Literary Blog

Table of Contents Nabokov’s lively objects ...... 2 Shoshana Zuboff ‘s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism...... 5 Camus’ Notebooks ...... 10 Graham Greene’s novels ...... 13 Carson McCullers: ‘Untitled Piece’ ...... 16 Piketty’s Capital and Ideology ...... 17 Rezzori’s Abel and Cain ...... 21 Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason...... 24 Lucy Ellmann Ducks, Newburyport ...... 26 Zola’s Sin of Abbe Mouret...... 31 Zadie Smith’s essays Feel Free ...... 31 Zola’s Pot-Bouille and Abbe Mouret’s Sin ...... 33 Zola’s Eugene Rougon, The Kill, Money and The Conquest of Plassans. I ...... 34 Zola’s The Bright Side of Life ...... 34 Wodehouse’s What Ho, Jeeves and Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway ...... 35 Keswick Theatre by the Lake production of Alan Bennett’s Single Spies ...... 36 Danny Leigh in Saturday’s Guardian bemoans the lack of working class actors, ...... 37 Gaddis’ The Recognitions ...... 38 Powell in The Military Philosophers...... 39 Re-reading Powell’s Dance...... 39 Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last ...... 40 Penelope Fitzgerald Innocence ...... 41 Abandon Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion ...... 41 Barnes’ Nightwood...... 41 Mannheim’s translation of Celine’s Death on Credit...... 41 Susie Dent in the i last week notes the accidental aspects of the English language – malapropisms ...... 41 Chester Himes Lonely Crusade i ...... 42 Iris Murdoch’s Bruno’s Dream and start her The Philosopher’s Pupil ...... 42 Solzhenitsin’s November 1916 ...... 42 Kelman’s new collection of short stories...... 42 Linz. I walk to Shifter’s House ...... 43 The enormous American Library edition of Mann’s Joseph...... 43 Franny and Zooey ...... 43 Thirty years after my first reading of Mann’s Dr Faustus ...... 44 Stegner’s All the Pretty Things ...... 44 Beckett’s trilogy ...... 45 I finish The Man without Qualities ...... 45 I get Tessa Hedley’s short story collection Bad Dreams ...... 45 Lethem’s The Blot, ...... 46 Bellow’s Collected Essays and Journalism ...... 46 I Download from Lancashire Libraries ebooks Elizabeth Bowen’s A world of Love...... 48 Eliot: Poet-Phenomenologist ...... 48 Re-read Sartre’s Iron in the Soul...... 50 Read a selection of Gramsci made in the Forgac’s edition...... 51 Short notes made when reading Proust. How sociological he is!...... 51 Sodom and Gomorrah cod psychology ...... 51 Richard Ford’s collection A Multitude of Sins...... 52 Re-read Solzhenitzen’s First Circle ...... 52

Nabokov’s lively objects After a time Nabokov’s supercilious tone wearied me and in the later novels, especially Ada the tone is pretty egotistical. The early novels, though, are marked by a quirky stylistic trope of animated objects which Nabokov used intriguingly in order to confront the reader’s experience of literary metaphor. Essentially, Nabokov pursues an original, highly individualistic, phenomenology of objects that makes the reader re-vision the world as a result of this defamiliarization.

In Nabokov’s first novel, Mary, this characteristic is not much in evidence, but in the majority of Nabokov’s novels up to The Gift (in which it reaches its apogee, a novel itself much centred on a number of questions of style and language) and The real Life of Sebastian Knight, and in the short stories of this period, destabilizing objects is a regular concern. Nabokov’s essay ‘Man and Things’ (1928) sets out his thinking on this topic. In it he takes a kind of Berkeleyan viewpoint in which it is not the object itself that exists for the viewer but only what our perception makes of it. ‘A thing, a thing made by someone, does not exist in itself’ (69) he states, but is ‘dependent upon who looks on it’. Things thus ‘bring to mind’ images which are the material of thought, of representation (he regularly criticized James Joyce for his over- estimation of the verbal-linguistic in the constitution of human thought or experience). Nabokov sees us as ‘lending things our feelings’ – which he calls ‘anthropomorphic ardour’ (72). He even goes as far to argue that things die when we ‘neglect’ them, and we often mourn them when we have done so (73).

In Invitation to a Beheading the central character Cincinnatus is shown to be surrounded by a ‘false logic of things’, chimera, objects that are animated by others, by the agents of the state who are working to subjectify him. In his experience we see him feeling a ‘general instability, …a certain flaw in all visible matter’, even if the ‘objects still observed an outward propriety’ (172). In this Orwellian and Kafkaesque world there is a moral concern to address the political status of objects and to confront the issue of who or what is doing the primary seeing and defining along with the phenomenological status of everyday objects.

This concern is also prominent is many of the interviews and essays Nabokov made concerned with questions of his style. In his fragment-essays ‘The creative writer’ and ‘style’ (both circa. 1941) he shows a concern to ‘dislocate the given world’ (189), to make the reader see the ‘whatness of things’ (187), to ‘move objects from their usual series’ (198), and to bring things out of the domain of habitual modes of experience (188) (in this he shows an affinity for Proust). This concern is particularly marked in Look at the Harlequins with its performative ‘look’ in its title and where the aim is ‘to make iniquity absurd’ (197).

But Nabokov consciously rejected the type of politically-committed literature of writers like Sartre and Camus, the Soviet novelist-ideologues of the Stalinist era such as Sholokhov, or even novelists like Pasternak who were critical of the regime. Mostly, when objects crop up in his novels they do so apolitically, defamiliarizing, to ‘reveal the most elementary things in their unique lustre’ (Think, Write, Speak 132). The aim is to redefine domestic objects in their particularity, to give them a kind of agency, like the mirror ‘that had plenty of work to do’ in Laughter in the Dark (37). In Despair, Nabokov’s Doestoyevskian novel about a Hermann Hermann and his double, Hermann laments the ‘sick mirror’ he has created of himself, the mirror representing an outside, perhaps narcissistic, view of himself that he has fallen for when he stumbles on his double. Hermann believes that having a double might allow him to escape the confines of the self he has created, that by killing his live reflection he can achieve freedom, to re-imagine himself. Hermann has an ‘eye to eye monologue’ with his double, but he is put into a critical light when Nabokov shows that in seeing just the outside of things, people as much and as like objects, Hermann is on a faltering path of redundant defamiliarization:

I cannot recollect now if the ‘monologue’ was a slip or a joke. The thing is typed out on good, eggshell blue notepaper with a frigate for watermark: but it is now sadly creased and soiled at the corners; vague imprints of his fingers, perhaps. Thus it would seem that I were the receiver – not the sender. (45) Hermann is attempting to create a world of dead things that lack their own animation. It is also, in writing, what Nabokov sees as going on in the ‘cooperatives of words’ in tired metaphors or, historically, the way objects from earlier periods become obsolescent because the generation that animated them has dissipated (338).

The Gift serves as the apogee of Nabokov’s concern with reanimating things. In fact, the ‘Gift’ in the novel is the ability ‘to go beyond the surface of things’ (326). This is contrasted to the positivist scientific idea of objects, be they human, social or natural. In this novel Nabokov directly criticises cold German systematizing philosophical materialists like Feuerbach and Hegel. Fyodor, the protagonist artist sees ‘things like words as [having] their cases’ but commonly-understood dictionary-syntactical confinement of meaning ‘must be displaced’ (236-7) by a poetical imagination built upon ‘chance and emotion’ (198).

At one point around half-way through the novel, there is a sudden shift in the syntax and style (approximately 173 of the Penguin edition) when Nabokov’s metaphors and his characterization of objects becomes somewhat tired, predictable, conventional – a blond woman is described woodenly as ‘buxom’ and ‘whose soul was more like that of a replica of her apartment’ (186). A little further on, Herzen (whom Nabokov associates with Russian revolutionary materialists) is described as a writer producing ‘false glib glitter’ (198). And the café in which Fyodor meets Zina is described in a kind of dead prose as ‘an empty little café where the counter was painted in indigo colour and where dark blue gnomelike (the dull imprecise simile here underlined by merging with its marker – ‘like’) lamps…’. Such prose contrasts with the earlier part of the novel in which a sustained defamiliarization of the object world is evident. In particular, Nabokov sees natural phenomena, such as ‘the bent shadow of a poplar sitting there’ (51); a ‘young chestnut tree [is] unable to walk alone’ (57) and ‘dun birches…stood around blankly with all their attention turned inside themselves’. This latter instance continues to note ‘a little man was tossing a stick into the water at the request of his dog’ (45); and rain ‘loses the ability to make any sound’ (75).

Early on in Despair Hermann Hermann recounts the walk he took that led him to meet his doppelganger, Felix:

I trod upon soft sticky soil: dandelions trembled in the wind and a shoe with a hole in it was basking in the sunshine under a fence. (3) The reader is struck by this shoe, abandoned, an object which has lost its pair and its ‘use-value’ but is still seen as being alive, animated by the verb ‘basking’. The reader is, simultaneously, aware of the subtle contrast in the metaphoric language by the more conventional attribution of ‘trembling’ to a plant like a dandelion eddying in the breeze. This is juxtaposition in Nabokov’s earlier work of conventional and animated metaphors is a regular one. It is Nabokov’s way of disturbing the reader’s literary sensibilities, to make them experience the ‘Gift’ of undermining cliched writing passing itself off as literature. In The Real Life of Sebastian Knight this occurs regularly, thus we find ‘letters resent being unfolded’ (34), the author is described as ‘budding’ (46). Bookshelves are ‘densely peopled’ which seems conventional, in contrast to the following sentence in which a writing desk ‘looked sullen and distant’ (30). A reflection is seen, commonly, as ‘live’ but is quickly followed with the attribution of a window as being ‘sick’ (51)

That shoe basking and yet useless in the human world seems to be part-way back to returning to nature, which means in Nabokov’s world to have lost its conventional meaning, that it can now only appeal to us to re-view it, reexperience its thingliness before it is lost to us. The idea of ‘thingliness’ reminds me of Derrida’s articles on Van Gogh’s boots and what Heidegger made of them in his ‘Origin of the work of Art’. Derrida, like Nabokov, was concerned with how Van Gogh’s boots were non- functioning, and, as the shoe in Despair is subject to the novelist’s revisioning, revivifying, so in Van Gogh the boots become reviewed, become the (a) ‘subject’ in painting (301). Derrida partly is concerned with literary comparisons to the painterly, suggesting that Van Gogh’s boots have a figurative value comparable to metonymy or synecdoche (302). But his main concern is how things are ‘brought into the nameable’ (306) in painting, literature, in the artistic generation of cultural value.

Things like boots become nameable when they are disturbed from their (back)ground, related in the Aristotelian concept of an originary state hypokeimenon (305). In paintings like Van Gogh’s boots this revisioning process occurs or, in literature like Nabokov’s there is a detaching and estrangement of the objects of the natural world or shoes and other domestic(ated) objects. Nabokov’s Gift, like Van Gogh’s, is to bring objects out of their expected gaze, their ground, and into revision- ing. Derrida categorizes this more generally as disturbing objects’ ‘substantia’: the thing no longer has the figure or value of ‘an underneath’ (308). Nabokov’s early novels thus sensitize us to the presence of things, to reexperience them by the activating light of his literary imagination.

Shoshana Zuboff ‘s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism This book, a best seller is essentially in two parts. The first, introductory chapters provide an outline analysis of what Zuboff considers to be a radically, deleterious, new form of accumulation regime in capitalism – surveillance capitalism. The second part is much more discursive and concerned with broader historical trends in western society and culture that have led to the ‘Age’ designated in the book’s title. The first part (which includes in my reading elements of Zuboff’s second part) details Surveillance Capitalism’s (SC) particular mode of extraction of profit/surplus value. Zuboff call’s this (using actual industry terminology but flexing it to analytical purpose) ‘data exhaust’ arising from individuals’ (rarely, in Zuboff’s generally psychological understanding of SC, groups’) online social and overtly e-commercial activity. This exhaust is the digital-form of online behavioural activity, the data trail any user leaves in their wake. This enables SC’ concerns, such as Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft to trap, trace, then predict and in turn prompt and manipulate that behaviour in the future. The second part of the book, the Age part, traces influence of the political-economic neo-liberalist Hayekian School economic currents of the period, along with the affinity SC managerial thinking has with Skinnerian behaviourism (due to the behavioural tracing and tracking in data exhaust.)

So Zuboff insists that SC is a dangerous vertiginous development that provides a historical break from traditional market-based capitalism which from the 19th century on up to SC was premised generally by an understanding of consumer demand arising from aggregations of individual preferences and (relatively) autonomous choice in overwhelmingly non-virtual market places. This period was without the massive levels of consumers’ behavioural data exhaust now available following expansive virtual online economic and social activity. Traditional capitalism, also, despite the predominance of mass media and relentlessly propagandizing forms of persuasion, did not have the sophisticated feedback mechanisms available under SC.

Zuboff, also, glossing Durkheim’s idea of the Division of Labour in Society, sees these trends as a tragic mutation affecting the contemporary state of the ‘division of learning’. SC puts unprecedented (Zuboff’s favourite, pervasive, adjective in describing SC, yet her historical work on its roots suggests, rather, a quantitative change – perhaps unparalleled would be the better word – see below on this) control of learning into the hands of SC:

Eventually, Google codified a tactical playbook on the strength of which its SC operations were successfully institutionalized as the dominant form of information capitalism, drawing new competitors [i.e., Facebook] eager to participate in the race for surveillance revenues. (19)

Much of Zuboff’s academic research into SC is into the patenting applications of big tech companies, Google, Microsoft and Facebook and Amazon (but not, generally Apple which is seen by her as a less ‘rogue’ form of high-tech SC, at least in terms of individuals’ data manipulation and extraction). Zuboff notes in particular Goggle’s 2003 patent Generating User Information for Use in Targeted Advertising which bluntly stated that the company had built up sufficient capability from data exhaust to provide it with the material to deploy a honed or individualized focussing of ads sent directly to particular users:

[This] patent is emblematic of the new mutation and the emerging logic of accumulation that would define Google’s success. Of even greater interest, it also provides an unusual glimpse into the ‘economic orientation’ baked deep into the technology cake by reflecting the mindset of Google’s distinguished scientists as they harnessed their knowledge to the firms’ new aims. 77

In this way, Zuboff’s tracing of the consciously manipulatively thinking of Big Tech companies serves to counter techno-determinist arguments, what Zuboff calls ‘inevitablism’ (‘SC was initiated by a specific group of human beings in a specific time and place’ 85.) The ends of all of this is mass population via individuated manipulation, and SC control and direction of the social division of learning.

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Another of the, many, strengths of this study is its historical and conceptual defining of SC. Continually Zuboff makes the point that this form of capitalism is qualitative new, ‘unprecedented’. She presents the reader with a refined vocabulary in which to name, reveal and categorize SC – much of the terminology drawn from the actual language ‘out there’ feeding the mindset of the data tech minions in SC computer labs and managerial meeting rooms. ‘Data exhaust’, for example is seen to be common parlance in this (2014) statement of Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella:

The opportunity we have in this new world is to find a way of catalyzing this data exhaust from ubiquitous computing and converting it into fuel of ambient intelligence. 162)

Sometimes Zuboff re-embodies terms which seem innocent, pervasive and common, but have developed in SC in sinister ways, such as ‘search’ which, seemingly so innocent, was key to the propulsion of Google’s ‘supply chains’ of behavioural data (128):

I tell them [young people] that the word ‘search’ has meant a daring existential journey, not a finger tap to already existing answers; that ‘friend’ is an embodied mystery that can be forged only face-to-face and heart-to-heart; and that ‘recognition is the glimmer of homecoming we experience in our beloved’s face, not ‘facial recognition’. 521

Such points, perhaps romantic (can friends never be digitally initiated, conveyed and sustained by means of digital media?) are made to ‘replenish’ the politics of western democracy in the face of SC’s form of Newspeak, regain the meaning of words so that we might counter SC’s undermining of democratic politics.

Zuboff is often a catastrophist in the second part of her book, but she is also utopianist in that she wants to remind us of alternative hopes, and possible directions of digital/information capitalism. In catastrophist terms she talks of the present organization of human nature and social experience in SC’s domination of the social division of learning as the ‘7th Extraction’ (in distinction to the disastrous ecological consequences of the 6th extraction of industrial mass production capitalism) (516). She always nudges us, reminds us, about the political and economic alternatives, such as ‘exchange-based advocacy-oriented market form[s]’:

Mass production was aimed at new sources of demand in the early 20th century’s first mass consumers….supply and demand were linked effects of the new ‘conditions of existence’ that defined the lives of my great-grandparents Sophie and Max and other travelers in the first modernity. Ford’s invention deepened the reciprocities between capitalism and these populations. In contrast Google’s inventions destroyed the reciprocities of its original social contract with users. The role of the behavioral value reinvestment cycle that had once aligned Google with its users changed dramatically. 88

The catastrophist element of this book’s second part is reminiscent of the popular 1970s’ sociological writing of Alvin Toffler or Vance Packard’s 1950s hit The Hidden Persuaders. Admittedly, such studies were much less theoretically and empirically astute in comparison with Zuboff’s book. However, Zuboff is herself is prone to an over-reliance on metaphor and hyperbole. In particular, this can be seen in her insistence on the ‘unprecedented’ nature of SC, a word she uses so heavily it becomes somewhat irritating in its iniquitousness. It as a consequence increasingly becomes emptied of impact and it is obvious that to say something is unprecedented doesn’t mean it is necessarily bad in the singular connotation Zuboff gives the word. Also, when Zuboff refers to previous ‘ages’ which had similar rogue forms of ‘robber baron’’ capitalism, such as marked the Gilded Age (105), her argument about the unprecedentedness of SC is undermined. As noted at the start, this book is a best seller (perhaps this is marked by the fact that it’s voice-book form is actually cheaper than its paperback edition – indicating its accessibility) and there is nothing wrong with popularity and accessibility. But it is telling that Zuboff regularly falls into over- elaborated metaphorical language. At one point she talks about SC as ‘more Mad Max than Red Cross, more Black Sails than Carnival Cruise. The wizards behind their steering wheels…’ 193. She regularly uses mixed metaphorical language (‘the human hive’, ‘just like the self-driving cars and the policy-worshipping jackhammers’. 414). Popularity and accessibility is perhaps also the explanation for the, surprising for an academic, use of misleading metaphors such as evolutionary similes (‘These contests are the stage upon which SC made its debut and rose to stardom as the author of a new chapter in the long saga of capitalism’s evolution’ 17.)

3 Zuboff stresses that it is capitalism, in its 2nd Modernity manifestation, that is crucial and core to her analysis of surveillance society. Capitalism is in the driving seat of surveillance technology, it drives high tech digital information technology today simply in the pursuit of profit. She sometimes examines military drivers, the appearance and control of surveillance by state capitalist China, for example. But it is the profit driver which she stresses as key, particularly as a result of neo- liberalism’s rhetoric of free markets, freedom of the individual entrepreneur, the limiting of the state. This is the ‘Big Other’ that marks out SC, the data gathering instrumentalism of world dominating digital tech media concerns like Google from the ‘Big Brother’ of totalitarianism. She therefore sees the ‘gainers’ of these conditions as being the managerial elites of Microsoft, Google, Facebook and, of course, their shareholders and banking backers.

My main criticism here is that this over stresses capitalism, it is a reductive argument. One might think about the pioneering analyses of surveillance society, like Lyon’s, where the state is seen as a key driver, alongside markets and capitalistic extraction of surplus value. One might think, also, about the academic field, institutions like MIT, in moulding and supplying the types of highly-educated individuals, like Zuckerberg and his ranks of staffers or ‘tuners’ (505) who inhabit the material spaces of these concerns and reap the rewards (which may not be just financial.) Then there is the whole complex of manufacturers of digital hardware, computers, networking software, cables infrastructure, wireless technologists, who also extract more traditional forms of surplus value from high tech capitalism.

Zuboff needs a much more fully formulated analytical understanding of the forms of power which are distinct from market and (to a much lesser extent) state sources. There are many forms of power, many types of interests that are driving the SC profit-driven ‘fraction’ of surveillance society. Related to this is the fact that this book cries out for a better sociology of SC. It is not enough to examine the rise of ‘tuners’ and ‘priests’ (466) and tech executives alone in the formation of SC. Often Zuboff talks of powerful ‘networks’ (341) but is actually hazy about the who of these networks. When Zuboff uses the word ‘capitalism’ she tends to use it in an adjectival sense as descriptive rather than its noun-form which might help us to define the much larger social groups and classes benefiting from SC. Thus, in a section entitled ‘How did they get away with it?’ it is not clear who ‘they’ are, it is rather that ‘surveillance capitalism represents an unprecedented [that word again] logic of accumulation defined by new economic imperatives…’ (337)

Finally, I am not sure about Zuboff’s analysis of SC in terms of its application of searching out in it the tenets of Skinner’s behavioural psychology:

Skinner imagined technologies that would pervasively institutionalize the viewpoint of the Other-One as they observed, computed, analyzed, and automatically reinforced behavior to accomplish the ‘vast changes’ that he believed were necessary. In this way the laws of human action would finally be illuminated so that behavior could be effectively predicted and shaped…(369)

Zuboff’s underlying romantic view is of the individual's autonomy and volition, if given a free public sphere and open media, to make rational decisions in their social and market place activities. The Skinnerian behaviourism is her countering stalking horse to that position. But a social phenomenon like SC needs to be equally, at least, referred to in terms of surveillance society if we are to have any adequate understanding of who benefits as much as the why. We must delineate which social groups, classes, have the contemporary historical relationship to SC that bears equivalence to the groups of agrarian bourgeoisie, urban bourgeoisie, who benefited from industrial and 1st Modernity capitalism. Behaviourist theory is inherently reductive, universalistic in its conception of human motivation and the nature of the mind, and therefore limited in providing a theory of large scale historical socio- economic phenomenon like SC.

Along with the use of highly metaphorical language, what also contributes to this book’s popularity is its quoting of statements given by tech SC’ CEOs and other executives: they are really jaw-dropping. But these direct professions of policy can only tell us so much – essentially that of the consciously manipulative behaviour and thought, of SC. The shock value of these quotes can deflect attention from the ‘unspoken’, structural social, political and economic forces driving SC. For this we need to turn to a range of thinkers of second modernity, like Giddens, Beck, Harvey, Piketty, Krugman and others who pursue and depict its landscape by differentiating sources of power and assessing their particular contribution to any particular mix like SC. At one point Zuboff talks about the power of ‘naming’, the performative power of words in changing the world and in effecting domination (177). But, as Bourdieu pointed out in Language and Symbolic Power, the performative needs to be understood in the context of the ‘perforce’ of the social conditions that make any word performative. It is not enough to simply show the words spoken, the conscious policy statements of Austrian school neo liberal thinkers, academic behavioural psychologists, and tech CEOs in relation to SC alone: we must have a much more complex conceptualisation of the mix of sources of power that effects the performativity of their words.

Camus’ Notebooks I read Camus’ Notebooks and instantly get transported by the lyricism (admittedly, translated), and the profound feeling of being alive and being in touch with a sense of the eternal in the everyday, conveyed in the quite plainest of language:

All around, the hills and valleys vanish in wisps of smoke. After looking at it for a time, one becomes aware that this landscape, as it loses its colours, had suddenly aged. It is a very ancient landscape returning to us in a single morning through millennia… Camus is regularly sensitive to the historical echoes of the north African landscape, as something both present and past, urged into significance by what one might call the ‘prevailing conditions’ of a particular season, the position and relative heat and shade of the sunlight, the prickle of the environmental conditions on skin, face and eyes. Further on he writes:

Hegel: ‘Only the modern city offers the mind the terrain in which it can be conscious of itself.’ Significant. This is the time of big cities. The world has been amputated of a part of its truth, of what makes its permanence and its equilibrium: nature, the sea etc. there is consciousness only of city streets! He is dismissive of Hegel because Camus was totally convinced that reflectiveness, self-knowledge, arises in an embodied form, it is not just ‘spirit’ but mind and skin unified and body and brain must ‘quiver’, like a spring breeze in foliage, mutually, together. Trotsky says somewhere that our epoch is not a lyrical one, and Camus would have agreed. Politics and knowledge as a whole have become detached from human feeling, from emotion. In contrast to this (Aristotelian) prevailing mis-direction of western political thought, Camus preferred a lyrical sublime, the experience that nature can give to the body politics of being.

Zaretsky’s book on Camus notes that Camus was always concerned to see the people – the body politic - in the issues. Everyman, he said, dies unknown. Camus thus not only rejected Aristotle’s concept of the polis but also rejected Kantian ethics, the deontological and normative claims underlying modern politics. Camus wanted to see the activity of embodied action, in places and in time – the specificity of claims that may be individual, group or perhaps of larger forces, but never those hiding behind universality, modern political abstractions like the nation state and other institutionalized forms of injustice.

Camus reminds us of the lessons to be learned from nature, to blend in with the flow of life and its rhythms rather than to over-intellectualize life and fly high above it. Camus’ attitude here reminds me of Joyce’s Buck Milligan wanting to Hellenize Ireland - but Camus had his sights on the west, to repaganize Christianized lands. And a contemporary Christian thinker like Rowan Williams reveals a nostalgia for Camus’ ethics, noted in this review of his book on Saint Augustine:

‘Rowan Williams defends Augustinian ideas of matter as charged by spirit, by ‘materia prima’ by sheer potentiality-to-be that never exists apart from spiritual activity…From an orthodox Christian perspective, creation from nothingness is in essence the peaceful summoning of this existence of all the dimensions of the world-material…

Camus, of course, would reject the Christian route to this taken by Williams. Camus’ concern is not with transmitting the idea of the Holy Spirit in contemporary life. But there is a sense that, for Williams, there is a materiality in which the spiritual can be found. And the rise of Christianity on the back of paganism, the mysteries of their rituals and lore, the incorporation (very much with the stress on ‘corpus’) of pagan seasonal festivals, transmuted into, say, Christmas and Easter. Perhaps Williams is thinking of the ‘centones’, the Christian stories that are actually based on the lives of pagan authors. Camus, perhaps, hints that that there could be a concordance if the suppressed memory of the Hellenic world was rediscovered:

We help a person more by giving him a favourable image of himself than by constantly reminding him of his shortcomings…We are, for instance, the result of 2000 years of Christian imagery. For 2000 years man has been offered a humiliating image of himself. The result is obvious. Anyway, who can say what we should be if those twenty centuries had clung to the ancient ideal with its beautiful face? For Camus, the immediate problem is that of finding a new basis for ethics, a more embodied one, a more lyrical one. And this is seen as very much being a question of our understanding fate. Camus urges us to get away from Christian fatalism – we must see that there is a multiplicity of fates. And to energize this we must adopt values that are more provisional, dynamic, in nature rather than universal. In his essay, key to his thinking in this area of debate, ‘The Unbeliever and Christians’ Camus takes issue with censorious values that are presented as complete, universal, Christian:

What M. Marcel wants is to defend absolute values, such as modesty and man’s divine truth, when the things that should be defended are the few provisional values that will allow M. Marcel to continue fighting someday…By what right, Monsieur, could a Christian or a Marxist accuse me, for example, of pessimism? I was not the one to invent the misery of the human being or the terrifying formulas of divine malediction. This reminds me of Bataille who in The Secret Conspiracy called for an anti-fascism based on ‘a sacred without transcendence, rooted in the intensity of experience, that the virulence of fascism could be countered…’ So, Camus called for values that avoid universalist tenets, that instead must infuse themselves with the intensity of nature, the experience of life in the active sense of being alive.

Further points on this:

For Marx, nature is to be subjugated in order to obey history, for Nietzsche nature is to be obeyed in order to subjugate history. It is the difference between the Christian and the Greek (The Rebel)

But Robert C Solomon in Dark Feelings notes that Camus ‘cheated’ at philosophy and phenomenology because he insisted that our descriptions of the world were ‘less than adequate’. He also sees Camus adopting a concept of reflection that lay outside of experience, was antithetical to lived experience (47)

Contrast Camus’ North African lyricism based on sea and sky to that of Virginia Woolf’s metropolitanism, the garden, the town house, the townees in a holiday cottage at the seaside. When I read Camus I feel nature, landscape, flexing into thought and experience. In Woolf it is a lyricism based on observation without any particular political message other than, perhaps, mirroring the mood of the characters.

Nietzsche in The Twilight of the Gods notes the ‘Socratic equation reason = virtue = happiness…the bizarrest of equations and one which has in particular the older Hellenes against it’. Or this in the section ‘Morality as Anti-nature’: ‘the spiritualization of sensuality is called love: it is a great triumph over Christianity.’

Graham Greene’s novels I love Greene but his novels always perplex me because I am of the profane world and want profane explanations of human behaviour. But Greene always deals, first and foremost with the profane – greed, power, lust, betrayal, adultery, cheats. In the mid-1990s I read most of the novels, many for a second time, and I was untroubled by the fleeting theological concerns at the margins. I remember liking It’s a Battlefield for its, minor, modernist elements – the newspaper headlines, bill boards, the short staccato sentences, repetitions giving a sense of synchronicity across the metropolis. And the political Green was strong in this early novel, countless references to the British empire and the evils of colonialism, shown as working its way into the habits and nervous spasms of the Assistant Commissionaire (a title which, being both a colonial and domestic police title suited Greene’s concerns.) Greene perhaps was a loss to modernism – offering a less tortured and intellectualized moral dimension than Eliot’s’. But at that time I had not read The Ministry of Fear one of Greene’s more obviously proselytizing novels containing a large number of passages directly addressing ‘pity’. Like Zweig Greene believes we must beware of pity.Carson McCullers’s fiction often evokes the theme of the ‘mismatching’ of characters in their environment or society. In her essay ‘Loneliness - an American Malady’ she states:

“Fear is a primary source of evil. And when ‘who am I? ‘recurs and is unanswered, then fear and frustration project a negative attitude…” Writing of her admiration for Dostoyevsky and ‘Russian Realism’ she locates the source of this form of evil, unhappiness, as a key impulse in human motivation: ‘Morally the attitude is this: human beings are neither good nor evil, they are only unhappy and more or less adjusted to their unhappiness’.

The great question of the source of evil in McCullers’s fiction is when people do not really know who they are. In her ‘Outline of the Mute’, the proposal for The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, she states: ‘each man must express himself in his own way, but this is often denied to him by a wasteful short-sighted society’. In the treatment for The Heart is a McCullers’s Lonely Hunter Mick is presented as a girl struggling to make herself, form herself, against ‘social forces working against her.’

But McCullers is not really a sociologically aware writer, instead her individual characters tend to embody either the repressive axis of the problem, or those that buck against social unhappiness, those confused resentful characters like Mick, like Amelia of The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, of Francis in the story ‘Wunderkind’, even Captain Pemberton, the murderer in Reflections in a Golden Eye.

Then, again, some of the figures in McCullers’s stories never resolve the torturing core problem at the heart of their unhappiness, their deep fears being displaced by booze or illness - Howard, for example, the sodden failing author of ‘Who has seen the wind?’ Or Marianne in ‘a domestic dilemma’; the invalided Alice Langdon in Reflections in a Golden Eye. All are characters presented as very unhappy and afraid, flailing against a dreadful destiny they’ve inherited by living, growing up into, a perverted society which, like Dostoyevsky’s Russia, has a ‘system of values…so uncertain that who can say if a man is worth more than a load of hay’.

The crucial time when we experience fear, when we are confused by society, by our parents as representatives of the larger world, is in childhood. And so many of McCullers’ stories, and characters, are drawn from a child’s point of view. The story ‘Untitled piece’ is like this, as is ‘Wunderkind’, ‘The haunted boy’, and ‘The orphanage’. In the latter, McCullers states: ‘The child knows two layers of reality - that of the world, which is accepted like an immense collusion of all adults - and the unacknowledged, hidden secret, the profound.’

Sometimes the concern with the roots of unhappiness, the lacking in human kindness, appears in relation to misdirected sexualities. This is clear in the story ‘The Jockey’ as well as in Captain Pemberton in Reflections. The jockey is a pugnacious character, clearly gay, who is seen by the straights - the trio of the bookie, owner/wealthy man, and trainer, as having a ‘prim voice’ and someone who has a ‘particular friend’. But the reader feels that although McCullers wants us to identify with the Jockey, he is a deeply tormented character, an unresolved man, probably what we now call bulimic, who doesn’t hold his drink well. He is on the downward path to the career of drunk, or maybe like Captain Pemberton, someone who externalises his sources of evil onto others.

Captain Pemberton is a complex character who has a bullying, brutish, attitude to everyone, in particular to his wife louche Leonora, perhaps someone who is well adjusted, too adjusted perhaps (‘she had a gay cliche for everyone’). Pemberton is presented as a repressed homosexual, although, really, McCullers rarely thinks of people’s sexuality in a uni-dimensional way. There is a Laurentian episode in this novel when Pemberton comes upon the demonic Private Williams, resting stark naked after riding Firebird, Leonora’s horse. Pemberton cannot speak, ‘only a dry rattle came from his throat’ and ultimately, [SPOILER ALERT!] although obsessed by this soothingly violent and dangerous man, he never can really ‘speak’ to him, ending up instead shooting him dead. But Pemberton actually is shown as knowing what the source of his unhappiness may be, of his conforming to his army career in spite of his ambivalent sexuality. Thus, discussing what to do with an effeminate, resentful, man-servant, we find Major Langdon suggesting that he should be treated to some hard army discipline to sort him out. But Pemberton replies:

‘You mean that any fulfilment obtained at the expense of normalcy is wrong, and should not be allowed to bring happiness. In short, it is better because it is morally honourable, for the square peg to keep scraping about the round hold rather than to discover and use the unorthodox square that would fit it?’

Pemberton thus mouths the approach to human kindness seen in McCullers’ essays and the treatment of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. But he is one of the unresolved characters wherein society breeds its evils, because in the final paragraph of this novel, as Pemberton [SPOILER ALERT!] slumps down after shooting private Williams, he is described as looking like a ‘broken and dissipated monk’. Whereas Williams himself has an expression of animal comfort.

But, although the axis of evil-unhappiness is often worked through in terms of misdirected, unformed, or perhaps ‘uniformed’ sexuality in adults, it is in the period of childhood that the crucial battles against unkindness take place. Nowhere is this more telling than in the long story ‘Wunderkind’ in which the child Francis, endures only for so long the bully music master Bilderbach, her music teacher. The story makes us realize early on that his music room is a room of correction, of discipline, of unkindness:

Mister Bilderbach was not pleased; his guttural effulgence of German words had kind in it somewhere…’

But his type of kind-ness is seen through by Francis, she rejects the sexual and gender-stereotyping formulation he has of her. In fact, what comes across more than anything in the context, the encounters of the music room, is the way Francis is working on the scales of herself rather than the simpler practice pieces Bilderbach patronizingly makes her play (the ‘Harmonious Blacksmith’), the music of innocence, unchallenging. Francis gives up her lessons, she can no longer ‘play’ in this way, she stumbles out into the street and McCullers shows her setting off for home taking initially the wrong direction. But we know it is the right decision, that she has rejected the hidden curriculum of womanhood:

She felt that the marrows of her bones were hollow and there was no blood left in her. But she leaves Bilderbach no longer able to form her, ‘his hands held out from his body…relaxed and purposeless;

McCullers’s story ‘Madam Zilensky and the King of Finland’ is not about childhood, the title character has something of the child about her. Like Francis we feel that this is a similar character who has had to learn to resist male music masters’ attempts to form her, who in this story is represented by the head of the music department, Mr Brook. Madam Zilensky is an accomplished composer and she has three boys fathered by different men, and is marked out as having had a bohemian life prior to coming to earth teaching at an America college. Mr. Brook is satisfied with her teaching but her somewhat masculine sense of confidence, garrulousness, is shown to perturb Brook – she worries him unaccountably. To expel this feeling, he latches on to her description of an encounter she says she once had with the King of Finland. Brook decides she is a ‘pathological liar’ on this flimsiest basis. But McCullers reverses our initial sympathy with Brook on this matter when the ends shows Brook hallucinating, seeing a dog walking backwards.

McCullers’ final novel, Clock Without Hands is based around this image (it occurs elsewhere in her work). In ‘Madame Zilensky’ we learn at the start that she has lost her metronome whilst travelling to take up her position at the college. And in McCullers’ poem ‘When we are Lost’ she writes:

Yet nothing

Is not blank. It is configured Hell;

Of noticed clocks on winter afternoons…

These similar images of time, of relentless regularity/regulation, of the metronome dictating time, are seen to be at odds with human time, with the body’s sense of rhythm, with unbalanced time associated with unhappiness.

Carson McCullers: ‘Untitled Piece’

"Genius is the ability to summon childhood at will." Baudelaire.

McCullers’ short story ‘Untitled Piece’ is about the awkwardness of adolescent experience and the threshold time of young adulthood. The title is a good one because at that stage of our lives we are all untitled pieces, not sure what we will become, what job or career title we will attain, what marital or other countless statuses we will acquire. Like Hamlet’s ‘what a piece of work is a man…’, we are still to be formed, to become a man or woman or nowadays something that doesn’t easily coincide with that classical desecration of humanity. At first this story seems to be all about Sara, the older sister in the family, the difficulties she faces in getting ‘launched’ like the glider which she and her brother build at the start of the story. McCullers’ notes how everyone at that age ‘wants to run away’ and Sara does run away, although the physical distance she goes from home is not so very far - just downtown. But it is the mental distance of this trial departure that indicates that the psychological break is happening as she becomes a woman.

But then Sara actually does go away and, left abandoned Andrew her brother runs riot with school friends on a building site. We see him climbing up onto the top of the frame of a roof, hollering out meaningless but defensive calls into the air. We see him searching for male models and latching on to a man called Harry, a jobbing jeweller at his father’s store. Harry teaches Andrew chess and maybe he is the artificer he needs - McCullers draws our attention to his ability to carve wooden chessmen. But when Andrew tries to express his hopes and desires to Harry he gets no response - he isn’t interested in being a surrogate father.

The story develops, seen from the ‘formed piece’ of view of Andrew in later years, as he is waiting at a roadside cafe, considering if he would continue his nostalgic journey home from his time at a New York college. I won't say if he will complete his journey. Maybe he will go back or not complete his journey home. But it doesn’t matter because McCullers transmits to us in her intensely evocative prose, that he has come to understand himself, that the place where he began is not as important as the journey away from it. It is a story in which the truth to adolescent experience is so sharply conveyed (I think immediately of Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye but there it is much more an attitude that is conveyed rather than an experience). I found this story quite unnerving as it puts the reader back to that time of physical, sexual and other turmoil of teenage life.

Piketty’s Capital and Ideology. This book is a political-economic analysis of several, quite sweepingly broad (from the middle ages up to the present period of hyper-capitalism) historical regimes of inequality, mainly in the West although there are interesting comparative forays to India and Brazil. Piketty uses a very broad brush to depict a tripartite schema of inequality regimes ranging from medieval estates to the ownership/propertarian (aristocratic to haut-bourgeois) regime of the 18-19th centuries, then he goes on to the era of hypercapitalsim (with a significant interregnum of state redistribution-welfarism in the middle of the 20th century.) I said the seep is broad, but it is also bold, not just in historical terms but also in its highly convincing use of data sets from key states, principally European and the United States, but also significant data from India and Brazil. The study thus gives a convincing statistical analysis of the economic bases of the inequality regimes and relates the regimes to their contemporary state ideologies, tax, revenue and welfare policies. The point of the book is to relate, therefore, capital (although Piketty does use the term hyper-capitalism, the focus is, as the title states, on capital rather than capitalism in its more Marxist sense – I think on the whole Piketty’s position is Weberian) and the ideologies (as insidious belief systems that have a type of defining power on the dominant forms of policy thinking) coincident with the main inequality regimes.

To my mind this book is somewhat theoretically weak in the area of its second key word – ideology. In many respects the book’s highly economistic analysis would surely have had the better title ‘Capital and fiscal inequality regimes’. Ideology, if it is to be of use theoretically, cannot just be tagged on to economic analysis in the manner of pointing to the historical coincidence of legitimatory ideas – although this is important. But any ideological analysis worthy of the name requires a much more cultural form of approach – ideology has to be seen as a force in its own right with its own forms of ‘data’, concepts, ideas, images, just as economic analysis requires clusters of concepts of finance, fiscal policy etc. Too often in this book ideology is seen as simply a legitimatory and reactive political phenomenon riding the back of economic inequality, in this sense it sometimes has a hint of crude 30’s Marxist understandings of ideology.

This is not, of course, to say that this book is not a great, important, crucially timely work that is a resource for all who need substantive factual backing for their arguments against contemporary trends in states in thraldom to populism, identarian (nationalism), tax and ‘fiscal dumping’ policies, what Piketty summarizes as the ‘drive to the bottom’ logics of global capitalism. Some of the strongest sections of the book are in fact on the propertarian regimes of the 19th to early 20th century in which Piketty shows how sacrosanct ideologies of ownership had the effect of stifling more progressive state and social policies. He gives as an example the UK in the 19th century where a propertarian ideology blinkered state policy to the extent that the principals of debts arising from the Napoleonic wars were repaid right through until the first world war to the detriment of national economic development. Piketty contrasts this to the accelerated German and French debt reductions after the second world war when ‘Debts of 200-2000% of national income in 1945-50 were reduced to almost nothing’ (444-5)

Piketty often uses what at first appear quite hackneyed historical examples, the Democratic Party’s support for slavery, the social-welfarist state in Sweden, the rise of Russian Oligarchs, all quite time-worn now. But he develops these by revealing the facts of their economic underpinnings. And the book is also studded with less well-known examples, such as the extradition of Mexican immigrants from Roosevelt’s United States in the 1930s (228). But nearly always for Piketty the key actor and focus is less social classes than states and it is no coincidence that he gives a primary role for state and federal agencies in his hopes in the final pages of the book for revolutionary reform of the social, welfare and taxation systems of contemporary societies. Piketty, in this vein, often has a nostalgic view of the post- war social democratic reformist states of the UK and European states, particularly France, Germany and Sweden (not, also, forgetting the highly progressive tax policies of the USA in the 1960s):

The significant reduction in inequality that took place in the mid-twentieth-century was made possible by the construction of a social state based on relative educational equality and a number of radical innovations, such as co-management in the /Germanic and Nordic countries and progressive taxation in the United States and United Kingdom. The conservative revolution of the 1980s and the fall of communism interrupted this movement; the world entered a new era of self-regulated markets and quasi-sacrilization of property. (1036-7)

However, he grafts much that is new onto this generally acknowledged view, such as ideas of temporary property ownership, the need to foster progressive taxation at the federal level, the need for deliberative democratic principles as the basis for developing dynamic fiscal rules, particularly required at the regional and global levels of governance (such as the EU) in order to counter hyper capitalist accumulation and competitive ‘drives to the bottom’.

But there are also subtle and confusing lapses or contradictions in Piketty’s analysis. There are minor ones, deriving I think from the unacknowledged but nevertheless clearly Weberian-pluralist political bases of his argument. For example, his notes the ‘conflictual socio-political trajectories in which different social groups and people of different sensibilities within each society attempt to develop coherent ideas of social justice’ (454). But then he has, sometimes conscious, but certainly underlying, a Durkheimian ideal of the possibility of an organic social order at the basis of his ideas for reform. This latter ideal might be the basis for new forms of social solidarity to counter old identitarian ideas again on the rise (racism and anti-immigration). But I cannot see how this contradiction between the motive forces of capital and society, of human nature and ideals, can be easily resolved. I am not certain it is something that will easily yield to the deliberative model of governance-technocratic management Piketty essentially adopts.

Other minor flaws in the argument come from the book’s unreflectively liberal view of what he deems ‘secondary’ market transactions. In this Piketty contrasts primary goods and services, such as education, which should not be marketized, and secondary sectors by which he means areas like clothing where:

there is a legitimate diversity of individual aspirations and preferences – for instance, in the supply of clothing or food – then decentralization, competition, and regulated ownership of the means of production are justified. (595) But the major problem with this book is its lack of a more complex understanding of the concept of ideology. At the start, Piketty signals that he was going to use cultural examples, such as extracts from novels, in order to illustrate the defusing of the ideas underlying inequality regimes into everyday life. But these examples, mainly from novels (an essentially 18th century cultural form) are brief, limited, often footnoted, rather than being intrinsic to the analysis. Piketty needed to have some understanding of the role of the media and state intellectuals (i.e., from cultural Marxists like Gramsci), if the reader was to make the link between capital and ideology. What is needed is a more informed understanding of ideology, ideology as a force in its own right. Too often Piketty sees ideology as arising in a type of ‘logic’ riding on the back of the inequality regimes they coincide with:

We learned that most premodern societies, in Europe as well as in Asia, in Africa as well as in America, were organized around a trifunctional logic. Power at the local level was structured around, on the one hand, clerical and religious elites charged with the spiritual leadership of society and, on the other hand, warriors and military elites responsible for maintaining order in various evolving political-ideological configurations. Between 1500 and 1900, the formation of the centralized state went hand-in-hand with a radical transformation of the political-ideological devices that served to justify and structure social inequalities. (410)

At other times, particularly in the analysis of the cultural influence of the Brahmic domination of ancient India, seen by Piketty in the Manusmriti texts which:

…the authors plainly believed that the time had come to promote their preferred model of society…(313)

Similarly, in criticising the ‘philanthropic illusion’ arising around contemporary billionaires like Bill Gates he fails to relate how elite figures must be seen in terms of the broader ideological currents of the time – in this case, for example, Band Aid.

Nevertheless, Piketty’s book is massively generous in its scope and the depth of its economic analysis of the variations in polices that accompany the historical inequality regimes. His calls for policy reforms in areas such as progressive taxation, basic income, the socialization of ideas of property and inheritance, participatory democracy in the economy, redistributive financing of educational opportunity which are presented on the firm back of substantive economic analysis. It is this, the capital-side of the analysis, in which the reader experiences the book’s most powerful rhetoric – hidden behind Piketty’s restrained, almost prosaic text - the statistical tables and graphs that relentless flow facts after facts recording our historical and contemporary shame. Rezzori’s Abel and Cain. I was attracted to this novel by its mittel-european associations and its size (retirement lures one into ‘big reads’, ironically the age just when one’s eyes are giving out). I expected a modernist text but it confounded this. Clearly, a novel of the 60s counterculture, although pretty much nihilistic in comparison with the over-weaning seriousness of the leftist politics of its time. And not in any way a novel concerned with simply the end of the Austro-Hungarian empire and the rise of bourgeois mentality into cultural dominance in the 20th century. But a novel written by a Romanian-stateless orphan with a footloose, flailing, grasp on what might be termed national identity and loyalty. So, quite like Musil, but not; quite like Joyce, but not; and nothing like Proust.

But three or four key themes emerge in this long, highly (consciously) repetitious novel. One is, a concern with rationalism in its expression in the 20th century novel and other literary forms. This is particularly seen in his digs and longer forms of criticism of the writer Nagel, a popular but intellectual novelist, a character who is a little like Günter Grass (I’m guessing this is who Rezzori had in mind), but is also seen in his attitude to Freudian psychology, modern cinema, where they as texts concern themselves with Rezzori’s own concerns with analysing the 20th century’s cultural mind-set and the two world wars associated with it. In contrast to these, Rezzori pursues a form, an erotics, of what can be likened to a worried fretting intense condition of negation and repetition. Another theme is linked to this – a spasmodic style that conveys repeatability rather than narrative burdened with linearity, plot development.

This in turn is added to by Rezzori’s adoption of a form of utopian modernist-form of urbanism where experience is seen as formed by the modern city. This is seen as having the potentiality to ‘vaporize’ 20th century manifestations of bourgeois tropes of self and identity. This resort to some type of location of experience, along with other essentializing ideas (a time, for example, when language was free of writing or scripts; an ideal Ur of un-regulated ego) lets the novel down – it fails in delivering to the reader an adequate sense of these ideals as achievable/recoverable.

Rezzori sets himself against conventional literary narrative because it is implicated in the 20th century’s myth of rationality that pervades modern man’s consciousness – what he calls ‘our allegedly rationalist yet ardently myth-believing century’ (509). He seems here to be with Adorno’s Negative Dialectics and the problem of writing after Auschwitz, as well as the concerns of The Dialectic of Enlightenment where modernity is depicted as a socio-political tragedy. His anti-Freudianism comes through in the regular denigrations of bourgeois life and experience, culture, which itself is rationalizing and undermining of any hope of self-realization. This concern, in fact, seems more prescient of Deleuze than simply anti-Freud:

It is ridiculous to hold fast to the old, out of date idea of action, to the obsession with activity or passivity vis-à-vis history – this world means something only if I had a history in the absolute sense, were allowed to have a history. This history would the skin, the solidifying envelope, of the person. It would give me contours – and thus form. What once held together my SELF (at least in my imagination), giving it distinguishable, recognizable form, was the notion of a personal history. But this now proves to be a typically subjectivist error, showing only my infantile limitation of vision; it is schizothymically autistic, correlating with my bourgeois worldview and leptosomic habitus: superreality enlightens me, makes me understand that my conception of self is completely out of proportion. 458

In contrast, Rezzori (and the character(s) Subicz/Schwab) moves away from conventional literary form, seen as an abstraction, the form that the writer Nagel (Grass?) adopts - an explanatory, a comforting style which coincides with the way the bourgeoisie likes to form its self-image. Thus, in Uncle Ferdinand is:

‘a bizarre retro-morphosis occur(s), a development back into a species and genus, which makes the individual recede and the type come to the fore…’ (153-4)

Again, instead of narration there can only be repetition which is in contrast to Nagel’s literary concern only to show, prove, the role of historical necessity, a ‘final European attempt to insert an orderly structure into the absurdity of existence…’ (352). Conventional writers, even radical ones like Nagel/Grass, are the ‘clowns’ of the bourgeoisie (656); entertainers of the dominant cultural class. Instead, like a phenomenologist who will not evaluate but just continually describe an object from multiple points of view and write these impressions down non-evaluatively, Subicz/Rezzori continually goes round and round the events of the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938; of the introduction of the Deutschmark, of his failed marriage; of his affair with Stella; of the prostitute Gisela; the ‘rubble murderer’; his Raskolnikov- like dream of murdering an old woman; of the old woman Viennese flower seller running to heil Hitler in the Anchlaus.

So Subicz’s style is halting, recursive in its subject matter, or what he calls spasmodic, ‘a style that has something nervous and spasmodic in its incessant changes of milieux and moods’ (358). Subicz needs to engage with the element of ‘quicksilver’ (842) of the times. He wants to get away from unrepeatability, even to the very core of desire, to form a repetitive erotics of style and the self:

Smash the fiction of bodies that imprison us and keep us locked apart; smash the fiction of woman that makes me the fiction of man; smash the fictions of solitude, uniqueness and unrepeatability which exclude us from the world, splice me away from oneness with God and His cosmos…333

But Rezzori is no nihilist, as the final words of this quote suggest. Ultimately, he draws back from the absurd, from negation (negative dialectics) and clings to new old standards, like the city (‘Anthropos’) and nature. Subicz/Rezzori, in relation to his, continuously resorts to the sky as a kind of empyrean fixture- a standard:

Under the sky, air, in whose moods and whims I am greeted again by all the promise of my childhood, all the delights I expected of the world… (81)

The sky is glimpsed amidst the debauchery of a brothel, a glinting square between the dark buildings of Berlin or Paris. The sky is, however, seen in molecular forms, volatile, ether, but a refrain, a standard that may have mutations. So too this dynamic romanticism is linked to a type of Edenic era before the Fall of the invention of

…the vice of writing abstracted even the absurdness into material that could be experienced at second and third hand: into book-page reality…306

Similarly, the resort to the city, either the city of modernity that ‘vaporizes’ being but which, in avoiding it’s 20th century manifestation in the American and Disneyland form, might offer ‘a promise, you understand: the Jerusalem still to be built: ANTHROPOLIS’ 402 Modernity held out the promise of Anthroplis but it was betrayed, essentially by a skewered, rationalized modernism that could not develop the imagination to realize it:

I am a foundling of this myth, a latecomer to an era that had set out to dream the dream of man as a blissful inhabitant of the ANTHROPOLIS but was born into an age of maggots…369

At places in this novel I was reminded of Sloterdijk’s Critique. Both texts are concerned with the betrayal of modernity, the 20th century’s journey of western culture to Auschwitz and liberalism, fascism, communism. At one point Rezzori criticises modernist writers like Joyce and Proust for betraying critical reason, for becoming the modernity-betraying ‘Eulenspiegals of our time’ (656). And in post war states, it is a similar underlying cultural and rational-legalistic absurdism that put on trial Nazi leaders as war criminals ‘on a very flimsy legal basis’. So, as the novel progresses this critique turns back itself onto Subicz: …is enjoying his role as the prankster Till Eulenspiegal, surely partly out of schoolboyish spirit of revenge against his one- time friend Nagel…821

So, perhaps, in the end, Rezzori realizes, doubts, and see the limits of his particular novelistic form of a critique of cynical reason, the danger of becoming the cultural clown rather than a critically aware Diogenes’ cynic.

Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason. The title echoes Kant’s Critique but Sloterdijk is far from Kant’s concern with the philosophical basis of scientific procedure. Sloterdijk rejects Kant’s cognitively-biased universalisms associated with the Enlightenment, such as impartiality in scientific practice, materiality-based empiricism. Instead, he argues from what he calls a ‘pre-Enlightenment’ tradition that posits the body, critical (i.e., not Heideggerian) ‘existential ontology’. He sets the body against intellect, desire against abstraction, a sexual exhibitionist’ impulse versus the bourgeois boudoir and privatization of sexual desire. In essence, he calls for the instantiation of desire into Soviet-era as much as western European forms of the public sphere.

Sloterdijk’s key philosophical sources are the pre-Enlightenment ‘low thinkers’ like the ‘cheeky’ (surely the translator could have come up with a better translation of the German than this?) Kynic (the K to distinguish them from later cynical reasoners) Diogenes and Heraclitus and their modern age heirs in artistic developments like Dadaism, and literary figures like Goethe’s Mephistopheles.

Low theory is a philosophy of ends, of desire, embodied reason rather than the perverted thinking of means, procedure, subject-object division. Sloterdijk’s low theory is one that is constantly historicizing thought and theories that obscure their functionalism and involvement in political subjectification. Low theory counters on the basis of an epistemology pinioned on the subject and physicality the ‘physiogonomist as philosopher’. This is pitted against, for example, forms of ‘schizoid’ reasoning found in Freudian analysis which must always sublimate the ‘id to the superego’. Sloterdijk wants to counter ‘Nobodyness’ because Kynicism and embodied identity have no place, at least in pure form, in bourgeois’ disembodied publicness or its constant attendant dangers of nationalistic war and state’s suspicion of their own and foreign populations. For Sloterdijk we need to start thinking substantively of ends because this will save us, politically, from the cynical and manipulative sciences and technologies based on procedure and other forms of means-directed thought.

A long chapter engages with Heidegger because this cynical uptake of ontology (in its conceptualization of the idea of ‘homeliness’, death-consciousness, in particular) typifies the corruption of ontological thought – as seen in its involvement in Nazism. Instead Sloterdijk wants to kynicise ontology and combat its political misappropriation of the human desire for belonging and community: Inspired by the kynicism of ends, life that has learned the coldness of producing, ruling and destroying through the cynicism of means could become warm again for us. The critique of instrumental reason presses for its completion as a critique of cynical reason. Its chief task is to loosen Heidegger’s pathos and break its tight hold on the mere consciousness of death. 207

Sloterdijk counters embodied kynical reason to unearth the failings of the degenerative ‘master cynicisms’ that dominant modern societies such as the state and military power, Christianity, sexual cynicism. His writing style is often marked by diffuseness, allusion and, particularly because he comes from a position outside the cynical traditions he analyses, somewhat dualistic. Sloterdijk also tends to a highly functionalist form of argumentation as seen in statements like, ‘Imperialist power submitted to Christian Kynicism in order to tame it’ (235). The master cynicisms act always thus to sublimate Kynical impulses into serving the means of power and instrumental reason rather than the ends of the good, the unstoppered complex desires and rhythms of the body.

Despite these drawbacks this book is compulsive, critical, creative in its analysis, and the examples he gives from 17th century western culture onwards are always intriguing – some of the illustrations alone are probably worth half the book’s cover price. But the theoretical (rather than the stronger historical) bases of his critique are somewhat weaker. Sloterdijk’s key thinkers, Heraclitus and Diogenes are not really strong enough to build such a wide-ranging critique of western culture and science. And a concept like embodiment could have been deepened and made more analytically useful by linguistic theorists like Merleau-Ponty, for example. Similarly, more from Foucault could have deepened Sloterdijk’s analyses of the master cynicisms from a bio-power perspective.

One must, also, turn the book’s historicism back upon itself. This is a height of the Cold War-era study circ. 1983 and the threat of nuclear Armageddon, its consequent features of spying and surveillance, inform its analysis of cynical reason. But cynical reasoning has moved on – the commoditization of desire, for example, it could be argued has made the ‘gay sciences’ themselves more corrupted as they become pervasive. And one will find nothing of the key political Other of our era - Islamophobia. Sloterdijk cannot be guilty of missing such contemporary issues, but the Euro-centric nature of his examples means it is hard to relate to his work now. And Sloterdijk is responsible for his glaring oversight of racial ideologies in the traditions of cynical reasoning, and the impact of colonialism.

However, how on earth this (great) book passed under my radar when I was employed in research and teaching about Habermas and public sphere theory in the Noughties is beyond me. This book was referred to in a recent TLS review of Sloterdijk’s latest book and its suggestive title, like Bourdieu’s Logic of a Theory of Practice, shouts out at one, it demands to be read. Sloterdijk is, essentially, a theorist who prefers to allude indirectly to the contemporary thinkers he has in mind. Thus, Habermas’s early idea of Universal Pragmatics isn’t mentioned directly but adapted in Sloterdijk’s idea of Universal Polemics, or Ricoeur’s ideas on rhythm analysis go unreferenced (there is one cryptic reference to Ricoeur early on in the book.) Habermas and the bourgeois concept of the public sphere, dialogic reason is more directly discussed, the diogenetic questioning of the classical Greek foundations of the public and private divide being a key feature of the book:

Where dogmatics postulates an unconditional duty toward truth, the Gay Science assumes from the start the right to lie. And where theory demands that the truth be presented in discursive forms (argumentatively self-contained texts, chains of sentences), the original critique knows of the possibilities of expressing the truth pantomimically and spontaneously. 289

In this way Sloterdijk dismisses the Habermasian argument that dialogical agreement, disembodied reasoning are the bases for unbiased political argument or reasoning. So, the Habermasian idea that ‘agreement’ is good in itself – is a false ‘Third Party’ that erases the specific quality of experiential forms of knowledge and argumentation.

But Sloterdijk never really puts forward a viable utopian moment – his is a Kynicism of negation, a negative dialectic. Sloterdijk, in the end, remains a much better critic than theorist. His Gay Science, the concern with the body, of pre-Enlightenment ideas, is thin on any prescription other than that of radical dissent, of revealing ‘bluff’ and ‘disingenuous opinion’ (402) If there is anything to cling to, to hope with, it is an erotics, not just a sexual erotics, but of non-objectifying love:

[T]here is another kind of precedence that is not based on subjugation: The precedence the object enjoys in sympathetic understanding does not demand that we reconcile ourselves to an inferiority and an alienated position. Its prototype is love. The ability to concede the object a precedence would be tantamount to the ability to live and let live (instead of following the impulse to pull everything down into death with us). 360

But that, I’m afraid is just very noble guff.

Lucy Ellmann Ducks, Newburyport, is from the front cover onwards, unsure of its status as a novel. Assuredly, yes, it appears to be a modernist novel, in style, and a contemporary novel in its concerns with American gun culture, male sexism, the position of women as housewives. But its literary and generic status? A brash front cover quote from Cosmopolitan states that ‘Ulysses has nothing on this’ is probably ironic, particularly as it is counterpoised to one from the Observer which calls it, significantly, a ‘wildly [my emphasis] ambitious and righteously angry portrait of contemporary America’. It is a heavy, near 1000 pages, novel, but its modernism is light. It’s shyness on this count can be seen in the often childlike tone of voice of the housewife narrator, and certain graphic features, like the map in the appendices which looks like one from Swallows and Amazons seem to confirm this. As a vaguely modernist novel the text, its graphic or characterful features are important and Ellmann includes the conventional ones of changes in font-size, bold, lists, etc. Perhaps her more innovative element in this is the relentless appearance of hundreds of acronyms throughout the text.

The woman’s voice is often angry about the state of Trump’s America (although, when Ellmann began writing this long novel would Trump actually have been on the horizon? It is noticeable that she hasn’t published for quite some time before this novel) but it is also a somewhat contradictory voice, quite simplistic in its concerns then fractured by abstruse knowledge of ecological and natural sciences. The voice is often witty in its conscious pursuing of the absurd connections between mundane, experiential knowledge but then it is often confoundingly abstract as abstruse knowledge appears.

The ‘internal’ monologue bundles up thoughts, ideas, but generally the associations between one or other concept of words dissipates quickly and defy rationality (for me, this is a good thing, but for other readers perhaps a majority?). The reader may think that this is just willful space-filling. At many places the reader is jarred by the intrusion of self-reflections on the part of the narrator, like on page 135 where she states wearily ‘what is this with this constant monologue going on in my head’. Again, as I noted above, the voice is fractured by simple-mindedness and abstract knowledge and I think that rather than being at home with the modernist novel, a genre with its roots in the hierarchical compartmentalization of knowledge, this should have rooted itself in the post-modern stylistics of hypertextual lateral knowledge. This is a Google age novel because the lists, the chaotic logic of its chains of association, the mixing of abstract knowledge – superficially adopted – with the experiential knowledge of the narrator indicate that, this, time. I doubted, because of this, the authenticity of the voice of the character: but I don’t think Ellmann intended it to be a postmodernly unreliable one.

But this potentially postmodern, ironic, novel of contemporary America is not one because it resorts, particularly towards its end, to a conventional drawing together its plots: it must conclude, a stopper must be put on the bottle, that recurring problem with even great modernist novels like Ulysses. The fragmentary experience of time, of the fluctuating nature of the internal time of the monologue, of compression and extension is betrayed by the relating of cause and effect, of the, for example, constant reflections on gun violence in America and its occurrence in the narrator’s own life SPOILER ALERT – MISS THE NEXT PARAGRAPH IF YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS! when the delivery man goes on a rampage in her kitchen. This event comes across as too melodramatic because the generally unconventional, internal-temporality of monologue in the novel is betrayed, short-circuited (in an earlier situation, when the narrator is trapped in her car by a snow storm, the resort to conventional caesura is avoided, not particularly well but at least less jarringly, by a four dot break after which the scene returns to the kitchen where an explanation follows of how she got out of the fix.)

Szeley’s Turbulence Fine writing, concise and every word precisely right, telling, and artful. But no great depth – a writer in touch with the interconnectedness of contemporary life, of a globalized world. But unable to take a position on this world, to evaluate it. That he leaves to the reader which, I suppose, is right, modern, but also harder to take than having one’s conclusions drawn for one. Joyce did that, the post-modernist novel does the Szeley thing.

The Léger exhibition at the Liverpool Tate finishes. The exhibition reminded me of the powerful impact of mechanization on 20th century visual art and literature, particularly in their modernist forms. If one reads one or other of the key exhibition guides, such as Vallye’s Léger – Modern Art and the Metropolis emphasis is usually given to the influence of cinema and the stenciled street advertising hoardings on the artist, as well as direct aesthetic sources from Apollinaire’s ‘aesthetics of surprise’. But, more simply, mechanization provided Léger with an instant iconography: the signs of towers, industrial elevators, articulated segmented pipe bends, metal staircases running outside square functional factory buildings. Coming into Liverpool via the waterfront couldn’t have been more appropriate – its huge corn silos, conveyor towers and bridges, the eight-story stone and brick warehouses, the forms of key icons that figure in paintings like ‘Tugboat’ (1923). Part of the compulsive appeal of modernism to me is just this - that it deals with the world of mechanized labour I was initiated into when I worked as an engineering apprentice in Trafford Park, Manchester. In Léger one sees both human and material signs of that world, as indeed one finds then in constructionist and cubist art, and the re-articulation of the commercial objects of the time in dada. It is easy to forget the profound impact that the mature years of mechanized society had on experience and its interpretation in art and literature, in contradistinction to industrialization as a more general historical force. In 19th century realist art the industrial sublime figured largely in painters like Joseph Wright, Turner, up to Seurat and the impressionists. But in early to mid-20th century art, it wasn’t so much the impact of industrialization on agrarian society and its associated genre of landscape that was the concern so much as the mechanization of experience. We can see how the mechanization of the body in paintings like ‘Men in the city’ (1919) and even in the most theatrical-coordinated tumbling of ‘Acrobats at the circus’ (1918) points to this pervasiveness. But, art after Auschwitz changed again and Léger’s ‘Tree Trunk on Yellow Ground’ (1945) obviously illustrates this change – his mechanical images give way to those of the barbed wire of the concentration camp.

On Re-reading Proust’s Sodom and Gomorrah in the Vintage Enright and Kilmartin revision of Scott Moncrieff’s translation. It is surprising the repercussions of Proust’s assumption of the first-person singular narrator. It is often pointed out the absurd ways Proust has to ‘position’ his narrator in order to observe or overhear the goings on of other characters. Nowhere is this more underlined than at the start of this volume when Charlus and Jupien have their fling. One can sense in the writing (even in translation) that the writer, Proust, is aware of the difficulties he is putting his narrator into, contradictory in that his is a nature that is somewhat withdrawing, reflective and yet in the onerous position of sneak.

And yet it is interesting how hypocrisy and contradiction actually become important themes of the novel. The reader senses this in the way narrator adopts a somewhat crassly simplistic psychology in his comments on homosexuality. But then, ironically, in just a few lines the narrator is seen to move from cod-psychology to an astute and balanced, highly perceptive understanding of the interplay between social oblique and sexual preference. Thus when Cottard has his hand stroked by Charlus:

And, not only without any physical pleasure, but having first to overcome physical repulsion – as a Guermantes, not as an invert – in taking leave of the Doctor he clasped his hand and caressed it for a moment with the kindly affection of a master stroking his horse’s nose and giving it a lump of sugar. But Cottard, who had never allowed the Baron to see that he had so much as heard the vaguest rumours as to his morals, but nevertheless regarded him in his heart of hearts as belonging to the category of ‘abnormals’ […] persons of whom he had little personal experience, imagined that this stroking of his hand was the immediate prelude to an act of rape…p546.

The narrator regularly reflects on the hypocrisy of his fellow characters, almost reflexively adjudging that hypocrisy is fundamental to human nature, as intrinsic to all the avenues of social and political life that have become established, routinized. Early in the novel it is noted how homosexuals and Jews, in the opinion of the narrator (in ‘cod’ mode) yearn for social acceptance and yet as they remain imprisoned and impassioned by the driving forces of their ‘innate’ natures. This contradiction, one may say societal force, leads them to deliberately shunning others like themselves and ‘seeking out those who are most directly their opposite.’ (19)

All the way through Remembrance Proust subjects the reader to long passages where the narrator or, more usually, the Combray Cure or Professor Brichot, go into the etymology of names and the process of naming of places and people’s family names. This can be tedious, particularly in Volume 4, but at the base of this is Proust’s almost messianic view of believing that there was a point in the past before cultures began to overly concern themselves with naming things, that names really meant something, were clearly denotative. But names now are habits and disguise the need for analysis, such that when we hear the narrator adopt the terms ‘pervert’, ‘Sapphic’ and ‘invert’, we realize that Proust sees this, in his narrator, as betraying the complexities of sexuality. So, very early on in this novel it is suggested, as if not in the narrator’s cod-voice, that there will be a future state where the dominant polarities of sexual identity ‘shall die, each in a place apart!’ (18-19)

Proust further develops this theme dialectically as one of stasis and change in his concern with naming and issues of the splitting of particular personalities and abnormal forms of morality. This, again, is a reflection on the simplifying, ignorant position Proust puts his narrator into. Thus the homosexual Proust adopts the guise of a commentator-narrator who abhors ‘inverts’ but he knows he is much like the uncle he instances who lectures his nephew on the basis of a morality he himself does not keep to (106), or compares this to a major writer like St Simon who is betrayed by his appropriating models of behavior and character that are not his own (424). Like names, then, which change either as a result of the lapses of memory or the longue durée of historical progression towards a time when all names might vanish, so, too, all contradictions arising from habituated morality might yet become redundant. In this vein Proust thus suggests gossip has a role because it leads to the undermining of names, questioning the social status given to them (either family or place names). We must undermine habit and break through conventional nominations of places and people. Thus the narrator complains about familiarity of the Balbec landscape in producing a ‘corrupting effect’ - it becoming a land of ‘familiar acquaintances’ (592)

However, at other places the narrator states that there is a core to human beings, but this is not so much as ‘natures’, as historically-relative ‘social types’. This is seen in his comments on Cottard’s way of rubbing his hands together, part of what he calls “the ‘genus’ of Cottard”. This is where the sociologist in Proust also comes forward, and like Bourdieu and Merleau-Ponty, he sees class as embodied. Proust sees individual character as historic demarcated and ultimately shaped by class and perhaps, more fundamentally, by epochal types:

The truth is that similarity of dress and also the reflexion of the spirit of the age in facial composition occupy so much more important a place in a person’s make up than his caste, which bulks large only in his own self-esteem and the imagination of other people, that in order to realize that a nobleman of the time of Louis-Phillipe differs less from an ordinary citizen of the time of Louis-Philippe than from a nobleman of the time of Louis XV, it is not necessary to visit the galleries of the Louvre.’ (95)

Zola’s Sin of Abbe Mouret is one of the novels (like The Dream) which are stylistically distinct in the Rougon-Macquat series. Its adoption of the language of a quasi-mystical Christian devout tract, perhaps like Augustin’s Confessions or Thomas a Kempis and St John of the Cross but with a rather crude Old Testament symbolism derived from the book of Genesis. This language just doesn’t work to convey Zola’s moral message, or rather it does because that message is rather hackneyed and not worthy of a novelist whose concern is with modern society. If the novel was parodying the irrelevant continuance of a medievalist conception of Christian virtue in modern society it might have come off, but Zola just seems to lose his naturalist bearings in this novel. I skipped or skim-read huge chunks of the descriptions of the flora (only, really, fauna hardly gets a mention but for a very brief appearance of a deer, and birdlife) of Paradou, which was like going down a garden centre’s catalogue or a guide to Kew. And perhaps Zola also misses an important philosophical dimension of these questions of the clash between nature-instinct and church-perversity, because surely we have something of a primordial instinct for religion as much as for sex and ‘impregnation’.

The comparison must have been made countless times between the World Wide Web and Borges’ story ‘The Library of Babel’. In that story there is the threat that the ‘librarianic’ impulse degenerates into pursuing the idea of an ultimate goal of comprehending the entirety of knowledge in one volume. That has to be Google Books. But the betrayal is also there, the feeling of powerlessness and dissolution that follows after one so easily summons electronic texts but then becomes engulfed by them. No other word whose change of meaning better conveys this than ‘browsing’ which has now refers primarily to the web and the ‘browser’ is now inhuman in the form of software.

Zadie Smith’s essays Feel Free. She is a novelist with an academic background that infiltrates her novels as much as the essays collected here. In this she reminds me of Saul Bellow, one who can discuss intellectual ideas through either comment or the mouths of characters as much as formally in his essays (See the recent collection There is Simply Too Much to Think About.) She is a brilliantly, clinically, clear writer, yet her prose conveys character, her particular mix of gender, race and class consciousnesses coming through. But she moves around in her novels from one concern to another, I find it hard to think in general terms of ‘a’ Zadie Smith novel. However, I was drawn to this book by a review which picked out ‘Meet Julian Bieber’ for its discussion about the nature of social relationships in a celebrity- obsessed culture. Drawing out the common root of Bieber and Buber Smith contrasts Buber’s ideas about the meaningful nature of other-relatedness in I-Thou. She argues that celebrity culture makes us turn people into objects rather than persons/beings, which Buber says depends on a much more moral grounding. But there is something rather dubious in Smith’s elaborating her argument by analyzing the lyrics of ‘Boyfriend’, or even more morally dubiously referring to Bieber’s leaked email/texts concerning his breakup with his girlfriend.

Smith is on stronger ground, though, when she writes about Kureishi’s Buddha of Suburbia. She focuses on the ambiguity of life experience of ‘second generation immigrants’ (not her phrase, these are scare quotes) in contrast to the reductionist nature of political correctness in multicultural thinking. This novel is definitely not PC, but it’s truth to the experience (I was going to write to the ‘particularity of experience’, but the sense of experience she is getting to is not that limited, in fact it is closer to being ‘universal) of being subordinate to the dominant culture is not reducible to conceptions of that experience as a form of political identity. Universalists are on less contradictory, less hypocritical, grounds than cultural relativists, those who would stress the politics and experience of being as ‘difference’. In the novel, as a form, we can understand, experience, this distinction, as it is best suited to working through, describing and developing, the nuts and bolts of human identity that are recognizably human. This is why the experience one gets from reading a novel is particular, literary, and in the best fiction, ethical. It is why, also, so often consciously political novels, think of soviet social realists like Sholokhov, or English equivalents like Richard Llewellyn, struggle in their attempt to convey class experience in this most bourgeois of literary form. Due to its profound individualism the novel demanded a literary public that was educated enough and able to experience it as individual readers. Smith recognizes this of The Buddha, a book which refuses to ‘toe the party line’ and ‘received ideas about class and society are gleefully upended’. Smith’s title, Feel Free summarizes exactly this position of the basic tenet for the novelist to break free from conventional expectations. Smith references in this way both Bellow (referred to as ‘Bellow, Sam’ in the index) and Philip Roth as Kureishi’s companion writers, their writing made space for themselves to subordinate characters who are “Jewish” always to character – being politically correct about being Jewish is what they were revolting, writing against. One has only to look at the reaction within the Jewish community to the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint and Ghost to see he was getting this right.

And, related to this, although not strictly literary, the current exhibition at Manchester Art Gallery of Martin Parr’s early and contemporary photographs of Manchester, brings similar questions to the fore. In the past, my more innocent approach to Parr was to enjoy the technical brilliance of his critical approach to representing working class life. In particular, his photos of working-class families on holiday at New Brighton, all garish reds and yellows under his relentless flashlight, the polluted and litter-strewn beaches, suggested an argument, somewhere, about the rights and wrongs of class. This was much more in contrast to those early black and white photographs of Derbyshire and Lancashire’s small town semi-rural communities which, on the whole, were of quirky characters, northerners less as people and more as amusing objects. But this exhibition reveals much about the early origins of Parr’s approach to ‘the North’ with its black and white photos of inmates at Prestwich hospital, one of his first projects. It is morally-questionable, no – morally-indefensible – to objectify the powerless, the unwell, in the way he did in these photos. How could they have given informed permission? And I think the model of this approach shows up in his later career which always avoids questions of power, betraying subordinate class subjects to a patronizingly-directed camera lens (the middle class appear briefly in Parr’s Signs of the Times.) It is to be seen in his photographs of drinkers in Yates’ wine lodges, the gormless shoppers at market stalls, the ‘characters’ in shops, barbers and hairdressers, the image of cracked clogs (come on, really! Who wore clogs in the 1970s?) a photo technically perfect, its graduated range of blacks and whites, but so demeaning. And now Parr has been invited back to photograph modern Manchester, and his photos bent to serve the ruling Manc ideology of a dynamic, modern city. These photos, mostly presented the gallery in 10x8 format with large white borders, are celebratory, democratic and multicultural in intent, the lens less demeaning now. But, as a result, Parr’s new images of Mancunians are also ‘noisy’ with details, cluttered, lack clear subjects or stories – he’s unsure of himself because the stereotypes, all those 1960s new documentary realist’ (i.e. films like A Taste of Honey) ways of seeing that must have informed his earlier vision are now de trop.

Zola’s Pot-Bouille and Abbe Mouret’s Sin (this latter is a somewhat stupid novel). In both novels but in very different ways (essentially naturalist in the Bouille, idiotically parodic of devout religious works like the Imitation of Christ in Abbe Mouret) Zola relates the sexual impulse to the throes of death. In Pot Bouille, Zola writes that at the death bed of old Vabre,

‘Duveymier, roused from his musings about Clarisse, whose method of putting on her stockings with one leg in the air was just occupying his thoughts, strongly urged the administration of the sacraments’ (204 of the Oxford Classics edition).

Here Zola juxtaposes sexual daydreaming with a bourgeois’ formal concern with appearances of moral litany and ritual. Zola sees his characters as motivated and obsessed by sex (as well, of course, as money) and as a naturalist he is consistent on this point. And, those characters who seem to act outside of these impulses are often presented as dreamers or, in the case of the bending of sexual motivation, perverted by ‘mysticism’: Madam Mouret in The Conquest of Plassans, for example; or guilt, seen in the religious zealot Abbe Mouret. But as a political novelist Zola also links the posturing of bourgeois morality back to its denial: in Bouille so often the characters exclaim ‘I would rather die…’ than be exposed to social disgrace. In this Zola is equivocating on the bourgeois sense of shame and the meaning of ‘die’ with regard to sexual climax.

Zola’s Eugene Rougon, The Kill, Money and The Conquest of Plassans. In the first three, Zola infuses his prose with an equivalence of sex and power and, more critically, by forging a close association between sexual perversity and the lust for profit and market position. In Saccard money predominates in motivation and sex is just an addendum to that instinctual urge or aspect of power. But for the key characters around him, particularly his son Maxine and his wife, and subordinate characters associated with the Bourse, sexual perversity is a drawn like a Darwinian struggle of settling accounts, the competitive owning, disposing and outwitting of others. His brother Eugene Rougon is asexual, really, and his wife a mere shadow in that novel (although there are many powerful, fully sexualized women in Zola’s work as a whole.) But Eugene turns into a monster and this development reminded me of Tournier’s depiction of Goering in The Erl King. There is more violence in Saccard, the description of the royal pack of hounds gorging on the remains of the hunt kill. But Eugene Rougon has his moments – the sado-masochistic encounter with Clorinde, typically in a stable, is a key incident. But Eugene is almost entirely a political animal, it is power rather than sex that motivates him, de-sexualizes him in the end. And he never really develops as a character (Saccard, similarly, although he has many more dimensions). In all these novels Zola transmits a thoroughly depressing view of humanity, there is not race of idealism in the fields of power and money, and Paris of the 19th century is seen as penetrated by a calculating approach to life – a natural focus for Zola’s naturalism.

Deciding to read the Rougon-Macquat sequence in narrative historical order puts a completely different light on Zola than the one that comes from reading in isolation the ‘great ones’ like Germinal, The Debacle, and Nana. Presented as ‘classics’ in isolation these books become thus diluted, the reader unaware of their position in the scoping depth of Zola’s condemnation of 19th century France. I am not so sure that the key characters actually develop, are in any way consistent, or that many of the subordinate novels in the sequence rarely escape the longueurs that, I suspect, result from their original serialization; or the sometimes preposterous episodes (the entirely unconvincing way, for example, in Plassans in which Mouret is committed to the madhouse). But, nevertheless, Zola’s is a critical intelligence, never sentimental like Dickens, never condescending like Balzac.

Zola’s The Bright Side of Life in the new translation which has the somewhat dubious benefit of the long description of a breech birth, more or less completely missing in the cheap editions and free online ones at places like Gutenberg. Although this is an important amendment in completing a full translation I am afraid that I found the blow by blow account of the premature and complicated birth of Louise’s baby overlong and I ended up skim- reading it. More important, though, are the places where the past history of Dr Cazenove’s training in the French Colonial and naval service is alluded to. As the editor, Andrew Rothwell, correctly notes, generally and in this novel Zola was positive about developments scientific and medical knowledge. In this way Zola energized his arguments against the pessimistic strain in naturalism seen in writers like Huysman. But then there are these two passages within which Zola points to the issues arising from the dark side of rationalism and a de-ethicized positivist basis to the natural sciences allowed free-rein in the colonies:

‘...he had killed men of every colour, studied the effects of poison on Chinese people, and risked the lives of negroes in delicate vivisection experiments.’

‘This was the only type of experience a naval surgeon could get, occasionally ripping women open during a tour of hospital duty out in the colonies.’

Zola’s critical consciousness of the dark practices of European colonialism shown in these quotes is remarkable for a writer of his generation, and for one who is generally seen as utterly focused on French society and politics.

Wodehouse’s What Ho, Jeeves and Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. I have tried repeatedly in the past to read these and always failed, and failed again this time. Wodehouse is Marmite, take him or leave him, it’s diversionary reading with no original literary pretensions (although he now has his corner in Westminster Abbey thanks to promotion by the likes of Stephen Fry) but for me the humour is too dated, the situations ridiculously manipulated.

I feel much guiltier about Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. I must have attempted this novel at least four times and always given up on it. I just cannot stand the primness prissiness of the narrative voice – don’t forget this writer was a class snob and that, for instance, Joyce might be a genius but Ulysses was ‘brackish’ and ‘underbred’ (Diary entry, 6 September 1922). The voice in this novel is , unlike Joyce’s, sexless and it has a vision that flutters around and lights like a butterfly on London as if the city was an English garden full of wonderfully scented plants. It’s depth is about the same as those tourist t-shirts that say I love London, even though Woolf is fully conscious of the terrible legacy of the first world war, and the trajectory of the 20th century. And the names, so middle class, so wanting to be classical or medieval figures in the landscape: Clarissa, Septimus (I ask you!), aunt Helena, Richard, Elizabeth and the countless curtsying in the prose to Lords and Ladies This and That, the taking for granted of the legitimacy of having servants and landed estates. The other end of the narrative bow bends to take in the low lives, but these are inevitably characterless, thin, the objects of observation. And as a whole it seems to me to be a novel which tends to have an almost stiff-upper-lip tone when it comes to conveying human emotions:

Since she was so unhappy, for weeks and weeks now, Rezia had given meanings to things that happened, almost felt sometimes that she must stop people in the street, if they looked good, kind people, just to say to them “I am unhappy”

Although in the first person, in contrast to Woolf’s adoption of the third (but it is always her voice), the immediacy, the emotional tensioning of the prose in Greene’s novels has a profound impact on me: I was pushing, pushing the only thing I loved out of my life. As long as I could make-believe that love last, I was happy – I think I was even good to live with, and so love did last. But if love had to die, I wanted it to die quickly. It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck. (End of the Affair)

God save us always, I said, from the innocent and the good…Innocence is like the dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm. (The Quiet American

Initially I started reading Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish up to about ninety pages with enthusiasm. It reminded me of Grass’s The Flounder in conception or Michael Crumley’s Galore. But the novel becomes tiresome, the initial sprightliness of the narrative and scene setting splutters as the slimness of the characters shows through. The novel is repetitive and lacks consistency (even within magical realism there needs to be mindfulness of the need to tie up loose ends) and it’s theme of falsification in language and culture is not really explored in adequate depth. Of course, Flanagan can get away with this because the narrator-writer is re-telling a story that he has read only once from a book that has been destroyed – neat but unsatisfying for the reader.

The conflict and courtship depicted in the story in Shriver’s collection Property ‘The self- seeding sycamore’ is based on the false premise that the only way to stop the self-seeding tree is to topple it. Shriver should listen to Gardeners’ Question Time or read a little about how to keep weeds down, for example by laying bark or other mulching material.

Keswick Theatre by the Lake production of Alan Bennett’s Single Spies. The first play, An Englishman Abroad, is poor, hardly dramatic at all, maybe he had a television production in mind. At the interval I overheard a group of people running the production down, but it’s the play rather than the actors or production. The main fare, though, was A Question of Attribution which is a clever play about Anthony Blunt in which art fakery acts as a metaphor for treachery. I pricked up my ears when I heard the same arguments Gaddis makes in The Recognitions about art forgery often being exposed when the particular mode of reception of the artist faked becomes exposed as the terms of reception and interpretation move on to another mode. Although not quite the same, and I think he had literature more in mind, Raymond Williams’ idea of a ‘structure of feeling’ also evokes this argument, that cultural forms in any particular period will be informed by the modes of production and reception current in society. But Gaddis is more interesting than Bennett because he also sees that fakery, plagiarism, is inevitable and may not even be motivated – it simply slips into cultural production by the very air breathed there (see the part where he has Otto discussing with Stanley the how Handel’s Messiah must have been penetrating the brain of the composer of ‘Yes, we have no bananas’. What Gaddis doesn’t understand, though, is that it is the marketization of culture in capitalism that creates the issue of plagiarism, the need for publisher’s, art connoisseurs, editors and other intermediaries to control the rate and flow of the production of art.

Keswick, an expensive sort of literary ‘Wainwright’ book town dominated by well-to-do tourists (Leigh’s ‘middle class pound’) donning designer outdoor ‘gear’. The pubs therefore can easily overcharge, a practice seen particularly in the various concoctions of gin, the current ‘in’ drink (Jaegar bombs, like Jaegar jumpers, now out of date), are concerned. Don’t be fooled that they are cashing up your order at the till – it’s rare if you can see the total and it’s not practice to give you a receipt, not on a round anyway. At one time every pub put up a tariff by the bar, very few do so now. Best to pay by credit card rather than cash – and ask for the receipt.

Also, once pubs had to keep to opening hours but with the liberalization of these in the Noughties, it is now difficult to predict how long a pub might be open. In Keswick the pubs closed very early on the Tuesday night I was there. One, The (of course named) Wainwright, had the bar-room chairs up on the tables at 10 o’clock, even having a ‘Closed/Open’ sign in its window – as if the establishment was more subject to the hours of a coffee shop than a public house. But it’s not just liberalization of opening hours that is at the bottom of this – it’s because most bar and waiting staff are now paid by the hour and on rolling contracts. So managers just lock up if there’s no business and tell their staff to clear up and clear off.

‘in an age of irony, the deepest subversion is to be sincere’, David Streitfeld in this week’s TLS.

Heard on the X6 bus from Kendal to Ulverston: ‘Our empire was greater than the Roman’s.’ Even if, as this passenger was, this is correct if referring to area, it is that assuming or even espousing collective pronoun ‘Our’ which is interesting here. ‘Our empire’, like ‘Our Boys’ and the like indicates the extent that people get so infused by nationalist ideology that they unwittingly identify with it. This is a trait that is actually not as significant in the present when, perhaps, it is actually more thought about critically – marking active political debates about it – such as Brexit. It is more in its reference to the national past – that past becomes ‘ours’ and its historical facticity is established in our minds, in most cases, still, as something to take pride in.

Danny Leigh in Saturday’s Guardian bemoans the lack of working class actors, producers and directors in today’s media, particularly in film. The article takes as a contrasting measure the late 1950s and into the ‘60s when the likes of Shelagh Delaney, Tom Stoppard, Ken Loach and Woodfall films were in their heyday. But the article makes no attempt to locate the change today in relation to the political context that characterized the post-war years. In particular, the political organization of the mass manual working class as a dangerous force requiring its ‘consent’ to be won over by the various fobbing offs of the likes of The Loneliness of the Long Distant Runner and Poor Cow and pop culture. The post- war basic geo-political fact of the Cold War, over half of Europe, even if in name only, as a socialist/communist ‘workers’ bloc puts the period into a clearer light, one that isn’t nostalgic and politically naive. It is a great mistake to put cultural exclusion down simply to socio- economic conditions as Leigh does, for example, here:

Economically, short-term salvation lies in the middle-class pound that extends to wine and gourmet popcorn. But the exclusion of the young, skint and state educated from a mass market art form is a shame – and flatly suicidal in the age of Netflix. If the problem is vast, a mirror of the whole British class system, it is also deceptively simple. People like to see people like themselves o0n screen and be able to afford a ticket.

But then again, how many journalists today, whatever their social background, understand the message of Stuart Hall and the Birmingham school of cultural studies?

*

In the same issue in a review of a book about Soho in the 1980s, Will Self in (for once), plain prose, when speaking of Private Eye at least understands how a journal like that, overtly political-satiric may often be undermined by an over-riding social-cultural background of its editors and writers:

While the journal itself may have an honourable tradition of speaking truth to power, at a social level it has mainly comprised a sniggering crowd of public schoolboys.

I think of the smug self-satisfied little podgy-piggy weak-jowelled face of Ian Hislop appearing like a cheeky little boy’s ‘over the counter’ of Have I got News for You but a boy given free-rein to prognosticate a polluting (and only partially self-aware) Tory political position in the mainstream media (this essentially never finding balance with the other ‘captain’, Paul Merton, who concerns himself with maintaining an adopted Hancockian dourness with benign quips and personal naval-gazing.)

Gaddis’ The Recognitions misleads the reader because it opens pretty much in a conventional style, the narrative straightforward in conveying the death and burial of Wyatt’s wife in Spain. But after the first part the novel largely dispenses with conventional narrative and the interfusing of Otto’s life as a fake playwright and Wyatt‘s life as a faking artist turns on constructing ambiguity in the mind of the reader by continual shifts in construction in the prose. Also, long sections appear to have been written under the influence of drugs and booze. But in its concerns The Recognitions is like a novelization of Platonic notions of inherent form – Gaddis’ message seems to be one of cultivating the desire, the need, to see the universal in the particular. Maybe, also, he has elements of Adorno’s notion of aesthetic modernism in ‘truth to materials’, in this case of historically-particularized materials of artistic vision. That is why he gets Wyatt to state that art forgers often get revealed years after the act, when the particular vision they adopted of an artist, their contemporary vision of him, becomes outdated and the original work is looked at again with historically different eyes.

But it is also about family (what great novel isn’t about family?) and the need to recognize the essential elements within any particular one:

As the statues bore the currents of the seasons his family had lived with rock-like negligence for time’s passage, lives conceived in guilt and perpetuated in refusal. They had expected the same of him. Each generation was a rehearsal of the one before, so that that family gradually formed the repetitive pattern of a Greek fret, interrupted only once in two centuries by a nine-year-old boy who had taken a look at his prospects, tied a string around his neck with a brick to the other end, and jumped from a footbridge into two feet of water. Courage aside, he had that family’s tenacity of purpose, and drowned, a break in the pattern quickly obliterated by the calcimine of silence. (page 13 of the Dalkey Archive edition)

And it’s true, when we (sometimes) look at our family albums the flat images there, even those in family videos, flatten everything out, like a heavy roller. Whatever embedded those images, those sounds, voices, has gone. Our own memories are suspect, necessarily limited by generation, history, the present. So the question of recognition of one’s own family, one’s own place in it, is fraught and yet ever alluring.

Powell in The Military Philosophers notes that when Jenkins is being driven by Pamela Flitton and unable to engage the younger woman’s interest that ‘one never feels older than in the middle thirties’. A recognition particularly true when one is getting close to forty. First recognition of aging and loss – of hair, of vigour, of breath and sans quite a lot of things.

Re-reading Powell’s Dance and his trilogy of war novels, stimulated by Perry Anderson’s recent (positive) essays in the London Review of Books. Towards the end of The Valley of the Bones Powell enters Widmerpool’s office to overhear him adopting a Churchillian tone of voice whilst dictating to a secretary. Powell writes:

‘The voice, like so many other dictating or admonitory voices of even that early period of the war had assumed the timbre and inflexions of the Churchill broadcast, slurred consonants, rhythmical stresses and prolations.’ I think of Bakhtin on voice genres, and more particularly the ‘conflict of voices’ analysed in his Marxist manifestation as Volosinov. We like to think of our voices as individual as our characters, but just try listening to yourself on the phone, answering the door, talking in the pub...

Powell goes on to suggest that radio transmission of particular, powerful, voices is likely to affect the nature of the popular voice, or regional accents.

Also re-read A Question of Upbringing. No early boyhood, straight into schooling. Parents strangely absent, uncle Giles standing in for the entire family and he acts as a sounding board for Jenkin’s life. Just two episodes in the novel, really – Giles and La Bas and around these two the entire school years are accounted for and the novel then concludes with the brief visits to Stringham and Templer’s homes, the short interregnum at the Leboys’ house in France. Not a particularly strong narrative impulse but the characters and narrator’s v oice account for the success of this thin first volume. When I get to At Lady Molly’s I start to get irritated, too much concern with familial relations and in this his class bigotry comes through. When I get to the end of Books Do Furnish a Room I think of its contrast to Galsworthy’s Man of Property. Powell gently introduces characters across these early novels of the series whereas Galsworthy throws more or less the entire cast of the Forsyth Sage in from the starting volume. But they have an odd commonality – concerns of class symbolized by oddments of characters’ dress – Windmerpool’s overcoat and Bosinney’s grey felt hat.

Re-read The Great Gatsby and amidest the rather thin characterization and racist language (‘buck niggers’), one finds subloime but concise formulations of human behaviour:

I am slow thinking and full of interior rules that act to break my desires.

Then turn to The Beautiful and the Damned, a young man’s book which starts out in a somewhat Joycean modernist mode, alternating genres and voice, but then adopts a straightforward narrative. Concern with generational changes, relativity of perceptions of truth, value and culture, and seems to endorse Gloria’s view: that the present is perfect. Dick too concerned with documenting the present. Anthony just follows whatever wind comes at him, either Gloria’s or Adam’s. He looks to be a tragic character.

Read more or less in one sitting Ferrente’s Lost Daughter and am blown over by the immediacy of her prose, the incisive psychology, the harsh realism and her overall insight into the subtly menacing side of everyday life.

Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last but her dystopia is very thin and depends on an image of society which is essentially nuclear and monogamous. Because the couple have no friends they are at the mercy of the system. The same with Orwell’s 1984. And, of course, these are successful dystopian novels but they actually tell us more about the impact of nuclearity on human behavious than about the state or surveillance. What these writers are essentially reacting to is the more generally truncated life we live due ot ehs state of the family as an institution. Penelope Fitzgerald Innocence explores themes of generational clash and lost expectations:

He had become a bewildered sinner of a world grown hard to understand, the little Edwardian mannerisms learned from an English nanny or governess when in point of fact he had neither’ (102) I was reminded of how the 1960s cleaved me away from my father’s generation. In particular, it was no longer possible to wear the same clothes as my father had – ties were out for example. I remember how at secondary school lots of us had abandoned tie pins that were filched from our fathers, but never worn anywhere or anytime else. Julian Barnes’ introduction to this novel that most of the characters have varing degrees of innocence. I read the novel more as split between rationalists and emotionalists and either one, taken to extreme, is a form of innocence and I think the conclusion confirms this.

Abandon Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion around page 200. Far too prolix, the dialogue of the two narratives of Hank and Lee seem thin. Earlier in the novel the voices changed rapidly from one character to another so that the novel had a vibrancy, it seemed very modern.

Barnes’ Nightwood. I read it in a highly error-prone epub form the Open Library with TS Eliot’s introduction. Eliot has to try hard to get over the fragmented nature of the narrative but reading him I realize that what I enjoy about novels is the process of reading ‘thick’ poetic syntax, writing that is pregnant with meaning. Prose in itself, is a refuge from ordinary time. Once a narrative is delivered in plain prose one is back into ordinary time (or its construction). But to fill time with prose that dances, darts and upsets the ordinary rhythms of one’s mind, is so highly relatxing. The great find of my life was the fragmentedness of Joyce’s Ulysses, because it made me realize that I no longer needed to pay heed to befoe and after, that the act of reading creates a personal experience of time.

Mannheim’s translation of Celine’s Death on Credit. I pick it up around page 72 (I abandoned it there last year) where he is describing his fever-inspired dream where a titanic shop-lifting woman with breasts like planets is storming around the Paris streets and creating mayhem. I still need to be convinced about Celine – flat characters, unconvincing psychology, an inability to create sustained narrative. There must be something missing in translation.

*

Susie Dent in the i last week notes the accidental aspects of the English language – malapropisms for example, and other categories like ‘malaphors’ where metaphors get mixed up or there’s slippage – ‘it isn’t rocket surgery’. What these ‘mistakes’ reveal, however, isn’t some mental deficiency on the part of the speaker, or even in the normal sense of the term ‘slip’ as an accident in speech. Rather, it is the establishment of standardized language either formally, in dictionaries, or in usage that is promulgated by the media, where cliché is perpetuated. We are all stressed by these processes that act against the natural anarchy of speech that Saussure contrasted with Langue, or as Derrida shows, speech is fundamentally infected by the written/broadcast word.

Chester Himes Lonely Crusade in facsimile via the Open Library. Totally engaging book for me, I identified with the feeling of repression in Gordon as a worker who is vocal in the cause of trade unionism but in an unsympathetic environment. Hime’s powerful grasp of narrative, and his ability to instantly characterise people in crisp description as well as effortlessly move on to relay powerful dialogue, carrying all this off whilst slipping his didactic concerns into the mix. Clearly written from experience and yet the novel is so comprehensive in scope, the incisiveness of his understanding of socialist, communist, legal and racial arguments. A profound book. And, of course, Himes does not yet have a volume in the Library of America series.

Iris Murdoch’s Bruno’s Dream and start her The Philosopher’s Pupil more or less immediately afterwards. Something hollow at the heart of Murdoch’s writing, as one ranges across her novels one notices how formulaic they are, characters are similar across the stories, the voice rarely changes. But, my she knows how to grab a reader with excellent narrative propulsion.

Solzhenitsin’s November 1916. A slog and as one goes on into it his espousal of monarchism and Christianity start to chaff. But interesting how he manages to skirt giving not quite a historical novel, or a novel, not history, but a desire to show the fatefulness of the Russian people. And, here and there, perceptive ideas, for example the issue of food production and distribution laid the grounds for the establishment of state socialism. He also has the vision to move across the geographic dimensions of Russian society and not worry too much about having to make any particular cohesiveness or unifying connection. The unity, the overall character, is Russia and the changing scenes are like different organs of its body, a body that is in the process of stumbling forward into a time out of joint with its institutions.

Kelman’s new collection of short stories. The first one, a conversation in bed between a man and woman goes nowhere really, no Joycean epjphany, not really that deep characterization, not a slice of life. But it is adult writing for adults and operates a quietly profound way one in re-jigging one’s understanding of life.

I get 24 Hours in the Life of a Woman from the library and read it more or less at one go. A Nineteenth century novel in the 21st and I wonder why I ordered it.

I labour, now, at Mann’s Joseph but only get another thirty or so pages on. But Mann continues to refrain on about doublings, of sexual ambiguity, which I try to address in the Penuscunt of At Eve and Adams Linz. I walk to Shifter’s House but it’s closed. I went on to the modernist tobacco factory and then lazed on the river bank and read Eliot’s Four Quartets – East Coker so insistent on the principle of denying the wisdom of experience, like the image of Graham Green of the clown who keeps on getting up then knocked down and slapped in the face with a whitewash brush. Similarly, Waugh lamenting the silence to the question of if there:

‘could be experience without memory. Could there be memory where fact and fantasy were indistinguishable, where time was fragmentary and elastic, made of minutes that seemed like days, days like minutes?’

And then the importance for understanding Eliot of the influence on him of St John of the Cross - the seasons in our lives when we all get thrown into the dark and vacant interstellar spaces.

The enormous American Library edition of Mann’s Joseph. The first five hundred pages behind me and I was engaged by the meta-observations about belief, repetition, the role of deception in life (Mann always interested in this – see Felix Krull), the relationship between fiction and religion as narratives of experience. But I’m flagging now, over-extension of the well incident boring me. I put the door stop aside and pick up the gently thin Raise High the Roofbeams of Salinger and wonder why the Glass family stories were never collected together.

Franny and Zooey only comes alive for me when I read For Esme with Love and Squalor which throws more light on the idiosyncratic, to say the least, Glass family. But oh so much smoking and its associated actions in Salinger’s short fictions (reminds me of the frequency of the phone ringing, a character in its own right in Gaddis’ Carpenter’s Gothic) and the puzzling italic stresses on certain syllables which give little clue to pronunciation. But ‘A Great Day to hunt for Banana Fish’ made me start up in the night when I got it.

Stimulated by re-reading Mann’s Dr Faustus I’m reading Mann’s Joseph and it’s a type of postmodern novel where characters are never singular, project back to models and forward to those who must inevitably be forced follow the generational pattern of assuming the roles prescribed over the longue duree of the construction of what we call human nature. And Mann conveys complexly and so vividly, despite the welter of names and aliases. And, to go back to a founding myth, the Old Testament, and put so different a narrative time to it, a new understanding of motive, from the high and mighty breast-beating of the Abrahamic fathers to the cynicism of much older gods and hundreds of idols and lesser figures. Mann infuses monotheism with polytheistic ideas, the idea of ‘a’ character in the novel released from bourgeois bondage, to seeing how characters have to play themselves in many ways, on multiple models. And yet, in Dr Faustus, the way Mann shows the fascist desire to do away with words and what they transmit, to go ‘back to the barbarians’ not because we need to blame them, or as Cavafy noted because they were useful, but for their role in cultural renewal: that scary scenario of 1930s Germany.

Thirty years after my first reading of Mann’s Dr Faustus I re-read it after finding the Penguin Modern Classics’ edition of 1973 in the, great, second-hand bookshop just up from the clock tower in Morecambe. The book is fragile with age and I remember the library edition I borrowed when I first read it – a Modern Library edition, as often with American hardbacks a quality product, its cut pages warm light yellow in hue with a silky vellum-like texture. Often texts that one fondly remembers as having a significant impact on younger sensibilities often disappoint when returned to as an older, meaner, cannier reader (Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf is one such, On the Road another). But Mann endures for this older me, this long novelistic essay on modernist music, Nietzsche, and the horrors of European stumbling into fascism: bold philosophical themes that I can’t think of being attempted by any contemporary major novelists. The riskiest chapter – the dialogue between Leverkhun and the Devil which hovers between farce and dream, diabolic and inane – is totally convincing, in translation and I can only guess fantastic in German. And then in all of this is the sense of language as barbarity – a loosening of the chords between denotation and connotation, a type of anti-postmodern position on meaning before the advent of postmodern linguistic philosophers like Derrida. But this is not good, for Mann, he senses the dislocation of spoken language and the technologies of writing and print as having repercussions for humanity:

This meant in a way a departure from the abstract universal letter script, not bound up with speech; in a way a return to the word writing of earlier peoples…Radical objectivity must stick to things and to them only.’

He carries on, referring to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and the discussion of the desire to do

‘away with words and speech and to point to the things themselves… 376

Stegner’s All the Pretty Things: dreadfully dull prose, the characters flat, the dominant voice of the editor alienating, a rant against the ‘60s, irritating intervention of obscure vocabulary in his characters’ dialogue. And so much of it filled with description of the area, its flora but one can tell it has been lifted from diaries or notebooks, not as in Lawrence where place and characters’ moods interplay. Coover’s Public Burning supposedly seen as convincingly portraying Nixon’s consciousness – but the character’s voice just doesn’t ring true. And the novel is so of its time: it’s one of the hardest things, to be part of the zeitgeist and yet communicate to people long afterwards: Dickens, Tolstoy, the greats, maybe Bellow but not Coover, even, possibly not Philip Roth.

Frayn’s Towards the End of the Morning this narks me when I come to the part where the supposedly ‘hard up’ journalist leaves the dishes for the char in the morning. Quite clearly details like this are revealing, showing the novelist completely out of touch with the lives of the majority of people. Celine’s Death on Credit - I find it tedious in the extreme, even though I’d tested the water with this ‘novel’ by reading the first chapters online before buying the hard copy from Blackwells (at one time, when Kindles were new, people thought that booksellers may lose sales because readers browsing their shelves would then go home to download the cheaper ebooks of what took their fancy there. But it works both ways, one browses online and then buys the hard copy.)

Beckett’s trilogy – captures the fragmentary nature of the consciousness of his characters, their indeed fragmentary characters, their meandering minds, and the primacy of language rather than narrative consistency are utterly modernist. So, also, Kafka’s short stories which offer a break from normality, the writing taking the reader just one, hardly perceptible but crucially, abstract step away from the zone of conventionality.

I finish The Man without Qualities – almost three weeks of dedicated reading. I perhaps read slower on e-readers (I’d found the ebook on a library website but couldn’t download it to my ereader, only my iPad on which I have difficulty reading for any amount of time – too much like working at a computer screen. I ended up buying a copy from Kobo).And, like Joyce, like Proust, the feeling that somehow one has changed as a result of reading – the disordering rhythms of one’s mind, one’s eye on printed language, the elaboration of sensitivities, the writing making one step beyond one’s own experience and yet coming back to it. Musil’s argumentative, syllogistic, style, like a long diatribe on the soul beset by materialist society, set in the context of the filmic motion of city life. He shows the social strains of the old regime still hanging on in face of modernity:

…and finally one has no way of knowing whether the world has really grown worse, or oneself merely older. At this point a new era has arrived. 69

His excellent use of metaphor – he describes a piano as ‘savagely baring its teeth’, something is ‘like a child’s toy abandoned by the imagination ‘and particularly early on in the novel, continual comparison and an ironic stance to his characters.

I get Tessa Hedley’s short story collection Bad Dreams from the library. These are neat tales but empty epiphanies, and she is poor at dialogue. She seems to drawback from any conclusion, the stories peter out, the writer over-conscious of the contemporary tenet that renounces closure and punch lines. I finish, painfully, Chabon’s Moonglow (when I bought this the counter assistant at Barrow in Furness’ Waterstones commented, ‘Oh, I love the cover on this one!’ I sense that the staff at this chain have been trained to, whenever possible, commend the buying customer in some way) and then find myself asking why read this when there is Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow in the world? This has elements of memoir in places and it serves as a lesson that that form is dangerous in fiction because the significance the writer might see in their experience has little for the reader’s.

Reading three novels at the moment and I seem not to get very far with any one of them. Stegner’s rant All the Little Live Things is misanthropic, his taken-for-granted assumption that Caitlin is a surname that is owned by the husband whilst his wife is always referred by her Christian name is patriarchal. In Edinburgh two weeks ago I bought in Waterstone’s (their heavily-promoted) The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne, tricked into by it being a signed ‘special edition’ (probably worthless – these special editions are browsers’ sucker- bait). A novel that is flippant and just scratches the surface of human emotional life. So, in desperation, I download Robert Coover’s Big Lie and at least this is free from the Open Library. Initially, this seems impressive, ‘real life’ characters like Nixon, scoping across the elite field of post-war American politics, the state and Nixon. Reading on an iPad is not good, but at least the Open Library provides scanned books, warts and all with library stampings, underlining and other marks, traces left by real readers borrowing the texts from real libraries.

Lethem’s The Blot, a lightweight read. The characters larger than life. Lethem obsessed with describing food and meals, snacks, yet food has no significance in the story. I don’t like easy coincidences, like the girl on the ferry appearing just a page or two later as a prostitute. The game of backgammon arbitrary, it could have been poker or monopoly and it wouldn’t have made much difference, and the medical jargon on Bruno’s blot seems unworked from a medical textbook. But it is a read, making no demands – I finished it in two days. Also start Chabon’s Moonglow but another novel of little consideration, the situations characters find themselves in are inconsequential – they do not change in their environment. The characters, like Lethem’s, are larger than life and therefore unlifelike. I discover, also, that Lethem’s novel in America had the more honest title of A Gambler’s Anatomy. Both these writers started their careers with honest work that drew on their experience but are now deteriorating with untethered ideas. It is the greats, like Bellow, who can stay rooted.

Bellow’s Collected Essays and Journalism. In one piece he ponders the nature of the sensibility of novel readers. He sees them as individuals isolated and experiencing literature alone – at the time in the 1950s there were few organized ‘reading groups’. For Bellow this situation was good – he sees the novel as essentially an isolate’s experience. I think Bellow would despise literary bloggers, literary societies and reading groups. In my limited experience of the latter I found that just a clutch of members dominate the discussion, and between these there is a lot of points-scoring. So maybe the lone blogger position might have appealed to him, as a middle way between individual and public literary experience.

Bellow adopted an increasingly essentializing position on human nature in his later novels. Consider how in the early novel The Actual the main character believes that his long, Platonic love for Amy was based on ‘an actual affinity’. Amy asks what he means by ‘actual’ and he replies that ‘other women might remind me of you, but there was only one actual Amy’ (113). Three years later, in 2000 in a short piece he dismisses George Steiner’s espousal of Walter Benjamin or Baudelaire’s concern with developing a literature to deal with, universalize in fact, everyday life’s ‘ever-expanding experience of the minutia of consumer society’. He calls this endeavor a ‘jungle of allusions’ and asks if all this could be put into some sort of order, concluding ‘I really can’t say what the future of the novel is, but following Mr. Steiner’s lead does not seem promising’ (426). In The Actual both the person and the state of ‘actuality’ are posited against self-deceit and falsehood – for instance early on in the novel Harry believes Amy is projecting a false, ‘historical’ image to him. But it is what is behind this type of false image, the feeling projected (‘I’m not going to let them lay all kinds of feeling on me’ (107)). In many respects, this position is a defense of truth to character, and marks Bellow’s return to the early novel Augie March where actuality is shows as something that has to be pursued against the world of now, of the structures of our modern life that have been created by earlier manifestations of actuality:

That’s the struggle of humanity, to recruit others to your vision of what’s real. Then even the flowers and the moss and the stones become the moss and the flowers of a version. 438 This is not to say that Truth isn’t derived from personal experience, because soon after we find Augie stating:

What personal need … is there in the investigations of the creep of light from the outermost stars…? And at an earlier point in this novel when Augie and Happy are immersed in the everyday of Chicago city life we find the following reflection:

in those sleepy and dark with heat joints where the very flies crept rather than flew…and from the heated emptiness and wood-block-knocking of the baseball broadcast that gave only more constriction to the unlocatable, undiagnosed wrong. If you thought toward something outside, it might be Padilla [a student] theorizing on the size of the universe; his scientific interest kept the subject from being grim. (249) Bellow contrasts this position with what I would call ‘Planetary consciousness’ which provides a kind of fixed point against the more transient concerns of actuality that Steiner was stressing of urban life. Where Baudelaire and Benjamin or Steiner see this type of urban actuality as the stuff of experience, Bellow, the Platonist, Kantian, looks to Archedemian points outside the transitory, outside time and space, as where to set such experience in perspective. For Augie Chicago life is seen as marked by ‘too much history and culture to keep track of, too many details, too much news…all this hugeness, abundance, turbulence…’ (495). This, early, position is not, as in later novels like Humboldt’s Gift spiritualized. Thus, in Herzog we find Herzog reflecting:

All children have cheeks and all mothers spittle to wipe them tenderly. These things either matter or they not matter. It depends upon the universe what it is. (39) But what happens about the time of Mr. Sammler’s Planet is that this abstract planetary consciousness starts to become spiritualized. I’m not sure if at that time, the late ‘60s, Rudolf Steiner’s ‘anthrosophism’ had already started to influence Bellow, as it certainly had done by the time of Humboldt. But in Sammler we find Bellow reacting against the way planetary consciousness was being actualized by the space race. The novel is brimful of critical passes at the degradation of universal thinking into the socio-political actuality of Cold War projects. Sammler sees individual ‘orbits’ being displaced by too much information. Sammler is in many respects also a completely reactionary book: against the dark romantism of liberal permissiveness that was supplanting the older actualities of Calvinistic capitalism (25). In this way Herzog’s (and Bellow’s) planetary consciousness is displaced by a more ‘telluric’ form of consciousness – a fixation on the contemporary, the everyday. This is marked by forms of practical knowledgeability which overwhelms the abstract stellar planetary consciousness where there was purity, clearness, the exclusion of ‘too much information’.

But then Bellow got taken in by Steiner’s anthrophism as his new foundation for rising above the everyday. Anthrosophism acts as a kind of spiritualized proto-religious upending of Bellow’s earlier Kantian abstract values as the measure to assess human actuality. In this phase the individual might move the planet – effect the rotation of the earth. The planets still exist outside of us but they guide the spirit:

For in spirit, says Steiner, a man can step out of himself and let things speak about what has meaning, not for him alone but also for them. Thus the sun the moon and the stars will speak to non-astronomers in spite of their ignorance of science. 234 Rather than step out of the morass of too much information, space, the planetary consciousness of the earlier novels, is now something that is actually moldable by our own spirit – the inner light/guide: For what is this sea, this atmosphere, doing within the 8inch diameter of your skull? (I say nothing of the sun and the galaxy which are also there). At the centre of the beholder there must be a space for the whole and this nothing space is not an empty nothing but a nothing reserved for everything. (313) I don’t know enough of Bellows biography to be sure if he eventually dropped Steiner but it seems likely because the essay on George Steiner suggests, along with his return to a conception of actuality in The Actual a return to the early novels of Augie March and Herzog of planetary consciousness lying totally outside the self, the mundane, the particular.

I Download from Lancashire Libraries ebooks Elizabeth Bowen’s A world of Love. Her very thick descriptions of places, lucid, word choice absolutely perfect, her style so deliberative. It contrasts to the tortured prose in novels like, for example, Possession by A.S. Byatt. But character in Bowen isn’t so strong, motivation unclear. Her style, though, is as strong and has affinities with Patrick White’s. they share a concern with animating domestic objects, cultural objects as well, giving them motives, at least insofar as they are seen to be influencing character’s moods, destinies. Even the air in Bowen shares human mortality: ‘Air had died in here….’ But characters affect places in turn: ‘One does not go into the world and come home the same; isolation has altered its nature when one returns’.

Eliot: Poet-Phenomenologist

Eliot's poetic modernism aims to convey to the reader an experience of the presence of moral, religious, and philosophical ideas as they find currency in everyday life. We experience this in his poetry by the relational-effect of various ideas, positions, forms of language at play in and against one another. The ideas that we find at play in the poetry are, however, specific to the poetic realm, they like ideas in a novel have a literary ‘reality of its own' (Knowledge and Experience. 98), they are not untranslated. For the relationalist Eliot all of reality is constituted as a result of 'several points of view', a position found in Knowledge and Experience and bluntly stated in draft title of The Waste Land 'He do the police in different voices'.

Eliot, then, rejects a representational theory of knowledge (98) and furthermore extends his adoption of relationality to his understanding consciousness as a concept (130). Our consciousness of the world of things, objects or reality/actuality, the feelings we experience, are never in direct relationship to it but sensation, is always abstract from it because it is we that 'validate' them in various ways (Knowledge and Experience 20). Eliot thus sees words/language/ concepts as the means by which we discern, differentiate, conceptualize our perception of things or feelings about things in the world. Words are, however, related to actuality in a non-arbitrary way (i.e. as de Saussure views the relationship, or Pierce whom Eliot cites in this context (Kande 132)). But Eliot does not hold with a reductionist view of words just having dictionary meanings - see for example his reflections on the word 'concitation' in Gerontion (Ricks and McCue, 480). For the Christian Eliot part of his reason for this is that there are things that have no words but nevertheless exist in the realm of belief (Ricks and McCue, 475). But in our experience of everyday life common understandings are consolidated in words and concepts - they are 'bundles of experiences’.

In his view of experience of the world in Knowledge and Experience there are several 'different planes of reality' (Ricks and McCue, 1099) that we all live amongst in various ways but in which our voices are individual: It's only when they see nothing/That people can always show the suitable emotions - /And so far as they feel at all, their emotions are suitable,/The don't understand what it is to be awake,/To be living on several planes at once/Though one cannot speak with several voices at once. (The Family Reunion 324) This suggests what the role of the modernist poet is for Eliot. The poet must produce forms of verse that enable us to experience these different planes of reality, to move from one to another, to juxtapose them, to place them in contradiction, in sequence, in incoherent relationships. Just as words are formulations of our experiences of the world, so poetry formulates our experience of the world in order that the reader may, in a way, re-experience phenomena in that way. This is why we find Eliot talking of 'shuffling memories and desires' (in The Cocktail Party, The Waste Land) and why we sense so many different voices within his major poems, different points of view or opinions of reality, the situations in which they find themselves.

This is particularly the case in the Sweeney poems as well as The Wasteland and, of course, his dramas. There is in Eliot a latent sociologist who accompanies the phenomenological thinker. But the phenomenological poet's job is to create poetic forms in which to 'pack' together the fragmentary elements that we experience of reality. The aim of poetry is not to philosophize and produce ideas but rather to realize contemporary ideas (see his essay 'Dante' in The Sacred Wood), to 'state a vision' of the everyday reality in which we can assess the currency or redundancy of those ideas. Eliot thus suggested that there were no philosophical ideas in The Waste Land (Ricks and McCue, 614). The particular ideas that the modernist poet deals with are in particular the contemporaneous, the sociologically relevant.

This is what attracted me to TS Eliot in June 1974 when I first heard the BBC's dramatization of Sweeney Agonistes, the recognizability of the demotic voices raised in the poetry, even though at that time they were fifty years old. In this poem, and of course The Waste Land, Eliot articulates different voices one after/against another in order to produce a vision of how contemporary ideas of reality, of (a)morality are circulating in various milieus, in the case of the Sweeney poems, in a brothel. In Ricks and McCue's Composite Wasteland we find: The sailor, attentive to the chart or to the sheets,/A concentrated will against the tempest and the tide,/Retains, even ashore, in public bars or streets/Something inhuman, clean and dignified. As Eliot stated to Vivien about the cockney phrase 'Something o' he wanted to avoid marking demotic speech by spelling (Ricks and McCue, 639) because different voices, be it class gender, race, are not really found in differences in pronunciations of words but in aggregates of words, in grammers, or the characteristic denunciatory patterns that Eliot, the intuitive sociolinguist heard in pubs or in domestic servants, in the banking ambassadors which he came across whilst working for Lloyds as well, of course, the milieu of Bloomsbury aesthetes he knew intimately. Eliot noted that what may on its face seem to be simple language is one of the richest grounds for the poet to tilt against ordinary language's natural tendency to dissipate, dissolve particularity: Great simplicity is only won by an intense moment or by years of intelligent effort, or by both. It represents one of the most arduous conquests of human spirit: the triumph of feeling and thought over the natural sin of language. (Quoted from The Post-Georgians in Ricks and McCue, 1042)

Sweeney is probably Eliot's key protagonist in which he explores the demotic for evidence of mid-20th century philosophical ideas 'at large' in the everyday world. Sweeney is narcissistic and selfish and violent in nature whom Eliot commented on as being a one-time pugilist who'd retired to keep a pub. But Sweeney is an intellectual of sorts, at least a low-life manifestation of an intellectual, someone in whom intellectual ideas find expression in a more instinctual, preternaturally-violent character. He makes only a fleeting appearance in The Waste Land but he preceded that in the 1920 poems in 'Sweeney Erect' and post-dated both in the 'Agonistes' episodes in 1932, all years marked by the impact of the first world war and the flu pandemic and, in the case of Sweeney Agonistes, the Depression. And what better venue to explore contemporary morality and its working into everyday life than a brothel! Baudelaire is a critical figure for Eliot in this respect, whom Eliot notes argued that 'all first class poetry is concerned with morality' (Baudelaire), a poet who: 'perceived that what distinguishes the relations of man and woman from the copulation of beasts is the knowledge of good and evil…He was at least able to understand that the sexual act as evil is more dignified, less boring, than as the natural, 'life-giving', cheery automatism of the modern world. For Baudelaire, sexual operation is at least something not analogous to Kruschen Salts…he was capable of a damnation denied to the politicians and the newspaper editors of Paris' (quoted in Ricks and McCue, 814) In this poem the debates on murder ('any man might do a girl in', or the proposed scene of the 'resurrection' of Mrs. Porter in Eliot's later tilt at reworking the poem ('The Superior Landlord' - Ricks and McCue, II 449), reflections on the occult, birth copulation and death, the sin of language ('I've gotta use words when I talk to you', admittedly an instance of Eliot marking working class speech in a way of which he was usually critical), technology (telephones, gramophones).

This is the 'doing in different voices' that Eliot's modernist aesthetic - that element in much of his key poetry up until the late 1930s that marked him as a mid-20th century 'colloquial Petronius' (see Ricks and McCue for this influence on the young Eliot, 594). As Eliot stated in his essay on Dante, the aim of the poet is to state a vision, and the poet realizes the ideas that are dealt with more abstractly in philosophy. Much later in life, in Notes to the Definition of Culture Eliot makes the point that it is in everyday life, in the demotic, that cultural analysis needs to proceed because it is representative of the more general culture: it will reveal how more general moral ideas have become diffused (or not) (41)

Re-read Sartre’s Iron in the Soul. Over-long treatment of Mathieu’s company getting drunk, says little. But time and freedm seem to be thekey relationship, rather than defeat and freedom that is on the surface of the narrative. Also look over Sartre’s Last Chance but not very engaged – its depiction of the camp ad a debating ground about the role of the communist party and affiliations is also overlong. This is, though, undercoat writing and I wonder if this was how Sartre actially worked – from outline sketch to a filled in later text? Somehow I always imagined him as having the intellectual capacity to avoid labourious editing.

Read a selection of Gramsci made in the Forgac’s edition. At places I sensed that Bourdieu’s idea of the ‘field’ could be radicalized by adding points from Gramsci, particularly in relation to the role of intellectuals being seen in the ‘ensemble’ of social relations. Also there are hints in Gramsci of Husserlian ideas of the inter-relationship between emotionality and intellect, that the People’s intellectuals will at to maintain a nonnection btween the two, in like manner to the Marxian critique of the ideological role of the separation of manual and intellectual forms of labour.

Short notes made when reading Proust. How sociological he is! Almost Bourdieusian in the way he creates finely graduated communities of tast, partiucalrly in his depiction of the Verduruns. He also uses a tuype of Husserlian form of ‘imaginary variation’ as he traces the different viewpoints that constitue various characters’ personalities (in the face of other’s views of them.) Proust also characterizes things/objects with human moods, and as constuting human moods. In contrast to embodied knowledge, it is the imagesof others that give singularity, whereas the ‘real’ is just a ‘type’. Thus for Swann, life is more novelistic than a novel, but it is the opposite for the narrator (399)

It is also interesting to see the concern Proust has with invalids in the family, how characters like Leonie constitute/magnetize a family’s world, and isn’t it the case that nearly all families have some version of this type of ‘disabled’ character whom they must necessarily circulate around.

Flippant remarks made in the introduction to the second volume of Proust by its translator James Grieve. Proust is a sociological novelist and his quite donnish learning reminds me of Bellow’s. proust’s concern is not particularly time or memory, but jealousy and envy and how time and memory relate to these themes. I read avidly and make numerous underlingins. Novels provide us with working throughs of the social and emotional codes that hem us in, providing imaginative and demonstratable forms of truthfulness to emotions we experience as inviduals but have their origins in our social environment. He is so good, also, on the forms of reflections we make when brooding after we are snubbed or slighted in heavy or light ways (page 536 of vol 1)

But I experience longeur when reading the middle section of Within a Budding Grove which nearly defeates me. But the Balbec episode and the characters spinning around Charlus swave it. I imagine very little ‘happned’ to Proust, just as so very little happens to most of us in the sense of significant movement in life. But our mental lives are similar in narrative structures and it is this that Proust communicates to us. The continuous process of social monitoring and manouvering and reflecting on our actions, thoughts and those of others (a little like the sociology of Goffman). Proust seems almost to be carrying out a process of social psychological mapping of our mental processing of social life. Similarly, in terms of the ‘object field’ of these relations, the rooms and conveyances of our lives, the artifacts and clothing, he brings a phenomenologist’s insight into social life.

Sodom and Gomorrah cod psychology but a certain bravado in addressing the theme itself in early 20th century French Literature? I found it necessary to dismiss the Moncreif-Kilmartiin-Enright version in hard copy for Sturrock’s version (in ebook). Proust in translation is a slog, and ebooks at least provide some companionship in this, notes immediately accessible, the ability to we-search obscure references to the culture of the period. But an ebook is no lighter than the fat Vintage paperback volumes because the readers have a kind of dead weight in one’s hands whereas books distribute weight over a broader area, one’s hand(s) can grip them firmly with less force, and the feel of paper/card is more natural.

In The Prisoner Proust displaces the usual male focus (Ford, Roth, Updike) of jealousy to that of lesbianism. But is jealousy not always about the challenge of the similarity of the violator to the possessive one rather than a question of gender?

And The Fugitive’s silly mix-up about Albertine’s death, seems so repetitive. But, I guess so much richness of the experience of reading Proust is lost in translation. I enjoyed how Prous is not afraid to theorize ‘out loud’ in this novel – such as his discussion of the diplomat Norpois’s journalistic language. And despite the logeurs it is very true that reading Prous changes the reader, has a quite radical impact on one’s consciousness, of the depth of life even when nothing seems to be happening.

I near the end of Proust and I note how he sometimes can come out with remarkably trite observations and opinions. But his ability to address theunivesal out of the particular malaise of the French fin de siècle bourgeoisie is stunning. The following passage made me think of how our lives ae so often engaged with shadows, phantoms, the wanting to retrieve lost, injured, love:

All substitute relationships ae haunted by something like that. The desiring fingers enclose a phantom object, the hungering lips are pressed to a ghostly mouth. The mother lies in the grave and the child is not born, but in the very act of substitution there is a particular tenderness of pathos.

Richard Ford’s collection A Multitude of Sins. At one point we are told that all ‘robberies are Biblical’ and indeed in these stories and most of his novels, the near brush or direct involvement of characters in serious crime is always present or on the horizon. Sometimes just a stray remark by a character can have enormous conseuences. Ford is so good at showing how boredom insinuates itself into live, how mcouples go on flogging their dead horses of marriage despite awareness of the truth of their situation. And there are often hints of sexual ambiguity in essentially ‘straight’ characters, transgression hovering in sexual and therefore in social terms (i.e. the homosexual dad in the sotry ‘Quality Time’). Often triangular relations are used to disturb and then explore relationships. A highly mature view of relationships generally characterizes Ford,s stories and novels.

Re-read Solzhenitzen’s First Circle. This novel and Cancer Ward are gripping, the situation of the camps/hospital intense. The deceptively clear characterization, the honesty of the narrator’s evaluation of the characters. There is authenticity in the way the narrative deploys the author’s experience.