“Meaning is an event, something that happens, not on the page, where we are accustomed to look for it, but in the interaction between the flow of print and the actively mediating consciousness of a reader.”–Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin: the Reader in PARADISE LOST
In Paradise Lost, Milton dares to explore the Creation story at the core of the Christian belief, questioning how in a perfect vision pain and violence could exist. As Stanley Fish explains, it is our story that we consider in reading this epic work: Milton is deeply interested in understanding how humanity came to be divided from Heaven and what repercussions this has on our nature, our ideas around sin, gender, the natural world, justice…the poetry is majestic and the going may get tough: but to understand Paradise Lost is to probe deep into the structures of human spirit that we have inherited.
Heading off to Paris just now for two studies: Faulkner’s “The Bear” which will be happening in London next week as well and The Passion of New Eve by Angela Carter…two mind-bending works that the Paris Salonistas have been willing to tackle…next up in London:
Faulkner’s “The Bear” Thursday October 4th 7-10 PM One meeting intensive (space remaining for three participants) *use the links or visit the events page to register*
Paradise Lost by John Milton Tuesday Evenings 8-10 PM, Thursday afternoons 1-3 PM (five week study) *use the links or visit the events page to register*
Here is one reviewer on Paradise Lost (Norton Edition–available at Owl Bookshop in Kentish Town):
“Milton is hard to read. There’s no way around it. He was incredibly well versed in Latin and Greek and the famous epics, and intentionally set out to imitate that style with this Christian poem. Thus, some of the sentences are close to thirty lines or more, and are almost unintelligible at first. I am a Latin scholar, so I am used to seeing this kind of writing, but Paradise Lost could be challenging to the uninitiated. That being said, it is definitely worth the effort. Milton set out not just to tell the story of the Fall of Man but also to “justify the ways of God to men.” It is frequently remarked that God is a secondary character and Satan is the most well-developed. I think this may be the same technique used by Dante to draw in the reader and have them commit the same sin as the characters. And this is what is most enjoyable about Milton: trying to unravel the many layers.
If you are a Christian, this book may ask some interesting questions. Milton was definitely pious, but he did have some interesting personal beliefs that may or may not have agreed with doctrine at the time.
If you are just a fan of the classics and great literature, I’m sure you will find Paradise Lost to be among the best poems in history, and certainly the best in English.
Finally, the Norton Critical Edition is superior in that it contains about 300 pages of criticisms and background information, all of which aid to one’s understanding and enjoyment of the poem. ”
Sin. Satan. Fall of Man. I think we are in for some fun.
Tracy Brabin is an actress and writer. She has been a team writer on various TV shows such as Crossroads, Family Affairs, Tracy Beaker, Heartbeat, Hollyoaks and Shameless and has two feature films Yarko and Cross your Heart in development. She has appeared inLove + Hate, Midsomer Murders, Rosemary and Thyme, Sunburn, El Cid, Silent Witness, Holby, Casualty, Doctors, Strictly Confidentialand several series of Outside Edge, A Bit of a Do and Ghosthunter, as well as playing Roxy in Eastenders and Trisha Armstrong inCoronation Street for three years. Tracy will be reading from a work in progress, Paradise, a novel for young adults.
Syd Moore is the author of The Drowning Pool, a ghost-thriller set in Leigh-on-Sea, inspired by the legend of the 19th Century Essex woman – the Sea Witch, Sarah Moore. Her latest book, Witch Hunt, published on 11 October 2012, explores the myths and motivations surrounding Mathew Hopkins, the self-appointed Witch finder General, and voices the stories of the ‘witches’ he persecuted. Syd has worked extensively in the publishing industry and fronted Channel 4’s book programme, Pulp. She was the founding editor of Level 4, an arts and culture magazine, and currently works for Metal Culture, developing literature programmes.
Chibundu Onuzo grew up in Lagos, the youngest of four children to doctor parents. She has just finished a history degree at King’s College London and is about to start a Masters in Public Policy at UCL. Chibundu’s debut novel, The Spider King’s Daughter, was published by Faber in March 2012 to much acclaim. Chibundu’s second novel, also to be published by Faber, follows two soldiers during the Niger Delta conflict.
Denise Saul is a poet and fiction writer. Her White Narcissi (published by Flipped Eye Publishing), was Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice for Autumn 2007. Denise’s poetry has been published in a variety of US and UK magazines and anthologies. House of Blue (published by Rack Press) was Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Recommendation for Summer 2012. She is the winner of the 2011 Geoffrey Dearmer Prize for her poem ‘Leaving Abyssinia’.
Helen Smith is a novelist and playwright. She is the author of bestselling cult novels Alison Wonderland and Being Light as well as other books and plays. Alison Wonderland hit Amazon’s bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic, reaching number one in the US Kindle chart. The Times has called her: “at the very least a minor phenomenon.” Her latest novel is The Miracle Inspector published in September 2012. Helen is a member of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain and English PEN. She hosts the popular Literary Cabaret events at literary festivals.
Come and meet the authors, hear them read, buy their books
This weekend I had the wonderful privilege of attending King Lear at the Almeida Theatre with Jonathan Pryce in the title role. I love this play and know it deeply–found myself mouthing the lines along as though I were in a Lear sing-a-long…comparing this production to previous ones I have seen with Sir Ian McKellen and (the late great)Pete Postlethwaite–comparing portrayals of the Fool, the struggle to dramatize Cordeila (overheard: “I always judge a Lear production on how the gouging out of the eyes goes….”). In the moment of the play, I was newly alert to how full immersion in the perspective of other humans in turmoil can transform. For three hours I lived through Lear’s love test, rejection of those who loved him, rejected by those who flattered him, loss of his recognition of his self, madness, storm, rescue and collapse. I have not (yet) been thrown out onto a blasted heath and exposed to be reborn–but I can find within my own experience echoes of emotional drama I witnessed in the gorgeous language and images of despair that construct King Lear. The viewing of this tragedy and the projected experience of it onto one’s own life order opens perception, galvanizes and refreshes the muscles we need to weather the storms of being alive and aware.
In the Salon– whether I am looking at a work of literature for the first or 18th time, I find myself responding anew to the ideas with each meeting. The discussions in the Salon, the views of others and the questions that drive us further into the work help to make the engagement of reading an embodied performance. I hope to meet you in the pages.
I heard Howard Jacobson speak recently on Ulysses as the greatest Jewish novel of the 20th century. Ulysses shows us, Jacobson convincingly argued, ‘the healing power of creative exile into oneself…the dignity of the average damaged person.’ Leopold Bloom’s relationship with Molly is the relationship between the Jews and God: it goes on mostly in Bloom’s head while Molly herself is mostly upstairs and unavailable; it is built on the expectation of discomfort, and it is revolves on the deeply held belief that ‘it requires great potency to deserve great punishment’. His insightful, impassioned analysis of Bloom invoked how a complex character in literature may offer the reader insight into human psyche: one’s own pains and triumphs as reflected in another. So I was disappointed to read his rather simplistic rant against readers and reading groups in the Guardian this weekend.
I agree- emphatically- with his disgust at the limited response of readers who say, “I don’t like this book because I don’t sympathise with the main character.” Liking or sympathising with a character is not the point; understanding our own response, recognizing when a character has discomforted or engaged us gets the reader much further down the road to critical and engaged reading. But I disagree with his generalization that it is destruction of art to use reading to find ourselves–in fact, the discomfort or challenge offered by an authentic portrayal of human experience does help the reader ‘find themselves’–perhaps clarifying our own values in contrast, reflecting back to us our own narrow thinking, helping us expand our perspective by locating ourselves on a spectrum of human consciousness. This is certainly not the only purpose of a great read–and it would be solipsistic to limit the power of reading to simply understanding the self. But Jacobson’s cranky rejection of reading groups as ‘lacking the strong stomach’ necessary to understand and respond to difficult or unsympathetic characters reflects his own limited perspective. My experience with readers in the Salons demonstrates a variety of readers who, with courage and curiosity, explore the difficult aspects of human nature as reflected in the characters we study. My weekend reading partner also pointed out the great irony in a writer who is disgusted by readers who seek to find themselves in books as he is publishing a book about himself as a writer. Hmmmm…
The novel is in danger, according to Howard Jacobson, the Man Booker prize-winning author of The Finkler Question. But, he said, the fault lies not with novelists, but with the lack of good readers.
Describing his experience of appearing at reading groups – “sometimes they are lovely, sometimes they aren’t, and sometimes they are just staggeringly rude” – Jacobson said that he felt a sense of “heartbreak” when he heard readers say, “I don’t like this book because I don’t sympathise with the main character.”
He added: “The language of sympathy and identity and what we call political correctness is killing the way we read.
“That’s like the end of civilisation. That is the end. In that little sentence is a misunderstanding so profound about the nature of art, education and why we are reading, that it makes you despair. Who ever told anyone that they read a book in order to find themselves?”
Speaking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Jacobson said that the reader needed a “strong stomach” and ought to be able to withstand the “expression of an ugly point of view” in a book. There was, he added, great danger in the “politically correct” pressure that urged “you can’t write about women like that, you can’t write about men like that, you’ve got to be careful what you say about gays, you’ve got to be careful what you say about Jews… But you have to be able to say of the novel that it has free rein – it can go anywhere.”
His latest book, Zoo Time, is a comic novel about what he called the “multiplying degradations” of being a writer. When he began it, immediately after finishing The Finkler Question, he was convinced the novel that went on to win the Booker would be a disaster.
Being a novelist, he said, is “the nicest way of spending your life but it’s full of indignities. These indignities were swarming after I’d finished The Finkler Question. I also felt that no one was going to read it: the subject matter was inimical to the taste of the times. I was over, I thought. So I thought, ‘I’ll go out in a blaze, I’ll write one more novel that makes fun of myself: make fun of my dreams, make fun of my fantasies.'”
He added: “The signs were very, very bad for The Finkler Question. If ever I were not going to win the Man Booker prize, this was the time. I so wasn’t going to win the Man Booker prize that it actually can’t be that I won the Man Booker prize.”
Zoo Time, then, is about the failure of the novelist and the ruination of the publishing industry. It begins with its hero, a novelist called Guy Ableman, being arrested, after addressing a reading group in Chipping Norton, for shoplifting one of his own novels from the local Oxfam. In the second chapter, Ableman’s publisher shoots himself.
He put aside the draft of Zoo Time when he won the Booker, thinking, “How do you go on writing a book about literary failure when that happens? I put it away thinking that will be the final joke against me: great novel ruined by Booker prize.”
After a matter of months, though, he was prompted to take it up in “a state of retrospective despondency… It all came back to me, if possible even sharper than before, the misery of my life before winning the Man Booker prize.”
Final summer Salon: The Awakening on July 11th 8-10 PM *DATE CHANGE*
Register now on the events page for this study; thanks to SJ, I have The Awakening as a PDF file—please email me for this.
This would be a wonderful study to sample the Salon experience–or if you are missing the regular Salons and need this intellectual energy before the summer adventures…
From The Awakening: Opening thoughts
Part of the strength of this beautiful little book is that we are asked to consider Edna Pontellier’s ultimate choice not as a question of absolutes but as a consideration of human desires in conflict with the world it inhabits. The world of Pontellier is not absolutely oppressive, Pontellier is not without freedom, her treatment of her children (and the impact of her choice on them) can cast her in a nasty light. Chopin offers a feminist consideration that honors the idea of feminism as a complex assessment of the interaction between an individual and their particular society. The Creole world that Pontellier lives in is dynamic and sensual; Edna has the sympathy of at least two of the characters close to her. So we must move beyond the simple equation of a woman who has no choices, who lives in an oppressive world, taking her life in response. The Awakening offers a more complicated and therefore more authentic portrayal.
The writing is exquisite; Chopin manages to create the tension of seduction and the aesthetic world of Creole life in her words. This is not an overwhelming read (like some of our recent studies); therefore those that participate in this Salon may take the time to savor the work. I recommend reading in conjunction The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, which is written right around the same time with some similar explorations- but offers a very different consideration of a woman in struggle with her world. Some have studied this previously; I think you will find as I have that there is never the same response to a strong work . Though our focus will be on The Awakening, Yellow Wallpaper may creep in.
Musings from attending GATZ
I had the rare and wonderful pleasure of sitting through Gatz last night at the Noel Coward theatre: a seven hour reading of the entire book, The Great Gatsby, that slides from a casual engagement with one man in an office and grows into a fully performed ensemble piece using every word form the book. I have studied and taught this book many times, but the performance gave me the work anew. There was a reflection towards the end of the performance about a scene echoing an El Greco painting that I was ready to bet money was not in the book—but it was. This brief image adds a deep note of wasted, ageless sorrow to Nick’s shaping of the story of Gatsby. His narrative works to allow him to understand himself and his response to ‘the foul dust that preyed upon him…’: the El Greco painting shapes the mood of the final reflections perfectly.
The Gatz experience clarified for me why I am such an advocate for reading—for re-reading, for discussing, for using precious time from our ‘one wild life’ to consider literature carefully. It is this: when we read a significant book, we first grasp the story (what happened, who was involved…) then we stop to think about why this happened, and then we get to the good stuff. By studying characters and their responses to the challenge of living, we have an objective platform for considering human capacity and behavior—and perhaps understanding ourselves more in the process. Listening to Nick last night, I realized I was still learning about his love of Gatsby and his struggle with Gatsby’s desperate and wondrous hope. The book has more to tell me about how we, or I, try to sync our experience of flawed selves with our dreams of what we might be, what we could be…made particular in the sharpness
of Fitzgerald’s vision which is a meeting of a particular moment, place and personalities.
It is the great mystery of human connection and relations that the study of literature has the potential to illuminate.
It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…. And then one fine morning—So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
–The Great Gatsby, Chapter Nine
I am putting together the fall Salon schedule…one of the Paris Salonistas emailed me an article arguing for Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom as the ‘American analog to Ulysses so looks like that will be in the offerings along with Paradise Lost and….? Chaucer? Iliad? Suggestions welcomed…
Registration is happening NOW–the Eliot Salon is almost full so sign up today to ensure your participation. To Register, follow the link to the Salon event that you would like to join and use the paypal button to register; upon receipt of payment, I will send you the opening notes and details…Contact me if you have any questions.
2. May 12 & 13th Salons
For your calendars– The next Paris Salon is scheduled for May 12-13…this will most likely include:
The Aeniad (Robert Fagles translation recommended –he has gotten us through Odyssey and Iliad–why stop now?)The Aeneid (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) by Virgil and Robert Fagles (1 Apr 2010)
Their Eyes Were Watching Godby Zora Neale Hurston (recommend Virago ed. with intro by Zadie Smith)
The Odyssey Robert Fagles translation recommended
Short Story Salon for busy people—Chekov and Cheever
Please do let me know your preference for the May Salons now…
3. Musings on the private self
Last Sunday I had the wonderful opportunity to hear Henry Goodman and Howard Jacobson speak about and read from Ulysses as part of the King’s Place Jewish Book Week. Many rich thoughts and questions were spurred- and I heard one of my favorite readings of Molly Bloom’s monologue ever—but one that I thought would be applicable to many great reads (as I do realize not everyone in the world is swimming in Ulysses world right now) had to do with Joyce’s celebration of the private self.
We might call this the soul or the interior voice but it is that deeply buried self that may escape censorship and conformity; the social forces that shape the parts of the self that are closer to the surface. To find that self and give it permission to want what it wants, to be what it may be, to explore all possibilities, desires and dark corners is a rare and private thing. Jacobson’s passionate proposal was that Joyce celebrates and advocates for this voice in the person and narration of Leopold Bloom…and that this may allow the reader to find and attend to that voice in themselves. This is an act of courage sometimes as that self may be what speaks against prevailing attitudes of discrimination or small-mindedness or all the forms of narrowness we inhabit as the quotidian wears us into thoughtlessness; Jacobson’s example was Bloom’s confrontation with the Citizen in what are some of my favorite lines of the book.
–But its no use, says he, Force hatred, history, all that. That’s not a life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everyone knows that it’s the very opposite of that that is really life.
–What? Says Alf.
–Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred.
What is astonishing to me about this passage is this is not a quiet conversation between friends; Bloom says this in the face of the Citizen who is vilifying Bloom in front of a group of drunken men who are bearing down on Bloom, accusing him of being an outsider, one who does not belong…and yet he can say something so lucid and authentic. I hope you are reading something that opens up your quiet self.
Wonderful Salon Intensive on Sunday Evening January 08, 2012
We worked to understand the multi-perspective narration of the epic journey of the Bundrens: farcical tragic comedy, existential philosophy or modernist experiment? Or a roiling engagement of family dysfunction?
I don’t know…my mother is a Fish…
Some feedback: Thank you so much for hosting a great salon yesterday. I may have had to work too hard to enjoy reading the book (reading for me is largely an escape) but I thoroughly enjoyed discussing it. If my english teachers at school had been as inspirational as you, who knows, I might not have been a medic today. (good or bad?) The intensive format suits me far better than the weekly sessions which I find count my life away….please keep me in the loop for more of these!
And a few thoughts from our own Bill Faulkner:
“I decline to accept the end of man.”
William Faulkner: Nobel Prize Speech
Stockholm, Sweden
December 10, 1950
“All his life William Faulkner had avoided speeches, and insisted that he not be taken as a man of letters. ‘I’m just a farmer who likes to tell stories.’ he once said. Because of his known aversion to making formal pronouncements, there was much interest, when he traveled to Stockholm to receive the prize on December 10, 1950, in what he would say in the speech that custom obliged him to deliver. Faulkner evidently wanted to set right the misinterpretation of his own work as pessimistic. But beyond that, he recognized that, as the first American novelist to receive the prize since the end of World War II, he had a special obligation to take the changed situation of the writer, and of man, into account.”
–Richard Ellmann
I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work–a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand where I am standing.
Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed–love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, and victories without hope and worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
Until he learns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
The Passion of New Eve Salon co-facilitated by Dr. E. Welby meets for two intensive sessions at the end of February and the first week of March.
For the New Year, gift yourself or a friend the opportunity to focus and learn. Our lives are full of noise and distractions; reading a book like Ulysses and participating in the Salon conversations allows a time of reflection. You are accompanied by fellow journeyers who are balancing the demands of the exterior world with the hunger of the inner world to be present, to be aware. Here is one route in.
I appreciate the perspective Zoe Williams presents here; but (of course, I am a literature nut) I disagree with her overall analysis. It is crucial that we understand the politics and economics of the times…these are complex systems and our ignorance does not serve us. I am frequently demanding of my resident economist to try to explain junk bonds again to me; but this time in under 2o minutes. But Williams proposes that because fiction is ‘made up’, it does not inform. I violently disagree. We run a terrible risk of living without perspective–of not understanding other cultures, people, value systems–if we chuck out fiction. If we stop reading fiction, we risk the danger of thinking our contemporary perspective is an absolute; that the struggle for greater equality(economic, racial, ethnic, gender)is hopeless, that the value system that confers power on the wealthiest is unchangeable. Fiction allows us to imagine other ways of being–and these other ways, other worlds other beings are not untrue–they are contained within pages but informed by lived experience.
Another response to Zoe: Do we really have to choose? Less social media, more reading…that make bring some balance to the whole game. Let me know what you think.
It’s something that they say a lot in publishing, apparently, that once you turn 40, you start reading biographies. I do remember in my 20s, someone nearing 40 saying, “When a novel says, ‘So-and-so walked into the room,’ I have this voice in my head shouting ‘So? They’re not real! The room isn’t real!'” I thought, what an incredibly weird, sad, unexpected, unattractive side of ageing, like getting cellulite on your nose. Sure enough, though, I’ve found my appetite for fiction has fallen off a cliff. It’s possible that this is just part of my inexorable crawl toward death. But there’s a topnote of guilt, which reminds me of that wartime poster: “To dress extravagantly in wartime is worse than bad form. It is unpatriotic.” When the news is so apocalyptic, and there is so much to understand, and a lot of it is quite basic (what’s the point of low interest rates again? How do you devalue a currency? Why are there so many earthquakes? Tell me one more time about tectonic plates; I promise this time I’ll listen … ), it feels more than frivolous to read about made-up people. It feels unpatriotic. Or, to put it another way, it is like watching the telly when you have homework.
There is a surge in popular economics books – if you look at the Penguin catalogue for next year, every second one is about money, how it works, how it doesn’t work and how soon it will end.
There is a surge of books about the changing world order: India Rising, from Faber, as of course it is, but also Keeping Up With the Germans. Its author, Philip Oltermann, finished it before the crisis, and before Angela Merkel fetched up at the centre of the eurozone pantomime. He describes the eerie experience of hearing economic commentators pose exactly his question, as a matter of urgency: how on earth can everybody keep up with the Germans? The book is not straightforward economics. “It’s a book about why English and German people sometimes get on and sometimes don’t. It’s a book that argues that, in order to understand the phenomenal success of the German economy over the past 50 years, we need to look beyond the cliche of robotic, machine-like ‘efficiency’ and understand why Germans are ultimately sentimental romantics, even when it comes to cars.”
And that, in a way, is why I feel as if I should be reading it. It’s reasonable, as an adult, to decide you don’t want to read a book about the German economy, because you probably wouldn’t understand it, whereas it seems unreasonable to watch a crisis unfold before your eyes, and know so little about it.
There are two questions looming over every conversation – how did we get into this mess? And who, in 10 or 20 or 30 years’ time, will have come out of it? I had a sudden snap of realisation about how prevalent those questions had become when I was flicking through a book called Running With the Kenyans; I misread it as “Running With the Keynsians”; my friend misread it as “Running with the Koreans”.
The key text for popular economics is John Lanchester‘s Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay. It’s sold 30,000 copies since it was published last year. (For comparison, Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman wrote an incredibly slim, readable volume called The Return of Depression Economics, and that’s sold 19,000 in three years – these are UK figures, by the way.) Lanchester wrote the book because he was researching the financial industry for a novel, Capital, which is out next year; and the intricacies of the way finance worked seemed a) so interesting and complex that they were effectively a character in their own right, and b) vitally, this was stuff nobody understood. “I felt, and still feel, that the gap between people who speak money and people who don’t is actually a democratic deficit. This is the only time I’ve ever felt that I have a citizenly duty to keep it up. I mean, only reactively, when I’m asked.” I personally am of the view that he should do a Whoops Roadshow, but that is between him and his citizenly duty – at some point you do start thinking, I should have understood this before circumstances made it alarming not to understand it.
Much of the territory of Whoops relates to financial instruments, CDOs and other toxic debt bundles. “Some of the people who didn’t understand them were the directors of major banks. That should be a joke, but isn’t.” That counts as a mitigating factor, for the layman – but the storm we’re living through now makes me realise how little I understood of any of the past 20 years, in terms of the economic foundation stones they were laying down. So to take, at random, the eurozone again: there were people objecting who weren’t just dyspeptic Tories. There were also leftwing Eurosceptics, Jack Straw, the late Peter Shore, predicting exactly, to the letter, what would happen to a single currency – that the interest rates would be determined by the strongest economies, but wouldn’t suit the weaker ones, which then wouldn’t be able to devalue and wouldn’t be able to leave. I didn’t really know why a low interest rate would suit a strong economy, and I didn’t understand the point of devaluation. I was too busy reading Martin bloody Amis. As if that’s going to help. Lanchester says, possibly by way of reassurance, “We’d all rather be in the back seat of the car, with our parents in the front, driving. But now we’ve woken up doing 90.” The problem with ignorance is twofold: you feel alienated and disempowered, and that’s quite anxious-making, but you also feel embarrassed by the limits of your understanding, so you back out of the conversation.
When you back out of a conversation at a macro-level, that’s how you wake up doing 90, with a government full of bankers and technocrats. I’m emphatically not saying, “We’re all going to be Italy in a minute,” because that’s the kind of scaremongering nonsense that you’d only start if you hadn’t just read (26 pages of) Akerlof and Shiller’s Animal Spirits. The alienation effect makes it necessary, much as it pains me to say it, to understand what the parents who were driving were actually thinking: so not only do we have a citizenly duty to understand Germany, economics, the new world order, science and climate, but we probably also have to read, if not Tony Blair’s autobiography, at least Gordon Brown’s and/or Alistair Darling’s.
But this isn’t just semi-sincere self-flagellation; there is also a problem with the modern novel and its continuing fear of saying anything useful, for fear of not sounding literary enough. Everyone expected Alan Hollinghurst to write the definitive book of our recent past, since that’s what he did for the 1980s, in The Line of Beauty. Instead, to use a technical publisher’s term, he “did an Atonement” – this is where you re-site your large themes in the past, where they are more attractive and less political. Hannah Griffiths, editorial director at Faber and Faber, explains that this is partly a pragmatic consideration: “You’d have to write a very ambitious contemporary novel, because they take so long to come out.”
Damian Barr is a writer and playwright who also runs literary salons in Shoreditch House, as a result of which he has read almost everything: “There is this false idea that fiction has no particular stance because it is made up, as a result of which it doesn’t have to be informed, and it doesn’t have to inform. I think we desperately need to be informed about our times, and our history, and our human condition, and at the moment, the novel is really only good for the latter. Of course, I only mean the ones worth reading.” Lanchester notes: “In general, the literary novel has turned slightly too far away from the things that press on people. It is an utterly bizarre place to have ended up, but if the subject of a novel is too interesting, that’s not literary enough.” I can remember the beginning of falling out of love with fiction, when it began to annoy me if the main character didn’t have a job or any visible means of support. Once that annoys you, you get annoyed by almost everything.
And if fiction is permeated by considerations – some practical, some literary, some pretentious, some reasonable, because long explanations of things are boring – that make it fight shy of big questions; even non-fiction shares some of this coyness. The Costa shortlist came out this week, and in the biography section, one (broadly) about the first world war, one (broadly) about the second, one biography of Charles Dickens and Patrick and Henry Cockburn’s Henry’s Demons: Living with Schizophrenia, a Father and Son’s Story. And that last is a fine book, but Cockburn’s area of expertise, won over a lifetime, is as a foreign correspondent. Yet when he writes a book about Iraq (Muqtada al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq), about things that would be quite useful to know, especially if we’re going to start attacking Iran, the mainstream acts as if it had never happened.
Of course, there’s a caveat, isn’t there? A novel that does take on big contemporary questions, even if it then hinges on an understanding of complex warfare, or politics, or industry, or finance, if it can do that and not be boring, not be full of what science fiction calls the “tell me, Professor” moments, that will be more use to you, probably, than any amount of explication delivered in factual, readable, lay terms. “If I’ve learnt anything real,” Griffiths concludes, “I’ve learnt it through fiction.”
And this point is made flesh, really, by John Lanchester, who illuminated all this nefarious financial jiggery-pokery – but Whoops was a side-dish or an amuse-bouche to the main project, Capital, a great monster of a novel, which does more than illuminate finance: it animates it; and that’s when you fully comprehend something, when you can see its face.
This article titled “Howard Jacobson attacks the dearth of ‘good readers'” was written by Charlotte Higgins, chief arts writer, for theguardian.com on Friday 24th August 2012 17.25 UTC
