On overshooting your superiority

I don't normally think of The Big Issue as a publication that encourages philistinism and ignorance, let alone celebrates it. But there it was, on the letters page, a response to the previous issue's interview with Will Self. Hilariously, the letter was entitled 'Self Abuse'. More contempt than an affectionate pun, the title said it all. I don't know why such views wind me up, but they do, and I am sure most of you will agree with my frustrations.

Will Self certainly knows how to walk the walk, but he's still got a lot to learn when it comes to talking the talk. Unlike him, I happen to be a member of the jeunesse crappe who wasn't lucky enough to benefit from an Oxbridge education. As a result of this irreparable tragedy, I was forced to look up the meaning of the word 'psychogeographer' on Google while reading Jamie Kenny's otherwise excellent review with the lugubrious author and Have I Got News For You star last week. According to the Social Fiction website, psychogeography is "the study of the specific effects of the geographical environment (whether consciously organised or not) on the emotions and behaviour of individuals". "At its most simple," claims Kenny, "psychogeography is simply walking with an end point in mind, soaking up the territory between departure and destination". Now I could be wrong, but I can't for the life of me fathom the difference between this and what round our way is known as "going for a stroll and taking an interest in the surroundings". Nor could I tell you why Self preferred to describe a female character in his recent novel The Butt as having "orchidaceous breasts" rather than "boobs like tropical flowers". His wife was bang on the money when she said he just wants to go for a walk and he's being pretentious about it. If he was my husband, I'd tell him just the same when he started writing his next book.

Pauline Ratcliffe
Manchester

There are a number of misfired views here. First is Pauline's sustained ignorance of psychogeography. Self includes the remark from his wife as a pepper crunch for the interview, but despite this, his interest in psychogeography is intact. The extent to which his Saturday Independent column is actually psychogeographic is almost certainly determined by how many such practices the reading public of a Saturday supplement can manage and/or digest; but I expect the book he is currently researching will engage psychogeographic practices even more. What the letter writer gets wrong is that Self is merely going for a walk, which he is, but not in the same way as most of us do when we put one leg in front of the other. The psychogepgrapher is a variant of the nineteenth century flâneur, who roamed the streets of Paris in search of nothing but with considerably more than nothing in his or her head. In other words, the flâneur and pyschogeogrpaher are equipped with a frame of mind that is responsive to the accidents and random occurrences of a specific geographical locale, and which he or she makes knowable in a particular manner. In this, the flâneur/psychgeographer is pitted against the tourist, whom Self in his interview rightly refers to as a purely materialistic, disengaged walker in thrall to guides, Baedekers, and much worse, the demands of the market. So this is why we have the term psychogeographer. It melts several frames of mind - poetic, artistic, photographic, philosophic - in a mobile body responsive - docile, even - to the flux of life. But there is much more to it than this. We're talking of a tradition that is demarcated retrospectively, from de Quincey, Baudelaire and Dickens to Woolf and Benjamin, right through (crucially) to the Situationists, W.G. Sebald, Iain Sinclair and (him)Self. You can't repudiate these figures, their work, or the traditions of which they form a steady and evolving continuum.

So that's the first problem with the letter. The second has to do with language, specifically Self's infamous use of language in his novels, but also assumptions about style in the novel as well. I know and love Julie Burchill's estimation of Self as 'dictionary swallower', even though I totally disagree with its implied assertion that language should somehow tame itself in the act of writing. Self's style has worked for him, his characters, his readers, but most importantly his publishers, who stand by him and all that he produces (two substantial books so far this year!). Self will not lose any sleep over this Big Issue letter, but there are concerns expressed in it that massively overshoot the letter writer's assumed superiority before this prolific and highly successful writer.

Self is known as a satirist, and like other satirists before or alongside him (like his Independent column companion, the cartoonist Ralph Steadman), his use of language can at times appear overdone, bloated, as if the words filling your mouth will make you increasingly nauseous, in the way that the subject of satire fires up the writer's imagination. But it's not even that the letter writer doesn't get this. It's her poor substitution of a phrase Self uses in The Butt and for which she school ma'amishly ticks him off. The word under attack is 'orchidaceous'. Initially, it has a number of meanings, the main one being fairly obvious: 'of or pertaining to orchids'; and one meaning which is not so obvious: 'characterized by ostentatiousness; showy'. Self uses 'orchidaceous' to describe the breasts of one of his characters, in which case the reader might take the second meaning to be the most apt, that possibly the narrator refers to the breasts in order to say something about the character as a whole. We could also infer a wider point about the narrator's identity, too, in that (his?) sly reference to the breasts gives the reader ammunition to accuse the narrator of being a chauvinist, or worse, a misogynist. But this, for a satirist, is too easy. Delving into the etymology of 'orchidaceous' potentially reveals more than the reader could ever bargain for. In this, we should remember that in Greek, 'orchid' means 'penis', and that pursuing this reading means we reveal the narrator's ironic and scabrous view of the breasts of which he's speaking. It doesn't rescue the narrator from the charge of misogyny, but it does paint a rather unusual portrait of a woman that embodies her as a distinct character. Language puts real flesh on this idea of a human, making her vividly particular. This is the way of the satirist. 'Her breasts in fact were like penises', is one possible substitution of the original phrase, conflating humour, satire, contempt and whatever else, all in one go.

And what does the letter writer think Self should have written? 'Her boobs were like tropical flowers.' In one foul cliché of a phrase, all those possible readings and meanings are blasted away, and all the reader is left with is a - sorry, forgive me - flaccid formulation that any secondary school creative writing student might have thought up. Ouch indeed. But this is what results when you overshoot your superiority: arrogance, ignorance, tedium, lack of originality, paucity of thought. I don't know about you, but I stand by Self's orchids.

MY NEW BLOG!

I've started a new blog over here at Adam's Breed. Its focus is gay life today. I'm not sure how long I'll be able to keep it up - physically and/or mentally - but I intend to sustain my fighting spirit. To let the political lifeblood loose much more than I've ever wanted to on this blog, Adam's Breed is possessed of a much more relaxed voice, possibly free-flowing experimentation, even; an attempt to quell the superego, if you like!

Revenant

So close to the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht, this report details some extraordinary things happening at the moment outside Berlin.

Another not lost weekend

Curiouser not Insular!

John Freeman, president of the US National Book Critics' Circle, defends American literature against Horace Engdahl's indictment of insularity. Aleksandar Hemon is the example Freeman gives to demonstrate how American literature habitually absorbs the European, and that consequently, it is in no way closed to what Engdahl called the 'big dialogue of literature':

Aleksandar Hemon's The Lazarus Project is the story of a novelist who discovers parallels between himself – the accidental refugee of a Bosnian war – and the victim of a hate crime committed in 1908. Like the fiction of WG Sebald, the novel twists and meanders across Europe's landscape as its hero tries to imagine how this man escaped Europe's worst pogroms only to be murdered in Chicago.

Again, the trade in influence between Hemon and Sebald is acknowledged. Perhaps Hemon, though, is too young a resident - if not citizen - of the USA to count as one of its contemporary novelists. And the historical interchange between the US and Europe was surely articulated most strongly before him, by Jonathan Safran Foer in Everything is Illuminated. The same could be said for Joseph O'Neill's impressive Netherland, a novel that shifts constantly between Europe and the US whilst maintaining its keen sense of milieu in Manhattan and environs. Do (untranslated) European novels manage this particular novelistic high-wire act too?

In any case, who's to argue with Günter Grass? Interviewed by Alison Flood last week at the Frankfurt Book Fair, Grass offered his succinct rebuttal of the Engdahl paradigm (as it must now be called):

"I cannot accept this. My writing is more influenced from the European side - the picaresque novel, but also for me there's Melville, and not only Moby Dick, and poetry from Walt Whitman, who've influenced European literature. [American and European literature] are connected from the early beginning."

Freeman links to an article Hemon wrote for Powells.com on (his) influences. This year's National Book Award's shortlist can be found here.

A bolt out of the blue for lunch

Which is exactly the situation I faced one day last week when I walked past the cafe in the place in which I work, and saw a gentleman leafing through a brochure for a gay, lesbian, and transgender film festival, with the following books resting beside him on his table: an edition of M.R. James, an essay collection on Gothic fiction, and W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz. They were so casually placed, but it felt like there was an intention behind their combination. This vision arrested me, so much so I had to walk past a number of times to absorb the surprise, but also in the hope of picking up on any other signs that I may have missed the first time round.

M.R. James. W.G. Sebald. The idea of the Gothic. I thought about the connection between James and Sebald a couple of years ago when I watched Jonathan Miller's powerful Whistle and I'll Come to You, a screen adaptation of James's Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad, and I wonder whether the gentleman sitting at the cafe table had made the same connection. Or were the books piled together with no apparent connection having been made between them?

Should I have approached the gentleman concerned to ascertain the truth? (Did he exist?!) There was definitely something Sebaldian about the whole experience. It felt like I had stepped into the other side of something. Either this, or it was a jolt (out of the blue), maybe, and hopefully from the Muses.

Hemon and Sebald

I must get a copy of Aleksandar Hemon's new novel, The Lazarus Project. I hadn't realised until I heard mention of the book's use of photographic images how much his work links to Sebald's. And indeed, as this interview attests, Hemon acknowledges just this influence:

Authenticity is a problematic concept in fiction, perhaps even in general. Sebald addressed the problem of authenticity, of truth, by using photos in his books—they constantly fail as documents of the past, they can only signify loss. And pointedly, they interrupt the text. In Austerlitz, there are only nine paragraph breaks, I think, not counting the photos, which is to say that the photos interrupt the testimonial flow. I learned from Sebald. I wanted to create a situation in which writing would confront photographs.

Also noteworthy is the novel's story, which is about a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe arriving in Chicago. I wonder how much of The Emigrants has seeped into this book? I wouldn't like to deny Hemon's work its own integrity, though, especially as his technique of merging images with narrative appears to be different from Sebald's own inimitable method. Following the byways of influence allows us to acknowledge how one writer diversifies from, possibly evolves, the source of influence itself.

The website dedicated to The Lazarus Project takes some getting used to, but give it time and you'll appreciate how its method of extracting sentences and images from the novel links you at the click of a mouse to other such sentences and images in a seemingly rhizomatic fashion. I would think that this Flash-style presentation exists solely for the website, but nevertheless you might view it as presaging further developments of the techniques and explorations of forms of navigation between text and image.

On the accessibility of knowledge

A certain minister in the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (what a ridiculous combination!) should pay a visit, if he times it right, to the glorious bookshop pictured below, in Skipton, North Yorkshire. I think he would learn a thing or two about what it means to really, really want to read books and buy them for that purpose. He might learn that reading books is not just another leisure activity, and that his Department's responsibility lies not with stupid proposals that would kill the sanctuary-like atmosphere of libraries but with the task of filling them with books. This is what libraries exist for, you see.

(Click on the image to discover what the sign in the middle says.)

The owner of this bookshop was sitting at a table piled high with books when I took this photograph. She was completely oblivious to me, my friend, or, it seemed, anything going on in the outside world. She was focussed, possibly reading a little and then writing on small cards the studious annotations that accompanied the editions on offer in the window display. One such card, alongside an edition of a mid-twentieth-century teenager's school adventure novel, carried wry criticism of J.K. Rowling: other writers got there before her, in other words; the older writers have simply been forgotten. On other cards, The Box of Delights' owner was also keen to notify her potential customers of bibliographical details in strange Lewis Carroll Society reports. What a coincidence this was! A few days before I visited the ancient market town of Beverley, in which there is a church called St. Mary's, known for its eccentric stone carving of the Pilgrim Rabbit. It is said that this carving inspired Carroll to create the character of the White Rabbit.

On the destruction of books

A certain vice-presidential candidate should be forced to read this book.

Readers of Sebald might like to know that the publishers of that book was founded by one of Sebald's interviewers, James Atlas. Also of interest is that Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction is included in the book's bibliography, though not in the index, which means that either Sebald isn't quoted or that the index writer forgot to index the quotation that is actually included. The book's title evokes Sebald's own work, as it happens, and it was just this connection that made me pick up a copy of the book today in my favourite (local, independent - cooperative, even) bookstore.

Book/Archive/Memory

Perusing these volumes is the closest one can ever get to strolling through the streets of the towns they memorialize. One stumbles through a dizzying and complex world, one whose physical smallness is belied by the magnitude of its cultural and political ferment. A rapturous description of Friday night in the Rebbe’s court might be immediately followed by a scandalous recollection of the sexual freedom rampant in the community Zionist youth movement’s weekend confabs. Saints and sinners, rebbes and revolutionaries, Mensheviks and madmen live side by side on the pages.

Allan Nadler writes on Nextbook about Yizker-bikher, or memorial books, written to memorialise Jewish life after the Holocaust. As Nadler explains, this year saw the publication of the English translation of one of the most famous of Yizker-bikher, Mordechai Nadav’s The Jews of Pinsk: 1506 to 1880. Hebrew is the main language in which these books were (and are) written, so English translations are indeed welcome. Nadler celebrates the rich literary heritage of the Yizker-bikher, defining their style against that of historiography. It is their stylistic waywardness, their generic multifariousness, their protean nature, that connects the reader to the specific locale being described in them.

Nadler mentions a number of publications whose intentions look towards the Yizker-bikher, the most familiar name in his list being Eva Hoffman and her 'beautiful, elegiac Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews, which is largely based on the Polish translation of the Bransk Yizkor book'. I wonder what Nadler makes of Sebald's own books, which as one critic has already outlined, reflect the specific intentions of Yizker-bikher to memorialise those who are threatened by oblivion and who are brought back from the brink of it by textual illumination. Sebald's focus is not always on Jewish life, but the impulse to memorialise could bear no stronger relationship than to the Jewish tradition of the Yizker-bikher.

[How uncanny: the link provided above to the Book Depository's page for Hoffman's book places Roger Deakin's Wildwood as a recommended book. I have a copy of this book myself, and though I've not read all of it, I'm pretty sure there is no mention of Hoffman. There is, however, an all-too-brief chapter on the late Michael Hamburger, whose Sussex house Deakin visits to speak to the poet about his incredible apple orchard and garden-archive of rare apple breeds. Readers of Sebald will of course know that the narrator of The Rings of Saturn makes a similar journey to Hamburger, as detailed in the book's seventh chapter.]

The last (not the lost) weekend

Keeping it up there

Does photography rule our lives? More specifically, does it rule our memories?

I face a dilemma this weekend: going away with my family, I wanted to record certain moments on my digital camera, but alas, the contraption is away with the manufacturer because of a major fault that came out of nowhere about a month ago. The camera suddenly decided not to work. And this, after it having notched up a fair few miles but practically no major bumps and scrapes along the way. It's a mystery. The fact remains that I do not have this camera and the only option available to me for this weekend is to buy a disposable version.

I am reluctant to do this; they are unreliable, fairly poor in their results, expensive - just not what I need or want. But the dominant feeling in anticipation of this weekend is that of melancholy disappointment; anticipation pitched exactly in view of the loss of those precious moments that arise on such weekends as I am now preparing myself for.

Photography is all about loss, of course - Kodak came about in order to prevent the kind of dilemma I am faced with - and I know of the annoyingly complacent view that deals with the lack of photographic opportunity: keep it, in other words, 'up there', in the head, which is where memory is.

Digital photography has made humans relentless in their pursuit of the precious moment. The digital camera's immediate image generates more and more hunger for image-taking, so much so that humans may walk away from events disappointed that they have been so lacklustre as not to have provided enough precious moments to capture. What a bizarre situation we now face, then: photography controls us. I know this because it is almost dictating my mood about this weekend in advance of the event itself, and I am also imagining how I might feel next Tuesday when it is all over and I have nothing to show for it.

It is difficult to muster any enthusiasm, therefore, for 'keeping it up there'.

On the Casement

Readers of Sebald will know that the Irish nationalist, vigorous anti-empire, anti-colonialist, and gay, Roger Casement features in the fifth chapter of the The Rings of Saturn. Casement is very much the figure de jour: a major new biography was reviewed in last week's TLS and the Guardian review reported yesterday that the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa is currently researching a novel based on Casement's life. Vargas Llosa's forthcoming novel is indeed an exciting prospect, and a project that has a Sebaldian ring to it, however distant. Sebald perhaps would never have considered the kind of fictionalisation that Vargas Llosa's novel is to demonstrate, but the idea of approaching a real historical figure in the spirit of paying homage to him, will certainly be familiar to Sebald's readers.

Vargas Llosa was interviewed at Hay Festival Segovia last week. Some of what he said in this interview is interesting from a postcolonial POV:

It is a project that is taking Vargas Llosa himself to the Congo - where Casement was the first person Joseph Conrad got to know when he arrived there at the turn of the century.

He was making the trip, he said, "because it helps me convert the process of writing into an adventure, not just an intellectual one, but also a life-affirming one. It allows me to get to know the scenery, to smell it, to feel it, which enriches the firsthand material of the story and, above all, gives me a bedrock of security that allows me to invent and to write. I'm not looking for historical precision but for something to shake me out of my insecurity."

He is aware that he is treading on sensitive territory, both as a white man writing about Africa and a Peruvian writing about Anglo-Irish history. But he rejects as racist itself the suggestion that he should not tackle these subjects. "If we believed that, we would only write about what goes on in our own households."

Vargas Llosa's humility here intrigues me. It struck me how little an English or USA writer would stress their distance from the subject in just this way. No, the world of the imagination is as up for grabs for the writer as was the world for the coloniser. Perhaps this accounts for Vargas Llosa's humility. He understands the implications of his project, possessing the power as a writer to conquer the narratives of those geographically distant from him. But of course drawing such an analogy between the world of the imagination and the colonial world breaks at the point where empathy - a universal human attitude - enters onto the scene. Vargas Llosa's project is a fascinating one for many reasons, but quite possibly the dominant is the question of how to universalize such a particular history for it to register with readers who live in a world and age starkly different from the subject's own. Regarding this point, I wonder whether Vargas Llosa is one of Sebald's readers.

For more on Vargas Llosa, see Paul Hamilos' interview with him here.

Insular and insular

So Horace Engdahl of the Nobel Academy has claimed that American literature's endemic insularity is the reason that prevents their authors from winning the prize of prizes. Is he right? And why are American writers insular over and above European ones for writing about what they know best, which is their own situation and place in the world? Remember also that what happens over there affects all of us, which accounts for why the coverage of the election has to be so extensive, so highly-monitored.

So how is Engdahl defining insularity? And wouldn't US writers be criticised for overstepping the mark and writing beyond their own ken/pen if they looked beyond their own physical boundaries? Is it true that European writers are capable of balancing an enlightened outlook with the necessity for focus in their writing?

This is what one reviewer had to say about the new book from Alaa al Aswany, the non-US born but US resident author of The Yacoubian Building:

Chicago's frequently light tone disguises the overall pessimism of its vision. The book suggests there is no real possibility of successfully transcending the cultural divide; national identities are fixed and impermeable. Any Egyptian who attempts to 'become' American will be condemned to an unhappy life.

Al Aswany is perfectly entitled to these views, and he is correct to suggest that immigration is always a struggle. But the pessimism of the novel feels false in one respect, and this has to do with the way in which he presents America. While his understanding of Egyptian culture is subtle and nuanced, his understanding of America is crude. When he ventures beyond the confines of his Egyptian community, he often gets things comically wrong. One scene shows a black woman being publicly subjected to the kind of racism that was no longer possible in Martin Luther King's day; when another character takes a single line of cocaine, this instantly means she is an 'addict'. This is the world of bad Hollywood movies and anti-American propaganda, not of real life.

Al Aswany has sought to represent the contemporary experience of immigrants arriving in the USA, and from this position makes wider observations about the condition of exile and assimilation. But the last two themes might just as well define American literature, the United States having been built on immigration and emigration. Philip Roth, reputed to be America's greatest living author (and whose works are currently being published in that most American of literary establishments, the Library of America), is emblematic of this identity of the American author in being Jewish and having written early on his career about just those issues that define the subject position of Jews against the backdrop of their new home. (You could argue as well that Roth hasn't ceased reflecting on Jewish identity in the USA, so much so that this ultimately defines the condition of the American novel.) The same can be said for a huge array of American authors whose voices collectively define American literature but whose subject matter looks beyond national boundaries to Europe. Think of Bashevis Singer, Cynthia Ozick. Think right through to Safran Foer. Think also of the huge canon of African American literature that reflects on the legacies of slavery and racism, both of which are inextricably tied up with United States history and contemporary life. Could it be said in any realistically critical way that the aforementioned writers, together with Alice Walker, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison, being 'American', are also inevitably insular?

"The US is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature ...That ignorance is restraining."

I agree with the presupposition here that a literary culture can thrive only by translating the work of authors beyond geographical boundaries. But what makes European literary culture so much more cosmopolitan, thriving, enlightened - better? Perhaps the short list of this year's German Book Prize offers us clues. Of course these writers are not yet ripe enough to be awarded the Nobel, but if Horace Engdahl's view is anything to go by, they inherit a richer, much more enlightened literary sensibility than do contemporary USA writers.

Not so with Giles Foden, whose pithy response to this debate is to argue the essential point about American literature and genre:

From the start there was export, too. Whole genres have come out of the States. Detective fiction could not have existed without Edgar Allan Poe. Modernist poetry would have been much the poorer without Eliot and Pound.

Quite right. But there I was thinking Roth was up for this year's Nobel..

Would he have watched TV, though?

Typical? Of the licensing authorities I have no doubt, yes.

The reminder was delivered to a primary school bearing Schiller's name. Despite receiving a letter from the school's headteacher, in which he pointed out that "the addressee is no longer in a position to listen to the radio or watch television", a second reminder was sent by the GEZ, telling the poet that he would be exempt from the fee only if he could prove he owned no TV or radio sets, but that otherwise he was obliged to pay his contribution.

On the trail

Someone else is intent on catching up with him.