South Downs, South England, snow; some sheep. (via my.opera.com)
Robert
Facfarlane doesn't live in the same world as the rest of us. His
world is better, probably. He's the kind of guy whose life consists
of looking out the window after a few hours of writing, noticing that
it's just snowed, and pulling on his boots to walk across the crisp
virgin whiteness with a dram of whiskey and a few owls
for company. This isn't me being poetic; this is the first chapter of
the book. Last time it
snowed I checked the bus schedule to see whether I would be late. The
people he meets are all folklorists or poets as well as fishermen or
sailors or farmers or just walkers. The people I meet mostly work 9-5
and don't like it very much. The places he goes are imbued with
mystery and magic and soul; the places I go are now mostly dingy backroads near Kings Cross.
The
delight of The Old Ways
is that Macfarlane shares this world view with you, for a few hours
at least. He is primarily a walker, of course, and not all of us have
a lot of time for walks in the country or holidays with our academic
friends in Gaza or our mountaineering friends in Tibet or our
fisherman friends in Orkney. But we can enjoy them vicariously.
Macfarlane, in places, writes a weird sort of travel writing.
Unlike
most travel writers, however, Macfarlane is not really interested in
describing locations or places per se. He is far more interested in
analysing the journey itself, in the effect of a new place on the
mind, in the palimpsests of history that leave their vague tracks
across the land. This is travel writing located somewhere between
love poetry and academia, closer to Nabokov's 'travel writing' of
America in Lolita
than Bill Bryson (disclaimer: I have never read a single word by Bill
Bryson). In Macfarlane's eyes, the world is permanent but also
weirdly inconstant. The walker has access to a whole range of levels
of experience at once: aesthetic bliss in nature, the crunch of fresh
snow beneath boots; the simple pleasures of greasy campstove bacon
after a thirty mile day, a night spent with ghosts in a neolithic
barrow; the slight resistance of the rudder as you learn how to steer
a boat, tacking across the wind; company, the fact that hiking is
about the only place where strangers acknowledge one another's
presence rather than icily gliding past one another, eyes fixed
ahead, like icebergs or ex-lovers; connection with the past,
connection with a friend; profound alienation; and, perhaps most of
all, the easy rhythm of an experienced walker's paces, free,
unencumbered, tramp tramp tramp towards the horizon.
The amazing thing is that a Cambridge academic can write a
non-polemic book about walking and folklore and Romantic poets and
that it can be so rhetorically effective and convincing. Macfarlane
gives the world a little bit of a glimmer, even as you tire of his
almost precious interests and pursuit of obscure, long dead poets.
There are other ghosts for us to follow.
As I sit here writing this, I am in the back of my parents' car, on
the M4, just west of Swindon. Arguably the least romantic or exciting
place in the world. But, post Macfarlane, or, with Macfarlane, I am
starting to see a little bit of joy. It's a dark, cold November
night, one of the first frosts of the winter, and we pass men in high-vis jackets spreading grit, slightly illuminated by our headlights,
and pass into a world where vague fog gives a dreamy quality to the
pricks of light that pass us by, and to the red dots than hang a half
mile in front of us, leading the way, and to the cat's eyes that mark
the road and keep us from going astray.
Paranoia is a
trendy mental state. Paranoid delusions have been recorded throughout
history, but the
form that they take is a remarkable mirror to contemporaneous
society. Feelings of persecution and conspiracy were, in the
sixteenth century, likely to be blamed on demonic possession or
witchcraft; in the twenty-first, they are more likely to be seen as
some kind of government conspiracy, or to feature plot-lines lifted
from The Truman Show
or The Matrix.
Reality dissolves into a complex, almost convincing facsimile;
unending webs of clues offer continual and provocative hints that
something is awry.
If
the forms of paranoid delusions are based on the cultural tropes
surrounding the sufferer, then it logically follows that by examining
the delusions one could seek to understand the larger culture. Such a
process has, for much of his career, been the goal of Thomas Pynchon.
His works tend to follow confused, isolated figures who traverse
landscapes fecund with hyper-signifying clues; often the realities of
his worlds will fragment, for a moment – glitches in the Matrix,
pauses where things don't quite make sense. Shadowy enemies pursue
manic protagonists, maybe. The uncertain ontological state of
Pynchon's world – is it reality or simulation, everyday 1999 or
computer generated prison? - infects the fiction itself on a sort of
meta level. We never know if the conspiracies actually exist; we
never know if Pynchon's stories contain a shred of realism. “For
there either was some Tristero beyond the appearance of the legacy of
America, or there was just America and if there was just America then
it seemed the only way she could continue, and manage to be at all
relevant to it, was an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle unto
some paranoia.” This is the situation for Oedipa Maas, the hero of
The Crying of Lot
49
(1965), and, in Pynchon's eyes, it may well be the situation of the
average American too.
Pynchon
views American culture as fundamentally paranoid. This dates back to
the hard-line Calvinism of the first Pilgrims (conspiracies have
deep roots). Puritan theology views the world as another revelation,
a coded message from God to man. Observation of natural phenomena can
therefore offer access to deeper truths. The poet Edward Taylor, for
example, observes a spider:
Hell's Spider gets
His
intrails Spun to whip Cords thus
And
wove to nets
and
sets.
To
tangle Adams race
In's
stratagems
To
their destructions ('Upon a Spider Catching a Fly', 1680-2)
Or,
more briefly: a spider catching a fly is like Satan tempting humanity
into sin. Or, briefer still: the world is out to get you.
Puritanism's fairly harsh stance on predetermination – that
everyone, pretty much, will be damned, and even if you're not, you
can't know it – and the doctrine of Original Sin – everyone
carries the burden of an earlier fall from God's grace – foster a
fairly negative attitude. Everything in the world is a symbol of
man's fall and imminent damnation.
To
gloss quickly over three-hundred or so years of history, not much has
changed. National traumas (JFK's assassination, Pearl Harbour) spawn
fairly mainstream conspiracy
theories; there are theories about a bunch of really innocuous
seeming stuff like the Federal Reserve and water fluoridation.
Conspiracy theories have even gained mainstream political
recognition: see the embarrassing débâcle about Barack Obama's
birth certificate. The '90s saw the enormous popularity of The
X-Files,
a show where basically every known conspiracy was realised on screen,
and where UFO-loving crackpot Agent Fox Mulder is proved correct at
every turn, in small towns like yours all across America. Death in
the woods? 'It's probably aliens,' speculates Mulder, and it is.
Death in an office building? 'It's probably a rogue Central Operating
System,' guesses Mulder, and he's right again. The show, however, is
careful to prevent Mulder from ever finding the definitive proof he
needs to go public. Instead, it 'proves' it to the viewer, by showing
on-screen the paranormal elements, and then having hazy
pseudo-bureaucrats cover it up. The genius of the show was in weaving
the variably-crazy paranormal/UFO/evil computer/ghost/monster
delusions into the larger tapestry of governmental conspiracy. After
all, the idea that your own government might be against you is surely
scarier and more plausible than the fear of rogue Neanderthals.
This is what life was like in the '90s: carefree fun, not even worrying about all the calories in those 'shakes. (source: bilmoore.com)
It
is against this backdrop that Bleeding
Edge,
Pynchon's most recent novel, opens. Maxine Tornow, mother-of-two and
fraud investigator, beings to poke around some dodgy start ups in New
York. The year is 2001; the first dotcom bubble has just burst, and
hasn't yet reinflated. Mark Zuckerburg is just about to start at
Harvard, and will later go on to inspire a movie staring Jesse
Eisenberg. Seinfeld
has been off the air for three years, although Friends
is still going strong. Predictably – inevitably, fatedly – Maxine
starts to uncover hints of a large scale X-Files-style governmental conspiracy. There are dodgy payments and time-travelling
assassins, glimpses of the full vast bureaucracy of the
military-industrial complex in full swing. The whole thing is
enjoyable, Pynchonian, fairly light-hearted, swathed in '90s
nostalgia and exquisite references (name me one other major work of
literature that features jokes about Pokémon).
And
then, about two-thirds of the way through the novel, on the 9th
of September 2001, American Airlines Flight 11 and American Airlines
Flight 175 are hijacked and flown into the World Trade Centre.
Bleeding Edge
is so grounded in 2001, and 9/11 so seared onto our collective
memory, that there's no way you don't see it coming. And yet, you
never expect 9/11 to happen during the novel's narrative. Like the
conspiracies of V.
or The Crying of
Lot 49
or Gravity's
Rainbow,
you didn't expect payoff, just paranoia.
This
is the genius of Pynchon's new book then: that the paranoia finally
gets made real. The shocking thing is that no one really expects it
to happen; part of being paranoid, after all, relies on the
conspiracy remaining shadowy, hidden, obscure. The moment Pynchon
stages in Bleeding
Edge
feels like a recapitulation of classic Puritan lapsarian theology,
made relevant for the computer age. Before 9/11 – before 'The Fall'
– the novel is vibrant and exuberant, the conspiracies threatening,
sure, but more interesting and quirky than terrifying. The internet
is an anarchic playground, the tech sector filled with ideologues and
hackers, open-sourcers who promote knowledge and experimentation. New
York is still a city: Giuliani hasn't yet managed to gentrify and
yuppify and sanitise the whole of Manhattan.
But
all of these innocences are being eroded. Urban gentrification, the
corporatisation and monetisation of the internet, the establishment
of cyber-spying and intelligence gathering: all act to attack the
Edenic idyll of 'Silicon Alley' – or, more broadly, of the '90s
culture where The
X-Files
existed, where conspiracies were about alien cover ups and monsters
who ate livers. The erosion had already started, but 9/11 is the
singularity that marks the transition, the gunshot the marks the
death-knell of an already terminal patient.
Soon
after the attack, paranoia starts up again. There are whisperings
about Jewish involvement, pan-Islamic involvement, military
involvement. There are inconclusive evidences that the government
staged, or knew about, or something, the attacks. Pynchon doesn't
side with the 9/11 conspiracists, and refuses to validate any of the
various theories in the novel. In a sense, 9/11 is, for New York,
beyond conspiracy; the comfort provided intellectually or emotionally
by the coherent, certain knowledge of the conspiracy world view is
scant comfort if your home is under attack.
But
in a more figurative sense, paranoia is the right response to the
post-9/11 world. There is an
episode of The
Simpsons,
also from the late '90s, where Bart is proscribed a drug called
Focusyn. A side effect of this drug is that Bart becomes increasingly
paranoid, and eventually convinced that he is being spied on by Major
League Baseball. Obvious he seems crazy; when he steals a tank, he
seems crazier. Then Bart shoots down the actually MLB spying
satellite, and it turns out his paranoia was true. In 1999, the
concept is pretty funny, and faintly absurd. In 2013, the idea of
being spied on to this degree by corporations is commonplace;
furthermore, the government are doing it too. It's the path from this
absurd late '90s paranoia to its actualisation ten years later that
Pynchon follows in Bleeding
Edge;
he tells a Fall narrative where humanity falls not because it gains
more knowledge, but because it becomes more ignorant, more in the
dark.
I've
been reading quite a lot of Zadie Smith recently. I read her latest
novel, NW.
I read some short fiction that appeared in the New Yorker: one
some kind of techno-dystopia,
that, to be honest, was pretty bad; the other about an illegal immigrant in North London that was ok but not great. I read an interview she did with London's Evening Standard
where she came across really well and it turned out she likes
Game of Thrones. I read some of her essays and journalism: an interview with Jay Z
(note: his name is now unhyphenated) and an essay on joy, both of which were excellent. I'm still not convinced that, as a
fiction writer, she's one of the greats, although she definitely has a lot of
talent. But there is something about her and her writing that I find
very compelling, and I've been trying to assess what exactly it is.
1)
She writes about Britain.
I feel small and parochial saying this, but I think that, for me, her
writing about stuff in Britain is actually appealing. There's a
pleasurable squirm of recognition and familiarity from scenes set in
places you know, or places that are really like places you know (just like I felt watching the London bits of Fast and Furious 6). There's an ease of access, culturally, a sensitivity to
class and race barriers that I'm already pretty familiar with. So
there's that. Also, I find it refreshing to be reading novelists who
aren't writing brazenly and blandly about America. Don't get me
wrong, I love America, I'm possibly the most Americaphilic person I
know who isn't actually American. But a stream of modern (hyper-)realist novels about America can get tedious. It isn't the
geography, it's the genre. They want to be the next Great American
Novel, and, I think that genre's pretty desiccated nowadays like
Owens Lake, sucked dry from years over overuse. (A brief aside on Jonathan Franzen's The
Corrections,
that I'm currently nearing the end of a struggle through: this is a
book so tediously in this Great American Novel tradition that,
despite being only ten years old, it feels like it's seventy, to the
point where all the references to contemporary technologies like cell
phones or laptops or the internet feel weirdly anachronistic. It's a
bit like my dad telling me that he owned a smart phone in the '70s. I
wouldn't believe him, and I still wouldn't trust him to use it properly.) There's something fresh about Smith's attempts to produce
modern, British novels.
A picture of the Great American Novel.
2)
Zadie Smith is genuinely beautiful.
As far as I can tell, never having met her. Again, I feel pretty bad
saying this, because it seems like a fairly sexist remark, and
potentially not something that I'd say about a male author, or should
want to say about an author of any sex. But writers tend to
be so relentless depressing looking, saggy and unfashionable and
bespectacled, or nerdy and neurotic, or pasty from years of
library-light. Her beauty gives Smith an edge; it makes her seem
glamorous and cool in a way very few authors actually can. And it
lets her do it effortlessly, without having to try hard to shock or
brag like a failed punk band. Her coolness is important, because it
elevates her cultural status beyond that of a literary author. ‘My
sister tells me I’m in the Evening
Standard every
other week. My fame seems not to require my presence,’
she said to the Standard. It's sad that we live in a society where
being beautiful makes you seem cooler, especially because, in so many
other ways, Zadie Smith seems to be quite cool anyway. But it is an
advantage she has that propels her out of the narrow literary-fiction
niche into a more culturally relevant area, that she perhaps shares
more with artists like Vampire Weekend or Kanye West (although, Smith
is nowhere near Kanye West, who may be the best current pop-cultural
expression of consumer capitalism both within his songs and sort of
mimetically in his public life) rather than ugly old Will Self or
similar.
3)
Zadie Smith is cool.
I know this is essentially the previous point, but it should be
stressed that Zadie Smith seems actually cool. By which I mean,
beyond the fact that she's likeable seeming and beautiful, that she
is aware of current pop culture in a way that few other authors seem
to be. She likes hip-hop and Game
of Thrones;
she references Friends
and The
Wire
(in NW)
in a been-there sort of a way. She's aware of the need to be
pop-culturally sensitive, rather than literarily exclusive (I know
this isn't a very fair binary, but, whatever). She says of Game
of Thrones:
'Literary
novelists would do well to learn to plot from these people.’
And she's totally right. If only more writers could plot. (Although,
also, Game
of Thrones,
and George R.R. Martin in particular, could learn a lot from literary
novelists, especially with regards to economy and actually finishing
stories rather than rambling aimlessly for thousands of pages in a
constant peripatetic digression that will only end with the death of
the author and the disappointment of the fans. But this is a rant for
another article.) Even more astute than this awareness is her
awareness that she is, in fact, a little bit out of touch. That she
is one generation behind of today's young people stuff. She writes
'Meanwhile,
back in the rank and file, you still hear the old cry go up: Hip-hop
is dead! Which really means that our version of it (the one we knew
in our youth) has passed. But nothing could be duller than a ’90s
hip-hop bore.' I think that middle sentence, that parenthesis, contains so much wisdom.
How Game of Thrones became zeitgeisty, I will never know. Just to be clear, Joffrey is my favourite character. (from tgdaily.com)
4)
Zadie Smith writes about women.
As I was reading NW,
my mum remarked to me 'I'm surprised you're reading that Zadie Smith.'
'Why?' I asked. 'Isn't she one of those women's writers?' In a way
(not the one my mum intended), she was right. Smith does write about
women, far better than most people I have read. But she isn't a
'women's writer' in the way my mum used the phrase, a soppy Mills &
Boonish romance-spewer. Nor is she a women's writer in that her
novelistic purpose seems to be exclusively to rectify patriarchal
literature's lack of women, lack of address of women's issues, and
mannish dominance. She's just a novelist who writes about women as
part of what she writes about, because, obviously, women form a large
and fascinating part of the social world about which people write. As
soon as you start thinking about it, it's remarkable how many
otherwise great authors fail at this simple hurdle.
Here's a picture of Zadie Smith I found on someone's Flickr (from: flickr.com/)
5)
Zadie Smith is a post-David Foster Wallace author without all that
Harold-Bloomian anxiety-of-influence bullshit. By
which I mean that she has read DFW and liked it and internalised it
(all my editions of DFW have a great quote from her on the front: 'A
visionary, a craftsman, a comedian...He's so modern he's in a
different time-space continuum from the rest of us. Goddamn him.')
but isn't in his thrall. To again compare her favourably to Jonathan
Franzen (poor guy), she manages not to crib a bunch of Wallace's
preferred poetics (especially medical, psychological, pharmaceutical
jargon) or regurgitate his subjects. It's clear that she has other
masters (most obviously E.M. Forster). She also seems, interestingly,
to have avoided Wallace's PR problems. Indeed, this whole piece is essentially about how, in stark contrast
to DFW, she seems really likeable and comfortably part of the world,
rather than existing best as a series of spectacular verbal
constructions. (Here are a bunch of videos featuring Smith and
Wallace [and Franzen!] speaking together at some event. I like the
one where Wallace talks about watching the 2006 World Cup.) Which I guess is sort of why she's sort of compelling to me.
Wallace, Franzen, Smith, others hanging out in Italy. (from leconversazioni.it)
I
first encountered David Foster Wallace (DFW) shortly after Roger
Federer won his 17th
Grand Slam title at Wimbledon on the 8th
of July 2012. One of my Facebook acquaintance posted a link to an article DFW wrote on the subject of Roger Federer back in 2006 (or,
in Federer's more sublime terms, 9 Grand Slams previously). I was,
and am, an absolute sucker for Federer, a devoted follower, an
acolyte, perhaps, in different circumstances, a groupie. He is, I
think, inarguably, empirically, one of the very few genuine geniuses
to have been alive during my own lifetime. Little did I know, when I
clicked the link on that fateful July day, that I would discover not
just a pleasant victory hymn once more lionising a well-acknowledged
legend, but an absolutely astounding essay, the start of a thread
that has lead me, belatedly, to the appreciation of one of the other
very few genuine geniuses I have shared this earth with.
One
of the nicer things I can say about DFW is that he's one of those
people you read sometimes who you desperately want to imitate. I
think of the part in The
Incredibles
when Mr Incredible is followed by a kid who wants to be his sidekick,
even though he has no superpowers. Realistically, if I could be DFW's
sidekick, I would be very happy. Because this seems unlikely, I've
mostly ended up semi-consciously speaking, writing, thinking a little
more like him. I've started to overuse w/r/t and w/ rather than with
respect to and with respectively. I've started to adopt all kinds of
extra equivocators in my prose, extra subclauses, extra information,
extra self-effacement, self-diagnosis, self-assessment; extra mixing
of high- and low- brow culture (although I think this
interest/addiction came earlier; it was certainly fed significantly
by The Simpsons);
extra brackets. This
actually-quite-interesting-but-a-little-self-contradictory article
points out DFW's “attempts
to ward off criticism by embedding all possible criticisms within the
writing itself.” I definitely now try to do this, reminding myself
of a character in one of DFW's own stories who tries to bluff his psychiatrist by anticipating and self-diagnosing his own
neuroses. In
the end, he (the character) outwits his psychiatrist, because he (the
character again) is such a grotesquely shallow, manipulative shiny
surface of a person that his facsimile self-exposition is all that
can be analysed about his character; the psychiatrist, of course,
doesn't realise that. Not just does he anticipate criticisms by
explicitly stating them in his prose; the plot here seems to
encapsulate the paradox within itself: the false mirage surface of
the character resists analysis because it offers self-analysis which
is in itself a shimmer on the horizon, precluding the very
possibility of any real
analysis, but totally revealing that it is aware that said real
analysis is not and never could be a real possibility. Fata
morgana
everywhere; it gets in your eyes while you read. (Obviously, I
haven't quite reached this level of meta-static all-encompassing
pseudo-self-revelation, but a boy can dream; obviously, I am enacting
a rehearsal of the embedding of all possible criticisms within the
writing itself right now; obviously, at the moment it is a little
crude.)
Which
all sounds horribly postmodern and complicated and unfun. Perhaps the
greatest achievement of DFW's anticipation of future critcisms is
that it makes allowance for the insidious but unavoidable problems
associated with postmodernism – that if the world, or at least the
work of art, is all surface, and surfaces are indistinguishable or
shallow or terrifying, what's the point of anything? D.T. Max's essay on DFW's biography (later expanded into the well-titled book Every
Love Story is a Ghost Story,
released last year) takes this as the jumping point for its central
argument w/r/t/ DFW: that he managed to escape from the postmodernist
mire, with a new sort of meta-sincerity. Max puts it a lot better
than I do.
The
whole point doesn't seem very controversial, to be honest. All you
have to do is read the aforementioned and mind-blowing essay on Roger
Federer. The DFW classics are all present, but the tone is not of
postmodern ironic jest, but of vast admiration and sincere fandom and
appreciation, the very tone that I hope to be striking right now.
Unfortunately,
I think, after a few months of gestation, that I didn't quite get the
right Federer-essay-tone. Rather, what I have written seems gushing,
adolescent, pseudo-academic. Somehow, DFW seems to inspire it. His
flexible, loquacious, elongated, subtly modulating, colloquial,
conversational, equivocal tone inspires loyalty. But, more than that,
it inspires fondness, an almost personal appreciation for DFW. He
seems like your friend. But he seems like so much more than that, so
impossible to pin down. He seems like a really really smart guy, a
kind of hyper-literate polymathic role-model. He seems, most of all,
kinda nice. As far as I can tell from his biography, this isn't
strictly true. At the very least, he was a difficult man to live
with.
This
was going to be an article about my puppyish DFW enthusiasm, but,
after failing to finish it, it has transformed, several months
later, into something a little different. I haven't been reading any
of Dave's work in a while; what I have been doing, however, is
watching videos of him on youtube. The experience is alarming, it's
distancing, it's iconoclastic. Dave's aura may not be able to stand
being filmed; his groovy-guidance-councillor shtick – ironically,
best presented in his videoed commencement address shit, which is
ripe for Facebook quotation – just doesn't stick when you can watch
him actually speak. His nauseating anxiety, his greasy desire to be
liked, his lofty distance, they all come across in interview. What
if, in an age of internet access, people who write words – and who
have a lot of control over the words they write and how they are
presented – can't control their self-presentation? What if the
special relationship between author and reader is violated? (What if
you read about said author in gossip columns?) Since most everyone
I've read for years has been dead for decades, this whole minefield
is one I've only come to recently, and my relationships with any
contemporary authors are being actively mediated by my now
university-over-educated DFW-style hyper-self-conscious brain, and
I'm starting to sort of actively repulse from them, even as I
continue to be actively seduced by the Internet's promise of more and
more information, and end up reading shitty interviews with Ned
Beauman in the Oxford student newspaper by mistake at 2am on a
weeknight.
Most
professions in the public eye seem to have developed capable PR. If
actors, musicians, and presidents can seem
funny and human and humble through online media, why do authors
struggle? I should equivocate a little here: I don't follow all
authors at all times to make this statement comprehensive: rather,
some authors I have followed, or tried to follow, notably David
Mitchell, Ned Beauman, Michael Chabon, Zadie Smith, Lila Azam
Zanganeh, have very limited online presence. When they do appear, the
medium is either hyper-controlled, like Smith's occasionally and
often very goodessays, or kinda lame. Never is there the
sense of honesty, of glimpsing the real person behind the mask of
publicity, that the best celebrities can offer. They want to make you
believe that they're normal people just like the rest of us;
sometimes they succeed, sometimes they seem to be trying too hard. For some reason today's literary authors don't seem
that interested in that. They want to keep their distance. They only
want to interact through their words, they only want to monologue at
you.
I
wonder if this is just a missed opportunity, an example of a fairly
technophobic & PR-suspicious part of today's media landscape
failing dismally to grasp new potential. Or if it reveals something a
little deeper, some kind of compulsive solipsism – probably the
case for Dave. Or, maybe a little more worryingly, if it's part of a
kind of elitism. Intellectuals are above the Internet. The Internet,
with its tweets and youtube self-parody videos and AMAs, is pop
cultural; literary writers are high cultural. The place of the
literary artefact is in the library, not on imgur, being mindlessly
upvoted amidst dozens of gifs of cats.
This
thought first crossed my head a few days ago, when I went to see the
poet Geoffrey Hill speak in the lofty environs the Oxford
University's exam schools. Hill at his best is capable of imbuing his
poetry with a vast and deeply affecting empathy.
Hill as a public speaker is curiously old-school (to be fair to him,
he is now in his 80s, and probably isn't all that online). He speaks
with a booming, received-pronunciation voice, with occasionally
Worcestershire slippages. He emphasises raspingly; he often repeats
important phrases. He sounds a bit like a BBC radio announcer from
the mid-30s crossed with a cultist prophet and a thespian. He has a
Gandalf-beard. One thing he said has stuck in my head. Talking about
Beckett writing about Joyce (a fairly high-brow legacy), he said (I
paraphrase) 'there is a kind of arrogance to Beckett's essay that I
find pleasing in comparison with the mewling populism of contemporary
critics.' I found this strange. Should poets and critics and
novelists and commentators be arrogant? Are today's critics populist?
My own problem with them is that they aren't populist enough, for the
most part. They are happy with a small intellectual/academic niche,
and in-field respect. Anyone must be arrogant to some extent, I
think, to assert their opinions on the public, but not in Beckett's
way, with long untranslated passages of Italian citation (the
feature Hill approved of).
All
of which brings us back to Dave. DFW was certainly, in some ways,
arrogant; he was also an insecure mess. He was, self-proclaimedly, a
kind of snob, a grammar-nazi, unafraid of writing essays about modern
critical theory, and applying the same theories to essays about pop
culture; unafraid of writing long and difficult novels. At one level,
he is a good model for a combination of intellectualism and populism,
maybe one of the best the literary world has produced. And yet, at
the same time, he's an awful example to follow, alienating and
personally unpleasant, distanced from the positive interpersonality
of modern popular culture. I came to Dave through the Internet, I
researched him through the Internet, and I fell in love with him
through the Internet; and yet this was all, inevitably, tragically,
done without any of Dave's own involvement. He wrote the words; other
people, fans and afficionados, spread them for him. There's potential
there, someone just needs to figure out how to use it.
I fell out of
love with Dave through the Internet too.
***
DFW
apparently had a tattoo of his first love's name – Mary – on his
arm, and when they broke up he had the name crossed out, and when he
met his second love, he appended a footnote, further down his arm,
and the footnote had the name of his second love.
I
find it amusing that The
Teleportation Accident
nestled on this year's Booker longlist with Hilary Mantel's Bring Up The Bodies.
Mantel, of course, eventually won the prize with an unashamedly Tudor
novel, emphasising the importance of historical fictions in the current 'zeitgeist' – especially those which make a claim to
fidelity and accuracy. I'm thinking here not just of Mantel, but
everything from the ludicrous Downton
Abbey
to the glorious Mad
Men,
from Phillipa Gregory's The
Other Boleyn Girl
(historical romance endorsed by my own mother) to the Assassin's
Creed
video game series. And this is not even to mention the various
retro-isms that periodically wash over pop music and high street
fashion. History is in.
Beauman's
second novel is itself a historical one, of a sort. The plot flits
around interwar Berlin, Paris and Los Angeles, and demonstrates a
dizzying amount of research and detail. But research and detail do not make a convincing history. The Teleportation
Accident is
not trying to recreate history: it is trying to demolish it.
The novel concerns itself with the impossibilities of historical
fiction. Partly this decision is logical, epistemological even:
stories are not really the best way to preserve, to archive, to
recreate. A historical novel is just as much an accurate
representation of the past as a theme park.
I
suspect that Beauman also has an aesthetic agenda here, a disregard
for the current vogue for historical realism, and for realism in
general. And I tend to agree with him: I find something very kitsch,
and very dissatisfying in the Downton-type
of history. It's a stage dressing, not an insight. Characters in this
kind of historical fiction still think
like 21st
century people, however they think.
Beauman's
characters, of course, think like 21st
century people, to they extent that they think at all. They are, to a
great extent, surfaces, archetypes, bits from other novels. Beauman's
recreation of history is far more reliant on novels from history than
history itself. He produces the kind of historical novel you get if
you try and conceive of history through literature: shifting,
parodic, genre-aware, and, above all, fun as hell.
People in Downton Abbey doing their thing, whatever that is.
This
use of other writers' works as props (in both sense of the word) has
its downside, though. It's really the only major criticism I can
offer of the novel, which is otherwise fantastic. Beauman is
especially good at plotting, by which I mean not crafting rip-roaring
adventures, but something rather more technical. He is great at
reintroducing and recombining all of the plot elements (scenes, objects, minor characters, books; MacGuffins generally) in
ingenious ways. It gives what could seem messy and overstuffed an air
of economy and purpose. The tightness
with
which he writes is hugely admirable, joyously ecstatic, and completely self-aware, a remark about the falsity of narrative tightness.
But
back to my criticism, which is, unfortunately, nagging and banal.
Beauman's hyper-inter-textuality (sorry) leaves him a little
stranded, a little identity-less. Reviewers seem to be incapable of
writing about The
Teleportation Accident
without referring to who they think Beauman's influences are, coming
up with a vast array of authors who have been studied, cribbed and
alluded to. And Ned himself, author of The
Teleportation Accident,
is left, to use a grotesque cliché, without a voice of his own. I'm
not really sure what this means; I think it's something to do with
tone. I am convinced that great literature, the really good stuff,
marks itself as unique, as the product of this
particular author, this
particular
style, when you read it. I am being prescriptive and limited of course,
but, I like to think, not completely wrong. Beauman isn't quite
there yet, hasn't yet found a way to forge a vast collage of writers
and sentences and styles and facts and details and history and life into a cohesive artwork. Undoubtedly, not having done so
is the point, and it's terribly and grossly New-Critic-y of me to
suggest otherwise. And it is. But I don't think the two are
irreconcilable; a cohesive collage, a themed scrapyard, if you will,
is an achievable goal.
