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“Tyranny of the Contemporary and Literary Redundancy

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“Tyranny of the Contemporary and Literary Redundancy “““TTTyyyrrraaannnnnnyyy ooofff ttthhheee cccooonnnttteeemmmpppooorrraaarrryyy &&& llliiitteeerrraaarrryyy rrreeeddduuunnndddaaannncccyyy::: TTThhheee cccaaassseee ooofff RRReeegggiiinnnaaa MMMaaarrriiiaaa RRRoooccchhheee””” “I’m fallin through the years As each dream it disappears When the night is full of tears I’ll be holdin on Now this life is etched in black But I won’t be lookin back The rain washed out the tracks I’ll never find again I’m still reaching for the light I’m still wearin out the night And you know I’ll be alright I’ll be holdin on.” [Gregg Allman]1 The Value and importance of heritage Delineation and definition of who and what we are requires contextualisation and this is best done through exploration and study of our heritage. Great art provides not just a reflection of society, it offers us a distillation and insight into times events and people. Joyce has suggested that if Dublin was destroyed it could be recreated from his seminal descriptions in Ulysses. Insights should have validity beyond the time in which the work was written and placed. All great art has a universality of appeal; the work of Michelangelo, Shakespeare and Bach transcends its physical and temporal dimension – it can as Joyce has suggested serve as an epiphany of the artistic experience portrayed. It can, perhaps more accurately, serve as an episteme for the period in which the work was executed. Placed against such a standard only a fraction of output over time can be considered great. But there are also standards by which a work can be considered to have Regional National and International importance. In preparing this paper the focus is on Literature and the essential related task of Reading as central precepts in the examination of the importance of the work of Regina Maria Roche. Preoccupation with the contemporary together with an allied, askance and infuriating tendency to view the past, even the relatively recent past, through modern glasses has all too frequently reduced history and historiography to comic-book quality. Good literature need not be complex nor labyrinthine but over time layers which were apparent to the contemporary reader can become less clear and necessitate guided assistance. However, these depths of meaning were present to begin with: “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned: Intribo ad altere Dei, Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called up coarsely: Come up, Kinch, Come up, you fearful Jesuit.”2 This extract is from the very first page of Ulysses and is absolutely critical in establishing the nature of the work. Juxtaposing the act of shaving with cut-throat razor, brush, and bowl with a quotation from the introductory to the Latin Mass wherein the chalice was brought to the altar and adding a description of Buck Mulligan dressed in “vestment” like attire not only prepares the reader for the importance of ritual throughout the book but also echoes Joyce’s scholastic preoccupations3 and suggests the need for knowledge of Homer’s text. A recent Easons survey of “Favourite 50 books since 2000” indicates the fleeting and ephemeral nature of public taste. The top 104 titles chosen features no less than seven titles which have movie tie-ins; another is related to one of these seven and finally The Road by Cormac McCarthy in addition to having a movie tie- in won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the 2006 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and was an inevitable entry. 1 Allman, Gregg I’ll be holdin’ on [from the soundtrack of the film Black Rain, 1989] 2 Joyce, James Ulysses U.K.: Penguin Books, 1969 pg. 9 3 See the vivid and exhaustive explorations of scholastic philosophy in Stephen Hero Joyce’s precursor to Portrait of the Artist as a young man. 4 The Boy in the striped pyjamas; The Time traveller’s wife; The lovely bones; The girl with the dragon tattoo; The curious incident of the dog in the night-time; The kite runner; The book thief; A thousand splendid suns; The Road; Atonement. The Oprah Winfrey Book Club is one of the best known “Reading Clubs” in the world. Between 1996 and 2009 some 67 titles have been featured. Almost all are current titles but there are a few notable exceptions including work by William Faulkner. However, the most notable and only classic featured is Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina which was chosen in 2004. On the announcement of its selection the novel immediately went to Number 1 in the New York Bestseller list, this occurred even before discussion had taken place, and the book was subsequently named in the top 105 books chosen by American Writers. What this confirms is the absolute ability and power of the media to determine consumption and taste. Tramore Reading Group is one of the most successful such Irish groups. Since 2002 it has featured and studied some 131 critically acclaimed and popular International and Irish titles. While Dubliners and Tarry Flynn were read, no “classic title;” either Irish or International features. The Leaving Certificate English Course is, for most students, their final formal exploration of our literary heritage. The current curriculum has as main texts nine works. Six of these were written after 1900; the 17th century is represented by Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the 19th Century is represented by Ibsen’s A Doll’s house and Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. Irish Literature is represented by two plays and two novels, all are relatively contemporary. Regina Maria Roche & Literary Tradition The Gothic Revival was a key cultural movement during the second half of the 18th and early part of the 19th Centuries. The impact of the movement was most obviously manifested in the field of architecture; in the field of art, (most powerfully by the work of Henry Fuseli [his painting The Nightmare6 could almost be interpreted as a microcosm of the entire movement]) and in the myriad of Gothic Fiction titles published throughout the period. Gothic fiction is today one of the most popular forms of the novel and the characters Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Frankenstein and Dracula are extraordinarily well known. However, few know that the genre originated in the 18th Century and even fewer are aware that gothic fiction was “the most popular literature in Britain during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries” or that these novels “effected a revolution in popular taste.” Gothic novels “appeared at the rate of more than a dozen every year from 1794 through 1797, and increased to nearly two dozen per year for 1798 through 1810…”7 According to McCormack the gothic novel is not easily defined, “but the sublime and asymmetrical character of gothic architecture, transformed into verbal intricacy, convoluted plot, emotional intensity – and all this overlaid with implications of supernatural agency – lies behind the literary experiment.”8 Perhaps the most obvious thematic preoccupations in gothic fiction can be noted as: Aesthetics of the sublime9 Religion and the supernatural Influence of ancient romance Discourse of Enlightenment reason versus Romantic imagination 5 The list is: 1 Anna Karenina by Tolstoy; 2 Madame Bovary by Flaubert; 3 War and Peace by Tolstoy; 4 Lolita by Nabokov; 5 The adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Twain; 6 Hamlet by Shakespeare; 7 The Great Gatsby by Scott Fitzgerald; 8 In search of lost time by Proust; 9 The stories of Anton Chekhov; 10 Middlemarch by George Eliot. [The Top ten: writers pick their favourite books edited by J. Peder Zane U.S. W.W. Norton & Co., 2007] 6 The Nightmare is a 1781 oil painting by Henry Fuseli (1741–1825) which is currently held in the United States. Since its creation, it has remained Fuseli's best-known work. With its first exhibition in 1782 at the Royal Academy of London, the image became famous; an engraved version was widely distributed and the painting was parodied in political satire. Due to its fame, Fuseli painted at least three other versions of the painting. Interpretations of The Nightmare have varied widely. The canvas seems to portray simultaneously a dreaming woman and the content of her nightmare. The incubus and the horse's head refer to contemporary belief and folklore about nightmares, but have been ascribed more specific meanings by some theorists. Contemporary critics were taken aback by the overt sexuality of the painting, which has since been interpreted by some scholars as anticipating Freudian ideas about the subconscious. 7 Norton, Rictor (ed.) Gothic Readings: The first wave, 1764-1840 U.K.: Leicester University Press, 2000 xiii, 369p. pg. viii 8 McCormack, W.J. Irish Gothic and after, 1820-1945 [in The Field day Anthology of Irish Writing Vol. II pgs. 831- 833. Ireland: Field Day Publications, 1991] pg. 831 9 Central to this is the exploration of the Sublime by Burke wherein his thesis is that the “Beautiful, is what is well-formed and aesthetically pleasing, whereas the Sublime is what has the power to compel and destroy us. The preference for the Sublime over the Beautiful was to mark the transition from the Neoclassical to the Romantic era.” See: Burke, Edmund A philosophical enquiry into the Origin of our ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. (1757) Genre’s conventions or ‘hobgoblin machinery – e.g. vampires, nuns, mystic forests ruins etc. The social vulnerability of women was a theme increasingly found in the genre as more and more new titles transferred their settings from medieval and mainland Europe to England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales.
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