16th February 2011

Cycling home along the Regents Canal the other night, from a seminar at Birkbeck given by Iain Boal (who, coincidentally, has just written a book on the history of the bicycle), I got to thinking (as you do) about the political insult. In Writing Degree Zero, first published in the early 1950s, the young Roland Barthes makes two acute observations about political language (his immediate target is the French communist party, but what he has to say has broader application). Firstly, he points out that political language always carries with it an implicit threat of force - it takes the form “Agree with me, think as I do and do as I say, or bad things will happen to you.” Secondly, political language tends to collapse the distinction between description and value judgment. To designate something is simultaneously to extol or condemn. (So the Stalinists of his day would label someone a “deviationist”.)

Combining these two thoughts, the force of political language and its conflation of judgment and description, one can see the centrality to political language of the insult. The insult is the purest form of verbal violence, and of conflation of description and judgment. Hence the fascination of parliamentarians with it - all the flummery of “Right Honourable Member” etc is merely a frame to highlight what is really important: the insult.

The main reason I haven’t written in this blog for so long is the eye-straining amount there is to read when you’re studying for a PhD. And the more you read, of course, the more you discover your own ignorance (which is why arrogance is as sure a sign of stupidity as you can get in this uncertain world). How in god’s name have I got to the age I am now without reading Flann O’Brien? The Heavens cry out against it.

        Whomsoever passes this and reads thereon: don’t let yourself make the same mistake. Go forthwith and study At Swim-Two-Birds. For there is no limit to our ignorance and prejudice: I was vaguely aware of O’Brien as a “follower” (ha!) of Joyce, but more importantly, as far as I was concerned, he had the label “comic writer” stuck on him. And for a beknighted Englishman like myself, “comic writer” meant something like Evelyn Waugh or Kingsley Amis or Howard Jacobson: meat-and-potatoes Anglo-Saxon realism with jokes.

How wrong could I have been? O’Brien’s quality is that of wit - not wit in the sense of Oscar Wilde epigrams, but Witz as Friedrich Schlegel and the German Romantics used the term (inheriting it from Locke’s distinction between judgment as the quality of making distinctions and wit as the quality of making connections): wit is speed of thought and the ability to join together what is distant. This is what the German Romantics admired in Laurence Sterne, and what Flann O’Brien has by the barrel-load. Wit and fantasy (of which At Swim-Two-Birds is full) are one and the same.

August 16th 2010

Having read Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 earlier in the year, over the summer I’ve been reading The Savage Detectives and By Night in Chile. If asked by someone coming to Bolaño for the first time, I would recommend doing it the other way round and starting with The Savage Detectives or perhaps the dark, intricate (and funny) novella By Night in Chile.

The Savage Detectives is a 600-page novel about the aimless wanderings of two forgotten and possibly mediocre poets. As a pitch, it wouldn’t get you in the door in Hollywood, but then The Savage Detectives is a literary novel - not just in the sense of the importance to it of literary technique, but also because its central subject-matter is literary ambition, literary failure, literary immortality.

Because I am setting up Creative Writing classes at the moment, I was interested in how this brilliant novel could be used in writing classes. Both The Savage Detectives and 2666 are intricately constructed, using traditional literary techniques to brilliantly subversive effect. They are anti-novel novels.

The combination of dazzling technique and subversive intent makes Bolaño’s writing fascinating for students of Creative Writing. His mastery of an array of literary strategies are all the more sharply in focus for existing against the backdrop of an open, questioning, sceptical vision of what a novel is. In any discussion about following the rules/breaking the rules, these masterpieces of contemporary literature should have a central place.

To give a taste:

Particularly important in The Savage Detectives is Bolaño’s mastery of Point of View and voice. The book opens with an extract from a teenager’s diary:

“NOVEMBER 2

I’ve been cordially invited to join the visceral realists. I accepted, of course. There was no initiation ceremony. It was better that way.”

We are captured immediately by the voice of the self-important adolescent, and the mood of laconic bathos that he brings. And this is the first of many, for The Savage Detectives is a novel of voices. Unlike 2666, there is no third-person narrative in it. The first part (“Mexicans Lost in Mexico (1975)”) and last part (“The Sonora Desert (1975)”) are written in the form of the teenager’s diary (though the mood is quite different between them), while the long central part (“The Savage Detectives (1976-1996)”) is a collage of what read like transcripts of taped conversations, the rough cut of a radio documentary, with each voice prefaced by a log of where and when the interview was carried out. Particularly dazzling are the interviews with Amadeo Salvatierra, in which he recounts a drunken evening when addresses “the boys” with his reminiscences. Rather than distance the reader, these effects of perspective draw one in.

For years a copy of Georges Perec’s novel Life: A User’s Manual has sat on a bookshelf in the bedroom, unread. It was bought by my partner, who got to page thirty and gave up. There’s a train ticket inserted in the pages to mark the spot she reached - dated 24^th June 1996, from London’s “Zone 2” to West Dulwich. She was going to see her then boyfriend. He was a musician. It was a short relationship and ended badly.

I think Perec would have liked the detail about the ticket. Life: A User’s Manual is full of happenstance, of inconsequential details that would be left out by a serious-minded novelist concerned with the pursuit of a grand theme. Indeed, inconsequence is a kind of guiding principle of the book. The lifelong project pursued by its main protagonist, Bartlebooth, is a supreme exercise in uselessness. (I won’t spoil the wonderful care with which Perec contrives this uselessness by giving the game away here.) The curse of modern literary fiction (and, even more, of journalistic discussion of it) is the furrowed-brow concern with what it is (really) “about”, what its “theme” is. If one were to ask what Life: A User’s Manual is “about”, one would have to answer: nothing. But contained in that “nothing” is everything – or in other words, life.

It was shortly after (as I thought) completing this thread on Coincidence that I took pity on that neglected copy of Life: A User’s Manual, with its train ticket, and read it. And of course it is a wonderful book – full of quirky and gay (in the old sense) inventiveness. For such a long novel there is surprisingly little dialogue - a reflection, I think, of the tenor of Perec’s mind, which, moving through the rooms of the Paris apartment bloc that is the book’s frame and principal protagonist, is always in love with the melancholy absurdity of objects (e.g. old train tickets). Perec preferred to describe rather than to dramatise.

On page 89 (in the UK Picador paperback edition) of Roberto Bolano’s huge novel 2666 there is a passage in which three literary critics - one Italian, one French, one Spanish – are visiting a painter called Edwin Johns in a Swiss lunatic asylum. One of the critics notices that the nurse is reading an anthology of modern German literature that includes a story by Benno von Archimboldi,  the fugitive writer whom the critics are seeking. He remarks on this happenstance lead to a discussion on the nature and meaning of coincidence – a discussion that could be read (albeit reductively) as a manifesto for what Bolano is attempting in this brilliant, diffuse novel.

“The whole world is coincidence,” says Johns. “Coincidence isn’t a luxury, it’s the flip side of fate, and something else besides . . . Coincidence . . . is total freedom, our natural destiny. Coincidence obeys no laws and if it does we don’t know what they are. Coincidence, if you’ll permit me the simile, is like the manifestation of God at every moment on our planet. A senseless God making senseless gestures at his senseless creatures. In that hurricane, in that osseous implosion, we find communion. The communion of coincidence and effect and the communion of effect with us.”

I can’t envisage an “osseous implosion” (perhaps there is a Spanish reader looking at this who can let me know whether it is less opaque in the original), but aside from that the importance of the passage for rest of 2666 is clear. In its 900-page span the narrative moves from a rarefied world of literary conferences to random murder in the slums of a Mexican border town, then back to Europe in the Second World War, taking in innumerable other episodes (the American Black Power movement, for example) along the way. Binding all this together (apart from the page-turning verve of Bolano’s writing – but that’s another story) there is no conventional plot (though the search for Archimboldi is surely the ghost or evolutionary vestige of one), but rather a series of coincidences and chance encounters. As my teenage children would say (admiringly) it’s “really random”.

I came to Roberto Bolano’s 2666 by chance – browsing in a bookshop. His publishers are pushing it hard (and also reissuing Bolano’s earlier books) but it hadn’t made an enormous splash in the press, and I hadn’t seen any reviews. (Bolano is both dead and foreign – two almost insurmountable obstacles to artistic worth in the eyes of the British media.) I came to it soon after reading Haruki Murakami’s stories, and also soon after the coincidence after that strange coincidence of Fenton Gray and “Fenton Gray” that had manifested itself while I was making the radio documentary about Victorian music hall. “Coincidence,” says the artist Edwin Johns in 2666, “is the flip side of fate.” I think I now have a clearer vision of the meaning of that coincidence. (No coincidence, of course, is meaningless.)

Coincidence obeys no laws and if it does we don’t know what they are . . . Jung attempted such an investigation in his Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle – a book which I have not read yet, but will now . . . Globalization; increased mobility of people, images and ideas; the internet; greater understanding of the connectivity of the 100 billion neurones in our brains – all this will stimulate a greater interest in coincidence (an interest already manifest in what might call a new kind of literature, whose representatives include Bolano, Murakami and the English writer David Mitchell).

Perhaps we shall see a new science – Synchronology. Chairs of Synchronology will be established at leading universities (at one, controversially, the winning candidate will be chosen by lot). The different categories of coincidence will be analysed and randomised. From the Departments of Synchronology students will pour out – some (the radicals) to found new religions and new political movements; some (the conservatives) to become advisors to government and business on how to manipulate and control man’s most powerful and abundant metaphysical resource – coincidence. 

January 7th 2010

I was travelling home on the tube before Christmas when I noticed opposite me a middle-aged man in a pin-striped suit, his head deep in large paperback edition of that bible of capitalist individualism and entrepreneurship, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Then I noticed that around his neck he was wearing a plastic security card for Royal Bank of Scotland – the bank that has become a symbol for the way the greed and hubris of the financial sector has brought the economy to its knees. It was a juxtaposition so rich in irony that I felt like following him off the train and congratulating him. When I got home it crossed my mind that he had been a piece of performance art.

Another tube journey: this time opposite me someone is reading a newspaper. The front page stares at me: a photograph of a thirty-something blonde. Above her is the headline Thirteen Years of Mystery. An English Home Counties version of A Hundred Years of Solitude. ]]> http://www.adamlively.com/?feed=rss2&p=151 http://www.adamlively.com/?p=144 http://www.adamlively.com/?p=144#comments Sat, 19 Dec 2009 11:07:22 +0000 Adam Lively http://www.adamlively.com/?p=144 December 19th 2009

In my first blog (below) I described a strange coincidence, and promised to return to it to explore its meaning . . .

The shoulder-shrugging pragmatist will reply: “There is no meaning. It’s just an unlikely, meaningless coincidence.” A part of me (the radio producer part – there was no mention of any of this in the programme) would agree. But the other part of me – the part that enjoys Haruki Murakami’s stories – spent the next few days pondering Fenton Gray and “Fenton Gray”.

The first thing to say is that I don’t believe that such phenomena tell as anything about the objective, external world. The synchronicity of Fenton Gray and “Fenton Gray” does not reveal some new dimension of physical reality hitherto unknown to science. That is not, however, to say that they are necessarily without significance or meaning. (This is where the two ways of looking at the world part company.) I have an old friend who is extremely knowledgeable about the esoteric arts. In the past she has given me astrological and Tarot readings, and from her I have learned that when it comes to such matters, interpretation is all. Their meaning belongs to a personal realm.

When I came to think about my experience of Fenton Gray and “Fenton Gray”, the first thing that struck me was that, from my perspective, its context was that of a chain of other coincidences:

• Fenton Gray had gone into the same business as his great-grandfather.
• The grave of Dan Crawley (and of a number of musical hall stars whom we also featured in the programme) was in Abney Park Cemetery, which had loomed large in my life twenty years before.
• I was reading Murakami’s stories, many of which revolve around what might call the significance of inconsequentiality. Indeed, the story I came to on the day after the cemetery/museum day, “Chance Traveller”, is explicitly about coincidence, the main strand in the story being introduced by Murakami recounting strange, inconsequential coincidences that had occurred in his own life.

Strange coincidences one usually thinks of coming out of the blue. But from my point of view, the Fenton Gray/”Fenton Gray” coincidence seemed to fit a pattern, and the more I thought about it, the more its meaning seemed to lie in the phenomenon of coincidence itself. There was a message for me in this strange event, and it was to do with coincidence.

In his Introduction to Richard Wilhelm’s translation of the I-Ching or Book of Changes, Jung describes synchronicity as taking “the coincidence of events in space and time as meaning something more than mere chance, namely, a peculiar interdependence of objective events among themselves as well as with the subjective (psychic) states of the observer or observers.” If the observer is receptive, the fall of the yarrow stalks can provide a psychic Polaroid of the moment. The same is potentially true, I think, of many incidences of objective coincidence. It all depends on the imagination of the observer.

And perhaps, in our increasingly complex, globalised and interconnected world, the importance of chance will loom larger.  Everything moves faster, and there are more collisions. It is said that everybody in the world is five steps (“met somebody who has met somebody etc”) from everybody else. (In my own case, I know I am one step from both Osama Bin Laden and Barak Obama.) That would not have been the case two hundred years ago, or perhaps even fifty years ago.

And perhaps a new kind of fiction is emerging from this world – the fiction of Haruki Murakami’s stories and novels, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Roberto Bolano’s monumental 2666, which I have just started reading. For me, returning to fiction writing after a long absence,  the strange case of Fenton Gray and “Fenton Gray” pointed towards a particular imaginative world.

The BBC Radio 3 Sunday Feature The Good Old Days?, which was broadcast last night, is available on i-player here for the next seven days. Presented by Billy Bragg, it presents a reappraisal of Victorian music hall.

Actor FENTON GRAY, singer BILLY BRAGG and Chairman of The Music Hall Guild of Great Britain and America NEIL MORKUNAS at the grave of DAN CRAWLEY in Abney Park Cemetery.

Some people, on getting to the end of this story (it’s absolutely true, by the way - though you’ll have to take my word for that), will shrug their shoulders and think “So what?” Others may pause and ponder the meaning of similar incidents that may have occurred in their own lives. The difference in response is down to two very different ways of looking at the world, two perspectives between which I myself feel torn. Sometimes I look in the world in the one way, sometimes in the other.

Making TV or radio documentaries contains a creative element, but for the most part that element is necessarily subsumed to a more reductive kind of intelligence - an ability to excise bullshit and keep things on time and on budget. Fiction is something very different - it demands receptivity and openness. At the time of the events I’m about to describe, I was reading a writer who exemplifies that quality to the nth degree - Haruki Murakami. His stories (Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is the volume I was reading) are as open as you could imagine. They’re elusive and elliptical - if you’re unsympathetic to them, looking at the world wholly in the first way, you might say they could do with some bullshit excision.

Anyway, here’s the story. I’ve recently been making a radio documentary, with the singer/songwriter Billy Bragg, about Victorian music hall. A few months back, I was contacted by an actor/singer called Fenton Gray who told me about how he’d been doing research into his great-grandfather, who was a London music hall singer and comic called Dan Crawley. I met up with Fenton, and he agreed to take part in the documentary, singing some of his great-grandfather’s songs.

So one damp October morning we were at Dan Crawley’s graveside in Abney Park Cemetery, a vast, overgrown Victorian necropolis in Stoke Newington. (Twenty years ago, in another life, I used to jog and push a baby’s buggy round it - this was the first time I had stepped in it since.) Billy did an interview with Fenton about his great-grandfather, touching on how it was a strange coincidence (there was no unbroken theatrical line through the generations) that Fenton had ended up in the same line of work.

Later the same day, Billy and I were doing some recording at the Museum of London. Beverly Cook, the curator of social history there, had brought some boxes of material out of the archives, and Billy was looking through some song-sheets from the 1890s and 1900s. On the backs of the song-sheets were lists of other songs available from the same publisher - there were three columns, listing title, song-writer and singer. Billy was running his finger down the columns - partly looking for the name “Alexander”, because he’d heard family stories that he had a distant ancestor by that name who had sang in the halls.

“Oh look,” said Billy, “and there’s Fenton Gray.”

There, printed on the old, yellowing paper in the “writer” column, was the name Fenton Gray. The same name appeared a couple more times further down. It was a busy day, and we didn’t say any more about it. Only the next morning, on the way to another location, did I turn to Billy and say “Fenton Gray . . . the song-sheet in the museum . . .” He looked at me: “Yes, that was weird.”

I’m not a statistician, and unfortunately I don’t know any statisticians whom I could ask. But I’d bet that the chances of a name like “Fenton Gray” turning up on a hundred-year-old song-sheet the same day that one had interviewed a modern Fenton Gray at the graveside of his great-grandfather are incalculable - not just small, but literally incalculable.

What is the meaning of such coincidences? Now there is a question . . .

To be continued . . .