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 the PLBOAMS mindset, was the abolition of the Net Book Agreement, a cosy cartel assembled in 1900, which, until 1995, fixed the price at which books could be sold throughout the UK. Eight years on from its demise, the above-mentioned Harry Potter tome is retailing in hardback from between £7.34 (Tesco OnLine) to the full price of £16.99 in smaller shops who don’t have the buying power to negotiate publisher discounts at this astonishing rate of 43 per cent. Furious lobbying greeted news of the NBA’s proposed withdrawal, and, it’s true that freeing the market up has been a mixed blessing. The downside is that a lot of independent, quirky bookshops have gone to the wall, which concentrates more power into fewer hands, which isn’t noted as being a good thing in any walk of life. But the dire warnings that fewer books would end up being published as the outlets for low-circulation books evaporated have been proved completely wrong, as we noted above. There’s now more books appearing than ever, right across the subject spectrum. And there’s plenty of circumstantial evidence that it’s not just the potential big sellers that are being discounted; in my local Waterstone’s this morning, I counted at least a dozen first-time authors that were being stickered, which might just persuade our Recreational Reader to take a punt on a name he’s never heard of rather than buying the latest John Grisham. You never know.

Then there’s the introduction of the Book Charts. The music industry’s had theirs in one form or another for over 65 years; and it’s a mark of how wonderfully blase the book business can be sometimes that it took them half a century to catch up, and even then, few were convinced of the value of having these statistics to hand. It was all rather grubby and smacked of, well, commerce. But then the multinationals arrived and started demanding rather more grown-up market indicators than the ‘I counted ‘x’ number of books out and I counted ‘y’ number of books back’ that had served the trade so well for so long. Now most MD’s are glued to the middle pages of ‘The Bookseller’ every Thursday to see how their offspring are faring ‘out there’ in the dog-eat-dog world of properly audited sales.

Since 2002, the sales of every title can be monitored from point of sale tills in the UK, the USA/ Canada, Ireland and Australia. So we can tell what everyone’s reading in the major English-speaking markets, with data from over 6,000 retailers.

Footnotes:

1. The name ‘Penguin’ was thought up by Allen Lane’s secretary when her boss asked for ‘”dignified yet flippant” suggestions for the new company. Those first ten titles were ‘Ariel’: Andre Maurois, ‘A Farewell to Arms’: Ernest Hemingway, ‘Poet's Pub’: Eric Linklater, ‘Madame Claire’: Susan Ertz, ‘The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club’: Dorothy L. Sayers, ‘The Murder on the Links’: Agatha Christie, ‘Twenty-five’: Beverley Nichols, ‘William’: E. H. Young, ‘Gone to Earth’: Mary Webb, ‘Carnival’: Compton Mackenzie. But as with so much we’ve looked at so far in this section, there was a precedent for both the appearance of Penguins and their editorial policy: Albatros books [notice the recurring bird motif], themselves based on the Tauchnitz editions of Leipzig started in 1842, were founded in Hamburg in 1932 - there’s nothing new under the sun in publishing, it seems . . .

2. And now there’s loads of classic imprints, all doing reasonably well in what’s become a crowded area of the marketplace. Penguin now has several hundred titles available, joined by Wordsworth Classics, Picador, Dover and Oxford World’s Classics, to name a few.

Part 28

Then there’s the appearance and layout of the bookshop itself; if our Recreational Reader peruses the book charts in his Sunday newspaper and sees a title he likes the look of, they’re right there staring him in the face when he crosses the threshold of any chain bookstore. And this is done for a simple reason. It may seem odd or even ridiculous to the bookworms among us, but extensive market research by the majors has revealed that a significant percentage of prospective book buyers are actually subconsciously intimidated by bookshops, because these establishments can make them feel inadequate in a way that a clothes store or a supermarket does not. Venturing beyond the front of the shop seems to say to those who don’t know their Austen from their Anouilh, “You Don’t Belong Here”. Whether that’s real or imagined doesn’t matter, it’s a fact of life that bookshops have identified and (quite rightly) acted on.

None of the above is retail rocket science in any other area of merchandising - but in publishing, it remains something of a novelty, particularly to the few remaining older grandees to whom books resemble virgin debutantes trembling nervously on the verge of their coming out season. Will they find themselves anyone to love? Nowadays, with retailing being dragged into the modern era, some reckon books are more like hard-headed career women brandishing pre-nups - yet the world doesn’t seem to have ended. We can only hope that commerce doesn’t eventually turn them into over-rouged old slappers who care not a jot for our respect as long as we part with our money.

So the worlds of publishing and book retailing have changed beyond all recognition in the last ten years, and, it’s true, not always for the better. What we’ve lost is some of its eccentricity; but the widespread nostalgia for that idiosyncracy sometimes conveniently forgets its various shortcomings: in the case of the Duckworth imprint, its best-selling novelist Beryl Bainbridge was never paid more than £2,000 as an advance, and only 3,000 copies of her hugely popular novels would be printed in hardback; and when those copies had sold, there would be no reprint. She’s now published by a conglomerate, AOL Time Warner.

When her first outing with that company ‘According to Queeney’ appeared in 2001, it sold more than 19,000 copies of the hardback through high street bookshops. So more readers and royalties for Beryl - and good for her.

But the most obvious (and worrying) thing we may lose as a result of these changes is the degree of risk a publisher’s prepared to take on a title that isn’t immediately marketable - who knows, if a distant company in the multinational’s empire begins haemorraging money, it may be us readers who’ll eventually suffer. But this doesn’t seem to have happened yet, and it hopefully won’t as long as long as the market for books holds its own in the greatly-expanded leisure industry. Which it is doing, in part because it modernized itself in the nick of time.

But what’s all this got to do with meaning?

A lot. Increased accessibility to information about literature, a greater awareness of its history, the availability of a wide range of titles, and the maintenance of the profile of books within our culture are all facets of circumstantial meaning that will help replenish literature’s gene pool and enable it to survive. Dumb little spats about the difficulty or otherwise of interpretation are red herrings that should remain inside the cloisters of academe or within the covers of slim books that cost 40 quid. We should all be happy that there are writers that will cater to our tastes for all types of literature, challenging or otherwise, at whatever level we’re able to appreciate it. Because to do otherwise is to paint meaning into a corner, to restrict its resonance - and let’s not forget, the kind of snobbish intolerance publicly demonstrated by some reviewers and critics isn’t the best shop window for literature. But that’s precisely why they indulge in such egotistical nonsense; in their scheme, meaning can only be preserved by, paradoxically, restricting its audience to thems that know and can truly appreciate it. And that, of course, means them - a self-appointed aesthetic elite who, to the rest of us, come over as a bunch of ponces who need to get out more.

So although the role of money in the story of meaning may seem small, and to some, even irrelevant, it’s absolutely crucial: it gets the book published, distributes it and tries to get you to notice it. But it’s once the book’s out in the marketplace that its real trials begin, and it’s usually going to be what’s between the lines that counts.The ways books insinuate themselves into the reader’s consciousness are many and varied, which is what we’re going to be looking at in the following section, which is basically about how we fall in love both with literature and the individual works that comprise it.

Those of us who are habitual readers often have a story to tell about how we fell in love with books. And I’m no exception.

I was forced by an English teacher to put down my ‘Boy’s Bumper Book of All World Facts’ and read ‘Decline & Fall’ by Evelyn Waugh. I reluctantly obeyed, because he threatened me with dire consequences if I didn’t, and at the age of 13 I had already developed a finely-honed instinct for survival. He then practically stood over me while I got stuck in. And I never looked back. Next came ‘Scoop’. Then the complete works of PG Wodehouse. Then Dorothy L. Sayers - it all just snowballed as a result of that single encounter. Talk about a defining moment. So thanks, Tony Brunskill. This book’s all your fault.

But I was a comparative latecomer to the world of fiction - many are bitten at a far earlier age than I was.

And it’s fascinating what sorts of meaning children take away from their first brushes with literature - since these interpretations are rarely even remotely connected with the author’s intentions, and certainly nothing a critic or journalist would ever dream of seizing on in their assessment of a book’s significance.

There’s no doubt scads of academic treatises on childhood cognition I could quote you if I could be arsed, but far more telling is a website I only recently heard about which enables us to deal with this fascinating area far less boringly. It’s called BookSleuth, and it uses the resources of the internet, and the accumulated knowledge of all the other readers who log onto it, to track down books that we loved (usually as kids) but whose salient details we can no longer remember.

You can read the often forlorn experiences of adults who have been severed from a much-loved source of childhood pleasure, and it’s what these bookseekers connected with that in itself makes fascinating reading. It’s all there on the site, a testament to the randomness of meaning in our childhood perceptions from as unscientific a selection of people as it’s possible to find.

Meaning often seems to reside not so much in a memorable message or the perceived cultural value of the book, but in the colour of the cover; the name of a character, a stray couplet, an illustration or a telling incident, which turns the conventional wisdom that we associate lifelong memory with “great literature” completely on its head. As children, we can often bypass these traditional benchmarks of literary status. Often, it’s the circumstantial meaning we’ve been looking at which sticks in the brain, and it’s usually more significant than the received meaning that may have been passed on by a parent or teacher - the “you really ought to read this because it’ll do you good” type of recommendation. These books, for whatever reason, have been taken and absorbed into the self, with perhaps nothing else but their imaginative importance having been registered - things that seemingly have no meaning or content other than their inexplicable place in the memory.

And it can happen to writers too: take CS Lewis, in whose 1955 autobiography ‘Surprised By Joy’, we find this:

I had become fond of Longfellow's "Saga of King Olaf": fond of it in a casual, shallow way for its story and vigorous rhythms. But then, and quite different from such pleasures, and like a voice from far more distant regions, there came a moment when I idly turned the pages of the book and found the unrhymed translation of ‘Tegner's Drapa’, and read:

I heard a voice that cried
Balder the beautiful
Is dead, is dead -

I knew nothing about Balder; but instantly I was uplifted into huge regions of the northern sky; I desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale and remote) and then...found myself at the very same moment already falling out of that desire and wishing I were back in it.

It is these fleeting moments of perception, occurring throughout his life, that Lewis refers to as "Joy" (I suppose “Surprised by a Literary Orgasm” might have been a bit racy for 1956 when the book was published), and it is they that provoke his longing:

Joy, must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and Pleasure. Joy has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again...I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power,
exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But Joy is never in our power and Pleasure often is.

You can always trust old Clive to turn pleasure into a sort of philosophically resigned despair, but I would guess the principle holds true for many of us, that these personal epiphanies are both unlooked for and unaccountable - and frustratingly difficult to recapture. We can only rejoice that they happened at all, and the testimony of the hundreds of contributors on the BookSleuth site, who are all helping each other to recover the trigger for those lost moments of joy, serves as an excellent reminder that the creation or identification of meaning doesn’t necessarily have to obey any laws, -isms or -ologies whatever. And don’t let anyone persuade you it does.

So falling in love with literature at all is, to say the least, a rather hit-and-miss affair. But thankfully, tens of millions do, and it’s mainly, I suspect, down to their own initiative coupled with a deeply-ingrained cultural assumption we looked at earlier that some of a book’s ‘value’ rubs off on the reader. There’s any number of routes you can travel to arrive at this destination, whether it’s a blinding Road to Damascus-style revelation, peer pressure, curiosity, an enforced period of inactivity - whatever. We may need a small push or a bloody great leg-up, but however we get there, it’s a cause for great personal celebration, since whatever you read and enjoy becomes yours, an intellectual property that is personal to you according to the way you interpret it.

Part 29

We’re getting to a highly subjective part of the argument here, and one that I suspect can never be adequately explained or accounted for since trying to rationalize any form of love is practically impossible - but let’s carry on regardless since the way literature expands your sense of selfhood lies at the heart of the experience of reading.

The interior pleasures of reading are well documented; the historian Edward Gibbon noted that he wouldn’t exchange the delights he got from reading “for the treasures of India”; Sir Richard Steele pronounced that “Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body”; and no set of endorsements would be complete without a testimonial from Morrissey, who observed in another of his seminal lyrics “There’s more to life than books - but not much more.”

For a more rigorously academic analysis of reading, it’s difficult to beat Harold Bloom’s magisterial tome published in 2000, ‘How to Read and Why’.

To read human sentiments in human language you must be able to read humanly, with all of you. You are more than an ideology, whatever your convictions, and Shakespeare speaks to as much of you as you can bring to him. That is to say: Shakespeare reads you more fully than you can read him . . .We read Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Dickens, Proust, and all their peers because they more than enlarge life. . . We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are. Yet the strongest, most authentic motive for deep reading . . . is the search for a difficult pleasure. . . There is a reader's Sublime, and it seems the only secular transcendence we can ever attain, except for the even more precarious transcendence we call "falling in love." I urge you to find what truly comes near to you, that can be used for weighing and for considering. Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.

Which pretty much sums it all up, at least from the perspective of what Bloom labels the ‘solitary’ or ‘selfish’ reader. What he’s saying is that literature shines its light into corners of your soul you never even knew existed. So in a strange kind of way, the text is reading you as you’re reading it. It can give perspective, it can make connections, it can spark recognitions as your mind flashes around within it, giving new life to old meanings you may have forgotten. It’s both animator and re-animator, weaving patterns of meaning and significance into fresh designs. It involves you and the person you are in its meaning.

And it doesn’t do to forget that reading is also a visual medium; while you’ve got your proboscis in a book, all kinds of pictures come flooding involuntarily into your head - what Bertie Wooster looks like; the appearance of Gormenghast or Wuthering Heights. You’ll have your version, others will have theirs that is quite different. Whether they’re willed or uncalled for needn’t matter - these visions are there if you’re engaging with a text fully and you’re firing on all imaginative cylinders.

And it’s quite easy to get proprietorial about this world you’re creating. We’ve all known or heard about friendless children who seek solace in stories, and whose fictional companions are more real (and sympathetic) to them than any of their peers. Adjust the perspective slightly, and you’ve an adult using literature as a retreat from a noisy, cluttered life. Not necessarily an escape, perhaps, but a quiet place they can call their own where family and work colleagues can’t intrude. Nick Hornby’s creation Katie Carr, with whose testimony we began this section, discovers that in order to hang on to her sense of self that has been systematically eroded by the responsibilities of her job and by the twin roles of mother and wife, she has to find a space that she can sit in and decorate with things that mean something to her and her alone. Prompted by her reading of a biography of Virginia Woolf’s sister, the artist Vanessa Bell, she tries to construct “a beautiful life” for herself, but soon discovers that the only place she can do this is in her imagination. Being a GP, it’s the one area of her being that isn’t permanently on call. Books, and to a lesser extent, music, are the building blocks to create this private domain. But, of course, reality keeps intruding on any time she sets aside for her project, and Katie resigns herself to the fact that we all have to grab meaning as and when we can, even if it’s from a ‘Star Wars’ video. It’s a sad but realistic account of the modern Recreational Reader. It’s not merely selfish - it can be lonely too, having no-one to share your meaning with. More of which momentarily.

But let’s look a little more deeply at the ways literature strikes chords within us. If we examine this logically, there has to be:

Þ a point of encounter;

Þ next, the establishment of contact;

Þ and lastly, a process of communication

or what I’m going to refer to as ‘Accessibility’, ‘Dialogue’ and ‘Empathy’ respectively.

Just before we start: you’ll notice in what follows that I’ll be drawing examples from extra-literary disciplines (photography, painting and sculpture). This isn’t because I can’t find any in literature - far from it. Rather I’m trying to demonstrate the fact that interpreting literature and reacting to it shares many principles with the way we look at practically anything outside ourselves. So the study of literary meaning is as much to do with the way we use our senses and intelligence in this broader context than about different schools and theories of criticism, many of which tend to rope off literature as a separate field of study with its own exclusive sets of rules. I’m not saying there aren’t these exclusive methodologies, simply that you don’t necessarily need to be aware of them to interpret literature both satisfyingly and successfully - as we’ll see at greater length in Part 4. It can (and does) come perfectly naturally.

To that end, let’s rejoin our travelogue, which finds Chris and I staying at Yellowstone Park in Wyoming, an absolutely gob-smackingly beautiful slice of nature that could do with some better visitor facilities. At various points during the day, there’s a series of free lectures on offer, and one of these was conducted by Paul Johnson, a professional photographer, who gave an excellent talk on getting the best out of your camera. Which is, of course, not a bad idea when you’re surrounded by some of the most spectacular scenery, flora and fauna anywhere on the planet.

Throughout the talk and subsequent Q & A session, Paul repeatedly referred to the “drama” in a photo, and how this particular term is regularly employed in photographic competitions, or if you’re hawking your snaps round magazine picture editors. When I asked him how he would define it, he said he was referring to the element in the picture that draws you into it.

It may gently seduce you, or roughly assault you - but either way it gets your attention, makes you look twice, and, most importantly, is an incredibly compact way of telling you a story, however inconsequential. In short, the effect on the viewer transcends the literal image and takes you ‘behind’ the shot in a way that requires additional explanation.

Of course, Rod Stewart got there first: “Every Picture Tells a Story Don’t It?”, he asked rhetorically in 1971. Which he might have partially amended to “Every Good Picture”. Paul then produced some pictures that resolutely refused to tell any kind of tale, usually The Great American Family Group set against an anonymous backdrop. These photos, he went on, are untroubled by imagination, or, indeed, any attempt to make them interesting. Zero story potential. Usually taken to assure grandparents that the family had been where they claimed to be going, and hadn’t spent their entire vacation in Vegas. They’re evidence, not art. Even if there was a bison’s bum or something in the background, that might have been the catalyst for further discussion, a ‘way in’ to why that particular shot was taken, or at least a clue to where the family were. For example, did you know that there used to be 60 million bison in America? The plains in Yellowstone were black with them. Then, within the space of a couple of generations, over-hunting reduced the figure to under 50. And that’s not a typo. It’s amazing what a bison’s bum can do to help get your attention.

OK, so it’s not ‘War & Peace’ (unless, of course, you’re a bison), but it’s a start. ‘Drama’ doesn’t have to be anything as sensational as a bunch of war-weary troops raising a tattered Stars & Stripes at Iwo Jima, or a naked Vietnamese girl screaming in agony from the effects of Agent Orange. It can be the shadow on a tree. A dark cloud presaging a thunderstorm. Anything that engages the viewer, no matter how trivial it may seem at first glance. This is what ‘makes’ a picture. And this a is Principle 1 (of 3) in the process of how readers engage with literature - Accessibility. Just exchange the word “drama” for “meaning”.

By ‘accessibility’, I don’t necessarily mean ease of entry; rather it’s the issue of whether we get in at all.

Meaning is, among other things, like a door into the text; it’s an opportunity to come in and make yourself at home, poke about a bit, get yourself oriented, look at the books and CD’s on the shelf, get to know the personality of the writer who’s assembled all this from whatever clues he’s left lying around. You don’t necessarily need a formal invite - anything that captures your attention will serve as your calling card. But something needs to buttonhole you in this way, or else you’ll just skim across the surface of the text without necessarily engaging with it on any meaningful level. Or at the level the writer may have hoped.

It may be that the writer’s locked you out, or you may not have the right set of keys - the fault may just as easily lie with the reader as the quality of the writing. What you’re reading may lie outside the boundaries of your experience; you may find it too distasteful or disturbing; it may tax your reserves of patience, or you may find it just plain boring. One aspect of this disjunction between text and reader is taken up by the literary biographer Lucasta Miller in her re-assessment of Mary Braddon’s bestselling Victorian melodrama ‘Lady Audley’s Secret’:

. . . these novels [of sensation], do make you read them in a peculiar way. I’d had the same experience with [Wilkie] Collins’s ‘The Woman In White’ a few years ago. In both cases, I was almost affronted to find that I remembered almost none of the detail of their complex plots. It’s as if these narratives compel you to devour them at such lightning speed that they only go into your short-term memory - which means they can be just as exciting the second time.

I find this too, particularly in plot-driven literature like that constitutes most detective fiction. It’s difficult to say what the book’s ‘about’, because it’s all about the story. If I were a reviewer, I couldn’t discuss the book’s meaning in any depth, so I’d have to fall back on ‘circumstantial’ material - re-hashing the plot, comparing the book with previously-published works, or the writer with his predecessors and contemporaries in the genre - because there isn’t anything sufficiently arresting or distinctive to prompt a conversation between my imagination (which is meaning’s power supply) and the text. Sometimes, even with some of my favourite authors, I’ll get several pages into a book before realizing I’ve already read it - or even more galling, that I’ve bought the damn thing twice.

It’s like a species of ‘Under-Reading’ - not getting as much out of a book as you should, or as much as you suspect is actually there.

Part 30

One further example of ‘Under-Reading’, which could best be described as “getting completely the wrong end of the stick”.

Back in the 1800’s, as the policy of ‘Manifest Destiny’ saw white America expand East to West across the sub-continent from sea to shining sea, the early settlers hit a snag - there were already people there. Indians and Mexicans, mostly, the latter actually governing where Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and parts of California are now. Following the Mexican Wars of the 1840’s, most of this territory was ceded to America, with many of the original inhabitants becoming foreigners in their own land virtually overnight. Not only socially but economically marginalized, these people were quickly reduced to the depths of poverty, to the point where a novelist with a conscience decided ‘something must be done.’

Helen Hunt Jackson spent 1882 and 1883 touring Southern California’s impoverished barrios around San Diego on a fact-finding expedition designed to expose the horrific conditions many hundreds of thousands were experiencing. The material she gathered formed the basis for her novel ‘Ramona’ published in 1884, which became an instant bestseller.

Jackson died just ten months later, never witnessing the huge impact ‘Ramona’ was destined to have on its readers - which is probably just as well. She no doubt hoped it would be the next ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’, raising awareness of Hispanic poverty in the way Harriet Beecher Stowe had managed on behalf of enslaved blacks. (1) But the book’s message was, however, entirely misread. Or more accurately, scarcely noticed. A novel intended to shame the leaders of a great democracy into remedial action became a source of myth-making and material for California boosterism instead.

‘Ramona’ is the story of an orphan, the half-caste child of a white father and an Indian mother, who is raised by a foster parent, Señora Gonzago Moreno, but kept ignorant of her true parents’ identity. She falls in love with an Indian, a shepherd implausibly named Alessandro. Señora Moreno, who hates the “redskins”, tries to keep the two apart, but they elope and are married by Father Gaspara, and Ramona is forced go to live with Alessandro's people. Then the social message starts getting hammered home - and I mean hammered: a child is born to the couple but dies of medical negligence. Land is needed by Yankee farmers who force the tribe to move. Ramona’s husband is murdered by the settlers before her very eyes, but she manages to escape, living with the knowledge that the courts will not take the word of an Indian woman against a white.

Nobody seemed to care about that second bit, though. They liked the love story, when Ramona’s living in a pre-lapsarian world of idyllic Spanish missions full of quaint adobe huts and well-meaning Catholic missionaries. Soon after publication, coach trips started visiting ‘Ramona Country’; you could see the bed where Ramona and Alessandro consummated their love; they still sell bottled ‘Ramona water’ in the town of Hemet, California, so Jackson no doubt continues to revolve in her grave over one hundred years and 300 imprints of the book later, knowing that her readers sold her short. Many Hispanics still don’t have much fun, but the book’s legacy is everywhere, particularly in the insufferably twee cities of Santa Fe and Taos in New Mexico, where even the gas stations are disguised as pink adobe shacks - because they won’t get planning permission if they aren’t.

This kind of Under-Reading is mighty odd. It isn’t as if the message isn’t expressed strongly enough - it practically assaults you with a sharp stick. What its mis-readers did to ‘Ramona’ is on a par with interpreting ‘King Lear’ as a play about the joys of senility. Something clearly went wrong with the connection between the novel’s meaning and its audience, which, on this occasion, seems to lie with the readers’ distaste for anything but the picturesque. A satisfactory Dialogue has not been established. And that is Principle 2 of how readers engage with literature, which we can illustrate with another example from Yellowstone.

As the American West was being explored and mapped in the mid 19th-century, stories reached the East Coast cities of an incredible place where boiling gases erupted from the surface of the earth, where molten mud bubbled, and where waterfalls tumbled down precipitous canyons. Few believed these claims, particularly since most of them were made by trappers who had lived alone too long in the backwoods with only coyotes and moonshine for company. But sufficient curiosity was aroused in the Federal Government for them to allocate money to an exploratory expedition fronted by Ferdinand Hayden, director of the US Geological Survey. To provide the necessary evidence to support his observations, he invited William Henry Jackson, a practitioner of the new-fangled art of photography to accompany him. Then, at the last minute, a New York painter, Thomas Moran practically invited himself along for the ride, and the party was complete.

Jackson took over 400 photos of the Yellowstone region - nothing to us now, but back then a laborious and time-consuming process. Moran painted furiously, and the two men got on famously.

The entire expedition fell in love with Yellowstone, and in his final report Hayden recommended that contrary to the usual Federal policy which encouraged the piecemeal division of territory into farmsteads (with the accompanying slaughter or removal of the indigenous peoples), Yellowstone should be preserved as a wilderness (he was concerned that the same fate that befell the Niagara Falls region, which is still one of the most vile blots on man’s environmental record, should not be repeated).

When they saw the photos accompanying Hayden’s 500 page report, Congress was skeptical. There was nothing wrong with them, given the primitive box camera technology Jackson was using, but examining the images now, they are, well, rather flat. And, of course in sepia. Yellowstone seemed to be nothing special. So the region looked like it was destined to be overrun with cheap motels, fast food outlets, tacky souvenir stalls and Piggly Wigglies just like Niagara.

Knowing he had nothing to lose, Hayden exhibited the paintings. Moran’s work, by contrast with the photos, was far from figurative; the closest parallel I can think of is with Turner’s mid-period landscapes - recognizable physical features partially transfigured by rich lighting effects.

Now what the Congressmen saw was, in fact, more than was actually there. They were looking at the spirit, atmosphere, aura, emanation, essence, call it what you will, of this magnificent wilderness area as witnessed through the transforming vision of the artist - and they too fell in love with it, even though they’d never been there. Thus was the world’s first National Park decreed in 1872, preserving it for future generations; 2.2 million acres were set aside for "the benefit and enjoyment of the people”. And they still do, despite the godawful accommodation and food.

So once the politicians had penetrated the surface of the region, and had been given some idea of what it actually felt like to be there, they were convinced. So the ‘way in’ (Principle 1) has prompted dialogue between the object and the viewer (Principle 2), which, in its turn, has led to Empathy (Principle 3). And it’s exactly the same when you’re reading a book, or indeed, perusing any work of art. Or, rather, of course, any successful work of art.

Evidence, or literal representation, won’t necessarily take you under the skin of anything (although the artist’s editorial eye, what he chooses to focus on, is crucial to meaning as we’ll see in Part 3); but art will do that, and what lies beneath the surface is meaning. But meaning isn’t just about seeing beyond the literal or figurative - that’s just artistic evisceration, and the whole can never be more than the sum of the parts; (2) it’s also in the way the reader (or viewer or listener) subsequently reacts to it - what it awakens in his mind. Which, added to the sum of the parts, produces meaning.

To engage with meaning is an active, not a passive experience. It can’t be spoon fed to you and be terribly nourishing. (3) And because you participate, you can claim the meaning as part of you. You have taken the meaning from the work of art, but you’ve also necessarily had to give of yourself to create the empathy that gives rise to meaning. So meaning actually is the two-way traffic Harold Bloom suggests.

If we wanted to get all Platonic about it (or even existentialist), you could say that both you and the work of art are more complete for that experience of empathy; the quality of your individual attention has added to the total sum of attention the work of art has cumulatively attracted, thereby strengthening and validating its meaning. (4) So it’s more than just popularity, or figures on a balance sheet; the work of art is accruing interest of a totally unquantifiable spiritual nature. The trouble is, no-one can audit or collate these experiences - we’ve no idea how many people have involved themselves with meaning in this way. What we do know is that the work in question continues to be bought, discussed, and therefore forms part of our intellectual currency, and, indeed heritage. And once the book’s reputation has achieved this status, it’s practically self-sustaining. Its admission to the Pantheon or Canon has been guaranteed, and won’t easily be revoked. That’s if you believe in canons, and many don’t. Particularly these days. More of which in a moment.

So you’ve connected with the text, and you’re empathizing like crazy. Thus far, however, you’re on your own. You are Bloom’s ‘selfish reader’. You may think you’re the first person ever to feel like this. But there are aspects of reading Bloom doesn’t fully cover which mainly group themselves around some of the more social aspects of reading. He isn’t convinced there is such a thing, but recent history is proving him to be mistaken. And a good thing too.

Footnotes:

1. ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ was perceived as hugely influential in championing the abolitionists’ cause. In the midst of the Civil War in 1862, President Abraham Lincoln said to Stowe when introduced, “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!" She should have slapped him, the patronizing bugger. She was little, though.

2. As we’ll see later on a lot of lit crit doesn’t get beyond this stage of meaning as a sort of Airfix kit - assemble all the pieces and you’re bound to get the meaning. Actually, you won’t. You’ll have a Hawker Hurricane. Now you can put that model plane up on the shelf and statically display it, or you can play with it. Only the latter course of action will begin to access the model’s meaning. Because play is interactive (dread word, but wholly applicable in this example).

So meaning is not a formula. Now up-end the telescope, and you’ve got another incorrect assumption - identify all the individual pieces and you’ll find out how it works. You won’t. You’ll have a Hawker Hurricane in bits minus the animating principle, which can only be apparent when the pieces are glued together. Remember Plato’s chicken.

3. Remember ‘Ancrene Wisse’ we mentioned earlier?

4. Whether or not you can articulate the experience, or assess its value, is perhaps a secondary consideration. You felt it, and that’ll do for now.

Part 31

One of the most compelling pieces of evidence to refute his conclusions has been the boom in Reading Circles, which not only encourage both new and existing readers to come together in a social context to discuss literature, they help to develop two important facets of the reading experience that are often curtailed when we read alone (which is, of course, most of the time);

Þ the development of opinions about what we’re reading (beyond simple like and dislike);

Þ and the development of a language to help us express those opinions.

The best Readers’ Groups don’t just encourage a judgemental approach to a book’s meaning, they foster an analytical one too. And then you’ve got to articulate those thoughts out loud. In front of other people. Which sharpens the mind wonderfully. After all, you don’t want to be considered ignorant.

I know I’m often clearer about what a book means to me if I’m discussing it with my wife Chris - I realize I know much more about it than I’ve consciously registered. So a personal recommendation (which informs many of our reading choices) needn’t simply be based on an overall assessment of whether you engaged with the book or not - you can say how it drew you in. Or, indeed, didn’t.

This is wonderfully healthy, and the most positive development that’s taken place in the world of reading for a long time. I’m particularly fond of reading circles because people will (hopefully) be less inclined to take notice of TV Arts Reviewers pompously parading their metropolitan prejudices; starved of the oxygen of an audience, maybe they’ll eventually just bugger off and leave us in peace. And my blood pressure will go down.

But TV is an immensely useful tool in the right hands, and the very antithesis of this culture smugness was Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club, which made a welcome return in Autumn 2003 by popular demand, and which, in its initial six-year run, managed to introduce more people to a love of literature than even Germaine Greer, Tony Parsons and Tom Paulin (OK, I’ll go easy on the sarcasm from now on). First transmitted in 1996, the US critics had a field day speculating what the diva of daytime TV would recommend to her ‘white trash’ audience. Mills & Boon? Or maybe something less taxing like the verses inside Hallmark greetings cards? You can just hear the scriptwriters on ‘Frasier’ picking this one up and running with it.

But then Oprah wrong-footed them, selecting books like Rohinton Mistry's "A Fine Balance" and Ann-Marie McDonald's ‘Fall on Your Knees,’ demanding titles that, to the surprise of many, began selling by the truckload. Jacquelyn Mitchard's ‘The Deep End of the Ocean’ was her first pick. The book was released with an initial print run of 100,000, but within a week of the book’s selection, 640,000 copies were on the shelves, propelling the title to No. 1 on the fiction bestseller lists of both the ‘Wall Street Journal’ and the ‘New York Times’. Another featured title, Anita Shreve’s ‘The Pilot’s Wife’ went on to sell a staggering 4 million copies.

As you might expect in certain snitty corners of the literary world, not everyone thought the Book Club was such a great idea. Some felt Winfrey held too much sway and were critical of the choices, which they characterised as routinely inclining towards the sentimental, and too heavily influenced by issues of race and women who overcome adversity. Some authors also preferred not to have their work discussed on a vehicle more commonly associated with gossip, dieting, sexual problems and soap operas. The most prominent of these was Jonathan Franzen, who made what were interpreted as disparaging remarks about the club's lack of sophistication when his novel ‘The Corrections’ was picked for inclusion. What he actually said concerned the phenomenon we’ve just been looking at; that the moment you’re popular, in certain quarters your meaning is perceived not to have greater resonance because it’s touched a wider audience, but, strangely, has been diluted by all the attention it’s getting. Which as I hope I’ve already made clear is total bullshit.

Anyway, 46 selections later, the run came to and end in April 2002 with Toni Morrison's ‘Sula’. Other TV shows tried to plug the gap, including the ‘Today’ programme and ‘Good Morning America’. But none approached the impact of the original, which is yet another example of how this artificial distinction between ‘literary’ and ‘popular’ fiction can be broken down when you don’t underestimate the willingness of your audience to embrace new and unfamiliar reading material. And, of course, celebrity endorsement can’t hurt either.

One of the secrets of the programme’s success was an intelligent collaboration involving the books’ publishers; selections were publicized some weeks in advance not only to allow viewers time to read them, but for the publishers to get their side of the act together. Those that did printed special editions, on whose endpage was included a set of ten questions about the meaning and the central themes of the story to kick start further thought and/or prompt discussion. By and large, the issues raised were skilfully pitched at a general audience and anchored in everyday reality, usually inviting readers to draw parallels between their own experiences and those of the book’s characters. The principle behind this simple idea was to ’socialize’ meaning, moving beyond conversational pleasantries and getting people into the habit of talking about literature without feeling selfconscious. And for once, here was a book venture not exclusively targetting a middle class audience; the edition of the programme that announced the Club’s return also featured “Bathing Suit Makeovers!’ and ‘What to Wear this Summer!”, so Oprah can’t be accused of straying too far from her roots.

One day, it would be nice to think that we’ll see groups of blokes down the pub analysing their favourite book with the same passion and knowledge that’s evident when they’re discussing football matches - but I’m not holding my breath. However, anything that improves the quality of the bush telegraph we mentioned earlier has got to be a good thing; it makes the process of selecting a book less haphazard. Without necessarily removing the joy of an accidental discovery, it can give a focus and direction to reading, making exploration easier, targetting favourite authors and genres as well as giving useful context and background which can make the act of reading less random and more satisfying. Even a ploy as simple as printing a list of other works by the same author on any spare endpages may serve to keep curiosity levels up.

It also prevents a lot of dithering in bookshops as you get to know your way around the world of literature, and grow more comfortable and familiar with what you feel you need to take from it. Then you can share that new-found knowledge, whether with total strangers through a website like BookSleuth or within the familiar members of a Reading Group, or even with your other half when you’re reading in bed, and you’ll keep replenishing that literary gene pool both of meaning and of literature itself, a process which, as we’ve seen, is essential to its survival. Meaning has to be kept moving, by whatever means, or it will slowly wither on the vine. And this will be the subject of the next section in our little meditation.

But first, a quick hippy soapbox moment: in the UK, whenever a Government agency or a large corporation wants to close something down, they issue a shot across the public’s bows which says something crass like “Use It Or Lose It” (I remember this particular imperative was used when our local Post Office was threatened with closure. And guess what . . . it was shut down 3 months later, even though there were queues out the door most days).

It’s the same with literature. Fortunately, books have proved marvellously resilient to the onslaught from recent seismic developments in the leisure industry, and there’s every reason to be optimistic that this position of strength will continue into the foreseeable future. But that’s no reason to get complacent.

So love those books, for love gives animation and meaning to meaning, and we all need to do our bit. And don’t let your love be that which dares not speak its name. Be open and frank about it, particularly to children, and we’ll prove Samuel Johnson right about the influence we can exert as Common Readers. After all, one of the most usual opening gambits in a conversation is “Did you see such-and-such on TV last night?”. It can so easily be substituted occasionally for “Have you read . . . “ That way, you’ll promote the third factor in our examination of the life and times of meaning:

Longevity (end of hippy soapbox moment, by the way).

So what happens to a book now you and a load of other readers have clutched it to your collective bosom?

If sales are still steady, the publisher will place it on the backlist, where it’ll receive little by way of promotion, but will at least be available to the small but numerically and economically significant stream of readers who haven’t managed to catch up with it yet. The title will be dusted off and wheeled out from time to time as part of an ongoing reissue programme, or maybe to coincide with new material from the same author, or a significant anniversary. It may be chosen as a set-text for school exams. There may even be a film tie-in edition - whatever. But essentially, the publisher’s work has been done for the time being, and other new projects will be making demands on his attention. So it now has to stand on its own two feet, and if it don’t pay the bills, it’ll be quietly removed from the shelves.

This is a fascinating period in the life of a book’s circumstantial meaning which can make or break its reputation. What it has to achieve is not simply to be carried from reader to reader by the bush telegraph or the publisher’s sales strategies, or any of the vehicles we’ve been looking at; it’s now up for adoption into the Pantheon of Great Literature, and its journey there is dependent both on luck and merit. Once it acquires this Classic status, its meaning will be officially recognized as timeless, and its ongoing survival all but guaranteed.

I say officially, but there’s no ceremony that confers these laurels on a work of literature - it’s not like being inducted into the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame or getting an Oscar. Granted, awards such as the Man Booker Prize and, of course, the Nobel Prize for Literature aren’t going to harm its chances, but, as we’ve already noted, in the glorious tradition of the literary world, the giving of prizes (or making any kind of fuss) is so contentious it alienates as many people as it attracts (it’s that jealous lover thing again). Which brings us back to the opening pages of this book, where I noted that we have no objective criteria with which to evaluate literature. If there were, there would presumably be a satisfactory explanation for why the Nobel was given to Pearl S. Buck in 1938 on the strength of just five (now largely forgotten) novels. It’s the example everyone critical of awards seems to wheel out when discussing the iniquities within the system. Then they note that Graham Greene and Proust were famously overlooked, and, unlike in Hollywood, the poohbahs in Oslo don’t have a catch-all safety net Award for Lifetime Achievement to fall back on.

Anyway, old Pearl’s still not published by Penguin Classics, so them Norwegians can’t have been right. Besides, there’s all sorts of politics, tokenism and affirmative action going on at these ceremonies, so literary merit will, of course, only play a cameo role in a much more complex extra-literary drama played out behind the scenes. And the more we adopt the ‘all shall have prizes’ culture of political correctness, the more conservatives grow apoplectic and whinge about declining standards, and that meaning’s not what it used to be.

Part 32

So what, or indeed who does have it in their gift to confer classic status? I don’t think anyone genuinely has the answer - it’s certainly no one individual, so what most writers who deal with this subject end up saying is that each successive generation finds something relevant within the work’s meaning irrespective of its temporal setting; it’s a variation on the the “old universal truths” we looked at in Big Theme #7 - Myth.

I think this is one of the least worst explanations we have, but it still reeks of contingency, a justification wheeled out in the absence of anything more satisfactory. It’s neat and plausible and works on a theoretical level, but I’m not convinced it’s the entire truth. After all, what this theory’s saying is that if the writer sticks to an exclusive diet of universal truths then nothing much can go wrong, and that coveted black spine will soon be his; it’s as if, once he’s worked out what a universal truth is, he’s away to the races. But writing a classic isn’t like assembling the ingredients of a recipe, and, as I’ll be demonstrating in the rest of this section, immortality’s more likely to be won in a casino than in the kitchen.

So let’s have a look at this hoary old question. To start with, we’ll examine works which haven’t or won’t stand the test of time, or those which went belly-up first time round and then re-surfaced when society’s tastes had caught up with them. Then we’ll flip the negative and look at the 24-carat classics of today.

How many times have you read one of those lazily-conceived phrases that shriek from book covers announcing, “ . . . an instant classic!” Aside from its potential as an oxymoron, what the reviewer actually means is that he thinks the book has exceptional qualities that set it above its peers. But neither he, nor anyone else can guarantee whether it will actually become a classic, because, as any fule kno, tastes and times change, often quite quickly. And this is Scenario 1 (of 3) concerning the way meaning survives through the ages:

What’s rampantly fashionable today can be replaced in the public’s consciousness tomorrow, leaving the “instant classic” to begin its rapid journey to oblivion via the dump bin, the remainder shop and the pulping vat. One good instance of this is Henry MacKenzie’s novel ‘The Man of Feeling’, published in 1771. It’s perhaps the best English (actually Scottish) example of the Sentimental novel, a French import that proved all the rage in the late 18th century. It’s characterized by a lot of blubbering, which was, for a short time (certainly until ‘thirtysomething’ appeared on TV over two hundred years later) an index of a man’s sensitivity, or the degree to which he’s in touch with his feminine side; indeed, within the space of 115 pages, our sentimental hero, Harley, turns on the waterworks no fewer than 49 times. In the following example, he manages four cascades in one page, as he hears the sorry tale of a young girl in Bedlam;

Though this story was told in very plain language, it had particularly attracted Harley's notice; he had given it the tribute of some tears. The unfortunate young lady had till now seemed entranced in thought, with her eyes fixed on a little garnet ring she wore on her finger; she turned them now upon Harley. "My Billy is no more!" said she; "do you weep for my Billy? Blessings on your tears! I would weep too, but my brain is dry; and it burns, it burns, it burns!" -- She drew nearer to Harley. -- "Be comforted, young lady," said he, "your Billy is in heaven." -- "Is he, indeed? and shall we meet again? and shall that frightful man (pointing to the keeper) not be there? -- Alas! I am grown naughty of late; I have almost forgotten to think of heaven: yet I pray sometimes; when I can, I pray; and sometimes I sing; when I am saddest, I sing: -- You shall hear me -- hush!

"Light be the earth on Billy's breast,
And green the sod that wraps his grave."

There was a plaintive wildness in the air not to be withstood; and, except the keeper's, there was not an unmoistened eye around her.

"Do you weep again?" said she. "I would not have you weep: you are like my Billy; you are, believe me; just so he looked when he gave me this ring; poor Billy! 'twas the last time we ever met!--

"'Twas when the seas were roaring -- I love you for resembling my Billy; but I shall never love any man like him." -- She stretched out her hand to Harley; he pressed it between both of his, and bathed it with his tears. -- "Nay, that is BIlly's ring," said she, "you cannot have it indeed; but here is another, look here, which I plated to-day of some gold-thread from this bit of stuff; will you keep it for my sake? I am a strange girl; but my heart is harmless: my poor heart; it will burst some day; feel how it beats!" She pressed his hand to her bosom, then holding her head in the attitude of listening -- "Hark! one, two, three! be quiet, thou little trembler; my Billy is cold! -- but I had forgotten the ring." -- She put it on his finger. -- "Farewell! I must leave you now." -- She would have withdrawn her hand; Harley held it to his lips. -- "I dare not stay longer; my head throbs sadly: farewell!" ---- She walked with a hurried step to a little apartment at some distance. Harley stood fixed in astonishment and pity; his friend gave money to the keeper. -- Harley looked on his ring. -- He put a couple of guineas in the man's hand: "Be kind to that unfortunate" -- He burst into tears, and left them.

Us latterday cynics can only weep with laughter as we imagine the unfortunate girl’s cell awash with salt water, and pray for Harley’s death from dehydration. Suffice to say, there’s nothing wrong with accessing your feminine side, but this is a bit much. MacKenzie tugs on every heartstring he can until there’s practically a harp concerto going on in the background. I don’t know if Dickens read him, but it certainly seems he took an almighty big leaf out of MacKenzie’s book when he concocted some of his own syrupy scenes, which now also appear dreadfully dated, and are the features of his work routinely singled out by those who loathe him.

Anyway, ‘The Man of Feeling’ surfed the lachrymal tide - and then plummeted into obscurity, not exactly helped by Mackenzie denouncing his own creation 15 years later in a magazine article, in which he characterized readers of the sentimental novel as being "the young and the indolent, to whom the exercise of the imagination is delightful, and the labour of thought is irksome". Hypocritical bugger. It no doubt awaits rediscovery as cult literature, or a classic of kitsch.

A more up-to date example (and a bit of a soft target but what the heck) might be the phenomenon of chick-lit, which is basically all the bastard offspring of the superb ‘Bridget Jones’s Diary’; in fact, by the time you read this, the genre may already be six feet under. In an ‘Observer’ article the other day, former Tory spin doctor Amanda Platell (who clearly knows a bandwagon when she sees one) amusingly stated the obvious when she noted a lack of meaningful action in these books: “Some of us,” she wrote, “have grown out of the stage where love is a pair of size 10 Earl jeans, contentment is a full-body St Tropez tan and heartbreak some bloke who doesn't call . . . where tragedy is a sick nanny and failure is a lacklustre dinner party?”

Well bully for you, Amanda. But most likely she’s right. Although you just somehow know no-one’s going to be reading this stuff in 200 years’ time, a lack of objective literary standards means it’s difficult to be certain.

Chick lit may have struck a brief chord with a largely metropolitan set of young semi-affluent career women (which, let’s face it, is a reasonably small niche, despite their ubiquity in the media), but the composition of society, and therefore its tastes, moves on.

But it’s not just tastes that move on; so, naturally, do society’s mores and values. So although the book may be viewed as a work of quality that has enduring features, its meaning is undermined over time as the ethos that provides its setting gradually loses its relevance. This is Scenario 2, and we’ll take ‘Brideshead Revisited’ as our example.

Throughout Evelyn Waugh’s distinguished novel, several members of the aristocratic Marchmain family inform the narrator, Charles Ryder, that not being a Catholic, he couldn’t possibly understand their thoughts and behaviour. And, I suspect, that as traditional forms of organized religion gradually fade from the cultural radar, fewer readers will be able to empathize with characters possessed by almost pathologically high levels of guilt and a neurotic tendency to interpret everything they do, no matter how insignificant, through the long lens of a redemptive eternity. And why Sebastian Flyte, the absent centre of the novel, should be viewed as a glorious, even “holy” drunk because he embodies these qualities, rather than just a common or garden drunk who’s a sucker for the more sentimental trappings of religion.

Even at this middle remove (the novel was first published in 1945), it’s getting less easy to see the artistic justification for the sustained atmosphere of metaphysical remorse that ultimately has the effect of ‘flattening’ the novel, and dampening its emotional impact, although we know from Waugh’s many biographies that he considered ‘Brideshead’ his ‘magnum opus’ and wanted to use it to dramatize what he considered was the most significant and taxing spiritual issue of his day (“the operation of divine grace” in a secular age, as he termed it).

Now, although the issues of flesh and spirit, earth and heaven and sin and redemption haven’t gone away, they’re expressed through a number of different cultural channels, and Catholicism doesn’t enjoy the central role in these debates it once did.

In short, I feel society as a whole will lose the knowledge (and sympathy) it needs to understand the ‘glue’ of the book. And that may be the signal for the entire exquisitely-crafted structure of its meaning to collapse, or at least lose much of its resonance. Like the gothic chapel at Brideshead, it’ll become a glorious anachronism.

Now compare that now with another novel set in a country house in the early to mid-20th century, ‘The Remains of the Day’ by Kazuo Ishiguro, published in 1989. Potentially, it could suffer from the same flaws as ‘Brideshead’ - only it doesn’t.

The central character is Stevens, a model English butler who believes that he has served humanity by devoting his life to the service of a "great" man, Lord Darlington. It’s 1956; Darlington has died, and the Hall has been let to an American businessman. As Stevens begins a rare and solitary motor trip to the west country, traveling farther and farther from the context of familiar surroundings, he also embarks on a revelatory journey through his own memory. What he discovers there causes him to question not only Lord Darlington's greatness, but also the meaning of his own insular life shut up in the Hall. For Darlington, like many of his class, was a Nazi sympathizer in the run-up to World War Two, and by serving this flawed, rather than evil man so assiduously, it gradually dawns on Stevens that he’s passed up the opportunity to have a life of his own, so tantalisingly symbolized by his unconsummated love for Miss Kenton, the former housekeeper.

The critics of Greek antiquity would have loved the book - every aspect of its meaning arises from the plot, unlike Waugh’s theme of Catholicism, which, as time goes by and its aura diminishes, increasing resembles an unfamiliar guest at a party who you can’t quite place. Meaning isn’t parachuted in from outside as a “given” quantity we’re asked to accept; it develops, quite naturally, out of an initially commonplace story of thwarted love which is gradually lent a greater poignancy as the historical perspective surrounding it unfolds. Stevens’s story is always at the centre, and his flaws are of his own making, rather than inherited from an outside agency. And this is what I feel will make the book’s meaning survive longer than Brideshead’s - the ascendancy of character over theme.

We can all associate with Stevens - he’s human, and subject to the same passions and frustrations as the rest of us; but we don’t all subscribe to the same religion, no matter how universal the concerns which lie at its heart. So, if you fancy opening a book on it, my money’s on Ishiguro to be the longer-lived classic, much as I love Brideshead too.

Part 33

So what will happen to Brideshead? It will gradually assume the status of a period piece, very much of, and inseparable from, its time and setting.

There are, of course, many hundreds of other novels, plays & poems that fit into this category of partial transcendence, that make it into Division One but don’t quite have the staying power to get to the Premier League: ‘New Grub Street’ by George Gissing would be on my list, as would practically anything by HG Wells or GK Chesterton; virtually all of Dryden’s poetry; most Restoration comedy, perhaps with the exception of Congreve;and even Shakespeare’s ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’. Whole genres can date; Realism performs particularly badly when measured against the yardstick of eternity because it’s so time sensitive. Likewise a lot of sci-fi - nothing dates so quickly as the future.

This is, of course, a partial list, and adding to it can turn into quite a good parlour game. But I would stress that a work’s inclusion doesn’t mean it’s necesarily bad art, or that it will end up being totally forgotten. These are simply literary examples that have, in many cases wilfully, forfeited the dimension of timelessness by being too firmly rooted in their own period or a particular social milieu. A too-strict adherence to literary fashion; the desire to deliver a direct message to a particular audience; or putting faith in a seemingly ‘eternal’ quality that turns out to be merely transitory will all dilute the impact of a book’s meaning over time. So what future generations of students and critics will tend to focus on is the position of that work in social or literary history, and its meaning will be discussed in relation to these secondary contexts, not necessarily on its own terms. The circumstantial meaning of the work will start to be of greater significance than the textual meaning.

Unless your name happens to be Charles Dickens. There are always exceptions to any kind of literary rule you might care to formulate, and so far in this book Dickens seems to be the one who regularly frustrates my attempts to tie up the loose ends of a line of thought too conclusively.

He’s very much a writer of his time, yet one who somehow manages to persuade you that this doesn’t matter, or, in his best writing, makes you forget about it altogether.

By anyone’s standards, it’s dead easy to carbon date his output; the subject matter, prose style, prolixity, authorial presence and voice - all scream mid-nineteenth century England at us. Particularly when he’s writing badly, which he’s perfectly capable of doing even in his best novels, these faults can become glaringly obvious to the point of being cringeworthy. Yet the sheer promiscuity of his imagination, what Franz Kafka called his “great, careless prodigality” somehow carries him through. And Kafka wasn’t alone in his admiration; Fyodor Dostoievsky was also a fan, particularly of ‘Bleak House’, and Sigmund Freud was sufficiently enamoured of ‘David Copperfield’ to name one of his most famous cases after David’s child bride Dora. Placing Dickens among this illustrious company has given critics considerable opportunity to remark on his relevance to those separated from him by time, geography and discipline, and to claim him as a proto-Modernist. Certainly in the case of Freud, Dickens’s imaginative anticipation of what would subsequently emerge from Freud’s clinical investigations into the human subconscious can offer fertile ground and provide plenty of material to support this thesis. It can be argued that Dickens was a pioneer not just in the energy and comprehensiveness with which he represented reality, but also the atypical nooks and corners his imagination was drawn to. So if you subscribe to this line of thought, a classic text is one that doesn’t just buck trends, it anticipates them. And this is:

Scenario 3:

Take Laurence Sterne’s ‘Tristram Shandy’ as another example. Published in nine volumes between 1759 and 1766, it tore up the rule book for novel writing, and freed the incipient art-form from the tyrannies of realism, chronology, linear narrative and, indeed, comprehensibility. The sensation it caused on its first appearance was largely prompted by this complete disregard for the sorts of rigid conventions and techniques that had solidified very early in the novel’s history.

Its early readers were equally amused and appalled by what some would term experimentation, others whimsy: a cross appears when Dr. Slop crosses himself; a black page symbolizes the death of Yorick; squiggly graphs indicate the progress of the narrative line; blank pages are made to represent pages torn out and a very different kind of blank page is offered to the reader for the purpose of composing his own description of Widow Wadman's beauty. The novel continually draws attention to the craft of writing behind its composition; for instance, here’s a delightful little digression on the subject of . . . digressions:

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine;--they are the life, the soul of reading;--take them out of this book for instance,--you might as well take the book along with them; [...] restore them to the writer;--he steps forth like a bridegroom,--bids All hail; brings in variety, and forbids appetite to fail.

All good knockabout stuff, which, however, failed to charm Doctor Johnson, who famously pronounced in one of his darker moods that it wasn’t “English”, and that “Nothing odd will do long. ‘Tristram Shandy’ did not last.”

And for a while it didn’t. Once the initial popularity wore off, its reputation remained semi-dormant until it was re-discovered by a new generation of readers for whom the narrative dislocations were a very early precursor of Modernism. (1) By the 20th century, Sterne’s reputation had been completely re-appraised and resurrected; everyone, from surrealists to post-modernists were claiming ‘Tristram Shandy’ as their own, almost two hundred years after its first publication.(2) Sterne’s revolutionary vision of the novel has naturally attracted a whole forest of criticism, most of which appears to state, at great length and in some of the most tortuous jargon I’ve ever come across, that the novel focuses not so much on narrative, as about writing a narrative, which really strikes a chord with academics who’d much rather jaw about theory than read a text. So I’ve saved you the trouble of perusing guff like this, which is a genuine quote from a recent academic paper:

The novel is an incipient phenomenology the ultimate aim of which is an ontological analysis of the meaning of Tristram's being.

What I think he’s saying is that ‘Tristram Shandy’ is an autobiography which tells the story in an idiosyncratic way. But I can’t be sure. I thought you might also like a narratological analysis of the meta-narrative, which, according to one critic, goes something like this:

E (C (Ca, A, Aa)- C (A, B)- C (A, B)- C (B, Cd)- Cs- C (Cs, A, B)- D (Dd)- B- B). The plot(s) could be reductively summarized: E (C-C-C-C-Cs-C-D-B-B), factoring out the level of narration. From these notations, we should be able to see that the overall shape of the novel is fairly simple.

Ahem.

So your meaning can get a welcome injection of authority and relevance when society’s tastes and literary sophistication finally catch up with you. In Sterne’s case, this was one of the longest, slowest processes in literary history, but we got there in the end - ‘Tristram Shandy’ is now published in Penguin Classics, and, given the level of attention it currently receives, isn’t likely to go out of print any time soon. Something odd did last, Dr J.

So that’s three examples of how meaning’s stock can fluctuate over time. But we’re still not that much nearer solving the riddle of what keeps readers consistently revisiting the same text over successive generations to the point where its meaning is self-sustaining and immune to any amount of mud or wrong-headed interpretations being hurled at it. To answer this, we’ll have to address the fraught issue of . . . the Western Literary Canon.

I remarked a few pages ago that the conferment of classic status is more about luck than judgment. If you’re a writer, you can’t will your book to be a classic - it’s a process that happens despite you. Of course, creating a work of unimpeachable quality can’t hurt, but acknowledgement of this artistic excellence is down to the caprice of the Great and the Good within the literary industry, and those Recreational Readers with whom your meaning strikes a sustained chord.

We all create our own individual literary canons, whether they’re in our heads or on our shelves; they’re the titles we’ve read that have meaning for us, and as such they’re going to be a highly personal, maybe even idiosyncratic selection. While we will inevitably share titles with other readers, no two lists will be identical. They’re like a spiritual fingerprint, a record of what we’ve read and what we’ve reacted to. And books don’t just furnish a room, as Anthony Powell once noted; they furnish your mind. And you can tell a lot about a mind by its choice of furnishings.

But if you’re the editor of Penguin Classics, or an examiner setting a syllabus, or even a Radio 4 commissioning editor, you have to move beyond what pushed your particular buttons and try and establish what’s worth including on the list of the best literature can offer. Your prejudices should be sacrificed to the interests of objectivity. Because what you’re doing is influencing what people will read, or continue to read, no matter how inconsequential the occasion for your list; in many ways, it’s an awesome responsibility. If there was such a contraption as a ‘Meaning-Ometer’, you could stick it in a book and measure its score against a graduated scale. But because there’s no benchmark for what meaning is, let alone how you calibrate it, you’re going to have to rely on a combination of historical precedent and your own instinct for what’s best. And then pray, because you’ll get slagged off whatever judgment you make, or however disinterested and benign you consider your editorial intentions. (3)

Footnotes:

1 . Oddly, the book’s popularity never waned in Germany. Goethe loved it; and, believe it or not, the young Karl Marx wrote a novel directly imitating it.

2. FR Leavis , flying in the face on contemporary opinion, still hated it, describing the novel as “irresponsible (and nasty) trifling.” Which in my book makes it even better.

Interestingly, if you look at the Penguin Classics website, the selection process is scarcely mentioned. It wisely emphasizes ‘readability’ over literary immortality, but does acknowledge that there’s not enough Eastern literature on offer. See http://uk.penguinclassics.com/?10CS^

Part 34

The origin of the idea that literature aspires to canonical immortality has proved difficult to pin down, but it clearly began with religious writings. Anything that supported your chosen faith was immediately canonical - anything that didn’t was heretical or blasphemous. So the canon was, at first, a collected body of literature that adhered to the tenets of your religion. Which makes the Bible the best known canon there is, because it’s a compilation of the work of many different writers. Moreover, its meaning is immortal by default, being the Word of God that carries its own celestial copyright. Writings that different religions have expelled from versions of their holy texts are placed in various ‘Apocrypha’ (literally “hidden writings”), or stuff not considered to be authentically ‘inspired’ enough to pass the meaning test. The Koran has them (the “Satanic Verses”), and so does the Book of Mormon. It’s like editing a text; some bits are genuine, others aren’t, and the latter are discarded.

It’s not a great leap from this to the secular definition of canonical literature - it’s those works that most successfully embody your aesthetic rather than your religious creed. (1) I dare say any medieval or Renaissance scholar worth his salt would have jotted down a ‘must read’ list of non-religious reading from his tutor and kept it in his doublet pocket. Ferdinand, the King of Navarre in Shakespeare’s ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ and his coterie of young wits certainly would have. They aspire to be “heirs of all eternity” by setting up their own “little academe” to study the finest texts literature and philosophy can afford them. Sir Philip Sidney had a similar ambition; in his ‘Defense of Poesie’ we looked at earlier, the following writers are quoted in support of his arguments: Pliny, Musaeus, Homer, Hesiod, Orpheus, Linus, Amphion, Livius Andronicus, Ennius, Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Gower, Chaucer, Thales, Empedocles, Parmenides, Pythagoras, Phocilydes, Herodotus, Virgil, Xenophon, Tremellius, Junius, Tyrtaeus, Lucretius, Manilius, Pontanus, Lucan, Cicero, Heliodorus, Plato, Aristotle, Cornelius Agrippa, Horace, Terence, More, Erasmus, Plautus, Euripides, Phocion, Sannazaro, Boethius, Persius, Plutarch, Pindar, Tasso, Ovid, Dio Cassius, Ariosto, Scaliger, Bembo, Bibbiena, Beze, Melancthon, Fracastorio, Muret, Buchanan, Hurault, Juvenal, Surrey, Spenser, Sackville, Norton, Apuleius, Demosthenes, Landino, and both Old and New Testaments. Someone must have given him a hand with that list of worthies.

Notwithstanding these early examples, the sense of the word ‘canon’ used in the non-religious sense of ‘a body of literature’ doesn’t gain general currency in English until the mid-18th century, and even then, all you had to do was read widely and have firm opinions to compile your selection. There were no objective criteria involved. Just an intellectual cocktail of precedent, peer pressure and dogmatism - and it’s these three elements which have characterized the judgments of the self-appointed gatekeepers of the canon ever since. Take Joseph Addison’s ‘An Account of the Greatest English Poets’ as an example, in which he notes that the canon changes as tastes do. No-one likes Spenser any more, he reckons, because he’s so old-fashioned;

Old Spenser next, warm'd with poetic rage,

In ancient tales amus'd a barb'rous age;

An age that yet uncultivate and rude,

Where'er the poet's fancy led, pursu'd

Through pathless fields, and unfrequented floods,

To dens of dragons and enchanted woods.

But now the mystic tale, that pleas'd of yore,

Can charm an understanding age no more;

The long-spun allegories fulsome grow.

While the dull moral lies too plain below.

We view well-pleas'd at distance all the sights

Of arms and palfreys, battles, fields, and fights,

And damsels in distress, and courteous knights;

But when we look too near, the shades decay,

And all the pleasing landscape fades away. (2)

Away with tradition, says Addison, we’ve made progress since then. So Spenser was out of his canon, then.

From the mid 1790’s onwards, anthologies of (mainly) poetry came thick and fast. And these were not just Miscellanies which were basically collections of verse: these were sold as selections of good stuff that you needed to read to be thought ‘up’ in English literature. And it’s from these times that English Literature (in capitals) begins to coalesce as a subject not for university study (that, as we’ve seen, came nearly a hundred years later), but as an ‘improving’ pastime. Joseph Ritson’s ‘The English Anthology’ was published in three volumes in 1793-4; hot on its heels was Samuel Pratt’s ‘The Cabinet of Poetry’ at double the length. Among the better known examples is William Hazlitt’s ‘Select Poets of Great Britain’ published in 1825, a feat of prodigious reading which includes detailed selections from the works of 41 writers from Chaucer to Burns. And, of course, there’s been many hundreds since, separating the wheat from the chaff so that we grateful Recreational Readers don’t have to ruin our eyesight compiling our own ‘Now That’s What I Call Literature’.

Then came those critics who chose to write about the canon, who performed a similarly thorough editorial role; so when TS Eliot, in his essay ‘The Perfect Critic’ rhetorically demands that we “Compare a medieval theologian or mystic, [or] a seventeenth-century preacher, with any liberal sermon since Schleiermacher” he’s not only relieving us of the responsibility, he’s letting us know that, scarily, he actually has. And if you look at Harold Bloom’s incredible list of canonical literature published in 1994, you wonder how the poor bugger had time to eat or sleep.

The members of the literary police force who, like Eliot, were taking the job seriously were keen that the canon should not only foster a reverence for past achievements, but also demonstrate a range of “quality” writing (which was usually identical to the stuff they liked). Some had more pretensions to impartiality than others; Johnson, in his ‘Lives of the Poets’ tried to cloak his partiality by appealing to a notion of taste shared by all right-thinking people (of whom he, of course, was the leader); Eliot thought that meaning worth its salt didn’t need any personal endorsement to help it survive, and tried, wherever possible, to write himself out of the selection procedure. The canon, in fact, selected itself on intrinsic merit.

I think Eliot’s arguments still form the best impartial introduction to an understanding of how a canon works, so I reckon a quick precis wouldn’t be a bad idea.

The Canon, says Tom, shouldn’t be conservative - it should never blindly follow tradition. And tradition, anyway, is a far broader church than that represented by a blind obedience to past successes. If you’re going to try and write for the Canon, you need to educate yourself both in “the historical sense” (a conception of “the pastness of the past”), but also be aware of the presentness of the past. And in order to get that sense, you have to read one hell of a lot.

That being the case, “no . . . artist of any sort, has his complete meaning alone.” His meaning is built on both the vital and decomposing meaning of every previous artist. Then he goes all Emersonian/ Platonic on us. Every new work of worthwhile art adds meaning to the sum of that which preceded it, altering the nature of all meaning “ever so slightly”. But the sort of literature that exerts the greatest influence on this sum of meaning is that which demonstrates the greatest “intensity of the artistic process”. The component parts of meaning don’t matter that much when set against the power of the artist’s vision that fuses them all together into meaning. And the more diffuse and startling those components are, the greater the force of that imaginative power that shapes them needs to be. So it’s not necessarily the period trappings of a work of art which will date it - it’s rather a failure of skill. So only second-rate, conservative art will date. Neat, isn’t it?

So at least Eliot thought the matter through for himself, although he declined to produce a definite canon; as we’ve seen, he didn’t think there was any point because it would be too personal and, therefore, inconsequential. It’s a pretty safe bet that Dante would be #1 though.

But most compilers of canons and anthologies not blessed with Eliot’s intellectual conscience and rigour usually hug a well-tried formula: a mixture of the usual suspects with a few idiosyncratic, cult and/or contemporary selections thrown in to either ferment debate or to show how magnanimous or hip they are. And so the canon creeps inexorably forward over time, shedding its dead wood and enshrining new reputations as it proceeds.

But in practice it’s all so arbitrary, particularly if you’re remotely inclined to favour any form of rational or scientific analysis in the way you assess excellence; meaning, by and large, still lives or dies courtesy of its perceived merit and not its intrinsic merit, no matter what Eliot says - even though the unwritten criteria governing that merit are impossible to objectify. But those texts that make it into the canon are necessarily ‘representative’ of those shadowy criteria.

Perhaps it would be better just to look at popularity; there’s nothing (except as we’ve noted, snobbery) that says meaning can’t at least in part be the product of concensus. And it’s what’s tending to happen anyway.

In recent times, the canon has become a publisher’s dream - any marketing director who wants to stoke up interest in the back catalogue canvasses readers every few years for their personal Top Five books and a chart is compiled. Which of course shifts the idea of meaning further away from quality in the direction of opinion. It’s all much more democratic. And this change of emphasis away from the traditional guardians of the canon and their Masonic criteria of excellence that even they don’t fully understand towards the Recreational Reader and his pursuit of pleasure is no bad thing. “Favourite” and “Best” can cover a huge range of potential responses which are just about as empirically sustainable as anything academe has thus far offered, after all.

But what’s surprising is how closely the respective canons of the Great & the Good and the Recreational Reader often resemble one another.

One of the most recent polls of favourite novels (by the sponsors of the Orange Prize for Women’s Literature) found it’s still ‘Jane Eyre’, ‘Wuthering Heights’ and ‘Rebecca’ that push the distaff meaning buttons. Of the Top 10 authoresses, only two were living - Carol Shields and Harper Lee. (3)

The BBC’s ‘Big Read’ of 2003 (once again, novels only) was less conservative, but nevertheless boasted Tolstoy (2 entries), Dickens (5), Dumas, Dostoyevsky, Hardy (2), Charlotte Bronte, Louisa May Alcott, George Orwell (2), Jane Austen (2), Robert Louis Stevenson, James Joyce, Wilkie Collins, and Emily Bronte on its list, rubbing shoulders with JK Rowling (4) and Terry Pratchett (5). Any of these authors can still be found on reading lists and syllabuses in our schools and colleges.

So maybe all that canonical brainwashing worked after all. Or maybe they’re just damn good books whose meaning has endured. It could even prove that academics’ tastes aren’t governed by such different criteria as they’d like to think. Or, even better, than the public’s better read than they imagined.

Talking of the academic community, democracy within the canon in that neck of the woods is being interpreted in rather different ways. In fact, it’s currently hugely unfashionable to talk in terms of ‘canons’ since, to many of the more socially or culturally-influenced critics, the very idea of a hierarchy of meaning smacks of good old-fashioned colonialism. And there’s no denying that some groups of writers have been neglected (or as we say these days, ‘disempowered’) in what’s come to be known as the ‘Western Literary Canon’. The American critic George P. Landow is one of the more dispassionate commentators on the subject:

Like the colonial power, like, say, France, Germany, or England, the canonical work acts as a center - the center - of the perceptual field, the center of values, the center of interest, the center, in short, of a web of meaningful interrelations. The noncanonical works act as colonies or as countries that are unknown and out of sight and mind. That is why many object to the omission or excision of female works from the canon, for by not appearing within the canon works by women do not appear anywhere.

Landow’s using women’s literature as his example, but he could, of course, equally have used Black or Gay in its place. And he’s right. There is a strong case to be made that the WLC is overly male and bourgeois. But was this the result of a deliberate excision of other sources of writing or their omission through ignorance? Conspiracy or cock-up? The argument goes as follows: the canon of "great literature" has thus far ensured that it is only what is called “representative experience" (one selected by male bourgeois critics) that is transmitted to future generations, rather than those deviant, unrepresentative experiences to be found in much female, ethnic, and working-class writing. So meaning is a white middle-aged, middle class bloke. Which still adequately describes many of the senior teaching staff in academia, but isn’t an adequate reflection of the wide variety of literature that’s currently being written, or, indeed, who’s reading it.

So what can you do about this? Landow reckons there’s three options - (1) make the canon bigger, (2) change the entry criteria or (3) start an ‘alternative’ canon. Well, for what it’s worth, I’d jettison (3) for two reasons: you’ll ghettoize the very writers you’re intending to help, and, as typically happens in anything set up as a reaction to something else, you’ll replace one hierarchy with another that’s usually as tyrannical as its predecessor. With (2), it’s easy to level charges of special pleading or positive discrimination that hinder the reputation of those very works you’re trying to help. So we’re left with (1), and then someone comes along and accuses you of diluting the quality of the existing canon. Lose/lose.

But what the issue ultimately reduces itself to is whether you want the canon to draw on a wider list of influences for the sake of variety and inclusiveness, or whether you think these minority genres aren’t represented because they simply can’t cut the mustard in the company of Shakespeare, Milton et al.

If your sympathies are with the former, you won’t mind that my nephew’s studying the poetry of Emily Bronte (which is basically badly-written juvenilia) for his AS Level and not her classic ‘Wuthering Heights’; or that his other set text is ‘Top Girls’, a badly dated critique of the Thatcher era by Caryl Churchill; if you’re in the latter group, this attempt to redress the paternalistic/ hierarchical composition of the canon using students as its lab rats will make your blood boil.

I could go on, but I won’t, for obvious reasons. Suffice to say the debate is very much alive and kicking.

Footnotes:

1. And let’s not forget that the works of Shakespeare form the best-known secular canon there is. Never collected and published in his lifetime, attribution of individual plays and poems keeps a whole industry in a job.

2. In his ‘Preface to Addison’, Johnson teases the poet and essayist about this particular passage: “In this poem is a very confident and discriminate character of Spenser, whose work he had then never read. So little sometimes is criticism the effect of judgement.” Johnson, of course, never fell into this trap.

3. Since that poll was conducted, Carol Shields has, of course, died.

Part 35

The issue of what’s canonical is either of devastating importance to you, or nothing more than a cultural parlour game - and basically there’s no correct answer. But to sum up:

Þ Should the Canon be viewed as 1) a glorified recommended reading list or book chart? Or 2) should it be taken more seriously as an index of artistic excellence?

Þ If 1), you’ll have no qualms about the ways in which the canon regenerates itself over time. It’s simply a contingent guide to contemporary opinion, and the responsibility for meaning in literature will fall squarely on the shoulders of the Common or Recreational Reader, call him what you will. This will have the advantage of being more democratic, but does invite the charge that it is uninformed - “difficult” books, or those that aren’t widely available are less likely to make the list. And it will almost certainly take into account more contemporary work which will not have had the chance to prove its lasting worth, and genres (such as children’s fiction) that have hitherto not been considered appropriate or even worthy of inclusion. So while the list will be more varied, turnover will be higher, and any conclusions you can draw about literary meaning will not have the empirical value of the kind that can be broadly applied;

Þ If 2), that last sentence will be the most disturbing to you. You’ll be looking for more informed opinion than most Recreational Readers will possess; a wider range of reading, and, hopefully opinions that offer some level of self-justification beyond simple matters of taste, like and dislike. You will be concerned that these opinions transcend the purely personal and aim for some kind of impartiality. The fact that the same names keep cropping up repeatedly will not necessarily concern you, because your criteria for entry into the canon will be that more stringent, however you have managed to formulate them.

By using a model for literary meaning, your inclusions will be necessarily more conservative; so you’ll need to take care that your template’s sufficiently elastic to admit at least some newcomers. But at base you’ll believe that meaning is an absolute, though shadowy, criterion of excellence.

Most of us, I suspect, combine elements from both groups. While the issue of literary meaning and its survival doesn’t give us sleepless nights, we like to think that for at least part of the time, what we’re reading has some value, and we’re more likely to use the criterion of longevity than perhaps any other if we’re going to choose a ‘worthy’ read, as opposed to something that’ll simply keep us amused. Certainly those recent polls suggest that us Recreational Readers are equally responsible for keeping Tolstoy’s reputation alive as the amount of attention he receives from academics.

But what we must also remember when we’re in the bookshop or library is that entry to the canon doesn’t automatically make a book any harder to read; its appearance on an arbitrary list doesn’t suddenly make its meaning harder to understand or experience. It just somehow feels that having been raised onto a cutural pedestal, it’s somehow less approachable. And of course it’s nothing of the kind. Dickens is just as much fun now he’s a “classic” writer as when his novels first appeared. OK, so critics write considered pieces about him - but that needn’t spoil our enjoyment. We won’t have to work any harder to get at his meaning because of that. But whether we read the canon for pleasure or instruction, we should also bear in mind Matthew Arnold’s contention that the canon will survive, not by our assessments of the meaning contained in it, but out of man’s sheer naked instinct for self-preservation. We can’t, he thought, live without it and still claim to be human. For Arnold, literary meaning was that important.

So what we’ve been looking at in this section is the way readers react to texts, not so much how we interpret them - that’ll come in Part 4. But I’ll make no apologies for dwelling so long on a facet of reading that yields so few tangible results.

After all, if we don’t engage with a book on whatever level we’re capable of, nothing else will follow, and it’s worth trying to understand how this occurs, because it’s too often taken as a given, certainly by some of the canon-mongers who feel it’s our sworn duty as human beings to read these books.

And, certainly in this section, I don’t want to leave you with the impression that there’s such a thing as a specifically ‘literary’ response to reading a text, or that meaning has to be judged exclusively by literary criteria, whatever they are. "The 'greatness' of literature," TS Eliot observed in his essay ‘Religion and Literature’, "cannot be determined solely by literary standards," and I’m with him there. But when an eminent (and prominent) critic like Harold Bloom (whose phenomenal canon I defy anyone to complete) decries the contemporary “loss of the aesthetic” in the study of meaning, what I think he’s quite rightly decrying is the tokenistic and inappropriate importation of outside disciplines into the study of meaning for their own sake; what I hope he isn’t claiming is that literature doesn’t share ways of seeing things with other creative endeavours, from whatever discipline. Because he’d simply be WRONG.

And with this in mind, let’s conclude with another instalment of the travelogue, which, I think, in its emphasis on design and architecture, embodies what I’ve been yakking on about in this section - that meaning argues Accessibility, Dialogue and Empathy if it’s going to be perceived, taken to heart, and survive:

So let’s travel to Washington DC, where just about every armed conflict the US has been involved in now has its own memorial. As have some of American history’s most dangerous men. Of the Presidential monuments, only George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and Franklin D. Roosevelt have their own: Theodore Roosevelt has an island on the Potomac River named after him, JFK has a performing arts centre, Lyndon B. Johnson a row of trees, Richard Nixon has nothing, and Ronald Reagan an enormous and ugly office/retail complex that went over $400 million over budget. Then there’s the memorials to the armed services, and the various international military campaigns fought by American troops.

Of this last group, the latest to be completed is the Korean War site (1995), which is certainly striking while remaining curiously unmoving. It’s a triangular field with nineteen life-size representations of battle-weary or wounded soldiers trudging to their next objective. And what it seems to be trying to communicate in a graphically literal way is the heroic yet grim determination of the US troops in conditions of both tedium and hardship - at least judging by the posture and the facial expressions of the steel effigies. The location doesn’t help this determinedly downbeat mood either; situated quite close to the Lincoln Memorial, it’s hidden in a wooded area, as if the city were somehow ashamed of it. And it’s a million miles from the cheery medics on the TV series M*A*S*H, the most familiar image modern America has of those events on the 38th parallel, which ran over eight years longer than the conflict on which it was based.

Now contrast this literal depiction of the horrors of war with the completely abstract Vietnam memorial, known locally as ‘The Wall’ and consecrated in 1982. For a start, it’s thronged with visitors - far more than at its Korean counterpart. It consists of two black marble walls at right angles to one another gradually sloping into the ground, the deepest point being at where they join. As you walk down the gentle incline towards this junction, inscribed onto the walls are the names of every one of the 60,000 American service men and women who died in the conflict, arranged in the order (or as nearly as can be ascertained) of their demise. So walking the full length of The Wall takes you on a chronological excursion through the carnage from 1959, the date of the first combat death, to 1975, when Saigon fell and the last choppers took off from the American embassy. The lower you get, the higher the wall towers above you, and the more names you see, until, by the time you get to the bottom, you’re almost drowning in them. Then, turning right, you gradually emerge out of the memorial, the names grow sparser as the wall diminishes, and then you’re out in the open air again. It’s like a journey into hell and back, and you’d have to be an unusually inflexible pacifist not to be moved by the experience.

And yet many of the Vietnam vets didn’t like the memorial at first; it wasn’t graphic enough. Some said it belittled the sheer horror of what they’d experienced. How on earth can we learn the lessons of war if we play down its brutality?, they argued. The Government quickly capitulated to their request, and erected a conventional statue depicting three (male) soldiers in states of grim distress, each supporting the other. Appropriate symbolism, but most people when we were there walked straight past it in their hurry to experience The Wall. And of course the moment you start separating out individual groups, no-one (quite rightly) wants to be omitted, in case their contribution gets overlooked by posterity. So, in 1992, the Women Veterans fought for (and got) a third memorial, commemorating their involvement. This one could run and run.

To have respected the wishes of the veterans, is, of course, highly laudable. They fought the damn war after all. But commissioning separate statues completely missed the point of the original memorial’s symbolism. By eschewing all forms of literal representation, it was actually inviting everyone to react to it in their own way. Even people who weren’t born when the hostilities were happening. And this invites the kind of conversation between art and its consumers that I hope we’ve agreed is essential if its meaning is to resonate as widely as possible. Let’s not forget the three necessary stages of accessibility, dialogue and empathy we’ve just been looking at.

If you haven’t come prepared with a guide book and you see this black gash in the earth for the first time, you’ve initially no idea what it is; whereas looking at the Korean assemblage it’s immediately identifiable as a war memorial. It’s as if it yields up its meaning too easily, there’s too much accessibility, short-circuiting the spectator’s natural curiosity. So by steering an audience’s reaction too overtly (and, like it or not, the more representational your memorial, the more you are guiding people to a specific message), the less they feel consulted, and the more meaning resembles a monologue. The rules of engagement are pre-packaged, and you react to, not with the art you’re looking at.

In the case of The Wall, however, the scale of the monument has an impact, and the blackness of the marble sets a certain tone, as does the symbolism of the descent and the almost dizzying density of names. But that’s the full extent of what it’s saying, or, rather suggesting. It’s not going for the sympathy vote by graphically depicting suffering - that’s an inevitable product of conflict, and something of which we (hopefully) don’t need reminding. So at the heart of The Wall’s meaning is a restraint which acts as a sort of tabula rasa on which spectators can inscribe an interpretation that’s personal to them. [1] You can remember. Or learn. Or contemplate. Or try to come to terms with the loss of a loved one. The Wall’s not telling you what to do; it doesn’t steer you in any particular direction. It’s your choice how you react to it, and there’s room for everyone inside meaning that encourages this kind of dialogue.

The net result in the case of the two memorials is that while the Korean sculpture is quite rightly held in high regard, the Vietnam Wall is actually loved. And don’t just take my word for it - visit www.vietvet.org/thewall and look at the poetry and reminiscences it has inspired, from children, ex-hippies and combatants alike. As yet, I’ve been unable to find an equivalent site for the Korean monument. In terms of what we’ve been discussing, the former’s a classic; the latter isn’t, and never will be.

So, in conclusion, we might say that if you want your meaning to last, say it subtly. And let your readers do some of that saying for you.

Now let’s see what writers have to say about that.

Footnotes:

1. Sorry for the tautology, but it’s in a good cause.

Part 36

In Part 2, we looked at what literature means to readers, and the ways we interact both with books, and the text within them. So really, all things being equal, we should now turn the spotlight onto those who write literature and ask two similar questions: 1) what does literature mean to them, and 2) how do they imagine what they’ve written communicates with those who read it? Put another way, we need to find out what writers think they’re up to, and how they go about delivering the literary ambition(s) they’ve set themselves. [1]

We’re going to try and do this as open-mindedly as possible, without placing too much reliance on the traditional ways literature has been filleted and classified by the Lit Critters. Because it’s actually a lot simpler than they make it out to be. And here’s the carrot: if you stick with this section, you’ll have literature completely sussed, and you’ll never have to read another word of Lit Crit ever again. So it’ll be worthwhile for that reason alone.

And if you’re not convinced, here’s a reminder of what you could be ploughing through. Be afraid. Be very afraid:

This article explores the ways in which the trope of appropriation is expressed in Antony and Cleopatra, and how it has a complex effect on the ways in which subjectivity, cultural organisation, and epistemological enquiries are formulated in Shakespeare's play. After gaining some initial insights into Early Modern perceptions of the insecure spatial and chronolocial [sic] ordering of the world, discussion focuses upon the manner in which this very concept of insecurity is articulated in this play as a dominant stimulation for human creativity. Particular reference is made to developments in New Historicist and Post-colonial theorising of Renaissance litarature [sic], in addition to Early Modern textual voices (Bacon, Purchas, Browne etc.), in order to give greater clarity to the analyses of the different ways in which appropriation may be conceived: in terms of geographical mapping; gender expectation; cultural spectacle; mythic referencing; textual revision; versions of nationhood etc. Finally, the reader is invited to consider the variety of ways in which this play may be found to unpick the familiar opposition of imperializer and imperialized.

And there was me thinking it was a love story.

As I say, there’s no reason whatever to get involved with this guff, since there’s no shortage of information that’s actually been written by writers themselves - so we’ll be getting most of our data directly from the horses’ mouths, as it were, and not from third parties. We’re effectively cutting out the intellectual middle man.

You can find these authorial observations both in the canon of literature itself and in writerly criticism (what’s called ‘primary material’), and those reviews, magazine articles, autobiographies and interviews where writers break cover and discuss their craft directly (‘secondary material’). They’re writers and their job is writing, so what’s to stop them writing about writing? Particularly if they’re being so poorly served by academia?

If this material is cast as non-fiction (as in the case of great writer/critics like TS Eliot and Matthew Arnold), the writer is stepping out of his role as creator, and donning the garb of a cultural commentator or analyst; if it’s enclosed within a fictional narrative, he’s now labelled a Postmodern Writer. Or as we used to call it, one who washes his dirty underwear in public.

So, in the tradition established by ‘Tristram Shandy’, we now have books about writing novels (an excellent newcomer to the genre is ‘Elizabeth Costello’ by JM Coetzee; a pretty dire one is ‘Coming Soon!!!’ by John Barth, which is so postmodern it refers to itself as “supersophomoric dreck”, a self-conscious irony that is ironically true); novels about what it’s like to be a novelist (anything written by Philip Roth from 1979’s ‘The Ghost Writer’ to 1990’s ‘Deception’); poems about being a poet (I suppose the best known is Wordsworth’s ‘The Prelude’, but try Pablo Neruda’s ‘Poetry’ for something more up-to-date) and plays about writing plays (of which the most obvious is perhaps Luigi Pirandello’s ‘Six Characters In Search of an Author’). And of course there’s any number of books which riff on the theme of constructing narrative (which is why modern detective fiction is so beloved of contemporary critics as the detective/gumshoe weaves together the discovered threads of the plot into a story - just like a writer does!). It’s a sign of how self-obsessed (and self-regarding) literature can get. Or as the French poet Paul Valery puts it, “If you’ve run out of things to say, take your clothes off.”

But all this writerly navel-gazing’s going to help us steer our arguments round the Lit Critters, so for our purposes it’s actually rather useful.

And of course, some authors are dreadful drama queens.

Oh, that utterly terrifying blank sheet of paper (or empty screen) mocking you first thing in the morning as you sit down to write! Take William Styron’s anguished assertion that “ . . . writing is hell,” and his description of the “pain” he has to go through to get started. But the creator of ‘Sophie’s Choice’ then adds, without breaking step, “I find that I’m simply the happiest, the placidest, when I’m writing . . . it’s the only time that I feel completely self-possessed, even when the writing itself is not going too well.” And the condition of not-writing is, of course, even worse than writing: like that other paradoxical cliche, the unhappy clown, the writer can often be a (self-proclaimed) reluctant showoff. Having writer’s block stops him communicating his meaning to others, and without that lifeline to the outside world, he’s not able to perform for anyone but himself. Creativity can be a cruel mistress.

So with this wealth of self-referential material to choose from, let’s address two Year Zero issues:

Þ why do writers write?

and

Þ how do they write what they write?

These key questions will determine how they conceive of literary meaning, and the ways they go about organizing it within their texts. Because meaning, as it reveals itself to the reader, is all about ORGANIZATION. There, I’ve said it. It’s Big Theme #11, and the subject that’ll concern us for the rest of this section.

b) Why Writers Write

“There are eight million stories in the naked city”, ran the tag line from one of the most celebrated American TV shows of the 1950’s. And that just referred to the hard, fast, gritty, brash, noir-ish city of New York; in every apartment block, behind every door lived a human being with a story to tell, even if it was simply his own biography.

But there’s other places on the planet, particularly those with a rich oral culture, where the air itself seems to be saturated with stories. Travel south from the Big Apple down below the Mason-Dixon line, as Chris and I did, and you’ll find;

The country is one of extravagant colours, of proliferating foliage and bloom, of flooding yellow sunlight, and above all, perhaps, of haze. Pale blue fogs hang above the valleys in the morning, the atmosphere smokes faintly at midday, and through the long slow afternoon, cloud stacks tower from the horizon and the earth-heat quivers upward . . . the influence of the Southern physical world is itself a sort of cosmic conspiracy against reality in favour of romance.

Social historian WJ Cash’s masterful description of a landscape supremely adapted to storytelling is absolutely spot on. Compared to the West of America, where light is bright to the point of harshness, lending clear, sharply-defined outlines to everything it touches, and where the air is either crisply cold or dryly hot, the South is miasmic, imprecise, soporific, damp and fecund. The physical atmosphere has clearly shaped the vision, the outlook even the genre most Southern writers choose to tell their stories. [2]

So the general currency of the South tends not to be social realism or hard-boiled detective fiction - it’s more likely to be the shaggy-dog story, the Gothic, the Baroque - forms which accentuate unreality and exaggeration over the tyranny (as Southerners see it) of Northern city fact. [3] And it’s not delivered in the machine-gun quack of a Brooklyn dweller or the tortured vowels of a native Bostonian - but in the unhurried elongated drawl of someone who not only relishes what he’s saying, but how he’s saying it. Try these for size:

When Chris and I first arrived in Mississippi, we toured Melrose plantation in Natchez whose centrepiece is an outstanding antebellum mansion. Within moments the guide began telling the story of how the original owner’s younger brother disappeared into the nearby woods at the close of the Civil War, where he survived on a diet of nuts and berries for over 40 years. Given up for dead, he made a dramatic re-appearance, louse-ridden and stinking, at a society garden party being held in the grounds, and hurled lewd and insulting remarks at the petrified female guests before vanishing never to be seen again.

Then in Lynchburg, Tennesee, home of the Jack Daniel’s whisky distillery, we learned that the original Mr Daniel, a short man, died prematurely aged 61 in 1911, after kicking his iron safe in a fit of rage. The resulting broken toe turned gangrenous, and being a pig-headed individual he refused all offers of medical assistance - so goodbye, Jack (the killer safe is still there, incidentally, brooding darkly in the corner of its erstwhile owner’s office).

In the Sun Studios museum in Memphis, you find out how the guitar sound that played such a distinctive part in the impact of early rock’n’roll was “invented”. An amplifier fell off the back of a truck carrying Ike Turner’s Kings of Rhythm to a recording session, so a prompt repair had to be effected by stuffing the perforated cardboard speaker cone with newspaper, and - hey presto - the fuzz-tone guitar was born.

And lastly . . . at the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, you discover how at the funeral of Faron Young, an over-eager relative emptied the packet of the singer’s ashes upwind of the mourners, and that for several months afterwards Johnny Cash was picking powdery mementoes of his late friend out of various items of the clothing he wore that day.

It’s almost as if stories like these condense out of the air down South, which is one possible explanation why the area’s spawned such a vital literary heritage - and great tour guides. Much of the material comes under the general heading, ‘You Couldn’t Make It Up’, an accusation of unbridled fantasy often levelled at Southern novelists by critics who’ve never bothered to venture into Dixie. But it’s all there - and most of the stories owe at least a partial debt to reality. So if you’re in one of those areas of the world like, say, Ireland, Central America or India where storytelling is a habitual, even revered element of the culture, no-one’s going to raise an eyebrow if you choose writing as your main source of income. Which makes the decision to set pen to paper that much easier.

But the ready availability of potential material isn’t necessarily the main reason why writers write; one of my favourite pieces on the subject is by the American novelist Joan Didion, probably because it’s so unassuming. Efficiently entitled ‘Why I Write’, she points out the following:

In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. Its an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating, but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.

I can find no more honest or succinct appraisal of how writers understand literary meaning.

Footnotes:

1. Most of them aren’t in it for the money: in the UK more than 60% of writers earn less than £10K a year. Either the pay’s crap or they’re being less than honest with the taxman.

2. More of which in a few pages’ time.

3. Not one of the best-known American ‘Realist’ writers of the first half of the 20th century came from the deep South - they were all Northerners and mid-Westerners.

Part 37

No matter how you cloak your ambitions in ideas of objectivity, meaning is an extension of the self, which is, of course, necessarily partial. As a writer, you’re in love with communicating, but communicating on your terms. Even the most objective author has this personal agenda behind what they write, no matter how much they try and hide their authorial interventions. Or they wouldn’t be writing. No one writes for the void, or, as Didion has it, to impact on nobody. And, as we noted in Big Theme #10, Meaning Is Personal, which is why Didion thinks writers are bullies - the direct link that meaning creates from person to person is a de facto invasion of the reader’s “most private space,” - if they can reach it. They’re exploiting this privileged access to our hearts and minds. And we, of course, let them, because we enjoy letting them in. Literary orgasms all round.

And, of course, the circumstantial meaning of the book as a printed artifact is just as significant for its creator as for those reading it, maybe even more so. As JM Coetzee’s fictional novelist Elizabeth Costello notes, there’s something “undeniable” about it; in short, it both proves she exists and vindicates her choice of profession. Having a book on the shelves of a copyright library like the Bodleian in Oxford or the British Library in London means that;

. . . there is at least one copy that will not only be read but be taken care of, given a home, given a place on the shelves that will be its own in perpetuity . . . if I, this mortal shell, am going to die, let me at least live on through my creations.

She acknowledges this need for security is on one level “pathetic”, but that she couldn’t ignore it, and wouldn’t rest until she was sure her first published book had been deposited in the library, safe amid the pantheon of all those other writers that had preceded her. The need to belong, to assume one’s place within a historical continuum is a neurosis most writers would recognize, and is all part of the package of existential anxieties Joan Didion describes.

Didion admits that she nicked the title for her essay from George Orwell, who performed a similar act of self-appraisal in 1947, in which he says much the same thing, only at greater length. He writes out of:

Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen -- in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all -- and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.

Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but . . . above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations. [itals mine]

Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

Political purpose. Using the word "political" in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples' idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

It’s an honest, although not terribly flattering portrait of the artist that owes a lot to existential theory - the writer writes to impact his personality, views - whatever - on others. It’s also an odd mixture of the ideal, the real and the downright grubby. The need for revenge sits hand in hand with a desire to share the world’s beauty with others; vanity and selfishness proceed in partnership with a desire to make a better world.

But the most important point Orwell makes is his assertion that in terms of meaning, there is no such thing as pure objectivity, which might sound odd coming from a writer whose reputation rests as much on his non-fiction as his ‘made-up’ novels. Everything, he says, bar a railway timetable, has an ‘aesthetic’ element, and that aesthetic element is the way the writer interprets the world and recreates it on paper. [1] In doing so, he’s not so much reflecting the world, but the world as he sees it, the world as filtered through his aesthetic consciousness.

So, for example, Orwell could never agree with George Eliot’s idea that the writer owes a debt to verisimilitude: in her novel ‘Adam Bede’, she proposes that the novel must be as faithful to life as possible, possessing the “rare, precious truthfulness” of “many Dutch paintings”.

In Orwell’s opinion, however, this ambition is delusional: you can never reproduce reality completely accurately because your senses get in the way. And your senses are personal to you. So what he’s effectively saying is that literature can never travel to the furthest left of our Meaning Line. It will always contain a measure, however small, of ambiguity. Because there’s a human consciousness somewhere in the equation. So he’s shaved the extreme left off it. And in any case, there’s a point beyond which literature can’t travel without becoming a string of facts, and reading, say, the phone book in pursuit of meaning isn’t, let’s face it, time well spent. So if we take that on board, here’s what the Meaning Line looks like now:

Fact------------Meaning-----------------------------------------Significance

Literature-------------------------------------------------Literature

I don’t think we need bother too much about defining what we mean by ‘fact’, or we’ll be here all day. But there is an interesting concept we can borrow from the language of computing which may help get our thoughts straight.

To a computer programmer, a fact is either “unbound” or “bound”, which basically means it either arrives with or without additional baggage (or what they call “subgoals” or even “logic variables” - what can be interpreted from a fact or what can be built out of a fact respectively). So a fact either stands alone (bound), or has something that props it up (unbound). It either has implications (unbound) or it doesn’t (bound).

What Orwell’s saying is that there’s no such thing as a bound fact in literature, because everything it contains is either there for a reason (because the writer wants it to be there) or carries the potential to be interpreted. So all facts, however much they aspire to being a definitive parcel of unequivocal meaning, are “unbound” by the writer’s aesthetic.

Simply by its inclusion within a literary text, the fact is begging to be assessed, probed or analysed; it already has a number of potential meanings. And when placed together with a second fact, all kinds of perspectives are possible, as any journalist or spin doctor worth his salt will testify. So even Orwell’s own “historical impulse” is suspect - there can be no such thing as what he calls “true facts” to build history from. You can’t deny the authority of fact and then, as Orwell does, immediately re-establish that authority in your very next sentence. As a creator of literature, you can’t have your cake and eat it. Which is why I’m going to let the ‘bound’ fact bookend our Meaning Line, effectively banishing it from our model for the time being, because I don’t believe it exists either.

So what we’re going to be doing for most of this section is look at a number of representative authorial aesthetics (or writing styles) and see how far they reflect/distort/re-cast the facts in their own image, and the means by which the writer achieves this transformation. In doing so, we’ll also begin the process of filling in the Meaning Line, so it becomes more than simply a pairing of opposites. But first, given that we know all meaning is more or less partial, we have to look at three hopelessly involved themes that lie at the heart of the writer’s partiality.

Footnotes:

1. You could argue, of course, that under privatization, the UK passenger timetable is actually a cleverly-crafted fiction.

Part 38

How the writer sees the world: three little words; ‘above’, ‘within’ and ‘onto’

To a greater or lesser degree, every writer is building his or her own world from the moment they commit words to paper or screen. In fact, as Joan Didion goes on to argue in her article, without the ability to express herself in words, she couldn’t make sense of her imaginative life: [1]

I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. Why did the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits seem sinister to me in the summer of 1956? Why have the night lights in the bevatron [a redundant particle accelerator housed in a huge building near Didion’s childhood home] burned in my mind for twenty years? What is going on in these pictures in my mind?

Didion wants to know why her editorial eye gives significance, and possibly meaning, to certain things and not to others. Why has her imagination lighted on these images - and ugly ones at that - for transfiguration? Why did she unconsciously choose to endow the bevatron with significance over, say a bunch of flowers? She wasn’t looking for significance - seems like it came to get her. So was it the result of:

Þ the intervention of an outside agency (inspiration?) that made her see it

Þ some quality inherent in the bevatron itself that chimed with her

Þ some pre-existing inclination in herself that chimed with the bevatron

In short: Where Does Meaning Live in the writer’s world, and just who’s in charge of it? Is it ‘out there’ waiting to be drawn down? Is it ‘in there’, contained within the physical world, waiting to be teased out?

Or is it within the writer, waiting for an appropriate vehicle to be projected onto? It’s not often remarked on, but the use of these spatial metaphors to ferret out where meaning lives plays a crucial role in the way we understand it.

Of course the study of meaning contains a strong philosophical bias, but that philosophy has ultimately to be expressed in words, and because meaning isn’t something you can see or touch, we’re forced to describe its origin and location metaphorically. And each of these spatial referents comes complete with its own set of intellectual baggage which colours out vision of what the writer actually does, and therefore what literature is.

Let’s examine the proposition that meaning is a function of ‘inspiration’, and I’ll show you what I mean.

Q: Where is it often said inspiration comes from ?

A: Above.

Q: What exists ‘above’ us?

A: The Divine.

Q: If meaning emanates from a divine realm, what’s it going to be like?

A: Transcendent. Mystical. Inspirational.

Q: How do you commune with the Divine?

A: It tends to get in touch when it wants to, although prayer can help.

Q: In what form will it communicate with you?

A: Revelations. Epiphanies. And, of course, Inspiration.

Q: So what does that make the artist?

A: A messenger. A medium. A priest. A spiritual leader.

Q: Whose job is . . ?

A: To lead his audience up to meaning. Or to draw meaning down so his readers can share it.

When “inspiration” enters the discussion, a set of associations tends to crowd into the mind based on how we define the word “above”, because that’s where inspiration is commonly thought to come from, and has done since antiquity. As we saw in Part 1, this was the model for meaning among the philosophers of Ancient Greece; meaning was a gift from the Gods, and consequently the role of the artist carried weighty social and religious responsibilities. And while this meant that there was a dominant moral component to meaning, it also meant that literature had its own inbuilt divine authority, which of course gave your writing added credibility. Not a bad trade-off. So in this example, we can see how it’s not just meaning that’s influenced by the spatial metaphor, but the writer as well. He’s beloved of the Gods, and would be responsible for passing on the meaning of the bevatron, which had was already pre-ordained by the powers that be on Mount Olympus (and Zeus naturally knew everything about nuclear physics, because, as King of the Gods, he invented it). So the writer sits between the Gods and us mortals, explaining their divine purpose to those who are not as tuned into it as he is. But he’s pretty much in the dark as to why he’s writing about a particle accelerator. And so would you be. But he doesn’t need to know why he’s writing about it, because he’s being instructed to by his Muse, whose loyal servant he is.

So how about meaning that’s within the physical world, and needs bringing out? For a start, this implies a more ‘active’ intervention on the part of the artist - but the nature and degree of that intervention is will also colour our ideas of what the writer brings away from the encounter:

If the meaning of something actively ‘announces’ itself to the writer, his role is to notice and to record it in his art. So while there may not be a great deal of authorial intervention in the relationship, it differs from our ‘inspirational’ model in that the perceived world already possesses a physical independence, an autonomy that doesn’t rely on an outside agency like the Gods for its meaning. The bevatron is first and foremost a bloody great ugly piece of technology. Of course, the writer may wish to ponder on the significance of this bloody great ugly piece of technology and work outwards from there, but whatever meaning the writer chooses to draw from it, the bevatron will have selected itself simply by being there, rather than the writer selecting the bevatron to embody a meaning he’s using to make a point.

Which is essentially out third category of spatiality, projecting meaning ‘onto’ something. And that this is something we looked at in Big Theme #4, when we discussed ‘organic’ meaning vs ‘manufactured’ meaning. So when Joan Didion noticed the bevatron for the first time, she didn’t know why she’d noticed it. But she is, of course, at perfect liberty to use it as, say, a vehicle for discussing green issues. And, as such, it would be an excellent metaphor. But she could just as easily have felt the urge to discuss green issues, then seen the bevatron, and then decided it would be a good starting point for a story about the rape of the countryside. In that case, the bevatron would have lost its autonomy; it would be a cipher onto which Didion is projecting her own preoccupations. And, of course, our picture of the writer’s role will change too; he’s not a conduit; he’s not a recorder or interpreter - he’s essentially God, because the world exists to be moulded to suit his purposes. So he’s naturally more important because of that.

Three little words - above, within and onto - three different conceptions of meaning, each entirely different from one another, yet, as I say, hopelessly intertwined. And in much literary criticism they’re used as metaphors almost interchangeably, which means that Mr Critic is assuming too much if he a) doesn’t acknowledge these distinctions exist; or b) takes it for granted that as readers, we know where he’s coming from on this issue.

So what we can draw from this little canter in speculative philosophy is that as an artist, you may feel any or all of the following:

Þ the world, or ‘reality’ dictates how you write about it;

Þ the world and your art are equal partners in forming your literary world;

Þ your art is the world.

And precisely Where Meaning Lives (and it might share all these three different addresses) is our Big Theme #12, and will pretty much eat up the rest of this section.

So when writers write about writing, they repeatedly ask themselves how much they ‘own’ the world within their art - how much they’re passively reflecting what’s already ‘out there’, or how much they’re involving themselves with what’s already out there, or how much they’re actively forming it from what’s inside them. [2]

Meaning Line again:

Fact--------Meaning------------------------------------------------Significance

Ownership Partnership Inspiration

Forming Involving Reflecting

As with most oppositional schemes like this, the majority of writers will fall towards the centre, occasionally being drawn left or right, depending on the artistic ambitions they set for themselves and their meaning. So you could write a simple equation to define the middle column along the lines of Writer + World = Meaning, just as we did in the previous section when stating that Reader + Text = Meaning. And this tendency to hover around the centre is elegantly summed up by the American poet Robert Lowell, who once wrote that;

. . . the author is an opportunist, throwing whatever comes to hand into his feeling for start, continuity, contrast, climax and completion. It is imbecile [sic] for him not to know his intentions and unsophisticated for him to know too explicitly and fully.

So that puts him smack dab in the middle of our Meaning Line. What Lowell’s saying is that it’s possible for the writer to know too much or too little about his craft, and, by implication, how his meaning will be interpreted. He will either be too much in control, strangling its resonance (which he considers “unsophisticated”), or else he’ll allow his meaning to be too pregnant with possibility for the text to yield any kind of sense (which is “imbecile”). Lowell continues;

Nor is it [the author’s] purpose to provide a peg for a prose essay. Meaning varies in importance from poem to poem, and from style to style, but always it is only a strand and an element in the brute flow of composition. Other elements are pictures that please for themselves, phrases that ring for their music or carry some buried suggestion.

So Lowell’s ideal would be;

a) to incorporate elements of meaning that are directly comprehensible, together with other effects from which the reader may derive other, less rational forms of pleasure, and

b) for the author to be in a state of informed ignorance or unconscious knowledge of what he’s up to. He has to be aware, yet somehow unaware of his aesthetic - both at the same time.

It’s a wonderfully contingent and, as we’ll see later, utterly impractical compromise of the kind we looked at in the case of the Washington monuments at the close of Part 2. It’s all to do with creating ‘room’ for meaning to exist within the text: create no room and you’re crowding the reader with your own authorial presence; create too much and you’ll lose both him and yourself. So to avoid either of these possibilities you have to juggle both of them. Without looking.

Footnotes:

1. And she wasn’t alone: EM Forster once famously asked, “How do I know what I think till I see what I say?”

2. And, of course, readers and critics ask that too - how much am I being encouraged to participate in the formation of this book’s meaning? More of which in Part 4, along with some more spatial conceptions of meaning.

Part 39

Given my assertion at the end of the preceding section that meaning is all about order, I’d like to look at five different principles of ordering (I know five’s a lot, but remember my promise at the beginning of the section - this is ALL you need to know). Meaning Line again:

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

1. Order 3. ‘Mixed Economy’ 5. Disorder

2. Disorder pretending to be Order 4. Order pretending to be Disorder

Control Collusion Abstension

Rules Contingency No rules

Solid Sticky Evanescent

‘Me-ness’ of the world ‘Is-ness’ of the world ‘Other-ness’

My World This World Another World

Writer as God Writer as Interpreter Writer as Conduit

So at the left-hand end we have Order (Principle 1). At the right Disorder (Principle 5). And in the middle Lowell’s position which I can only describe as a sort of ‘mixed economy’ (Principle 3) that owes allegiance to both. THEN we have two gaps to fill in, one between Order and the middle; and another between Disorder and the middle. These, respectively are ‘Disorder pretending to be Order’ (Principle 2) and ‘Order pretending to be Disorder’ (Principle 4).

Now if you read histories of literary theory, you’ll find dozens of ‘-isms’ - Literalism, Empiricism, Nominalism, Imagism, Futurism, Surrealism, Symbolism, Mythicism, Expressionism, Impressionism, Post-Modernism, Structuralism, Pluralism, Vorticism, Absurdism, Realism to name but a few. Basically, however, they’re all made up of varying combinations of these five principles.

So while we’ll use some of these traditional labels to anchor our argument in what’s gone before, we won’t be slavishly examining every one of them. What we’ll be looking at is not so much how meaning has been perceived to be ordered in literature, so much as the urges that drive the writer’s stylistic movements among these five different possibilities. So rather than viewing meaning from the top down, we’ll be approaching it from the opposite direction, drawing order out of texts rather than fitting theories on top of them.

And then, hopefully, we’ll be able to find out not only where meaning is within a text, but also what it’s doing there and why it’s doing it. We’ll get onto that in a moment, but first, I’d like us to take a look at why writers bother to monkey about with reality at all. Why not just leave it as it is?

So what’s the easiest way to smoke out the writer’s ‘take’ on the world, or how he sets about representing it in his art?

If, as the Russian Formalist critic Roman Jakobson puts it, “Literature is . . . organized violence committed on ordinary speech”, the act of interpretation is simple. [1] As we noted above, all you’ve got to look at are;

Þ the ways in which the violence is organized, and

Þ to what degree the writer’s orchestrated it.

Together, these constitute the writer’s ‘style’. And if sufficient numbers of author’s write in a similar way, with similar aesthetic ambitions, these individual styles coalesce into a ‘genre’ like ‘Realism’ or ‘Symbolism’ (they often end in ‘-ism’).

And style’s not just evident in the writer’s choice of language, but also the textual structures that support that language, which we’ll come to later.

So (if you’re a Formalist), all you have to do to start getting the meaning out of a text is subtract ‘ordinary speech’ from the artist’s literary representation of it, and look at the discrepancy between what Ezra Pound called those “book words” (literature), and the “words you can actually say” (ordinary speech). Take the second away from the first and Bingo! the writer’s linguistic style is revealed and with it the way he’s representing his created world. So, if Meaning is ‘C’, Literature is ‘B’ and Reality ‘A’ we can formulate a neat little equation that C = B - A.

The shorter the journey between A and B, the more direct the communication between form and meaning, the more the writer wants both him and us to ‘understand’; generally speaking, we’re moving from right to left along the Meaning Line in the company of Joan Didion, EM Forster and those writers who choose to compose their work in more or less conventional prose. Or in the direction of what Robert Lowell calls “unsophistication”.

The longer the journey, the further we’re moving from left to right, against the current of formal understanding, and towards Lowell’s concept of the “imbecilic”. If that’s the case, more metaphorical the writer’s meaning is likely to be, and the harder we’ll have to work as readers to get it out. If, indeed, we can get it out at all.

We go through these journeys up and down the Meaning Line all the time when reading literature, often without knowing we’re doing it.

Take something as simple as a single metaphor:

We know that someone who calls a spade a “portable excavation implement” is a somewhat literal-minded individual who doesn’t want you to misunderstand what he means by ‘spade’ - so that’s a pretty short journey between metaphor and meaning, but one which might have its uses. After all, if you stumble across Colin MacInnes’s novel set in the Notting Hill of the 1950’s, ‘City of Spades’, you might think it has more to do with ironmongery than black guys. Which would be wrong. And in the Quartermaster’s store at any army depot, you’ll see crates labelled “Cutlery: Assorted: Knifes, Forks, Spoons. Eating. For the Use Of,” which, while not a metaphor, leaves you in no doubt that these sorts of knives aren’t suitable for quietly killing the enemy.

Of course, a cursory visual inspection would indicate this, but then you’d have to open the box. So, at best, this form of periphrasis is purely functional - but at worst, pedantic.

Þ describing a fish “a gloried denizen of the finny tribe” sees us on a slightly longer, more time-consuming excursion through metaphor, and it’s the sort of purple description a rather affected poet might use (try Gerard Manley Hopkins.) [2] It’s periphrasis that’s decorative without being strictly necessary, and in order to interpret it properly, we need to be aware that fish have fins, so outside knowledge needs to be imported to make the metaphor work;

Þ calling either a fish or a spade “a snow-capped mountain” means you might never arrive at journey’s end because the writer’s using an idiolect or indulging in surrealism where form and meaning are almost completely estranged from one another. And, depending where you stand, he’s either challenging our received notions about the world, or taking the piss. A genius or a charlatan.

Ernest Hemingway called this ability to extract ‘true’ meaning from aesthetic strategies his “shit detector” or his “writer’s radar”, for reasons that’ll become apparent in a moment. Ernie most definitely dug holes with spades, caught fish and a writer to whom mountains were large things made of rock.

But in a work of literature there can be multiple linguistic and structural strategies going on. At the same time. And it can be confusing, particularly if the reader isn’t connecting with the text. He’ll wish these aesthetic strategies were pared down to the minimum. Calling a spade a spade is just fine if it means the difference between getting into a work of literature or being forced to abandon it as incomprehensible.

But if we believe Orwell, writers all have individual styles and strategies, because the natural inclination of literature is to recast the world in the writer’s image. And according to the Formalists, the writer does this to stop what he writes being boring, both to him and to us. Otherwise he might as well be writing an efficient form of purely functional prose, and where’s the interest in that?

Although not a Formalist, the poet Robert Frost would have agreed; all the fun in poetry, he reckoned, “comes from how you say a thing,” although you did have certain obligations to make yourself understood. Edgar Allan Poe reckoned style was a collection of the writer’s “mental idiosyncracies”, and Matthew Arnold muttered darkly about the necessity for “simplicity” and “severity” in your depiction of the world. So the long and short of it is - a writer’s style is a tension between how the world “is” and how he represents it in his work. But why travel outside reality at all? Why not just describe what he sees? The answer is that the writer is that by adopting a style, he is, paradoxically, re-connecting the rest of us with reality by jolting us out of our complacent patterns of perception. He’s bullying our conceptions. Or indeed our pre-conceptions.

Footnotes:

1. By using Formalism as a model I don’t wish to imply it’s the best or only way to examine literature; it’s simply that Formalism is a useful stalking horse for what we’re going to be looking at in this section, as it addresses many themes central to the nature of artistic representation. The Formalists emerged in Russia in the years prior to the 1917 revolution and flourished throughout the 1920’s until Stalin effectively silenced them. Important members of the group included Roman Jakobson, Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Eichenbaum and Boris Tomashevsky. See http://www.kristisiegel.com/theory for a useful overview.

2. This particular description apparently originated in the writings of Irish Rosicrucians, a body of philosophers who don’t have a coherent philosophy, but who claim they can explain the eternal laws that govern humanity.

Part 40

"If we start to examine the general laws of perception," Viktor Shklovsky writes in "Art as Technique," "we see that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic." So there we are, taking reality for granted, because familiarity breeds contempt. Our daily lives are composed of repeated and innumerable encounters with the world, such that our perceptive powers become dulled. Shklovsky calls this an "algebraic” method of thought, according to which the world comes to be perceived not as a world of objects but as an incomplete world of ciphers and outlines:

By this "algebraic" method of thought we apprehend objects only as shapes with imprecise extensions; we do not see them in their entirety but rather recognize them by their main characteristics. We see the object as though it were enveloped in a sack. We know what it is by its configuration, but we see only its silhouette. The object, perceived thus in the manner of prose perception, fades and does not even leave a first impression. . . . The process of "algebraization," the over-automatization of an object, permits the greatest economy of perceptive effort. Either objects are assigned only one proper feature--a number, for example--or else they function as though by formula and do not even appear in cognition.

So we’re not perceiving the true meaning of things. We’re using a form of perceptual shorthand, which doesn’t do it full justice. We’re making a part of something stand in for the whole of it, something Shklovsky doesn’t approve of. Now step forward Mr Writer, who’s going to free us from our perceptive chains.

Literature can restore our world of meaning to us. It "exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known", says Shklovsky. So we need to rediscover the world through the artistic process of what he calls “defamiliarization” if we want to see the world anew.

I think we can all probably agree with Shklovsky up to this point. We can’t see familiar objects with a fresh pair of eyes every time we encounter it. Would that we could, but we haven’t the time, energy or maybe even the ability. So we have a partial appreciation of the meaning in our world. Art can restore that meaning back to100% of its potential, and we have the artist to thank for that - when he’s on form, that is.

Now let’s leave the Formalists behind, and return to our Meaning Line.

There’s any number of ways the artist can help to defamiliarize us. But at one end of our line (the left) he’s choosing to re-cast the world in his own image, and on the right in it’s own image. So on the left he’s defamiliarizing and then re-familiarizing; on the right he’s simply defamiliarizing and allowing outside influences, including the reader, a greater say in this perceptual reconstruction. So on the left we tend to get more of the author, of structured intervention, form, rules and perspectives; on the right suggestion, essences, resonance, and independence. The left is controlling, the right less so, or perhaps, as we’ll find out, controlling in less obvious ways.

And NOW, finally, we can look at those five principles of ordering, starting on the left, with Meaning as Order.

Form always makes one tacit statement - it says: I am a definite form of existence, I choose to have character and quality, I choose to be recognizable, I am - everything considered - the best that could be done under the circumstances, and so superior to a blob.

Richard Poirier, critic, on the vision of Norman Mailer

“He [JMW Turner] seems to paint with tinted steam . . . so evanescent and so airy.”

John Constable, artist

So let’s start on the left with the ‘Me-ness’ of the artistic world - in other words, the writer as God. The Australian novelist and poet David Malouf is a good example of this tendency. Here he is seated at the far left of our line:

The writer always wants to be the creator of the world. He wants to be God in that way, in the way in which he can breathe out of his mouth, and all the world is there, all shiny and new, with the breath just condensing on it. We try to do that. Every time you offer a description in a novel or write a poem, what you are trying to do is present that landscape or that object, make it present, as if it were absolutely freshly made, for you and for the reader.

In that quote, Malouf’s unequivocally in charge. He will alert us to the ‘stoniness’ of stone, or make us see the meaning of a bevatron in a new and exciting way - his way.

You’re looking at the world as created (or more accurately, re-created) by the artist.

As readers we often refer to the writer’s ‘world’ if we detect a powerful vision at work, one that’s consistent and self-contained, whether it be Henry James’s Boston, Milton’s Paradise or Tolkien’s Middle Earth. No one’s saying it has to be recognizable or familiar, only that there’s a controlling imagination that appears to define its boundaries and contents, with the writer as its sole owner and proprietor. That’s certainly true of Malouf, one of whose characters, Digger, is possessed of the same impulse to encompass everything he possibly can. In a recent interview, Malouf stated;

He’s . . . a person who in quite a priest-like way is dedicated to the preservation [itals mine] of everything — he says at one point that he doesn’t want a pin or a soul to get lost. He wants to hold it all in his head, a bit like God. . . the author’s a bit like that too.

To which you might wish to add , “Some authors are a lot like that.” Take Ernest Hemingway, who was into “preservation” in a big way.

“I am trying”, Hemingway wrote to Mrs Paul Pfeiffer in 1933, “ to make a picture of the whole world - or as much of it as I have seen. Boiling it down always, rather than spreading it out thin.” And here he is again in ‘Death in the Afternoon’; “A good writer should know as near everything as possible.” And again in ‘By-Line’, “If a man is making a story up it will be true in proportion to the amount of knowledge that he has and how conscientious he is.” In order for a writer to concoct a fiction, he must never write from a position of ignorance, so he must spend a lifetime observing and learning, storing up material for when he might need it, then express it as clearly and concisely as possible.

With an attitude like that, it’s not surprising to learn that Hemingway cut his teeth as a journalist. While working on the Kansas City ‘Star’, he credited his first editor Pete Wellington with changing his verbose high school writing style into clear, provocative English.

He also digested “The Star Copy Style” sheet, a single, galley-sized page, which contained the 110 (!) rules governing Star prose. Hemingway later would recall the sheet as something “they gave you to study when you went to work and after that you were just as responsible for having learned it as after you've had the articles of war read to you.”

Hemingway would always remember the style sheet and its core admonition: “Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative.”

“Those were the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing,” Hemingway said in 1940. “I've never forgotten them. No man with any talent, who feels and writes truly about the thing he is trying to say, can fail to write well if he abides with them.”

The “Copy Style” sheet was a bible, containing some eminently practical rules. Here’s some others:

· Eliminate every superfluous word as ‘Funeral services will be at 2 o'clock Tuesday’, not ‘The funeral services will be held at the hour of 2 o'clock Tuesday’. Avoid the use of adjectives, especially such extravagant ones as splendid, gorgeous, grand, magnificent, etc.

· Don't say, ‘He had his leg cut off in an accident’. He wouldn't have had it done for anything.

· He was ‘eager’ to go, not ‘anxious’ to go. You are anxious about a friend who is ill.

· He died of heart disease, not heart failure -- everybody dies of heart failure.

Hemingway fashioned these dicta (with the later assistance of fellow writers Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein) into a creed he not only lived by, but almost fetishized, yet he only really thought he’d perfected these stylistic ambitions over thirty years later in his novella ‘The Old Man and the Sea’, the publication of which undoubtedly bagged him the award of the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature; writing to his publisher Charles Scribner at the time he noted, “This is the prose that I have been working for all my life that should read easily and simply and seem short and yet have all the dimensions of the visible world and the world of a man’s spirit [itals mine].”

Which not only perfectly encapsulates what I’ve been saying in the last few pages, but also is an excellent model for the writer who wants to be in complete control of his expression and, by extension, his meaning. A brief quote from ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ shows Hemingway was deadly serious about putting his theory of prose style into practice;

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy’s parents had told him that the old man was definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week.

And you can’t get much clearer than that - try finding any ‘book words’, let alone extracting the reality from them - it’s all there on the counter and in your face. Borrowing a title from one of Hemingway’s short stories, he’s created “a clean well-lighted place” which represents the world with the minimum of distortion. Hemingway had successfully purged his own style of “bullshit” or what he called “ten-dollar words” to the point when at times it’s almost self-parodic. Yet it’s a style that can produce crackling dialogue (see his short story ‘The Killers’) or achingly beautiful natural descriptions (try ‘Big Two-Hearted River’). One of his favourite adjectives is “clean”, which he often used when describing his own conception of an ideal prose style, shorn of adjectives, adverbs and pretty much all metaphor. And once you’ve created that clean prose that apprehends reality as it is, you’ve given yourself the most useful tool for making meaning. The ability to read the landscape in front of you is as useful to the artist as it is for the fisherman.

Part 41

In Joseph Conrad’s marvellous short story “Typhoon,” reality teems with “everyday, eloquent facts, such as islands, sand-banks, reefs, swift and changeable currents—tangled facts that nevertheless speak to a seaman in clear and definite language.” Even a desert island won’t be alien and voiceless to someone acquainted with the flora and fauna of that region and knowing what to look for even before his raft beaches on the sand. (“No sharks in the lagoon.... an animal trail into the jungle... fresh water nearby, probably....”) The island speaks to him. It is charged with meaning. Take also William Faulkner’s hunters in his masterful novella ‘The Bear’, looking for the smallest clues in the natural world to orientate themselves. And this is, at root, what the writer’s doing - using the meaning of the physical world to anchor his place within it. And, the more experience he acquires, the more he takes up ownership of it, as the hunter or fisherman does when he ‘reads’ the landscape.

The poet WH Auden was another artist who delighted in rigidly-applied aesthetic rules, and felt there were enough perfectly good ones around without him having to concoct a set of his own like Hemingway. Auden was in absolutely no doubt that he was in sole charge of his world, and writing poetry was a construction project with rules as strict as any to be found on a building site:

Between the ages of six and twelve, I spent many hours of my time constructing a highly elaborate private world of my own based on, first of

all, a landscape, the limestone moors of the Pennines; and secondly, an

industry - lead mining. Now I found in doing this, I had to make certain

rules for myself, I could choose between two machines necessary to do a

job, but they had to be real ones I could find in catalogues. I could decide

between two ways of draining a mine, but I wasn’t allowed to use magical

means. Then there came a day which later on, looking back, seems

very important. I was planning my idea of the concentrating mill - you

know, the Platonic idea of what it should be. There were two kinds of

machinery for separating the slime, one I thought more beautiful than the

other, but the other one I knew to be more efficient. I felt myself faced

with what I can only call a moral choice - it was my duty to take the

second and more efficient one. Later, I realised, in constructing this

world which was only inhabited by me, I was already beginning to learn

how poetry is written.

There’s the writer once again creating a world for himself and his art, albeit at a precociously early age.Yet for the rest of his life, Auden would always see the writing of poetry as this same technical process he identified when a boy growing up in the no-nonsense county of Yorkshire; informed by inspiration, yes, but at root, a technical endeavour. And not only that, but a moral technical endeavour, as if anything that wasn’t “efficient” was somehow sinful. In this, of course, he closely resembles Hemingway. And notice what kind of world he was drawn to create: not one peopled with fantastic characters and sweeping mythic vistas you might normally expect from a child - old Wynstan was busy building lead mines that needed pumping out. And he wasn’t going to invent some miraculous machine that would just somehow do it - he wanted one that worked. And a reliable one at that. So it didn’t have to be pretty. On this showing, it’s amazing he became a writer and not a civil engineer.

So, in later life, it maybe isn’t surprising to find he wasn’t a great fan of free verse. He viewed this as originating in a schoolboy-like aversion to discipline.

Not only couldn’t he understand this tendency, he considered the aesthetic goals of free verse illusory. After all, he said;

If one plays a game, one needs rules, otherwise there is no fun. The

wildest poem has to have a firm basis in common sense, and this, I think, is the advantage of formal verse. Aside from the obvious corrective advantages,

formal verse frees one from the fetters of one’s ego. . . At any given time, I have two things on my mind: a theme that interests me and a problem of verbal form, meter, diction, etc. The theme looks for the right form: the form looks for the right theme. When the two come together I am able to start writing.”

This vision of the impulse to poetry is seemingly paradoxical on two levels - 1) Auden’s freeing himself by obeying rules. And 2) by using these rules, he’s consciously taking control of his artistic representation of the world while claiming to be writing himself out of the equation; meaning’s having a conversation with form which doesn’t include him.

So while Auden looks like he’s out there on the left of our Meaning Line with the first of those paradoxes, he’s actually edging rightwards with the second. In truth, like most writers, he’s being tugged both ways, but it is nevertheless wholly clear that his conception of how art works begins left of centre. And it’s his concept of efficiency that betrays his overriding need for the writer to have complete control over his material. And it’s ultimately, I suppose, of no real consequence whether these rules are consciously or unconsciously sought or applied, even though it would make our argument a little neater. What Auden had to convince himself is that by the time he’d finished his poem, he could detect as little ambiguity in it as possible. When discussing the ‘Prefaces’ of Henry James he noted, "there are times when their tone of hushed reverence before the artistic mystery becomes insufferable, and one would like to give . . . [him] a good shaking". One could never envisage the blunt Yorkshireman abasing himself before something he couldn’t make his own. Let’s finish our all too short examination of him with a stanza from his poem “In Memory of WB Yeats”:

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:

The parish of rich women, physical decay, Yourself.

Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives

In the valley of its making where executives

Would never want to tamper, flows on south

From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,

Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,

A way of happening, a mouth.

I don’t think he ever produced a better realization of his well-known dictum that “poetry is the clear expression of mixed feelings”.

The subject of that poem, WB Yeats, also developed an unaffected style, but only after his art fully embraced a political vision:

I made my song a coat

Covered with embroideries

Out of old mythologies

From heel to throat;

But the fools caught it,

Wore it in the world’s eyes

As though they’d wrought it.

Song, let them take it,

For there’s more enterprise

In walking naked.

If style is the man, Yeats no longer wanted to be considered the Bard of a Romantic Ireland complete with lush Pre-Raphaelite trappings. As the Easter Rebellion and independence from Britain approached, he published a volume entitled ‘Responsibilities’ in 1914 heralding a new directness of structure and vocabulary that was to find full expression in his next collection ‘The Wild Swans at Coole”, which he published five years later. ‘A Coat’ was both an aesthetic manifesto and a statement of intention that he was to ‘enter’ the world of hard clear actuality, history, politics and struggle “naked”, forsaking “the woods of Arcady” or his idealised Lake Isle of Innisfree, where he planned (in his early poetry at least) to live the life of a picturesque hermit. We’ve caught him in transition, between worlds and between styles.

Which is precisely the progression of the Imagist poets, who wished to move poetry away from “the word as symbol towards the world as reality”. Briefly returning to Hemingway, whose aesthetic ideas were in part influenced by the group, his writing style is characterized by the vividness he brought to his depictions of physical objects, as if he thought the only worthwhile things are those that are concrete or which can be personally ‘captured’. In the novel ‘A Farewell to Arms’, Lieutenant Frederick Henry notes that in times of war:

Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names or rivers, the numbers of regiments and dates . . .

Which was exactly the impulse explored by the Imagists in the early years of the twentieth century. Meaning had got a bit airy fairy under the Symbolists (as we’ll find out later), and so Ezra Pound set about marketing a motley collection of writers including Richard Aldington, Herbert Read, T.E. Hulme and Hilda Doolittle under the ‘Imagist’ banner, helping them to write their aesthetic manifesto (obligatory for any artistic movement at that time) which insisted, among other things, that poetry should:

1. Use the language of common speech, [and] . . . employ the exact word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word.

2. Absolute freedom in the choice of subject.

3. To present an image. We are not a school of painters, but we believe that poetry should render particulars exactly and not deal in vague generalities, however magnificent and sonorous. It is for this reason that we oppose the cosmic poet, who seems to us to shirk the real difficulties of his art.

4. To produce a poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite.

5. Finally, most of us believe that concentration is of the very essence of poetry. [1]

What this boils down to is meaning conceived as pure, unequivocal form. To escape the imprecision of Symbolism, the Imagists pursued single, personal visions which could not be interpreted either randomly or impartially. Hence the reluctance to mix abstraction with the concrete, and the ambition to shake off the influence of the self-consciously ‘poetic’ language (those “book words” again) that belongs to the “cosmic poet”. Remember our ‘nodes’ from Part One? Well, the image is a node of meaning concentrated in an intensely physical form, one that’s almost aggressively ‘there’, demanding attention.

Let’s take Joseph Campbell’s short poem ‘The Dawn Whiteness’ as an example of this directness of expression:

The dawn whiteness.

A bank of slate-grey cloud lying heavy over it.

The moon, like a hunted thing, dropping into the cloud.

Not a fantastic effort, but a compact embodiment of Imagistic aesthetics. In its verbal economy, it’s suggestive of a Japanese haiku. Notice the use of the word “thing” - he’s already employing a simile, which is a tad iffy for an Imagist, but Campbell adds a deliberately bland noun to atone for his sin. “Like a hunted gazelle” would have put him well beyond the pale. So “thing” it is. Note also its visual bias - you can actually ‘see’ what he’s describing.

Footnotes:

This version of the manifesto was first published by the then leader of the group, Amy Lowell, after Pound had stormed off in a huff to become a Vorticist. But from its roots as a publicity stunt, Imagism found itself some powerful adherents: WB Yeats, Carl Sandburg, Hart Crane, Conrad Aiken, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, D.H. Lawrence, and T.S. Eliot were all influenced by it in their own poetry.

Part 42

The Imagists’ main gripe with their predecessors was their tendency to seek poetic immortality by dealing with Big Things - symbols, myths and the like, or what the critic Natan Zach calls “anarchic infinitude”. By contrast, the Imagists were dealing with what they called “street emotions” (sounds a bit hip-hop to me), the here and now, which marked an aesthetic shift from the general to the specific, the absolute to the relative, the public to the personal. So in terms of meaning, Pound reckoned the Image “presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” in which the relationship between the writer and subject resembles that of an equation, or a direct correspondence Note also that he proposes a neat reunion between the intellect and the emotions, with the brain keeping a check on the emotions and the emotions livening up the dry cerebrations of the brain. He may well have lifted the main tenets of this idea from the French poet Stephen Mallarme, who noted some years previously that the aim of poetry is “To establish a precise relationship between images so that a third aspect emerges which is both coherent and clear” - the ‘third aspect’ being meaning. [1]

Pound’s version of this equation-like relationship between form and meaning was to prove hugely influential in the criticism of TS Eliot. In fact, one of Eliot’s best-known dictums concerned the ‘objective correlative’, which he defines as “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. [2] In doing so, the artist is “intensify[ing] the world to his emotions”. What Eliot was setting up as his benchmark for meaning was that;

Þ form and meaning needed to be entirely separable - the object and its attendant emotion, the trigger and its response must be clearly identifiable

Þ the nature of their relationship should be completely transparent

Þ it should be a marriage of the concrete with the abstract

Þ should be communicable from the writer to the reader

Þ and should therefore be both transferable and repeatable

Which was pretty much what the Imagists wanted too. [3] You can see quite clearly that the concreteness of Eliot’s vision, its specificity and awareness of locale and geography, showed he was thinking along similar lines. Take the first of his ‘Preludes’ published in 1917:

The Winter evening settles down

With smell of steaks in passageways.

Six o’clock.

The burnt-out ends of smoky days.

And now a gusty shower wraps

The grimy scraps

Of withered leaves about your feet

And newspapers from vacant lots;

The showers beat

On broken blinds and chimney-pots

And at the corner of the street

A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.

And then the lighting of the lamps.

How much more vivid can you get? There’s sights, sounds, smells - everything.

You’re right there, immersed in Eliot’s created world, but a world that is also recognizable as the London Eliot was living in when he wrote the poem. He’s not calling a spade a spade, but he’s not calling a fish a denizen of the finny tribe either. It’s a beautifully poised piece of work.

But with Eliot there’s usually also a mood or ‘emotion’ being evoked, of somehow being aloof from all this detail, of being an observer rather than a participant. Which the more doctrinal Imagists may not wholeheartedly have approved of. But then the drive of Eliot’s aesthetic, while admiring the Imagists’ desire for precision and clarity of expression, was always more inclusive, and raised what was basically a theory into a workable blueprint for writing great poetry.

In fact, Eliot’s conception of the ‘Objective Correlative’ found full expression in the conceits of the Metaphysical Poets, which we briefly examined in Part 1. In his eponymous essay dealing with this ‘school’ of poets, Eliot coined his best-known critical phrase, “the dissociation of sensibility”, a schism in (English) literary meaning between head and heart, thought and feeling, idea and emotion that occurred after the Metaphysicals left the stage. [4] Like Pound, Eliot wanted to reunite these ways of seeing in images that lent free rein to the imagination, while being subject to the iron discipline of rational thought;

. . . it is the difference between the intellectual poet and the reflective poet. Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience . . .

The intellectual life of the “ordinary man”, says Eliot, is chaotic and fragmented. But a poet’s shouldn’t be; it should be joining, amalgamating, seeing connections even among the most disparate objects and experiences. Above all, it should be “forming new wholes”, new sites and groupings of meaning. In short, re-creating the world.

But this alertness to the possibilities of experience needs a controlling vision, or it won’t join up into anything more meaningful than a bunch of randomly generated, emotionally charged images. The dissociation of sensibility was the result of “crude” thinking, letting emotion off the leash, allowing the heart to rule the head. So what Eliot was really after was a kind of unconscious ordering of meaning that united the best of both worlds - the immediacy of the emotions with the controlling mechanisms of thought. Otherwise you were building your artistic representaion of the world upon the sand and not the rock; you were trading “massive music” for a “pleasing tinkle”.

So, to sum up: what we’re looking at here is a mindset that could be typified by the following adjectives: hard, personal, unequivocal, disciplined, particular - and perhaps most importantly for the study of meaning, Controlled. In William Faulkner’s novel ‘The Mansion’, the attorney Gavin Stevens muses that:

Man must have light. He must live in the fierce, full constant glare of light, where all shadow will be defined and sharp and unique and personal.

On that showing, Stevens is an Imagist. But he’s also a figure of (legal) authority whose mind deals, as far as it can, in certainties. The attorney needs to know, understand and be able to express all the pertinent facts of the case he’s presenting. So it’s no surprise, then, that it’s often pointed out that Stevens is really an artist figure. He’s a compiler and narrator of stories, just like the artist who created him. And his need for certainty in controlling the world within each individual brief is really not that different from what the artist’s doing when writing; the disparate writers we’ve looked at so far in this section ultimately like to be in control, to represent each of their chosen worlds in as detailed and compelling a way as they can, so that meaning will be reinforced and authenticated both by their omniscience and the vividness of its artistic realization. As little as possible will be left to chance, or the case will be lost through ambiguity and equivocation. And the discipline implied by this need for accuracy finds an excellent metaphor in the way the artist responds to the physical world of form and shape, and the play of light and shadow over its surfaces.

It’s been remarked that in Imagist poems, meaning aspires to the condition of sculpture, which isn’t a bad way to think about it. Because - and here’s yet another related theme - sculpture tends to last longer than most forms of art. Keep your meaning unequivocal and it will endure. Which, along with clarity of vision, was what the Imagists were all about. Hemingway’s Frederick Henry noted that concreteness was most necessary in times of war - in other words, when the world’s collapsing round your ears, it’s useful to have something to hang on to. And there can be no doubt Hemingway, in common with just about every other artist, wanted his work to last. And, as we’ve already noted, the early years of the 20th century were regarded by those living through them as an era of unparalleled intellectual and social change.

So is it any wonder artists wanted to create something with a bit of stability?

William Faulkner, Hemingway’s contemporary, also noted the connection between solidity, meaning - and sculpture. In his novel ‘The Wild Palms’, the sculptress Charlotte Rittenmeyer wants “to make things, take the fine hard clean brass or stone and cut it, no matter how hard, no matter how long it took, cut it into something fine . . . “ The flip side of this emphasis on substantiality in art occurs when Faulkner wants to describe evil or worthless aspects of his created world. For example, when we first meet Popeye, the gangster villain and rapist of ‘Sanctuary’, the appearance of his face is contrasted against a natural setting, having “that vicious depthless [itals mine] quality of stamped tin.” Similarly, in the story ‘Barn Burning’, the arsonist Ab Snopes has no depth - he’s rather ”a shape, black, flat and bloodless as though cut from tin.” And this can extend to buildings too; Faulkner, no great fan of Los Angeles, characterizes the brand-new jerry-built houses there as “lighter even than dust and laid lightly in turn upon the profound and primeval lava, which one good hard rain would wash forever from the sight and memory of man.”

Footnotes:

1. Actually, he might also have nicked it from the philosopher Henri Bergson, or even his Imagist colleague TE Hulme, both of whose aesthetic philosophies embrace variations on this theme.

2. He then continues by deeming ‘Hamlet’ a failure because Shakespeare’s depiction of Hamlet’s ’madness’ isn’t objective enough.

3. In his novel ‘The Wild Palms’, William Faulkner gave a good account of the objective correlative through his character Harry Wilbourne who puzzles, “Surely memory exists independent of the flesh. But this was wrong too. Because it wouldn’t know it was memory, he thought. It wouldn’t know what it was it remembered. So there’s got to be the old meat . . . for the memory to titillate.”

4. Trouble is, Eliot doesn’t really know when this occurred. He rather vaguely places it at some point between “the time of Lord Herbert of Cherbury and the time of Tennyson and Browning”, i.e. between the mid-17th and the mid-19th centuries.

Part 43

And it’s an impulse that can also be found in the French ‘Nouveau Roman’ (literally “new novel”) that flourished in the 1950’s, in which the significance of objects is stressed above that of human motivation or action. Alain Robbe-Grillet, the movement’s leading light, wrote that it was his ambition to;

try to construct a solider, more immediate world to take the place of this universe of meanings . . . so that the first impact of gestures and objects will be there before that are something, and they will still be there afterwards, hard, unalterable, ever present.

To Robbe-Grillet, a lack of solidity encourages acts of interpretation which dilute the object’s meaning by introducing possibilities. Basically, he wants to return dignity to the physical world by stopping people poking about beneath its surface. In this scheme, the object’s appearance is its meaning. What you see is what you get. And it’s startling, its vividness forcing a kind of perceptive (and not conceptual) double-take. Within the created text (which is, of course, the product of the writer’s consciousness), it has an independence and autonomy, and we should marvel at its presence, not weigh its value by what we think it signifies.

And let’s not leave out drama; the German critic Leonore Ripke-Kuhn (no, I’m not making her up) writing in the early 20th century confidently announced, “Gone are the days of half-tones and subtle nuances, of scintillating highlights in word, sound or colour . . . and [an] all-embracing mingling of moods.” Death to Impressionism!

So here’s another set of related visual ideas; insubstantiality, lightness, 2-dimensionality - newness even, can all be indicative of something missing from the world. A world of incomplete meanings. And if your art isn’t capable of creating or reflecting a solid, worthwhile, stable vision it’s not much cop.

Well, the jury’s out on whether ‘hardness’ or impermeability in matters of meaning will guarantee survival - as we’ve already seen in part 2, a lack of flexibility in can consign your art to the dustbin of history; it’s art’s ability to adapt, to generate fresh meanings to successive epochs that will make it endure, not necessarily its non-negotiable characteristics. Reeds bending and breaking in the wind and all that - and Imagism (and the Nouveau Roman) broke. While variations on their aesthetic legacies continue to reverberate through literature, they aren’t much read any more. But the impulse to order has always been a preoccupation of literature as it grapples with the myriad ways it could represent the world.

f) PRINCIPLE 2: Disorder pretending to be order: of substance and surfaces, language and chaos

. . . reality is a nice place to visit but you wouldn’t want to live there.

John Barth, novelist

Cloquet hated reality but realized it was still the only place to get a good steak.

Woody Allen, writer, film-maker, humourist and clarinettist

This section of the argument’s all about nervous writers - writers who aren’t 100% convinced that a career in literature’s all they’ve been promised - fame, wealth, immortality. They’re worried that the meaning that underpins art either fundamentally isn’t there, or ain’t what it was. Art is either a flimsy bridge built over chaos, or, worse, over nothing at all. These writers certainly don’t feel like they’re God, although most of them wish they were; they’re rather the plaything of forces they can’t control.

So let’s recap where we’ve got to.

The Imagists tried, for better or worse, to reproduce reality as honestly and economically as they could. And they believed, naively some might say, that representing the ‘realness’ of reality was possible, and that controlling it was in some measure attainable. It was at the very least an ambition they could aim for.

And the fact they were writing poetry, with its economy of expression and ellipses allowed them to purge a good deal of extraneous verbal baggage in a way not open to even the most fractured prose stylist. So we’ve got a set of associations all centred around ideas of hardness, permanence, concision and exactness.

But what happens if that’s all a sham - that there’s nothing inside that hard crust? The minute the writer suspects this, he’s letting his control falter. He’s no longer completely confident of his powers to order the world within his art. And there’s an entire body of literature based around the idea of artists ‘losing it’, of heroically battling against the forces that will see his meaning shrivel up and vanish. [1] And it can be a lonely job, fighting the forces of anarchy.

Perhaps the best known artist figure in literature is Shakespeare’s Prospero from ‘The Tempest’. The limits of his world are bounded by the shores of the island on which he’s been exiled. But within those boundaries, he’s in complete control of what’s going on. Using the alchemical knowledge in his books, he can raise storms, wreck boats - even make his daughter Miranda fall in love. So far so good. But all the time this white wizard is fighting against the disorder represented by the black witch Sycorax and her ‘son’ Caliban whose malign influence lurks at the back of the main plot.

So it’s perhaps not surprising the most common interpretation of the play is as an allegory of creativity [2] ; Prospero is the playwright, the island is the stage and his willing sprite Ariel is his imagination, oiling the wheels of the plot. And despite the problems caused by the fecklessness of the comic characters and their fondness for drink, and the legacy of Sycorax, Prospero manages to overcome these forces of randomness to engineer his desired outcome and restore order to the island - and the story.

But there’s quite a bit of tension evoked when we reckon there’s a possibility that he might quite literally lose the plot.

Reflecting this problem of writerly control, Shakespeare’s island world in ‘The Tempest’ is presented completely differently from that within an Imagist poem. There’s much talk of ‘spirits’, ‘shadows’ and ‘dreams’; shapes are never constant, but alter, fade and dissolve. And there’s a good deal of defamiliarization going on both for the play’s characters and its audience as Prospero weaves his spells and makes the fantastic real. No hardness here;

Our revels now are ended. These our actors

(As I foretold you) were all spirits, and

Are melted into air, into thin air,

And the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud capp’d tow’rs, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

And like this insubstantial pageant faded

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on; and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

I don’t reckon there’s another 11 lines as elegaic as this in the rest of literature, and there can be few lonelier artist figures than Prospero. His talent, though miraculous, sets him aside from the rest of humanity, and he has to renounce it before he can return to Milan and a ‘normal’ social situation “where/ Every third thought shall be my grave.”

This is commonly interpreted as Shakespeare’s farewell to his Muse; we know ‘The Tempest’ was one of his last plays, and our desire for conceptual neatness tends to write the rest of the story. But whether Shakespeare actually believed his art was heading for the dumpster of history - whether his meaning would survive, has been endlessly debated.

Of course, we now know he needn’t have worried; such vastly different poems as Milton’s ‘Comus’, Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ and Auden’s ‘The Sea and the Mirror’ all owe ‘The Tempest’ alone a huge debt. But in the absence of a collected edition of his works during his lifetime (and one was only published seven years after his death), the thought may have crossed his mind that his art might not play a part in posterity.

Shakespeare’s near contemporary Edmund Spenser certainly worried about this possibility. And he also allegorized the struggle in various bits of his mammoth tale of questing knights, ‘The Faerie Queene’. And once again, he uses a comparison between two landscapes to drive his point home.

Spenser contrasts what critics have called the “moralized landscape” of ‘Nature’ (the world) and ‘Art’ (the writer’s representation of it); the former is embodied in ‘The Garden of Adonis’, the latter in ‘The Bower of Bliss’. And what Spenser’s saying in his use of these horticultural metaphors is that the more Art deviates from Nature, the more transient it’s likely to prove.

The Garden “. . . sited was in fruitfull soyle of old” and:

In that same Gardin all the goodly flowres,
Wherewith dame Nature doth her beautifie,
And decks the girlonds of her paramoures,
Are fetcht . . .

This garden is completely free of artifice, and while Time is the sworn enemy of life in the garden (“For all that lives, is subject to that law/ All things decay in time, and to their end to draw”), it’s represented in the form of a loop, endlessly recycling the material of life into new configurations. So it’s obviously planted with hardy perennials. Adonis himself;

All be he subject to mortalitie,
Yet is eterne in mutabilitie,
And by succession made perpetuall.

Adonis is immortal because he will forever be reborn through the devices of good art, which is happy to describe things as they are. It’s the only sort of art that will last.

Now compare the world as it’s embodied in bad art. Spenser reckons the artist is never happy to depict things as they are. He’ll always gild the lily, wherein lies his downfall. Just take a look at these grapes;

And them amongst, some were of burnisht gold,
So made by art, to beautifie the rest,
. . . That the weake bowes, with so rich load opprest,
Did bow adowne, as over-burdened.

The image of a vine bending under the weight of its golden fruit illustrates how nature is distorted by artifice to the point of over-richness and even decadence. Compare this with Keats’s “mellow fruitfulness” in his ‘Ode to Autumn’, and it’s a whole different level of fecundity. Art in the Bower of Bliss “Was poured forth with plentifull dispence,/And made there to abound with lavish affluence,” since “as halfe in scorne/ Of niggard Nature, like a pompous bride/ [Art] Did decke her, and too lavishly adorn.” So Art is an unnaturally forced hothouse flower.

Then Spenser hammers home his main point having thus set the scene: art of this super-rich kind, he notes, cannot give rise to genuine emotions and therefore its meaning is suspect and cannot last. So the art of Love as practised in the Garden is characterised as “steadfast”; yet love in the Bower is simply “lewd” and “wastefull”. And gazing on this environment merely saps the questing knight’s energy and precious bodily fluids rather than inspiring him to greater feats of chivalry, which is an essential part of his job description. So while art may be attractive in its ability to transfigure reality into a sort of hyper-reality, it’s all a sham, and ultimately a waste of time. And so by implication, as readers, we’re not getting any worthwhile meaning out of art that’s too flowery or over-wrought. It’s all superficial - there’s nothing inside.

I can’t resist including another example of artistic over-richness which carries a similar purpose, this time from Ben Jonson’s satirical masterpiece ‘Volpone’, first published in 1607. Volpone, an out-and-out scoundrel who worships money, is enamoured of Celia, a woman whose virginity is proving hard to win. His wooing takes the form of poetry, describing the meal they will eat, and the contents of her bathtub prior to the consummation of their ‘love’;

The heads of parrots, tongues of nightingales,

The brains of peacocks and of ostriches

Shall be our food: and, could we get the phoenix,

Though nature lost her kind, she were our dish . . .

Thy baths shall be the juice of July-flowers,

Spirit of roses and of violets,

The milk of unicorns, and panther’s breath

Gather’d in bags and mixed with Cretan wines.

This catalogue of over-abundance not only transcends the bounds of reality (they don’t sell unicorn’s milk or bags of panther’s breath in our local Sainsbury’s, or even Waitrose), it’s positively bilious in its catalogue of sensual delights. It of course symbolizes the emptiness of Volpone’s love which is nothing more than carnal lust in fancy dress. And as if to prove the fact, he tries to rape Celia when these blandishments fail to win her over. It’s a further instance of art being used to compensate for a fundamental inner emptiness. And Celia might have chosen to paraphrase the lyrics of Shania Twain’s “That Don’t Impress Me Much” if only she’d had the presence of mind.

Footnotes:

1. Some writers, as we’ll see in the next section, aren’t too bothered by this. The group we’ll encounter in this section are.

2. And this is one of the biggest honey-traps in all literary criticism. Which we’ll skirt around without necessarily falling in, since it over-schematizes a work which offers far richer resonances than this single theme.

Part 44

So like Hemingway, (and here’s three unlikely bedfellows), Spenser and Jonson reckon that your art’s got more chance of being worthwhile if it’s penny plain rather than tuppence coloured. Imaginative promiscuity is not the thing. Beneath the surface of art, there may well be nothing, and the richer it is, the more suspicions it will tend to arouse. It may look real. It may feel real. But it’s too rich to be real. [1]

These examples indicate two different ways the physical world can be represented; in ‘The Tempest’, insubstantiality characterizes a landscape where disorder and subversion can thrive; in ‘The Faerie Queene’ and ‘Volpone’ superficiality is a sure sign of lax moral standards. In all cases, order is associated with ideas of solidity and accuracy . Only in a solid, massy real object can meaning be successfully embodied.

And the moral of the story is - if you’re an artist, don’t let your creativity run away with you. Stick to the discipline of depicting reality as it is. Keep your language under control. It’s a rather austere and essentially conservative credo trotted out by many writers possessed of a strong Puritan streak.

I mention Puritanism because it’s a vein that runs a mile wide through English Literature. [2] And Puritans were very cagey about the use of language and its capacity for suggestion. In fact, they were actively frightened of it, since it imprecision was all bound up with the Fall of Man; words, and their tendency to be misinterpreted, represent the Fall from Divine Meaning. People who don’t know the meanings of words aren’t just fools, they’re dangerous subversives.

And this hostility arises out of a deep suspicion that language, being a man-made construct and hence the product of a fallen creature, can only ever be a superficial apprehension of reality. Form and meaning are in constant danger of coming apart, never coming together, or being wilfully mismatched to distort meaning. Feeling guilty, Eve?

Take this representative sermon from the Victorian preacher Charles Kingsley, author of ‘The Water Babies’;

A difference in words is a difference in things. Words are very awful and wonderful things, for they come from the most awful and wonderful of all beings, Jesus Christ, the Word. He puts words into men's minds. He made all things, and He makes all words to express those things with. And woe to those who use the wrong words about things! For if a man calls anything by its wrong name, it is a sure sign that he understands that thing wrongly, or feels about it wrongly; and therefore a man's words are often honester than he thinks; for as a man's words are, so is a man's heart ... and, therefore, by right words, by the right names which we call things, we shall be justified, and by our words, by the wrong names we call things, we shall be condemned. '

It’s not the greatest revelation that words can misrepresent what they’re supposed to mean, and to be fair to Kingsley, he does say words can be “wonderful” as well as “awful” (well he would - he made a tidy living out of them). But a doctrinal Puritan wouldn’t commonly give you the benefit of the doubt. Misuse a word and by default it signifies a darker purpose than simple ignorance. Language is DECEITFUL, full of lures and snares. Hence the Puritanical distrust of art, which represents nothing more than a graven image of reality. It was this, among other considerations, that led them to close all the playhouses in London for most of the period 1642-60.

But that distrust is ever-present in non-religious writers too. They worry that they can’t get the truth down on paper because words are not adequate symbols, or their talent won’t provide them with the correct words to embody their meaning - so we’re back at Big Theme #1 again - Art is Lying. It’s disorder masquerading as order, contingency replacing accuracy, surface standing in for substance.

But let’s not be Puritanical for a moment and cut the writer some slack - maybe he’s not lying deliberately.

Maybe, if he’s being honest and not simply neurotic, he genuinely can’t say what he means. That being the case, he can react in one of two ways; he can rail at the paucity of his own talent or lay the blame elsewhere - most commonly with the nature of contemporary reality as being unconducive to creating meaning that means something. And if he doesn’t want to lapse into a self-imposed silence (which will, of course spell the end of his career), he’ll adopt the latter expedient. What he’s having to confront is nothing more or less than (cue dramatic music) . . .

The Fall of Language: Modernists and Conservatives form unholy alliance shock.

"Then I went into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining."

Samuel Beckett, ‘Molloy’

Hugo Von Hofmannstahl was an Austrian dramatist and commentator who’s commonly cited by critics as being among the first in the modern era to raise this long-running issue of the fallibility of linguistic meaning. [3] As the twentieth century dawned, however, the situation was being addressed from a more secular perspective than it had been previously, so the restoration of meaning by simply returning to God or writing about Godly things were no longer default options. The future was looking black for our plucky writers in this rather circular argument - there’s no meaning because there’s no God (or God-equivalent), and there’s no God (or God-equivalent) because there’s no meaning. Result - impasse.

Hofmannstahl’s most famous essay is ‘Ein Brief’ (1905), an imagined fictional letter from Phillip Lord Chandos to Lord Francis Bacon. Chandos confesses a major crisis of language - he cannot express himself coherently and it isn’t his fault. Don’t point your finger at me, he writes, because "the nature of our epoch is multiplicity and indeterminacy".

And there’s your trouble; what other generations believed to be firm and constant, he considers das Gleitende (the slipping, the sliding). So his only option, if he’s to remain true to his artistic principles, is to keep quiet.

And the letter does communicate a genuine, heartfelt malaise; the only things that can still ignite a spark of creativity are a pretty desultory list of ‘real’ objects - a watering can, an abandoned harrow in the field, a dog in the sun, a shabby churchyard, a cripple or a peasant cottage. He’s got it really bad if that’s the best artistic fuel he can come up with. Can you imagine Milton trying to writer ‘Paradise Lost’ with those ingredients?

Chandos’s ennui, taedium vitae - call it what you will - was prompted by his perception that contemporary language is the product of a society that has fragmented; from being an aristocratic, feudal, humanistic and rural it’s now bourgeois, democratic, mechanistic and urban. And there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that - certainly nothing which is necessarily hostile to art; Dickens’s fictional world with its seething hordes of characters, urban disorder, and cast of lowlifes teems with life and vigour. But with Chandos/Hofmannstahl, the problem lies much deeper - it’s an absence of any underlying order to help make sense of all this mess. In short, it’s a failure of aesthetics - modern life is just too ugly for art, which Chandos is confusing with an actual absence of spirituality.

It’s a common condition among writers in the early 20th century (although in this example, it’s being spoken through the mouth of an eighteenth-century aristocrat). According to this way of looking at the world, the spirit and unity that gave meaning to society (and the language appropriate to describing it) no longer exists. And you can’t build anything lasting because there’s no solid underpinning, and no framework holding the building together. While once “beneath the stone arcades of the great square in Venice,” he could conceive of “that structure . . . whose plan and order delighted him” he no longer has the tools to do the construction work he originally planned. Whether you believed that cohesiveness was divinely-inspired or not was academic - it simply wasn’t there.

And he wasn’t alone. As WB Yeats noted in his melodramatic and much-anthologized poem ‘The Second Coming’;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

And this mood of world-weariness and/or alarm was getting to philosophers too. Take this diagnosis from the Martin Heidegger, which contains all the above ingredients, and which he reckoned was still a propos as late as 1961:

The spiritual decline of the earth is so far advanced that the nations are in danger of losing the last bit of spiritual energy that makes it possible to see the decline . . . The darkening of the world, the flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth, the transformation of men into a mass, the hatred and suspicion of everything free and creative, have assumed such proportions throughout the earth that the childish categories of pessimism and optimism have long since become absurd.

And yet, all the time, the industrialized society creates a very plausible imitation of a world functioning as normal, with people who are not poets going about their daily lives as if nothing’s amiss. But lurking beneath the thin surface crust is a boiling sea of chaos that the writer no longer feels in control of, because his main tool, language, is ironically helping to construct that crust or veneer, by not getting to the heart or the essence of what it’s trying to capture. Language is no longer a vehicle that’s luminous and resonant because a) worthy subject matter isn’t there for it to describe and b) that subject matter has nothing animating it. It ends up bouncing off the outlines of things. So you end up writing about static or decaying forms or life that’s asleep - like watering cans and weary dogs.

Footnotes:

1. In other versions of the Grail story, particularly the 12th century ’Queste del Saint Graal’, the richly created landscape simply vanishes into thin air just as the knight’s about to succumb to temptation, forcing him to learn the lesson that overabundance symbolizes sin.

2. I’m not just referring to dyed-in-the-wool Puritans by using this term; it’s more a shorthand for the more ‘muscular’ tendencies in any religion for whom all artistic expression bordered on the sinful. Charles Kingsley, who I quote in a moment, was actually a Christian Socialist.

3. Which is still very much with us, as we’ll see in a moment.

Part 45

Now there’s a lot of ideas bundled together here which we should start to unpack;

Þ meaning is being characterized as essentially aristocratic (and there’s no meaning because the old social hierarchies are collapsing);

Þ it’s conceivable only in retrospect (because it’s no longer with us);

Þ it’s mysterious (unlike the regimented, standardized industrial world);

Þ and it’ll take some kind of “Second Coming” to reconstruct a world in which meaning can flourish again.

Sounds a bit like a Tory Party manifesto to me. And the result of this divine intervention will be that the writer can be once more inspired, because language and meaning will have been reconciled (and, presumably, the nobs’ll be back in charge). Let’s flirt with our Meaning Line again:

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

Mysterious Mechanistic

Aristocratic Bourgeois

Rural Urban

Paternalism Economics

Nostalgic Contemporary

Feudal Democratic

You’ll notice something rather odd’s happened here. Until now in this book, Meaning, or the left hand side of our line, has been inclined towards the rational, the planned, the interpretable and the expressible. However, take away its perceived value, as Hofmannstahl, Yeats & Heidegger have, and the columns flip over. Suddenly, it’s the product of mysterious social and spiritual forces that can’t be quantified, and it’s Significance that provides a new home for rationality.

So this represents a 180-degree change of direction from what we’re used to. Going right back to Part 1 for a moment, Plato reckoned the irrational was harmful to literature; now here we have a collection of writers and philosophers who reckon the irrational is essential for language to function.

But surely language is all about definitions, I hear you say - and definitions aren’t vague and intangible, or they wouldn’t be defining anything. Surely if you want meaning back you’re going to have to aim for Hemingway’s ‘clean, well-lighted place’ and not, for example, travel to the depths of a murky forest where you can’t see your hand in front of your face.

But that was before Modernism came along.

Modernism wasn’t, as its name might suggest, modern at all - certainly not in outlook. It was only ‘modern’ in the aesthetic solutions it chose to address the problems it identified in the relationship between society and art. Essentially, it was NOSTALGIC, longing for a time (partly real and partly imagined) when language, art, and of course THE ARTIST were all appropriately valued and were invested with a certain cache by society. So here we have an intellectual oxymoron - an essentially conservative ideology, an offshoot of the lapsarian Puritanism we looked at earlier, developing revolutionary aesthetic solutions to fly in the face of what society (wrongly, to the Modernist) imagined was progress.

Modernism was reversing into the future using literary technique as a battering ram. And all because many of its leading lights were worried that the traditional forms of authority they craved were being undermined by a new world order that had been busy emerging since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. This is why TS Eliot, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene fled into the arms of the church; why WB Yeats hung out with Lady Augusta Gregory in her stately pile at Coole; and both Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis were pro-Fascist. All these were both physical and spiritual retreats from a grubby world to which, for a period in their lives at least, they took aesthetic exception. It was a world that had too much of the wrong kind of order, of regimented rather than ‘natural’ order, was too egalitarian, was too superficial. It was DISORDER MASQUERADING AS ORDER. And that’s why the Meaning Line’s gone all weird on us.

While Prospero was never in any real danger of losing the plot, the Modernists were convinced they almost had and would be lucky to escape from modern times with their art intact. Because they felt society, and perhaps more specifically, an unsympathetic culture, had banished them to the margins of the onward-flowing tide of history. They were sitting at the back of the theatre, squinting at the stage and wondering what was going on. Prospero was lonely because his powers set him apart from the rest of humanity. But he had Milan to return to. The Modernists felt a similar alienation, but had nowhere to go. So the American contingent fled to Europe where they thought art was better appreciated because there was a longer and more established tradition of creating it - only to find out that the spiritual malaise was just as strong there. The whole world had ‘fallen’. [1]

So, unlike Hemingway, who wanted to create something hard and bright and tangible, a high proportion of Modernist art is animated by the mysterious forces of Myth - the ‘natural’ human order of things we looked at in Part 1. Meaning, to the Modernists, was at its most powerful when was least capable of being defined. And in the game of hide and seek, the winner is the player who isn’t found. So the strongest things were the most elusive, and, paradoxically, the most evanescent. Meaning isn’t a physical thing, it’s a quality again. Anyone recognize religion in that definition, by the way?

There’s been so much written on Modernism, I don’t aim to pursue it much further. But it will be worthwhile bringing this section on Disorder as Order up to date.

Basically, things only got worse. Even the Modernist thesis of seeking meaning in myth was rejected as unrealistic or undesirable, particularly following the grim realities of World War Two. To many writers, the world was degenerating into absurdity. So, once again, they had the option of confronting this chaos of meaning, acknowledging it, or going and getting a proper job. After all, most people outside the realms of art hadn’t realized there was a crisis of language. They were still making themselves understood perfectly efficiently in their day-to-day dealings with one another.

The 1950’s in America and to a far lesser extent, Europe, was a time of unbridled optimism in many areas of society. And it’s true that after the gloom of the Modernists, writers did start to cheer up a bit and focus on the RIDICULOUSNESS of modern life rather than its UGLINESS.

In the paragraph I quoted earlier, Martin Heidegger uses the term ‘absurd’ - a seemingly innocent adjective pressed into use (by critic and BBC Radio Drama chief Martin Esslin in 1962) to describe a movement in the theatre that gave a wider set of reactions to the “de-meaning” of the world than mere nostalgic pessimism.

Boasting a pedigree stretching back to Kierkegaard via Surrealism, Dada and Existentialism, it embraced both tragicomedy and out-and-out slapstick. [2]

And what most of the absurdist dramatists and poets are saying is that the world has no meaning not because meaning (or God, or the aristocracy, or whatever) doesn’t exist, but because it can’t be put into any kind of order, and therefore given any significance - the ingredients that should make up reality can’t be assembled into reality. The pieces are all there lying around but won’t fit together - and that’s when we can actually find a reason to want to fit them together. And most absurdists, you feel, would like to be able to achieve that, but feel they can’t. So you react to this meaninglessness either by sinking into depression or laughing in the face of it. Which is either heroic or stupid, depending on whether you’re depressed or amused by things that don’t add up.

In what’s become the best-known absurdist drama, ‘Waiting For Godot’ by Samuel Beckett, this tragicomic vision is perfectly encapsulated by the actions of the two tramps, Estragon and Vladimir, at the close of the play. The two men have just botched up a suicide attempt in which they try to hang themselves with a piece of rope which snaps. Unfortunately, the only piece of rope they could lay their hands on was previously holding up Estragon’s trousers. And so, with acute existential despair staring them in the face, it’s the cue for those trousers to fall down around the tramp’s ankles. Move over Laurel and Hardy.

Even the final line of the play “let’s go” sees the tramps not moving, since language no longer connects with the reality of their situation. There’s nowhere to go to, and nothing to go for. So they don’t go, even though they’ve expressed their intention to do so. And this scenario may move you to depression or to nervous laughter in the face of the void.

And the daddy of all absurdist novels is Joseph Heller’s ‘Catch-22’, set during the Second World War and published in 1961. The Catch itself is a seemingly logical premise that Heller describes thus;

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.

"That's some catch, that Catch-22," [Yossarian] observed.
"It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed.

The wonderful circularity that is Catch 22 seems perfectly logical but is simultaneously a betrayal of logic and therefore wholly specious.

In almost every scene in the novel, characters make plausible-sounding assertions fashioned from perfectly good vocabulary which obey the rules of grammar and syntax - but don’t mean anything. When Colonel Cargill tells his men, “You are American officers. The officers of no other army in the world can make that statement”, he’s absolutely right, but his meaning is so self-evident, it didn’t need stating in the first place. [3] Listen to a football manager waxing philosophical after a game, and you can hear this sort of thing on Sky Sports practically any day of the week. Yes, we know the game’s all about scoring goals. Perhaps you could have communicated that to your players.

Major Major is similarly challenged in the meaning department: when he tells his assistant Sergeant Towser, ”From now on, I don’t want anyone to come in to see me while I’m here,” Towser’s willingness to obey leads to the following exchange with Appleby;

“About how long will I have to wait before I can go in to see the major?”

“Just until he goes to lunch,” Sergeant Towser replied. “Then you can go right in.”

“But he won’t be there then. Will he?”

“No, sir. Major Major won’t be back in his office until after lunch.”

I could keep going with this all day - but one last memorable scene; Milo Minderbinder the entrepreneurial Quartermaster is paid by the Germans to use US pilots and planes to bomb American troops because the Luftwaffe can’t be bothered to do it. So Milo’s twisted brain tells him he’s successful in his job - procuring money and supplies to keep the US army functional - while actually murdering the soldiers he’s supplying. I believe these days the Germans would simply be described as ‘outsourcing’ their war effort, albeit employing a rather unorthodox service provider to do it (although one uniquely placed to guarantee its success). In fact, the entire novel is scarily plausible in the way it depicts our ability to reason meaning out of whatever we do, most particularly in the theatres of war and commerce. And the even scarier thing is that Heller’s vision is becoming more relevant with age.

Footnotes:

1. See Malcolm Cowley’s excellent memoir of the 1920’s ‘Exile’s Return’ for the full story of the American expat aesthetes.

2. We’ll be looking at Dada and Surralism later in this section.

Can you hear President George W. Bush saying that? I’m afraid I just did.

Part 46

Philip Roth was similarly perplexed about the nature of contemporary reality when he published his essay ‘Writing American Fiction’ in the same year ‘Catch 22’ appeared;

the American writer in the middle of the twentieth century has his hands full in trying to understand, describe and then make credible much of American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates; and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meagre imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.

If he acknowledges that this disjunction between art and contemporary reality exists, Roth reckons the writer has a number of options, not all of them within his own gift:

Þ enjoy it for the freedom it offers. Chaos is both an opportunity and threat for the writers and their characters who are able to roll with the punches. Despite Roth’s reservations in this early essay he clearly belongs in this category, being one of the great urban novelists, alternately railing and revelling in the complexities and frustrations thrown up by the chaotic ‘busyness’ of modern life, yet finding his own creatively successful passage through it. Saul Bellow writes well in this vein, as does EL Doctorow and yes, Martin Amis. Oddly, Surrealism and Dada partly belong in this category too;

Þ he can rise to the challenge and create something from the ruins (as Roth reckons fellow novelist Norman Mailer has managed to do in his unique fusions of autobiography and fiction; likewise the other writers of ‘fictory’, ‘faction’ and other literary hybrids (such as Gore Vidal, Louis de Bernieres, Robert Harris and others) who we’ll be looking at later;

Þ retreat (aesthetically and/or geographically) into an artistic world of his own making; this self-imposed artistic exile gives the writer some distance from reality where he can maybe get his thoughts together, or wait for times to improve.

Þ A combination of this alternative with the one above accounts for a good deal of Modernist writing, as well as the existential hero of Ralph Ellison’s superb novel ‘Invisible Man’, who, according to Roth is “alone as a man can be.” [1]

Þ go mad when the disorder becomes so absurd, he can’t take it any more. Literature is littered with writers and characters who can no longer build themselves any kind of order as their world disintegrates around them, from King Lear to Holden Caulfield in JD Salinger’s ‘The Catcher in the Rye’, and the fabulous monster that is Allie Fox in Paul Theroux’s ‘The Mosquito Coast’.

These options will set the scene for the remaining three sections of this section. We’ve now reached the point in the relationship between art and reality where some perceive there’s been a total breakdown. Things can’t get any more disordered than a meaningless absurdity, yet from this point, we’ll be looking at writers who recognize and acknowledge this chaos, but who’ve chosen to do something about it, writers who haven’t been frozen by despair into inactivity (which is the vast majority of them). Because writers are incredibly resilient creatures, despite their frequent self-dramatizing protestations to the contrary. TS Eliot may claim only to have shored up fragments of poetry against his ruins, but ‘The Waste Land’ is one hell of a fragment. You might think he’s being ironic when he writes that - and, in truth, we’ll probably never find out whether he knew he’d created a great work of literature or whether it was just a flawed attempt to do something. Whatever, the work of those who aren’t just happy to sit back and wallow in ennui can be viewed as just a tad heroic.

So we’ve now plumbed the depths of chaos and the only way is up!

Before we move on to the next section, however, I’d like to draw your attention to two novels of the early 21st century that acknowledge the potential for meaninglessness, but who address the issue in different ways that sum up how the writer can cope with what are essentially the two greatest threats to literature - the fall of language and the perceived gulf between art and reality, both of which aren’t hugely helpful when you’re trying to create any kind of meaning that actually means anything.

In JM Coetzee’s ‘sort-of’ novel ‘Elizabeth Costello’ (which is actually a collection of previously-published articles and meditations), Elizabeth, a novelist, gives a lecture entitled ‘What Is Realism?’ which contains the following observation:

We don’t know and will never know, with certainty, what is going on in [a] story . . . There used to be a time when we knew. We used to believe that when the text said ‘On the table stood a glass of water’, there was indeed a table, and a glass of water on it, and we only had to look in the word-mirror of the text to see them.

But all that has ended. The word-mirror is broken, irreparably it seems . . . The words on the page will no longer stand up and be counted, each proclaiming “I mean what I mean!” The dictionary that used to stand beside the Bible and the works of Shakespeare above the fireplace, where in pious Roman homes the household gods were kept, has become just one code book among many.

This fall of language has, according to Elizabeth, had an effect on the status of the artist. She feels “less certain” of herself than she would like to. “There used to be a time,” she says, “when we could say who we were. Now we are just performers speaking our parts.” But there is the clear implication in this novel that the crisis of meaning in literature is actually the result of literature shooting itself in the foot - it’s not just a recalcitrant reality ganging up on literature that’s caused the problem - literature itself must shoulder some of the responsibility.

What literature’s done is strayed too far from representing reality, to the point where it thought it could abandon it altogether.

The bigger the gap between art and reality, the bigger the hole interpretation can rush into, the more interpretations are possible within a text, the more that text is destabilised and the less it means. Literature isn’t simply reactive - it’s proactive too. And in some ways it’s been the agent of its own downfall.

That is the root of Elizabeth’s discomfort, and why she feels that “the bottom has dropped out” of meaning. So Spenser was right when he invented the Bower of Bliss, but in a way he could never have imagined; in actively looking for new ways to represent reality (let’s say in Modernism), literature has revealed an impatience, a dissatisfaction with nature, the status quo, reality, call it what you will, and this impatience has actually contributed to the fragmentation of society certain writers find so distressing. Literature isn’t just the plaything of reality - otherwise it could consider itself a victim with some justification; literature sometime drives forward the ways we perceive reality, and if these new and revolutionary aesthetics have chosen to stress fragmentation, that can and will have consequences not just for the way we look at the world, but the way we read literature too. Literature doesn’t exist in a cultural vacuum. As a writer, you can’t, unless you’re a total hypocrite, believe in the meaning of art and the value of what you’re doing and expect your meaning to have no effect.

So to quote two timeworn proverbs, Elizabeth reckons literature can’t have its cake and eat it; and that it takes two to tango, and reality and literature have, certainly since Kafka’s time, been locked in a dance of death from which her art is suffering the fall-out. And she can offer no solutions. [2]

JM Coetzee writes bloody good books, but they can be just a bit depressing.

The second novel is Peter Carey’s masterful, multi-layered examination of meaning, ‘My Life as a Fake’, in which the opening chapters re-tell the story of Australia’s most notorious cultural hoax - the Ern Malley scandal of 1944. Ern was the fictional creation of a pair of conservative poets, Harold Stewart and James McAuley, who concocted a plan to rubbish Modernism by inventing an undiscovered, diamond-in-the-rough poet, then getting a left-leaning ‘alternative’ magazine (‘Angry Penguins’) to champion him, at which point they would out him as a fake.

In Carey’s version, the singular hoaxer is Christopher Chubb, a struggling poet who sends his former schoolfriend David Weiss (the editor of a literary journal), the manuscript of poetry by “Bob McCorkle”, whose works of “brutish genius” he publishes - only to be prosecuted for obscenity.

The first point Carey makes, is the complete disjunction of the art world from that of day-to-day life. In the dock, Weiss is cross-examined by Detective Vogelesang, who clearly isn’t a regular poetry reader. [3] This gives Carey a golden opportunity to engineer a comical confrontation between the literal-minded officer and the poetry editor with his metaphors and meanings.

Then there’s a second theme - the ‘unknowability’ of meaning. The gist of Weiss’s responses to the flat-footed enquiries is that in order to establish what a poem means, you would ultimately have to ask the writer. Which isn’t possible in this case, because according to Chubb’s invented biography McCorkle has conveniently “died”; as a reader, then, Weiss can’t possibly offer an opinion whether the poem ‘Boult to Marina’ is obscene or not, with its difficult structure and wealth of cross-references to ‘The Tempest’, and parodies of TS Eliot and Herbert Read. It’s just too problematical. So when he refuses to venture an opinion (he “sometimes seemed like a bright but lazy post-graduate hiding behind obfuscation”), the Court reckons he’s being deliberately obstructive. Cue more satire:

Weiss: The poem starts off with the man examining the body.

Prosecution: What man?

Weiss: The man in the poem.

Prosecution: Where does that come from - examining the body? I don’t see it in the poem.

Weiss: Each thing he takes up suggests to him the inexplicability of human life.

Prosecution: Where does it say anything about the inexplicability of human life?

And so on. The representatives of the law cannot grasp that McCorkle has “ripped up history and nailed it back together” so that the “glistening green truth” can’t be glimpsed. Certainly not by judges and attorneys. And not by the “allegedly esteemed psychologists from the Melbourne Tech” who are subsequently brought in to help establish whether the poetry’s fine art or pornography. All of these people, we are told, “couldn’t read a poem to save their lives.” Because they live outside the temple of art and are far too bourgeois.

Of course, Chubb doesn’t believe any of this guff about “the decay of meaning” - the McCorkle poetry is a parody of modernist verse, in marked contrast to the delicate sestinas and villanelles he usually writes. All this talk of a crisis of language and its attendant posturing is merely a sentimental romantic conceit that poets use to beat themselves up in public - and as a ploy to deliberately obfuscate their meaning. [4]

Carey’s third theme now comes into play - that art and meaning can be more real than they look. The court proceedings are interrupted by a huge man with wild eyes and black shoulder-length hair who begins hurling abuse at the prosecutor (“you fucking philistine”), and who, it turns out, is none other than Bob McCorkle himself. Like Frankenstein’s monster, Chubb’s creation has actually come to life - or, rather, has assumed a life of his own outside the pages of the poetry. And for the rest of the book, he dominates not just Chubb’s imaginative life, but his actual life as well - at one point even snatching his adopted child.

His artistic creation has become all too real - and Carey seems to be saying that reports of the death of meaning are somewhat premature. Or, perhaps, that the Modernists were right after all - the risen McCorkle messes up Chubb’s conventionally conservative life because that’s what real life’s like - messy and disordered. It’s almost as if an agent of this “fallen” Modernist meaning is taking his revenge on an unbeliever who reckons meaning can be controlled, and who writes twee little chamber verses when his art should be reflecting the confused anger of the lapsed world instead. Or there might be a third wrinkle to the story - that you never know when meaning’s going to leap out of literature and start slapping you around - that the law of unforeseen consequences is the only thing you can be sure of. Or maybe it’s all the above.

And then there are even more wheels within wheels. ‘My Life as a Fake’ has a series of narrators, none of whom are guaranteed to be telling the whole truth. If, indeed, at all. [5] So nothing can be taken for granted. For example, Weiss believes “McCorkle” to be an actor, hired by Chubb to give an added twist to the hoax - and maybe he’s right. It’s difficult to tell. But amid all these Chinese boxes of meaning, the postmodern theme of the novel is never overstated - the theory arises from the story quite naturally. And Chubb does, finally, learn something from what he has done - yes, the truth is “dismembered and shattered”, and all the writer can hope to do is gather up these fragments and do the best he can with them. And if he succeeds (and throughout the book, we’re assured that Chubb’s McCorkle poems are actually excellent pieces of work), he can create something that not only lives, but takes on a meaning of its own. It’s one of the most elegant analyses of Modernist despair I’ve ever come across, which is simultaneously both an acknowledgement and a refutation.

There may be nothing beneath the surface of life, and there may be a million ways disorder masquerades as order. But the writer has to carry on regardless. It’s his duty to rescue meaning from disorder - if he wants to do his job properly. And both Carey and Coetzee have contributed thoughtful dispatches from meaning’s front line, giving grounds for guarded optimism that meaning isn’t the terminal patient it’s sometimes made out to be.

Footnotes:

1. This is not the same as the writers we looked at it the previous section like Hemingway and Auden, the main thrust of whose writing was to create a world of their own based on the real and not a world filtered through a sort of pre-alienated sensibility.

2. Interestingly, the postscript to Coetzee’s novel is a sequel to the Hofmannstahl letter we examined earlier. Cast in the form of a reply from Chandos’s wife to Bacon, it examines whether the “embodiment” of complex meaning is possible.But he should care - it’s just been announced that Coetzee’s won the Nobel Prize for 2003. And good luck to him.

3. Carey doesn’t change the name of the real-life detective in the Ern Malley trial.

4. And the original Ern Malley poems are great fun as parodies of Modernism. This extract from ‘Petit Testament’ is particularly well-observed:

It is something to be at last speaking
Though in this No-Man’s-language appropriate
Only to No-Man’s-Land.
Set this down too:
I have pursued rhyme, image, and metre,
Known all the clefts in which the foot may stick,
Stumbled often, stammered,
But in time the fading voice grows wise
And seizing the co-ordinates of all existence
Traces the inevitable graph
And in conclusion:
There is a moment when the pelvis
Explodes like a grenade. I
Who have lived in the shadow that each act
Casts on the next act now emerge
As loyal as the thistle that in session
Puffs its full seed upon the indicative air.

We’ll be examining the role of the so-called “unreliable narrator” in section 4 of this section.

Part 47

PRINCIPLE THREE: The mixed economy of meaning - the Writer as Interpreter

- Getting to grips with reality

How cold the vacancy
When the phantoms are gone and the shaken realist
First sees reality.

Wallace Stevens

Having looked at the Eeyores of literature, I reckon it’s high time we examined those writers who view the plasticity of the perceived world as an opportunity rather than a threat. These are the writers who regard literature as a joint venture between their creativity and what’s already been created, and who aren’t afraid to play with reality in order to create what they feel their art demands of them. So reality becomes their starting point: they neither want to dominate it completely like those writers in Principle 1, nor are overly worried that an element of indeterminacy or invention will wreck their meaning like those in Principle 2.

And the writers who fall into Principle 3 constitute an incredibly broad church, covering genres as diverse as formal biography all the way through to Modernist poetry. But what they share is a fundamental impatience with the relationship between art and reality, usually coupled with an ambition, whether they publicly acknowledge it or not, to leave their imprint on their chosen material. For them, the key issues are either (or both) that;

there’s not enough reality to satisfy their ambitions, so they have to embellish reality by “sexing it up” ;

there’s too much reality for their art to cope with, in which case they have to explore new ways to represent it within the formal limitations imposed by literature;

Both groups reckon reality needs a bit of help from art to create meaning, whether that help takes the form of invention (in the first group) or technique (in the second).

We’ll get low down and dirty with this second group in Principle 4 of this section, but now let’s start by looking at the first group, who, despite their frustration with reality, keep at least one foot firmly planted in it. So we’ll quickly examine the art of writing biography.

Meaning Line, please;

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

Accuracy Invention

I’m choosing biography, but I could equally focus on history, or indeed any discipline which is reliant on accuracy for its perceived success. So you’d think that biography belonged on the far left of our Meaning Line; if you’re writing someone’s life, it doesn’t do to make things up or you’re misrepresenting the way things actually happened (and, if your subject’s still alive, they can sue you if they don’t like the way you’re portraying them). But this is precisely, of course, what biographers do ALL THE TIME, and you’d have to be incredibly naive to believe they don’t. In fact, biography is an excellent touchstone for any study of meaning, since the aesthetic principles underlying it encompass a number of our Big Themes, including # 2, High & Low Meaning and # 1, Truth & Lies. And it all has to do with the desire to make reality more interesting than it actually is (or was).

Andre Maurois (whose biography of Shelley, as we’ve seen, was the first Penguin book to be published), put his finger on the button when he wrote;

It is in this impossibility of attaining to a synthesis of the inner life and the outward that the inferiority of the biographer to the novelist lies. The biographer quite clearly sees Peel, say, seated on his bench while his opponents overwhelm him with perhaps undeserved censure. He sees him motionless, miserable, his head bent on his breast. He asks himself: 'What is he thinking?' and he knows nothing.

If you want to keep up with Sir Robert Peel’s contributions to Parliamentary debates, read Hansard.

But you wouldn’t pick it up willingly, because it’s merely a transcript of the proceedings in the House. And that’s not sufficient to sustain most peoples’ interest. But the novelist, or indeed the creative biographer, can climb inside Peel’s head and try to inform us what he was thinking while he was making those speeches. He’s got no way of knowing for sure (was it a momentous historical thought or wondering what he was having for dinner that evening?), but, using the facts he does have, he can work out a likely explanation (which, of course, is part of Big Theme #4, Accidental vs Intentional Meaning). He can propose a solution consistent with the facts he already knows to be verifiable. And once again, we can turn to Virginia Woolf for a pithy summation of this habit;

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.

“The creative fact” is a wonderful phrase Woolf uses to describe that which animates dull bits of a life. And it’s what made James Boswell’s biography of Dr Johnson published in 1791 not only revolutionary for its time, but also a candidate for one of the greatest biographies ever written.

In Johnson’s time (and let’s not forget he too was an excellent biographer), biography was an emerging genre, but was most commonly cast in the form of a moral tale for the guidance of others. Johnson’s own ‘Life of Savage’ was an account of how a talented man could be dragged down by a combination of bad luck of personal foibles. Johnson picked up this tradition and ran with it, but added touches of realism which, to some, seemed disrespectful to the dead; “If nothing but the bright side of characters should be shown, we should sit down in despondency, and think it impossible to imitate them in any thing,” Johnson wrote in his defence. And this rubbed off on Boswell. “I profess to write,” he said of his magnum opus, “not his panegyric, but his Life”. These guys were keeping it real two hundred years before The Fugees.

But this wasn’t all Boswell learned from his subject. In an essay for ‘The Rambler’, Johnson opined;

[Biographers] . . . rarely afford any other account than might be collected from the public papers, when they exhibit a chronological series of actions or preferments; and to have so little regard for the manners or behaviour of their heroes, that more knowledge may be gained of a man’s real character, by a short conversation with one of his servants, than from a formal and studied narrative, begun with his pedigree, and ended with his funeral.

Exactly. The telling detail. But to be privy to these telling details, this body of anecdotal evidence, you not only had to be there (or know someone who was), you had to be an accurate stenographer. Which of course was one of Boswell’s most singular talents. But even Boswell’s memory sometimes let him down, or he wasn’t in a position to record a Johnsonian bon mot as it emerged lest he break the rules of propriety; after all, how would you like it if someone was following you around with a notebook jotting down everything you’d said?

And this was what damned Boswell’s ‘Life of Johnson’ in the eyes of many of its early readers - the almost indecent intrusion into the personal life of its central figure. Boswell’s portrait was so all-encompassing that it was almost too real - there was a little too much information for the morally squeamish. It’s like being told that the Queen uses the toilet - we know she must do, but it’s somehow distasteful to record the fact.

Yet there were some who recognized the book for the ground-breaking achievement that it is; the painter and scientist James Elford was on the right lines when he wrote to Boswell that he hadn’t simply described Johnson, but “exhibited” him, and that this was a “perfectly new” way of tackling biography.

It’s only with the publication of Boswell’s letters and journals that we’ve been able to discover just how much of the Life was inferred; although notoriously scrupulous with the factual content, Boswell could gloss and extrapolate as well as any fiction writer. For the first time, it was possible to see that the book was far more than a simple record of what Johnson had done or said - it was carefully planned, structured and edited to show the incredible source material he had gathered to its best advantage.

Until this new evidence began to trickle out, editors had felt perfectly entitled to fillet, bowdlerize, abridge and generally mangle the Life; George Henry Lewes, George Eliot’s lover, was one such vandal in his avowed aim to delete the “thin soup of Boswellian narrative” leaving only “the solid meat of Johnson” on the plate. But by the end of the 19th century, a radical re-assessment of Boswell’s achievement saw the Life being considered as not just a collection of observations, but a crafted work of literature. George Birkbeck Hill, himself a Johnson biographer, complained that only a “blockhead . . . could with scissors and paste-pot have mangled the biography which of all others is the delight and the boast of the English-speaking world.”

And so it finally came to be acknowledged, after a century of misunderstanding, that the facts of biography could be “creative” and still be, essentially, truthful to their subject. We weren’t quite at the point reached by the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega Y Gasset when he noted that “Biography is: a system in which the contradictions of human life are unified”, but we were heading in the right direction: that truth is not exclusively literal. Take this passage, for instance;

Next morning, while we were at breakfast, Johnson gave a very earnest recommendation of what he himself practised with the utmost conscientiousness: I mean a strict attention to truth, even in the most minute particulars. 'Accustom your children (said he,) constantly to this; if a thing happened at one window, and they, when relating it, say that it happened at another, do not let it pass, but instantly check them; you do not know where deviation from truth will end.'

BOSWELL. 'It may come to the door: and when once an account is at all varied in one circumstance, it may by degrees be varied so as to be totally different from what really happened.'

Our lively hostess [Mrs Thrale], whose fancy was impatient of the rein, fidgeted at this, and ventured to say, 'Nay, this is too much. If Mr. Johnson should forbid me to drink tea, I would comply, as I should feel the restraint only twice a day; but little variations in narrative must happen a thousand times a day, if one is not perpetually watching.'

JOHNSON. 'Well, Madam, and you OUGHT to be perpetually watching. It is more from carelessness about truth than from intentional lying, that there is so much falsehood in the world.'

Boswell had no recording device or even shorthand to assist him in his recollection (in fact he’s skeptical of the accuracy of the speed-writing he developed while gathering material for the Life); yet the joy of much of the book is to be found in the short vignettes and dramatizations which bring Johnson to life, many of which are quite obviously staged. And, while crediting Boswell with extraordinary diligence over and above the call of duty, and acknowledging his almost superhuman feats of memory, we know several passages in the text were recalled many weeks after the actual conversation took place. So I’m with Mrs Thrale on this one - just try remembering what you said ten minutes ago, let alone at a remove of ten days.

Yet allowing for this necessary inaccuracy, it doesn’t (or shouldn’t) spoil our enjoyment of the book, or the value we place on Boswell’s achievement; I (and many others) would argue that we have a better sense of Johnson as a result of it, since Boswell was creating a more consistent figure that leaps more vividly from the pages, one that’s true to Johnson in its spirit if not altogether in letter. When Boswell relates the contents of a private conversation Johnson had with George III in 1767, he was taking the material (gathered from several sources) on trust. But not to have included it on the grounds of possible misrepresentation would have been a scruple too far. In fact Boswell himself skilfully manipulates the scene to place Johnson, and not the King, at its centre.

The encounter took place in the King’s Library, and although the monarch spoke to several readers on his brief visit, Boswell only mentions Johnson. Similarly, when quitting the room, Boswell implies that the King left so as not to interrupt the great man’s studies for too long; actually, he’d received a summons from the Queen. Johnson then expressed himself “highly pleased with His Majesty’s considerate and gracious behaviour”, as if it were Johnson’s role to approve of the King and not vice versa. These are small but telling deviations from the truth - but are no less enjoyable for that. Written lives would be incredibly dull if biographers took their cue from Hansard.

I also remember the occasion when I was reading the late Timothy White’s biography of Bob Marley ‘Catch a Fire’, in which the author describes in detail when the future king of reggae was put on a bus, at the age of four, for a journey from his home parish of St. Anne’s to Kingston, the capital of Jamaica. White vamps outrageously on what was passing through the child’s mind, describes Marley’s fellow passengers and how they regarded this singular young traveller - material he could not possibly corroborate if his life depended on it. The only real facts he has are Marley’s age, that he travelled on a bus, and his destination. The rest is fiction. But it’s mighty entertaining, and, perhaps even more important in a biography, plausibly entertaining.

So impatience with reality doesn’t inevitably lead to lying; meaning that’s ‘consistent’ with reality, or that can bridge gaps and fill in holes needn’t automatically be accorded a lower status in meaning’s pecking order. After all, it’s what most writers tend to do whether they realize it or not - they begin with source material and embellish it. They often can’t help themselves. And this tendency is perhaps most evident in the school of “faction”.

Part 48

Faction incorporates researched historical material into an imaginative reconstruction of the past. Or, if you like, you can look at it from the opposite perspective; it adds imagined events into the framework of received history. Which perhaps accounts for its popularity over formal academically generated accounts of history, because it enriches what actually happened in a manner that dispenses with footnotes or appendices.

Faction isn’t quite the same as realism. It’s not that easy to offer an definitive explanation, but if pressed, I’d say faction is more “knowing” of its artifice, and is a tad more relaxed about it. The realist, at base, wants to inform; the faction writer is more in the business of entertainment, and perhaps lacks the social imperative or agenda that tends to motivate his realist colleagues.

The development of faction can be traced back through literary history almost indefinitely; I suppose you could say ‘Antony & Cleopatra’ falls within a broad definition of its ambit. But we can certainly look back at the historical romances of Sir Walter Scott or the works of Tolstoy as being the major influences on what is currently a crowded genre: in the UK, there’s Beryl Bainbridge’s account of Dr Johnson, ‘According to Queeney’, or anything by Robert Harris; Australia can boast Peter Carey’s ‘My Life as a Fake’ that we’ve just been discussing; in the United States, there’s Gore Vidal’s masterful disquisitions on American history and Truman Capote’s seminal dissection of crime and punishment ‘In Cold Blood’; and in Colombia, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s gripping account of the drug wars, ‘News of a Kidnapping’. All good, all faction.

Now is not the time or place to examine the philosophy of history; that would require a whole other book entitled ‘How History Works’ - and EH Carr got there first anyway. But the relationship between literature and history is discussed at considerable length in the second Epilogue Tolstoy added to one of the greatest novels ever written, ‘War & Peace’, which gives takes a long, hard thoughtful (and thought-provoking) look at the deficiencies of “modern” historical narrative. And since its implications impinge somewhat on our own musings, a brief summary will be quite useful here.

Like the novelist, the historian is engaged in making sense of reality - he’s just as much an interpreter of it as his literary counterpart, in that both disciplines involve beating a path through the available material. Some choose to follow a well-trodden route, others decide to hack through virgin territory. But that’s where the similarity between these two groups of storytellers ends, and Tolstoy’s lifelong beef with history has several points of conflict between how he envisages it should be written, and how it tends to emerge (and please bear in mind that Tolstoy’s main target is historical texts written in the middle of the 19th-century, before the era of social or even cultural history had really dawned):

First, there’s the source material itself: the historian rarely casts his net wide enough:

History is nothing other than a collection of fables and useless trifles messed up with a mass of unnecessary dates and proper names....Why should any one have to know that the second marriage of Ivan the Terrible to the daughter of Temryuk took place on August 21, 1562, or that the fourth to Ann Alekseyevna Koltovski happened in 1572? Yet they demand that I learn all this by heart, and if I do not know it, they give me a ‘one.’ [i.e., a low grade]

That’s the young Tolstoy complaining that history isn’t just about kings, dates and battles. These are just the headlines of history which move the narrative along, and not its real root system which fans out through the whole of society. And this brings us to his second point:

History is more about causes than effects

. The drive to accuracy doesn’t allow the historian to poke too deeply into the world of motivations, which, certainly to a novelist, is far more interesting although not as verifiable (and may be more attractive because it’s not verifiable);

And so for history, the insoluble mystery presented by the incompatibility of free will and inevitability does not exist as it does for theology, ethics, and philosophy. History surveys a presentation of man's life in which the union of these two contradictions has already taken place.

By playing down the concept of “free will”, history’s wilfully confining its explanation of why things happen to mechanistic causes. The other disciplines Tolstoy mentions allow themselves the luxury of speculation; but the burden of proof requires the historian to rein in his imagination. And this is contrary to human nature: man is a web of complex motivations, not all of them logical and comprehensible. Nonetheless, doctrinal historians regard the use of such unreliable indicators of behaviour as highly suspect; investigation of “insoluble mystery” isn’t encouraged, whereas to a novelist, it’s essential if he wants to bring his characters to life. And it’s from this Tolstoy’s third point emerges;

History, by its very nature as a retrospective activity, places spurious structures on the facts

;

If I examine an act I performed a moment ago in approximately the same circumstances as those I am in now, my action appears to me undoubtedly free. But if I examine an act performed a month ago, then being in different circumstances, I cannot help recognizing that if that act had not been committed much that resulted from it- good, agreeable, and even essential- would not have taken place. If I reflect on an action still more remote, ten years ago or more, then the consequences of my action are still plainer to me and I find it hard to imagine what would have happened had that action not been performed. The farther I go back in memory, or what is the same thing the farther I go forward in my judgment, the more doubtful becomes my belief in the freedom of my action.

What Tolstoy’s saying here is that the further removed you are in time from what happens, the more you can place it in contexts and structures that are often bogus. Not necessarily deliberately, either: you might simply have a tidy mind that isn’t enamoured of loose ends. Some would call this necessary perspective, but Tolstoy reckoned it’s more like over-rationalization. In his eyes, therefore, history will inevitably favour the conspiracy over the cock-up. And, as we all know from our own experience, there’s no shortage of the latter in everyday life. Not everything is planned and executed faultlessly.

So history, in the way it represents reality, is often way too neat.

Witness the sheer vanity in all those political autobiographies where experience has subsequently “proved” the subject to have been right all along, even though at the time the events were occurring he was giving a very convincing impression of being a clueless idiot running around like a headless chicken. We all know it’s crap, but are usually happy for the politician concerned to wallow in the fantasy he’s created of his life, even though it’s a travesty of the truth. We figure that being politicians, they just can’t help themselves.

And that’s why Tolstoy wrote ‘War and Peace’ and not a history of the Napoleonic Wars. History usually ends up being too narrow, causal and schematized for its meaning to be recognizable as ‘real’. There’s too many straitjackets for the creative mind to work inside.

And Tolstoy practised what he preached: we need only look at his characterization of the Russian Marshal Kutuzov: Tolstoy transforms him from the cunning, elderly, corrupt and sycophantic courtier of the early drafts of ‘War and Peace’ which were based on authentic source material, into the powerful symbol of the Russian people in all its simplicity, dignity and inherited wisdom he became in the novel’s later manifestations - once, that is, his creator decided he wasn’t going to let history stand in the way of his artistic ambitions which, clearly, weren’t reconcilable with the facts he’d unearthed in his research.

Perhaps the consummate writer of faction in the modern era is Gore Vidal, whose cycle of novels chronicling American history have provoked numerous controversies which have often dragged on for years following publication. By far and away the most contentious has been ‘Lincoln’ (published in 1984), in which Vidal employs not a single authority figure but multiple narrators (Lincoln’s personal secretary John Hay; his wife, Mary; Secretary of State William Seward; Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P.Chase, and Southern sympathizer David Herrold) to reveal aspects of Lincoln’s thought and behaviour many of the President’s apologists would rather not draw attention to. I mentioned the Queen’s visits to the smallest room earlier - now here’s details of a President’s:

A teetotaller . . . Lincoln was also . . . averse to food in general, [due to] a constipation so severe that he seldom moved his bowels more than once a week; and was obliged to drink by the gallon a terrifying laxative called blue mass.

I’ve no idea where Vidal dug up this remarkable piece of information, but his absolutely scrupulous eye for detail elsewhere in the series convinces me that he didn’t just invent it. And what about the comic interlude in a Washington whorehouse during which Lincoln's former law partner informs Hay that Lincoln had contracted syphilis as a young man and had, just before marrying Mary Todd, suffered what can only be described as a nervous breakdown? Not something you routinely find in the history books, but facts that can be corroborated without too much trouble.

Notwithstanding these, ahem, fascinating revelations, Vidal has regularly shown himself prepared to go to the wire over even the tiniest narrative details, including, in just one example noted by an enraged reader, the shakiness or otherwise of Lincoln’s handwriting in a particular letter. In his reply published in the correspondence column of the New York Review of Books, Vidal explains;

A member of the Lincoln Brigade of hagiographers has taken exception to my comment on the signs of stress in Lincoln's handwriting, particularly the letter to Governor Andrew of Massachusetts, which I have examined (at Brown [University Archive]), so unlike in its straggling lines "the eloquent thought-out letters to Mrs. Bixby and other mourners for the dead." I have only seen a reproduction of the Bixby letter, the work of a secretary but very like Lincoln's own clear firm hand when not in a state of panic. As usual, the brigadier misses the point which is not who did or did not copy Lincoln's letter to Mrs. Bixby but the revealing letter to Andrew so unlike, etc.

Shaky handwriting denotes someone who is either drunk, ill, uncertain or afraid - and an All-American Hero of Lincoln’s stature can be none of these things if he’s to live up to the image created and fostered by the more institutional (OK, right-wing) American historians. Many of Vidal’s critics are unable to advance beyond the idea that to flesh out a story in this way is inherently disrespectful not only to the subject, but also to received history - and as a regular and often mischievous debunker of authority figures, Vidal lays himself open to these charges more than most. Yet many readers are convinced of his sincerity, particularly when he’s prepared to go to such assiduous lengths to detail his sources. Vidal has most definitely done his homework, as he makes clear in the novel’s Afterword, in which he attempts to answer the question `How much of Lincoln is generally thought to be true?

How much made up?' , before proceeding to thank Professor David Herbert Donald of Harvard's History department not only for his helpful publications but also “for his patient reading and correction of the manuscript”. Vidal then adds a final rider: “Any further errors, if they exist, are mine, not his,” before leaving the reader to ponder the fascinating question - if ‘Lincoln’ makes it onto school curricula, should it be taught in History or English Literature?

A question that can never be answered conclusively.

Part 49

Part 50

Part 51

Part 52

Part 53

Part 54

Part 55

Part 56

Part 57

Part 58

Part 59

Part 60

Part 61

Part 62

Part 63

Part 64

It’s this question that has prompted perhaps the biggest schism in Lit Crit, one that will probably never be healed. On the one hand, there are those critics who consider that literature is an integral part of society whose business is to reflect and comment on it; and on the other hand those who think it has a far broader remit, and if that means the writer turns his back on society, so be it.

So the former group looks for engagement, and grows impatient with any meaning that exists, as they see it, for its own sake; the latter is happier to allow literature greater latitude to venture rightwards on our Meaning Line towards Significance.

Meaning.......................Significance

Society The Artist

Judgement Elucidation

Outside Inside

Straightforwardness Complexity

Two sets of thoughts, two conceptions of meaning, two critical imperatives. Here’s how they split apart.

Until the 1920’s, lit crit was almost entirely impressionistic and judgmental. It maybe didn’t know it was - it just was. There was no shortage of theory, just theory specific to literature that didn’t involve the wholesale importation of standards from other disciplines, as we’ll see in a moment. True, some critics stuck up for the idea that literature had an internal harmony which was not wholly dependent on extra-literary concerns, but they were in a distinct minority (Coleridge was one of the more notable examples).

But then along came Modernism, which, with its emphasis of technical innovation and wilfully pluralistic meanings, left traditional types of criticism looking curiously old-fashioned almost overnight. Faced with this increased technical sophistication, Lit Crit simply couldn’t cope, and certain critics reckoned a whole new way of looking at poetry was needed.

These were the so-called “New Critics”, a movement born in the Southern states of America, most of whose members were poets themselves. They believed:

1) A literary text is not a cultural artifact but a unified, self-contained, & self-defining piece of art. A reader needs no specialized nor special knowledge beyond the text itself to understand its meaning.

2) The meaning of a literary text is entirely contained within its structure. Meaning therefore has an “organic unity”.

3) Meaning doesn’t have to be simple.

So New Criticism had three major impacts on critical thought respectively:

It was now OK for Judgement to take a back seat to Elucidation: if literature was to be governed by its own rules, it would help if we knew what they were. So in order to gain a more sophisticated understanding of literature critics would of necessity have to judge less and appreciate more;

If a text has an organic unity, it’s infinitely interconnected, at least potentially. All sorts of things are linking into other things whether on the surface or deep beneath the surface. So it was more commonly accepted that every component of a literary text is there for a reason, even if it doesn’t announce its purpose;

Complex meaning is good; it’s not a sign of confusion, but of a rich appreciation of reality.

These impacts themselves generated their own legacy:

Criticism aspired to the status of a science, since it needed to concern itself with how meaning worked as well as what it meant. This necessitated that the impressionistic Gentlemen Critics should be replaced by Professional Critics who would back up their opinions with theory rather than prejudice;

Critics became more paranoid because they felt they ought to see things in the text;

It was generally understood that literature that isn’t complex can’t be any good.

And these points of view laid the keel for much of the anal rubbish that has passed for Lit Crit in the last forty or so years. I’m not exclusively blaming the New Critics, but they must shoulder a fair proportion of the blame.

To be charitable to them, it was a perfectly respectable route to go down if you wanted, as they did, to rescue literature from the attentions of those who could only offer their unsubstantiated opinions as to what books meant. Meaning surely deserved better than naked prejudice from a bunch of old windbags, or how could it be held to be important? Opinion that has no basis in science or fact or best practice can only rely for its status on the literary cache of the critic, which waxes and wanes with fashion. So as long as Doctor Johnson is held to be a great critic, all well and good for the literature he promotes. But should he fall from favour, he’ll more than likely take that literature down with him. And that’s surely unfair. A more impersonal approach would preserve literature from the capriciousness of literary taste. It would deal in standards and principles rather than such empirically dodgy things as opinions and prejudices.

And that approach would need to be more academically rigorous if it was to withstand detailed examination. If the critic was going to be dealing in standards and principles, he needed to put his serious thinking head on, not simply be vaguely negative or appreciative. So it would no longer be sufficient to talk in terms of “Fancy”, “Beauty”, “Nature”or “Imagination” as Pope, Dryden and Johnson did in the 18th century, because they’d accumulated so much baggage as to be meaningless.

Not only did a new approach have to be developed, but a new language forged. Hence all the various “syndromes” and adjectives dreamed up by the NC’s; “The Intentional Fallacy”, “The Affective Fallacy”, “The Historical Fallacy”, “The Heresy of Paraphrase”, “Autotelic” are just some high concepts forged in the white heat of the New Criticism.

But an unfortunate by-product of this approach was that it became more difficult for critics to unreservedly “love” literature, because it let rather more daylight in on the magic than was commensurate with actually enjoying reading. And that can be passed down the food chain to us Recreational Readers, potentially blighting our enjoyment. Let me explain, in case there’s a danger of it happening to you.

Back in Part 2, I quoted the novelist Zadie Smith, who, from an early age was bitten by the literary bug to the point where she didn’t just read books, but subsequently progressed to writing and lecturing on them. And her analysis of what happened to that first infatuation with books as she grew more deeply enmeshed in “the industry of literature” makes for depressing reading. For Zadie reckons, to put it bluntly, that the act of applying literary criticism to literature sucks out all the energy that lies at the heart of meaning, which, of course, isn’t meant to happen. Quite the reverse in fact. It’s like taking the family pet and dissecting it in the name of scientific research; you’ve learned something about dogs, but you’ve killed the thing you loved.

And this happens, according to our Zadie, because love simply isn’t enough for the critical community. It’s almost a guilty pleasure, something to be ashamed of because it’s so nebulous and even sentimental. As she writes, “ . . . there is something about love that does not sit well with the literary academy,” and the upshot is that they feel the need to continually justify that love using whatever means they can. It’s the legacy of the literary Puritanism we examined back in Part 3.

And this “shame” manifests itself in a desire to ‘validate’ literature: Smith uses the example of the critic FR Leavis, who wanted to anchor literature within the continuum of social history, moral philosophy, public policy - any discipline that could protect it from accusations of vagueness or irrelevance.

So in our list of critical approaches, we’re looking at 1, 2, 3, 5, 7 and 10 - those disciplines which are influenced by schools of thought which have a life independent of literature. What the appropriation and subsequent importation of these disciplines implies is that literature (and its attendant criticism) needs to feel it’s as good a way as any of understanding how us human beings tick. In short, Leavis could stand next to the Professor of, say, History in the SCR at Downing College Cambridge and chat to him on equal terms, with no fear of English Literature (which, as we’ve seen is a comparatively young university subject) being viewed as a second cousin to the more established ‘Greats’. And of course, we can trace this unease with the empirical value of meaning back to Big Theme #1, whether literary meaning is “real” or not. So literature’s onboard, hard-wired inferiority complex sees it climbing into bed with other subjects so it can feel better about itself. It’s meaning by association, fraternizing with disciplines that have been at it longer and therefore appear to be somehow more “solid”.

Then the New Critics came along, who sought to justify their love by revealing how wonderfully allusive and complex meaning was, demanding even more stringent standards that would involve major surgery on the text, for all their talk of its “organic” provenance. Suddenly, the sheer amount of meaning that could be extracted from a text grew almost exponentially - hence the boom in English Literature studies at tertiary level following World War Two. Critics were swarming all over literature, rediscovering, re-evaluating, leaving no stone unturned, weighing every nugget of text for its pound or ounce of meaning. And they yoked these techniques to their career trajectory: the more gold they panned, the more articles they wrote, the more they were published, the greater chance they had of being elected to the Professorship. So, down in the mine, academic critics travel deeper and deeper into the motherlode to scrape out ever smaller pieces of precious meaning. Much of it is fool’s gold, yet the desperate miner doesn’t see that in his quest to find The Big One that will guarantee his fame and fortune.

The upshot of this ambition is that the unconditional love of the dedicated Recreational Reader is replaced by the conditional love of the professional reader. And this, I would argue, is why most Recreational Readers have little to do with Lit Crit. Neither group is talking the same language. One group is reacting to literature for what it is; the other for what it represents. And that’s a big gulf. Obvious, I suppose. But if it’s that obvious, I don’t know why there isn’t more Lit Crit that doesn’t tune in to the way the Recreational Reader approaches the text.

How Literature Works

The Script

Part 01

Part 02

Part 03

Part 04

Part 05

Part 06

Part 07

Part 08

Part 09

Part 10

Part 11

Part 12

Part 13

Part 14

Part 15

Part 16

Part 17

Part 18

Part 19

Part 20

Part 21

Part 22

Part 23

Part 24

Part 25

Part 26

Part 27

Part 28

Part 29

Part 30

Part 31

Part 32

Part 33

Part 34

Part 35

Part 36

Part 37

Part 38

Part 39

Part 40

Part 41

Part 42

Part 43

Part 44

Part 45

Part 46

Part 47

Part 48

Part 49

Part 50

Part 51

Part 52

Part 53

Part 54

Part 55

Part 56

Part 57

Part 58

Part 59

Part 60

Part 61

Part 62

Part 63

Part 64

Part 65

Part 66

Part 67

Part 68