Whereof one cannot speak

Tags

A.J. Ayer, Bertrand Russell, Charles Sanders Peirce, David Edmonds, Ernst Cassirer, G.E. Moore, Hannah Arendt, Immanuel Kant, Jenny Uglow, John Dewey, John Locke, John Maynard Keynes, Karl Popper, Kurt Godel, Louis Menand, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Moritz Schlick, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Otto Neurath, Plato, Rene Descartes, Rudolf Carnap, Samuel R. Delany, Stuart Jeffries, Susan Haack, Walter Benjamin, William James, Wolfram Eilenberger

For the few brief, interminable weeks between the last of our A-Level exams and the end of the school year, we were still required to go into school every day. There was nothing for us to do, no lessons, no activities, but we were there. We spent our lunchtimes at the local pub, where the teachers discretely ignored us except to maybe tap a watch when it was time to get back to school. Other than that, I spent most of my time in the school library, reading. That was when I first read The Lord of the Rings. More importantly, because our history teacher had once told us Plato’s allegory of the cave, that was when I decided to read Plato. I read several of the Penguin Classics at that time, starting with the collection of short dialogues gathered as The Last Days of Socrates. It changed my life.

I had already been applying to universities to study history, but when I got to the New University of Ulster I found that I was able to take one or two modules in a different subject. So, with Plato still fresh in my mind, I took Introductory Philosophy. This turned out to be a brisk canter through epistemology from Descartes, via Locke and Russell, to Wittgenstein and analytical philosophy. Even before the end of the module I’d applied to change my major to philosophy. Not possible, I’d already done too much history, but I could do a joint degree in philosophy and history.

This was the early 70s, the emphasis, certainly at NUU and at Warwick where I did a postgrad year, was heavily on Anglo-Saxon philosophy, notably empiricism and particularly linguistic philosophy from the later Wittgenstein. I did some courses on ethics, which I found interesting but oddly unsatisfying, and formal logic which I enjoyed but having never been a mathematician the closer the two disciplines converged the more I was out of my depth. But my real interest, and the dominant line of thought at both universities, was around the old questions: what is real, what is true, how do we know there’s a world out there, what do we mean by …

Not my copy, but in pretty much exactly the same condition.

All of this was enduringly fascinating, and almost entirely anglophone: I read Ayer and Russell and Austen and Peirce and Quine and Kuhn and Popper, with brief asides to Frege and Carnap, but most of all I read Wittgenstein. The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus blew me away, and then I discovered Philosophical Investigations which came to dominate my thinking in ways I never anticipated. What was then rather airily dismissed as “Continental Philosophy” practically never crossed my horizon. Kant’s Prolegomena came into one of my ethics classes, and I did a course on the Critique of Pure Reason (the margins in my copy of the book are filled with tiny pencil scribbles pointing out how wrong Kant was), but other than that, nothing. Once or twice, in the university library or bookstore, I would glance at one or other of the great tomes of continental philosophy, Being and Time or Being and Nothingness, but invariably gave up within a page or two. I did not then, and do not now, have a great deal of patience for metaphysics, and those books struck me as unreadable nonsense.

The one bit of continental philosophy we were aware of was the Vienna Circle, though we knew of them en masse rather than individually. It was years later before I discovered, for example, that Carnap was a member of the Circle, and that Gödel was associated with them. What the Vienna Circle actually thought we encountered almost entirely through A.J. Ayer, not the most reliable of sources. And though they regarded their own work as logical empiricism (which would have made their work a pretty good fit for my own interests), they were termed, largely thanks to Ayer, I suspect, logical positivists. Let’s face it, simple positivism is a fairly easy position to undermine, particularly when you’ve encountered Popper’s falsifiability.

My tutor at Warwick was Susan Haack, even then a very big name in logic, and at one point I produced an essay for her which she regarded as so good she was going to footnote it in her next book. (Did she do so? I’ve no idea, I never saw that book.) Unfortunately the external examiner wasn’t of like mind (for reasons I’ve long suspected might be partly political) so I missed out on the MA by a whisker, and at that point left philosophy behind me. Or I thought I did, at least I stopped keeping up with the subject. But at this time I was already into science fiction, and I wrote what would have been my first piece for a fanzine about Samuel R. Delany’s Triton. It wasn’t used, but in the next issue of the fanzine the editor included a note which rather dismissively said that he’d received a review of Triton which said it was all about philosophy. I don’t think that’s actually what I said, but the piece has long since vanished so I can’t be sure. But the editor’s response made me think, for the first time, that philosophy and reviewing weren’t actually all that far apart. So when I did seriously start writing reviews a year or so later, I found my years of study had a use after all.

If I thought I had left philosophy behind, it would also be true to say that philosophy hadn’t actually left me behind. I kept encountering bits of philosophy all over the place, often in reviews or essays in the TLS or LRB, and I also kept recognising echoes of the philosophy I had learned peeping out of the things I wrote. But I wasn’t actually reading philosophy.

Except that a few years ago I came across a book called The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand. Nowadays, we’d probably call it a group biography, but at the time it was presented as a cultural history; I’m not sure there is any difference between the terms. Menand told the interconnected stories of Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey, in effect, though it is not spelled out as such, telling the story of American pragmatic philosophy. It is a wonderful, fascinating book and to an extent reawakened my interest in pragmatism; though to be honest I’d never been that convinced by the pragmatics, and was more interested in the book as a history of ideas.

Other group biographies began to turn up, usually presenting the history of ideas as the story of the people who were central to the development and propagation of those ideas. The Lunar Men by Jenny Uglow about the congeries of scientists and industrialists in the late-18th century Midlands is one of the best of the type; Grand Hotel Abyss by Stuart Jeffries about the Frankfurt School is one of the densest and, in the end I think, least satisfying. It was after reading Grand Hotel Abyss that I said there really ought to be a group biography of the Vienna Circle. No sooner said than done: I spent part of my holiday reading exactly that book, The Murder of Professor Schlick by David Edmonds. And, as is the way of these things, you wait for one book and two come along at the same time, because also on holiday I read Time of the Magicians: The Invention of Modern Thought, 1919-1929 by Wolfram Eilenberger. Time of the Magicians isn’t about the Vienna Circle, though its members do appear, but it tells the story of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Ernst Cassirer and Walter Benjamin, which means that it overlaps with both The Murder of Professor Schlick and Grand Hotel Abyss.

I want to say here and now, in case it doesn’t become crystal clear later on, that these two books are already set fair to be my top two books of the year.

Let’s get the murder out of the way first. In June 1936, Moritz Schlick, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Vienna, was shot and killed by a deranged former student. The right wing press in Austria defended the student on the grounds that Schlick, though not Jewish himself, had been promulgating Jewish ideas. And when, a couple of years later, Germany annexed Austria, the student walked free. Meanwhile, the other philosophers who had belonged to the Vienna Circle, that Schlick had headed since the end of the First World War, all had to find ways of fleeing the country. They ended up scattered in Britain, across America, and in Australia, so the cohesive unity that had been the Vienna Circle was broken. That is the fervid political atmosphere against which the story of the Vienna Circle is played out.

But the intellectual atmosphere of the time was no less fervid. The Circle had formed in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, largely at the instigation of Otto Neurath, and they met every week for the next decade and a half, to discuss philosophical issues of the day and also to try to ensure that the madness of war that had killed many thousands and torn their country apart would not recur. In philosophical terms, they saw the enemy as metaphysics, and they wanted to advocate a rational, scientific, empirical approach that would institute a rational, scientific, empirical society in which war would be unthinkable. There was, in short, a very political issue underlying their abstract philosophical musings. Particularly as the empiricism they advocated was associated with Jews (Einstein for one), while the dominant philosophical approach in Germany, from Hegel to Husserl to Heidegger, concentrated on phenomenology and metaphysics. I don’t think, until Schlick was murdered, that the Vienna Circle had any appreciation of the political overtones of their thinking (well, Neurath did, but I’m not sure about the others), but they were increasingly at odds with the intellectual climate of their time and place.

Then, in 1922, Wittgenstein published the Tractatus, and set the Vienna Circle ablaze. Here was the book that said everything they believed in. Or at least, so they thought. Nobody at university told me that the Vienna Circle was inspired by Wittgenstein; it would have spoiled the dominant narrative, that they were on the wrong side of philosophical history, and Wittgenstein was the one who done them in. Actually, the interpretation of the Tractatus that I was taught was pretty damn close to the Vienna Circle’s interpretation. Unfortunately, that wasn’t Wittgenstein’s own interpretation. They (and we) saw Wittgenstein as an anti-metaphysician: metaphysics cannot be expressed in the language of logic, so it is not worth saying. But Wittgenstein saw himself as paving the way for metaphysics: it is worth saying precisely because it cannot be expressed in the language of logic. (I derive this interpretation from both The Murder of Professor Schlick and Time of the Magicians, so I assume this is now the standard reading of the Tractatus, but that wasn’t what I was taught, so it came as something of a shock to discover this position being clearly laid out in both these books.)

I wish I had had one or both of these books when I was studying philosophy. It is not just that complex arguments are laid out clearly and effectively (I even feel like I’m starting to grasp something of what Heidegger was on about), it is that the cultural context makes sense of the way a lot of these arguments developed. For example, I realise that much of what I was taught, many of the approaches to problems that I adopted as my own, were lifted straight from the Vienna Circle, including many of the same mistakes needless to say. And yet the overall tone of what I was taught was that the Vienna Circle was wrong. And where we were taught stuff that came straight from the Circle – Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, for instance, which became one of the touchstones I returned to again and again – there was no reference to the fact that this came from the Circle.

At least I knew about the Vienna Circle. Because I did no Continental Philosophy, I knew nothing of the other great development in philosophy that was going on at exactly the same time as the Vienna Circle was meeting. This other strand came to a head at Davos in 1929. Davos was famous for hosting philosophical conferences, before it became famous for hosting economic conferences, and the highlight of the 1929 conference was a debate between Cassirer and Heidegger in which Heidegger, at least by his own reckoning, trounced Cassirer. Now Cassirer is probably not one of the names to conjure with in the history of philosophy, he was rather a bland, middle class suburbanite really. He did some interesting work, particularly in the area of myth, but he was never the sort to set the world on fire. But earlier in 1929 he had made an impassioned speech in defence of democracy. Heidegger, on the other hand, was everything Cassirer was not: a fire raiser, magnetic, idiosyncratic, and decidedly not a democrat. He was also not a particularly nice man, happy to betray his own mentors in order to secure his own advancement, and he joined the Nazi Party not out of necessity to preserve his own position, but out of conviction. This, and the fact that he had been briefly Hannah Arendt’s lover, was all I really knew of Heidegger before I read Time of the Magicians; well, that and the fact that he wrote some of the most turgid and impenetrable prose known to humankind. The debate between Cassirer and Heidegger, therefore, became in retrospect a battle for the soul of German philosophy, one in which the metaphysics of Nazism emerged victorious.

In the decade covered by Eilenberger’s book, both Cassirer and Heidegger were part of the German academic establishment, professors at universities. Neither Wittgenstein nor Benjamin was a full-time academic (not for want of trying on Benjamin’s part). Neither was at Davos, neither took any part in these soul-stirring debates, but both were refining their thinking in ways that would shape the intellectual world that was emerging. Wittgenstein didn’t even have a PhD at this point. He had studied under Bertrand Russell at Cambridge before the First World War (Edmonds implies that ever after Russell had a sort of philosophical inferiority complex because of Wittgenstein, which is believable and not believable at the same time). When the war began, Wittgenstein had returned home to fight in the Austrian army, and began to write the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus while a prisoner of war. Because he believed that the Tractatus was the absolute last word in philosophy (if nothing else, he was an arrogant sod; no wonder when he returned to Cambridge in 1929 that John Maynard Keynes wrote: “Well, God has arrived”) he saw no point in continuing to do philosophy and got a job as a teacher in a small rural school. He wasn’t very good at it, and ended up moving from school to school several times over the next few years. Then he worked briefly as an architect to help design a new house for his sister (he was a multimillionaire who had given away all his money, but the family still tended to look after him). Meanwhile, his book had been published to a weird mixture of acclaim and bemusement. He was persuaded to meet several members of the Vienna Circle and was frustrated by the fact that, by his lights, they were dramatically misinterpreting what he wrote. But this prompted him to start rethinking his ideas (the Blue and Brown Books would start to be written around this time, preparing the way for the Philosophical Investigations that would be published posthumously), and at the end of the decade he allowed himself to be tempted back to Cambridge. Here Russell and his fellows connived to give Wittgenstein a PhD, so he could be awarded a grant and a permanent position; the thesis was the Tractatus, the oral exam was conducted by Russell and G.E. Moore, and it ended with Wittgenstein telling them, “Don’t worry, I know you’ll never understand it.”

Meanwhile, Benjamin was scrabbling a living writing reviews, begging for loans, chasing all sorts of academic positions and then screwing up every opportunity he was given. Though as the decade ended the Frankfurt School was getting started, and Benjamin would at last find a sort of intellectual home if not an actual home. One of the fascinating things about Eilenberger’s book is the structure: he takes us roughly year-by-year through the 1920s, and in each chapter deals in turn with his four principals. But this allows him to do a lot of comparing and contrasting with often surprising results. He traces out a mass of complex interconnections between the ideas of the four philosophers, the similarity in their approach to metaphysics taken by Heidegger and Wittgenstein, the way Benjamin’s thinking intersects with Wittgenstein’s, and so on. For what is essentially a popular book, there is a lot of complex work going on so that ideas keep arising and shifting and showing themselves in unexpected lights. Between the two of them, these books lay out a vivid map of philosophical thought between the two world wars, a time when philosophy was at its most austere and challenging, and yet they keep everything crystal clear. These are two books that will, I suspect, shape my own thinking for some time to come.

And now, surely, it is time for a book about the Cambridge School of Philosophy …

Unenlightened

Tags

Ritchie Robertson

Working my way through Ritchie Robertson’s dense but wonderful account of The Enlightenment and I am struck by two words. The words recur throughout the book (as far as I have got), sounding like a tocsin proclaiming not the achievements of the Enlightenment, but its purpose, its aspirations.

Those two words are “happiness” and “tolerance”. And I realised that they have all but disappeared from public discourse these days.

Happiness crops up in that great Enlightenment document, the US Declaration of Independence, which asserts that the purpose of independence is the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” That line gets quoted a lot, but the emphasis is always on life and liberty, although these have been strangely distorted by politicians of all parties. Happiness, as a national aspiration, is forgotten.

When did you last hear a politician of any stripe talk about happiness? Come to that, when did you last hear anyone talking in public about happiness? When, many decades ago, I studied philosophy, I don’t recall happiness cropping up in any of the contemporary moral or political philosophy I encountered. I don’t know if it is any different now, but I doubt it. We don’t hear church leaders talk about happiness, or educators, university administrators, local councillors.

Now, admittedly, business leaders talk all the time about “keeping the customer happy”, but in this instance happiness is more of a sedative than anything else. As long as “they” are happy with what we give them, then “we” can do what we want, make any profit we desire. This is not an aspiration to spread happiness but to keep the lid on dissent. The word crops up in entertainment, also, but to much the same effect: consumers of entertainment are just one more type of customer to be kept placated.

When did happiness stop being an aspiration beyond the private sphere? It is not as if we have achieved national happiness, which might mean it could safely be forgotten as we move on to other things. Far from it. And besides, happiness en masse is probably unachievable, it must remain an aspiration. But surely it is a worthwhile aspiration, something we should desire for ourselves, our neighbours, our fellow citizens. And as such, surely, it is something that those who set out to be our leaders should hold up as their goal, their shining city on the hill? But they don’t, do they, none of them. Politics, business, religion, none of them any more have any real interest in making life tolerable for the masses, for their constituents, their customers, their followers. That’s not cost effective, is it, it’s not worth the effort. As a polity we have gone beyond the tolerable, the goal now is control, power, the certainty of being returned to lucrative positions time after time.

And the way to secure that certainty, that lucre, is to scrap the tolerable, the tolerant. Doubt, fear, enmity, are the great agents of control. In advertising, we were taught that the two great ways to sell anything are greed and fear. And it works: you make people fearful and they are in your pocket forever.

Which is almost certainly why that other great enlightenment word, tolerance, is no longer heard. Tolerance is wonderful for helping people get along with each other, for spreading communal happiness; it is not so good for securing control. Voltaire said that tolerance was the hallmark of humanity, but humanity doesn’t rank very highly in public discourse any more, does it, because it really isn’t that useful, at least not if you are looking down from a position of authority.

The Enlightenment was not necessarily a good time to live. It was intellectually exciting, but for most people it was poor, miserable, disease-ridden and uncertain. There were wars, there were revolutions, there was persecution. Enlightenment was limited to the way a few people were thinking about their world, though those thinkers did very slowly manage to achieve some advances that bettered the lot of most people. But I can’t help thinking that right now we are in desperate need of a new Enlightenment, where the aspirations for happiness and tolerance become once more a way that people think about the world.

In Pink

Tags

Clement Attlee, D.J. Taylor, George Orwell, Katherine Burdekin, Neville Chamberlain, Ramsey McDonald, Stanley Baldwin, Victor Gollancz, Winston Churchill

Sometimes, the most unlikely of sources can make you see something that has been staring you in the face forever and has just passed you by.

I am continuing my intermittent read of The Prose Factory by D.J. Taylor, and his chapter on the 1930s is, predictably, all about left wing literary movements. It is a reasonably fair account, I think, given that I suspect Taylor’s own political inclinations are centre-right and he doesn’t come across as at all sympathetic to Marxist views. But he manages to connect a few things that I hadn’t really connected before.

Let me try and put this into chronological order. In 1929, the Wall Street Crash had sent the Western economies spinning into the Great Depression. In May of that year, the Labour Party under Ramsey MacDonald had come out ahead in one of the tightest of elections and formed a minority government. That is not the most stable situation for dealing with the economic shocks that were to come over the next couple of years. So, in 1931, MacDonald entered into coalition with the Tories as the National Government, which won an overwhelming victory in the 1931 election. The National Government held something over 500 seats in Parliament, the only opposition being provided by a small group of rebel Labour MPs. Despite the National Government being theoretically a coalition, it was overwhelmingly dominated by the Conservative Party, with the Tory leader, Stanley Baldwin, taking over as Prime Minister in 1935.

What this meant (and the connection that Taylor spelled out for me) was that the left had no political voice, just at the start of a decade that was filled with causes for which the left needed to be heard. And so the left started to turn to extra-parliamentary ways of making their views known. Thus you got things like the hunger marches, which had been occurring intermittently since the start of the century, but which now became much larger and more frequent. One march from Scotland brought 100,000 people to Hyde Park in 1932. These marches were often organised by the communist party, and so were just as often brutally put down by the authorities. The communist party was also behind the large numbers of working class young men who travelled to Spain to fight for the Republicans (there were some British volunteers who fought for Franco, but they were neither so numerous or so well organized as those who fought against him).

But this activism also had a more intellectual underpinning, provided by the spread of the Workers’ Educational Association, which had been formed at the beginning of the century but which was at its largest and most successful during the 1930s. And also by the totally unexpected success of Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club, which aimed to break even with 2,500 members but had over 40,000 within the first year. The club would make books more widely available and far cheaper than usual, and published works ranging from George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier to Murray Constantine (Katherine Burdekin)’s Swastika Night; books that brought home again and again the social conditions and political enemies that those on the left were up against. There were Right and Centre Book Clubs, but these had neither the reach nor the effect of the Left Book Club.

With the sense of community and purpose provided by the likes of the hunger marches and the Spanish Civil War, and the spread of ideas promulgated through bodies such as the WEA and the Left Book Club, the left found a powerful and often working class voice throughout the 1930s, just at the time when they had no voice in government.

The National Government shed all pretence and became a straightforward Conservative government under Baldwin, as it remained under his two successors, Neville Chamberlain (from 1937) and Winston Churchill (from 1940). Under Churchill, and with a war to fight, the government again became a coalition National Government, but again it was predominantly Tory. After Baldwin’s election of 1935, there was no general election until 1945, when it was generally assumed that the great wartime leader, Churchill, would sweep back into power. It was a shock, therefore, when Clem Attlee won an overwhelming victory for Labour. But it perhaps shouldn’t have been, because that victory was the fruit of all those years during the 1930s when the left had been deprived of a political voice and so had found new ways to make their voice heard. The Attlee victory, if you like, was a direct consequence of Victor Gollancz creating the Left Book Club, which had, after all, published a book by one C.R. Attlee.

Modernisms

Tags

Anthony Powell, Constant Lambert, D.J. Taylor, E.M. Forster, Edith Sitwell, Ford Madox Hueffer, H.G. Wells, Henry James, John Middleton Murry, Joseph Conrad, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Muriel Jaeger, Peter Quennell, Sarah Cole, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, William Walton

When I read Lost Girls by D.J. Taylor last autumn, I was disappointed. It seemed to me that the book only really came alive when Taylor was discussing the London literary scene during the 1940s, and the four young women who were the titular subject of the book were at best only peripherally involved in that scene. So I decided to try a book that seemed to more directly address his interests. Which is how his 2016 literary history, The Prose Factory, appeared on my Christmas list (very many thanks, Maureen).

At the moment I am only into the second chapter, but already it is obvious that this is a subject he is much more interested in writing about. The book is a literary history of Britain from 1918 until, more or less, the present, and it is as general and has the sort of blinkers as one might expect. A cursory glance, for instance, suggests that H.G. Wells is the only science fiction writer to appear in the index; which is fine with me, I wasn’t really expecting anything else. As a broad account of literary movements it is providing exactly the sort of historical context I was hoping for, and at times it can be quite revealing.

When you look at literary history from a science fiction perspective, for instance, modernism tends to come across as a monolithic force, an instant literary establishment that, as the result of a quarrel between Henry James and H.G. Wells, conspired to exclude Wells and, in his wake, science fiction as a whole, from serious academic consideration. It wasn’t exactly like that. Reading Taylor’s chapter on modernism in the 1920s I wasn’t surprised to find that it was quite a fragmented movement, but I was surprised to learn how tribal it was.

The father of literary modernism, as I suppose we might put it, was Henry James, who is barely mentioned in Taylor’s book primarily because he had died in 1916. He brought a number of his Romney Marsh friends and neighbours, such as Joseph Conrad and Ford Maddox Ford, into the modernist camp on his coat tails, though it has to be said that at the time Conrad and Ford were more readily seen among the Georgians, the conservative, traditionalist literary movement that began with the end of the Edwardian era and fizzled out during the First World War.

It was after the war that modernism really got going, often lauded within the pages of the plethora of small magazines that were published throughout those years. These are magazines with famous names – Criterion, The Athenaeum – but they were still decidedly small. Even the best of them were lucky to have a circulation of 1,000, and those subscribers were fickle, if they grew weary of John Middleton Murry’s jeremiads in The Athenaeum, they would switch to T.S. Eliot’s austere pronouncements in Criterion. And though Taylor doesn’t say so, I get the distinct impression that this readership primarily consisted of academics in Oxford and Cambridge, and would-be writers in London plodding from the offices of one small magazine to the next in the hope of getting published. Despite this, the magazines were influential, at least in terms of how later academics look back on the modernists.

Middleton Murry was the cheerleader for one tribe of modernists, endorsing a number of the newer writers. But he seems to have been at war with everyone, and fairly soon lost his influence. Another tribe centred on the Sitwells, who were early advocates of the work of Eliot. Their circle included the composers William Walton and Constant Lambert, and they brought into their branch of modernism something of the polyrhythms and improvisation of jazz, the other great artistic movement of the decade but one that was not otherwise widely taken up by modernists. But the Sitwells were self-obsessed, idiosyncratic, and argumentative. Edith Sitwell in particular seems to have delighted in her feuds. There is one delightful vignette in Taylor’s book in which someone came upon Edith Sitwell and Virginia Woolf sitting side by side on a settee during one of their periodic truces, and I got a vivid impression of two tight-lipped women each preparing to spit venom at the other. Woolf, and Bloomsbury, introduces another tribe, one that encompassed the artistic as much as the literary, and whose publishing house, the Hogarth Press, brought out books by writers like E.M.Forster, Peter Quennell, and Muriel Jaeger, who weren’t all normally classed as modernists. Though the most notable title from the Hogarth Press was probably the first edition of “The Waste Land”, which brings us inevitably to Eliot himself, buttoned-up and puritanical, whose early poems, and especially “The Waste Land”, made him the torchbearer for post-war modernism. He inspired reverence – Taylor tells of a young Anthony Powell gazing in wonder when he chanced to spy Eliot dining alone at a Charlotte Street restaurant – and there were any number of would be writers trying to copy his work (as successfully as such copyists invariably are); but he also inspire mystification and condemnation, especially from critics like J.C. Squire, the last of the Georgians. Though Eliot himself, politically conservative and religiously inclined, probably had more in common with the Georgians than with the new generation of would-be revolutionaries who followed in his wake.

And this, I suspect, barely does justice to the internecine conflicts that characterised the first decade or so of literary modernism in Britain. I mean, where does one fit James Joyce, championed by Eliot but hardly the clubbable type one might find in Bloomsbury or at a Sitwell country home? So when Sarah Cole, in her truly wonderful book, Inventing Tomorrow: H.G. Wells and the Twentieth Century, argues that Wells was a modernist writer all along, the response has to be: of course, but what brand of modernist?

Rhyme Schemes

Tags

Alec Douglas-Home, Alistair Campbell, Anthony Eden, Barbara Castle, Boris Johnson, David Cameron, David Steel, Dominic Cummings, Edward Heath, Enoch Powell, George Floyd, George W. Bush, Gordon Brown, Harold Wilson, James Callaghan, John Major, Margaret Thatcher, Mark Twain, Mo Mowlem, Roy Jenkins, Theresa May, Tony Blair

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. It’s a neat aphorism, ascribed to Mark Twain though he probably never actually said it. Whoever coined it, it’s probably more accurate than the other line that keeps going through my head at the moment, the line about history repeating itself, first as tragedy then as farce. Our current repetition is not farcical. But then, our current situation is not a repetition of the 1930s, though it does rhyme.

I grew up in the 1950s. Postwar rationing was still on in Britain when I was born, though it had ended before I was old enough to notice. It was a time when the war filled every aspect of our lives. All around where I was brought up I was aware of sudden gaps in rows of houses, odd areas of wasteland. They were bomb sites, though I would be much older before I realised this; for the child of the 50s this was just what our suburban landscape looked like. Some remained blights; some had ugly and inappropriate buildings put up hurriedly in their place, and some had been repurposed in other ways. I remember, not far from my home, a piece of ground known as the “Wreck”; it was wartime wreckage, of course, but it had been repurposed as a Recreation Ground, so the name contained both meanings.

One thing I do remember from this time: war was of the past. War was ever-present, you could not watch an evening’s television (I remember when our first set arrived in the late 50s, and how quickly it became the centre of our family’s entertainment) or read a comic without encountering the war, but it was always looking back on the bravery of the past rather than anything current. Oh there were wars all the time: Korea, Kenya, Malaya, Aden, Suez; but these were small and far away and there was a sense that they would not be allowed to grow and consume the world as “the War” had done. When conscription was ended in the early-60s there was a feeling that the army was being put away somewhere, only to be taken out on rare occasions. Meanwhile, Britain’s postwar poverty led to us steadily shaking off the ties of empire. We couldn’t afford it (whatever the Brexiteers might imagine, Empire always cost more than it gave us; it wasn’t even our main trading partner, at the height of Empire we traded more with Argentina than with any part of the Empire), and there was agitation for independence, so the easy option was to go along with it. I suspect people in Britain barely noticed, Empire didn’t really impinge on most people except for those relative few who were stationed there in the army or who emigrated. My aunt and uncle lived in Rhodesia, came home to Britain in the late-50s, complained for ages about no longer having black servants, then emigrated to Australia early in the new decade. They were, I think, the exception rather than the rule.

This extended period, ending with the existential shock of the Cuba Missile Crisis, seems to me to rhyme with that much briefer period from 1919 into the early 1920s when the world was consumed with the idea that there would be no more war, when the shape and nature of the world was being reimagined, when global forces (the League of Nations / the United Nations) were being imagined into existence, and when everyone was shaken by the immediate after-effects of war, the emotional cost of so many dead, the financial cost of war debts. It was elongated into the early 1960s, I suspect, because so many of those in power had lived through the earlier period, had seen the relative failure of so many of their efforts, and probably had no clear idea of how to get it right this time. So, of course, they didn’t get it right. Maybe their indecision allowed some natural healing, though some wounds inevitably remained open and festering.

Then came the wonder years of the 1960s, a period as colourful, as sexually liberated, as focussed on youth (specifically those who could have had no direct experience of war), as the 1920s had been. It was a time of hope, a time when affluence was replacing austerity, and a time of just enough social improvements for us to imagine that much more was actually getting better.

In Britain, for instance, it is a general rule of thumb that the Home Secretary is the most right-wing member of any cabinet, of whichever stripe. It still holds true that every new prime minister comes to office proclaiming that they are going to make things better for everyone. Then you look at who they appoint as Home Secretary, the office that will be putting most of these reforms into practice, and you know that none of these promises are going to be followed through. But for a time in the mid-60s Britain had the only socially liberal Home Secretary in my lifetime. Roy Jenkins, working with the new leader of the Liberal Party, David Steel, pushed through most of those liberal reforms – decriminalising homosexuality, reforming divorce laws, abolishing the death sentence, legalising abortion – that helped make the 60s feel so positive.

Of course, just like the 1920s, advances in some areas were accompanied by failures in others, particularly in terms of employment. Barbara Castle’s “In Place of Strife”, the most concerted effort by any postwar government to end the adversarial character of labour relations in Britain, was shelved because it was opposed by both unions and employers, two groups who both profited from the continuing war between bosses and workers. So the decade devolved into an ongoing series of strikes which ushered in a Conservative government and a decade and a half of class war. Just as the 1950s felt like an extended version of 1919, so the 1970s was a decade-long replay of 1926.

After the feel-good 60s, the 1970s was a miserable decade. There were near-constant strikes, and consequently huge numbers out of work, while government appeared helpless. Edward Heath’s Conservatives introduced the three-day working week, Jim Callaghan’s Labour government saw rubbish piling in the streets and bodies going unburied. The affluence of the 60s seemed to have been frittered away. Urban blight made our landscapes ugly and dispiriting, with constant scandals of substandard buildings. Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968 had ushered in a decade of racial tensions. Religious tensions in Northern Ireland flared into outright conflict, which began spilling across to the mainland. I was at university in Northern Ireland at the time of the Protestant Workers’ Strike in 1974, which had the eerie effect of forcing me to revise Kant by candlelight.

In the early part of the decade, Edward Heath, who had spent his entire career campaigning for closer ties with Europe, finally managed to achieve British membership of the Common Market. It is strange, looking back, to realise that at the time membership of Europe was a Conservative policy actively opposed by a significant proportion of the Labour Party. Opposition to the Common Market was led by an unholy alliance of the extreme left of the Labour Party and a handful of MPs on the extreme right of the Tory party. As an avowed pro-European, then as much as now, I saw opposition to the Common Market as the province of the lunatic fringe, but it was storing up trouble.

Ever since the 1950s, both parties in Britain had tended to be centrist. In most details, a change from a Conservative to a Labour government, or vice versa, didn’t entail a great deal of change. But when Heath lost to Harold Wilson in 1974, the right of the Conservative Party engineered the election to leadership of Margaret Thatcher. This began a polarisation of politics in this country, particularly on the right, that has continued to this day. The impoverishment of the 1970s cleared the way for the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, just as the impoverishment of the 1920s and 30s had cleared the way for the election of strong (for which read, authoritarian) leaders in so much of Europe. Nevertheless, her popularity was low and falling lower before she engineered the Falklands War (she withdrew the Royal Navy presence in the islands just at the moment when the Argentine junta was making the most bellicose noises about reclaiming the Malvinas, and lo and behold almost immediately afterwards there was an invasion, and her popularity skyrocketed because there’s nothing the British like more than a minor war against a weaker enemy). Her brutal war against the miners during the strike of 1984-85 didn’t just destroy the strength of the unions (a popular move in much of the country, since the unions were seen as responsible for much of the chaos of the 1970s), but also destroyed the working class as a political force while militarising the police. For many people in this country, the police have never been trusted since. (It is interesting that during the 50s and 60s, police shows from “Dixon of Dock Green” to “No Hiding Place” invariably showed the police as noble and congenial. I remember the early-60s episode of “Z-Cars” in which the villains got away with their crime, which was viscerally shocking. But I can’t remember a single police show from the last 30 or 40 years that has not, in at least the occasional episode, shown the police to be brutal, stupid, corrupt or otherwise untrustworthy. They have not been unalloyed heroes since the Miners’ Strike.)

When, at the end of the decade, even the Conservative Party decided that Thatcher was too much, the leadership eventually devolved to John Major (think of “Yes, Prime Minister”: the least likely person getting the nod because the other alternatives were too polarising). Major was probably the most liberal Conservative PM of my lifetime, but he had no control over his Cabinet, and the story of his government was a story of political corruption, “Cash for Questions”. The distrust of the police following the Miners’ Strike had widened to a more general distrust of authority, but it has to be said that most politicians have shown remarkably little interest in retaining or regaining trust. Which is what eventually paved the way for the election of Boris Johnson who has benefitted from a general feeling that, yes, he’s a liar, but at least he’s our kind of dishonest.

For a moment, a very brief moment, there was a sense of 60s hope recurring with the election of Tony Blair in 1997. For me, this was encapsulated in the sight of Mo Mowlem arriving in Belfast almost before Blair had confirmed her in the position of Northern Ireland Secretary, and engaging with Northern Ireland politicians in a way that none of her predecessors had bothered to do. It couldn’t last, this moment of hope lasted months rather than years: Mowlam was attracting too much attention and very quickly Blair reined her in and started taking the lead on Northern Ireland policy. It was a harbinger of what was to come: government by focus group, by unelected advisors (Alistair Campbell in this case, but Dominic Cummings obviously comes to mind), by spin. Then came Blair’s shameful lap-dog approach to George W. Bush, the blatant lies that led to our involvement in the Iraq War. By the time he saw the writing on the wall and gave way to Gordon Brown, Blair was about as popular as Thatcher at her nadir.

Say what you like about Thatcher and Blair, though, (and they were awful in so many ways), I suspect they knew what they were doing when it came to governing. Which is more than can be said for the trio of incompetents that have followed Gordon Brown. During the long years of Tory rule in the 1950s there was a complacency in the Conservative Party, a sense that they were the natural party of government, and hence anyone they chose as their leader would automatically be a brilliant Prime Minister. Which gave us such glittering mediocrities as Anthony Eden and Alec Douglas-Home. No wonder that the line that defined the 1964 General Election, and which probably won it for Harold Wilson, was “Thirteen years of Tory misrule”. But Cameron, May and Johnson have each outshone those predecessors in their bland indifference to anything they were doing. I read a piece on Boris Johnson recently that rang very true: the writer said Johnson had dreamed all his life of becoming prime minister, and of having been prime minister, but wasn’t actually interested in the bit in the middle, the bit where he has to actually be prime minister. But that is pretty much true of Cameron and May also, they had no real idea what to do with high office, particularly when it involved dealing with a fractious party keen on pushing its weight around.

That was how Cameron was trapped into calling the Brexit referendum without any idea that he might lose, and without any plan in case he did lose. Brexit destroyed him; it destroyed May; and in all probability it will destroy Johnson. Hardly surprising, Brexit is a no-win situation. Johnson has only one negotiating position: don’t budge until the very last minute and the other side will give in. It’s a high risk strategy in several ways. For a start, one slight miscalculation and the whole thing could blow up in your face, and Johnson is not exactly good on fine detail. But, if he does get a deal, it will antagonise the most hardline of the Brexiteers, on who he depends to stay in power. No deal, however, will have catastrophic economic consequences in both the short and the medium term, consequences that will adversely affect the most ardent pro-Brexit parts of the country, particularly in those former Labour seats he won at the last election. While a deal will necessarily create a split between Northern Ireland and the rest of Britain, annoying the Unionists who have often propped up Conservative governments, possibly giving rise to renewed sectarian violence, and perhaps even paving the way for Ulster to reunite with the Republic of Ireland. No Conservative and Unionist prime minister is going to want to preside over the disintegration of the United Kingdom. But Brexit makes that a distinct possibility, particularly given the way that Johnson has consistently ignored the devolved governments of Wales and Scotland, and has lied to the devolved government of Northern Ireland. Any Brexit, deal or no deal, threatens renewed pressure for an independence referendum in Scotland, with the very real possibility that this time the vote would be for separation.

All of this, of course, comes amid the disruption of the coronavirus pandemic. This, too, threatens dire economic consequences that will only exacerbate the costs of Brexit. This, too, has seen the UK government ignoring the devolved governments, which have increasingly pursued policies at odds with those in England (and which have proved much more effective and more widely trusted than those in England). This, too, has illuminated the mendacity of the government, the failure to act promptly and effectively, the unpreparedness, the search for scapegoats, the sense that they are above the common herd. Since the pandemic started, trust in the government and approval of Boris Johnson have both evaporated.

And now, now, comes the eruption of protest over race. This isn’t new, it’s not sudden, it has been there for years, decades. Enoch Powell never went away; Windrush never went away; the “No Blacks, No Irish” signs never went away. It has simmered in Notting Hill, in Brixton, in Toxteth, in a hundred other places across the country. A sizeable portion of the British population is racist and always has been, and that breeds discontent, anger, despair. It has been coming to the surface in the dismay at the way the Windrush generation was treated by the unfeeling racism of Theresa May’s immigration policy when she was at the Home Office (remember what I said about the Home Secretary invariably being the most right wing member of any Cabinet). In Britain, immigration policy is a dogwhistle term that means “keeping out the blacks”, that’s all it has ever been, and the Tory faithful up and down the country in constituencies that have rarely ever seen a black person lap it up.

But it bursts out now. George Floyd was the trigger, but not the reason. It’s like the way the British Empire tumbled like a pack of cards in the late-50s and early-60s: the authority was stretched, distracted, weakened, impoverished. COVID-19 provided the opportunity: the criminal incompetence of the governments in dealing with the pandemic, the slowness, the obvious lies, the ineffectuality, all undermined trust. If all a government can do is tell people to “do as I say, not as I do”, that government is not governing. What is left but to take things into our own hands? If authority is replaced by trying to instil fear, that government is not governing. What is left but to face those fears in the name of a good cause? If the world is visibly falling apart and it is obvious that nobody in authority has the first idea what to do about it, that government is not governing. What is left but to try to bring about a better world by our own efforts?

We look at all of these things and we see terror, dismay, cataclysm. We try to make sense of it all: such deep-seated racial division; a disease that seems as overwhelming as the Black Death or the Great Plague or the Spanish Flu; a government that seems intent on undermining the country for their own ideological reasons. We find patterns, because that’s what humans do. All these things form repetitions of places we’ve been before: the race riots of the 60s and 80s; the outbreak of influenza at the end of the First World War; the rise of the fascist states in Europe between the wars.

But they are not repetitions. They are not even perfect rhymes. Instead there is a mass of partial rhymes, half rhymes, assonance, internal rhymes. Each creates a sense of familiarity, that hesitation: have I heard this before? Bits of what is happening now recall bits of what has happened in the past. But there’s dissonance also. We’ll only know how regularly events hit the AB, AB, rhyme scheme when we know where all this is going. How many times in the past have people thought: this will change the world. But we change, the world doesn’t. And this, this perfect storm of events that might rearrange the pattern, change the order, how much difference will it really make?

When we emerge from lockdown, will the world be different or will we? We have spent weeks depending on the under-paid and under-appreciated of our society: the nurses and care home staff, the delivery drivers, the warehouse workers. We have discovered that we can do without MPs in parliament, without bosses in their offices, but we can’t do without shelf-stackers and cleaners and postmen. So when this is over, when we start returning to normal, will it be a new normal? Will we start to ensure that nurses and drivers and cleaners have a higher status in society and higher pay to go with it? Or will the bosses simply go back into their offices and assume that people standing on their doorsteps cheering was all the appreciation that was really needed?

When the protests die down, when police forces put away their tear gas and riot gear, when new funding models are put in place, what will have changed? Will we suddenly be less racist, less eager to cling to our status? Will we have put in place mechanisms that ensure everybody has equal treatment, equal opportunity, regardless of race, gender, sexuality, political persuasion, country of origin? Or, when all is said and done, will it have been enough to tear down a few statues?

When politicians continue damaging the country for the sake of ideology, will we mutter and grumble and let it pass? When they decide that losing our industrial base is as nothing compared to taking back control; when allowing the import of American chlorinated chicken or hormone-fed beef is more important than maintaining the animal health standards we had previously set; when we lose the European health care workers because we don’t want to pay them enough to earn the right of residence, how will we react? Or is it enough to shrug and say we voted for it?

The things we want to emerge from all of these catastrophes are utopian, they would seriously make the world better for all of us. But I know those rhymes, the dull, monotonous beat of history – dum-dum dum-dum dum-dum – and usually it means that the world doesn’t change. There are always slow, gradual improvements, but also there are the same underlying issues, the ones that don’t change, the ones that don’t go away. The same racism we have known for decades, the same exploitation of the poor that we rely upon but don’t reward, the same exercise of authoritarianism that politicians express whenever they think they can get away with it.

Right now, this exact moment, we don’t know which way the world will move. Will it follow exactly the same course it always has done, or will there be a seismic shift? There could be the sort of transformation we dream about. But if that is to be the case, then we have got to hope, desperately hope, that history doesn’t rhyme or echo or repeat itself.

A Better Place

Tags

Brian Aldiss, H.G. Wells, Iain Banks, Michael Chabon, Roger Penrose, Thomas More, Ursula K. Le Guin, Utopia

Two roads converged in a dark wood.

Or, to be more accurate, two pieces of reading converged in the darkness of my mind. They are distinct pieces, unrelated, but the coincidence of reading them at about the same time untethered connections that, I suppose, have meaning to me more than anyone else.

The first was an essay in the Paris Review: Michael Chabon writing about Ursula K. Le Guin. What struck me in this essay was when Chabon talks about Le Guin’s attitude towards reading, and literacy in general. For Le Guin, Chabon tells us, literacy was “defined not simply as the capacity to read a text but as a means of training the imagination—and ultimately of constructing an authentic self—through sustained encounter with literary art.” In other words, literacy and imagination are the same thing: to read is to imagine; and it is through our imaginations that we become who we are.

Taking the next step, therefore, the function of any piece of writing, fiction or non-fiction, is to excite and exploit that imagination. Literature that does not engage the reader imaginatively, that does not make us think, see, wonder, learn, enjoy, is failing in its most basic purpose as a piece of literature.

Which takes me onto that second road, a novel I was reading before I chanced upon that Chabon essay, and that I have finished reading now only after having put aside the essay. This is White Mars, written by Brian Aldiss in collaboration with Roger Penrose. Now, it has to be said that Aldiss could be, shall we say, hit and miss as a writer. He wrote a number of things that were extraordinarily good: beautiful, vivid, engaging. But he also wrote a number of things that were simply bad. However, this is the only one of his novels that is not just bad, it is dull. It is only as you engage with the tedium of this book that you realise that even novels that were catastrophically bad, like The Eighty Minute Hour, were never actually boring.

But it is not the faults of White Mars as an individual novel that concern me here, but rather as an exemplar of a type of novel.

White Mars, which came out in 1999, is a utopia. In fact it is a utopia of an almost classic form, a form that generally hadn’t been written throughout the preceding century. The model of the classic utopia stems from Thomas More’s ur-text: the perfect society has been established some time before in the image of its progenitor, King Utopus or his avatar, and has since remained fairly static as a society since once perfection has been achieved there is nowhere else to go. H.G. Wells began to challenge that formulation at the beginning of the 20th century with A Modern Utopia, which suggested that utopia was not a destination but a process. Wells would continue to develop this notion in his subsequent utopia writings, such as The Shape of Things to Come, but already the environment in which utopias prospered had been changed. The technological consequences of modernism, evident in the First World War, made people start to distrust the future. And then we saw the brutal and authoritarian consequences of utopian political aspirations in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, militaristic Japan, China, Italy, Spain and elsewhere. Utopia gave way to dystopia as a vision of the planned society.

One of the things that is odd about White Mars is that it is a utopia at at time when the dystopia is in full flood. The few utopias that were being written were ambivalent about the notion (Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia or more tellingly “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”), or imagined radically changed circumstances, such as the universe of plenty in Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels. Nobody was writing the sort of guided tour of the institutions that were making everybody’s life better. Oh there is some scientific hand-waving in the novel, but it is at its core the sort of political, social, cultural utopia that Wells and his predecessors used to write. The sort of book where dealing rationally with everything makes everything perfect.

Take such ideas alongside Le Guin’s dictums about how vital the imagination is, and it seems a natural fit. Shouldn’t we all find our imaginations stirred by the notion of making a better world? But in fact, it is dystopias that have better engaged with our emotions through the simple device of telling a story about someone caught in the laocoonian coils of a dystopian system. Utopias fail so often because that is precisely what they do not, what they cannot do. There is no story in utopia. There should be: imagine how exciting it is in a crime story or a science fiction story to read about someone solving a puzzle, working their way towards a position that makes sense and that makes things right. Isn’t that exactly what a utopia should be: solving a social puzzle and making it right.

But that is not the story that utopian writers (and I am definitely including Aldiss in this) have chosen to tell. Thomas More had two models to draw on for his original Utopia, the traveller’s tale typified by recent books by Amerigo Vespucci, and philosophical disquisitions typified by the work of his friend Erasmus. Those who use More as their model have concentrated almost exclusively on the traveller’s tale, and that model has barely changed in the centuries since. More presented an argument; his successors present a status quo, a fact that has to be explained, described, but not dramatised.

Aldiss (and I am assuming that Penrose’s contribution is largely connected to the handwavium concerning the search for something beyond the Higgs boson) sets the story up as if it is going to be a sort of intellectual detective story. Economic collapse on Earth leaves a small Mars colony stranded, so they have to start working out how to govern themselves. That should be fine: a succession of social issues (what to do about sex, about crime, etc) become the puzzles to which utopian thinking provides the solution. But having set the situation up, Aldiss immediately resorts to the standard utopian model of the traveller’s tale, as if that is the only way that anyone can think of presenting a utopia. So we get the puzzles, but as soon as a rational response is suggested everyone falls in with it, nothing is complexified, nothing is made dramatic. It is the besetting sin of utopian writers that they consider their own particular utopia so obvious that everyone will immediately see its rational wonderfulness. Aldiss is no different from anyone else in being unable to see why anyone might disagree with his oh-so-rational solutions.

There is imagination in utopian fiction, but the imagination is expended on the idea, not on the story. In that respect it fails Le Guin’s test: it is an engagement with the imagination of the writer, a sort of literary onanism, not with the imagination of the reader. Just as the utopian writer cannot imagine an antagonist who might, for perfectly rational reasons, work against the version of the perfect state they have just invented, so they cannot imagine a reader who will not instantly see the sense of their invention. So the classic model of a utopia is a series of showcases for different aspects of the perfect state, it does not attempt to dramatically win the reader over to the benefits of such a state. The argument is assumed to have been won before the reader even opens the book. Which is why so many utopias, and White Mars is just such a case, are dull, because the literary engagement is not an imaginative engagement.

Siri Hustvedt

Tags

Iain Banks, Margaret Cavendish, Paul Auster, Siri Hustvedt, Virginia Woolf

The Kent Literature Festival, which started lo these many years ago (though after most of the country’s other literary festivals) has gone through a fair number of name and location changes over the years. It now seems to be settled as the Folkestone Book Festival. One thing has been consistent over all this time: it has been something of a tail-end Charlie of book festivals, coming late in the year and drawing on a number of participants already familiar and tired from a year on the circuit. There have, from time to time, been somewhat misplaced attempts to live the thing up. I remember one notorious occasion when they had Iain Banks, and the organiser therefore decided it would be a Scottish Evening with himself and all the staff in tartans.

The more recent incarnation of the festival does seem rather more adventurous, however. This year, the cast included Siri Hustvedt, which felt like a real coup to me, though I did wonder if anyone else in Folkestone would have even heard of Siri Hustvedt (it didn’t help that they misspelled her name in the programme). I am inveterately early for things like this, and for a while my worries about how popular she might be seemed to have borne out: I was sitting outside the auditorium for over 20 minutes before anyone else turned up. Still, in the end there were around 40 of us in the audience, though I hadn’t taken on board that she seems to have become something of a feminist idol, and the only other few men in the audience were accompanying more intense wives.

Initially, I confess, I was disappointed. It turned out that we were not having an audience with Siri Hustvedt, we were having a Skype chat with her: she was sitting in a sunny room in her home in Brooklyn, we were in a dark theatre in Folkestone. It is, admittedly, a creative way to broaden the range of writers we might get to see at our tired little late-year book festival, but at the same time, bang goes my hope of getting her to sign The Blazing World. And I was a little annoyed that this wasn’t made clear in the programme: the Siri Hustvedt talk was under a heading “Words from a Wider World”, and if you worked your way patiently through the programme book you would find, several pages away, a note about this thread that, mid-paragraph, included a passing reference to “live link-up”, but that wasn’t at all clear.

On the plus side, her head filled a six-foot screen, which meant we had a wonderful view of how animated she is. Her eyes were particularly expressive, opening wide, rolling, glancing away to left or right. Her face was never still, and she laughed a lot; maybe, being in her own home, she was more relaxed that she might have been on stage. When we came to questions from the audience, someone asked inevitably about what conversations were like over the Siri Hustvedt/Paul Auster dining table. I saw Auster once at a reading, and I suddenly had an image of the light and lively Hustvedt against the dark and static Auster, and nearly burst out laughing.

The real problem was the interviewer. She wasn’t a writer or a critic, or even a psychiatrist (Hustvedt is a lecturer in psychiatry, so that might have been an interesting dynamic); she was an artist interested in “text and image”, the sort of bland phrase that means nothing. I’m not sure she’d had much experience interviewing, because her questions were rambling statements to which she somehow managed to append a question mark. And she had a habit of still hesitating and qualifying her question long after Hustvedt had started trying to answer it, which for me is a capital offence among interviewers.

But Hustvedt was gold: full of perceptions and ideas that moved effortlessly and revealingly from the structure of writing to the history of science to the character of memory to the role of women to the fluidity of gender. Everything was grist to her mill, everything interweaved with the way she wanted to write her novels. It was fascinating.

From the audience, after the usual fluffy questions from people who don’t really know how to talk to writers (the Hustvedt/Auster dining table, can you tell me something about that picture on the wall behind you) I managed to ask how she came to Margaret Cavendish. She immediately started on an excited five-minute talk about researching 17th century science and how the name Cavendish kept coming up and how she knew it from Virginia Woolf’s dismissive comments and how she therefore hadn’t read any Cavendish (because, well, Woolf), but then she did and how the scientific ideas still resonate with ideas we’re asking about today. When she finally wound down, she added: “And thank you for asking that question.”

So, a good evening. But I still don’t have my copy of The Blazing World signed.

A History of Literary Criticism

Tags

D.A. Miller, Eve Sedgwick, F.R. Leavis, Frank Kermode, Frederic Jameson, Gilles Deleuze, I.A. Richards, Isobel Armstrong, Jacques Derrida, Joseph North, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Roman Jakobson, Stanley Fish, Terry Eagleton

Okay, the first thing I need to say is that I am an amateur at literary criticism. I did not study English Literature (or English Language, come to that) beyond O-Level. Everything I have picked up about it is self-taught, with all the randomness and happenstance that implies. My reading on the subject has been undirected, so there are major figures in academic literary theory (Leavis, Fish, Deleuze) that I have not read at all, and others (Kermode, Eagleton, Barthes, Jameson) where I have read at best one or two works. This is not special pleading: I am comfortable with literary criticism in practical terms, if not always in theoretical terms. I practiced close reading before I actually encountered the term; and when I first heard about Historicism, or perhaps New Historicism, I thought that chimed with my own approach to the subject, until I realized that my approach seemed to be diametrically opposed to theirs (I look at the history as a way of understanding the literature that emerged from it; Historicists, at least as interpreted by Joseph North, look to the literature as a way of understanding the history).

Anway, I’ve been reading Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History by Joseph North in the hope that it might help to fill in some of the immense chasms in my knowledge of the subject. (I must, for example, read up more on Historicism/New Historicism, if only to see if North is correct in his interpretation.) I was, in the end, disappointed, frustrated and excited by the book.

Let’s start with the disappointments: the sub-title is, to say the least, misleading. That it is short (217 pages) does not equate with it being concise; it is more polemical than political; and though it is arranged in roughly chronological order, it is not exactly a history. As a general rule, histories become fuzzier as they come closer to the present: distance tends to make it easier to shape the narrative and arrive at an analysis. North’s narrative becomes longer, more detailed and sharper the closer it comes to the present. The more historical aspects of the book, in other words, serve mostly as a setting for the polemical arguments about the state of academic literary studies over the last ten or twenty years.

North is a polemicist, he has a particular argument to make; in outline, he argues that in each stage of its history, literary criticism as practiced in Anglo-American universities has started on the left and moved steadily to the right. I don’t really know if he is right or wrong in this (in most instances, I only have North’s word to go on), but the polemical argument overwhelms the history. His chapter on “The Historicist/Contextualist Paradigm”, for instance, consists of him laying out what he sees as wrong with the positions of certain key Historicists and Contextualists, without ever actually laying out in clear terms what those positions are or how they were arrived at. (My interpretation of North’s interpretation of the Historicist position, for example, is entirely gleaned from reading between the lines; you won’t find a statement to that effect actually in the lines.) Now he may be right in his critique, but without providing, if you’ll pardon the term, an historical context for the position, it is hard to see how accurate or effective a critique it is.

You will note, also, my remark about “Anglo-American universities”. The focus of the book is that narrow. Every critic dealt with at all substantially is either British or American (there may be a Canadian in there, but I’m not aware of any Australians; but they are anyway all anglophone). A couple of non-anglophone theorists (Foucault, Derrida) are mentioned in passing, others (Jakobson, Barthes) are not mentioned at all; which means that the so-called “Theory Wars” do not put in an appearance, structuralism and deconstruction play no part in this story of literary criticism. Though to be fair, Marxism hardly appears; I think the word “Marxism” only occurs in quotations from somebody else. And when I read about Historicism, the name that keeps cropping up is Stanley Fish, but he is entirely absent from North’s index. My knowledge of the history of literary criticism is partial, full of holes, but I struggle to fit what I do know into the story being told here.

But that is because, as I have suggested, that this is less a history than a polemic. North believes that I.A. Richards was the greatest thing that ever happened to literary criticism, but his immediate successors misinterpreted his arguments or took his ideas in inappropriate directions; and their successors did the same, and so on. Every generation or so, someone tries to come up with a radical new paradigm, usually something that can be aligned with contemporary political thinking, Keynesianism with the New Criticism, neo-liberalism with the Historicists/Contextualists, and so on. But these radical shifts in the paradigm then suffer the same processes of misinterpretation and misdirection, and they are anyway never radical enough to go back to Richards. And right now the most interesting critical thinkers (Isobel Armstrong, Eve Sedgwick, D.A. Miller) are showing discontent with the current paradigm without quite getting their acts together enough to establish a new paradigm.

I don’t know the work of Armstrong, Sedgwick or Miller, or the others he quotes here, so I don’t know if North’s selective quotations really provide an accurate impression of their work. Because North’s notion of concision is to assume that his readers are already intimately familiar with every writer he quotes, and therefore do not need a precis of their work or any sense of their context. Similarly, in what he tells us is meant to be a popular work, he litters his sentences with often impenetrable jargon. So what was meant to be a concise work turns into a long, hard slog.

As I said, this “Concise Political History” is actually none of these things. And yet, there is an excitement in reading someone so madly, and maddeningly, committed to an idea; there’s an excitement in seeing literary criticism (or at least a particular subset of literary criticism) provoking such political enthusiasm; and there’s an excitement in discovering so many new (to me) thinkers whose work might, in time, inform my own. Above all the experience of reading this book, the disagreements, the hesitations, the doubts, has forced me to think more closely and in a different way about the subject, and that in itself is perhaps the most exciting thing of all.

histories, his stories

Tags

David Cannadine

The union of England and Wales with Scotland that had been carried in 1707 had created a polity virtually coterminus with the island of Great Britain, but in 1800, the national boundaries of the United Kingdom were redefined and extended to encompass the neighbouring landmass of Ireland.

When I read the opening words of David Cannadine’s Victorious Century: The United Kingdom 1800-1906, I found myself oddly unsettled, and it took me a long time to understand why. I remember reading a lot of histories like this when I first got interested in history back in the 1960s and 70s. In those days, this patrician tone was par for the course in anything that was meant to be taken seriously as history. I’m used to this somewhat laboured style, it wasn’t unfamiliar to me. And yet it felt wrong.

It was only as I got half-way down the first page (and half-way down the first paragraph) that I came upon this sentence:

This Act of Union was driven through in Ireland itself by the Lord Lieutenant (or Viceroy), the Marquis Cornwallis, and in Britain by the First Lord of the Treasury (and de facto prime minister), William Pitt the Younger.

This, I realized, was the first appearance by a person in this particular history. But these weren’t people, they were positions: title comes before name, and in the case of Cornwallis, there are three titles (Lord Lieutenant, Viceroy, and Marquis) but only a surname. Nothing humanizes these figures who are shaping the destinies of two countries. Indeed, nothing does humanize them: Cornwallis isn’t given a christian name anywhere in this chapter; neither man is described, neither man’s character is explained, we aren’t even given their ages (in the case of Pitt, “the Younger” is made to seem part of his surname rather than an attribute of age).

And this, I realized, was what I found unsettling about the book. History books these days don’t start like that. They start dramatically: “On the morning in 1783, when William Pitt the Younger walked into 10 Downing Street for the first time as prime minister, he was just 24 years old.” Or they start descriptively: “Cornwallis was a beaten man, forever scarred by the events at Yorktown nearly 20 years before, but he had made a glittering success in his latest role as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.” Or they start in media res: “George III was having none of it. Pitt’s idea of a Union with Ireland was all well and good, he said, but Catholic emancipation was out of the question.”

History books nowadays begin in many ways, but two things are consistent: they are written to tell a story, and they almost invariably begin with people.

But not this book. This is an old-fashioned political history of Britain between the Act of Union with Ireland in 1800 and the election of the Liberal government of Campbell Bannerman in 1906. It is replete with names, hundreds of them, cabinet ministers, statesmen, campaigners and the like. But they are never more than names: if they ascend to the aristocracy (as so many of those in political office do) then they are only referred to by their title. No one is described (I think there’s a passing reference to Disraeli’s looks, but you could hardly avoid that, could you?), there is no attempt to get under the skin of any of them, to investigate motives, no moment in this very dramatic century is actually dramatized (I don’t think I have ever seen the Peterloo massacre dealt with so dispassionately).

Something of the quality of the book is displayed in the last chapter, when the publication of The Time Machine by H.G. Wells prompts Cannadine to a rare flight of fancy. For 30 pages he imagines what a visitor from 1800 would have made of the world of 1900. It is an interesting imaginative exercise, summarizing all that had changed over the course of the century. But for Cannadine, the very first thing his time travellers would notice was that “Britain’s position in the world was familiar, yet not quite the same.” Really? I would have thought that the very first things they would notice would be the clothes, the crowds, the smells, the monstrosities of trains and horse-drawn omnibuses and motor vehicles. The material things that represent all the ways that life had changed for ordinary people over the century. All of these things would open up discussion of population growth, urbanization, the development of new dyes, advances in technology and so forth. But no, “In the light of the many continental coalitions through which they had lived in the 1800s, the time travellers might not be surprised to learn that Britain had recently renewed its European commitment after a long period of detachment from direct involvement in continental affairs; but they might have been taken aback to discover that the recent military alliance had not been with Germany but with France.”

Don’t get me wrong, this is a fascinating book in many ways. There is a lot of rich detail. It is mostly political history: there is more detail about acts of parliament that succeed or fail, than there is social history about the way people live, and there is more social history than there is cultural history. But there is some cultural history, often presented in interesting juxtapositions: for instance, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is presented as part of the wave of popular unrest that included the Peterloo massacre. (Though it may be indicative of something that the very few errors that I spotted all tended to be associated with social rather than political history; for instance, unless things have changed dramatically over the last century and a half, New Lanark is not actually near Manchester.) It is worth noting, though, that Cannadine will provide some explanation of social and cultural changes, as if these aren’t his natural territory and he has to tread carefully; but when it comes to political structures, he often assumes that he doesn’t need to explain anything. Throughout the century, the person who is prime minister is chosen by the monarch regardless of the political make-up of parliament. Because of her antipathy towards Gladstone, Victoria seems to have several times tried to name Disraeli as prime minister even though the conservatives were not in the majority in the house. And this practice continued into the 20th century: Campbell Bannerman became prime minister in December 1905, before the election of 1906 that brought the Liberals a crushing victory. Now I don’t understand how this works, and I would have relished an explanation, but Cannadine doesn’t seem to feel that is necessary.

It is also, perhaps inevitably given its focus, a very masculine book. You can probably count on the fingers of two hands the women who are mentioned in the first 500 pages of the book. Even Victoria doesn’t get that much of a look in. We are told several times that she didn’t like Gladstone, but we’re not told that much else about her. Then, in the last few pages of the book, he launches into an account of the rise of the New Woman and suffragism in the latter part of the century, and all at once he multiplies by several times the number of women named.

I had to check: Victorious Century was first published in 2017. In many ways, it feels much older.

For Art’s Sake?

Tags

John Banville, Oscar Wilde, Philip Evergood, Simon Schama, Sydney Pollack, Thomas Carlyle, Walter Pater

I’ve been neglecting this blog recently: too busy keeping up with too much reading for the Campbell Award. It’s frustrating, I’ve got a couple of biggish things in my mind to write here, and by the time the decks are clear enough to do so I’m sure the inspiration will have faded, or I’ll have forgotten why on earth I wanted to write about that.

But here’s a brief thought, as a place holder if nothing more.

The first episode of Civilizations has Simon Schama talking about the origins of human art, and eventually he comes down to something like: “This is art because it is beautiful!” It’s the sort of floundering generalization we all make at some time or other: art equals beauty, art is the creation of beauty, if it’s beautiful it must be art. And yes, some art, quite a lot of visual art, is beautiful. But not all. Some art is ugly, deliberately so; some art is making a point or telling a story, and whether or not it is beautiful is irrelevant to whether it is art; and our ideas about what constitutes beauty change in ways that our ideas of what constitutes art do not change.

The latest issue of The New York Review of Books has an interesting article by John Banville about Oscar Wilde. Inevitably it raises the idea that first came to prominence among the exquisites, the belle lettrists, the romantics of the late-Victorian age: Art for Art’s sake. It is a resonant phrase that was still current in my youth, and for all I know is still current in some artistic quarters today. It is, of course, an abdication; it is Walter Pater and the aesthetics, and their peers and descendants throwing up their arms in defeat and crying: we don’t know what art is and we don’t know what it’s for, but we know it should be for something. (Following Carlyle, the Victorians were great believers that everything should be for some social or moral good, a viewpoint we’ve still not shaken off.) So, art is its own purpose.

But that is surely missing the point. Art is many things. It is the glorious and tiny carved female head that Schama was looking at when he declared: this is beautiful and therefore this is art. It is the song I haltingly pick out on my guitar. It is the seering dystopian novel I am currently reading. It is the broad comedy of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. It is painting and scrimshaw and poetry and dance and film and theatre and prose and …

And just as there is nothing that binds these various forms into a whole (they are certainly not all beautiful), so there is no one reason why we engage in creating or consuming these various arts. Yes, we might want to create beauty, or it is to exercise a skill, or to make a political point, or to express a spiritual belief, or to make money, or all of these or none of them.

I said, long ago, that science fiction is indefinable because it is not one thing, though the various strands that make up science fiction are loosely linked by family resemblances. That is an idea I stole from Ludwig Wittgenstein who argued, in Philosophical Investigations, that sport is indefinable because it is not one thing, but various sports are loosely linked by family resemblances. And the same, surely, is true of art. We shouldn’t try and define art because it is indefinable, it is not one thing. A painting, such as Philip Evergood’s “Dance Marathon” from 1934, may have family resemblances to a film, such as Sydney Pollack’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? from 1969; but there are other things (not least the medium) that divide them.

And this is a good thing. All these things, art and sport and science fiction, are the more interesting precisely because they are so malleable, so imprecise, so various. There are as many science fictions as there are readers and practitioners of the form; there are as many sports as there are sports people and spectators; there are as many arts as there are artists and writers and film makers and photographers and people who enjoy and appreciate and benefit from these paintings and stories and movies and pictures. That is why art is so important to us; because in all its multifarious forms it is never speaking to the many but to the one, to me. And it speaks in many languages. You and I may experience the same piece of art, and what it says to you cannot be precisely what it says to me.

That is why it is art. That is what art is for: not for its own sake, not for any quantifiable social benefit, not for any religious or political purpose, but because in art something expressed to the many speaks uniquely to me.