson - Memoirs of Hecate County, Richard Wright - Native Son; Black Boy.

Some you can just about understand - but ‘The Great Gatsby’?

3. The classic text on the subject of medieval and Renaissance literary love is ‘The Allegory of Love’, by CS Lewis - well worth seeking out

4. By contrast to the multinationals, Colin Haycraft, the late-lamented owner of Duckworth’s, a fiercely independent UK publisher, said he could tell how well his books were selling by the thickness of the dust resting on them in the warehouse

Part 25

For those who are made uncomfortable by the increasing closeness of huge media conglomerates like News Corporation, AOL Time Warner and Pearson to the cultural continuum, there are some crumbs of comfort to be found, and perhaps the first and greatest of these is the following: that even with their huge resources and market share (the accountants KPMG found that of 15,000 publishers (1), fewer than 40 accounted for over 60% of total book sales), their sophisticated retail tools and demographic samplings and focus groups, they’re still rubbish at predicting what will prove popular. So the good old blunderbuss approach of firing a huge number of titles at a wide audience and hoping some will hit the target is about as scientific as a general publisher’s going to get, no matter how big the company. The accountants no doubt wish the situation were different, but like it or not, success or failure hinges on the nous of the company’s Commissioning Editors - something you can’t measure, quantify or even necessarily teach. It’s that imprecise. So it’s actually in the publisher’s interest (unless it’s a niche company with a loyal audience) to cast their net as widely as possible.

But even the good Commissioning Editors tend to have a low strike rate: in 1998, for example, a mere 3% of titles accounted for 50% of the volume of retail sales. So the big players seem to be no wiser than the minnows on the issue of what will sell. As a website called www.ukpublishing-info tersely observes;

The book publishing business historically concentrated on pushing product out into the supply chain and has taken less account than it should of whether the books will sell. Typically 20% of a publisher’s titles will account for 80% of the revenues. Publishers seem divided over whether this is simply an inevitable consequence of the business – forecasting whether a particular title will sell is, after all, not like forecasting demand for nappies or baked beans – or something which publishers should be actively trying to change. Book publishing, especially on the fiction side, resembles the music and film business, where a few hits will be balanced by a large number of

failures.

Predicting readers’ responses is far from being a science. All the publisher can possibly know is the glaringly obvious fact that the book’s meaning - the essential bridge between the book and the reader - has to somehow reach as many people as possible. And, of course, there’s no way you can guarantee this is going to happen. One man’s meaning is another’s total crap. But meaning’s the thing to focus on, even at the most popular end of the market. The following quote is taken from one of the brashest (and so, by definition, American) “how to” book marketing publications I could find (for ‘content’ read ‘meaning’ - it seems we’re talking about the same thing).

Regardless of what kind of books you publish, the books must have some sort of content. Yes, it is possible to sell books with no content at all, but that is a limited market. Most publishers must give priority to content. And rightly so. Indeed, the reason most of us are in publishing is because of the content. We want to create books with lasting value, with significance, with substance.

Or, in other words, books that have legs. And legs are provided by value, significance, substance and meaning, call this property what you will.

But one of the glories of meaning is that it doesn’t behave like baked beans - and never will. The contents of no two tins is alike, even between two Mills and Boon formula romances. And once you’ve progressed beyond the ‘literature by numbers’ market, it’s more wayward still; who can account for the success of eccentric titles like Louis de Bernieres’s ‘Captain Corelli’s Mandolin’ or Yann Martel’s ‘The Life of Pi’? Or why ‘Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire’ sold far fewer copies in the UK than the other books in the series, including its successor? Or why Zadie Smith’s ‘White Teeth’ took off like a rocket and the follow-up didn’t? The most convincing argument our American marketeer can come up with is based on the capriciousness of the literary orgasm (which he calls “the chill factor”), and that’s no use to a multinational at all. So marketing books can be a nightmare for anyone who lives or dies by the balance sheet. (2) Which is, by a long way, the biggest understatement in this book so far.

And it’s not just the slipperiness of meaning you’ve got to take into account when you’re trying to flog books, or the utterly personal process that is reading - but the often cranky susceptibilities of your audience, bearing in mind the special aura surrounding books we looked at a few pages back.

Traditionally, there’s a far greater emphasis on what certain marketing managers call “the whispering campaign” as opposed to the ‘in your face’ approach adopted by other media. And in the UK at least, this (mostly) refined bush telegraph works brilliantly - to the tune of nearly 1.5 billion pounds spent in the UK on books in 2001. It’s a complex web of reviews and recommendations involving the broadsheets, the weekly literary magazines, book-oriented radio stations like BBC Radio 4 and Oneword, summer festivals and reading groups. Then there’s the book pages in publications as diverse as ‘Cosmopolitan’ and ‘Hornby Modeller’, the celebrity endorsements, not to mention the snatched glimpses over a fellow passenger’s shoulder on the Tube, train or bus at an eye-catching cover. Then there’s the book shop dump bins, the belly bands, and the panoply of marketing material that represents, as yet, only a mild flirtation with the vulgar. (3)

And books are marketed in this way for a reason: the love between a reader and a book is much more likely to take the form of a slow burn, growing slowly and steadily into a lasting loyalty over an extended period of time rather than a quick bunk-up. And it really is love, one that suffuses the entire army of people associated with this not-quite-sleeping giant we call literature. Why else would anyone work for the miniscule wages paid to the majority of staff in publishing and its associated retail industry? Why else do most assistants in bookshops tend to have degrees? You don’t get that in Tesco’s. Or indeed anywhere else. But it can be a fierce love, and, as we’ll discover in the rest of this section, often a jealous one too. All down to the mystique that is The Book. And whether you’re a multinational or not, you’d be a fool to ignore the fact that Meaning is Personal (Big Theme #10), as we’ll see in greater detail in the following section.

So you must bear the following in mind if you’re a publicist: best make sure you don’t get too populist, because if you do choose to mount a high-profile marketing campaign, any form of literary ballyhoo can put off as many readers as it attracts. Somehow making a big fuss about a book seems all rather vulgar, whether it’s a PLBOAMS or not. Take ‘Harry Potter’ as perhaps the best example of orchestrated book hype the world’s ever witnessed.

At midnight on 21st June 2003, hundreds of bookshops worldwide threw open their doors to accommodate the demand for ‘Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix’, which dictated an initial print run of 8.5 million copies in the US alone. Online retailer Amazon had more than one million advance orders, including 300,000 in Britain. Borders came next with 700,000, followed by Barnes & Noble, who were offering the chance to win a holiday for four in ‘Harry Potter’s England’ as part of their build-up. Mark Lawson in ‘The Guardian’, offered this level-headed assessment:

[JK Rowling] . . . has created a world in which novels - like new cars, grouse, Beaujolais Nouveau and Star Wars movies - are mass-purchased on the first day of availability and in which book reviews are phoned in at half-time like a sports report. Newspapers and airwaves contained the first literary notices in which critics freely admitted that they had not had time to finish the book.

Selling literature like this is a risk. The only previous novel released to even a percentage of this hysteria, Thomas Harris's ‘Hannibal’ . . . suffered from critics taking revenge on the publicity [itals mine]. But while no writer could ever justify this hype, my view - backed, more importantly, by assistant critics from the target market - is that JK Rowling may survive it.

And so far she has. But this is a phenomenon that’s yet to be repeated with any other author, and no-one in publishing I’ve talked to reckons this is going to be the thin end of a very fat wedge. Or, indeed, any wedge at all. Many actively hope it isn’t, balancing their obvious distaste for all this uncharacteristic hoop-la by saying that JK Rowling’s legacy will not be the unprecedented amount of money she’s earned, but that almost single-handedly she introduced a whole new generation to the joys of reading, thereby saving them from the middle-class cultural hell represented by MTV and the computer game. So, by using a bit of intellectual sophistry, we can disassociate all that razzamattaz from literature and keep it safely at arms’ length.

Those who want to man the trenches between literature and commerce can rest easily in their beds, safe in the knowledge that it’s OK to like ‘Harry Potter’. It was a close shave, though.

So, as a publisher facing these obstacles, and in some case downright hostility that he’s not a charity for the promulgation of Culture and Knowledge, what can he do to bring his books and the reader together? If tastes, and therefore the way we ingest meaning, are as capricious as I’m making out, is there anything that can be done not so much to try and standardize readers’ responses, but perhaps to encourage them to be less partial? Or to put it another way, to cast their nets wider in the sea of books and forget about any artificial distinctions that may have been bred into them? Can they reconcile the mass market with the exalted status books continue to possess? And can they maintain that special aura while increasing demand? (that’s enough questions, Ed).

First off, they’ll have to DEMYSTIFY the world of books, particularly for those whose patterns of consumption are sporadic and irregular (and let’s not forget that constitutes about three-quarters of the potential UK audience).

It’s often overlooked that it can be genuinely daunting if you don’t know your way around literature - I’ve heard it likened to being hopelessly lost in the middle of a big city. Which is spot on. I heard a well-known DJ on the radio this morning who’s decided, age 44, that he isn’t going to start reading literary classics because he’s scared he’ll find out what he’s been missing all these years, and he’ll never manage to catch up having left it so late. How sad is that? And all because he had formed a baseless prejudice that literature “wasn’t for him”.

Footnotes:

1. Most of these publishers are absolutely tiny: in 2000, of these 15,000, only 2,305 were registered for VAT - so only 15% of the total number had a turnover exceeding the VAT threshold, which (then) was £51K

2. I once had lunch with the literary editor of a national newspaper who offered this useful rule of thumb: unless a book is the subject of a Hollywood movie deal; a thinly-disguised tissue of real-life gossip; written by someone who’s already famous for doing something far more exciting than writing; or who’s committed an indiscretion that‘s come to the attention of the police or a group of religious fundamentalists, or ‘Harry Potter’, don’t waste money on marketing.

3. My current favourite promotional technique is a daring new development found in bookshops, where the endorsement arrives in the form of a handwritten note (signed by a member of the branch’s staff, who’s acting the part of a kind of trusted friend or go-between), usually on recycled paper, gently inviting you to look in the book’s direction, as you might find a brief dalliance mildly enjoyable. It’s all very adult. And if you think that’s a peculiarly British way of under-selling something, it isn’t; these little billets-doux are exactly the same in both the US and Australia, where you might expect a bit more gush. It reminds me of ‘Brief Encounter’, where the beast in Trevor Howard’s subconscious is telling him to rip Celia Johnson’s clothes off, a desire he ruthlessly sublimates into the offer of a cup of tea.

Part 26

In this country, school is unlikely to have prepared us to make educated choices in our reading. While most of us are taught the mechanics of reading, you may, if you’re lucky, get a teacher who instils a love of books in his pupils and encourages you to use the school library (if, these days, it’s got any books in it); (1) you may have parents who read to you as a child, or who’ve lobbed the odd book in your direction, or who may even have a decent home library of their own (assuming they don’t think reading is the exclusive province of nancy boys). Then comes the compulsory GCSE in English Lit, where you’re typically required to master two set texts chosen by the examining board’s literary gurus.

And that, for most people, is all the help they get, which, on its own, would make falling in love with Ian McEwan’s novels an unlikely future event. Even those who go on to ‘AS’ and ‘A’ Level, need only read another 4 set books in order to pass the exam, which is rather scary. You can be cast adrift on a sea of words at age 16 without knowing the sharp from the blunt end of the ship, having read 2 books, or at 18 having read 6, but with a qualification in English Literature. Small wonder that the reading matter in many British homes is confined to an unopened set of encyclopaedias, a bound Orbis partwork on the Second World War, the latest cookbook from a TV chef and the Reader’s Digest Book of English Villages. Esteemed publications all, but not much there to stimulate the imagination.

So assuming the spirit’s willing, where on earth do you turn next? I would argue, unfashionably perhaps, it’s those who are at the business end of book retailing who are currently adopting the most visible (and some would argue, effective) strategies to break down the barriers which have been erected to prevent potential readers engaging with Literature (with a big ‘L’). It’s only natural they should be in the vanguard of the popularization of all forms of reading, since they stand to make money from it. They want more readers, and they want more sales. And ‘Literary Fiction’, without a doubt, is an underperforming area of the catalogue.

As the song goes, Thems that knows know that they know, but thems that don’t know, don’t know they don’t know. If you see what I mean. So wouldn’t it be good to target thems that don’t know, and introduce them to some fantastic literature? (I dare you to answer ‘no’ to that question).

But before we look at the techniques they’re using, let’s examine what can put the mockers on people reading Literature before they reach the first hurdle, since it’s all tied up with Meaning. In fact, it’s our Big Theme #2 resurrected - that of ‘High’ and ‘Low’ Meaning.

Book Snobs

Earlier in this section, I made the distinction between the sorts of reading we may undertake for the purpose of self-improvement, and that which simply gives us pleasure. And there’s the rub. These represent two worlds in reading - the ‘Literary’ and the ‘Popular’ respectively, a situation that’s been a reality ever since mass production made it possible for books to be manufactured cheaply enough to attract those with little money, but one that’s only been intellectually schematized since histories of literary consumption started to be written less than a hundred years ago.

In major studies of popular fiction, ranging from QD Leavis’s 1932 magnum opus ‘Fiction and the Reading Public’ to Joseph McAleer’s ‘Popular Reading and Publishing in Britain: 1914-1950’ which appeared in 1993, researchers have tended to conclude that romances and thrillers are simply opiates for the masses, and, unlike, say, poetry or ‘literary’ fiction, quite deliberately reflect conservative social values and employ straightforward techniques to communicate their meaning. On our Meaning Line, their model looks like this:

Meaning---------------------------------------------------------------Significance

Popular Literary

Easy Challenging

Romance/ Thriller Literary Fiction/ Poetry

But what really upset the Cultural (with a large ‘C’) applecart is when the publishing industry started to show dangerous signs that they wanted to make money by pandering to this low-effort economy. That development, according to McAleer in particular, made publishers unwilling to take a chance on new or ‘difficult’ authors, and encouraged the dumbing down of literature as a whole. Not good, although as we’ve already noted, using the example of the Romance genre on page -- above, it’s clear this situation that existed in Britain since at least the eighteenth century, although the real mass market didn’t begin to emerge until the 19th.

For a start, far more people were learning to read; by the late 18th century, it’s estimated around 60% of men had attained a decent standard of reading literacy, and women weren’t far behind. This compares favourably with today’s figure, believe it or not. Which only goes to show how complacent we’ve become in promoting the ideal of a lterate population. Anyway. From his coffee house in London, Doctor Johnson opined that Britain was becoming “a nation of readers”; in bookseller James Lackington’s view, “All ranks and degrees now READ”. You can contest these assertions (and historians have) but there’s now little doubt that they’re broadly correct. Someone must have been borrowing books from the 1,000 circulating libraries we know were operating by the end of the 18th century. Supply and demand and all that.

Second, as printing technology became more sophisticated in the nineteenth century, so the cost of producing a book grew less, and those savings were passed on to readers by a new breed of entrepreneurial publishers. In the first half of the 19th century, the publishing industry favoured small editions and high prices for copyright texts. For example, Walter Scott's novel ‘Kenilworth’ was issued in 1821 priced at 31 shillings and 6 pence, or a guinea and a half as it then was. This was the normal price for new books published in the 1840s, which was way beyond the pocket of the average reader, whose weekly wage packet would be a few shillings (certainly under 50p) if he was lucky.

But from the 1830’s onwards, a wide variety of literature started to be made available at prices ranging from a penny to sixpence.

At the lower end were the ‘penny dreadfuls’ (melodrama, crime, gothic novels and pornography) - but there was also some quality stuff being distributed; the publisher John Cooke issued editions of British poets in sixpenny parts; George Newnes started the Penny Library of Famous Books (and had a print run of 100,000 copies a time); and Charles Tilt produced inexpensive illustrated classics. And last but not least was the habit of producing novels in monthly instalments in magazines and periodicals, which was largely responsible for the success of Charles Dickens (among many others), since the pricing policy of part-works more accurately reflected the cashflow in the majority of households. And these could be bought pretty much everywhere. When W. H. Smith opened their first railway bookstall in 1848 there was already a fair assortment of low-priced reprints on display, such as the Railway Library, the Travellers Library, and the Run and Read Library.

But let’s press on. More people were reading more books. And you can’t argue with the fact that in Queenie Leavis’s time, popular writers like Edgar Wallace, E. Phillips Oppenheim, Agatha Christie and Angela Brazil supplied the bulk of the fiction consumed by the British public, just as Jackie Collins, John Grisham and Jeffrey Archer do in McAleer’s. What’s more important is the conclusions both critics draw about the respective audiences for popular and literary writing.

Typically (and this goes for Leavis and McAleer, and we can add George Orwell and Virginia Woolf to the list here too), there was perceived to be very little mobility between the two; readers of “trash fiction”, says McAleer, “tend not to graduate to 'high-brow' novels and non-fiction".

Now look at that verb ‘graduate’, which, in all its innocence, begs three huge questions about meaning:

Þ Does popular fiction by its very nature mean anything less than literary fiction?

Þ Is the amount of effort you put into reading and/or understanding a work of literature directly correlated to the worth of its meaning?

Þ Is one genre of writing intrinsically superior to another?

To which, if you answered ‘Yes’ to all three of the above must be added:

Þ Do you automatically equate the word ‘Popular’ with ‘Bad’

and then the killer, which comes with its own reply:

Þ ARE YOU A SNOB? YES YOU BLOODY WELL ARE!

Underlying this model is the assumption that the more you have to work for your meaning, the better it is. You have to earn your enlightenment - the writer shouldn’t be spoon-feeding you, or else, somehow, the book’s not doing you as much good as if you are wrestling with it. Like a cryptic crossword, some readers relish the chance to actively struggle with meaning - how else to explain the classic status of ‘Finnegan’s Wake’, written by an author whose own wife asked him, “Why don’t you write books people can read?” The critic William Empson actually gave it a name; it was he noted the “puzzle interest” in art. It’s as if by selecting “difficult” material, the reader equates effort with value, and, ultimately, meaning (“I won’t be defeated!”, he resolves). The book therefore becomes a gauntlet, seemingly thrown down by the writer as a challenge it would be cowardly to decline. It’s an interestingly Puritical idea, that meaning not earned is bought cheaply and therefore of little value. So those who read for entertainment purposes are just downright lazy. And what they’re reading can’t be wholesome. And then, because we’re in Britain, the issue of class raises its ugly head and you can write the rest yourself.

Of course, this model isn’t just exclusively owned by literary historians: there are people who wouldn’t be seen dead with a Jackie Collins novel because of what they imagine it says about them; similarly, there are those who wouldn’t dream of picking up an Ian McEwan because they’ve heard he’s “difficult”. But while the former is a simple case of Hyacinth Bucket-itis that’s probably terminal, the latter aversion can be cured in a number of ways, as we’ll see in a moment.

But this bifurcation is still very compelling, and while the majority of us just get on with reading what we like, there are those who are desperately worried that the ubiquity of popular literature, and the populist strategies publishers are using to sell ‘literary’ works is diluting literature’s gene pool. It’s not as special as it was. The PLBOAMS is becoming a tin of beans.

It’s a point of view championed in a book entitled ‘Serious Poetry’, published in 2003, by Peter McDonald whose argument I’ll précis here, since, at 40 quid a pop, I don’t reckon many libraries or bookshops are going to have copies available for consultation. (2)

McDonald is convinced that only by a process of continual experimentation will literature remain vital. And for “experimentation”, read “difficult”.

Those, he argues, who make “popular acclaim their last refuge of value” ultimately narrow the scope for intellectual rigour - it’s actively disabling the spirit of poetic innovation as well as critical enquiry into that innovation.

There are two types of poems: one (the majority) courts approval and necessarily ingratiates itself with as wide an audience as possible; (3) the other goes it alone, refusing to play by these rules and confronts “the finally uncontrollable difficulty and complexity of language”. What will survive of us, says McDonald, is words, and not the “personality” of the poet. Words, after all, are where meaning resides. He then constructs a template of one such meretricious lyric:

Such a poem will be in the first person (at least to begin with); it will demonstrate wry knowledge of what is most current in speech or reference . . .;it will tell some kind of anecdote . . . ; finally, it will find an image or images that transcend the situation, and that constitute an unspecific, apparently secular, epiphany. The poem will cultivate a knowing irony in relation to everything but its own control of language.

Ouch. Some well-aimed barbs in that one. And most of us who’ve read any modern verse will see what he means; the poem will be written in a matey tone, takes nothing terribly seriously and commits itself to no particular point of view (other than its own of course). Most crucially, perhaps, you don’t have to read it 20 times to get the gist. By contrast, he says, poetry that is worth the name heroically works “against the grain of opinion, or in a complex and guarded relation to it”, and is less concerned with currying favour than the rigorous exploration of unfamiliar intellectual territory, caring not one jot for those it alienates on the way. (4)

Whether you consider McDonald’s ideas viciously satirical or a load of reactionary old toss is an issue we’ll address in Part 4. But it does remind me of the amusing arguments that used to rage in the field of orchestral music, between those who insisted on referring to it as “serious music”, and those who were quite happy using “classical”, albeit for the most part inaccurately. In the same vein Australians, of all people, were outraged when it was proposed that their Radio 3 equivalent should cease being called ‘ABC Fine Music’ and rebranded ‘Classic FM’. You would have thought the bottom had dropped out of their world. And in a funny kind of way, it had, because someone, without asking permission, had monkeyed around with the circumstantial meaning of what they loved, and, in their view, debased the currency.

Footnotes:

1. In 2000/2001, the average primary school in England spent a pathetic £3,834 on books. And at the time of writing (2003), this figure is widely predicted to go DOWN. Book spend is three times higher in independent schools, incidentally. In the state sector, the situation’s so bad, many schools rely on supermarket loyalty schemes to stock their libraries. So parents shop at Tesco’s to obtain book vouchers so pupils don’t have to share set texts. Pathetic, isn’t it?

2. This works out at almost 18 pence a page. There’s an interesting game being played here, which is directly relevant at this point in the argument. No-one, except the odd university library and the writer’s immediate family, are going to pay that much for a slender volume such as this, no matter how good it is. So, by their pricing policy, the publishers are effectively consigning this book to oblivion; they’re sticking by the old industry adage that because it’s ‘difficult’, no-one’s going to want to read it, so they’ll only print a few copies and charge the earth for them. This is, of course, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Maybe this doesn’t bother Peter McDonald; it is, after all, consistent with the argument of his book - but then again, he’s only lauding intellectual barriers to understanding, not fiscal ones.

3. So presumably the young McDonald, if invited, wouldn’t have addressed schoolteachers by their first name. Such tactics represent a short-term (and indeed patronizing) ploy to get chummy with the kids at the expense of the teacher’s traditional authority.

4. Maybe he doesn’t have many friends, and this is his way of coping with the ugly truth.

Part 27

There’s a certain sort of arts fan, and there’s a lot of them about, for whom a pleasure shared is a pleasure halved. It’s as if the meaning of a piece of art is actually diluted by other peoples’ appreciation of it, as if the object of their affection is having a succession of random extra-marital affairs with complete strangers. You can see this mindset at work in McDonald’s book - the work of art should be hard, proud and independent, formidable and a tad threatening, like some stern, formidable Wagnerian goddess accustomed to worship. It most definitely should not make its meaning available to any Joe who walks in off the street and expresses a casual interest. Courtship must be protracted and difficult - and when a jealous arts fan mates, he mates for life.

Once consummation has been achieved, obstacles must be placed around the inamorata to guard against any unwanted attentions from potential suitors. These are usually social (she’s out of your class) or intellectual (you’re not clever enough to understand her), and reviewers, critics and academics will play their part in guarding her chastity by trying and make the work of art appear as complex as they possibly can. It’s a pretty sorry spectacle all round, particularly if you think, as I do, that art should be the good time had by all. And while I wouldn’t for a minute suggest that the literary snob is a Freudian basket case, I reckon they do have a few screws loose. Isn’t it natural to want to share enjoyment?

For the publisher and the retailer, however, this distinction between Popular and Literary doesn’t matter a jot - they’ll happily sell to both markets. Money is money, no matter whose pocket it comes out of, so they’re not going to come down on one side of the argument or the other. They recognize the reality of the situation and act on it. So, even in smaller branches of High Street bookshops, there’s a section dedicated to each, and there need be no confusion as to which one is which, because all we have to do is look at the book itself. The format it’s published in will give you an idea of what you’ll find inside.

If it’s a small, thick book with gold blocking on the front and the author’s surname in far bigger type than his first name, it’s ‘Popular Fiction’ - an airport novel, a thriller, a romance, sci-fi - whatever. Apparently, we like our popular fiction to look that way - small close print, tight margins and lavatory-quality paper (which is chosen to ‘bulk out’ the book to make it look chunky and substantial). It’s easy to carry around, and you can break its spine because it’s not that expensive and you’ll probably only read it once anyway before lending it to someone else. It’s there to entertain more than it exists to stimulate or inform, so it’s designed to look brash and slightly vulgar.

But if you can’t find what you want there, try the ‘Literary Fiction’ area, distinguishable by its rows of titles in the larger ‘B’ format pioneered in the UK by Picador Books from 1972 onwards, and which just about every publisher has now copied. This has wider margins, larger print, thinner, better quality paper and a tasteful cover design. It also costs a couple of pounds more (on average) - all of which indicates that we’re in PLBOAMS territory. You’re more likely to find your challenging read here than in the land of gold blocking - and, if you’re so minded, you can sneer at your fellow readers flicking through the latest Ken Follett in the next aisle.

Two paperback formats, two worlds of reading, both of which have been extensively researched by the marketeers to help us readers find what we want. But formulated using the prejudice that some books are inherently less worthwhile than others.

I find it odd that the physical aspect of a book’s circumstantial meaning should prove so influential - but it always has. In the 1930’s, paperbacks as a format simply weren’t reviewed by the literary weeklies - they weren’t thought ‘serious’ enough, so editors tended not to bother with them, seduced instead by the more substantial cardboard of the hardback. It was almost as if, subconsciously, the added strength in the binding lent them more substance. I also remember an episode of the BBC’s sitcom ‘The Good Life’ in which the queen of the Surbiton snobs, Margot Ledbetter, says she wouldn’t allow a paperback on her shelves. People might think she was common, or, heaven forbid, couldn’t afford hardbacks.

It’s almost too stupid for words, and there are, of course, many examples of where these artificial barriers have been broken down.

Perhaps the most celebrated of these was the foundation, in 1935, of Penguin Books by the publisher Allen Lane, who sought to bring a range of quality fiction to the market at affordable prices (6d, originally) in paperback. The first ten books that appeared under the imprint were an inspired mix of the popular and esoteric: rubbing shoulders with mainstream writers such as Agatha Christie, Eric Linklater and Compton MacKenzie was Ernest Hemingway’s ‘A Farewell to Arms’, and even more surprisingly, Andre Maurois’s biography of Shelley, ‘Ariel’ - hardly light reading. Although advance orders of only 7,000 wasn’t an auspicious start for the new imprint, over 3 million were sold in the first twelve months of Penguin’s lifetime, proving that ‘popular’ and ‘poor quality’ were not necessarily synonymous. (1)

Heartened by this success, and following the easing of the paper shortages of the Second World War (which saw book production cut by around two-thirds), a new range of Penguin Classics was launched in 1946, putting yet another nail in the coffin of those who thought ‘difficult’ stuff wouldn’t sell: EV Rieu’s translation of Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ shipped three million copies and held the title of the most popular Penguin until sex overtook it in the form of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ in 1960. It was cheap, available, and a clearly-written translation of a damn good story. By the law of averages, there must have been a quite a few Recreational Readers who shelled out their tanners for a copy, giving the lie to those who feel that most of us are happy on an exclusive diet of crap. (2)

But it doesn’t necessarily take a revolutionary publishing venture to break down the barriers - just look what happens when a ‘classic’ is serialized on TV or made into a film. When this occurs, fiction usually stops being ‘literary’ and is simply regarded as a good story, whether it’s Stephen King or Henry James. Then a “popular” edition is released with a still from the production on the cover. And it sells like mad.

Take Robert Graves’s classical epic ‘I, Claudius’, for example, still regularly reprinted nearly 30 years after its first TV transmission on BBC2 in 1976. Not an obvious choice for an impulse buy before the serialization, but a title which raced off the shelves after Penguin put a mosaic likeness of Derek Jacobi (who played the title role) on the cover. And there was a knock-on effect: sales of Suetonius’s ‘The Twelve Caesars’ started to grow, once eager readers found out it was the source for much of ‘I, Claudius’. And who knows, many may have been propelled into a lifelong love of the Latin classics after they’d been given this tantalising glimpse of an entire new world of literature they didn’t even know existed.

The same thing happened after the movie version of Michael Ondaatje’s novel ‘The English Patient’ was released in 1996. Reading the histories of Herodotus as a prelude to intercourse certainly worked for Ralph Fiennes’s character, Almasy - and, judging by the number of Recreational Readers who bought a copy of “The Father of History’s” work on the strength of the movie, they were going to have a try themselves. Even Marcel Proust enjoyed a surge in popular acclaim after part of ‘A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu’ was filmed as ‘Swann’s Way’, starring Jeremy Irons in 1983.

So to build sales for an author who is one of the benchmarks of “difficulty” is, after all, possible. Which only goes to show; in most cases, it’s not the work of literature itself or how difficult or easy it is to read that’s the issue. It’s whether we know it’s available at all. Knowledge is the key, and, in many cases, it can start a momentum that will see a hitherto Recreational Reader seek out his own path through literature that will turn his tentative forays into a grand passion. Who cares how people come into the realms of literature, as long as they get there?

And this is an attitude increasingly prevalent in publishing, although, of course, it’s one driven more by business principles than cultural altruism; all you’ve got to do is provide accessible information, combine it with an attractive pricing policy, and you might just be able to sell more copies of a wider range of titles.

One of the less public inroads into th