tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-315524672024-03-13T19:12:14.780+00:00Kit Whitfield's BlogKit Whitfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623432518060526692noreply@blogger.comBlogger154125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31552467.post-29015656795394842462022-06-09T13:15:00.002+00:002022-06-09T13:15:39.274+00:00In The Heart Of Hidden Things<p> As of today, this book is available to buy! </p><p>To get a hardback copy from a site that supports local bookstores, <a href="https://uk.bookshop.org/books/in-the-heart-of-hidden-things/9781529414912?fbclid=IwAR0uOoQQ8KxBOzDXSbhMpGIrxQTcmgKSKz70m3qgDkT6bJXBT03pfJJDyTQ" target="_blank">click here</a>.</p><p>To buy the Kindle version, <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Heart-Hidden-Things-Kit-Whitfield-ebook/dp/B09B1TR92P/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3VBYVZTECF3PO&keywords=in%20the%20heart%20of%20hidden%20things&qid=1654768432&sprefix=in%20the%20heart%20of%20hidden%20things%2Caps%2C74&sr=8-1&fbclid=IwAR24D80QNBBj92bOe1dUkIY93hRIFKbp8iOGg1GFntZpTqF4VeCfuQcCw4k" target="_blank">click here</a>. <br /></p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm3sEp2ae4oZSP09qRAWFbQVbVGabcJr1JcGHZ0FMCUZyBItZSIGXiZUTrc-J6iGyZSUEcV7eDkHVPE7tfoMaJMvt2kX3eSIeQ0kehGCKSnPaVXcY1Qj-MKiD3uTT-xY9qCgHJbqYarVQb0imvvDAzcuZXeYb_xLxXyoe8zcnXsUT4W2vdSA/s500/9781529414912.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="324" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm3sEp2ae4oZSP09qRAWFbQVbVGabcJr1JcGHZ0FMCUZyBItZSIGXiZUTrc-J6iGyZSUEcV7eDkHVPE7tfoMaJMvt2kX3eSIeQ0kehGCKSnPaVXcY1Qj-MKiD3uTT-xY9qCgHJbqYarVQb0imvvDAzcuZXeYb_xLxXyoe8zcnXsUT4W2vdSA/w259-h400/9781529414912.webp" width="259" /></a></div><p></p><p><br /></p><p><span class="d2edcug0 hpfvmrgz qv66sw1b c1et5uql oi732d6d ik7dh3pa ht8s03o8 jq4qci2q a3bd9o3v b1v8xokw oo9gr5id">"Warm,
witty, compassionate ... with a village and woods in which it's sweet
to get lost ... You should get this book
the minute it's out."</span></p><div class="bi6gxh9e"><span class="d2edcug0 hpfvmrgz qv66sw1b c1et5uql oi732d6d ik7dh3pa ht8s03o8 jq4qci2q a3bd9o3v b1v8xokw oo9gr5id">- Francesco Dimitri, author of (among many other books) <i>The Book of Hidden Things</i></span></div><div class="bi6gxh9e"><span class="d2edcug0 hpfvmrgz qv66sw1b c1et5uql oi732d6d ik7dh3pa ht8s03o8 jq4qci2q a3bd9o3v b1v8xokw oo9gr5id"><br /></span></div><div class="bi6gxh9e"><span class="d2edcug0 hpfvmrgz qv66sw1b c1et5uql oi732d6d ik7dh3pa ht8s03o8 jq4qci2q a3bd9o3v b1v8xokw oo9gr5id"><br /></span></div><div class="bi6gxh9e"><span class="d2edcug0 hpfvmrgz qv66sw1b c1et5uql oi732d6d ik7dh3pa ht8s03o8 jq4qci2q a3bd9o3v b1v8xokw oo9gr5id"><br /></span></div><div class="bi6gxh9e"><span class="d2edcug0 hpfvmrgz qv66sw1b c1et5uql oi732d6d ik7dh3pa ht8s03o8 jq4qci2q a3bd9o3v b1v8xokw oo9gr5id">I'm not blogging much these days - lack of time, basically - but you can follow me on <a href="https://twitter.com/kitwhitfield" target="_blank">Twitter @KitWhitfield</a>, and also <a href="http://facebook.com/kitwhitfieldbooks" target="_blank">on Facebook</a>. Happy reading! <br /></span></div><div class="bi6gxh9e"><span class="d2edcug0 hpfvmrgz qv66sw1b c1et5uql oi732d6d ik7dh3pa ht8s03o8 jq4qci2q a3bd9o3v b1v8xokw oo9gr5id"><br /></span></div>Kit Whitfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623432518060526692noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31552467.post-75791576896135811752021-10-15T11:02:00.010+00:002021-10-15T12:57:42.614+00:00Hello again<div><p> </p><p> </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgy3eBmOslRBVAldX-kfqPTr_sOmjK7lfn1i0ob62GI-ZHtcAaavPGKbIQPJrGvDL3xd3IAoko6Ur7xyG8wpBnGwvuMMVBuQVas0hzbhtZE9ZNcaloxymp_yW4ykE02BUN-EeYV/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1080" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgy3eBmOslRBVAldX-kfqPTr_sOmjK7lfn1i0ob62GI-ZHtcAaavPGKbIQPJrGvDL3xd3IAoko6Ur7xyG8wpBnGwvuMMVBuQVas0hzbhtZE9ZNcaloxymp_yW4ykE02BUN-EeYV/w400-h400/GetAttachmentThumbnail-1.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /></div><div style="margin-left: 200px; text-align: center;"> (Available for pre-order <a href="https://uk.bookshop.org/books/in-the-heart-of-hidden-things/9781529414875" target="_blank">here</a>.)</div><p></p><p> </p><p>Well, I promised you a hiatus, and boy did I deliver. What happened there? </p><p> </p><p>Well, at the time I stopped blogging, there were two things going on: </p><p> </p><p>First:
I was dealing with an undiagnosed case of PTSD. It didn't get diagnosed
until later that year, by which time it had been going on for four
years, which is a lot of time I just didn't have it together to write,
and honestly only hazily remember at all. My mental health was pretty
much all to cock. It was postnatal PTSD; ironically enough, I got the
news that my last book had been shortlisted for a World Fantasy Award
the day before my son's induction was scheduled – and after that
induction, for a long time, there wasn’t enough left of me to do
anything about the career that seemed to be going pretty well. After I
got diagnosed, I got some treatment, and it was only after that I was
able to write anything, and for a long time it was just little bits of
stuff. Before that, the inside of my head wasn't a pretty sight. </p><p> </p><p>Second:
the point at which I vanished from the Internet was the month my son’s
diagnosis of autism was confirmed. He was three years old, bright and
beautiful and full of joy, and everyone adored him. They still do; he’s
eleven now, and it was just before his eleventh birthday that he was
also diagnosed with ADHD. (It's not uncommon for these to go together;
along with dyslexia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia, epilepsy and all sorts of
other neurodivergences; they often crop up in the same people and/or the
same families.) </p><p>So there I was, with a perfect son, but we were looking
at a double-black-diamond kind of perfect while most other parents were
coasting down the bunny slope. A lot needed to be sorted out to get him
supported, which meant wrestling with an education system not at all
set up to work well for kids with special needs, and dealing with an
outside world of prejudice and bureaucracy, as well as needing to learn a
whole ton of specialised parenting skills quick smart. Everything else
had to go on hold. </p><p> </p><p>I wanted to be writing, but I was firefighting instead. And that went on for years. </p><p> </p><p>Well,
I still have PTSD – I always will, trauma kicks open a door in your
head that never really closes – but I’m about as on top of it as I’m
going to get. And my lovely boy is thriving; there are always going to
be new fires to put out, but we know the drills now, and we’re about as
much on top of it as SEN parents ever really are. (Special Educational
Needs, that is. And the answer to how on top of it we ever get is,
‘About as much as any imperfect human being is ever on top of their
parenting.’) </p><p> </p><p>You live that life, though, and after a while it starts you thinking along different paths. </p><p> </p><p>One
day I was watching CBeebies with my son – and by ‘watching’, I mean the
television was on, he was racketing around the room and occasionally
glancing at it, and I was hoping he might see something he liked, maybe add something to the short list of things he enjoyed. Something came on – an episode of Tweenies, I think – in
which a character visited a ruined church on the Isle of Man. </p><p> </p><p>People
had started to build it, she said, but during the night, the fairies
ripped the roof off it. The builders had another go, but the next night,
the fairies weren’t having it: off came the roof again. They tried over
and over, day and night, build and destroy, and in the end, they gave
up. Now all that stands are the walls of a church the fairies wouldn’t
allow them to finish. </p><p> </p><p>No one knows, she said, why the fairies didn't want a roof on the church, but clearly they didn’t. </p><p> </p><p>‘What
do you mean no one knows?’ I thought. ‘Isn't it obvious? The first time
the fairies saw the church, it didn’t have a roof on it. So clearly it
wasn’t supposed to have a roof, because if it was meant to have a roof,
it would have had a roof. But it didn’t have a roof, so it shouldn’t
have a roof. What’s so hard to understand?’ </p><p> </p><p>And thus,
from a mind honed upon many thundering dramas over such apocalyptic
issues as The Door Is Closed When It Should Be Open, You Took Off Your
Glasses And They’re Supposed To Go On Your Face, and The Toothpaste Is
On The Wrong Side Of The Sink, a certain . . . whim . . . started to
emerge. </p><p> </p><p>It took a long time. I’d forgotten how to write
novels; I began with scraps of stories about the same people, watching
them do this and that, playing with imaginary friends to cheer myself up
on the difficult days. The stories started to get longer; the work
started to hold me together. </p><p> </p><p>I wasn’t writing any
literal depiction of neurodivergence; I don’t have ADHD and I don’t
think I’m autistic, so I can’t speak from the inside. Or not entirely; I
did have a neurodivergent baby, after all, and while he gets some of
that from his dad, I’m the one who fell in love with that dad. I a few traits that often go with autism - in particular, I have
sensory sensitivities and special interests. A neurodivergence coach once looked at a form I'd filled in for someone else and asked that someone, 'Have you considered you might have dyspraxia? I'm just looking at the handwriting . . .' And I'm
certainly clumsy, which goes with dyspraxia (and that does run in my family): put me at the top of a staircase with no rail, and
wander off; I’ll probably still be there when you come back. I probably have, as I like to put it, 'a little spice in my sauce.' </p><p>But the
idea of feyness – not the Victorian frilly wings, but the old folk tales
of cold-weather, intransigent, flint-willed creatures of the land – had
thoroughly caught my attention. </p><p> </p><p>The thing is,
neurodivergence and feyness have a long history together. Contemporary
ND people often relate to the myth of the changeling. And the old
stories of the changelings – some of which are horrible, horrible
accounts of child abuse – do sometimes describe children who nowadays
would be referred for a paediatric assessment. More than that, though,
there’s the simple fact of the fairies: they seem irrational, but they
aren’t lawless. Instead, they have rules of their own, which they hold
to implacably, but which a normal person may not understand at all –
until they cross them. </p><p> </p><p>I was living in a home with more than one kind of person in it, living by more than one set of laws. I got that. </p><p> </p><p>And we all play in our own ways. Finally, I felt like playing again. </p><p> </p><p>The
book I wrote, <i>In The Heart Of Hidden Things</i>, is not meant to speak for
anyone except myself. It came from a place of learning to enjoy quirks,
of fighting through a world that truly doesn’t care if your beautiful
child is hurt and demeaned, of knowing what it is to worry about your
children, of having fiery energy that couldn’t be let out anywhere else,
of wanting to go home. A lot of my childhood was spent in the countryside,
and my son’s needs meant that for years we couldn’t leave London, and
like many books, I think it came from homesickness and needing to create
a place where I could go. </p><p> People talk about fantasy as being
‘escapist’, but I don’t think I believe that. What this book was, for
me, would be better called ‘respite-ist’: you go away and take a respite
break, and then you have to come back and deal with the things and
people that need caring for. I’m with Jeanette Winterson: ‘Fiction and
poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes
on the imagination.’ So I wrote to grow places in my imagination that
life had been breaking; I wrote to make myself laugh again. I’d been a
hidden thing for a long time, but I felt able, at least, to stop hiding
from myself. </p><p> </p><p>All of which are my own reasons, of course. I
could cheerfully suggest everyone read the book because it would please
me, but I don’t expect that would get me very far. What I would say is
that I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever written. </p><p> </p><p>The title of the book is taken from a
wonderful poem by Charlotte Mew, herself no stranger to the worry that
goes with family members whose brains aren’t the way the world expects
them to be. I’ll finish quoting the part I used for an epigraph: </p><p> </p><p> </p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;">Sometimes
I wouldn’t speak, you see, </p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;">Or answer when you spoke to me, </p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;">Because in
the long, still dusks of Spring </p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;">You can hear the whole world
whispering . . . </p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;">Everything there is to hear </p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;">In the heart of hidden
things.</p>Kit Whitfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623432518060526692noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31552467.post-87479231205362078732014-03-20T09:35:00.001+00:002014-03-20T09:35:33.126+00:00Till further notice...I'm afraid this blog is on pause. Apologies to anyone this disappoints; personal and family reasons have called for a complete change in my schedule, and this blog, which isn't as high a priority as my fiction and which doesn't generate money, has had to be moved down the list.<br />
<br />
If you're looking for something to read in the archives, I'd recommend the Opening Line series; you can find a complete list of posts <a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/first-sentence-posts.html" target="_blank">here</a>.<br />
<br />
Have a nice day.Kit Whitfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623432518060526692noreply@blogger.com40tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31552467.post-71227818508285225152013-10-24T13:02:00.002+00:002013-10-24T13:02:20.819+00:00There's been a hiatus......and will be for a bit longer, I'm afraid. Because of two interrelated factors:<br />
<br />
1. Personal reasons.<br />
<br />
2. The next book I plan to do is <i>Moby-Dick</i>. I'd never read it before I decided that its famous first sentence was worth a look; now I am reading it, it staggers me that I wasted the last thirty-six years of my life failing to read that wild, warm, wonderful, bizarre and beautiful work. I don't know what was wrong with me. Happily, I am in the process of correcting that deplorable absence. The thing is, it's a long book. An extremely long book. And being as wonderful as it is, I'm not going to spoil this first read by rushing it. So unless I can scrape up the time or inspiration to do something else in the meantime - any suggestions, go ahead - it'll have to wait till I've finished it.<br />
<br />
If you're short of reading material till then, I suggest you try <i>Moby-Dick</i>. It is<i> fantastic</i>.Kit Whitfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623432518060526692noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31552467.post-33349363088883999172013-09-09T09:08:00.001+00:002013-09-09T11:05:28.677+00:00Opening Line: The Visit of the Royal Physician by Per Olov Enquist<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: xx-small;">This blog is undergoing revision; a temporary archive of the Opening Line series can be found <a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/first-sentence-posts.html" target="_blank">here</a>. </span><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Johann Friedrich Struensee was appointed Royal Physician to King Christian VII on April 5, 1768, and four years later he was executed. </blockquote>
<br />
Sounds like the beginning of a popular history book, doesn't it? But in fact, this is <i>The Visit of the Royal Physician</i>, an historical novel by multi-award-winning Swedish author <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_Olov_Enquist" target="_blank">Per Olov Enquist</a>. If the setting sounds familiar, it's probably because of a surprise hit film last year, <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Royal_Affair" target="_blank">A Royal Affair</a></i>, directed by by Nikolaj Arcel and starring Mads Mikkelsen. Of course, it might also sound familiar because you have Danish connections; <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OeA18Mb_jA" target="_blank">according to Mikkelsen</a>, 'It's part of our history, everybody knows about it, but how many details is very individual. Everybody knows about this guy, Struensee the doctor, the German doctor who took over the country, had an affair with the queen, got a baby, and he got beheaded. But details - that's very individual how much you know.' It's a story the more remarkable for being true: an ambitious doctor named Johann Friedrich Struensee was appointed royal physician in Denmark to the then king, Christian VII. Christian was mentally ill, although exactly how remains a matter of speculation, and Struensee, an Enlightenment thinker in a country still based on serfdom, succeeded first in calming the king and then in gaining such influence over him that for a brief period, the German doctor became de facto ruler of Denmark. Struensee was prolific and remarkable in his reforms, which tended to be <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Friedrich_Struensee#In_control_of_the_government" target="_blank">truly excellent ideas</a>, but he was also rash enough to fall into an affair with the queen, Caroline Mathilde, and he evidently lacked the political skill to protect himself with alliances. Early in 1772 he was arrested and imprisoned, and an executioner chopped off first his right hand and then his head. It's a remarkable moment in Danish history, and it's also significant on the international stage. When the French Revolution began in 1789 its Enlightenment thinkers had a severe example to consider. This is what happened to a man who tried to break aristocratic power by non-violent means. Our guillotine for them, or their axe for us.<br />
<br />
So the story is an intriguing one, and it's gained international interest in recent years. <i>A Royal Affair</i> is not, strictly speaking, based on <i>The Visit of the Royal Physician;</i> its makers tried to buy the rights, but they'd already been sold elsewhere and the film credits another novel, <i>Prinsesse af blodet</i> by Bodil Steensen-Leth, but Enquist's novel was influential enough that <a href="http://www.expressen.se/kultur/bocker/slaget-om-dr-struensees-liv/" target="_blank">they had to double-check and do some rewrites on an earlier draft of the screenplay</a>. (You'll have to run that article through Google Translate unless you happen to speak Swedish.) Most significant are the changes the film makes to Caroline Mathilde's character, which Enquist writes as ... well, as one of those female characters who are very obviously written by a man, primarily defined by sexuality and her instinctive rule over men, and while she's a well-executed version of that, to this reader at least it's a weakness in the novel, and the film's portrayal of Caroline Mathilde as Enlightenment herself is, if a romantic view, at least more humanising. But that said, the novel is fascinating - and it's not just because of the story. It's also a truly unusual feat of style.<br />
<br />
Now, analysing the style of a work in translation is always a provisional business. The translator in this case is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiina_Nunnally" target="_blank">Tiina Nunnally</a>, which puts us in pretty safe hands; she's another multi-award-winner, translator of another famous adapted work, <i>Smilla's Sense of Snow</i>, and she's evidently highly regarded in Sweden: it's hard to say which is the bigger tribute, her 2009 award for 'the introduction of Swedish culture abroad' or the fact that in 2007 she got to do a new translation of the beloved classic <i>Pippi Longstocking</i>. Any translation has an element of admixture - I'm sure the foreign editions of my books owe much to their respective translators, and I always remember the story of my friend's mother who first read Wordsworth through the translation of a famous Japanese poet and was deeply disappointed when she finally read the original - but while Nunnally had many choices to make about phrasing, the real feature of Enquist's style is one that survives translation. It's his use of flat, repetitive declaration.<br />
<br />
<i>The Visit of the Royal Physician</i> is a deadpan book. Enquist is quite capable of metaphor and poetry when he chooses - Struensee thinks of the long-abused, confounded Christian as having 'frostbite of the soul', for instance - but he makes that choice only rarely. Instead, as befits the Enlightenment theme, the tone is strongly rational, confining itself to dry statement of facts - yet at the same time, it's fraught with emotional tension. In <i><a href="http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/28th-september-2002/63/madness-again-in-the-state-of-denmark" target="_blank">The Spectator</a></i>, John de Falbe described the style thus:<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">Enquist writes in short, jerky sentences which often seem to repeat themselves. Although disconcerting at first, the technique works brilliantly. The atmosphere is suitably nervy, while the shifting ground beneath the apparent repetitions is vibrant with stealth and subterfuge.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;"> </span><br />
<br />
While not all the sentences are literally short and jerky, he's right that it creates a 'nervy' atmosphere. I'd go further; I'd say it's doom-laden.<br />
<br />
Fate and inevitability weigh heavy on the novel. Christian himself is a figure of profound pathos, a sane boy systematically tormented into helplessness at the hands of a court preferring to keep the king weak enough to leave their power unchecked; his preoccupation with acting and theatre, of which the film makes much play, is presented not as an aristocrat's vanity but as the utter confusion between reality and performance of a boy who has spent his entire life required to speak the lines given to him and kept ignorant of anything else. Struensee is, for a man who managed to revolutionise a country not his own, a curiously passive figure: it is Caroline Mathilde who seduces him and guides their sexual encounters, and his regency is unmixed with any desire for power:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
It was as if he saw the aperture of history open, and he knew that it was the aperture of life, and he was the only one who could step through this opening. Perhaps, just perhaps, it was his duty.<br />
And he was tremendously frightened.</blockquote>
<br />
Fear rather than ambition rules Enquist's Struensee, just as it rules Christian; Enquist's imaginative sympathy is entirely on the side of the frightened, and the Queen's fearlessness is presented as a strength of which Struensee himself is 'afraid', another way in which she dominates him. Struensee is afraid, and he's also 'doomed to destruction' because, as the Queen sees it (and the narrative tends to support her) he's too 'pure-hearted': fear, innocence and virtue are conflated, and those who do not fear, including the instinctual, physical Queen, have an element of monstrosity to them. The entire tone of the novel has a kind of impassioned caution, the desperate restraint of one who has much to say but fears to say too much.<br />
<br />
We can hear it in the first sentence, though the style is so unusual that it takes a little time, a little practice getting one's ear in to Enquist's rhythms, before the emotion starts to strain through the facts. It deviates from plain history in one notable omission, for example: it doesn't say which country Christian was 'King' of. A popular textbook, especially one written in Swedish, would more likely say 'King Christian VII <i>of Denmark</i>,' just to make sure that everybody had all the relevant information at the outset. By omitting the reference to the country, the narrative assumes a certain knowledge from us.<br />
<br />
Which, in turn, has a curious effect on the names. 'Johann Friedrich Struensee' and 'King Christian VII' are obviously formal, nothing anyone actually speaking to them would employ. But at the same time, leaving out that all-important location - it only crops up in the next paragraph, in which there's mention of 'the Danish court', still expecting the reader to do a little mild deduction, and even then it's only mentioned because it's about to quote the opinion of 'the British Ambassador to the Danish court', locating the sense of Danish foreignness in a character rather than the narrative - sounds as if, in some way, we were hearing about people we all knew. We hear their full names, but we apparently don't need telling who they are. It creates a weird sense of formality, a disconnected courtliness, as if the narrative itself is reluctant to commit straight away to calling them 'Christian' and 'Struensee' as it later does. Knowing already how Struensee's career ended - for this first sentence delivers him dead on arrival - it almost feels like reading a transcript, a statement to the police from a speaker not quite sure he won't be arrested himself if he says the wrong thing.<br />
<br />
And we can see why when we consider the sentence's content. A man's 'visit' opens and closes in a few short years, and the close of his visit ends his life. Fortune's wheel is revolving fast in this world: to be near to power - as we must be as readers of stories of the powerful - is to be near to danger, near to death. Caroline Mathilde acknowledges this to herself in the reflection that:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
To desire the queen was touch death. She was forbidden, and desired, and anyone who touched the most forbidden of all would have to die. It excited them; she knew that. She saw it in their eyes. And once she was aware of it, all the others seemed to become ensnared, ever more strongly, in an intense and silent radiance.</blockquote>
<br />
Enquist adds that this thought 'filled her with a tremendous sense of power', and as moments like this predominate when it comes to our insight into Caroline Mathilde's thoughts, you can see why I described her as feeling very male-written - but thematically it's central to the book and sexuality is only part of it. Life and death are intermingled, and to live too vividly is to court disaster. In a sense, the opening sentence links Struensee's rise and fall almost as cause and effect: had he not become Royal Physician, he would not have been executed. We open, in a sense, with the beginning of the end. (An impression that's heightened by the fact that the first few chapters following describe time after Struensee's death. Death hangs over Struensee before we ever meet him.)<br />
<br />
In the face of this morbidity, performance and concealment are key: spontaneous expression tends to be destructive, as in the 'great furious confused rape of Copenhagen' that takes place in anti-Struensee riots, or self-destructive, as when Struensee sleeps with the Queen or his ally Brandt defends himself against a frantic attack from Christian, a defence that will later sign his death warrant. The narrative does not court such destruction. 'Johann Friedrich Struensee' and 'King Christian VII' are not so much naming the people as <i>quoting</i> their names, using an official version that no one could be blamed for saying.<br />
<br />
It is, simultaneously, a sentence that speaks of characters more than of history. Note the order: not, 'On April 5, 1768, Johann Friedrich Struensee was appointed Royal Physician to King Christian VII,' but 'Johann Friedrich Struensee was appointed Royal Physician to King Christian VII on April 5, 1768...' The subject is the man, not the date. Now, this is a decision made by Nunnally, not Enquist;<a href="http://www.bokia.se/livlakarens-besok-roman-4304779" target="_blank"> the original sentence ran thus</a>:<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #2f2f2f; font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 15px;">Den 5 april 1768 anställdes Johann Friedrich Struensee som den danske konungen Christian den sjundes livläkare, och avrättades fyra år senare.</span><br />
<br />
- and according to my Scandinavian friends, it would have been grammatically acceptable to put Struensee's name at the start. (And the Danish translation begins with the date too.) Not being a Swedish speaker I'm in no position to comment on the subtleties of Enquist's choice - very probably it involves nuances of language and literary tradition about which I can say nothing sensible - but Nunnally's makes it clear to English eyes that this is a novel, and that Johann Friedrich Struensee will be at the centre of it.<br />
<br />
There's an added ironic emphasis that shows up on rereading, especially when we consider the title. Struensee's execution takes place a few pages from the end of the novel, in a section that concludes, '...the axe at last found its mark and severed the head of the German royal physician; and his Danish visit was over.' 'Visit' is one of those words that Enquist charges through repetition, and when we've read the entire book, we can see its significance: the 'visit' is a fatal one, not just a consultation with a patient but his engagement with an entire country and culture which will ultimately destroy him. 'The visit of the royal physician' is, in effect, summarised in the first sentence: we begin with the moment he could first be called 'royal physician', and end where he ends. The 'visit' is, like many other words in the novel, a word that contains more implication, more weight, more inevitability than a single word can comfortably contain.<br />
<br />
And it is, indeed, an uncomfortable read, linguistically as well as narratively. This is not a fault in the book: Enquist is evidently a fine writer and Nunnally does a fine job with the translation: discomfort is an effect it works to produce. To take an example: while touring Europe, Christian has a habit of smashing furniture in fits of hysteria, and Enquist describes it thus:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In the end [Christian] was practically certain that he was a prisoner who was being escorted, in a gigantic procession, to his punishment.<br />
This no longer frightened him. But an infinite weariness encompassed him; he felt himself slowly sinking into sorrow, and all that could bring him out of it were the regular otubursts of rage, when he would slam chairs against the floor until they shattered.<br />
The reports and dispatches were telling. 'There were few hotels along the travel route where a certain amount of destruction could not be found, and in London the furniture in the King's room was almost always smashed.'<br />
That was the summary.</blockquote>
<br />
Look at the final paragraph, that dry, repressed sentence, 'That was the summary.' We can hear it it both condemnation and resignation. Yes, that summary is accurate and contains within it a swathe of destruction, and in describing Christian's behaviour, more hardly needs to be said. And no, that description is a summary and nothing more, and what it omits - Christian's inner experience, the pain that motivates him and the abuse that created the pain and the profound cynicism that motivated the abuse - are the important things, and a 'summary' that omits everything important comes out of a culture that is itself the cause of the destruction. A single sentence, isolated in its own paragraph to give it weight, both affirms and blames the summary, not disagreeing with it factually, but challenging it morally - but a challenge that could, if pressed, be denied. After all, it's just a plain statement of fact.<br />
<br />
Interpretation, then, is key. The plain statements of fact are always <i>understatements</i>: 'It would be a long night. First dinner. Then tea. After that the masked ball. Then the coup d'etat.' And they're understated because they take place in a narrative that has already anticipated its end. We already know when we hear a comment like 'That's how things were at the best of times,' the worst of times are in view. More or less everything is 'summary', in fact; the closest we get to authorial explanation is the odd bald description like 'The atmosphere was charged and hostile, but courteous', a description that's once again isolated in its own paragraph, too frozen to expand. Expansiveness only takes place in the characters' private reflections, and the narrative voice just quotes them rather than confirming or denying. It's clear which characters the narrative prefers, but we have to deduce that from the evidence: it isn't going to tell us directly.<br />
<br />
The characters themselves tend to be obsessives of some kind or another, often defined by epithets - 'the wine treader', 'the Silent One' - and ruled by single guiding ideas. It's a device more commonly seen in comedy, where monomania is the staple of humour: think of Mrs Elton's 'Maple Grove' in Jane Austen's <i>Emma</i>, for instance, or Madeleine Basset in the P.G. Wodehouse novels and her preoccupation with rabbits, fairies and God's daisy-chain of stars. Here, though, it's frightening: while comic characters amuse us by finding endless variations on their central trait, in <i>The Visit of the Royal Physician</i>, variation isn't possible. The 'wine treader' Guldberg, for instance, who eventually orchestrates Struensee's overthrow, is driven by a ferocious commitment to punishing the impure who have failed to appreciate his value, and when Caroline Mathilde asks him why he destroyed them, he quotes long sections of the Bible with the air of finally revealing his character. Christian's preoccupation with unreality isn't funny: it's ridiculous, but it's also a prison that prevents him from saving his friend. When obsessives jostle against each other, it's only funny if it's survivable.<br />
<br />
Which, as we know from the first sentence, it is not.<br />
<br />
Pulling off a trick of style like this, and sustaining it through an entire novel without boring the reader, is a truly remarkable feat. For Enquist's style to work, we have to read at a slow pace, listening for the resonances and echoes in apparently ordinary words. By beginning as he does, with a single-sentence paragraph that contains both dry facts and the history of a man's terrible fall, he slows us down. It's as if the book is saying to us, 'Stop. Tread carefully. Listen to every word I say.' Fate is hanging over our shoulder from the very beginning, giving every word an invisible weight. In plain language, we are told that we are on borrowed time, and like condemned criminals awaiting execution, we find ourselves in a world where everything is magnified as if it were our last moment.<br />
<br />
Writing a work of historical fiction is always a case of compromise. Every era has its values that are held too deep to see, and a writer must balance their own era's preconceptions against the foreign preconceptions of the era they depict. At the same time, every historical novel is a novel of the present day: we interpret the past according to our own lights, and what we say of it, we say of ourselves. Struensee is an interesting case of this: the Enlightenment is an era that has shaped our own and most of us accept many of its new ideas as unquestioned truths; a man like Struensee is an easy choice for our identification. Yet at the same time, he must have had a will to power - nobody becomes head of state without one - and that sits uneasily with Enlightenment values: personal advancement is the stuff of aristocracy, and an Enlightenment ruler is supposed to be ruling for the sake of the people in the name of reason. It's interesting that a 1935 film of the same story, rather than choosing the more neutral '<i>A Royal Affair</i>' or the straight-faced '<i>The Visit of the Royal Physician</i>', was called '<i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0026657/" target="_blank">The Dictato</a>r</i>'; Struensee was, for a brief time, a dictator, and while his reforms seem to have been all to the good, the twentieth century has taught us to fear any man who claims to be dictating for the benefit of the people. Arcel and Mikkelsen deal with the issue by creating a Struensee mostly driven by human connection - by liking for the aristocrats who press him to apply for the royal post, by compassion for the demented Christian, by love and admiration for the enlightened Caroline Mathilde. Enquist takes our fear and relocates it in Struensee. We have nothing to fear from him because he is more afraid of his power than we are. <br />
<br />
You can see a useful contrast between the two approaches in the 'wooden horse' incident - a moment that <i>A Royal Affair</i> must have taken from Enquist, but adapted. If you've seen the film, you may remember it: riding together, Struensee and Caroline Mathilde pass the dead body of a peasant strapped to a torturous trestle, his widow sitting hopelessly beside him and running away in terror when she sees the aristocrats approach. Struensee dismounts, tries to reassure the widow, then unties the dead man, releasing him in death from the horrible device. In the book, it is Christian who accompanies Struensee, and the victim is alive, in the process of being whipped, probably to death. Struensee tries to explain to Christian that, 'That's the way things are in your kingdom, Your Majesty ... An entire peasant class is sitting there on that wooden horse ... That is reality. Liberate them. Liberate them.' Yet Christian is too horrified to make sense of the scene, unable to grasp its abstract 'reality', and Struensee, faced with Christian's panic, is too afraid to intervene. The boy - younger than depicted in the film, his age is guessed at sixteen - is left to his fate. All that Enquist is prepared to acknowledge is the power of Struensee's values, 'something left that could not be chopped off' after Struensee himself has been beheaded and quartered. Actual people are not saved. Enquist's novel is uncomfortable with granting any moments of hope to the past: ideals and ideas alone are safe. It's one of those novels that is as much a hymn of praise to the present, or to the future, as it is a commentary on the past. Struensee, in the abstract, is the eternal intellectual, frightened by the pragmatic brutality of the world and more potent as a symbol than as a man.<br />
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You can see why this wouldn't translate very well into a film. <i>A Royal Affair</i> has many influences, and cinematically it's somewhat akin to Kubrick's <i>Barry Lyndon</i>: visually lush, verbally understated, steady-paced and merciless. When you can see the people up on screen, their inner thoughts can only be expressed by actors' performances, and to perform a character is to render them specific, intimate, more particular than symbolic. To shoot in beautiful fields and palaces is to treat of beauty and expansiveness. What Enquist gives us, instead, is the entrapping repetition of obsession and fear, a voice that lives in the little breaks between reason and madness that make an oppressive world. What we have in the first sentence is the novel in microcosm, an ingrown fractal of fate. A man is appointed, he is executed, and the narrative voice can add no rhetoric that could possibly communicate more than the bare events. We, like the characters, must see what has happened and draw our own frightened, confused, hopeful conclusions.Kit Whitfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623432518060526692noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31552467.post-42812554873518616102013-08-28T17:50:00.000+00:002013-08-28T17:50:22.416+00:00Opening Line: Persuasion by Jane Austen<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: xx-small;">This blog is undergoing revision; a temporary archive of Opening Line posts can be found <a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/first-sentence-posts.html" target="_blank">here</a>. </span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somerset, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs, changed naturally into pity and contempt as he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century; and there, if every other leaf were powerless, he could read his own history with an interest which never failed.</blockquote>
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What's your favourite Austen book? Do you prefer the breathless romance of <i>Pride and Prejudice</i>? The poised sparkle of <i>Emma</i>? The involved drama of <i>Mansfield Park</i>? The warm, imperfect charm of <i>Northanger Abbey</i>? The witty, partisan suspense of <i>Sense and Sensibility</i>?<br />
<br />
Or do you prefer <i>Persuasion</i>, that most-favourite, least-favourite, best or worst of Austen's oeuvre, depending on who you ask?<br />
<br />
Jane Austen was a genius. In the days when the novel was but nascent, having no correspondence with any other writers, educated only at home, and beginning in her teens, she somehow managed to create a form of perfection, a brilliant, gripping, hilarious and polished set of creations that still enthrall centuries after the manners she parodied have passed. Few novel-lovers can think without regret of her early death, leaving us with only those half-dozen books to enjoy ... but among that half-dozen, loved as they are by both scholars and the popular market, which is the most loveable remains a question we can debate with some animation. <i>Emma</i> tends to sit securely high on most people's lists, as does <i>Pride and Prejudice</i>; <i>Northanger Abbey</i> has faults which most readers gladly forgive but openly acknowledge; <i>Sense and Sensibility</i> may suffer a little in comparison with <i>Pride and Prejudice</i>, but only a little, and we fall into it grateful for its existence.<br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Mansfield Park</i> is a thornier question; Fanny Price is perhaps the least popular of Austen's heroines, and the serious manner and pious attitudes of its hero lack the charm and virility of most of her other men. For all that, it's a beautifully written book with a truly marvellous structure, slow-paced on the surface but with an undertow as fast and forceful as any thriller: tiny incident adds to tiny incident and builds to some of her most extreme disasters, and the steady increase of tension is played with mastery. Likewise Fanny, if lacking in sass and sizzle, is a delicately-observed portrait placed in plausible circumstances, her timidity and caution understandable given her broken childhood and constantly-disregarded feelings, a heroine that Austen, finally calling her 'my Fanny', evidently loves. Personal preference being so much a part of reading Austen - another measure of her brilliance, for how many other great authors attract such intimate attachment? - I'll lay down my cards: <i>Mansfield Park</i> is one of my favourites, probably equalled only by <i>Emma</i>: for me, what it lacks in wit it makes up in psychological complexity, what it lacks in sex appeal it makes up in sensitivity, and its story draws me in every time.<br />
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Yet if we're talking about an engaging story, why do I not love <i>Persuasion</i>?<br />
<br />
I have an exercise in mind with this Opening Line post. A first sentence can cast light on the rest of the novel, and it's the rest of the novel as much as the first sentence that interests me. Sometimes, it's good to re-examine the books that don't engage us.<br />
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Earlier this year, the Slate journalist Adelle Waldman ranked Austen's novels '<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/the_completist/2013/04/jane_austen_novels_from_best_to_worst_plus_her_best_lines.html" target="_blank">from best to worst</a>' (in an order that I find hard to quarrel with, particularly if we're talking about technical perfection rather than personal preference), and rated <i>Persuasion</i> lowest. <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/the_completist/2013/04/jane_austen_books_ranked_and_reconsidered_from_emma_to_persuasion.single.html" target="_blank">Accompanying this list</a>, she posed the following question:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;">Why do so many of Jane Austen’s smartest readers consider her weakest novel to be her best? </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/0674049748/ref=as_li_ss_til?tag=slatmaga-20&camp=0&creative=0&linkCode=as4&creativeASIN=0674049748&adid=18P1W1ENWBESS2AP6CZD&" style="color: #006699; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><em style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; font-size: 12px; font-style: italic; font: inherit; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Persuasion</em></a></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;">, the story of kind, helpful Anne Elliot—who made a mistake years ago and is still suffering for it when the book opens—is didactic and full of crude, overdrawn characterizations. It is also the least funny of Austen’s books. The bad characters, whether snobbish, scheming, or hypochondriacal, are unwaveringly bad. (Directed at such easy targets, satire ceases to be satire. It’s more like gawking at roadkill.) The book’s good characters are even worse: boring, smug and, after a while, downright insufferable. Writing about a rough draft of</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/0140431020/ref=as_li_ss_til?tag=slatmaga-20&camp=0&creative=0&linkCode=as4&creativeASIN=0140431020&adid=0DZVWFHBCDFQSMH7NVZZ&" style="color: #006699; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><em style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; font-size: 12px; font-style: italic; font: inherit; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Watsons</em></a></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;">, one of Austen’s unfinished books, Virginia Woolf said that “the stiffness and bareness of the first chapters” suggest that “she was one of those writers who lay their facts out rather baldly in the first version and then go back and back and back and cover them with flesh and atmosphere.” Woolf might have been speaking of</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;"><em style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; font-size: 12px; font-style: italic; font: inherit; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Persuasion</em></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;">. Published posthumously, it has an almost skeletal feel, like an outline in which only the most salient points about each character are noted, as if Austen didn’t have time to “cover them with flesh.”</span></blockquote>
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<a href="http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91c/chapter12.html" target="_blank">The essay of Woolf'</a>s she quotes does actually touch on <i>Persuasion</i>, in a slightly more sympathetic style:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
There is a peculiar beauty and a peculiar dullness in <i>Persuasion</i>. The dullness is that which so often marks the transition stage between two different periods. The writer is a little bored. She has grown too familiar with the ways of her world; she no longer notes them freshly. There is an asperity in her comedy which suggests that she has almost ceased to be amused by the vanities of a Sir Walter or the snobberies of a Miss Elliott. The satire is harsh, and the comedy crude. She is no longer so freshly aware of the amusements of daily life. Her mind is not altogether on her object. But, while we feel that Jane Austen has done this before, and done it better, we also feel that she is trying to do something which she has never yet attempted. There is a new element in <i>Persuasion</i>, the quality, perhaps, that made Dr Whewell fire up and insist that it was 'the most beautiful of her works'. She is beginning to discover that the world is larger, more mysterious, and more romantic than she had supposed. We feel it to be true of herself when she says of Anne: 'She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older - the natural sequence of an unnatural beginning. She dwells frequently upon the beauty and the melancholy of nature, upon the autumn where she had been wont to dwell upon the spring ... The observation is less of facts and more of feelings than is usual.</blockquote>
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Waldman theorises that <i>Persuasion</i> is rated by some notable critics as Austen's best work because of a general preference for the 'serious' over the comic. Woolf's analysis notes a melancholy and emotion in <i>Persuasion</i> which may have a stronger effect than mere prejudice against the humorous. Both may have a point, but I'm not sure it's the whole picture.<br />
<br />
To me, <i>Persuasion</i> was hard to learn how to like - to the point where it didn't feel quite like an Austen book but like the work of a skilled ghostwriter. It's probably the least funny of her books, but that isn't wrong in itself; <i>Mansfield Park</i> is sober in its mien too and I've loved it since I first read it aged twenty. It's bitterly judgemental towards the 'conceited, silly' characters, but then <i>Pride and Prejudice</i> is thoroughly rude about the 'mean understanding, little information and uncertain temper' of Mrs Bennet right in the first chapter, and everybody loves <i>Pride and Prejudice</i>. What's the difference? Partly, I think, is that <i>Persuasion</i> is the angriest of Austen's books: as Woolf observes, Austen doesn't seem to be entertained by her characters. What laughter there is is scornful rather than amused. To draw out a single illustration: while Sir Walter's 'contempt and pity' are presented for us to judge harshly in the first sentence, it's also presented as a mark of worth that Frederick Wentworth, our charming hero, can be spotted turning aside from Anne's sister Mary with a look of 'contempt' not once, but twice - the 'contemptuous glance' he hides on the hill above Winthrop, and the 'momentary expression of contempt' when Mary presumes to whisper audibly that he must be 'delighted' to get an invitation from her father. 'Contempt' is the same emotion we deprecate in the ghastly Sir Walter - yet in Captain Wentworth, we are meant to approve it.<br />
<br />
I'll focus on this word for a while, because it's a good demonstration of <i>Persuasion</i>'s atypical tone. Using a Kindle search I find forty-four instances of the word in Austen (including variations such as 'contemptible', and including juvenilia such as<i> Lady Susan</i>), and in most of her other books, it's not a virtuous emotion. Emma denies to Mr Knightley that Harriet Smith's connections are 'so contemptible as you represent them', for instance, and the fact that she's attributing the word to him when he hasn't spoken it himself is a none-too-subtle accusation. Maria Bertram feels 'contempt of the man she was going to marry' - not entirely unfounded, for Mr Rushworth is a fool, but in that context the word is also a judgement on Maria: to feel contempt for a man whose fortune she plans to live upon is a sign of her own spoiled and selfish attitudes. Isabella Thorpe exclaims 'How contemptible!' in conversation: she is self-dramatising and affected, and almost nothing she says is sincere. General Tilney feels 'happy contempt' towards a man with an inferior greenhouse to himself, and 'contempt of [Catherine Morland's] family': he is a materialistic old snob. The word recurs a fair amount in <i>Pride and Prejudice: </i>Elizabeth Bennet discerns the 'contempt' of the Bingley sisters and accuses Mr Darcy of 'contempt' more than once; contempt is precisely the value Darcy must disown to win her. Elizabeth, too, fears the 'contempt' of society towards her family, and comes to regret her father's tacit encouragement of 'contempt' towards her mother.<br />
<br />
Most of the time, in other words, contempt is a vice or a problem in Austen. Seldom is it attributed to sympathetic characters, and on those occasions, it's usually very carefully handled. Marianne Dashwood is prone to feel 'contempt' for people, but while we love her, she's impulsive and prone to over-reaction. In that context, it's not so much a sneer as a tossed head and a lifted chin, the sudden reaction of a high-minded but immature girl. There are only two instances of sound-judging heroines feeling contempt, and in both cases, it's felt in heat, not coldness: Elinor Dashwood feels 'angry contempt' for Willoughby, but only after he's cruelly abandoned her sister and is attempting to justify himself, and Elizabeth Bennet can't think 'without anger, hardly without contempt' of Mr Bingley's willingness to be persuaded to give up his love for her sister Jane. Anger and contempt mix together in warm-hearted characters - even in <i>Persuasion</i>, the loving but misjudging Lady Russell's 'heart revelled in angry pleasure, in pleased contempt' at the thought that Captain Wentworth is proving himself unworthy of Anne Elliot, thus confirming that she was right to talk Anne out of marrying him. Anger is always added in, a touch on the reader's shoulder to remind us that this is the 'contempt' of indignation, of outraged love for a third party, not of superiority. Yet when we come to <i>Persuasion</i>, we see it in the hero, twice, with no such qualification. True, he has reason to dislike Mary, but she has not been the main agent of dissuading Anne from marrying him, nor is she the primary source of Anne's low status in her family: the former sin rests with Lady Russell, the latter with Sir Walter. Mary is demanding, self-flattering and unreasonable, but she is not cruel, and of the Elliot relations that encumber Anne, she is probably the least bad. On the hill he might be excused for still feeling bitter towards the whole Elliot clan, but by the time of the invitation, his love for Anne has returned, and he's still contemptuous towards her sister. We may feel a certain contempt towards Mary ourselves, but then we are outside her world, aware that she is a fictional character, not required to treat her with humanity. Wentworth does not have that position. He is a character, and subject to our judgement to - yet because Mary is not admirable, we are not to question how well a ready contempt sits alongside a declaredly loving disposition.<br />
<br />
The unmoderated language is far heavier, far cruder than we can usually expect from Austen. Compare it, for instance, to the beautiful turn that sums up a hero's dislike for a tiresome woman in <i>Emma</i>: 'Mr Knightley seemed to be trying not to smile, and succeeded without difficulty, upon Mrs Elton's beginning to talk to him.' There, we see a hero not just as a judge of character, not just desirable because his view of human nature is correct, but as a human being himself, interacting with others, trapped by good manners into a conversation that allows us to laugh in sympathy with his plight as well as with his opinion. <i>Persuasion</i> lacks this complexity; we are to accept judgements without being laughed into them. We do not get to laugh both at and with the heroes simultaneously.<br />
<br />
I may seem to be making heavy play out of a single word, but in fact, <i>Persuasion</i> is full of such issues. Part of the problem is that, as Woolf points out, the book is light on dialogue. In every other novel, Austen can boast at least one or two great comic voices: <i>Northanger Abbey</i> has the playful teasing of Henry Tilney and the pretentious flutterings of Isabella Thorpe; <i>Sense and Sensibility</i> has the 'beau'-obsessed elder Miss Steele; <i>Pride and Prejudice</i> has the raucous Mrs Bennet and the weightily obsequious Mr Collins; <i>Emma</i> has the incomparable Mrs Elton. Even <i>Mansfield Park</i>, serious though it is, has the endlessly mean Mrs Norris exposing her dreadfulness every time she opens her mouth: we may not quite laugh at her, but we certainly see her hypocrisies revealed, and hypocrisy is one of the prime ingredients of comedy. But while there are distinctive voices in <i>Persuasion</i> - Anne's egregious relations, the hearty Admiral Croft - there is less irony in their delineation: even the nasty people are not so much hypocrites as they are just plain selfish, conceited and dislikeable. There is no Mrs Elton, no Mr Collins, no Miss Steele: <i>Persuasion</i> contains none of Austen's comedic greats. Added to that, Austen tells us a great deal more in her narrative voice than she does with conversations. The first chapter of <i>Pride and Prejudice</i> reads almost like a play script; the first chapter of <i>Persuasion</i> contains only a single, incomplete line of quoted speech: 'For they must have been seen together,' he observed, 'once at Tattersal's, and twice in the lobby of the House of Commons.' Austen, that pitch-perfect writer of voices, sings rather low in <i>Persuasion</i>. The narrative voice intrudes; the character voices suffer.<br />
<br />
So, too, does the characterisation of her heroine. There is a simple problem: Anne, unlike the interfering Emma, the misjudging Elizabeth, the inhibited Fanny, the naive Catherine, the heedless Marianne and the misled Elinor, is never seriously wrong. Mr Elliott's courtship does not tempt her as strongly Wickham's tempts Elizabeth; her well-meant reticence is never truly unfortunate, as Fanny's is when she lacks the courage to warn her uncle why Henry Crawford is not a man to marry; unlike Emma or Catherine or Marianne, she has no moments of silliness; she does not even struggle, as Elinor does, with the keeping of a secret that leads her into unwanted deceits, or with the conflict between love for her family and fear of their folly - with moments when it's all but impossible to know what the right course of action should be. Anne's behaviour is consistently virtuous and her opinions consistently reliable. Yes, the novel's plot is based on a terrible mistake, in that she refused the man she loved, but that mistake is blamed on the 'persuasion' of other characters which 'was more than Anne could combat' - and even then, we are firmly told to believe her motives 'not a merely selfish caution', but 'the belief of being prudent, and self-denying principally for <i>his</i> advantage.' Anne is just a little too spotless. Austen herself acknowledged it in a letter to her niece Fanny Knight<a href="http://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/brablt15.html#toc" target="_blank"> (LXXXIV)</a>:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Do not be surprised at finding Uncle Henry acquainted with my having another ready for publication. I could not say No when he asked me, but he knows nothing more of it. You will not like it, so you need not be impatient. You may <i>perhaps</i> like the heroine, as she is almost too good for me.</blockquote>
<br />
In this same letter Austen acknowledged that 'pictures of perfection, as you know, make me sick and wicked', and while she does not quite attribute this nauseating quality to Anne, we are not seeing the tenderness of 'my Fanny' here. Anne is almost too good - which isn't just a flaw in a character, but in the narrative: events happen around Anne, but characters' stories have a tendency come to rest on the issue of whether they value Anne enough in the end. Anne struggles with her own feelings, and she struggles to be useful, but she is a rather static point in the narrative, and as such, rather a drag on the individuality of everyone else.<br />
<br />
Or at least, so she seems. There are reasons why the novel isn't universally popular: the dearth of dialogue, the 'almost too good' heroine, and the increasingly acidulated tone. It's a deft stroke, for instance, in Zoe Heller's <i>Notes On A Scandal</i> that Barbara, the lonely misanthrope, tells us, 'I have created my own traditions for the high days and holy days. This New Year's, as on every New Year's for the last decade, I bought in a bottle of sherry and spent the evening getting slightly sozzled while re-reading Jane Austen's <i>Persuasion'</i>; we can just picture her sighing along to the hopes of second chances and nodding in satisfaction as one character after another is condemned for failing to recognise the heroine's essential rightness. Yet somehow, despite all this, <i>Persuasion</i> is a novel people fall in love with.<br />
<br />
Why?<br />
<br />
Waldman's suggestion of humourlessness doesn't seem to cover it. Nor, peace to her ashes, does Woolf's reflections on the melancholy and the love of nature: they're part of it, but not, I think, the whole. The complex interactions between class and class are part of it - <i>Persuasion</i> takes in a lot of subtle social gradations - and so too is the hopeful message of lost opportunities redeemed. There's something else, though, something that we see in the action that outstrips any of Austen's other books. <i>Persuasion</i> is <i>sexy</i>.<br />
<br />
The plot is rich in tantalising thrills. Frederick Wentworth loved Anne Elliot, and she, foolishly, rejected him, breaking both their hearts in the process. Eight years later, he comes back to the neighbourhood. They are often in each other's company, but cannot speak. It is clear he has not forgiven her - though to heighten the suspense, we as readers sense that the very fact he's still angry with her is a sign he still loves her; his passion has never cooled to indifference, and is ready to return given the opportunity. But because of circumstances, they have no time alone together; they can only guess at each other by watching across an unsuspecting crowd. The sexual tension surpasses even that of <i>Pride and Prejudice</i>, and the language, too, is sensual. Anne 'trembled' after an indirect declaration that she doesn't love Wentworth's rival. Recalling moments when Wentworth seemed to praise her, she experiences 'a faint blush at some recollections' - and how tantalising is that laconic 'some'! Austen's characters usually blush from embarrassment; here, though, is a character blushing with excitement, a warm revelation. Anne is even seen 'beginning to breathe very quick' after speaking to him. Physical closeness is felt: Anne anticipates Wentworth's presence by looking at a setting and thinking 'a few months more, and <i>he</i>, perhaps, may be walking here,' inserting him as a physical presence into the scene before her; she manoeuvres around concert benches to get 'within reach' of him; there's a ravishing moment early in the story in which Anne, hung upon by a misbehaving nephew, finds the burden suddenly lifted off her - a perfect metaphor for the role the Austenian hero plays towards his heroine, but also a moment of near-embrace, of sudden, unexpected touch in which his strength is at her back. 'We are not boy and girl,' Anne reflects to herself, and indeed they're not: with constant separation and the restrictions of etiquette to magnify every moment of 'half averted eyes, and more than half expressive glance', this is Austen at her most erotic. Compare Anne's gasps and flushes to the <i>Pride and Prejudice</i> proposal:<br />
<br />
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<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span lang="EN-US">Elizabeth, feeling all the more than common
awkwardness and anxiety of his situation, now forced herself to speak; and
immediately, though not very fluently, gave him to understand that her
sentiments had undergone so material a change since the period to which he
alluded, as to make her receive with gratitude and pleasure his present
assurances. The happiness which this reply produced was such as he had probably
never felt before, and he expressed himself on the occasion as sensibly and as
warmly as a man violently in love can be supposed to do.</span></blockquote>
<!--EndFragment--><br />
<br />
... and you can see just how far Austen has come. Trembling and rapid breathing have replaced 'awkwardness and anxiety', as if sensuality has come to life somewhere between the two. Lord Grey of Falloden's famous remark on Austen comes to mind:<br />
<br />
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<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span lang="EN-US">Jane Austen is to me the greatest wonder
among novel writers. I do not mean that she is the greatest novel writer, but
she seems to me the greatest wonder. Imagine, if you were to instruct an author
or an authoress to write a novel under the limitations within which Jane Austen
writes!</span><span lang="EN-US"> </span><span lang="EN-US">Suppose you were to say, "Now you must
write a novel, but you must have no heroes or heroines in the accepted sense of
the word. You may have naval officers, but they must always be on leave or on
land, never on active service. You must have no striking villains; you may have
a mild rake, but keep him well in the background, and if you are really going
to produce something detestable, it must be so because of its small meannesses,
as, for instance, the detestable Aunt Norris in 'Mansfield Park'; you must have
no very exciting plots; you must have no thrilling adventures; a sprained ankle
on a country walk is allowable, but you must no go much beyond this. You must
have no moving descriptions of scenery; you must work without the help of all
these; and as to passion, there must be none of it. You may, of course, have
love, but it must be so carefully handled that it very often seems to get
little above the temperature of liking. With all these limitations you are to
write, not only one novel, but several, which, not merely by popular
appreciation, but by the common consent of the greatest critics shall be
classed amongst the first rank of the novels written in your language in your
country.</span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">It's a handsome tribute in its way, but he's wrong about <i>Persuasion</i>. It's quietly done, peeping from the margins, but in her last novel, passion literally breathes upon the page. Anne Elliot may be 'almost too good', but she is, to a unique degree among her literary sisters, finally and deliciously embodied. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">What can we see of this in the first sentence? </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Anne is more of a physical presence than a plot one in <i>Persuasion</i>: things happen to and around her, and only glances and hints allow her to shape her destiny. As befits a self-effacing character - the same thing happens with Fanny Price - we begin not with her, but with the people around her who will crowd her into corners. Sir Walter is not present during many passages of the book, both because as an individual he's too selfish to leave his pleasures, and because as a character he's too single-note to adapt well to every scene. 'Vanity was the beginning and end of Sir Walter Elliot's character', Austen tells us crisply after a page and a half of watching him play with the Baronetage, and when a character begins and ends with a single trait, their fictional possibilities are limited. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">It is a well-sketched trait, though, that's for certain. Austen loves serious readers - you can usually tell who her heroines are going to marry on the strength of it - and never opening books, in her context, immediately debars Sir Walter from her approval. More than that, though, he's a man who only reads 'the Baronetage' - that is, the guide to the baronets of Britain. Now, while to be a baronet is definitely to be blue of blood, there's a sly poke at Sir Walter in her choice of rank: baronet is the lowest of the inheritable titles, higher than a knight but not a full peer. Later in the novel, in fact, we see Sir Walter cravenly courting the attention of his higher-ranking cousin Lady Dalrymple; he cannot be unaware that to be a baronet, aristocratic though you are, is not to be above the whole of humanity. But he screens himself from that knowledge: it's not a peerage he's reading, not a list of every rank of nobility. He confines himself to the Baronetage, pleasingly full of more arriviste baronets than himself that he can look comfortably down upon, where he need be troubled with no odious comparisons. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Sir Walter is, by naturalistic standards, nearly insane with vanity. He feels 'admiration and respect' for those who rank alongside him or slightly above him, 'pity and contempt' for those who do not - and to admire your equals in rank simply for <i>being</i> your equals in rank is mere extended self-love. We know this even before Austen's sharp conclusion to the sentence, the 'interest which never failed' in reading the dry summary of his own life - a life he turns away from the reality of, to read the official records about. It's clear from the beginning that his life could do with some attention: obviously he's an empty-headed man if he's entertained in an 'idle hour' by reading the same page over and over, but he's also ignoring 'domestic affairs'. A few paragraphs on, we see the extent of his madness: that he's recorded not only his daughter's marriage - seeing no foolishness in this emendation that can only be read by people who already know about it - but, 'most accurately', the 'day of the month' of his wife's demise. His good lady's death occasions no deeper mourning than a careful adjustment to his favourite page - no reflection except the desire to keep his image impeccable. Pride destroys any kind of health in his family, and at the beginning of the story has led him near bankruptcy. What we see, in fact, is the perfect image of a latter-day Narcissus, gazing entranced</span> into his own destruction. </div>
<br />
The structure of the sentence supports the circularity of Sir Walter's thinking. It's a long opener, the longest of all Austen's novels - a hundred and two words, in fact, nearly twice as long as the fifty-six words of its nearest competitor, <i>Mansfield Park</i> - and in its repeated 'there' at the beginning of each new clause, it achieves a rhythm that's either soothing or maddening - soothing for Sir Walter, returning again and again to the reliable, controllable page, and maddening for us, watching him find the same wrong answer to every question life throws at him. It's almost like listening to a mother murmur 'there, there' to a child, or rather, like watching a childish sensibility murmuring 'there, there' to itself, when in fact it has no right not to act like an adult. In the name of historical accuracy, I should admit that far as I can tell from Internet research,<a href="http://www.word-detective.com/092906B.html#therethere" target="_blank"> the phrase 'there, there' may not have been in use in 1816</a>; whether or not it was a literal comfort phrase, it has the air of self-soothing through repetition. Self-soothing, and also mockery: we can almost hear the rhythm of harsh laughter. Sir Walter's opening line is one of circles, not progress: before we're told that vanity is his 'beginning and end', we know it rhythmically. Both in action and in tempo, he always comes back to the same place. And it's a place that narrows down. He begins by looking at 'the limited remnant of the earliest patents' (that is, the old aristocracy), then at the 'creations of the last century' (that is, more recent baronets), but he's not reading as an historian: he reads them only to compare with himself. Like his psyche, the sentence ends where it began, with Sir Walter Elliot.<br />
<br />
Austen never begins with dialogue, but this is an unusual piece of scene-setting. Often she opens with a bit of family history, but Sir Walter Elliot, part of a noble family, is presented solo. It's a neat reflection of the way that, despite his preoccupation with family as heritage, he isn't actually interested in his family as a living unit: he's only interested insofar as it reflects on him, so while <i>Mansfield Park</i> begins with the marriage of 'Miss Maria Ward' and 'Sir Thomas Bertram' and <i>Sense and Sensibility</i> with the statement that 'The family of Dashwood had long been settled in Sussex' - sentences about how families form and live - the Elliot family, in this opening sentence, exists only on a doctored page in a book. They do not interact; they are merely there in the record. Meanwhile Sir Walter Elliot is, uniquely for an opening character, actually seen in action. <i>Northanger Abbey</i> tells us that '<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, serif; font-size: 16px;">No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine,' and <i>Emma</i> that '</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">Emma
Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy
disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had
lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex
her,' - but these are characters in summary, not characters in motion. Sir Walter is in the action of taking up a book: not exactly as a single action, but rather as a habit, which fits with Austen's tendency to begin with generalities, but even so, the habit is that of single action we can easily picture. As befits <i>Persuasion</i>'s more sensuous tone, the first character we see is unusually tangible.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">His repeated action is also, of course, the opposite of the book's narrative and moral drive. Anne marries a newly-rich man with no aristocratic background to speak of, and is glad to do so; being trapped in old patterns is a comfort to Sir Walter, but a slow death for her. <i>Persuasion</i> is a book of second chances - another reason it's so popular, containing as it does a message of hope that even when we think life is over, good things may still happen - but what we see here is a character for whom second chances are of no interest. He is too complacent about what he already has - even though all he has is his title, his debts and a family that aren't really happy and don't really love him. Unsurprisingly for a man of the domestic habits we see in this first sentence, his children and he have no strong connection: his eldest daughter and he rub along in mutual admiration of their own beauty and name; his youngest daughter displeases him by being 'coarse' from her discontent in marriage, a discontent largely lying in the fact that he has raised her to have so much of 'the Elliot pride' that she feels ill-used at every minor inconvenience. And then there's Anne, obedient but ashamed, in whom he takes practically no interest. We begin with the cause of Anne's problems, caught in the act of repetitively closing himself off from the harm he wreaks. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">This is the angry element of the book. To say that 'Sir Walter Elliot was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage' is an epigram. Austen, that famous author of <a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/first-sentences-pride-and-prejudice-by.html" target="_blank">'It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of good fortune, must be in want of a wife,'</a> was not willing to stop there. 'There' extends and extends, measured but hammering, until we are absolutely prevented from picturing Sir Walter acting with any credit under any circumstances at all. Condemnation overmasters laughter. The very fact that we begin with a character to dislike is new: while it's not unusual for Austen to begin with characters who are less than helpful to the heroine - <i>Pride and Prejudice</i> and <i>Mansfield Park </i>do the same - it is unusual to begin with a single individual who is not the heroine (as we begin in <i>Northanger Abbey</i> and <i>Emma</i>), but is a problem all on their own. Problematic interactions or settings have begun her books before, but while </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><i>Pride and Prejudice</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">and</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><i>Mansfield Park </i>begin with faulty individuals, all of them have some redeeming features. Mrs Bennet is funny, and her concern for her daughters' marriage is not unreasonable; Mr Bennet isn't very responsible, but he loves his Lizzy; Aunt Bertram may be lazy and useless, but she's fond of Fanny in her vague way; Sir Thomas may be heavy-handed and unobservant, but he's principled and well-intentioned. Sir Walter, mounted on his own like Catherine Morland and Emma Woodhouse, is a villain. There is nothing about him at all redeemable; the most you can say is that his vanity sometimes can be directed towards a less-than-harmful end. What Austen places before us is not a piece of family history or a glittering joke, but somebody to hate. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><br /></span>
What we see in this first sentence, in fact, is deadly serious. Anne, famously among Austen heroines, is not a girl who may never get her chance at happiness: she is a woman who had her chance, threw it away, and now has to live in what looks to be a dreary and inescapable ever after. She's twenty-seven - the same age at which Charlotte Lucas marries the loathsome Mr Collins knowing it's her only alternative to dependent spinsterhood, the same age Marianne Dashwood declares is too old for a woman to ever 'feel or inspire affection again.' In carrying the first sentence into clause after clause after the initial swipe, Austen is presenting Anne's father - and thus her whole situation - as, literally, <i>beyond a joke</i>. Things have gone too far, too much has happened, and it's been happening for too long. It's no longer funny.<br />
<br />
The plot of <i>Persuasion</i> is truly glorious, and its tenderness towards women past their 'bloom' is righteous. To this reader, it would have been served by a greater degree of polish - as the quotes above point out, Austen (like many comic writers) was a rewriter, and a refinement of the acridity, a bringing-forth of the voices, a gentle balancing of the partisanship could have made it truly great. Tragically, of course, Austen was already in poor health when she finished it, and would appear to have done what writers often do with an unfavourite project: she looked back, editing <i>Northanger Abbey</i>, and looked forward, beginning the never-completed <i>Sanditon</i>. Then she died, at the age of forty-one, and there were no more novels. Or, you could say, she died, leaving the whole world to her children and grandchildren, to every novelist who followed after her. Both are true.<br />
<br />
<i>Persuasion</i>, from its first sentence on, is a difficult place to be. Anger burns through it; the writing is not ladylike but aggressive. 'If I am a wild beast I cannot help it,' she <a href="http://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/brablt11.html#letter61" target="_blank">wrote</a> to her sister Cassandra. 'It is not my own fault.' And there is a wildness to Jane Austen, a fury and a hunger and a vicious, desperate, brilliant imagination that only sometimes moderated itself into wit. Soon she'll be appearing <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-23424289" target="_blank">on our £10 notes</a>, thanks to the campaign of Caroline Criado-Perez, an irony we can imagine she might laugh at with greater pleasure: finally, Jane Austen will have contact with unlimited money.<br />
<br />
She might laugh more sharply at the chosen quotation, though: 'I declare after all there is no enjoyment quite like reading!' Austen didn't say that. Caroline Bingley said it in <i>Pride and Prejudice: </i>contemptuous, pretentious Miss Bingley, feigning a love of books to impress the wealthy Mr Darcy. Nobody in Austen who truly understood the value of books would exclaim so showily about them. Wherever value is located, it is not in the declaration. Any Austen lover knows as much.<br />
<br />
But perhaps, in a way, it's appropriate. There <i>is</i> no enjoyment quite like reading Jane Austen. Sometimes, reading her isn't quite like enjoyment. <i>Persuasion</i>, for many readers, is one of those books: it is too relentless, right from its protracted opening sentence, to read in comfort. But still, here she is, emblazoned on a banknote, mistress of the edged <i>bon mot</i> but stubbornly resistant to the soundbite, quoted with a pretentious incomprehension worthy of Mrs Elton, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/business/shortcuts/2013/jul/25/jane-austen-quotation-10-note" target="_blank">exposing a rich man to the ridicule of her readers</a>. It's so ill a choice, making the Bank of England's governor look so stupid, that it's tempting to feel it could only have happened with Austen. One feigner of literacy quotes another, and Austen's many devoted followers, as one, exchange a glance and get the joke. You can't condense Austen down to a comfortable phrase, for what does she do, right at the opening of her last book, if not savage a man for being too pleased with himself and too happy to stay in his comfort zone? The bank should have seen it coming. Nearly two hundred years after her death, and Jane Austen is still making fools of those who seek to control her.Kit Whitfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623432518060526692noreply@blogger.com18tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31552467.post-65387040644292935282013-08-19T15:08:00.001+00:002013-08-19T15:11:35.586+00:00Opening Line: Fingersmith by Sarah Waters<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: xx-small;">This site is undergoing revision; a temporary archive of Opening Line posts can be found <a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/first-sentence-posts.html" target="_blank">here</a>.</span><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
My name, in those days, was Susan Trinder.</blockquote>
<br />
To take on the Victorian novel is no small challenge for a modern author. Nowadays we like to think of ourselves as liberated from the fusty formality of the Victorian age, with its apocryphal covered piano legs and its improving moral pap, but if we look at the actual history, we see something else. It was in the Victorian era that recreation became serious business, giving us laws that created mandatory holidays and railroads that gave us places to holiday in, and with leisure time on the rise and capitalism's machines a-whir, an explosion of amusements followed on.<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
There was a switch from locally-generated activities and community-based entertainments to increasingly officialised ones: national cricket and football leagues, public swimming baths, dance clubs, museums, exhibitions, arcade games, ticket-only entertainment events - the repertoire of public recreations to which we still adhere. Visual spectacles took on a new primacy. Like us, the Victorians loved staring at things with their mouths open.*</blockquote>
It was the Victorian era that gave us <a href="http://www.grandguignol.com/" target="_blank">Grand Guignol</a> and, in Britain itself, the 'Sensation Dramas' like <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Colleen_Bawn" target="_blank">The Colleen Bawn</a></i> (1860), with its elaborate trap doors and wavering gauze and dramatic stage mechanics - or what we in our enlightened times would call 'special effects.' It was the Victorians who invented the magic lanterns that prefigure home televisions and the cinematograph, giving us the movies we still watch today. And the visual gadgets did not produce decorous tales, either; consider this 1895 offering of Edison's across the Atlantic, <i>The Execution of Mary Stuart</i>:<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="480" mozallowfullscreen="true" src="http://archive.org/embed/Execution_of_Mary_1895" webkitallowfullscreen="true" width="640"></iframe><br />
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The Victorians may not have given us skirts for furniture, but they did give us the splatter film. And of course, they gave us something else, something to which every novelist owes a debt. They gave us the modern bestseller.<br />
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What do we know of the 'Victorian novel'? Even those who know Dickens only through his film adaptations, and to whom the names 'Wilkie Collins' and 'Mary Elizabeth Braddon' mean little, have some sense of what the great hotcake-seller books of the era involved. They involved grand, complicated plots with twists and coincidences and tangled family trees. They involved journeys through high and low life with reflections on the nature of society, sometimes radical, sometimes conservative and sometimes both at once, but they were always broad in their sweep. They involved spectacular villainy and eventual punishment. They involved falls and restoration. They involved shameless shocks and grand dramas and, as the phrase of the era had it, they involved 'sensation'. They were gripping but smart, personal but political, thrilling but comforting. They gave you your money's worth. They were <i>big books</i>.<br />
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They made a market into which we all now pour ourselves ... and they created a mold that only the boldest of followers tries to fill.<br />
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Enter Sarah Waters.<br />
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<i>Fingersmith</i> is Waters's third novel and the last, to date, of her three Victorian settings. 'The lesbian Victorian novel' is a marketer's dream: an easy soundbite that immediately catches the ear. <a href="http://www.afterellen.com/interview-with-sarah-waters/04/2006/4/" target="_blank">In interviews</a>, Waters herself shows the balance you'd expect from so poised a writer:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #565656; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 23px;">I'm writing with a clear lesbian agenda in the novels. It's right there at the heart of the books. And it's both at the heart of the books and yet it's also incidental, because that's how it is in my life, and that's how it is, really, for most lesbian and gay people, isn't it? It's sort of just there in your life. So I feel it makes absolute sense to call me a lesbian writer, but at the same time I'm just a writer ... </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #565656; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 23px;">I'm just writing stuff that interests me and feels important to me...</span></blockquote>
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And somehow, the concept is charmingly fitting: what did sensation novels do, after all, if not look at the underbelly of life, peer into the dark corners, whisper of the unspoken? Homosexuality, though, was a step too far for most of them - or at least explicit homosexuality; as my Gender Studies supervisor remarked to me, 'When I read <i>David Copperfield</i> as a child, I was always very clear on who the real romance was between' - and the happy coincidence of Waters's natural interests and the appropriate sense of update that 'lesbian Victorians' brings to the field makes for some deservedly popular novels. It's a cool concept to sell, but it wouldn't sell if Waters wasn't good. And good she certainly is.<br />
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<i>Fingersmith</i> is the longest and most ambitious of her Victorian threesome, so to speak, more elaborately plotted than the picaresque romp of <i>Tipping the Velvet</i>, larger in scale than the bleak intrigue of <i>Affinity</i>, with a series of plot twists that leave the reader reeling in bewildered admiration. (And yes, I'm going to talk about them, so if you want to be surprised, read the book before you finish this essay. Really, do read it; you'll enjoy the heck out of it.) With the task she sets herself, there are certain things she has to do to make it work. The language needs to have an authentic period feel while remaining lucid enough for the reader to understand it without either losing interest or losing track. Every sentence needs to be both gripping and easy to follow: with so many strange events on their way, there is not an inch of room for minterpretation. It needs to be detailed and matter-of-fact: this is a book that rereading reveals to be rife with dramatic irony, but Waters plays fair and the clues are hiding in plain sight, remarked upon so incidentally that they don't stand out from all the background detail. And dramatic irony is strongly present in this opening line.<br />
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Linguistically, it's extremely simple: no word over two syllables, no phrase over three words, the plainest of all declarations - a character's name. Yet at the same time, there's a clear tension of time going on: the narrator's name may have been Susan Trinder once, but evidently it's something different now. 'Those days' have passed, that's what we know at once: we are reading a novel of a life lived in eras, not in a smooth continuum, and between one era and another, the narrator's very identity has been called into question. That's a lot of drama to pack into a small space.<br />
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There's another aspect to 'those days' that only becomes clear in retrospect, and in fact, it's central to the novel's theme. <i>Fingersmith</i> is the story of two changeling girls, the illegitimate daughter of a persecuted aristocrat hidden in a thieves' den and the child of a crooked baby farmer swapped into her ladylike, exploited place, and here, Waters doesn't just imitate the Victorian novel. She takes it on.<br />
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Nature versus nurture was a question familiar to the Victorians, and their novels reflect it. Though one can't simplify too much and it varies from writer to writer - Wilkie Collins, for instance, was firmly against the stain of illegitimacy and heroised the black cousin over the white in <i>Armadale</i> - there's a running thread of 'blood will tell'. Dickens, most famously, wrote novels in which natural virtue survived low circumstances and social mobility proved problematic at best; his later novels are subtler, but there's some justice in John Carey's swingeing description of Oliver Twist's impervious naivete in the face of baby farming, workhouse abuse and thieves' education as 'a hymn to the purity of the middle-class soul.'** While the popular novels didn't have an exclusively middle-class audience, family relationships are a central element to the Victorian novel - or at least to 'the Victorian novel' as modern readers understand the term - the question of a spiritual family resemblance, even without knowing who your family may be, makes for some interesting dramatic ironies. And it's dramatic irony on which so much of the Victorian novel rests. Sometimes the conclusion can be heart-warming: Rose Maylie, who loves Oliver Twist when he's just a friendless waif, turns out to be his aunt. Sometimes heritage can be risen above: Ozias Midwinter's agonies of conscience show him all the way through <i>Armadale</i> to be a better man than his murderous father, and despite his fears, he is positioned as Allan's protector, not his destroyer. Family connections may be many things, but what they aren't is irrelevant. Family, in the Victorian novel, isn't just circumstance: we inherit destinies and dispositions as well as faces and features.<br />
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Waters, on the other hand, takes the opposite line. <i>Oliver Twist</i> is an acknowledged progenitor - one of Susan Trinder's earliest memories is of being frightened by a stage version and fearing that Bill Sykes will come and get her - and in many ways, the story is an inversion of Dickens's concept. Susan, raised in the Borough, is a Borough girl through and through, genteel antecedents or not. Her speech is like that of the people who raised her, and so are her values: while she has more compunction about the meaner kinds of thievery than her foster-mother Mrs Sucksby, she herself says early on that this is largely because Mrs Sucksby protected her from being taken 'on the prig' and treated her with unusual kindness. That Mrs Sucksby did all this for cynical motives, planning to imprison Sue in a madhouse and retrieve her own daughter Maud along with Sue's fortune - that to her 'mother', she was not a daughter to be cossetted but an asset to be guarded until it could be cashed in - Sue does not learn until right at the end of the book. But while the knowledge shakes her, it doesn't change who she fundamentally is. She doesn't become aristocratic on learning that her real name is Susan Lilly; she is a poor girl raised among thieves but sheltered - in many ways, more sheltered than Maud, more used to kindness and less used to pain - and her guiding principle, above all else, is loyalty. She doesn't quite lose her warm memories of Mrs Sucksby; she stays fond of the simple-minded Dainty; she falls all the deeper in love with Maud when she realises that it's Maud who's done the most to protect her.<br />
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Maud, too, remains what she was raised to be: a strange, fierce, uncomfortable girl, the product of a ghastly childhood, capable of deep loves and deep hates and hard to subdue. Maud, Mrs Sucksby's daughter, has been raised by her 'uncle' - in reality Sue's uncle - as an amanuensis for his Universal Bibliography of Priapus and Venus (based, Waters acknowledges, on the work of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Spencer_Ashbee" target="_blank">Henry Spencer Ashbee</a>). Maud has been beaten into bitter submission, living her life among works of pornography that mean nothing to her except a collection of fonts and frontispieces until Sue draws her desire; returned to her natural mother, she feels no tenderness for Mrs Sucksby at all. She notes that there's some resemblance in their faces, and it's not unreasonable to imagine that her tough-mindedness and intelligence are traits she got from her mother, but it stirs no sense of kinship. Maud feels herself to be entirely shaped by experience; of her childhood, she says, 'I am an amiable child, I think, made wilful by restraint'; looking at her uncle's bookplate design, she says, 'Sometimes ... I suppose such a plate must be pasted upon my own flesh - that I have been ticketed, and noted and shelved - so nearly do I resemble one of my uncle's books.' Left without means, she eventually supports herself by writing the pornography she was raised to catalogue, saying only, 'I find I am good at it.' Her education becomes her livelihood, and her heart remains unfilial.<br />
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The disrupter of experience, in <i>Fingersmith</i>, is not nature but more experience, and it's not family relationships but sexual attraction that begins to break the patterns imposed upon Sue and Maud. Surrounded by 'villains' of one kind or another, each is enticed into a scheme to betray the other, both ignorant of the enticer's real motives; neither is innocent in the literal sense, but both are innocent of the machinations of all around them. Each is, as Sue would say, 'a pigeon'. They are manipulated according to plan, but the plan does not include the possibility that they should feel anything for each other. They are, in the feminist sense, objects who through desire transform themselves into subjects: positioned to be acted upon, their love for each other closes an unforeseen gap and throws everything out of order. The 'unnatural' romance between them becomes the most natural human relationship in the book; the only one between major characters that is based on spontaneous feeling and, despite all the lies, the only one based on really <i>seeing</i> the other person: seeing the small details of her reactions and habits and passing moments of selfhood. Sue and Maud see each other clearly through a welter of misdirection, and spend the rest of the book re-learning how to trust that initial instinct that drew them together.<br />
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And in this odd romance, everything in each girl's life is a misdirection, right down to her name. Maud is lied to when she's told her name is Maud Lilly: her name is Maud Sucksby, though she never uses it. Susan's name, with which we begin, is even more fraught. Technically, her name is Susan Lilly, though even that is a little tentative: Lilly is the surname of her mother, and the name of her illegitimate father is never known. Going to Briar to trick Maud, she carries the name Susan Smith, and imprisoned in a madhouse, mistaken for Maud and fearful of incriminating herself, she insists at first that this is her real name. There are moments in the middle of the twists where it seems possible that she might really be Susan Sucksby. 'Susan Trinder', though, is a complete fiction. Mrs Sucksby has raised her with the tale that her real mother was hanged for 'murdering a miser over his plate'; the story is elaborate and full of details, and Sue finds it entirely convincing. (Though again, in post-Victorian style, she feels no particular emotion for this supposed mother: 'How,' she asks, 'could I be sorry, for someone I never knew?') The truth is, there was never a Trinder woman before Sue; the name can only have been plucked from the air as something likely-seeming. Add all this together, and Sue hardly has a surname at all. When she says, 'My name, in those days, was Susan Trinder,' that's really the best she can do. It sounds, at first reading, like promising drama, but it contains all the loss and confusion of her life.<br />
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The choice is a suitable one. '<a href="http://www.surnamedb.com/Surname/Trinder" target="_blank">Trinder</a>' is a real surname with proper working-class roots - roots Sue doesn't actually have, of course - but at the same time, it's an unusual one, likely to be unfamiliar to many readers. The effect matches that blurring of reality that dominates the plot: it sounds at once real and unreal, to real to be true. It has the same sort of sound as 'prig' (meaning steal), the same clipped, staccato quality you'd hear in an accent that calls the police 'the blues' and describes the pronunciation of 'gentleman' 'as if the word were a fish and we had filleted it: <i>Ge'mun</i>'. You can hear it said in a Borough voice. Names in <i>Fingersmith</i> are all authentic, but they're also a little outlandish-sounding: John Vroom, Mrs Sucksby, Mr Ibbs, Mrs Cakebread, Maud Lilly. It's a nod to the Victorian tradition again, with its Quilps and Pecksniffs and Betteredges and Verinders, and Trinder sounds like the kind of name you'd expect a thieving girl to have. Actually the name derives from an old word for 'spinner', but if someone told you Victorian criminals called it 'trinding' to file the crest off stolen metal or substitute glass stones for real ones, you probably wouldn't be surprised. 'Susan Trinder' sounds perfectly plausible, and no stranger than anybody else's name. And that's the trouble with it, of course: it is plausible. It's plausible enough to mislead its bearer into a madhouse.<br />
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It's interesting, too, the slight note of formality in the opening. People don't actually call her Susan, as she immediately acknowledges in the next sentence: 'People called me 'Sue.' 'Sue Trinder' sounds consistent, 'Sue Lilly' a bit peculiar, but 'Susan' is a public name, an official one. I've said that nurture wins over nature in this book and that Sue retains some loyalty to her childhood, but there's also a note of distance about it, a slight caution about claiming it fully. 'Susan Trinder' was her full name, so she thought, but it's not as if we'd assume that 'Sue' was a shortening of anything else in this context; if she said, 'My name, in those days, was Sue Trinder', it wouldn't be inaccurate. What it does, though, is subtly disclaim the entire name, not just the surname. 'Susan' and 'Trinder' are opposites: 'Susan' was her name, but not what people called her, while 'Trinder' is what people called her, but wasn't her name. By setting the two in tension, this disclaimed identity feels a little unstable from the outset, as if it's become overheated and can only be handled with tongs. In the following 'People called me Sue' we hear the awkward balance between the two: it's at once the blunt statements of an uneducated girl and the careful precision of a girl whose very name is charged with lies.<br />
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The same applies to the cadence. 'My name, in those days, was Susan Trinder' is rather soft on the ear, the internal assonance of 'name' and 'days' drawn out by the comma that follows each of them, the setting much gentler than the sharp Ss and Ts and Ds of 'Susan Trinder'. Like so much else in the book, you can hear it two ways: it could be the elegiac grace of nostalgia, or it could be the jerky hesitance of a speaker not sure how to begin. It is, in other words, a deeply ambivalent sentence: an actress could perform it a number of different ways without straining the text. Sue shifts in tone according to the reader's interpretation, and the reader's interpretation shifts dramatically depending on whether we're encountering this book for the first time or the second.<br />
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What we begin with, in fact, is a nameless narrator for whom names are the starting point of a story. The book opens with a series of details about Sue's childhood, all with the feeling of background, and then Sue suddenly breaks off and addresses us: 'You are waiting for me to start my story. Perhaps I was waiting, then. But my story had already started - I was only like you, and didn't know it.' Sue tells us right in the opening sentence where the key to the mystery lies: her name. It was Susan Trinder - only it wasn't, and that's where her story begins.<br />
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Waters, in other words, begins the story at the beginning of the story, but until we know how it ends, we don't see <i>why</i> it's the beginning. It's a brilliant sleight of hand. The deceptions are indicated a little more clearly in the two sentences that begin Maud's narrative - 'The start, I think I know too well. It is the first of my mistakes.' - which befits its place in the story after the first major twist. Too, it has Maud's angry note in the writing; lady or not, Maud is a more aggressive character than Sue. Essentially, though, she is saying the same thing: I was wrong about myself, my <i>self</i>, all my life.<br />
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Waters tells us a tale with twist upon twist and revelation upon revelation, glimpses into high life and low, playing money at the root of evil and galloping through grand dramas and family complications in true Victorian style. What's modern about her, though, is her focus on how a character's inner life becomes shaped to her circumstances.<br />
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Modern, but not entirely modern. <i>Oliver Twist</i> was a very early work for Dickens, and he wasn't always that simplistic. The Dickensian brother of Susan and Maud is probably not Oliver Twist but Pip, conflicted and regretful and dangerously malleable in unscrupulous hands. The Victorian novel wasn't merely a case of shocks and spills; psychology and emotion were straining through it, and in <i>Fingersmith</i>, Waters was developing as much as she was subverting. More than most Victorian characters, her narrators discuss the effects of their childhood on themselves, but their basic theme - the relationship between an individual and the society in which they find themselves - is a lesson she learns as much as teaches. In this dark and convoluted story, she manages to be both classical and deviant, all without distracting the reader for a minute from the breathless intricacies of her storytelling.<br />
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<i>Fingersmith</i> is a profoundly educated book, but it's not, in the dry sense of the word, an 'educational' book. Waters's knowledge of her subject is naturalised until we are immersed in our strange circumstances just as much as Sue and Maud are in theirs. Nothing is flaunted; we are merely entertained. But the closer we listen to that entertaining voice, the more echoes whisper to and fro through its speech. The opening line of <i>Fingersmith</i> isn't a challenge to read; it's engaging, arresting, readable, combining classic and modern in a gripping new alloy. We read it for fun, but if we reread it, the deadpan subtlety is remarkable. To begin with a life at the beginning of a life is truly Victorian - but in true postmodern style - and so very appropriately for a story all about the dangers of myths and misinterpretations - how you read the sentence is far more complicated than the sentence itself.<br />
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*<i>Inventing the Victorians</i>, Matthew Sweet, Faber and Faber Ltd, London, 1988<br />
**<i>The Violent Effigy</i>, John Carey, Faber and Faber Ltd, London, 1973 and 1991Kit Whitfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623432518060526692noreply@blogger.com29tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31552467.post-934116274213473272013-08-12T17:14:00.000+00:002013-08-12T17:37:25.202+00:00Opening Line: Paul Clifford by Edward Bulwer-Lytton<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: xx-small;">This blog is undergoing revision; a temporary archive of Opening Line posts can be found <a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/first-sentence-posts.html" target="_blank">here</a>. </span><br />
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A reader request:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #202020; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Request: You mentioned, back in the Opening Lines index post, that you might be open to the idea of doing some bad literature. So how about the quintessential bad opening line?</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #202020; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #202020; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><i>It was a dark and stormy night</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #202020; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">. Could be fun.</span></blockquote>
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In his essay on Yeats, T.S. Eliot observed: 'One of the most thrilling lines in <i>King Lear</i> is the simple, "Never, never, never, never, never," but apart from a knowledge of the context, how can you say that it is poetry, or even competent verse?' So it is with 'It was a dark and stormy night.' To talk about that famous sentence, we have to talk about its context.<br />
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Because here's the thing: on its own, it's not that bad a line. It's just incomplete.<br />
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'It was a dark and stormy night' is, in fact, the beginning of a much longer sentence that open the novel <i>Paul Clifford</i> by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. This is the full sentence:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents - except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of lamps that struggled against the darkness.</blockquote>
In context, you can see the problem more clearly, and it's not exactly the dark and stormy night.<br />
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Bulwer-Lytton was a tremendously popular author in his day; to <a href="http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/bulwer/baldellou2.html" target="_blank">quote George H. Spies</a>, he's now regarded as 'perhaps one of the finest examples of a literary figure who was greatly revered during his lifetime and almost completely forgotten after it.' Even looking at that complete opening sentence, you can see the reason for both of these facts.<br />
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On the one hand, it's lavishly over-written. Before we've had time to catch our breath Bulwer-Lytton is pounding us with storms, rain, torrents, violent gusts of wind, rattling rooftops and struggling flames: water, wind and fire swirl all over the place, sweeping us into the novel in no doubt that things are going to be dramatic. The 'pathetic fallacy' is a common device in literature and describes the attribution of human emotions to the landscape, usually to express or accentuate a character's emotional state. This isn't quite a pathetic fallacy - 'violent' and 'fiercely' are just on the naturalistic side of the line - but it is, you might say, a <i>stylistic</i> pathetic fallacy. By beginning with such a ferocious setting, Bulwer-Lytton is telling us in no uncertain terms - and no succinct ones either - that this is going to be a story of extreme events and larger-than-life characters. (The story concerns a romantic highwayman, a subject that should surprise no one after such an opening.) This is one of the main reasons why 'It was a dark and stormy night' has become such a catchphrase: it's unquestionably purple prose.<br />
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But as a piece of scene-setting, it's also rather vivid. An inexperienced writer is usually well advised not to start with a description of the weather or the landscape: it can be done, and sometimes it can be done beautifully, but it runs the risk of beginning with a sentence in which nobody's there and nothing happens. This is not a problem Bulwer-Lytton faces: what with all the torrents and gusts and agitated flames of lamps, it's a scene full of movement and drama, almost cinematic in mood. Some of the descriptions are good: to describe the guttering of a flame as 'struggled' is really rather beautiful, painting a precise and graphic portrait of its movement, nearly as lovely in its way as the image of flames as 'dishevelled', which falls from such impressive pens as Donne's and Dali's.*. Frankly, as a writer reading that metaphor, my first impulse was to nick it and use it elsewhere (and I might just do that some time) ... but here's where I'd diverge from Bulwer-Lytton: 'struggled against the darkness'. 'Struggled' doesn't just convey the flickering motion in this context; it also conveys a sense of moral conflict: the 'scanty' flames are struggling <i>against the darkness</i>, as if sentient - and more than sentient, possessed of the same purpose as the people who lit them, as if lighting a human pathway was what a flame wanted to do. It's a handsomely Victorian idea - natural element as honest servant - but in terms of storytelling, it also manages to create some drama in a sentence without people. With characteristic speed, a person appears 'wending his solitary way' through the next sentence, but we don't need to see him to get the sense of things. What it's telling us, in fact, is that this is going to be a clash of good against evil.<br />
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Now, this is where some of the mockery comes in. It's an effective use of dramatic metaphor, but it's far from a subtle one. Consider, too, the quasi-archaic note of 'for it is in London that our scene lies'. Just as we're being advised that this is going to be a grandly exciting story, so too are we being advised to listen to it as a trusting audience. It's an almost-paternal aside, as if explaining to children hugging their knees around a fireside: it's 'our scene', not 'my scene', and we're assumed to be eager participants from the beginning. We have to accept this on its own terms if the sentence isn't going to feel like a jolly old uncle that nobody takes seriously: in effect, Bulwer-Lytton is forcing us to make a choice about whether we'll be naive readers or not right in the opening sentence. It's easy to make fun of him for this because it's hard to tell whether this is a conscious forcing: the sentence is so fulsome and races along at such a rate that it might just be a convenient aside. And if that's the case, it's easy to laugh at Bulwer-Lytton on the assumption that he's just gotten caught up in his tale without checking whether his audience is with him. We need our novelists to take their creations seriously or the prose won't have any sense of reality to it, but woe betide the novelist who's more convinced than the audience. On the other hand, we could just as easily slip into the role of Constant Reader, accept that this is going to be old-fashioned adventure, and be warmed at the inclusiveness of 'our scene': sometimes it's nice to hug one's knees and listen with simple faith. It could go either way, and the reader is unusually free to make their choice: Bulwer-Lytton runs a risk with this, and it would seem that it paid off for his contemporary audience but fell flat with later readers.<br />
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The fall probably has a lot to do with the fact that it's not the only aside. Our cynicism has been primed by a much clumsier one early on: 'the rain fell in torrents - except at occasional intervals...' While the description of those intervals that follows is pacy and vivid enough to distract us if we allow it to - this is prose written to be gulped, not sipped - that really is a bit of a clanger. When a writer throws everything into describing one kind of drama, storms and torrents in full flow, then checks that flow with an 'except' - and 'except at occasional intervals', which has a dry and pedantic ring that doesn't at all suit the tone - it sounds unfortunately as if he'd lost his focus. Loss of focus never looks good, but when it happens between one kind of extreme and another, with a qualification in the middle that smacks more of the inkstain and pince-nez than the swash and buckle, the effect is unavoidably bathetic. To convey broken action needs smooth writing, and Bulwer-Lytton's sentence is in too much of a hurry. Consider, for instance, this lightly-edited version:</div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents. Violent gusts of wind swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of lamps that struggled against the darkness.</blockquote>
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While a little jerky - I'm just removing words, not adding any to counterbalance their loss - it conveys the same information without that bump in the middle. It avoids the comedic glitch - but at the same time it loses some of the enjoyably breathless pace. (One can't fix a problem like that simply by trimming: one has to rewrite, and that's not my task here.) If Bulwer-Lytton had broken his first sentence into two the way I have, it probably wouldn't have become so notorious - but that's partly because it wouldn't have been so interesting. </div>
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Unfortunately for Bulwer-Lytton, it's also easy to imitate. Take a look at <a href="http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/2013win.html" target="_blank">this year's Bulwer-Lytton Contest winners </a>- the prize for writing a bad opening sentence to a non-existent novel - and you'll see a lot of it: Alanna Smith, Rachel Flanigan, Maggie Lyons, Ward Willats, Kathryn Nelson, Jackie Fuchs, John Glenn and Kevin Fry all use the awkward aside or qualification to some degree. The combination of high drama and sudden change is not a felicitous one, and if you're looking to parody, that's a simple device to copy. </div>
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Yet it's not this, the worst point in the sentence, that gets most often quoted. The bit people remember is 'It was a dark and stormy night.' Of course, that's the beginning of the sentence and an audience familiar with Bulwer-Lytton would know what 'It was a dark and stormy night...' denoted, but what it's become by now is an in-joke detached from its source: more people know it from Snoopy than from Bulwer-Lytton. (For those who don't know it from Snoopy: the <i>Peanuts</i> beagle is perpetually writing a bad novel, and 'It was a dark and stormy night' is one of the sentences we know it contains.) There's even <a href="http://www.goodreadgames.com/" target="_blank">a board game named after it</a>. Other writers, though, have taken it on as a challenge - famously, Madeleine L'Engle used it as the opening sentence of <i>A Wrinkle In Time</i>, a book that's considered a classic of its kind. It's the foundation of a circular story popular with children; there are various versions, but the one my dad used to tell me went: 'It was a dark and stormy night. Three robbers sat in a cave. Two said to one, 'Come on Bill, tell us a story,' and so Bill began: "It was a dark and stormy night. Three robbers sat in a cave..."'** And it's worth remembering that such stories are told partly as chants just for the pleasure of their rhythm: it would never have stuck if 'It was a dark and stormy night' wasn't a satisfying phrase to recite. By now, the phrase is more a shorthand for bad writing than an example of it, and not every use of it looks badly written. So, what can we say about the actual sentence as it exists in popular culture? What can we make of it, shaved of its context?</div>
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Really, it isn't that bad. As L'Engle and the chanting game show, it can sound pretty good in the right setting. It has a decent dramatic rhythm, a trisyllablic drumroll leading to some good solid iambs: 'It was a <i>dark</i> and <i>stor</i>my <i>night</i>.' It contains no particular howlers. If it has a flaw, it's that it would be a weak opening on its own because nothing happens in it except weather, described by two fairly plain and unimaginative adjectives (though you can't accuse the original sentence of these failings). 'Dark and stormy' is easy to understand, but at the same time non-specific: what is described is the sky and air, not the ground and people, so there's not much going on. Its problem, such as it is, is actually opposite to the problems of the full Bulwer-Lytton sentence: overblown though the latter may be, it's crammed with motion and imagery and scene-setting, and even with no people present, it tells us very clearly indeed what kind of book we're going to read. If this wasn't going to be a story about a highwayman, it'd have to have a gang of robbers or a circle of spies or something equally in that vein: we know what kind of people are going to populate this book well before we know their exact profession. In the context of that high-adventure-in-low-places intensity, 'It was a dark and stormy night' is practically disposable. To say a night is dark is not really necessary - some nights are darker than others, of course, but you could do without the word, especially when Bulwer-Lytton ends his sentence with 'darkness'. When rain is falling in torrents, you don't really need to know that it's 'stormy'. At root, it's faulty because while it's tonally dramatic, it's verbally flat: in context, it's a bit redundant, and out of context, it doesn't have the energy that we're supposed to be picturing in the stormy skies it indicates. Linguistically, it's like singing quietly about a loud noise. It informs, but it doesn't convey. </div>
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Now, in itself, that isn't much of a crime. Plenty of fiction, plenty of it perfectly adequate, has plenty of sentences like that scattered throughout their central sections. The problem here is that it's not the way to get a story on the move. If you've ever seen the film <i>Throw Momma From the Train</i>, you may remember Billy Crystal's character being chronically stuck over whether to begin his novel 'The night was hot' or 'The night was moist' (only to be driven to a final murderous rage when the harridan Momma produces the maddeningly perfect solution: 'The night was sultry.') Probably that's a nod to Bulwer-Lytton, but it's also an illustration of writer's block: if you begin by describing the climate, you'd better have a good idea about where to go from there or you've got nothing. </div>
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Fundamentally, 'It was a dark and stormy night' is a sentence that <i>doesn't suggest a plot</i>. It suggests an atmosphere - not very graphically when split from all Bulwer-Lytton's more flourishing additions - but it doesn't give you anything to expect. The art of novel writing is the art of building sentence upon sentence, and a good sentence suggests to the writer what the next should be. That's why<i> Throw Momma From the Train</i>'s dramatisation is so deft: if you're trying to get your brain working, talking about what kind of night it was probably isn't going to help you. Sentences need to <i>make</i> things, to introduce and build and create, and there's nothing in 'It was a dark and stormy night' that you can grasp to get a hand-hold up to the next one. </div>
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And that, I suspect, is why it's so popular as a joke sentence. Fiction is highly specific: every sentence tells you something about where you are, who's doing what, what's going on, and even badly-written fiction contains particulars. The world is full of badly-written sentences, but they're usually badly-written sentences about something, and as such don't stand in very well for <i>all</i> bad sentences. Every unhappily-phrased sentence is unhappy in its own way, as Tolstoy probably wouldn't say, and when one wants a shorthand, the many different varieties of unhappiness are a nuisance. 'It was a dark and stormy night,' though, a phrase that tells us almost nothing and could lead almost anywhere, is usefully generic. In itself, 'It was a dark and stormy night' is nothing worse than mediocre. For it to be truly hopeless, it has to be detached from its context to become meaningless. </div>
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But of course, that's not how it was actually written. You might as well say that 'Shall I compare thee to a sum?' is bad love poetry: once you start removing sections, it's no longer the author's fault if the thing doesn't work. It may not be the most evocative phrase in the sentence and it conveys little in itself, but that's exactly why Bulwer-Lytton didn't end the sentence there: to cut it down is to reduce the frantic profusion that makes it what it is. And what it is, frankly, is enjoyable, not as a sophisticated pleasure but as an enthusiastic piece of unselfconscious romanticism. You can read it generously or ungenerously, and it allows for both options, and if there's some '<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2008/aug/19/2" target="_blank">perfervid turgidity'</a>, as Professor Scott Rice has it, there is also a bravura that deserves its due. </div>
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In many ways, being turned into a cliche is a compliment to a writer. A cliche is simply a phrase that's been repeated too often. Shakespeare's plays have given the language innumerable sayings, from 'high and mighty' to 'a rose by any other name'; you don't sound original saying them nowadays, but that's because they redound to Shakespeare's credit, not yours. 'It was a dark and stormy night' has its flaws as a piece of literature, but it's punchy and, as a result, famous. And if it doesn't convey very much by itself, that's by design. It's just by the design of people who needed something generic and cropped it accordingly. 'It was a dark and stormy night' is as much the creation of Good Read Games and everybody who's ever quoted it out of context as it it is of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and it was created, not to serve as the first sentence of a novel, but to serve as an anti-sentence, a sentence stripped down until everyone could agree it was bad.</div>
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Really, though, its badness is as much a social fiction as a literary one. There are many worse sentences. What it possesses is a the right combination of qualities for the purpose required: it's short, it's simple, and it's non-specific. Of those qualities, only about fifty per cent can be attributed to its actual author. The rest is cultural rendering, reducing it down to an easily-packaged soundbite. </div>
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It's been observed that the jokes in crackers tend to be groaningly awful. ('What do short-sighted ghosts wear? Spooktacles!' 'What did the policeman say to his tummy? You're under a vest!') It's also been observed that there's a reason for this: their purpose is to unite people during a family ritual, and one that can include people who don't see each other that often, know each other that well, or even like each other that much. Different people have different senses of humour, and the chances of every member of every family that buys a box of crackers finding the same good joke equally funny are slim. If some people laugh and some don't, the family is, however subtly, divided in the middle of a feast that's supposed to bring them together. What will unite people is something <i>nobody</i> finds funny, a comedic common enemy; if you can't agree with your brother-in-law about anything else, you can at least bask in the brief harmony of agreeing that 'What do you get if you cross a duck and a reindeer? A Christmas quacker!' is a terrible joke. So the cracker manufacturers who add these paper slips with wince-inducing puns are not actually trying to amuse us, or at least, not to amuse us with the jokes themselves. They're trying to get us to wince in unison.<br />
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And that, basically, is the purpose 'It was a dark and stormy night' serves: a literary common enemy created by people whose main interest was in speaking generically of 'bad books' rather than of any one book in particular. It's not about the books, it's about the people talking about the books: not artistic expression, but social currency. For that purpose, a sentence doesn't have to be really bad. In fact, it can't afford to be really truly bad: awkward, unnatural, clunky phrasing doesn't stick in our minds as well as something neat and snappy, and there's nothing more moribund than a catchphrase that's hard to remember. To serve the function that 'It was a dark and stormy night' does, it doesn't have to be bad, it has to be <i>memorable</i>. Yet at the same time, it has to be non-specific: if it hinted at anything about plot, genre or characters, then there'd always be some bugger popping up to say, 'You know, I wouldn't mind reading a book that started like that...' and there goes the harmony. Once it's been repeated often enough, it stops meaning 'It was a dark and stormy night'; it takes on the social meaning of 'I'm a terrible opening sentence', and its actual content doesn't matter that much. It could have been done to any number of sentences. 'It was a dark and stormy night' is just the one we happen to have. But when you think about it, remaining memorable after being pruned of almost all your meaning is quite an achievement. Honestly, I think Bulwer-Lytton deserves some plaudits. </div>
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So, to answer the question: In literary terms, 'It was a dark and stormy night' is not a quintessentially bad opening line. It's a <i>proverbially</i> bad opening line - and that's quite a different beast.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">*Tip o' the nib to mmy for pointing out Dali's description of Federico Garcia Lorca's verse ('I felt the incendiary and communicative fire of the poetry of the great Federico rise in wild, dishevelled flames...'), and to Amaryllis for reminding me of Donne's 'To the Countess of Salisbury, August, 1614': </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Fair, great, and good, since seeing you we see<br />What Heaven can do, and I what any earth can be;<br />Since now your beauty shines, now, when the sun,<br />Grown stale, is to so low a value run<br />That his dishevelled beams and scattered fires<br />Serve but for ladies' periwigs and tires<br />In lovers' sonnets, you come to repair<br />God's book of creatures, teaching what is fair...</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black; font-family: Times; font-size: x-small; line-height: normal;">Thank you both; I knew I'd seen that image somewhere, but it was nagging at me that I couldn't place it. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">**On the other hand, my mother's version was, 'It was a dark and stormy night, and the rain came down in torrents. The Captain said to the mate, "Spin us a yarn, Joe," and Joe began as follows..." I quote my dad's purely because it's the one I remember from childhood, not out of preference for either version or, indeed, either parent. Interestingly, when I told my mum I was doing a post on the 'It was a dark and stormy night,' she assumed that I meant the beginning of the Captain-said-to-the-mate story; like many people who recite those little loops, it was the only version she knew. </span></div>
Kit Whitfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623432518060526692noreply@blogger.com52tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31552467.post-59919557452947590612013-08-05T08:15:00.000+00:002013-08-12T17:36:53.051+00:00Opening Line: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J.K. Rowling<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">This blog is undergoing revision; a temporary archive of Opening Line posts can be found <a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/first-sentence-posts.html" target="_blank">here</a>. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">So, a break from the usual choices of book: I put up a two-post series about critical terminology, mentioned J.K. Rowling by way of an example, and everybody abided by my request not to derail the discussion into a Harry Potter fan thread! Thank you all very much. By way of appreciation for anyone who had to restrain themselves, here: an Opening Line post on Harry Potter. Which is, in fact, an interesting subject. No slagging off Rowling as a person, please, we don't do that here, but I hope you'll enjoy the analysis of her style...</span><br />
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Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. </blockquote>
By now the Harry Potter books are hardly books any more: they're a cultural phenomenon, a modern myth both in their actual story and in the rags-to-riches tale of a penniless single mother lifted to fame and fortune by the books she somehow managed to scrape up time to write. J.K. Rowling is a known philanthropist and public figure, the books have been transmuted into films, video games and theme parks; so famous an export is this story that Britain chose to include it as part of the display of national pride that began the Olympic games. And why not? We have a proud history of children's fiction, being the nation not only of J.K. Rowling but Edith Nesbit, George MacDonald, Diana Wynne Jones, Philip Pullman and C.S. Lewis (some of whom I personally cannot abide, but that's another question). Books for children are one of those things, like nature documentaries and ornamental gardens and losing on penalties, that we do well. But this, the behemoth children's tale that reshaped the market, making common the sight of an adult commuter with a colourful volume of children's fiction in their hands, is so famous that it's easy to forget a few basic things about it. It was a minor venture when it first came out: J.K. Rowling's initial advance from Bloomsbury was £1,500, an extremely cautious amount. Its initial print run was <a href="http://www.tomfolio.com/PublisherInfo/HarryPotter.asp" target="_blank">five hundred copies</a>, of which the majority were intended for school libraries. It is, no matter how many adults read and enjoy it, a <i>children's book</i>, written by a parent and intended to be read by kids. And as such, it comes out of a cultural tradition of British children's writing. Whether or not you care about the book, it had a big impact on publishing, and it's interesting to consider, aside from all the hoopla, what kind of book it actually is.<br />
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So, what do we have in this first sentence?<br />
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Straight away we can see some fictional influences in the character names. 'Dursley': beige-sounding, thick on the tongue, utterly unpoetic; it is <a href="http://www.surnamedb.com/Surname/Dursley" target="_blank">a real surname</a>, actually, but like the other names in these books, sound rather than realism is the name of the game. Harry Potter, our eponymous hero, has an unpretentious name, friendly-sounding and determinedly ordinary - 'Harry' itself is traditionally a diminutive of 'Henry', meaning that his name feels informal and amiable right from the outset. Dursley, though, with its stupid-sounding 'dur' and its assonance with 'worse', carries a quick aural introduction: the Dursleys are unintelligent, uninspiring, unappealing as cold porridge.<br />
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Now this is a recognisable tradition in British fiction: the great champion of it was Charles Dickens, with his Grandgrinds and Gamps and Pecksniffs and Micawbers, energetic names that don't just suit the characters, but somehow summarise them. But if you go down through children's literature, Dickens had a major successor in Roald Dahl, the reigning monarch of children's fiction until Rowling knocked him off the shelves. Dahl was a passionate admirer of Dickens - his genius child Matilda starts her adult reading with <i>Great Expectations</i>, his villainous headmistress Miss Trunchbull in the same book cites Wackford Squeers as a role model, Dahl's autobiography <i>Boy</i> describes reading 'the entire works of Dickens' passing time in a cold school lavatory as a child, his short piece 'Lucky Break' in The <i>Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar</i> begins by describing the writer's life thus: 'Charles Dickens found it easy. At the age of twenty-four, he simply sat down and wrote <i>Pickwick Papers</i>, which became an immediate best-seller. But Dickens was a genius, and geniuses are different from the rest of us': to Dahl, Dickens practically <i>was</i> literature, and he adopted Dickens's use of colourful names with glad inventiveness: Willy Wonka, Miss Honey, Boggis and Bunce and Bean, all tell us what to think of them as soon as we hear what they're called. Dickens wasn't strictly a children's author, but he was a popular author with children as long as adult books were all they had to go on; Dahl was immensely successful, fond of boasting that he could enter any house in England as a welcome guest as long as there were children within, and he wasn't far wrong, either. Most authors at least think carefully about their characters' names, of course, but there's a particular tradition of outlandish, emphatic, character-delineating names in children's books that a name like 'Dursley' immediately invokes.<br />
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Rowling, then, knew what she was playing at. There's another implication, actually, if you hear the echoes of Dickens and Dahl; a child might not pick it up consciously but it's certainly there: energetically extreme names evoke a sense of <i>anarchy</i>. Dickens was on the side of the little guy; Dahl often worried adults by the lavishly rebellious punishments he showered upon the bad adults of his books. Children, of course, loved them, because he tapped right into the sense of outraged justice that besets every child sometimes when they run up against the endless power adults hold over their lives, and by refusing to give adults serious names - by refusing to give them <i>concealing</i> names, rather, but slapping on them labels in letters clear enough for a child to read - Dahl appealed directly to a child's desire for some power in a world so very much bigger than themselves. Comedic names cut characters down to size, and so it is with 'Dursley': they immediately sound mean, but also ridiculous, nothing serious to worry about. In fact they make Harry sleep in a cupboard under the stairs and allow their son to beat him up all the time and generally subject him to the kind of Gothically awful childhood that would traumatise a real child past repair, but they occupy the realm of fairy-tale, not reality, albeit fairy-tale in a modern setting, and that's what we get in this first sentence. They boast of their normality, but the author is poking fun at them through their very names. Outlandish names in children's fiction tend to be the province of the wackily inventive, and wacky invention sits ill with authority. Straight away we know there will be no pieties about respecting your elders here. If elders do not earn respect, they will not get it, and Rowling is on the children's side about this. Ordinariness and reality are themselves fairy-tale fictions, and with them manners and decorum.<br />
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Equally evocative - or rather, equally satirical - is the name of their address, a loud warning that this house will be ostentatiously dreary and conventional. For those not familiar, privet is a soft-leafed evergreen shrub, sometimes green and sometimes 'gold', bearing negligible flowers and popular in British streets as a front-garden hedge. Privet is fairly quick-growing, dense enough to form a barrier if you want, leafy in all seasons, and above all easy to trim: use your clippers on it a few times a year and it'll take on any shape you like. It's not small-leafed enough to make the finest kinds of topiary, though you can train it if you want to: what privet normally ends up doing is crouching in front of houses in a neat little box shape. It's a perfectly nice plant in itself and an excellent choice if you want something low-maintenance, but as far as gardening goes, a privet hedge is not exactly imaginative. In the streets of Britain that have front gardens, probably the majority of those streets have at least some privet somewhere.<br />
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Naming a street 'Privet Drive' isn't necessarily a slap at privet itself, of course, but what we do notice, whether consciously or not, is that it's not just a feature of the place, but its name, its identifying characteristic. This unimaginative plant choice isn't just background in Privet Drive. And this is relevant because it's Privet <i>Drive</i>, not Privet Street.<br />
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While Rowling has had international success, the Harry Potter books are very much of Britain, and to a British ear the word 'Drive' signals something immediately: this address is a new build, post-war and almost certainly suburban. It's a curious feature of British geography that the older addresses tend to have the plainer names, and a rather sad feature that the newer addresses tend to be a little charmless. Better insulated, probably, and more mouse-proof, and generally more practical, but they're also liable to be boxy in their architecture: Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian houses go for higher prices because their proportions, facades and general design are likely to have what estate agents refer to as 'character' - by which they simply mean a layout that feels friendly rather than just functional. British citizens who can afford it often choose a smaller old house over a bigger new build, and if you live in a pre-war house - especially in those cities that got battered in the Blitz - you get regular fliers through your door from the local estate agents pleading with you to relinquish your sought-after residence into their dealership. While there are certainly nice new builds in existence, the prestige is on the 'period' places: those are the houses associated with taste and art - and they don't stand in streets called 'Drive'. 'Privet Street' or 'Privet Road' might be pre-war, and maybe 'Privet Terrace' - though they wouldn't have the name 'Privet' if they were unless there was a person called Mr Privet somewhere in their history; 'Drive', like 'Close', is a more recent name. The usual rule of thumb is that the more expansive the name of a place sounds, the less gracious it will actually be; the most poetic-sounding names are 'Heights' and 'Gardens', and they usually mean an estate - or what American readers would probably call a housing project; even 'estate' is a bit of a euphemism, as it used to mean the land and holdings of a great house. 'Drive' is the name of a recent suburban development - not an urban estate, but middle-class residences, probably with off-street parking, and quite possibly with limited shops or buses so you need a car to get you anywhere useful. While plenty of interesting people undoubtedly live in a 'Drive' or a new build - the catastrophic housing boom hadn't quite hit Britain when the first Harry Potter book was written and houses weren't quite so impossibly expensive as they are now, but you still have to take what you can get - as a name in a book like this, it's a clear signal: this is a soulless suburb, with no history, no intricacy, no <i>magic</i>.<br />
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And when you add 'Drive' to 'Privet', you get something else about the character of this place: if we pretend for a moment that Privet Drive is a real place, we must suppose that it was built recently, built by design, and whoever named the road thought that privet, that uninventive gardening choice, was an attractive feature worth making part of the address. A new-built suburb is built with an eye to sales, and names are chosen to make it sound good to potential new residents. A town planner calling a place 'Privet Drive' is either the kind of person who thinks privet is a reason to move to an area or is at least bidding for buyers who do: people who think that the most boring garden plant in the country sounds like a tasteful frontage for a des-res. As I said, lots of houses have privet - there's plenty around my neighbourhood, for instance, and I live in an area with a lot of artists - but only a truly dull person would consider privet anything to get excited about. If we imagine Privet Drive to have been named by a town planner, they must have been the crashingest bore you could hope to avoid; if we remember that Privet Drive was named by J.K. Rowling, it's a very mischievous little poke at suburban gentility. Privet isn't a 'feature', as estate agents would put it; it's just kind of <i>there</i>. Calling a British street 'Privet Drive' is more or less on a level with calling a park 'Grass Common' or a body of water 'Reed Pond'. Like 'Mr and Mrs Dursley' - no first names given in this first sentence - the flavour is strongly, ferociously generic.<br />
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Uninventive to the nth degree, in other words, and also short on history. If you wanted to name a street for the other common garden plants in Britain, your first choice would probably be ivy - but ivy is absolutely out of the question here, because it has a magical ring to it, echoes of druidism and Christmas and festivity. Flower names would at least sound picturesque; going on the common garden frontages of Britain, you'd expect the Dursleys to have some neighbours in a Clematis Drive or a Laurel Drive or a Hydrangea Drive or even, pace <i>Desperate Housewives</i>, a Wysteria Drive, but all of them sound at least a bit more stimulating than Privet, that spiky word for those boxy hedges that never bear flowers or fruit worth the notice. It's as if the Dursleys live in the dullest street of a dull suburb. And that, evidently, is how they like it.<br />
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Because here's the other thing about privet: it's controllable. Ivy can pull down houses if you give it a chance; clematis and wysteria wind wildly all over the place and drip with petals in spring; hydrangea has its colourful seasons and needs responsive care to look its best. Privet, on the other hand, is planted specifically to be cut back. If you don't trim privet it gets leggy and tree-like, but it doesn't do you any harm, so it's not like a wild plant you have to keep in check for your own security; the worst you can say of untrimmed privet is that, like buddleia without the butterflies, it looks untidy. And that, of course, is what the Dursleys oppose: the untidiness of nature, of free development. They like a street where the plants exist to be cut into line, where it's a regular expectation that the hedges are square shapes never found in the wild. If you want to conquer nature, privet is a soft target, easily defeated and submissive to the shears. As parents, the Dursleys favour their natural son over their adopted one, letting the former run wild and trying hard to prune the latter into a more respectable appearance, but they don't succeed in either case: the pampered son doesn't run to vibrant wildness but to small, mean foolishness, and a magical force will soon sweep into the neighbourhood and transplant the neglected child into richer soil. Privet is what the Dursleys want to make of the world, but what they have on their hands is ivy, about to run rampant.<br />
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But that hostility to magic is clear throughout the sentence. Even though there's no dialogue, the Dursley voice rings through it: 'perfectly normal, thank you very much', is an indirect quotation, and in it one can hear the prim diction of the solid middle-class. We can hear, in fact, the Dursley <i>accent</i>. That irritable, emphatic rhythm, heaving with curt little commas and snapped mini-phrases, is the speech not of a cultured family, but of a <i>respectable</i> one: full of unnecessary emphasisers, it's not an elegant way of speaking, but instead a bundle of social quotations. 'Thank you very much' is a common addition when implying that someone was rude to imply otherwise; 'perfectly' is, again, a conventional adverb used under pressure, a kind of verbal ruffled feather. The tone isn't just 'proud' but defensive, a recognisable attitude from people privately sure of their own class but not entirely sure that other people will recognise it. The Dursleys actually send their son to an old-established boarding school, which implies aristocracy, but the primary purpose of that detail is to emphasise the difference in how much money and attention are lavished on their natural son versus their adopted one; in most of their lifestyle choices they are a thoroughly recognisable type: the respectable, monied, complacent middle class, aggressive, but only in a law-abiding way, and vulgar, but only in a boring way. There is nothing linguistically original at all about the phrase 'perfectly normal, thank you very much,' but it's something that the Dursleys are 'proud' to say. It's as if opinions and sentences are things they acquire in the same way that they'd purchase a car or a television: the brand needs to be familiar if they're to be admired and envied by their neighbours.<br />
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What's interestingly absent from this sentence, though, is the hero himself. Even for the first readers of the book before it hit the big time, the title makes it clear that the Dursleys are not the heroes: the title is <i>Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone*</i>, a good old pulp title in the tradition of The Famous Five and Asterix and all the other classic children's series where the main selling point, the hero's or heroes' names, are the first thing you see on the cover. Nothing could signal more clearly that Harry Potter, whoever that may be, is not just the hero of this book, but (sales and publishers permitting) the hero of a possibly limitless number of others. By the end of the book it's clear that the goal is seven novels, one for each school year, but on the opening page, Harry Potter could be another Billy Bunter, permanently at whatever age most suits the plot. Either way, when a character name leads the title, clearly he's here to stay for a while. What this sentence does, then, is set up a sense of anticipation: there is a hero called Harry Potter waiting in the wings, and whoever he is, he is hopefully worth waiting for.<br />
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What the first book does, in fact, is<i> begin with an antonym</i>. Harry Potter is the hero of this promised series. Harry Potter has not appeared yet. What we have instead are characters who are, we can assume, unlike him. We can assume it for two reasons: first, it's more structurally satisfying if the hero enters a situation that he then changes, and so a sentence that begins with the hero not present is the starting point, the place where change will be worked. And second, this is a children's book: we expect to like the main characters, and Rowling makes it impossible for all but the most perverse reader to like the Dursleys. In other words, we begin in a state of Dursleydom that the promised Harry Potter is going to change - which means that even before we meet him, we are on Harry's side. We begin trapped with the Dursleys, and they are written to attract our contempt and dislike: Harry is the breath of fresh air we wait for, and when we find he begins life trapped with them as well, we entirely sympathise. We like Harry Potter before he ever appears because, the book promises, he will be everything these dislikeable Dursleys are not. It's a neat and effective way of directing the reader to root for a hero who will, by the nature of the story, have to wait a certain amount of time before he has the opportunity to do anything heroic. Even having a different personality from the Dursleys is, from a reader's viewpoint, rescuing us from some kind of dragon.<br />
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Writing seven books is a massive undertaking, and writing them while they're in the process of publication, rather than writing all seven before committing to press, is a tremendous risk: no matter how large or intense the project becomes, one cannot go back and revise the earlier volumes. To publish a first book in a planned but unwritten series is a leap in the dark. Rowling's style, as any writers' does, evolves and changes as the series progresses: the kind of broad comedy that begins <i>Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone</i> moves more to the background as the conflicts intensify; satire and the skewering of certain 'types' remains a feature, but this is Harry Potter at its lightest and simplest. It's also Harry Potter at its most breathtakingly efficient. Reading is a slower business for children than for adults, and if you bore a child within the first page you're likely to lose a sale. Rowling, though, gives her children the most compelling of all hooks: a maddening set of antagonists that you earnestly want to see set at naught. Not so frightening that a nervous child might decide the book is too much - the real horrors of the story only emerge once the reader is well and truly ensconced - but irritating, dislikeable, smug, a set of turned-up noses badly in need of tweaking. Rowling isn't and doesn't pretend to be the kind of complex stylist I usually discuss in these posts, but by golly she gets the job done.<br />
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*Yes, I know it's the 'Sorcerer's Stone' in the US. That's not the title Rowling chose, though, it's a marketing compromise.Kit Whitfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623432518060526692noreply@blogger.com34tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31552467.post-62925510065793022132013-07-25T15:17:00.000+00:002013-07-25T15:18:59.923+00:00Deconstruction means 'not a not-deconstruction'<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; line-height: 19px;">In my last essay, I talked about the phrase 'Death of the Author', a structuralist essay that's somehow wound up a pop-culture catchphrase without retaining very much of its original meaning. Critical theories, like many other cultural movements, tend to have a trickle-down effect, and last century's radical innovations become this century's popular conventions - or at least, an approximation of them does. But those approximations sometimes bear little resemblance to the original; so it is with Barthes, and so it is too with Derrida. Because if 'the death of the author' is a phrase much thrown around on the Internet, here's a word that's inescapable: 'deconstruction.' </span><br />
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What does it mean? In its current usage, usually it means an essay, either written or spoken, usually about a work of art or a cultural phenomenon, and that takes issue with the politics or implications of that work. And as with the phrase 'death of the author', that's a very long way from where it started. 'Death of the author', in its current popular form, is an orthodoxy that attributes more than what was originally said, but 'deconstruction' is the opposite: a usage that reinscribes the very thing the word was created to subvert. If current uses of 'death of the author' involve assumptions that would have surprised its creator, current uses of 'deconstruction' involve assumptions that the author built a grand philosophy against. <br />
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'Deconstruction' is a word - an analytic and philosophical technique, in fact - pioneered by the famous critic Jacques Derrida, a man whose influence on twentieth-century cultural thought can mildly be described as 'major'. His work inspires both passionate opposition and profound devotion because it forcefully advances an entire approach to culture that is, to say the least, both widely applied and counter-intuitive, but one cannot properly discuss the history of the humanities disciplines in the twentieth century without spending a good amount of time talking about Derrida.<br />
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So, what was he getting at?<br />
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In attempting to describe what Barthes meant by 'Death of the Author', I acknowledged that it's difficult to summarise semiotics. Now, plot Barthes on a graph, move Derrida forward in time a little bit, and imagine a geometric progression of complexity between the two of them. That'll give you some idea of just how abstruse and difficult Derrida is. Derrida's systems of thought are such that he needed to invent new words to describe his ideas - made a point of it, in fact, because he was interested in freeing oneself of old ways of thinking. One cannot summarise Derrida in ordinary language without hearing him groan in his grave; however, I'm going to make a very simplistic attempt at it.<br />
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Semiotics, which is the school of thought out of which Derrida grew, is a method of studying linguistics, and one of its tenets is that words have meaning not only by what their definition includes, but what it excludes. Let's take an example; for convenience, we'll use the same word I used when talking about Barthes: 'chair'. In its primary sense, leaving aside the metaphor of 'chairing a meeting' and the euphemism of 'getting the chair' meaning getting executed, usages that derive from the primary meaning, 'chair' means a piece of furniture that can accommodate a single sitter. So, that's what the word 'means'. But it also has to <i>not </i>mean lots of other things if it's going to make sense: it cannot simultaneously mean a four-wheeled vehicle painted green, a crime involving the hurling of gelatine products, a phosphorescent deep-sea fish, a method of artificial insemination used upon imaginary animals and an uncut loaf of bread - or at least, not without some further distinguishing indicators. Otherwise, if someone said 'chair', we wouldn't know what they were talking about. Or, to take a less silly example: 'chair' can mean a small wooden dining chair or a broad, padded arm chair, but if a piece of furniture gets broad enough to accommodate two sitters, then it's no longer a chair but a sofa, or possibly a bench. If we're speaking to the manager of a furniture shop, it has to be understood that 'chair' means not only 'chair' but 'not-sofa' if we want to be shown to the right item.<br />
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In other words, one can look at language as a form that depends on oppositions in order to function: to understand that something is a chair, one must also accept that there is such a concept as 'not-chair'. And in fact, navigating these concepts can tell us a lot about how we navigate the world; take a semi-verbal child to the park and you may find yourself genuinely challenged when called upon to explain why this isn't a chair, it's a bench, or that isn't a door, it's a gate: to distinguish, we have to accept some quite sweeping conventions to do with usage and function - what counts as inside or outside, or what mechanical or aesthetic traditions we've inherited from our craftsman ancestors. What a word excludes, even a relatively neutral one, carries within in a great deal of conceptual history. Now, this may be a practical necessity when one is talking about furniture - but what happens when one starts talking about less concrete, more fraught concepts? When one says 'man', for instance, one is saying 'not-sofa', but one is also saying 'not-animal', 'not-boy' and 'not-woman'. And as animals, boys and women have often found to their cost, this is not a neutral distinction: throughout human history, 'man' is conceptually defined as superior to all of these 'not-man' states - and consequently, entitled to dominance over them. A dog beaten for disobedience, a boy forced through a painful rite of passage to 'manhood', a woman blamed for wearing that short skirt: all of these unfortunates are suffering from the conceptual elevation of 'man', from the fact that those who accept the dominant concepts must denigrate the 'not-man' to preserve the meaning of 'man'. And this is Derrida's point: '<em>In a classical philosophical opposition we are not dealing with the peaceful coexistence of a vis-à-vis, but rather with a violent hierarchy.' </em>Bigotry, by Derrida's logic, is built into the very way we define meaning: to elevate one over another is to create the preconditions without which oppression cannot take place. Conception and language are the raw materials of violence ... and yet, if we're going to distinguish between anything and anything - if language is going to have any meaning, any function at all - such betrayals are all but impossible to avoid.<br />
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This is where deconstruction comes in. The term is a translation of Heidegger's 'Destruktion', but Derrida deliberately chose to translate it (into French) as 'deconstruction' rather than 'destruction' to make it clear that the ethos was to be precision, not violence. Conceptual violence is what deconstruction exists to oppose. A deconstruction of a text identifies the opposing concepts within it and begins by overturning the hierarchy between them - not to destroy the distinctions or define new ones, because 'the hierarchy of dual oppositions always reestablishes itself', but to 'mark their difference and eternal interplay'. In other words, one doesn't draw conclusions: one identifies conclusions and moves upwards into a state of mind where one can see them from the outside, see the opposition without taking sides. Derrida advanced the idea that we should defer meaning rather than differentiate - which led to some incredibly dense writing, as you can imagine - but despite the intensely academic style, philosophically it's almost Zen: one plays with opposites instead of attaching oneself, because attachment to an opposed distinction is, in Derrida's terms, inherently violent.<br />
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With me so far?<br />
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Now, this is a gross oversimplification: I am no Derridan, and he's notoriously difficult to understand and intentionally difficult to paraphrase. But as a basic introduction, let's chalk it up as a temporary meaning, since temporary meanings are probably more in his spirit than fixed ones. What does it mean in terms of writing a 'deconstruction' of a text?<br />
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Well, in these terms, 'deconstruction' is a deliberately high standard of approach. One must, in a deconstruction, identify the opposing concepts in a text and perceive the hierarchy between them ... but by close reading in the appropriate state of understanding, start to show how they unravel. A deconstruction does not merely point out the sexist, racist, classist or otherwise bigoted concepts in a work: it reads them in such a way as to find that the text 'deconstructs' itself - which is to say, simultaneously advances the opposite meaning from the one it presumably intends.<br />
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One does not surpass oppositions altogether, because without oppositions language simply doesn't work at all - try shopping in an outlet that refuses to distinguish between 'sofa' and 'not-sofa' and see where it gets you - but one notes them and sets them in tension. Derrida was careful to state (with a reliance on oppositions that one must suppose justified on the grounds that he never said oppositions should be got rid of altogether) that deconstruction was not ... well, quite a lot of things. Not a method, because not mechanical; not a critique, because one cannot entirely free oneself of the baggage of cultural dogma to the extent that would be necessary to reach the state of neutrality a critique would require; not an analysis, because that implies breaking the text into discrete units of meaning and Derrida favoured a more holistic, interrelated approach. It's just ... deconstruction, its own way, its own state of mind.<br />
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It's a profoundly difficult concept, difficult to understand, difficult to perform, difficult as all get-out to define in layman's terms. But it's also a profoundly idealistic one: rigorous, self-questioning, resistant to easy answers, exploratory, reaching for some kind of integrity in the utterly, inherently compromised human condition.</div>
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And if you're an undergraduate required to study it in all its abstraction and extremity, it can be a genuine headache or a genuine high, depending on your personal preferences. But if nothing else, it is a definite, if difficult, meaning. A 'deconstruction' is, definitionally, not a 'not-deconstruction.'<br />
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For which reason, it's rather a shame to see the word used so broadly, applied to pieces that are not, by the terms of the man who invented the word because he needed a new word for his new concept, actually deconstructions. An essay that identifies problems in a text's implications is not, by Derrida's terms, a deconstruction, because it rests on a 'violent hierarchy' of its own: the hierarchy between problematic and non-problematic. It's one thing to note that a text, say, carries some deep presuppositions about what constitutes 'man' and what constitutes 'woman'; to say that a text is <i>wrong</i> in how it handles gender is, by purist standards, implicitly accepting that there's a <i>right</i> way to handle gender. There's a new hierarchy in place: rather than positioning gender identity as a set of spinning plates, one is instead stacking them in a different order. In political terms, it may be an entirely defensible order, but it's not a deconstruction. It's a re-construction. It's perfectly okay to prefer re-construction - it certainly comes more naturally to most people's understanding, my own included - but if it were a deconstruction, those plates would still be up in the air. </div>
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Now, you may argue that it's in the nature of language to change, that words mean only what people understand them to mean - the sign is not the signified, after all - and that a lot of people understand 'deconstruction' to simply mean 'essay', which is just how language moves. 'Decimate', in a modern context, no longer means 'kill one in ten', for instance, even though this confuses those of us who first learned the word in its original Roman context. It now has a new meaning, similar to 'devastate' (assonance with which is, I suspect, the origin of the change), but it actually has a meaning that 'devastate' doesn't quite have: 'decimate' in the modern context means 'kill everyone or nearly everyone present and/or lay waste to their environment'. It may nag at Classical purists - it certainly nags at me - but it's an entirely defensible change; the modern word 'decimate' has its own meaning for which there is no exact synonym. We have, therefore, gained a new semantic distinction. That's what language is for.<br />
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But while language flow is indeed a natural part of its process, we can still question how and why words change, and whether this is always useful. 'Infer', for instance, is often used to mean 'imply', not because of the need for a new word but because some people just don't know the difference - and that's a case where I'd argue that everyone would benefit if everyone bothered to learn the original distinction between the two words. We don't need two words that mean the same thing, and if 'infer' stops meaning 'draw an inference', we have lost not just a word but a meaning: we have no word to replace it. We are linguistically poorer for the change. Likewise, people often use 'literally' as an emphasiser when they're speaking metaphorically - 'I literally jumped out of my skin', say - and we're poorer for that change too: we have enough emphasis words to get by with already, we don't have another word that means 'in the literal sense', so we're a meaning down if that change takes permanent hold. </div>
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Those are language changes where we wind up losing a distinction rather than gaining one, narrowing rather than expanding our ability to communicate. And that, I think, is the effect of calling any political essay that treats of fiction or culture a 'deconstruction'.<br />
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'Deconstruction' is, as I've said, a word that was specifically created because there wasn't a word for the concept, and created to demarcate a deconstruction from other forms of analytic, critical or philosophical writing. If we lose the meaning of the word, we've lost our ability to make the distinction.<br />
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And, too, considering the pains Derrida took to define what a proper deconstruction was, it's worth remembering that it's not just a definition but an <em>accolade</em>, a high, idealistic term created to praise a way of thought that its author considered morally necessary. Lifting an accolade isn't just inaccurate, it's appropriative. One may or may not care for Derrida's philosophy - it's a very specific taste, often a divisive one, and as with every other critical school, having both proponents and opponents probably does us the best service in the end - but it was, at least, an idealistic one, and there's something sad about employing a word specifically created to serve a set of ideals without consideration for those ideals. It's an imprecise use of a word employed to value precision, a generic use of a word employed to create and promote new and specific concepts, a no-entry-fee application of a word designed to be difficult to win in order to encourage people to reach towards a complex intellectual accomplishment. It is, ultimately, an unthinking use of a word created to push people into new forms of thought. It's a pity.<br />
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But does it benefit people re-using it? Not particularly. If all one means by it is 'a piece of writing that discusses culture and/or considers the implications of a work of art', there are already words for that meaning: essay, analysis, commentary, critique - all perfectly respectable terms used in academia, in fact, that represent no drop in status or seriousness. The more accurate term for 'question a socio-political assumption' is probably 'interrogate'; to take a well-deployed example, look at this extract from Laurie Penny's recent essay <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/lifestyle/2013/06/i-was-manic-pixie-dream-girl" target="_blank">'I Was A Manic Pixie Dream Girl'</a>:</div>
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Similarly, some 'deconstructions' are actually just mockeries with a political slant, and there are words for that too, like 'roast' or 'snark-fest' or 'skit'. Whatever the style or depth, there is no shortage of alternative words.</div>
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To say a piece of writing is not a deconstruction is not to say that it isn't a good essay, analysis, critique or skit, any more than it's a condemnation to say that the discovery of a new species of bird isn't a feat of geology. Distinctions are, as Derrida has it, necessary for language to mean anything, and one can identify them in a non-violent way. But language changes can destroy meanings as well as create them, and 'deconstruction' is a word deliberately invented to express a very particular philosophy ... and unless you're going to sign up for a whole lot of Derridan thought, you may want to put yourself on the non-deconstructionist side of the line. Otherwise, it's a usage that actually kills the word's intended meaning. Death of the Author, perhaps, but a death that depletes our inheritance. </div>
Kit Whitfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623432518060526692noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31552467.post-65163988601562639102013-07-23T14:33:00.000+00:002013-07-23T14:46:07.050+00:00The Death of The Death of the Author<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; line-height: 21px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Okay, so I've been on holiday, I've been ill, and now I'm in the middle of a freelance project as well, so the ever-open maw of the blog has gone unfed for a while. In the name of providing some kind of content in line with the literary theme here, I'm therefore going to put up a couple of old essays on literary theory. (The first, this one, has been published elsewhere in a different form; the next, I never put up before. I'll follow it shortly, as this one isn't new: it'll be on Derrida and the concept of 'deconstruction'.) If the Opening Line posts are masterclasses in close reading, consider these posts a masterclass in very, very rough approximations of the ideas of famous literary philosophers. </span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 21px;">So:</span></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 21px;"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 21px;">It's a slogan one seems to encounter on the Internet: 'The author is dead'. Some of the time it's said to defend an interpretation of fiction that contradicts the author's stated intention, but as often as not it's said to declare that an author has no business, or at least authority, stating 'facts' about characters in a book that's already finished and published - J.K. Rowling telling scriptwriters not to write the wizardly headmaster Dumbledore as heterosexual because she'd always pictured him as gay, for example. Google 'Rowling', 'Dumbledore' and "the author is dead", and at the time of writing this, you'll turn up a staggering <i>412,000 hits</i>. This phrase is serious business. Sometimes it's even produced to state that authors have no right to object to fan fiction, as if the author were <i>literally</i> dead even though they claim to be walking around alive. Often it's said with great anger: Rowling faced a considerable fan backlash about that Dumbledore thing, and of the criticisms I read at the time, many of them seemed less about the character itself and more about the fact that she presumed to make an extra-book statement at all.* Rowling was actually bringing it up in the process of collaborating with an ongoing film project, of course, but even so, many people I read were outraged, as if she'd violated some principle - and that principle was most commonly expressed as 'the author is dead'. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 21px;">When I see people talking about the 'death of the author' online, frequently they seem to be arguing that the author needs to shut up.</span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">And that's really not what the phrase means.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">'The Death of the Author' - and please note the capital A - is an <a href="http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/barthes06.htm" target="_blank">essay</a> by the French literary theorist Roland Barthes, written in 1967. In a way it's not surprising that its title is so often quoted counter to Barthes' actual argument, because the essay contains phrases like this:</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the symbol itself, this disconnection occurs...</span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Barthes was not writing for a popular audience. Instead, he was an influential part of a critically significant movement - structuralism, post-structuralism and semiotics - which by its nature, by its fundamental design, resisted easy understanding and simple explanations. To explain Barthes in straightforward terms is, to some extent, to misrepresent him; however, I'm going to have a go, because I think it's time somebody tried to clear up this misunderstanding.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">To begin with, 'The Death of the Author' is not an actual death certificate. It's a single manifesto that formed part of an evolving and discursive philosophical tradition, one that is still evolving and shifting today, and one that placed a great emphasis - in a very abstracted and rarefied way - on the notion of intellectual playfulness. To understand Barthes, it helps to understand his context, because here's the thing: Taking anything that any member of this tradition said too literally is a chancy business. <i>J</i><em>ouissance</em> is the name of the game, the pleasure of saying something for the sake of saying it, and perhaps saying something different later. Structuralists were provocateurs much more than they were scientists. It's probably unwise to try to summarise this critical school, but to put it simply: the origins lie not in the study of literature, but in the study of linguistics. Structuralism approached language, as the name suggests, as a structure - but more than that, as an almost numinous phenomenon that was not so much used by individuals as acting through them.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The basic argument is this: language is in effect a fiction. The word 'chair' is not a chair; the signifier is not the signified. Instead, language is a <i>system</i>, one that an individual speaker does not originate and does not use with full conscious understanding; Marxism, which was fashionable at that time, argued that one's economic and social position determined one's speech and opinions, and structuralism tended to the belief that language itself acted upon people in the same way that a Marxist would say the economy did. (Though this is oversimplifying both Marxism and structuralism, I fear; complex ideas do not lend themselves to simple explanations.) Because we speak language, language speaks through us, and what we say is determined by the system of signs that acts upon us. It is, in short, a viewpoint that treats language as a force that tends to dominate free will.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">With that attitude - a philosophical viewpoint that is not fundamentally about art but about language and culture, and that treats art as an example of how these phenomena function rather than as a separate case - you can see where the attitude towards artists is tending. If we are largely determined by our linguistic context, then any artist is a person through whom culture speaks rather than an individual speaking for themselves ... but before one gets too excited about this and starts running around insisting that artists have no right to take any credit for anything, it should be pointed out that in this philosophy, <em>everybody</em> is determined by their cultural context. (Even, perhaps, the critics making this argument. In which case, one can question the legitimacy of what they say in an entirely impersonal manner, or indeed consider their pronouncements symptomatic of their cultural position rather than authoritative, and you can go round and round that carousel until you're dizzy. And that's before you even factor in the presence of the translator if you're reading the essay in anything other than the original French.) The artist is 'spoken through' by culture, but so is the reader. Understanding culture and language being a difficult feat that requires much education to even begin it, what we're seeing is a certain school of criticism assuming an almost priestly role as interpreters of a quasi-divine force.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">So, to Barthes. It's important to remember that his essay was addressed to a narrow circle - critics and academics - who could be relied upon to understand the philosophical context he spoke from: it's an easy essay to misunderstand precisely because he used a lot of terms to mean something other than their conventional, common-sense interpretation. What was he saying?</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">To summarise the essay: Barthes begins by asserting that within a given text, one cannot conclusively know whether any given sentence is the opinion of the character or narrative voice saying it, the author as an individual, the author assuming a public role, 'universal wisdom' or anything else - in other words, one cannot confidently identify what the author thinks based on their writing because the writing is not the author. (The sign is not the signified, remember.) He then goes on to blame 'French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation' for what he sees as the modern tendency to treat the author of a work as the capital-A Author: the figure whom critics must study to, he argues, a destructive degree. To quote one of his simpler sentences:</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centred on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions, while criticism still consists for the most part in saying that Baudelaire’s work is the failure of Baudelaire the man, Van Gogh’s his madness, Tchaikovsky’s his vice.</span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">He goes on to discuss the way different critics, authors and artists have dealt with this issue, but his fundamental contention is that criticism-as-biography is limiting.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">And that's basically what 'Death of the Author' means. Not death of the author as individual; it's important to note that the examples he cites - Balzac, Proust, Mallarme, de Quincey, Baudelaire, Brecht, Flaubert (the author of the cited Bouvard et Pecuchet), the Greek tragedians, and Tchaikovsky and van Gogh too - were all, at the time of publication, <em>literally</em> dead, mostly of them for decades at the very least. They were not present to make any kind of assertion about their work. They were gone, and all that was left was the text; when Barthes asserted</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Linguistically, the author is never more than the instance writing, just as I is nothing other than the instance saying I...</span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">(and note that he's explicitly speaking 'linguistically' rather than artistically, historically or personally), he was in a strong position to speak of the author as a linguistic phenomenon because that was all that was left of the authors he chose to illustrate his arguments.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">So if someone argues that, say, an author shouldn't get to control their copyright because there's no such thing as originality and uses the phrase 'death of the author' to substantiate it, or that an author, being 'dead', shouldn't make post-publication remarks about their books, one needs to remember that Barthes was saying nothing at all about the <em>conduct</em> of authors. Any actual behaviour from the authors he mentions was a matter of historical record, not social interaction. And, too, his take on originality was heavily linguistic: when, for instance, he states that 'the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original', one needs to understand that to Barthes, there was no such thing as originality in writing because there was no such thing as originality in speech: one does not originate words, so any word one ever says is inevitably a quotation. He is not using the word in its common sense of 'unusually dissimilar to whatever has come before', but in an <em>absolute</em> sense: unless one invents an entirely new word, every word we speak is not, linguistically, original. And even if we invent a new word, we build it from phonemes that precede us ... and also, if this new word is to have any meaning, concepts and systems of meaning will already be part of the cultural-linguistic context that lives through us. There's really no getting away from it: speakers and language, to a structuralist, are almost analogous to computers and code, and we can't say <em>anything</em> without the code defining how we operate. This is, as I said, a philosophy not of art but of language; it's difficult to refute, but at the same time it reduces the concept of originality to such an absolute state that it's also difficult to apply in any common meaningful sense.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">That priestly role is relevant here; he talks about the 'Author-God'. Since I am not a Barthesian I feel no obligation to leave Barthes the man out of the question, and I consider it worth pointing out that academics and criticism are competitive professions. Barthes is explicitly challenging what he sees as a critical orthodoxy (and for that reason, repeating 'the author is dead' as a new orthodoxy is doing his rebellious spirit no favours), which is to say that he's bidding for dominance against other critics. But he's also bidding for dominance in terms of the <em>'Author'</em>: when he concludes with a flourish that 'the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author', let's not forget where he's positioning himself here: as a reader. This essay may or may not be a convincing critical position - a healthy culture contains different schools of thought, and so it's to everyone's benefit if some people are convinced and others are not - but it's also a priest of linguistics taking aim on a rival faith. By appropriating the authority and kudos formerly attributed to authors, reader-critics stood to gain a great deal, and should not be regarded in the same light as a disinterested doctor seeking in vain for a pulse. The critic's profession is not to report on the battlefield but to out-duel your rivals.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Of course, you may prefer to take Barthes on his own terms, excluding consideration of Barthes the Author from Barthes the author. But if you're going to do that ... well, you have little ground for rejecting his assertion that 'I is nothing other than the instance saying I.' (In other words, the word 'I' is not a person, and any statement containing the word 'I' is therefore not to be taken as a clear representation of the actual person, or their thoughts, intentions or personality.) Which will, at best, problematise any sentence you write in which you use the phrase 'I think,' or 'I like,' or 'in my opinion.' In the name of consistency, if you want to consider the Author dead, you should probably accept that by writing anything you are rendering yourself equally dead, and your essay, post or comment is therefore equally open to any interpretation a reader chooses to put upon it - which in this philosophical tradition will necessarily include readings that are directly opposite to the meaning you intended and set out to destabilise whatever values you profess. (That's the original meaning of 'deconstruction', which I'll address in the next post.) According to the terms of structuralism, after all, you are subject to the system of language and cultural influence: if any language speaker is simply a conduit for language, that includes you. This is a major reason why structuralist and post-structuralist writings can be so dense and evasive: in this philosophy, the critic must be a gadfly, alighting and flying again, dodging in and out of the rules, engaged in a playful duel with the very concept of meaning. When language is seen as a system that acts through us, it cannot be our servant, and will do nothing so docile as obediently express the opinions we wanted to share. I said above that it can be dizzying when you think about this too hard, and the structuralist's common response is to start whirling too, to accept the absurdity of where this logic leads as an existentialist might accept an absurd universe, and to play the game. You can dance with language, but it's a fast and dangerous dance and you need to be light on your feet, and simple statements like 'This writer is wrong' are going to get their toes pretty thoroughly trodden on.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">In short: if you're going to criticise the behaviour of a living author, or to argue that you see something in their text that they would personally deny, then that's perfectly legitimate - but citing Barthes is not going to help you as much as you'd think. Barthes was talking about something else, something altogether more abstruse ... and something that has, by now, started to drift out of critical fashion. Like every living discourse, criticism moves on, and Barthes was writing half a century ago: the new and exciting ideas of one generation become the tiresome orthodoxies of the next, and while Barthesian thought occupies an important place in the history of criticism, it is not its culmination and stopping point. 'The Death of the Author' is a contention, not a coroner's report, and a contention that takes for granted an attitude towards language and art that you might very well not want to sign up for. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">*I<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 21px;">f you were a person or read people who were angry for other reasons, fine, but we're talking about Barthes and literary theory, and the Harry Potter books are just an example, so please don't derail with posts about the rights and wrongs of them: this is not a fan board and I don't want it turned into one. I know most people are more likely to have read Rowling than Barthes and hence find her an easier topic to post about, but that's precisely why I'm explaining Barthes:</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 21px;"> to either point you towards him or, if you find his style too dense, attempt an explanation of him. Do a blogger a favour and stay on topic here. If everyone is good about this, I'll do an Opening Line post on J.K. Rowling later. (Assuming people would like to see one; let me know in comments. But derail with fan-chat, and you won't get one.)</span></div>
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Kit Whitfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623432518060526692noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31552467.post-15370223335792158172013-06-10T06:29:00.000+00:002013-06-25T16:09:44.190+00:00Opening Line: Beloved by Toni Morrison<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: xx-small;">This blog is undergoing revision; a temporary archive of Opening Line can be found <a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/first-sentence-posts.html" target="_blank">here</a>. </span><br />
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124 was spiteful.</blockquote>
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Ordinarily I try to stay fairly impersonal on these posts, because on the whole I'm less interesting than the books we're discussing. In this case, though, it seems only right to begin with a personal confession: I've been putting off doing this one.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXvyJVV-SeWR3v72rlIck9oJkg-DC_VfT6-HBuChclMrZ8LjHZxBv-hAcmSQbp_mSO54S1yCJwkbJDoGpXqVWxGZudhIxHx_zqdOuMP9Z7KaUNTBcpI_T093gsrUteKXogo67R/s1600/114134210_amazoncom-beloved-toni-morrison-books.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXvyJVV-SeWR3v72rlIck9oJkg-DC_VfT6-HBuChclMrZ8LjHZxBv-hAcmSQbp_mSO54S1yCJwkbJDoGpXqVWxGZudhIxHx_zqdOuMP9Z7KaUNTBcpI_T093gsrUteKXogo67R/s200/114134210_amazoncom-beloved-toni-morrison-books.jpg" width="200" /></a>Why put it off? If you're going to do a series on famous novels, and especially if, as I do, you focus on modern classics, you really cannot leave out Toni Morrison. Pulitzer Prize winner, Nobel Laureate, and now, since 2012, bearer of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_Medal_of_Freedom" target="_blank">Presidential Medal of Freedom</a> as well, Toni Morrison is a giant among authors, an author you cannot discuss modern literature without talking about. But at the same time - and, really, for the same reasons - she's an author I've had a deep passion for more or less all my adult life. She was one of the first adult novelists I really fell in love with, halfway through my teens when I still only half-understood what she was getting at. I began with <i>The Bluest Eye</i>, and it was like nothing else I'd ever seen; I had to know more, so I moved on to to <i>Song of Solomon</i> and <i>Sula</i> and her other big books of the time, and eventually on to <i>Beloved</i>, the book you <i>had</i> to read if you admired Morrison, her acknowledged masterpiece and book of terror. It was a daunting prospect for a girl of sixteen or seventeen - I still have my worn old paperback with its pictureless cover, nothing but that one resonant word and those uncompromising reds and golds on the grim black background, as if to say, 'Don't pick this up unless you mean it; don't read it unless you're prepared to let it dominate you.' Well, I was - and it did. I was a white English girl with little American history on my school curriculum and my knowledge of the tragedy of Atlantic slavery was sketchy at best, and I really didn't know, culturally speaking, what she was talking about. But I knew how she was talking, and oh, how she was talking! It was a dense, difficult read for a kid, a challenge that forced me to push my mind to greater understanding like a walk up a steep, ragged hill ... but ignorant as I was, there was something there, a passion and beauty and horror and grace, that I had to walk towards. I am no Toni Morrison, but she's one of the reasons I became a writer: even without knowing the situation she was writing about or the culture she was writing to, this, <i>this</i> was writing, this was art screaming from the page and making something utterly new, something I didn't know could be until I saw Morrison make it. I struggled with it, but that struggle changed me. Now, as an adult - and more, as a <i>parent</i> - I understand more of what she's addressing, but even back then, just to read the devastating final pages was to leave myself desperate and drunken and breathless with art.<br />
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So, yes, I've been putting off talking about it, because how do you do justice to a book like that? And how do I do justice, more, to a book about and of a people whose struggles I have been spared all my safe white life? There's nothing for it, though: I cannot, in conscience, talk about modern literature without mentioning Toni Morrison. At some point I'm going to have to do her the lesser injustice of talking about her inadequately instead of the greater injustice of not talking about her at all.<br />
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So, short, staccato and uncompromising, a three-word sentence beginning the master work of one of the most eloquent, poetic, and linguistically inventive writers in the world. It's a repeated phrase, in fact; the second section begins '124 was loud,' and the third, '124 was quiet,' the phases following one after another: the house haunted by a baby's ghost, the house ravaged by the ghost's physical presence, and the house devastated by the explosion of the ghost's grief and fury. It's a movement from tension to chaos to grief, the eternal rhythm of disaster, for it's disaster that animates this novel, on a both human and historical level, both the disaster of a person and of a people.<br />
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The story isn't difficult to relate, though it's difficult to bear. Sethe, a slave on a small farm called Sweet Home, manages to escape with her four children after suffering too much torment at the hands of its new managers; seeing slave-catchers coming for her - an apocalyptic 'four horsemen' - she runs to the woodshed to kill her babies, anything but let them be re-taken. She's stopped before she's killed more than one of them, a baby girl whose real name we never know but is buried under a headstone reading only 'Beloved', a message Sethe takes from the 'dearly beloved' of the funeral service and cannot afford to include the 'dearly'. Sethe's house remains haunted, until one day a young woman calling herself Beloved walks out of the water and comes to stay, bringing with her the body and speech of an adult but, as life falls apart around her, the understanding of an infant - a child who cannot understand her mother's explanations or pleas, cannot understand anything except the violation of the mother-child bond. Sethe didn't protect her, she hurt and abandoned her, and she doesn't know or care what Sethe says to explain why she couldn't do otherwise: 'Beloved wasn't interested. She said that when she cried there was no one.' Babies cry for their mothers whatever their mothers are doing or thinking, and this baby's ghost is a voice of anguished humanity, that doesn't see anything except the sheer horror of what was done: a mother didn't protect her baby, and it blots out the world.<br />
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It's a horror at once simple and complex: in the context of slavery, love cannot be enacted naturally between parents and children, because slaves cannot stop masters from hurting their children, raping their children, torturing their children, <i>selling</i> their children, and when love makes you want to do right by your children and life makes it impossible for you to do so, love and life become intolerable - and under that pressure, the edges of things get confused. It's the humanity of African Americans that's ultimately at stake in <i>Beloved</i>, that inherent humanity that slavery tried so hard to legislate and intimidate away, and the nightmare of being forbidden to be human affects all the characters one way or another: Paul D, Sethe's lover, unable to feel his 'manhood' real after being 'collared like a beast'; Baby Suggs, her mother-in-law who survives the sale of all but one of her children and grows 'holy' in the sheer force of her refusal to stop valuing the hearts of those around her; Sethe, whose self-control starts to go when she sees the whites on the farm taking notes on her and listing her human and animal characteristics in different columns on the page, and breaks further when attacked while pregnant by white boys on the farm who drink the milk from her breasts and then whip her for telling. Paul D is appalled by the whipping, but it's the interruption of her motherhood that truly scars Sethe:<br />
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'They used cowhide on you?'<br />
'And they took my milk.'<br />
'They beat you and you was pregnant?'<br />
'And they took my milk!'</blockquote>
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Paul D is kindly, but he can't understand the force of motherhood Sethe feels. Even the most natural product of her body, created for her babies and no one else, isn't hers to keep, and when whites can rob even that, can break the ultimate boundary of what <i>isn't for them</i>, Sethe can no longer resign herself. The scarred 'tree on my back' is not what hurts the most. This:<br />
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is not the worst thing that was done to her. To Sethe, mother of young children, being prevented from being a mother <i>is</i> being prevented from being human:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
...worse than that - far worse - was ... that anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn't like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn't think it up. And though she and the others lived through and got over it, she could never let it happen to her own. The best thing she was, was her children. Whites might dirty <i>her</i> all right, but not her best thing, her beautiful, magical best thing - the part of her that was clean. No undreamable dreams about whether the headless, feetless torso hanging in the tree with a sign on it was her husband or Paul A; whether the bubbling-hot girls in the colored-school fire set by patriots included her daughter; whether a gang of whites invaded her daughter's private parts, soiled her thighs and threw her daughter out of the wagon. She might have to work the slaughterhouse yard, but not her daughter. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
And no one, nobody on this earth, would list her daughter's characteristics on the animal side of the paper. No. Oh no. Maybe Baby Suggs could worry about it, live with the likelihood of it; Sethe had refused - and refused still.</blockquote>
<br />
This, the baby Beloved doesn't understand. And Sethe's neighbours don't accept it, though they at least understand the impulse: Sethe has gone too far because she has failed or refused to separate her own self from that of her children. She hasn't killed Beloved because she thought Beloved better dead so much as because she couldn't bear to watch Beloved suffer: 'This here new Sethe didn't know where the world stopped and she began,' as Paul D perceives. It's a common sin of motherhood, and an entirely human one: with a very small baby, you have to let the lines blur because a baby needs so much; if you see the baby as fully separate from you, you don't nurture it. Most mothers would rather feel pain themselves than watch it happen to their babies - not even out of self-sacrifice, but out of selfishness, because as with so much about motherhood, it actually hurts less to have it happen to you. The sound of your baby crying is the worst thing in the world - it's created by evolution to get a woman with no sleep and a torn perineum on her feet - and most of the time you'd do anything, take anything, rather than feel the pain of your baby's suffering inside your own mind. But it's this refusal of Sethe's to feel anything less that problematises her: Paul D commits the inexcusable crime of responding to her insistence by telling her, 'You got two feet, Sethe, not four,' siding for a moment with 'schoolteacher' and the students who listed her 'animal characteristics', and until the last few pages, this entirely ends their relationship. Sethe, in effect, declares that she must have full humanity or nothing. But she's also a woman who can't 'like [her]self any more' and so transfers the full burden of her humanity to her children ... and so becomes a mother who kills her child, becoming both more and less human. That's the damage of slavery.<br />
<br />
How is this relevant to the first sentence? Well, look at the first word: '124'. That's a house number - not even spelled in letters, but in numbers, like you'd see on the front door - and yet it's presented like a name. Not 'Number 124', not '124 Bluestone Road', which is the actual address, but '124', as if it were the name of a grand mansion, or a farm, or a plantation. Or even a person, because '124 was spiteful', a house with a personality and a mood. The name of the house isn't prettied up, but it's still a name.<br />
<br />
Which is important in <i>Beloved</i>, because names are a crucial element of American slaves' disputed humanity. Famously, for example, Malcolm Little became Malcolm X: 'The Muslim's "X" symbolized the true African family name that he could never know. For me, my "X" replaced the white slavemaster name of "Little" which some blue-eyed devil named Little had imposed upon my paternal forbears.'* Whether every African American surname is originally a slavemaster's name is a debated question - Bill Bryson remarks in <i>Made in America</i>, for instance, that 'the evidence - not to mention common sense - suggests that blacks showed no special affection for the names of their masters. Those names that feature most prominently among Southern slaveholders - Pinckney, Randolph and Rutledge, for instance - appear only incidentally among any list of modern black names. It appears that most freed slaves either adopted an innocuous American name - Johnson, Jones, Smith, Robinson, and the like - or named themselves for a hero. Hence the relatively large number of African-Americans named Washington, Jefferson, Brown (from the abolitionist John Brown), and Howard (after General O.O. Howard, head of the Freedmen's Bureau in the years after the Civil War) - but not, oddly and inexplicably, Lincoln.'** (Perhaps the slaves noticed that Lincoln stated openly that he'd be willing to preserve slavery if it would preserve the Union; that kind of attitude doesn't exactly bump you up the list of heroes.) Welsh names like Powell are also fairly common, apparently, which <a href="http://www.data-wales.co.uk/plantations.htm" target="_blank">suggests</a> the influence of Quakers on the underground railroad or of Nonconformist preachers whose interpretation of Christianity appealed to former slaves - picking the surname of someone who helped you or whose religion you share certainly seems more natural than keeping the name of the bastard who enslaved you - but wherever most modern African American surnames come from, the place they clearly don't come from is Africa. The handing on of names from parent to child was broken by slavery, leaving a people who had to decide for themselves where to find a name.<br />
<br />
Morrison, being a novelist rather than an historian, addresses the issue through the choices individual characters make. 'Baby Suggs, holy' chooses her name over the slave handle 'Jenny Whitlow' because her husband's name was Suggs and he called her Baby, and 'Baby Suggs was all she had left of the "husband" she claimed'. It's a peculiar name, but it at least comes from someone who meant something to her - from someone who was, in the fundamental sense, family. Other characters get equally strange but important names, such as Stamp Paid, who chooses his name to symbolise the settlement of debts, and who has to do it because if he doesn't, he'll take all the frustration of slavery out on his wife and murder her. Names are reminders, not so much identifiers of self as of links to other people, to principles, to some kind of 'best thing' that you hold on to to stay sane. The very title of the book, <i>Beloved</i>, speaks to that ultimate loss: a child with no name, except the only name that means anything. Right from the beginning, an ordinary house has a name: not much of a name, just the number it comes with, but its inhabitants choose to personify it because if a hell like Sweet Home has a name, why not their own place? In a world where names are stripped away, they have to be reapplied, and applied according to what's important to the characters. 124 Bluestone Road is important to Sethe's family, and so its number becomes a name. When emotions run this high and sanity is so badly challenged, the ordinary takes on mythic status, because people need myths to keep the madness in check.<br />
<br />
And '124' is a name bestowed, not just random: on the first page, we hear that when Sethe's family first lived there, 'It didn't have a number then, because Cincinnati didn't stretch that far.' The name, or the number, marks a change in history, a change that her sons didn't stick around to see. The house is '124' now, now it's down to its core, Sethe and her daughter Denver, named for the 'whitegirl' who helped at her birth, and her ghostly daughter, with no name but that anguished word. What we see in this first sentence is a house whose name has grown on it along with the gathering haunting, haunted before it was named but haunted worse as the days go by. Its name is at once a plain label imposed, like so much of Sethe's tragedy, by politics and authority beyond her reach, and a name she and her family have made out of those circumstances. The people of <i>Beloved</i> take what they can and invest it with the meaning of their lives - the meaning of their contested humanity. And particularly, 124 has become a <i>female</i> house: the departure of the boys Howard and Buglar leaves only Sethe, Denver, and the dying Baby Suggs among the living. The story begins with the entry of Paul D, 'last of the Sweet Home men', but the haunting eventually drives him away, and it's only after Beloved has gone - cast out by the neighbourhood women finally uniting not so much in support of Sethe as of the principle that if the past come back to punish us, none of us will survive - that he's able to return. For all its dry numeracy, '124' is a female name. Manhood is an issue in <i>Beloved</i>, and one that Morrison handles with compassion and respect, but at its centre are the relationships between women and girls, and we're more or less told in the first paragraph that 124 is, as long as the ghost is unlaid, a women's place.<br />
<br />
A women's place, and a quasi-sentient place: that blunt information tells us something crucial about the book that we need to know at once if we're to keep our feet. This is a ghost story - not in the fireside spooks tradition, but in the magic realist tradition where reality is heightened to metaphor - and we're told straight away that there's a haunting; unlike Marquez or Allende, Morrison doesn't sneak the information up on us, but throws it in our faces, because nothing but metaphor can possibly express the scale of the story she has in hand. And it's interesting that 124 has a personality. Think of it in the context of slavery: a house is, by anyone's lights, a genuine piece of property. The whole of Western law is founded on the concept of property, and owning land and buildings is one of the most basic elements of such a society. Here, though, we have a haunted house to which the 'venom' of its ghost is attributed, as if the house itself had thoughts and feelings. What we begin with, in other words, is a piece of property refusing to remain a mere possession. It's a brilliant stroke: all our characters are people who have been required to consider themselves mere property and have been unable to do so. Now, in the aftermath, it's as if the madness of owning the ensouled has seeped out into their new, free world: Sethe's desperate rejection of slavery has created a life in which even her house won't accept that it's a mere owned object. The people in 124 are haunted, so 124 is haunted: the dead won't accept death and houses won't accept domesticity and nothing will lie down. So terrible a stroke has slavery laid upon the mind that the echoes ring off every surface, until a house on an ordinary street doesn't seem to know whether it's living or dead. Sethe's cry of ensoulment has been heard so loud that ensoulment seems to rub off on whatever she owns.<br />
<br />
It's notable, too, that '124' is presented in terms of moral judgement: not 'troubled' or 'pained' or even 'angry', but 'spiteful.' 'Full of a baby's venom,' as the narrative continues, and even before the physical Beloved walks into the house, the poltergeist has already wrought such havoc that it's driven out its brothers, both of Sethe's sons. Is this supposed to be the definitive judgement, the authorial pronouncement on what the baby ghost really is? Clearly not, as compassion for the baby as well as for Sethe burns on every page. What it is, instead, is the bewilderment of people suffering at the hands of a ghost that they do not yet fully know. The haunting is causing them pain - above all, it's inflicted further breaks on an already shattered family - and so we begin with that condemnation of the baby that breaks mirrors, leaves handprints in the cake, tips over kettles, strews lines of crumbs, all listed in the very first paragraph. Even in the first few pages, though, the ghost's motivations are under debate: 'Lonely and rebuked', is Denver's interpretation, while Paul D's first word is 'evil', which Sethe corrects to 'sad', and later 'mad', having already corrected Denver's doubts with her own fatal assurance: 'You're forgetting how little it is ... Too little to understand ... But if she'd only come, I could make it clear to her.' Of the three of them, Sethe's is probably the closest to the truth based on how Beloved acts when she finally does 'come', except for that painful mother's folly, the belief that if only they'd let us explain, our children would forgive us. Which of course, Beloved doesn't: the violation is too great and inflicted too young, and Beloved herself is no longer human. She's grief and outrage and incomprehension, all the human reactions to slavery, detached from the human capacity to learn. Anger detached from learning often does become 'spiteful', with a human being, and so we're forewarned with that word: Sethe's yearning to explain and be understood is one that her lost girl will never fulfil. It's not that Beloved is exactly spiteful, but she's wild and vengeful and will not forgive. We are warned against her at the beginning, put on our guard. We begin, in short, with an understanding of what it's like to be her victim. By the end, with so much victimhood on display, and so much choice too, so much human complexity that leaves no one a mere victim without action or agency of their own, all we have left is that final, grieving word: 'Beloved.'<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I will call them my people,<br />
which were not my people;<br />
and her beloved,<br />
which was not beloved.<br />
- Romans 9.25</blockquote>
So goes the epigraph to the book: the horrible complications of family and love that come when your name and your children are torn away from you. Yet to call Beloved 'not beloved', except in the actions of her mother, is not right: what she is is <i>unprotected</i>, which should be something else but, in the raw logic of mother-and-baby, in the blind understanding of the baby itself, is not. And this is a bigger story than the tale of one family; it's about a 'people', the 'Sixty Million / and more' to whom Morrison dedicates the book. The focus on a mother and child makes the story universal because that is the centrepoint, the irreducible unit of personhood, the love between mother and child - and if even that is violated, nothing can thrive. African Americans lived in 'chattel slavery', the crime that is reducing people to livestock, and it's no coincidence that Morrison chooses love as the theme of her novel, because it's by loving each other that we recognise each other's humanity, and by forming families - by <i>being</i> families - that even the slaves who didn't run expressed their resistance to their enslavement. Consider this passage from <a href="http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/02/i-am-your-fellow-man-but-not-your-slave.html" target="_blank">Frederick Douglass's famous letter to Thomas Auld</a>:<br />
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<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span lang="EN-US">At this moment, you are probably the guilty
holder of at least three of my own dear sisters, and my only brother in
bondage. These you regard as your property. They are recorded on your ledger,
or perhaps have been sold to human flesh mongers, with a view to filling your
own ever-hungry purse. Sir, I desire to know how and where these dear sisters
are. Have you sold them? or are they still in your possession? What has become
of them? are they living or dead? And my dear old grandmother, whom you turned
out like an old horse, to die in the woods—is she still alive? Write and let me
know all about them. If my grandmother be still alive, she is of no service to
you, for by this time she must be nearly eighty years old—too old to be cared
for by one to whom she has ceased to be of service, send her to me at
Rochester, or bring her to Philadelphia, and it shall be the crowning happiness
of my life to take care of her in her old age. Oh! she was to me a mother, and
a father, so far as hard toil for my comfort could make her such. Send me my
grandmother! that I may watch over and take care of her in her old age. And my
sisters, let me know all about them. I would write to them, and learn all I
want to know of them, without disturbing you in any way, but that, through your
unrighteous conduct, they have been entirely deprived of the power to read and
write. You have kept them in utter ignorance, and have therefore robbed them of
the sweet enjoyments of writing or receiving letters from absent friends and
relatives. Your wickedness and cruelty committed in this respect on your
fellow-creatures, are greater than all the stripes you have laid upon my back,
or theirs. It is an outrage upon the soul—a war upon the immortal spirit, and
one for which you must give account at the bar of our common Father and
Creator.</span></blockquote>
<br />
<br />
It's in that cry of 'Send me my grandmother!', in the anguish of being unable to write to his sisters and brother, that Douglass locates the greatest crime of all, the 'outrage upon the soul.' Consider, too, the popularity of the TV series <i>Roots</i>, an early case of black characters taking centre stage in mainstream media, in which the entire theme rests on the belief that a hero may give up his fight for freedom in order to stay with his child, and that the last avenue of resistance is the refusal to lose the memory of one's parents and grandparents. Morrison is writing in a clear tradition in which that word of grief is also a word of resistance: Beloved. But it's because the enslaved characters resist that they suffer. 'Anything dead coming back to life hurts,' as the helpful whitegirl Amy counsels, and anything live struggling not to die hurts too: flesh, love, 'immortal spirit'.<br />
<br />
124 was spiteful. A house contains its name in its number, and that nameless name means more than can be easily expressed. That's the succinctness of Toni Morrison, her alchemic ability to take a normal-seeming word and set it in a context where it rings out magically new. It's the confidence of a writer at her prime, too, the curt eloquence of three words stepping us over the threshold and giving no concession to our attention: keep up, the book says, or don't, but this story will be told as it needs to fall. This is not a tale told in chronological sequence, but one that, in the modernist tradition, loops back and back to events until we understand in full, like a bruised brain returning to a trauma that can only be viewed in glimpses. We enter a house already traumatised, a tragedy already committed and a handful of lives filled with memories that are so painful that we need to see them in retrospect to understand them: the damage they wrought can only be seen in the context of a damaged life. Sethe's murder of her child is a culmination of too much horror, and as the baby's ghost won't die, that moment of murder, that culmination, has never really ended. We have to enter where we do, a short sentence that spins in the bleak time between greater horrors, if we are to grasp even the beginnings of what has been done.<br />
<br />
It's a small sentence, clipped, surprising if you're used to Morrison's expansive poetry. Sometimes, though, the poetry is not in the use of many words, but in the density of a few. '124 was spiteful,' and already history has us by the throat.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
*<i>Autobiography of Malcolm X</i>, (c) Alex Haley and Malcolm X, 1964, from the Penguin Books edition, p 296<br />
<br />
**<i>Made in America</i>, Bill Bryson, (c) 1994, from the Black Swan edition, p 118Kit Whitfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623432518060526692noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31552467.post-7474665320026514282013-05-27T16:55:00.000+00:002013-05-27T21:40:29.584+00:00Opening Line: Catch-22 by Joseph Heller<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: xx-small;">This blog is undergoing revision; a temporary archive of this series can be found <a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/first-sentence-posts.html" target="_blank">here</a>. </span><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
It was love at first sight.</blockquote>
<br />
Sometimes, first sentences do not contain much of a clue.<br />
<br />
<i>Catch-22</i> is one of the most famous war novels of all time, a work of satire so precise and burning that its very title achieved the status of a cultural landmark, a phrase we didn't know we needed until we heard it. A 'catch-22' is often defined as a no-win situation, but it's more than that: a situation that rests on impenetrably circular logic, impervious madness. Who is and isn't 'crazy' is the opening theme of the book: this is a story of American war pilots being required to fly more and more missions, dying one by one, or, if they survive, returning to a world governed by petty military authority and expected, somehow, to see their situation as normal.<br />
<br />
Yossarian, our hero, doesn't care about the rights and wrongs of the war: his character is a hymn to unashamed cowardice - or rather, to the basic animal desire to live that overwhelms all other principles when it's threatened this directly. It's easy to be brave with other people's lives, as Yossarian's commanders so fatally are, but when it looks like you might die tomorrow - and die painfully, fearfully, violently - other considerations start to look trivial. 'It was a vile and muddy war,' the narrative remarks early, 'and Yossarian could have lived without it - lived forever, perhaps. Only a fraction of his countrymen would give up their lives to win it, and it was not his ambition to be among them ... History did not demand Yossarian's premature demise, justice could be satisfied without it, progress did not hinge upon it, victory did not depend on it. That men would die was a matter of necessity; <i>which</i> men would die, though, was a matter of circumstance, and Yossarian was willing to be the victim of anything but circumstance.' Although that last sentence isn't strictly true: Yossarian isn't willing to be the victim of anything. It's just one among hundreds, perhaps thousands, of verbal twists, the arch shamelessness that becomes the only defence when the flat reality is that you are living under circumstances in which the most basic instinct of any living creature is forbidden, and indeed considered morally wrong: you are not allowed to protect your own life, and wanting to protect it is frowned upon. In Heller's dark vision, soldiers - Yossarian is technically a pilot, but <i>Catch-22</i>'s satire isn't confined to the air force, so I'm using the word generically to mean 'members of the military' - are not allowed to think and feel like human beings.<br />
<br />
A 'catch-22', then, is not just a paradoxical situation, but a state of complete insanity, or perhaps non-sanity: a state in which the most normal of all human impulses is cast as abnormal. As Anthony Burgess remarks in his introduction: 'The other day I was writing about the situation of nineteenth-century philologists. They could not teach their subject in universities without possessing a degree in it, but degrees in it would never exist until they taught the subject in universities. This, rightly I think, I designated a Catch-22 situation. But it is a genuinely deadly matter in its text of origin.' As the phrase has come loose from its book and is often - not illegitimately - used to describe the more ordinary frustrations of life, it's worth hearing the original definition to help us be clear exactly what kind of a book we're in before we look at the first sentence in depth. The quote will be long, because the complexities both of logic and tone can't really be covered in a few sentences - a point I'll return to when talking about the first sentence. Yossarian is talking to the military doctor, asking to be 'grounded' - that is, excused from flying any more missions:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>
'Can't you ground someone who's crazy?' </blockquote>
<blockquote>
'Oh, sure. I have to. There's a rule saying I have to ground anyone who's crazy.' </blockquote>
<blockquote>
'Then why don't you ground me? I'm crazy. Ask Clevinger.' </blockquote>
<blockquote>
'Clevinger? Where is Clevinger? You find Clevinger and I'll ask him.' </blockquote>
<blockquote>
'Then ask any of the others. They'l tell you how crazy I am.' </blockquote>
<blockquote>
'They're crazy.' </blockquote>
<blockquote>
'Then why don't you ground them?' </blockquote>
<blockquote>
'Why don't they ask me to ground them?' </blockquote>
<blockquote>
'Because they're crazy, that's why.' </blockquote>
<blockquote>
'Of course they're crazy,' Doc Daneeka replied. 'I just told you they're crazy, didn't I? And you can't let crazy people decide whether you're crazy or not, can you?' </blockquote>
<blockquote>
Yossarian looked at him soberly and tried another approach. 'Is Orr crazy?' </blockquote>
<blockquote>
'He sure is,' Doc Daneeka replied. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
'Can you ground him?' </blockquote>
<blockquote>
'I sure can. But first he has to ask me. That's part of the rule.' </blockquote>
<blockquote>
'Then why doesn't he ask you to?' </blockquote>
<blockquote>
'Because he's crazy,' Doc Daneeka said. 'He has to be crazy to keep flying combat missions after all the close calls he's had. Sure, I can ground Orr. But he has to ask me to.' </blockquote>
<blockquote>
'That's all he has to do to be grounded?' </blockquote>
<blockquote>
'That's all. Let him ask me.' </blockquote>
<blockquote>
'And then you can ground him?' Yossarian asked. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
'No. Then I can't ground him.' </blockquote>
<blockquote>
'You mean there's a catch?' </blockquote>
<blockquote>
'Sure there's a catch,' Doc Daneeka replied. 'Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn't really crazy.' </blockquote>
<blockquote>
There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
'That's some catch, that Catch-22,' he observed. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
'It's the best there is,' Doc Daneeka agreed. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
Yossarian saw it clearly in all its spinning reasonableness. There was an elliptical precision about its perfect pairs of parts that was graceful and shocking, like good modern art...</blockquote>
<br />
And it goes on, Yossarian's narrative drifting straight into another conversation with another equally circular thinker, getting maddened by their lack of reason and then drifting straight on to yet another comrade, who he tries to confuse by telling him the same thing, passing on the abuse because if he can't be sane, neither can anyone else - or else, perhaps to test reality and see if any new witnesses can make sense of it. Reality is like a sore tooth in<i> Catch-22</i>, constantly poked at and explored and never yielding any relief.<br />
<br />
As I said, it's a long extract to quote, but while 'Catch-22' itself is simple and precise, the tone of the book is not so straightforward. Savage, frustrated humour animates it throughout, but the savagery is expressed in dialogue: you need two players for it to work. Once the catch has been explained to Yossarian he can reflect on it privately, and there, Heller shows a lyrical hand, relaxing from endless contradictions into the eloquence of 'spinning reasonableness' and 'graceful and shocking'. But here's the thing: I could have just quoted the paragraph that explains 'Catch-22' without any dialogue: 'There was only one catch and that was Catch-22...' But if I'd done that on its own, it would have been a little hard to follow, wouldn't it? Packed tight on the page, expressed in logical detail, it becomes like a mathematical equation: Heller has to explain it three times to make it perfectly clear. Following the dialogue between Yossarian and Doc Daneeka, though, is altogether easier. It's not just that we learn from watching someone else be taught: it's that the nature of 'Catch-22' is that it's an <i>answer</i> - an answer to a specific question, and that answer is 'no'. Can a soldier protect himself? No. Under this circumstance? No. Under that circumstance? No. Under any circumstance? No. Put in that way, it's very simple: the logic may be twisted, but the situation it creates is always the same: you have to die. And that being the answer, dialogue is the cleanest way to present it, because it is, as well as an assault on logic, an assault on Yossarian's actual physical safety: what we see in the dialogue is a man repeatedly running into a wall, and it's only by watching him crash and crash that we can witness not only the craziness but the aggression of 'Catch-22', its heartlessness in the face of genuine human fear.<br />
<br />
Which is why, when we turn to the first sentence, it seems uncharacteristic of the book. <i>Catch-22</i> is a book of paradoxes, and a paradox needs two sides. You can write a single-sentence paradox if you choose, but Heller's style favours the call-and-response, the ask and the rebuff, and for that, you need more than one sentence. No single sentence - or at least, no sentence arresting enough to start a book - could contain it.<br />
<br />
So, we have 'It was love at first sight.' Not romantic love; this is a heterosexual male world in which women are primarily prostitutes on the sidelines and falling in love with a woman is just one more minor variation on the craziness that afflicts every single character in the book. No, the second sentence informs us - already setting up the one-two-punch rhythm of <i>Catch-22</i> - it's something else: 'The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.' This is an intellectual love, the same love that Yossarian feels at the contradictions and the opportunities for mayhem that provide the only kind of relief from the ever-present threat of death: the chaplain is a well-meaning innocent, utterly out of his depth in this terrible world, and Yossarian takes a great liking to him precisely because he's so easily confused and embarrassed. In a world where most military figures - or at least, those who don't actually have to go into combat themselves - feel no shame at telling a man he has no right to live, that is quite a find: the capacity to get embarrassed depends on feeling the humanity of other people, and the capacity to get confused depends on the belief that things ought to make sense. Empathy and logic are in desperately short supply, enough to make a man feel 'love' - comical love, to be sure, rhetorically exaggerated love, but a genuine positive emotion - at the very sight of a man who still possesses them.<br />
<br />
There's something, too, in the immediacy of the sentence that fits with the texture of <i>Catch-22</i>: military logic runs round an unending track and you can't argue your way into or out of it. Reality, genuine truth, is perceived instinctually and by flashes: Yossarian ends the book with a sudden decision to desert based on a realisation about a friend having done the same, a realisation that actually, yes, escape is possible: 'Yossarian leaped out of bed with an incredulous yelp when he finally understood.' It's so instantaneous an understanding that he literally jumps to his feet. Orr, the apparent idiot, has slipped through the cracks and shown up safe in Sweden, and Yossarian realises with a thrill that his idiocy must have been a mask, a pretence to allay suspicion, under the protection of which he could run for his life. Very little makes sense in the world of <i>Catch-22</i>, and you can't understand it by thinking: the whole nature of 'Catch-22' is that it subverts thought. All you can see for sure, you see in 'first sight' revelations. The chaplain is a decent man. Don't argue; run. I don't want to die.<br />
<br />
That, really, is why the first sentence isn't much of a clue to most of the book. It's a flash of insight, and we have to be familiar with the background mania before those flashes become illuminating. The chaplain is going to be a friend, an ally who supports Yossarian's right to run in the final chapter: he's too normal for this story. We don't really see all that much of him for most of the book. Why do we begin with him? Because he's one of the few people who can be contained in a simple, isolated, declarative sentence. Everybody else needs paradoxes to express them: the true rarity is a man you can just flat-out <i>like</i>.<br />
<br />
At the same time, this first sentence phrase about him is a cliche, and cliches are important to <i>Catch-22</i>. As a culture, it's through cliche that we express conventional wisdom, societal norms. And what greater societal norm than this one: it's a good thing for a soldier to lay down his life for his country? The word 'subvert' is often over-used in literary discussions, but for <i>Catch-22</i> that really is the appropriate term: cliches are part of its vocabulary precisely because it's only by subverting them that the narrative can rebel against the conventional wisdom, backed up by armed authority, that destroys the characters in the story. Casualties are victims of circumstance. What's good for business is good for the country. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. When there's a war behind them, these are conventions that kill. <i>Catch-22</i> doesn't argue with them. It uses them, flips and spins them, recites them with manic enthusiasm until it drives everyone sane.<br />
<br />
So with 'love at first sight': divorce the sentence from its context, and this could be the opening of a piece of terrible romantic hack-work. It's not the phrase itself, but how it's used, that actually matters, and to understand it - to find the clue it's hiding - we have to read further, go further in and further down.<br />
<br />
The first sentence is ironic but direct and truer than it seems, and what it gives us is one of the rare moments of seeing clearly: love of life, love of decency, inexpressible in plain, sane speech. Because here's the other thing about <i>Catch-22</i>, the less famous but absolutely important thing: slipped between the looping layers of madness are moments of pure, graphic horror. 'Catch-22' is a thing of intellectual beauty, a kind of polished, heedless madness ... but then there's<a href="http://www.deathdyinggriefandmourning.com/Death-Dying-Grief-Mourning/100-Joseph-Heller-Catch-22-Death-of-Snowden.htm" target="_blank"> the death of Snowden</a>. The narrative flicks back and back to it, mentioning the death as early as the fourth chapter and gradually unpeeling more and more from the memory, like a kind of ever-worsening flashback, until we finally see the scene: Snowden, wounded terribly in the leg; Yossarian relieved that it's no worse than a case of exposed muscles twitching like 'live hamburger meat', then seeing that Snowden is wounded in the stomach and watching him die as his shattered insides all slide out. The language is sickening: 'was that a tube of slimy bone he saw running deep inside the gory scarlet flowed behind the twitching, startling fibers of weird muscle?' Yossarian wonders wildly, only to see Snowden's body fall apart and conclude that, 'It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret. Ripeness was all.'<br />
<br />
This is not what we were prepared for by the barracks shenanigans and gallows humour of the opening chapters. Many people start <i>Catch-22</i> and drift off early, in fact, because something happens to it around halfway through: having dropped us into a group of maddening people, wisecracking pilots all brandishing their craziness like a badge of belonging and terrible officers with parodic names like 'Lieutenant Scheisskopf' (that's 'Lieutenant Shithead', for those who don't speak German), we begin as the new kid on the base, rather dizzied with all these strange new people who seem so much more savvy than us. Incident follows incident out of chronological sequence with no clear storyline: everyone is going mad, missions have to be flown, more and more strange new faces pop up, each chapter title the name of a character until we start to wonder if we'll ever stop getting introduced to new people, new variants on the theme of craziness, or if this relentless jumping back and forth in time will ever start to make sense. But <i>Catch-22 </i>is cumulative. It drives us crazy ... until we start to get enough pieces to assemble into some kind of sanity, and about halfway through, we pass some kind of tipping point, and you freeze to the page. Incidents that get replayed and replayed start to become more real with each iteration: we start to see just how serious, under the joking, the situation really is. The silly number-juggling of capitalism that begins with an earnest mess officer becomes 'M & M Enterprises', the company that bombs its own side for profit and robs people until Yossarian has to care for the dying Snowden with no morphine because there's nothing in the case but a note reading 'What's good for M & M Enterprises is good for the country.' The missions rise and rise to the point where mention of them is less a laugh than a sob: after a particularly grisly and awful death scene, for example, one chapter ends with the deadpan statement, 'Colonel Cathcart was so upset by the deaths of Kid Sampson and McWatt that he raised the missions to sixty-five.' People we've gotten to know and like, to enjoy as comic characters with their own quirky variants on the general policy of insanity, get killed, suddenly, brutally, vividly before our eyes. Yossarian may be burned out when we start the book, but we aren't. It just takes us a while to catch up to him.<br />
<br />
So it is with the first sentence, 'It was love at first sight.' It's a joke, really, harmless-sounding, a little silly: a man sees a chaplain and finds him so sweetly raw that it's described as falling in love. It's a cliche, amusingly misapplied. It's nothing serious.<br />
<br />
Then we see men torn apart and their blood sprays across the page, and we forget that we ever knew how to laugh.<br />
<br />
We begin ignorant, and have to learn a new language, catch the rhythms of craziness; we have to learn who's who. But just when we're finding our feet, we are knocked off them again. We begin with the mental horror, and then, mercilessly, we are hurled up against the physical. <i>Catch-22</i> is, fundamentally, not funny ... but it takes us a long time to learn that secret.Kit Whitfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623432518060526692noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31552467.post-90113373162316733032013-05-13T05:30:00.000+00:002013-05-22T11:05:33.662+00:00First sentences: I, Claudius by Robert Graves<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: xx-small;">This blog is undergoing revision; a temporary archive of this series can be found <a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/first-sentence-posts.html" target="_blank">here</a>. </span><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles), who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as 'Claudius the Idiot', or 'That Claudius', or 'Claudius the Stammerer', or 'Clau-Clau-Claudius', or at best as 'Poor Uncle Claudius' [a marginal note here adds the date 'A.D. 41'], am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the 'golden predicament' from which I have never since become disentangled. </blockquote>
<br />
The publication of <i>I, Claudius</i> in 1934 was a bright moment for educated readers. It was shamelessly scandalous yet historically erudite. It was full of sex, violence and that great third member of the pulp triumvirate, scheming, yet it was written by a poet - and a First World War poet at that, one of those blood-and-gas anointed individuals who assumed the power to speak for a nation: an almost Sybilline figure himself, taking on the spirit of another era. It was a book you could read and tell yourself you were getting an education about history - and you wouldn't be entirely wrong, for Graves stayed close to the primary sources as far as possible and only employed artistic license in the areas where no records could contradict him - yet it was, and I use the words advisedly, bloody good fun. Nor has history forgotten it: the 1998 '<a href="http://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-novels/" target="_blank">100 Best Novels List'</a> by Modern Library features it in the impressively high Number 14 slot, for instance, just under George Orwell's <i>Nineteen-Eighty Four</i> and above Virginia Woolf's <i>To the Lighthouse</i>, which is some pretty august company. And yes, that's the list where they also had a readers-choice list alongside a critics' one and the Ayn Rand fans and Scientologists evidently heard about it in advance, swamping the top slots with votes for the their beloved Rand and Hubbard in a move that makes the list seem far more like a PR coup than a broad <i>vox populi, </i>and the sci-fi fans were evidently active voters as well given the prominence of Tolkien and Heinlein ... and yet <i>I, Claudius</i> is there in the readers'-choice list as well, merely bumped down to Number 74 between <i>Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance</i> and <i>The Call of the Wild</i>. In 2005 Claudius popped up again in <a href="http://entertainment.time.com/2005/10/16/all-time-100-novels/slide/all/" target="_blank">a hundred-best list for <i>Time</i> magazine</a>, compiled by Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo in what they called, half-humorously, a '<a href="http://entertainment.time.com/2005/10/16/all-time-100-novels/slide/how-we-picked-the-list/" target="_blank">massive, anguished, exalted undertaking</a>'. And that's just the book; a whole generation still remembers the Emmy-and-BAFTA-scooping TV series with enthusiasm, and that adaptation hasn't lost its influence even for younger viewers who haven't actually seen it. Without <i>I, Claudius</i> it's unlikely we would have had Charles Laughton and Laurence Olivier plotting at each other in <i>Spartacus </i>(1960), and without <i>Spartacus</i>, there's a good chance we wouldn't have the Oscar-nominated <i>Gladiator</i> in 2000, for instance, never mind the BBC-HBO collaboration <i>Rome </i>from 2005 to 2007: the BBC and HBO working together on anything is enough to make a television lover sit up, and in terms of pitch, <i>Rome</i> is essentially <i>I, Claudius</i> in the pre-Augustan era, only with a bigger budget, crisper editing and the shagging happening on-screen rather than off. Take away Graves's book, and lovers of fictional antiquity would have to content themselves with the solemnities of <i>Ben-Hur</i>. <i>I, Claudius</i> is a cultural force to be reckoned with.<br />
<br />
If I'm going to be honest and admit to a personal opinion, I'll have to begin by owning that I suspect its prominence all over the place is as much because it hits a sweet spot as for any more exalted reason: the highbrow can enjoy its grimy thrills without guilt because of the erudition, the lowbrow can enjoy its erudition without resentment because of its hearty dedication to sex, scheming and stabbing. It combines the popular tale of the underdog triumphant with the attractions of dirty work in high places, allowing us to enjoy the inside scoop on a privileged world while going, with its portrait of stammering, halting, patronised Claudius, straight to the heart of anyone who's ever felt uncomfortable in their skin, unappreciated by their family or smarter than the world is prepared to acknowledge - which covers, we should probably concede, just about everyone who ever picked up a book or switched on a television. The very act of reading so scholarly a book makes us, for the duration, Claudius figures ourselves, historians who are, like him, hiding from the monsters that stalk through his pages, him behind a mask of idiocy and us screened by the mask of time - though we also know that, like us, Claudius will live through these adventures, at least for a while, because the very first sentence makes it clear that he lived to tell the tale. At least for the duration of the book, we are hearing the direct voice of a man who has, like us, lived after the events he describes, and who is, like us, after the plain, unedifying truth.<br />
<br />
For Claudius's voice speaks out from the first line, and it's a voice at once impressively authoritative and reassuringly cynical. What is more appealing than an aristocrat speaking to us with frankness? 'I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles', Claudius remarks, shrugging at the weighty pomp of his own name: this is a speaker with no side, we are told. We may be modern, members of a lesser era, and ordinary people rather than aristocrats besides, but Claudius has the positive consideration not to 'trouble' us with too much information at once. It's extremely flattering.<br />
<br />
But at the same time, Claudius demonstrably does have something to put on side about: for anyone with even a small grasp of Roman history, his names are redolent with legend: Tiberius, Claudius, Nero, all fall with titanic force on the attention among the now-less-famous Drusus and Germanicus, and even then, Claudius carelessly informs us, there are other names he could still add if he chose. He may speak to us as to intellectual equals, but he also handles his grand name with the casual unconcern of one to the manner born, like a marquis putting up his feet on a Chippendale stool. The names are tossed out with little admiration for their lineage, even though the lineage is obviously there, for Claudius is in the unusual position of a man for whom family is history, both private and public, intimate and impersonal at the same time. In that light, it's an interesting foreshadowing that it's after 'Germanicus' that Claudius loses patience, for his relationship with his beloved older brother Germanicus is a central point to his character. Regarded as a deformed 'marmoset' by his aristocratic parents, it's primarily Germanicus's love that makes him care anything about his family at all. The historical Germanicus was a popular general in Roman times, though also a controversial one, who died relatively young and presumed murdered, and thought by some to be setting himself up as a rival to Tiberius after Augustus's death. Taking a dramatic line, Graves casts him as a relative innocent: a strong, talented boy, the perfect Roman son, but also a kindly and generous soul who protects and encourages his limping little brother: a person who somehow combines the qualities of being both admirable on Rome's ruthless terms and likeable on his own, and as such, in Claudius's view, is never going to survive this awful world. There's a rather wonderful touch early on, for instance, where an unexpected omen takes place as some eagles, fighting above the heads of the Claudian children, drop down feathers, spots of blood and a wolf cub on them, showing their various destinies. Claudius catches the wolf cub, auguring his future role as emperor, but being a child is less than interested in such matters and remarks that while the adults calculate the significance, 'dear Germanicus had found another tail-feather for me, sticking in a hawthorne bush, and I was putting it proudly in my hair,' a neat little example of <i>I, Claudius</i>'s ability to combine the human and the historical in an engaging read. Claudius stops his name - or rather, his great list of family names, as none of his names are chosen for their individuality as 'Robert' or 'Kit' would be nowadays, but are rather a dynastic accumulation slapped onto the Roman aristocrat like a list of ingredients - because once he's passed his family link to Germanicus, he no longer feels any connection and ceases to care. A name that belonged to his beloved older brother has meaning to him; other names given to him because other relations had them before him are just pointless honorifics. Most of his family is a burden to him.<br />
<br />
The list, then, is a character note, and already the beginnings of a complex character. Claudius may be impatient with his lineage, but at the same time it's an interesting little play on the novel's title: he does not actually introduce himself as 'I, Claudius', but as 'I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus....': there's the formidable 'Tiberius', a name that calls to mind both the infamous emperor and the mighty Roman River Tiber from which the name derives, before we ever get to 'Claudius'. He speaks to us directly, it would seem, but there's a bit of dynasty between us and the name that the book's title has primed us to expect. Rome's world is not ours, and after the approachable-seeming title, we get a swift introduction to its alien character: before we get to the brusque dismissal of his full name, we are slowed on the lengthy list that turns out to be so much more than we'd been expecting. It throws us off our guard a little, reminds us that we are culturally out of our depth and need the clever Claudius to keep us afloat. Claudius is writing the 'strange history of my life', and is addressing a generic and unknown future, an 'extremely remote posterity': his voice may seem direct to us, but at the same time it is, for all its frank tone, still a voice superior to us in both rank and knowledge - and knowledge of two kinds, of formal education (unless we're Classics professors, and even then, Claudius has presumably studied texts that are lost to the modern reader), and also knowledge of backstairs gossip, knowledge both high and low. The style throughout is pedantic as well as swift: 'starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change' extends no trust us having the good sense to realise that yes, a 'history of my life' probably does mean telling it in chronological order. It's also a scholarly way of writing, following the structure of a Classical annalistic history - Tacitus does the same, for example - which adds to the conceit: we're not supposed to be holding a novel in our hands, but a piece of serious history. Middle-aged Claudius is speaking with authority, and his dismissal of lengthy titles is not the friendly informality of an equal but the crusty impatience of a teacher. We are commanded to sit at our desks before we know where we are, and this makes it very hard not to accept <i>I, Claudius</i> as an authoritative text.<br />
<br />
Is it? According to my friend <a href="http://lizgloyn.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Dr Liz Gloyn</a>, who at the time of writing is teaching Classics at the University of Birmingham, it's a book that relies heavily on primary sources, particularly Tacitus and Suetonius, but that we should probably remember that 'primary' is a dubious description in the context. To begin with, both were writing a full generation after the events they describe: while the exact dates of their births aren't known, by the best estimates Tacitus was born two years after Claudius's death in 54 CE and Suetonius fifteen years after. More importantly, there's no such thing as an impartial historian and both were writing after the collapse of the Julian line: Tacitus had a dark view of the effect of power on virtue and Suetonius loved nothing more than a bit of juicy gossip. Graves's approach is to take the primary sources more or less on face value and extrapolate from there, rather than to challenge how reliable they are. It's an interesting device, and one that perhaps best suits his conceit of pretending that an actual emperor wrote this story: if Claudius basically agrees with Suetonius and Tacitus, then each of them lends the other verisimilitude, making history seem graspable rather than a confused welter of arguing voices. It may also be that he just enjoyed those writers - there's no reason why he wouldn't - and fancied writing a book in their vein. The historical Claudius did write history (he was very learned on the Etruscans, according to Liz), and while there are certainly interpretations that argue he wasn't anywhere near as nice as he seems in Graves, placing him in agreement with his near-contemporaries suits the tone of the novel, which maintains its Classical aspect throughout. This isn't revisionist history, but spiced-up traditional history, going straight for what looks like the most fun.<br />
<br />
Note, for instance, the way that the very first paragraph includes one of the marginal dates, as if we were reading a real history. It's a form of notation not uncommon to works of scholarship, making it look all the more authentic, as if what we held in our hands was not a novel but a pleasing new translation of a real Classical text. It's the contrast with this scholarly set-up that makes Claudius's voice so arresting: he begins with the convocation of historical names and then breaks off all of a sudden into the colloquial 'This-that-and-the-other', as if a work of history suddenly winked at us. The format of dry scholarship combined with a speaker who shares our impatience for long recitations is hard to resist.<br />
<br />
Yet Claudius is not entirely colloquial. He has the air of an educated Roman - a 'practised style', as he confidently asserts, defending against suppositions that the book was written for him - and one thing even a smattering of Latin will teach you (and a smattering is certainly all I have to my credit) is that Roman rhetoric tends to weigh heavy on the page. The ability to make grand and forceful speeches was an essential Roman attribute and they took public speaking nearly as seriously as military training, and more than that, Latin tends not to translate smoothly. English is a mostly analytic language, by which we mean that it tends to make grammar out of adding lots of little words to a sentence. If you want to change the grammatical context of the word 'table', for example, then you say that this is the leg <i>of the</i> table, or that I propped open the door <i>with the </i>table, or that I walked <i>to the</i> table. Latin, on the other hand, is a synthetic language, meaning that it tends to change the main words rather than moving prepositions around them: 'mensa' means 'table', but you would talk about the leg <i>mensae</i>, the genitive case, or propped the door <i>mensa</i>, the ablative, or I walked <i>mensam</i>, the accusative. To say it in English - here's the leg tablae, I propped the door with table, I walked tableam - is nonsensical, but you can see, too, how it's also a lot more concise. Especially when you consider further that personal pronouns, too, can often be left out in Latin: verbs have different suffixes depending on who's doing it, as in the common schoolroom example 'amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant', which English can only render as, 'I love, you love, he loves, we love, they love, he, she or it loves.' With such clear distinctions, Latin doesn't usually need to mention who's being spoken of at all and doesn't use articles like 'the', hence our examples could be even more cut down: here's leg tablae, proppedo door open table, walkedo tableam.<br />
<br />
When you can be that efficient - when the cases are fixed so the words can come in any order without changing the meaning, and length is hardly an issue - you can afford to pack a lot more content into a sentence. What looks sleek in Latin translates wordily into English because we have to add so much to make the meaning clear, and Graves is well aware of this. This is a long opening line. Check out the way it finishes: '...the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the 'golden predicament' from which I have never since become disentangled.' There are small subclauses tucked in with tidy precision, as if written in a language that would never confuse its listeners as to which words linked to which others in a sentence. Too, note the grammatical drag of 'from which I have never since become': a mind familiar with Latin translations instinctively reads this as the thorny rendering of some simple Latin phrase (put 'become disentangled' in the first person and the appropriate tense and all you probably need is the word 'numquam', meaning never, to have the whole sense of it). Graves knows his Latin, both its rhetorical habits and its grammatical incompatibilities with English, and pulls off the unusual feat of writing a sentence that manages to be at once readable and comprehensible and yet still to feel like a translation from an alien tongue.<br />
<br />
And yet, however foreign the language strikes on the ear, the tone is entirely modern. Robert Graves was a veteran, and war made him a cynic, <a href="http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-poetry-of-Robert-Graves-5738" target="_blank">remarking that </a>it eventually 'seemed merely a sacrifice of the idealistic younger generation to the stupidity and self-protective alarm of the elder.' To a man who fought in the trenches, noble sentiments about fine ancestry were not merely wrong-headed but murderously so, and what, for a man of his time and class, was more ancestral, more nobly sentimental, than reverence for the Roman Empire? Including, fatally, the Roman Empire's notions of patriotism and martial glory created in a time when warfare was a matter of swords, not machine guns and mustard gas? 'Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori' - that is, it is sweet and dignified to die for one's fatherland -was a phrase hated by more than one war poet - hated enough that Wilfred Owen actually used it as the title of <a href="http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19389" target="_blank">one of his most famous and brutal poems</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<br />
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace<br />
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,<br />
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,<br />
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;<br />
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood<br />
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,<br />
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud<br />
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—<br />
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest<br />
To children ardent for some desperate glory,<br />
The old Lie: <i>Dulce et decorum est </i><i>Pro patria mori</i>.</blockquote>
<br />
Britain modelled itself on the ancient world, based its education on it, aspired to it; the very fact that we refer to the Greek and Roman authors as 'the Classics' tells us where their culture stands in relation to our own. And once the British Empire sent its sons into the trenches, some of its sons started gunning for Rome. There is a real grievance here behind the pulpy fun and the academic play: Graves's noble Romans are a pack of scheming murderers and enthroned lunatics, and anyone who aspires to be like them is just plain ignorant, duped by the rhetoric and blind to the truth, and probably going to die a violent death.<br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>I, Claudius</i> is an infuriated book - but rather than Owen's beautifully-described injuries, his poetic screams of horror, Graves chooses in <i>I, Claudius</i> to satirise, because only in scepticism - in undignified, clear-eyed dishonour - lies any chance of survival. Claudius makes it through Caligula's mad reign not by noble resistance but by flattering obedience and determined clowning, showing himself too amusing to be worth killing and too silly to be worth the trouble. Dignity gets you killed: you live by understanding the ridiculous and accepting it. The story is, among other things, a prolonged mockery of Classical piety, and from the first sentence it drives through with a brisk bathos: Claudius the Emperor and Claudius the Idiot are the same man, and let's never forget it. The position of emperor is inherently idiotic, as far as Claudius is concerned - he's hauled aloft to kingship protesting 'Put me down! I don't want to be Emperor. I refuse to be Emperor. Long live the Republic!' and resigning himself with the thought, 'What nonsense! But at least I'll be able to make people read my books now.' It's a 'golden predicament', as we know right from the beginning, that delicate word 'predicament' sounding neither disastrous nor soluble but rather comically understated, as if Empire were a dog on your lap you feared to offend your hostess by dislodging. And if Empire is a silly little lapdog dandled by an irritable geek, what man of sense will die for it? Claudius is relentlessly donnish, an impatient bookworm of a man so small in relation to his historical position that reverence for history starts to seem ridiculous. Claudius himself finds it so, and is well aware that there's something ridiculous about him: in the shifting contradictions of his authority and fallibility, all that stays consistent is an angry sense of the absurd. There is passion for truth here, even as it embroiders and imagines history; Graves is the poet who wrote of the butterfly's <a href="http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/rgraves/bl-rgraves-flying.htm" target="_blank">'honest idiocy of flight'</a>, and it's a phrase that seems to sum up the mood of the novel. One must be honest that idiocy exists, one must be honest about one's own idiocy, and yet, scholarship and imagination pour themselves into a long, intense read. The truth, as Graves locates it, is in cynicism, for only in cynicism can we resist propaganda.<br />
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Early in the story, the young Claudius encounters famous Roman historians in the middle of a debate about whether it's right to make 'the people of Ancient Rome behave and talk as if they were alive now' when writing them up as history. Claudius finds himself siding more with Pollio, who is against this view, than Livy, who prefers 'finer, more poetical feelings' to influence the tale. Of course, this is sheer sleight of hand on Graves's part, as Graves's readable fictionalisation is far more Livy than Pollio: while phrases like 'this-that-and-the-other' and the careful parsings of grammar aren't exactly how people talk now, certainly the characters act like people act now, or if anything, they act worse. Yet there's a sense that the book is pushing its own vision of truth - 'though it may not be true in factual detail, yet it is true in spirit,' as Livy defends himself ... except it's not 'finer' truth: it's grimmer truth, nastier truth, less inspirational truth. 'There are two different ways of writing history: one is to persuade men to virtue and the other is to compel men to truth,' young Claudius speculates, and it's the latter that this - fictional, untrue, but by-gosh persuasive - Claudius proposes to do.<br />
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And even as he starts, he acknowledges, yet twists, the saving grace of such histories: the simple fact of different perspectives. Claudius has his fine family names; he has the insulting epithets of 'Idiot' and 'Stammerer'; he has the forgiving compromise of 'Poor Uncle': different people, in other words, see things differently, even down to their different views of the man telling the tale. We're tempted with the promise of an inside view into his 'strange history', but so personal is Claudius's tone, for all its formality and its 'translated' quality, that we feel we're not so much hearing a sole explanation as one part of an argument. Others have written on the subject, and like any academic, Claudius has raised his pen to fence with them: that's what academics do. He's a darn convincing academic, though: while those voices are acknowledged to have their own opinions, they are also, by the point of writing, <i>disproven</i>. Nobody is calling him 'Clau-Clau-Claudius' any more: those times are past and Claudius, by deploying his cleverness in his life as well as his writings, has outlasted them all. Claudius occupies, at least within the lines he draws in this sentence, the position that all academics most yearn to reach at the end of a debate: that of last man standing. Those people who interpreted him wrong didn't make it to the end of the debate - and in fact, they've mostly been killed.<br />
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That, ultimately, is the explanation for the mixture of scholarly pedantry and impatient shortcuts, bluntness and formality, personal and public, Livyan and Pollian that animates this long, crisp sentence. Graves had a point to make about nature and culture, and this is his hero, Claudius: intellectual observer of an era where cunning is the only law and forming an opinion is a blood sport. The Roman Empire is a terrifying place and a farcical one, and dulce et decorum citizens of it are killed very quickly. From behind the safety of these pages, we may laugh, we may thrill to the drama, we may doff our caps at the scholarship - but we feel no desire to die for the fatherland. For all its aristocratic backstairs gossip, <i>I, Claudius</i> is an anti-authoritarian work. We may study the Romans with interest, it implies, but only a fool would lay down his life to be like them.Kit Whitfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623432518060526692noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31552467.post-14442319847725941892013-04-29T07:09:00.000+00:002013-04-29T07:14:26.963+00:00First sentences: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee<blockquote class="tr_bq">
When he was nearly thirteen my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. </blockquote>
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Scratch the surface of <i>To Kill a Mockingbird</i> and you'll find a controversial book. On the one hand, it's a novel of evangelical tolerance, promoting the soothing message that 'most people are [nice] when you finally see them' even in an environment bitterly divided by prejudice, that makes a hero of the white lawyer who defends a black client unjustly accused, and a tragedy of the childhood loss of innocence that goes with discovering you live in a racist world. It's one of the great anti-racist novels ... at least if you ask a white person.<br />
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But at the same time, many black readers are far from happy with it*. Its portrayal of the defendant Tom Robinson, for instance, is very much the portrayal of a 'respectable Negro', who feels no anger at the injustice of his situation, just regretful sorrow towards the girl accusing him, simple fear of her father, and unmixed gratitude to the white lawyer who remains friends with the white farmers even after they try to lynch him- a lynching which Atticus forgivingly prevents, in itself something of a difficult issue given that, <a href="http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/blog/Mockingbird.pdf" target="_blank">as Isaac Saney points out,</a> 'this act has no historical foundation' and is an unduly rosy portrayal of how 'good' white people acted in the era. Real white people didn't intervene in lynchings, and it's a comforting fiction to pretend otherwise - and a comfort, many would argue, that we have no right to indulge in. Likewise, the African American community of Maycomb shows no desire to resist the oppression they struggle under. The closest they get to concerted action is raising money to support Tom's family in a church collection, an impeccably apolitical response - and again, contrary to actual history: consider, for instance, the case of the '<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotsboro_boys" target="_blank">Scottsboro boys</a>', which provoked not only demonstrations but activism from the African American community, including the NAACP's attempt to provide the defendants with legal representation (whereas Atticus Finch is asked to take on the case by a white judge). No African American character shows the kind of suspicion and wariness towards well-intentioned whites you'd think any normal person would feel in so rigged a system, with the one exception of a rude woman at the maid Calpurnia's church who objects to Calpurnia bringing her white charges along on Sunday but is quickly told not to be 'contentious' by her fellow parishioners, dismissed thus: 'She's a troublemaker from way back, got fancy ideas and haughty ways'. In other words, <i>To Kill a Mockingbird</i> presents the only open expression of black anger towards whites as an aberration that better-minded black people recognise as getting above her station, an interpretation that seems - let us say, somewhat at odds with human nature. The virtuous majority of black characters are acknowledged to feel upset at Tom's fate, but their only action in response is to shower gifts on the white man who tried and failed to save him, and to stand up with quasi-religious deference (the gesture is promoted by their reverend, indeed) when he is 'passin''.<br />
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<i>To Kill a Mockingbird</i> is, then, a book that's undoubtedly well-intentioned - tolerance and empathy are its watchwords - but it's also a book that suppresses anger at injustice. The children are counselled to forgive and understand the racists; black characters are permitted to celebrate good white people but are not depicted as resenting bad ones. Opposition to racism is a question of white heroism, not black, and unmixed white heroism at that: Harper Lee apparently based the character of Atticus on her own father while glossing over the fact that he was, like real people tend to be, a complex mixture, <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1289793/Dont-mention-mockingbird-Meet-Harper-Lee-reclusive-novelist-wrote-classic-novel-mesmerised-40-million-readers.html" target="_blank">defending black clients but advocating Jim Crow</a>. That white heroism is also explicitly class-coded: 'The handful of people in this town who say that fair play is not marked White Only' are 'The handful of people in this town with background, that's who they are' - which is to say that racism is the attribute of 'poor whites', not white aristocrats, which rather puts it on the level of other gaucheries like pouring molasses on your meat, a regrettable affliction of the ill-bred that should be forgiven along with other forms of ignorance and bad manners. Noblesse oblige, and it obliges without stopping to ask whether black people, or indeed poor white people, see it the same way.<br />
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In short, it's a book that presents a nicer portrait of history than the facts would strictly allow, that intermixes its claims of tolerance with a firm intra-racial snobbery, and most problematic of all, advocates forgiveness before redress. To forgive may be divine, but even many divines concede that it doesn't serve justice to ask forgiveness towards one who is still harming you. Rather than presenting injustice as something that must be righted before it can be forgiven, though, <i>To Kill a Mockingbird</i> presents forgiveness as the first step: racism can only be opposed gently, and only by white people who are all but canonised for their efforts. This may be a noble sentiment, but it's one that is, shall we say, easier to assume from a position above systemic injustice than it is from below, and open to accusations of complacency and condescension. It's a very feel-good book, viewed from a certain perspective, and that perspective is not unassailable.<br />
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But from from within that perspective, my goodness what an effective feel-good book it is. Politically, <i>To Kill a Mockingbird </i>can be difficult for many people to swallow - but one of the reasons for this is precisely that, for many other people, it's all too <i>easy</i> to swallow. Part of this, to be sure, is that it's a perfect cockle-warmer for white people insulated from black voices, but the other part of it is that, on a purely artistic level, it really is an excellent work of fiction. Wonderfully structured, linking tiny loss to tiny loss of innocence to the final tragedy and redemption; writing that goes down as smooth as good whiskey; infused from the first page with a vivid sense of place and an ever-delightful set of scrappy, charming, unsentimental children carrying us into the adult world, <i>To Kill a Mockingbird</i> is a book skilled enough to please college professors and readable enough to be the first 'grown-up' novel many children read. Indeed, I can testify that it was probably the first such book I enjoyed, and I still remember the sense of, 'Hey, this isn't boring! I'm actually enjoying this!' Adult conversations often went over my head and left me impatient, but this book spoke to me, not much older than Jem (and far more insulated from the pain of race relations in American history), as naturally as it spoke to my parents, whose copy I had in my hands. You can disagree with <i>To Kill a Mockingbird</i> politically; of course you can. There's no question, though, that it's a beautifully-done version of what it is. Among the famous 'Southern lady' writers, Harper Lee manages to eschew Florence King's cutesy digs and Margaret Mitchell's passionate polemics, and writes instead out of a kind of idealism, a genuine love of place and people that idealises them as well as any virtues they may have had. You may not be able to see the place and people the same way she did, and if you can't, history is probably on your side - but in writing what she saw, she wrote well.<br />
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Which makes it rather interesting that her book gets off to what looks like a slow start. We don't begin in the middle of a scene, but with a rather circular, discursive beginning. Jem 'got his arm badly broken'; the rest of the paragraph describes how the arm never quite healed right but that Jem didn't mind because he could still play football, meaning that the whole thing is filled with non-event. In the second, paragraph, the children's dispute about 'the events leading to his accident' are paraphrased, Scout blaming 'the Ewells' and Jem referring back to 'when Dill first gave us the idea of making Boo Radley come out', with no helpful hints for the reader as to who any of these people might be ... and then from there, we unspool straight into a family argument, Scout adding 'I said if he wanted to take a broad view of the thing, it really began with Andrew Jackson,' and from there, as if reminded of the role American history played in the development of her home town of Maycomb, wanders off into a digression about her family tree (which does in fact include a slave-owner, this fact presented without comment), her father's career, the family unit she grew up in and the town they inhabited. Scout's voice has the eloquence of an adult in these first pages, and, too, an adult's awareness that history shapes us -especially in a town that prides itself on its 'background - but she retains something of the distractibility of a child, taking four pages of paddling around in the backwaters of her life before giving us the definite event of 'the summer Dill came to us', and the meeting between brother Jem and sister Scout and their new part-time neighbour Dill Harris. (Famously based on Truman Capote, Nelle Harper Lee's childhood friend, though one doesn't need to know that to read the book.) In a story of a 'tired old town' populated by people deeply preoccupied with history and reluctant to relinquish whatever scraps of aristocracy they can glean from it, we almost need to get a little family history before we can really meet the Finches: they live in an environment in which family history is an essential part of who you are - at least if you're white.<br />
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It's a fairly common teaser to refer to a dramatic incident and then slide away from it, and this is Lee's technique here: Jem's arm breaks, and we don't know why. It's not a violent sentence: the retrospective tone makes this an injury we're remembering, not seeing, and the word 'broken' is cushioned at both ends, the innocuous 'when he was nearly thirteen' easing us in, and the practical detail of 'at the elbow' easing us out. Even 'badly broken' is, paradoxically, less harsh to read than 'broken': the word on its own can have a jabbing force (a device <a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/first-sentences-great-gatsby-by-f-scott.html" target="_blank">I've admired in F. Scott Fitzgerald recently</a>, in fact), but 'badly', even though it sounds serious, is still something of a shock-absorber. Any writing teacher can tell you that adverbs tend to lessen the impact of verbs: it's not a generalisation worth being too paranoid about, of course, but they do take up space in the sentence and can act like packing-straw around the central action, and so it is here. 'Badly broken' sounds like a medical assessment, and medical assessments are done <i>post facto</i>: at the instant of breakage we don't register exactly how 'badly' the bone splits. We just feel the crack, and the pain. 'Badly broken' is what the break is agreed to be after it's happened, and as a result, this sentence is packed in layers of past. Aptly enough for a novel that eases away some of the harsher truths of history, we begin with a wounded child whose injury we hear about from a safe distance.<br />
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At the same time, it's definitely a teaser, hinting towards the direction the story will take: what caused this break is complicated, and it will take a book to explain it. What is being hinted here? On one level, it sounds mundane, the kind of ordinary accident that happens in most childhoods: children fall down and hurt themselves a lot. There are just a few little whispers, though, that this is not a question of falling out of a tree or tripping on the football pitch. Jem was 'nearly thirteen', getting out of the clumsiest phase: twelve-year-olds do break limbs, of course, but it's not quite the age you'd expect - too old to fall over as often as small children do, too young to be in full-flight teenage recklessness. It sounds, if we listen closely, as if something has <i>happened</i> to Jem. Scout doesn't say 'my brother Jem broke his arm', which would be the usual construction, she says, 'my brother Jem got his arm badly broken': Jem is the passive subject of this sentence, not the active breaker. Jem didn't break his arm ... which carries the troubling hint, borne out by later events, that somebody else did. Even though the next paragraph soothes us by describing it as an 'accident', the precise phrasing suggests something more. It's only right at the end that we learn what really happened to inflict this permanently disabling injury: that a grown man has attacked two children, and that it's only through the appearance of a kind of guardian angel that he didn't murder them both. Scout's slightly unusual choice of words makes it absolutely clear that Jem is not responsible for the breakage. Jem is one of the book's innocents, in fact, not responsible for anything really bad, and even in the first sentence this is clear. He didn't break his arm. Jem is one of the mockingbirds.<br />
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Also clear, implicit in the very choice of subject, is where the book's focus is going to lie. From a political angle, one can find support for the African American criticisms of the book: we begin with a survivable injury to a white child, not with the effective murder of a black adult. Of course, to reveal Tom Robinson's fate on the first page would be to undermine the tension of the plot, so there are practical reasons why Lee couldn't begin there, but we don't have to be that literal about it. What it makes very clear is that this book is going to be from a specific viewpoint: Scout, who is white, mostly interested in her own family, and lives in a segregated world. Tom Robinson is a symbol in her childhood memories, not a 'neighbor' even though they live in the same town: she doesn't know him personally, never meets him face to face, and doesn't even know what he looks like until she sees him in court. One reason why the book's tight focus on the white perspective flies as well as it does is that this is a child's-eye view of the world: we don't expect children to be broad observers of the world outside their small circle. Children are expected to be insular, and Scout, naive, hot-headed and fallible, is the perfect vessel to carry the insularity of which people can reasonably accuse the book. She's not supposed to be all-knowing, and her imperfect perception of race makes a good cover for the book's imperfections. <br />
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Of course, this naivete is a luxury reserved for safe children; as J.L. Chestnut remarked of the era (quoted <a href="http://nicholaspatler.wordpress.com/2009/07/28/killing-the-mockingbird-historical-and-contemporary-efforts-to-ban-harper-lees-to-kill-a-mockingbird/" target="_blank">here</a>), 'If you were black, the significance of race wasn't something you suddenly discovered. It wasn't even something you had to be told. It was something you just grew up knowing, something almost instinctual ... It was just the way things were, and folk accommodated themselves to it.' Scout and Jem's sad discovery that it's a racist world is something they have to work out from a limited vantage point. They grow up with an African American maid, Calpurnia, who effectively serves the function of their mother, but when she scolds Scout, Scout can still complain about to Calpurnia to her father with the opinion that he should 'lose no time in packing her off'. Atticus responds with a 'flinty' refusal and a sharp injunction to show more appreciation for 'how much Cal does for you', but the fact remains that this is a society in which a white child's African American acquaintances are sackable servants, not comrades and equals. The old Southern apologetic about the 'special relationship' between white masters and black workers hangs over it: the book focuses on the affectionate relationship between Calpurnia and the Finches and nobody, black or white, points out the unequal structure upon which the relationship rests. The incident that Scout chooses as the story's climax, and hence the appropriate subject for the first sentence, is Jem's broken arm, not Tom Robinson's stolen life, and we go from there. 'Lawyers, I suppose, were children once,' reads the quotation from Charles Lamb at the book's beginning, and again, this makes it clear where we will focus: the legal heroism of a white lawyer, and on the children that look up to him.<br />
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It's impossible to talk about <i>To Kill a Mockingbird</i> and keep politics out of it: it is a political book, about a fraught issue, and from a questionable perspective. The awkward thing, too, is that the first sentence isn't very helpful when I'm trying to be fair to it: I can make a lot of political capital out of it, but the real charms of the novel lie in its dialogue, its humour (so often at Scout's own expense), its vivid spark of character against character, and these are simply not present in the opening pages. Those are the pages I skipped as a child, and I suspect a lot of other children did likewise: you need to have some knowledge of American history for them to make sense, and some patience in waiting for a story to start. But the first sentence still has Scout's most effective charm of voice: it is direct. No commas or digressions weigh it down, no presumptions about the reader: Scout just pulls up a chair and plants her elbows on the table and starts talking straight to us. How old is she when tells this tale? It's hard to know; she recounts her feelings and thoughts with no editorialising, as if still feeling as a child, but with a fluency, a vocabulary and a diction free of the Alabama accent that rings through Scout's speech that suggest an adult speaker - just one who remembers her childhood with the clarity of water over sand. Jem is still 'Jem', not Jeremy, his full name. Age is still measured with a child's aspiration: not 'twelve', but 'nearly thirteen', reaching up towards the older-sounding figure. 'Got his arm' has an earthy quality, 'got' always sounding that echo in which we remember some strict grammarian reminding us that it's 'I have', not 'I've got.' The descriptions are matter-of-fact, 'got his arm badly broken at the elbow' sacrificing elegance for a tumble of detail to make sure we understand plainly what's what. No word lasts more than two syllables, and none of them are high-sounding. There's nothing in any of it for a reader to snag on, no pretensions of language or flaunting of erudition. Stylistically, this is the art of making it look easy, one of the hardest tricks in the world. It's the perfect vehicle for the deadpan humour that will animate so much of the book's best passages and lend an air of dignity to its saddest ones. We trust a voice like this - even if we later regret it.<br />
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<i>To Kill a Mockingbird</i> is a good book, artistically speaking, with the particular merit of being both good and accessible. That's why it keeps cropping up on high-school reading lists, often to the discomfort of African American students, for whom having to sit through reading after reading of the N-word is, I imagine, rather like the experience of being a girl in film class expected to absorb a curriculum in which the only female-centred film is <i>I Spit On Your Grave</i>. Is it a good book politically? It depends on who you ask, and if you ask someone who immediately answers 'Yes', you'd better be prepared for an argument if you disagree. So persuasively, so wittily and eloquently and vividly does it put across its message that it's a genuine shock for most admirers to hear that it really does offend some people, and reasonable people at that. The sense of voice is so authentic that it can be hard to separate from its less-than-accurate portrait of history, the less-than-equal weight it gives to white and black anger at injustice, white and black activism, white and black heroism in the real world. It simply <i>feels real</i>, to the point where an entranced reader feels really, honestly confused if someone says that it's not.<br />
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Kick Margaret Mitchell off all the school reading lists you want, I guess, but remember you'd better brace yourself if you want to challenge <i>Mockingbird</i>. And it's not just white blinkers that make it so, though it is that too. It's a well-written, engaging, attractive work of fiction. It's just what it chooses to fictionalise that can be such a problem.<br />
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*For those who'd like to read up, Isaac Saney's famous '<a href="http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/blog/Mockingbird.pdf" target="_blank">The case against To Kill A Mockingbird</a>' is an excellent place to start, as it's one of the most authoritative and comprehensive critiques; see also Malcolm Gladwell's <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/10/090810fa_fact_gladwell" target="_blank">'The Courthouse Ring'</a>. For some less scholarly viewpoints, the comments <a href="http://stuffwhitepeopledo.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/warmly-embrace-racist-novel-to-kill.html" target="_blank">here</a> are also worth checking out. <br />
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Commenters in the thread cited mention Mildred D. Taylor's <i>Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry</i> as an interesting counterpoint to Harper Lee. I'd suggest another book too, though this one is by a white author: for those who've been following this series, you may remember my piece on <a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/first-sentences-little-friend-by-donna.html" target="_blank">Donna Tartt's <i>The Little Friend</i></a>. Among its various excellences, it contains an interesting riposte to<i> To Kill a Mockingbird</i> in the relationship between white child and black housekeeper. Ida Rhew, like Calpurnia, is a <i>de facto</i> mother figure to the protagonist Harriet Cleve, whose mother is alive but has lived in a permanent psychological haze, probably clinical depression, since the death of her oldest child, and whose father is living in another town with his mistress. Ida is not caressing, but she cooks meals and cleans clothes and makes beds and imposes order and creates, through her repetitive, menial work, a degree of comfort and predictability that make Harriet's shattered home a bearable place. What's different is that while Harriet passionately loves and absolutely relies upon Ida, she is forced to acknowledge that this love is basically unrequited - that in the relationship between employee and employer's child in a racist system, feelings cannot flow simply back and forth. Ida has her own children and her own concerns and, after the Cleve family try her patience too far, gets tired of her underpaid job and leaves. Harriet is desolate, but this not blamed on Ida: she has clear reason to limit her goodwill towards Harriet, given that the family pay her exploitatively low wages and make no effort to oppose the racism of the town, and that Harriet's best friend Hely prides himself on being so unmanageable that he manages to drive out one black housekeeper after another. Working for a white family, even if the children love you, is not much of a job, and Ida doesn't feel bound to sacrifice herself for ever.<br />
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Ida is also politically aware: she speaks to Harriet about the terrorism poor white people have perpetrated against her community 'after Dr King come to town' and the way middle-class white people have done nothing to punish it, and is openly angry, silencing Harriet's protests with a sharp 'Sometime the police favor criminals more than the one against who they commit the crime.' There's an interesting linguistic contrast in how she describes her neighbours, too: where Calpurnia describes the Robinson family as 'clean-living', Ida describes 'Miss Etta', who was killed in the attack, as 'righteous'. (And note the honorific; Calpurnia has to start calling the boy she's raised from childhood 'Mr Jem' when he hits puberty, but nobody is calling Tom Robinson's wife 'Miss Helen'.) Both are talking about victims in terms of their virtues, and their Christian virtues at that, but 'clean-living' is an unthreatening term of approbation, suggesting little more than passive acquiescence to social standards: the Robinsons keep their bodies and houses up to the mark, they don't drink, gamble or make too much noise - they are, basically, noted for what they <i>don't</i> do. Miss Etta, on the other hand, is 'righteous', a far more active term with the suggestion of moral authority.<br />
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There are other ways in which Tartt holds a mirror up to Lee: she takes an interest in the lives of 'poor white' characters, for instance, and makes one member of the Ratliff clan (the Ewells of <i>The Little Friend</i>) her secondary protagonist. It's interesting to read the later book with the earlier in mind.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Note to commenters: I wish I didn't have to say this, but this being the Internet I probably do, so here goes. The subject of race and racism is a difficult one to discuss without people losing their heads, but I would like to have faith in people here. Please confirm my hope that comments can remain civil and sensible. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">To that end, some basics. Stay on topic; the subject is <i>To Kill a Mockingbird</i>, not who gets to win the not-a-racist competition. If you're going to speak about other people's experiences, quote, cite and/or link as much as possible. If you're going to speak about your own experiences, especially if you're white, stick to the subject under discussion, which is the book, not whether or not you're a good person. Comments that smack of the troll, the tantrum, the breakdown, the racist diatribe, the progressiver-than-thou show-off or the asinine remark will be deleted without discussion. </span>Kit Whitfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623432518060526692noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31552467.post-87434121644050504772013-04-15T06:00:00.000+00:002013-04-16T09:44:13.085+00:00First sentences: Brighton Rock by Graham Greene<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: xx-small;">This site is undergoing revision; a temporary archive of first sentence posts can be found <a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/first-sentence-posts.html" target="_blank">here</a>.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: xx-small;">I take requests, or at least some of them; a post on Graham Greene was requested by Anonymous, so I chose Brighton Rock because it's the work of Greene's I'm most familiar with. Hope that pleases you, Anonymous. </span><br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him.</blockquote>
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Beat <i>that</i> for a strong opening. Crisp, pacy and ruthless, the first sentence slices straight into our attention: we are trapped - and in a place more inexorable, more claustrophobic and terrible, than we could anticipate from such a slickly suspenseful beginning.<br />
<br />
The story, for those unfamiliar, sounds simple on the face of it: Hale, a journalist who has previously exposed a Brighton gang, is sent back to the town on an assignment. Stalked and killed by seventeen-year-old Pinkie Brown, he falls - but Pinkie then realises that there are witnesses who could hang him. One, Ida Arnold, pursues him, but the other, the plain, meek waitress Rose, doesn't know the significance of what she witnessed - and to keep her under his eye, Pinkie marries her, identifying another victim for Ida to save. This is not, then, a thriller with police in it: the detective, such as we have one, is a middle-aged woman motivated not by law and order but by right and wrong - neither of them ideologies that mean anything to Pinkie, whose driving force is instead a faith-twisted sense of good and evil. There, rather than in the question of 'Will he get away with it?', lies the central conflict of the story: the cosmic question of whether one soul, or any, can be saved.<br />
<br />
One way to put it is this: Graham Greene is the kind of author who doesn't help the Catholics' case when Protestants call them 'morbid'. An immense but entrapping universe flavoured with a kind of sour-potatoes Catholicism is the world in which Pinkie Brown moves, and by the time we realise how far we've fallen, it's too late: we're already reading the story, lulled by the exciting plot into believing ourselves safe even as the earth curdles under our feet.<br />
<br />
As a stand-alone sentence, this opening is almost a masterclass in swift, efficient drama. 'When I describe a scene, I capture it with the moving eye of the cine-camera rather than with the photographer's eye ... I work with the camera, following my characters and their movements,'* Greene remarked, and he certainly knew how to keep things flowing - but at the same time, there's a precise and honed sense of language in the rhythm and diction of this sentence. Look at the way it breaks up: two commas snap it into three sections, each with its own punch to deliver. 'Hale knew,' introducing us to the character and showing him in the act of <i>knowing</i>, of mental engagement and action. 'Before he had been in Brighton three hours,' giving us his location and movements in a fast, neat stroke. 'That they meant to murder him,' a brilliantly quick, emphatic phrase, no wasted words to detract from the terrible force of that word held off until just near the end: 'murder'. The commas allow each subclause to be felt in full - there are no thickets of language for our attention to wander in - and the sentence almost races to its fearful conclusion. The language is all simple, no long words or complicated vocabulary to detract from 'murder's impact. In terms of structure, it's a thing of beauty: not even a work of art, but something sleeker than that, the smooth polish of a master craftsman.<br />
<br />
Which is, in itself, notable, because after that smoothness, things immediately become difficult. 'With his inky fingers and his bitten nails, his manner cynical and nervous, anybody could tell he didn't belong - belong to the early summer sun, the cool Whitsun wind off the sea, the holiday crowd,' runs the second sentence, dropping the simple structures to begin with the grammatically stickier 'With his inky fingers', and picking up several themes that were absent from the first sentence. There's the sense of religion (it's a 'Whitsun' wind, that is to say the seventh Sunday after Easter, time being marked by a Christian calendar that expects us to know what 'Whitsun' means without explanation), and, too, the sense that the universe itself is religious, the 'Whitsun wind' as if the very weather knew which festival it was. There's the sense of grimy displeasure and social awkwardness in Hale's description. Above all, there's the sense of cosmic alienation: Hale, whoever he is, isn't just feeling painful emotions in a cheerful crowd, he's utterly removed from it, he doesn't 'belong to' the sun, the wind or the people, cut off from both nature and culture, the growing world and normal humanity. Fear is an isolator, and the inability to feel at ease in one's environment - which will dominate Pinkie's relationship with the entire universe - seems to be reflected back <i>by</i> that environment: if you don't feel it belongs with you, you don't belong to it.<br />
<br />
We don't see any of this in the suspenseful first sentence, but we're dropped into it straight after. What we get, in fact, is first the cold bath of pure fear, then the queasy waters of alienation: the knowledge of death, the knowledge of hatred and evil, and then the complex shadows that they cast. We bite the apple, and everything follows after.<br />
<br />
What can we make of the details in this first sentence? To begin with, we're told straight away that we're in Brighton. Now Brighton, for those unfamiliar with the British coastal towns, is traditionally a holiday location - the 'holiday crowd' of the second sentence isn't a coincidence, but an essential part of Brighton's history and economy. George IV famously built a pleasure-house there as Prince Regent, but what really made it was it is today was the arrival, in 1841, of the railway. Brighton has a train station, and it has beaches, and it's within striking distance of London: it is, as a result, a place where people can make day trips or short stays without needing a great deal of money. Nowadays it's very fashionable, thanks at least in part to it having the biggest and liveliest gay scene outside of London, but that's another story: at the time of <i>Brighton Rock</i>'s publication, 1938, it was a pleasure town for ordinary, non-wealthy people, and with a slightly seedy reputation. Its visitors were people with money to hustle away from them, if you were a gangster; people busy living their lives and enjoying themselves, your mirror opposite, if you're afraid the gangsters are coming for you. Brighton was run down in the 1930s, though becoming less so, and racecourse gangs like Pinkie's were a part of it: to a contemporary audience, the location would carry an convincing air of roughness and risk. What we see first, though, is the holiday crowds: people seeking simple human enjoyment in a universe where nothing is simple.<br />
<br />
Too, it's worth thinking about the way the character's name is introduced: 'Hale', at the beginning of the sentence, with no explanation of who he is. It's a good plain English name, ironically echoing 'hale and hearty', which Hale is certainly <i>not</i> feeling right now. What it's not, though, is a full name: we're introduced to 'Hale' as if we too were early twentieth-century men who might naturally refer to a man by his surname if we didn't know him intimately. In fact, his first name is presented as something of a shock: Pinkie appears and calls it, and it creates not recognition but panicked denial:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
'Fred,' a voice said behind him, 'Fred.' </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The gin slopped out of Hale's glass on to the bar. A boy of about seventeen watched him from the door - a shabby smart suit, the cloth too thin for much wear, a face of starved intensity, a kind of hideous and unnatural pride. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
'Who are you Freding?' Hale said. 'I'm not Fred.' </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
'It don't make any difference,' the boy said... </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Hale said, 'I'm only here for my job. Just for the day. I'm Kolley Kibber.' </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
'You're Fred,' the boy said. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
'All right,' Hale said, 'I'm Fred. But I've got a card in my pocket which'll be worth ten bob to you...'</blockquote>
<br />
The sound of his first name, withheld from us at the start, makes Hale spill his drink in fright: the fact that we ourselves don't recognise it makes the moment a disorientating lurch, the word 'Fred' being as unexpected to us, unfamiliar with it, as it is to Hale, not expecting to hear it. By introducing him to us only as 'Hale', Greene manages to make the very act of saying his first name a threatening moment of unmasking. (And in fact, it's even more complicated than that, as his real name is Charles; 'Fred' is what he introduces himself as to casual acquaintances. Almost nobody has a very stable name here as the story begins; even solid, sane Ida begins by being jokingly addressed as 'Lily'.) Fred/Charles Hale denies his identity in ordinary times out of a fallen-humanity impulse towards secrecy, but he denies it now because he knows people are after him. 'Kolley Kibber' is the role he has to play that day, leaving cards through Brighton that can be exchanged for cash prizes with a bonus for anyone who identifies him as the 'Kolley Kibber' advertised; the gimmick is based on a real promotion, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobby_Lud" target="_blank">'Lobby Lud'</a> game, though the name is taken from the actor <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colley_Cibber" target="_blank">Colley Cibber</a>, those staccato Ks giving it the sense of kipperish squalor and spiky jargon that pervades the whole story, very different from the real Cibber's luxurious comedy. It's both his defence and his doom, because it sent him to Brighton in the first place: when his real name comes out, all he can do is desperately try and fail to bribe the boy who knows it.<br />
<br />
But on the subject of names, it's worth considering something else, too: this is not a book that starts with its protagonist, a character who barely has a name at all. Once he takes centre stage, he's only referred to in the narrative as 'the Boy'. We know he's called Pinkie Brown because that's what other people address him as, but 'Pinkie' cannot be his Christian name; it's not a real name, and certainly not for a Catholic boy: there is no Saint Pinkie (and this one certainly isn't about to break the tradition). He must have a Michael or a John or a Francis attached to him somewhere, some appropriate baptismal handle, but all we have left - and even that we have to learn from eavesdropping - is that weirdly off-colour, pun intended, nickname.** 'Pinkie Brown' sounds like a joke, a shade of paint rather than a person, and when added to the name of his hapless girlfriend Rose (another shade of pink, as if the two of them can't escape each other), it starts to feel as if names have no meaning - or rather, no power, except to make you the butt of some obscure joke. We begin with Hale's name, but that's the last time in the chapter a name will feel solid, and even then it's only his surname that stays still. Once we get to Pinkie's name - ironically unthreatening, like a glance at his beardless cheeks that doesn't see the knife in his hand - things start to come disconnected. He has no saint's name, nor any saint's nature. His humanity is cut off. As Ida says, 'A man always has a different name for strangers,' and within the book, Pinkie is a stranger to all of us.<br />
<br />
Because this is the other real point about the first sentence: not what it says, but what it excludes. Absent from it is the person the book is actually about.<br />
<br />
And this, in itself, is an essential part of the book's story. Pinkie is a character who evades our questions: is he damned? Is he evil? And if so, is he evil all through, like a stick of Brighton rock, or is there any merit left in trying to see his humanity as Rose does?<br />
<br />
As the book begins, Pinkie is nowhere, just part of an amorphous, frightening 'they'. He steps out of the background, naming his victim, and stalks him in and out of the pages. He moves closer to the centre as the narrative takes up his perspective ... but he's stalking again, this time the naive little Rose, hiding his character from her as well as he can - which means hiding himself from the only other 'Roman' near the centre of the narrative, hiding himself from the only person who could understand him on his own spiritual terms. Pinkie is gradually materialising throughout the book, sharpening ever more into focus, until the final revelation, the 'worst horror of all'. On their wedding day, Rose presses Pinkie to step into a recording booth to make a gramophone message for her; knowing that they have no record player and that she won't hear the message at least in the immediate future, Pinkie records his bitterness and resentment at being married to this girl: 'God damn you, you little bitch, why can't you go back home for ever and let me be?' After his death, knowing him to have been a violent thug, Rose is unable to quite let go of her loyalty to him, of her belief that his love for her might have been the one good thing in his soul that might save him from the fires. She speaks to a priest who reflects, comfortingly, that there can be moral heroism in standing by the fallen and that if she should be pregnant (for Pinkie, though revolted by sex and women, has grimly consummated the marriage 'in a sad, brutal, now-or-never embrace' that he consoles himself for by the reflection that 'It's mortal sin') she might 'Make [her child] a saint - to pray for his father.' Rose, feeling 'given the sight a long way off of life going on again,' heads out holding her head high:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
She had a sudden conviction that she carried life, and she thought proudly: Let them get over that if they can; let them get over that [...] There was something to be salvaged from that house and room, something else they wouldn't be able to get over - his voice speaking a message to her: if there was a child, speaking to the child. 'If he loved you,' the priest had said, 'that shows....' She walked rapidly in the thin June sunlight towards the worst horror of all.</blockquote>
<br />
The worst horror: Pinkie's voice speaking hatred out of the pit, both a cruel husband who never valued her love and a damned soul rejecting her prayers. The book leaves us helplessly anticipating this final, crushing blow, the moment in which Pinkie finally comes into full focus.<br />
<br />
Interestingly, neither the 1947 nor the 2010 film could bear this ending, choosing instead a dodge in which the record is scratched and she hears only, 'What you want me to say is I love you ... I love you ... I love you...' In the original film this was apparently <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/jul/20/featuresreviews.guardianreview14" target="_blank">a rather clever compromise on Greene's part</a>, rejecting a happy ending added by Terence Rattigan for an ambiguous one, Greene remarking: 'Anybody who wanted a happy ending would feel that they had had a happy ending. Anybody who had any sense would know that the next time Rose would probably push the needle over the scratch and get the full message.' For a 2010 remake there's less excuse, really. But that's rather the point: the ending is purposefully, remorselessly unbearable.<br />
<br />
Life, according to Pinkie, is 'Worms and cataract, cancer. You hear 'em shrieking from upper windows - children being born. It's dying slowly.' As far as he can, he inflicts 'dying slowly' on those around him, and what the book focuses around is not just his murders, but his attempted soul-murder of Rose ... which looks likely, finally, to succeed, not by the swing of a blade, but by the final revelation of himself, the final appearance after a booktime of hiding. And that hiding act begins in the first sentence. We start with Hale, who knows what Pinkie is but not where, and we end with Rose, who has been physically closer to Pinkie than anyone, spiritually entangled, but lacks the basic knowledge that Hale begins with: what Pinkie really 'meant to' do to her. Right up until the last sentence, something about Pinkie is hidden from someone - or at least, from his victims. He begins offstage, and his final impending appearance is enough to annihilate the narrative.<br />
<br />
<i>Brighton Rock</i>'s first sentence is deceptive: it hooks our attention with its swift simplicity and then drags us under. We begin with a victim's-eye view ... and we end just before the final victim can have her eyes fully opened. Some things, even Graham Greene's narrative doesn't want to see.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
*Quoted in J.M. Coetzee's introduction to the Vintage Classics edition; footnote attributes it to Marie-Francoise Allain, The Other Man: Conversations with Graham Greene. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983, p 125.<br />
<br />
**In the 1947 film he's identified as 'Piers Brown' when talking to a policeman, and as Greene co-wrote the script with Terence Rattigan we must assume that this was a choice Greene either originated or approved, but it doesn't feature in the book.Kit Whitfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623432518060526692noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31552467.post-7843779194781124452013-04-04T16:20:00.000+00:002013-04-04T16:20:02.235+00:00First sentences: Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: xx-small;">This site is undergoing revision; a temporary archive of first sentence posts can be found <a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/first-sentence-posts.html" target="_blank">here</a>. </span><br />
<br />
Somewhere on my shelves there still rests a slim picture-book from my childhood, adorned on the cover with a familiar scene: the giant Gulliver bewilderingly tied down by a regiment of swarming Lilliputians. The story explained itself to me in simple terms: at first they were very afraid of him but then they let him go; they saw themselves as normal and him as a giant; once the palace caught on fire and Gulliver helped put it out. Being a book for children, it didn't add the true Swiftian detail: that he 'helped' extinguish the fire by pissing on it - and in so doing, igniting a bizarre political debate about as sane as Swift was prepared to consider the real world.<br />
<br />
How do we view<i> Gulliver's Travels</i> - or, to give it its full original name, <i>Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships</i>? Most of us are raised on it as a children's tale of whimsy, the undoubted imagination of its calmer waters being the only things we hear about. But it is, in fact, a book of satire, pointed and specific: an undergraduate can pick their way through it making charts that match whimsical diversion to historical controversy in a neat line. If we're going to talk about it on its own terms, this must not be forgotten: Swift had points to make and axes to grind and heads to sever, and that is what Gulliver does. From a writing aspect, though, it seems wrong to abandon entirely the child's eye perspective. To ignore the history and see only the fantasy is obtuse, yes, but reading the book as a mere game of spot-the-satire misses the wild excess of imagination that made it so unforgettable a read even centuries after the controversies it lambasts are forgotten by all but the historians. Jane Eyre reads Gulliver as a child quite unaware of its parodic edge ('I considered it a narrative of facts,' she remarks dryly): Usborne and the modern publishers are not to blame here. There's something in its virulent profusion of fancy that has outlasted its political relevance. It's not just a long pamphlet. Swift was a politicker, but he was also a writer. Gulliver is a <i>novel</i> - more so than it needed to be, maybe even more so than it intended to be, and even more so than contemporary culture expected to to be, the novel itself being a form still in its infancy. Its elements are not easily separated even as they strain against one another.<br />
<br />
And so, characteristically for such a bundle of opposed forces, it's actually difficult to know what's the first sentence. We've seen this problem before, of course - <a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/first-sentences-name-of-rose-by-umberto.html" target="_blank">Umberto Eco capers to mind</a> - but here it's even worse: even different <i>editions</i> disagree about which elements of the beginning to include. Going through the Kindle store to find a copy, I was appalled to find that not all of them began in the same place. There are historical reasons for this: Swift was a novelist, yes, and also a poet, but he was also a pamphleteer. Imagine a commentator on the Internet nowadays, and you have something of the flavour: a political writer producing text as part of an ongoing war of words, with anonymity something of an issue - it's thought, for instance, that Swift may have had his manuscript copied before sending it to press so he couldn't be identified as its author through his handwriting. There is, too, more than one edition: there is the first edition published by Benjamin Motte, who cut some of the most inflammatory material, and the 1735 edition published by George Faulkner, restoring what he could based on notes from 'a friend of the author' (probably not Swift himself, though it's generally thought that Swift may have reviewed Faulkner's edition before going to press).<br />
<br />
The trouble is, this was all done secretively. Faulkner's edition is considered more authoritative than Motte's, but because Swift was writing satire, at a time when it was dangerous to do so, his agency and intentions were deliberately kept off the record. Authorial intention is hard to prove even in a well-documented case, but here, it's almost impossible. We simply have to take what we can get - and different modern editions draw on Faulkner to different degrees.<br />
<br />
This is, in short, an issue that professional academics and editors could have a real argument over. The copy I chose in the end was the Penguin Kindle edition, Penguin being about as safe a pair of hands as you're going to find: this edition includes a 'first' that was part of Faulkner's text but not Motte's - indeed, was a reaction to Motte's, a letter supposedly by Gulliver complaining that 'I do hardly know my own work' after the alterations his 'Cousin Sympson' made to a previous edition.<br />
<br />
A complaint from <i>Gulliver</i>, we note, not a preface from the author.<i> Gulliver's Travels</i> is a cavalcade of authorial thimble-rigging, and what we hear of Gulliver's complaints mixes in as much madness as sense - lamenting not only that his text had been altered, but that he lives in a world where 'I see these very <i>Yahoos</i> carried by <i>Houyhnhnms</i> in a Vehicle, as if these were Brutes, and those were the rational Creatures' - throwing in minor quibbles about whether it should be spelled 'Brobdingnag' or 'Brobdingrag' alongside the self-righteous declaration that 'I still improve in some Virtues' by talking to the horses in his stable, and the crazed lament that the publication of the previous volume has not put 'a full Stop to all Abuses and Corruptions, at least in this little Island, as I had Reason to expect.' This is an introduction that pokes fun at itself for expecting any serious good to result from pamphleteering even as it indirectly complains that the pamphlets were censored. It begins - our first first sentence - thus:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
A Letter from Capt. Gulliver, to his Cousin Sympson </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I hope you will be ready to own publicly, whenever you shall be called to it, that by your great and frequent Urgency you prevailed on me to publish a very loose and uncorrect Account of my Travels; with Direction to hire some young Gentlement of either University to put them in Order, and correct the Style, as my Cousin <i>Dampier</i> did by my Advice, in his Book called, <i>A Voyage round the World</i>. </blockquote>
<br />
No address to this letter, no 'Dear Sir', but a blunt, aggressive challenge: you're responsible for the faults of this volume. Gulliver sidesteps criticism from the beginning, so absolute in his judgement that we immediately run into the problems of interpretation. So problematic is Gulliver's voice that there are actually two contending schools - something it's hard not to feel would have given Swift further tinder - known as the 'hard school', believing that Gulliver's view of human nature as irreparably depraved accurately resembles Swift's, and the 'soft school', believing that Gulliver is as much an unreliable narrator when he decries all human beings as revolting 'Yahoos' (the name for the savage humans in the land of the Houyhnhnms, sentient horses devoted to reason) as he is when he recounts without comment the Lilliputian courtiers' tradition of seeking advancement by 'leaping and creeping' over and under a stick. The latter is obviously a satire - 'Sometime the Emperor holds one end of the Stick, and his first Minister the other; sometimes the Minister has it entirely to himself,' Gulliver explains deadpan, and the swipe at the courtier's need to balance the favour of king and government is obvious to all. How much are we to trust Gulliver when he <i>does</i> express an opinion? It depends who you ask.<br />
<br />
The reference to Dampier is a telling indication. William Dampier was a real author, and his travel writing very successful: one of the multiple, inextricable purposes of <i>Gulliver's Travels</i> was to satirise that popular genre. The Lilliputians and the Brobdingnagians and the Laputans and all the rest are good opportunities to point up political grievances of the day, but they're also parodies in their sheer outlandishness: by referring directly to 'my cousin Dampier', Swift makes us aware that at least one of his arrows is aimed at the excesses or implausibilities of travel stories. But if we look at one of his most direct shots at that target, it shows up just how hard it is to be sure how much Swift, or Gulliver, mean what they say.<br />
<br />
The incident is simple one: under the care of a Brobdingnagian family, Gulliver finds himself in dire need of relieving himself, and describes in detail how he was 'pressed to do one more Thing, which another could not do for me', and has to pantomime his desire for privacy before, carried out, 'I hid myself between two Leaves of Sorrel, and there discharged the Necessities of Nature' - wittily delaying naming those necessities, struggling to preserve his modesty before the reader as before the Brobdingnagian until he can finally let both go. But having done so, he then turns and addresses us:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I hope the gentle Reader will excuse me for dwelling on these and the like Particulars, which however insignificant they may appear to grovelling vulgar Minds, yet will help a Philosopher to enlarge his Thoughts and Imagination, and apply them to the Benefit of public as well as private Life, which was my sole Design in presenting this and other Accounts of my Travels to the World ... I did not omit one material Circumstance: However, upon a strict Review, I blotted out several Passages of less Moment which were in my first Copy, for fear of being censured as tedious and trifling, whereof Travellers are often, perhaps not without Justice, accused. </blockquote>
<br />
It's a sharp attack: even weeing behind a leaf is not as 'trifling' as the 'Passages' he imputes to travel writers. So the incident is a parody of Dampier and his ilk for including exhaustive minutiaie, right? Well, in isolation, perhaps. But at the same time, this is the 'Celia, Celia, Celia shits' author - a line so pleasing to Swift that he employed it not just in the poem '<a href="http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/dressing.html" target="_blank">The Lady's Dressing Room</a>' but in '<a href="http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/cassinus.html" target="_blank">Cassinus and Peter</a>' as well. Therein lies one of Swift's paradoxes: while he lambasts Strephon in the former for failing to see the 'Order from Confusion sprung, / Such gaudy Tulips rais'd from Dung,' he dwells, in this and other poems, with prolix, graphic fascination on the shit and sweat and grease and filth of physicality, and female physicality at that. It's 'dung' that ends the poem, not 'order from confusion sprung', and the yuckier word ends every equivocating couplet in that poem's conclusion - 'ooze' has final say over 'refuse', and 'quean' over 'scene'. Swift denies that a man should think too disgustedly on such matters, but disgust animates his writing to such a degree that even nowadays, calling someone's disgust 'Swiftian' carries an immediate meaning. Whether he was really disgusted and dwelled on that disgust, whether he saw disgust as the inevitable punishment of excessive expectation, or whether he simply found excrement interesting in and of itself, is characteristically impossible to say: do we side with Strephon or Celia, and how much does he mean any of it? It's hard not to think of the modern vulgarism, 'Are you shitting me?' In Swift's case, the question is actually easier to answer literally than metaphorically: yes, he is, but it's hard to be sure exactly how. To assume that Swift included Gulliver's ablutions solely for the sake of poking fun at excessively detailed travel writers is - let's say, difficult to sustain when one thinks of the rest of his work.<br />
<br />
Dampier is thrown at us in the preface, in other words, but he's not the whole explanation: when one reads the book itself, it just doesn't cover it. Nothing does. It's too complicated.<br />
<br />
So, there we see two immediate effects in this first first sentence: the poke at Dampier that doesn't explain everything in the book, and Gulliver's confusingly aggressive tone, opening at the pitch that, once the voyages themselves start, it takes an entire book to work up to. Too, there's the parodic sense of verisimilitude: while Swift had ample reason to complain that Motte had censored him, there's also a sense of fun in treating Gulliver as an ongoing character who would have opinions about the public reception of his work - and indeed, Swift himself wrote a sequel called <i>Memoirs of the Court of Lilliput</i>, continuing to play with the idea. Gulliver isn't quite inert on the page: he turns and complains about how it represents him, leaving us even less certain, even less safe, than before. He's watching us, with angry opinions about how we interpret him - even when this is not an easy book to interpret.<br />
<br />
This opening sentence is prolonged, making no modern concessions to the reader's attention span, but there's also the quality of a rant about it. The following first sentence - 'The Publisher to the Reader', the fictional cousin Sympson's mild comment on the whole situation - is altogether more temperate and urbane:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The Author of these Travels, Mr. <i>Lemuel Gulliver</i>, is my ancient and intimate Friend; there is likewise some Relation between us by the Mother's side.</blockquote>
<br />
There's no such frantic accusation in Sympson's voice; instead, the confident assumption that the public will care to know who Sympson is and how he's involved in this whole situation. Interestingly - which might perhaps be taken in support of the 'hard school' of interpretation - he has plenty to say in Gulliver's favour, that he's held 'in good Esteem among his Neighbours' even though he's apparently spending his time talking to horses, and that he is 'so distinguished for his Veracity, that it became a sort of Proverb among his Neighbours at <i>Redriff</i>, when anyone affirmed a Thing, to say, it was as true as if Mr. <i>Gulliver</i> had spoke it.' Sympson's brief introduction builds on the sense of verisimilitude, sounding very sane while testifying to the truthfulness of this mad crank.<br />
<br />
What do we have, then, going into the book proper? A knowledge that both literary and political parody are in question, and that while the book is going to play it absolutely straight - and indeed, the book's narrator will be furious if we disbelieve it - we will have to keep our wits about us because we are being absolutely, thoroughly messed with, by an author deeply fascinated with mess.<br />
<br />
And, just to make things more complicated, really full editions like my Penguin one include something else as well, an 'Advertisement' from the 'publisher', beginning with the mild assertion that 'Mr. Sympson's Letter to Captain Gulliver, prefixed to this Volume, will make a long Advertisement unnecessary. Those Interpolations complained of by the Captain, were made by a Person since deceased, on whose Judgment [sic] the Publisher relied to make any Alterations that might be thought necessary...' - in other words, blaming a safe target off-stage for any reflections that might offend 'her late Majesty.' Motte actually died in 1738, a few years after the Faulkner edition; in any event, the effect of a book under dispute both by its author and its characters is heightened. We aren't just reading a book here. We're jumping into an argument.<br />
<br />
So, how does the first chapter begin?<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>The Author gives some Account of himself and Family, his first Inducements to travel. He is shipwrecked, and swims for his Life, gets safe on shore in the Country of </i>Lilliput<i>, is made a Prisoner, and carried up the Country.</i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
My Father had a small Estate in <i>Nottinghamshire</i>; I was the Third of Five Sons.</blockquote>
<br />
Like Sympson, Gulliver is capable of a conventional opening, a kind of self-identifying letter of introduction to the reader, when required. The brief summary at the beginning of each chapter is likewise conventional for the time, and Gulliver's social position, too, the middle son of a respectable if not wealthy man - in other words, a son obliged to work for his living - is easily comprehensible: he is, socially at least, a gentleman. It's quite similar to <a href="http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks05/0500461h.html" target="_blank">Dampier's</a> introduction, in fact:<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
THE AUTHOR'S DEPARTURE FROM ENGLAND, AND ARRIVAL IN JAMAICA. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I first set out of England on this voyage at the beginning of the year 1679, in the Loyal Merchant of London, bound for Jamaica, Captain Knapman Commander.</blockquote>
<br />
<br />
Chapter summary and practical beginning are present and correct; Dampier waits a few paragraphs before referring to his own 'small estate in Dorsetshire,' but the similarities are obvious. It may also be worth noting, if we're trying to assess Gulliver, that the 'soft school' of interpretation could make some advance by pointing out that Dampier was, at one point, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Dampier#Court_martial" target="_blank">court-martialled for cruelty</a> and 'deemed unfit to command any of HM's ships': he continued to make voyages, but he was not an unblemished character. Gulliver's discovery of 'The Country of the Houyhnhms' follows a mutiny of his crew ('debauched' by new members who 'had been Buccaneers'); Dampier's second voyage ended in mutiny. Parallels with Dampier may give the book a certain literary familiarity, but they aren't an unmixed endorsement. So much, at least, the 'soft school' may argue, though the 'hard school' may interpret piratical mutineers as support of Gulliver's disgust for Yahoo humans: in any even, in literary terms, the Dampier-like beginning feels <i>recognisable</i>. People who had read contemporary travel books would know the style, have some sense of what was being parodied, some expectations of structure, if not of content or tone.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
What's the effect? Mostly, to lull us into a sense of security that the rest of the book smashes up. The inclusion of Gulliver's angry correspondence at the beginning gives modern readers some kind of warning, but then we lack the advantage of contemporary readers in that we are not, unless we are professional academics, automatically familiar with the events and controversies brought in willy-nilly. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Talking about Swift in the light of this first-sentences method of mine is really something of a challenge. For most books, the first sentence does cast a lot of light, even when it's difficult to pin down exactly what the first sentence is, but with <i>Gulliver's Travels</i>, it starts to feel like a gimmick - or else, like a magnifying glass that excludes more than it enlarges. The thing about<i> Gulliver's Travels</i> is that we can't understand it through single sentences, because we never know which way it's going to jump next. Satire strives against imagination: take, for instance, the 'leaping and creeping' moment in Lilliput mentioned above. Gulliver starts talking about the contortions of court in the middle of a paragraph that dwells with simple fascination on the kind of detail that gets the story trimmed down into children's picture books:</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I would sometimes lie down, and let five or six of them dance on my Hand. And at last the Boys and Girls would venture to come and play at Hide and Seek in my Hair. I had now made a good Progress in understanding and speaking their Language. The Emperor had a mind one day to entertain me with several of the Country Shows, wherein they exceed all Nations I have known, both for Dexterity and Magnificence. I was diverted with none so much as that of the Rope-Dancers, performed upon a slender white Thread, extended about two Foot, and twelve Inches from the Ground. Upon which I shall desire liberty, with the Reader's Patience, to enlarge a little. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
This Diversion is only practiced by those Persons who are Candidates for Great Employments, and high Favour, at Court...</blockquote>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Bang: one minute we're at a curious little festival, replete with vivid images of children hiding in a giant's hair and adults jigging around an upturned palm, and then suddenly the local colour turns into a blunt satire of contemporary politics. Is this a book of politics, or a book of imaginative festivity? Both at once, Swift's sheer talent for picturing the peculiar outlasting the political issues that drove so much of his writing, and it can lurch from one to the other without ceremony. Add to this the fact that there's an element of randomness to some of the satire: at one moment the Lilliputians are exemplars of virtue in treating breach of trust as a more serious crime than theft or for rewarding the law-abiding as well as punishing the guilty, and at another, they're performing these ridiculous corrupt circus-acts. Other races such as the Laputa scientists are more consistent - the name, 'la puta' for 'the whore', is a pretty big hint - but even there, flashes of wit, such as the famous scheme for 'extracting Sunbeams out of Cucumbers', have an imaginative beauty that makes them, like so many other details of the book, objects that we enjoy contextless, flourishes of whimsy that take on their own life. And come to that, even the clear moments of satire have just that quality: clarity. Jung Chang, in her autobiography <i>Wild Swans</i>, describes encountering <i>Gulliver's Travels</i> for the first time after the nightmare of the Cultural Revolution and comments, 'When I first read in <i>Gulliver's Travels</i> about the emperor who "published an Edict, commanding all his Subjects, upon great Penalties, to break the smaller End of their Eggs," I wondered if Swift had been to China.' (Page 604 in <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Wild-Swans-Three-Daughters-China/dp/0007463405/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1364904416&sr=1-1" target="_blank">this edition</a>.) Chang may have been in no position to assess the analogy's relevance to the issues of Catholic-Protestant fighting in eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland, but she didn't need the reference to understand Swift's attack on needless suffering inflicted over doctrinal differences. Swift's writing brims with moments that stand alone. It's just that they stand <i>so</i> alone that sometimes it can be hard to know where they stand in relation to reality at all. </div>
<div>
<br />
Holden Caulfield famously loves books that make you wish the author was 'a terrific friend of yours'. Swift feels like an author you never want to meet: a man whose wrong side is a terrifying place to be - and who, like a dropped diamond, looks like a whirling flash of nothing <i>but</i> wrong sides. The details are so charming, so funny and clever and inventive, that small children are fed them like illicit treats out of the literary cupboard - and this is not a new phenomenon; John Gay wrote to Swift in 1726 that 'It is universally read, from the cabinet council to the nursery' - and yet professional academics cannot agree on whether this is a book that concludes in damning all mankind. It's a pretty disquieting mixture. Even today with the issues he sided on long gone, Swift feels like a dangerous read: so brilliant, so aggressive, so fast-moving in his thoughts and inventions, that sometimes you fear that if you tilt the book wrong, it might explode in your hands. And if you just picked up and started reading from the first page, you'd never know it. You never do, until the next storm blows up, and suddenly you don't know where you are. </div>
Kit Whitfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623432518060526692noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31552467.post-4294888063999602532013-03-28T13:01:00.003+00:002013-04-17T14:47:53.888+00:00First sentences: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: xx-small;">The site is undergoing revision; a temporary archive of the first sentence analyses can be found <a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/first-sentence-posts.html" target="_blank">here</a>. </span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.</blockquote>
<br />
Meet the writing of F. Scott Fitzgerald: the slow, graceful cadence, the deadpan preparation that leads beguilingly to the sudden, staggering sucker-punch.<br />
<br />
<i>The Great Gatsby</i> is one of the top contenders for the elusive title of 'Great American Novel'. It's a rather Gatsbyish concept in itself, that: where older cultures can rest complacently on a long-established tradition and other New Worlds seem more willing to move with the tide, writing and publishing good books without worrying about which of them most perfectly accessories their history - or at least, a search for 'The Great Canadian Novel' and 'The Great Australian Novel' turn up a modest 59,700 and 46,600 hits respectively to 'The Great American Novel's towering 8,810,000 - there's something in America that provokes a search for the <i>great</i> one, the great <i>one</i>, the green light at the end of literature that if we write deeper, stretch out our pens further, will one fine morning - But whether one considers the Great American Novel a useful concept or not, there's no question that <i>The Great Gatsby</i> is a great novel, and a great novel both of and about America. Fitzgerald's 'gift for turning language into something iridescent and surprising', as the critic Edmund Wilson so precisely put it, is on luminous and finally devastating display.<br />
<br />
<i>The Great Gatsby</i> is, for all its lucidity and its light page-count, a difficult book. The plot may be simple - James Gatz falls in love with a rich girl, becomes the wealthy Prohibition bootlegger Jay Gatsby in an attempt to win her, but when she runs over her husband Tom's mistress she callously lets Gatsby take the blame, Tom saves himself some aggro by pretending that Gatsby was the real lover, and the mistress's husband shoots and kills Gatsby - but its presentation is deceptive: rather than commenting or describing in depth, rather than helping us understand, Fitzgerald just quietly shows us things and lets us draw our own conclusions. The story lays small and great tragedies side by side and leaves us to judge, steering us only with its elegant, implicating prose. Reading <i>The Great Gatsby</i> is more like reading a poem than a novel: we have to meet the language halfway. I'll freely admit that I bounced off it in college - I was too young, and more than that too foreign to the culture it quietly savages, to quite understand what it was telling me. You have to read <i>The Great Gatsby</i> actively, and in my younger and more vulnerable years I hadn't mastered the activity it required of me. Another common complaint, apparently, is that the characters aren't likeable - and it's true, they're not, that's the point - and to that objection, the best answer can be found <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xw9Au9OoN88" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cn0WZ8-0Z1Y" target="_blank">here</a> in John Green's admirable Crash Course Literature series of vlogs. (Only a short series when it comes to literature, to my sorrow, as his main focus is on history - though I'd highly recommend his history vlogging too.) Reading <i>The Great Gatsby</i> is like listening through glass: you can see what's happening, but you have pay attention, watch closely, use your knowledge of human interaction to translate the snatches you do hear into a full, free exchange. It's 'unusually communicative in a reserved way', as Nick quickly says of his relationship with said quoted father, and we have to fall into that relationship right away - enter into reserved communication ourselves and start turning over <i>The Great Gatsby'</i>s not-fully-expressed advice. We have to follow closely - because it's only in this act of following that we can be receptive enough to the conflicted sorrows and moral grief and blazing, half-concealed rage of Nick Carraway's narration. We have to be to Nick what Nick is to his father: listeners who understand more than what is said. What he speaks of is too deep, too complex, to be spoken of in more than hints.<br />
<br />
What is this first sentence, the place we begin to listen? To begin with, it's elegant. Soft consonants smooth throughout, only one T in twenty-three words, and a T that leads downhill onto the trochaic cushion of 'turning', and for the rest, Ys, Vs, Ss, Fs, nothing staccato or harsh on the ear. The words themselves are neither a rattle of monosyllables nor a thicket of polysyllables, but a pleasing medley of variation. Rhythmically, the sentence breaks down into three and a half rough beats: 'In my younger and more vulnerable years', the assonant U tying together the longer words; 'my father gave me some advice', the Fs and Vs leaning towards each other; 'that I've been turning over in my mind', the stressed syllables of 'turning', 'over' and 'mind' weighting the phrase towards the end and the downward drop of 'mind', which in turn pulls us towards the short half-phrase that carries in it so much time: 'ever since.' In 'ever since' is nostalgia and memory, the pondering of whether lessons from the past have been learned and understood - whether they have been, either financially or morally, profited from.<br />
<br />
We know from the sentence, then, that our narrator Nick considers himself to have been more vulnerable in the past, which is to say that things have happened which have hardened him: there's a breath of cynicism in amidst the wondering. It's a sentence of regret, in other words, regret and uncertainty, moving from vulnerable youth to parental advice which has not been finally decided upon. Nick has been 'turning over' his father's advice, and he still hasn't stopped turning it. Something has happened to close him off, and he still isn't entirely sure what to make of it - or rather, how to contextualise it, how to fit it into the scheme of simple certainties. A father's advice - perhaps especially in a country where 'Founding Fathers' are quasi-mythic figures and fatherhood can take on almost a sacred stature - is supposed to be wisdom speaking to inexperience, a piece of certainty that we can rely on. What our father told us when we were young enough to advise is morality from a time when we were young enough that moral certainties seemed possible. Nick, we are told in this sentence, is no longer in that comfortable place. He has the piece of wisdom, but in comparing it to his own experiences, he hasn't closed the issue.<br />
<br />
What is this piece of advice? We get it in the next sentence: 'Whenever you feel like criticising anyone ... just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.' While Nick acknowledges that the advice is given 'snobbishly' - the Carraways are a rich family, and for the unedifying reason that an ancestor paid someone else to fight in the Civil War (on which side, Nick doesn't disclose) so he'd be free to continue running his business - and in its folksy way, it might seem inoffensive: not everyone has our airs and graces, our education, our opportunities.<br />
<br />
Except for that sucker-punch, because this is what Nick leads us up to: 'I snobbishly repeat a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.'<br />
<br />
There we have <i>The Great Gatsby</i>: a patient, elegiac meditation that suddenly wheels around and knocks you flying. The book contains one of the greatest shock sentences in literature, which is worth quoting in context just as a demonstration of its power before we return to the first sentence: the scene takes place on a weekend afternoon when Tom Buchanan has run into Nick on a train and with 'a determination to have my company that bordered on violence' (Tom is a former football player of massive physical strength), insisted that Nick come join him on a visit to his mistress Myrtle Wilson. Nick notes 'the supercilious assumption ... that on Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to do'; the reader may also note the rather stunning assumption that asking your wife's cousin to come party with your mistress is perfectly okay and that you don't need to worry about the conflict of loyalties you are dragging him into on a whim. In any event, the party is awful and grows increasingly drunken and fevered as the evening progresses, until things degenerate into a nightmare haze (it's a long extract, but do read it in full if you want to feel the impact):<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
'My dear,' [Myrtle Wilson] cried, 'I'm going to give you this dress as soon as I'm through with it. I've got to get another one tomorrow. I'm going to make a list of all the things I've got to get. A massage and a wave and a collar for the dog [bought that day on a casual impulse mid-shopping spree] and one of those cute little ash-trays where you touch a spring, and a wreath with a black silk bow for mother's grave that'll last all summer. I got to write down a list so I won't forget all the things I got to do.'</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
It was nine o'clock - almost immediately afterward I looked at my watch and found it was ten. Mr McKee [a guest with an imperfectly washed face] was asleep on a chair with his fists clenched. Taking out my handkerchief I wiped from his cheek the remains of the spot of dried lather that had worried me all the afternoon.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The little dog was sitting on the table looking with blind eyes through the smoke and from time to time groaning faintly. People disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet away. Some time toward midnight Tom Buchanan and Mrs Wilson stood face to face discussing in impassioned voices whether Mrs Wilson had any right to mention Daisy's name.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
'Daisy! Daisy! Daisy!' shouted Mrs Wilson. 'I'll say it whenever I want to! Daisy! Da-' </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Making a short deft movement Tom Buchanan broke her nose with an open hand. </blockquote>
<br />
Nothing prepares you for it: certainly not the incidents that come directly before. There's a more diffuse horror that occupies our attention: the rattling materialism that conflates luxuries and pet care and cute gadgets and mourning the dead all of a piece, and conflates, too, the act of buying things with the act of doing things - this is a world of consumers, not producers. Myrtle's manic flaunting of her lover's wealth, the drunken confusion, Nick's obsessive worrying about Mr McKee's shaving cream: all get us as disoriented and uncomfortable as Nick himself. The shaving cream spot is symptomatic: is Nick's worry compassion for the display Mr McKee is making of himself, snobbish disdain for poor grooming, or just a befuddled mind fixing on some small problem because when everything is wrong it's hard to know where to focus? We have to decide for ourselves - and in trying to decide, in craning to see whether the poor little dog is all right and trying to keep trace of slippery time, the distancing language of hearing the lovers 'discussing in impassioned voices' misleads us. It sounds so formal, so Jeevesian, and so buried in the middle of of a paragraph where things are happening in a vague, undifferentiated state, that we don't quite realise it's a stand-up screaming drunken fight until the dreadful, brutal simplicity of 'broke her nose'. Not 'hit her', but 'broke her nose', with that horrible adjective 'deft', as the skilled athlete deploys his physical perfection to batter his girlfriend. Language whirls and wavers and then strikes us into reality with a sudden crack.<br />
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As I said, this is a book of the sucker-punch, and when it hits us unexpectedly, we reel. The first sentence sets us up for the first of these dizzying confusions, but not the worst. We just get prepared for the homily that not everyone has the same nice things, and then get struck with the assertion that not everyone has the same nice souls.<br />
<br />
What we don't know when we first encounter this book is that Nick is reflecting on something that deeply, irrevocably angers him: a man he has liked, cared about, tried almost successfully to be a friend to, has been destroyed with casual unconcern by people with even more 'advantages' than Nick. Gatsby is dead, and after all his prodigality, his lavish hospitality and generosity and charm, almost nobody bothered to attend his funeral. Gatsby has reached up towards the aristocracy, and as soon as the liquor dried up, the aristocracy dropped him like any other broken toy. And particularly culpable are the Buchanans, Nick's cousin Daisy and her thuggish, hyper-wealthy husband Tom: Daisy, who killed Tom's mistress Myrtle with her reckless (or possibly murderous) driving, and Tom, who spared himself the inconvenience of dealing with Myrtle's widowed husband by letting him assume that her real lover was Gatsby. Faced with the possibility of unpleasant consequences, they simply shrug them off onto the nearest convenient stooge, the nearest butler with an expendable nose, and carry on. Nick is bitterly angry at the beginning of this story, angry enough to commute his father's simple-sounding advice against judging people on externals into the deep, harsh judgement that people are not equal morally: that 'the fundamental decencies' - not even refraining from getting people killed, but as little as those many guests at Gatsby's parties who knew no better than to 'sneer most bitterly at Gatsby on the courage of Gatsby's liquor' - are not an evenly distributed resource. At this point, Nick feels or suspects, some people, maybe most people, are just bad. But at the same time, 'birth' is far from uncomplicated, because who you are born to be is, for everyone except Gatsby - and maybe even him by the end - an inescapable influence. You don't choose where you're born, and it's very, very hard to be something other than what you were born and raised for.<br />
<br />
Look, for instance, at the way this book begins by touching on the issue of parenthood. What's simpler than motherhood and apple pie? Well, practically everything, actually, but it's notable that of the many things wealth destroys in <i>The Great Gatsby</i> - cars, noses, valleys, lives - there is a deep fracture in that all-American institution, the family. Nick is as close to healthy as anybody here is going to get: he has left home with his father's blessing and some words of wisdom, even if he's too angry or too grieved to be sure whether they apply any more, and when he's had enough, he can go back home again and it's not so bad. But what remains for everyone else? This is a novel of the Roaring Twenties, the era of the young adult - the era of being twenty-something, in fact, which Nick, passing his thirtieth birthday, is just leaving, driving away from youth and 'toward death'. It is not an era of parenthood. The damage reverberates up and down the generations: Jay Gatsby, taken first by changed identity and then by death from a bewildered father who still calls him Jimmy; Pammy Buchanan, 'the well-disciplined child' who spends her life almost entirely with a nurse while her parents are busy with their wealth and adulteries. Henry Gatz loves his son, but it wasn't enough to keep the boy at home, or even to keep the son carrying his name: James Gatz raced away from his family into a life as Jay Gatsby at the first opportunity. Daisy coos over her 'bless-ed pre-cious' with perhaps genuine but certainly transitory affection: Pammy snuggles her glamorous mother only 'shyly' and is dismissed before she's had the time to say more than three things - 'I got dressed before luncheon,' 'Yes ... Aunt Jordan's got on a white dress too,' and 'Where's Daddy?', two bids for approval in the only terms that interest her mother, and a question about her Daddy's whereabouts that Daisy doesn't bother to answer. Jimmy runs away from a home he feels ashamed of; Pammy is dressed up and brought out because, as Daisy says of herself, 'your mother wanted to show you off' - and to the man bent on stealing her from Pammy's Daddy at that. Even Myrtle Wilson's family love is more a matter of shopping than feeling: if she can spend Tom's money on a long-lasting wreath, it'll save her work on her mother's grave. Nick's family still matters to him, but then they can bestow inherited wealth along with the homespun wisdom. Everybody else is too busy chasing the dream. The first sentence of the novel is more or less a farewell to the undamaged family. The great Gatsby has no mentoring father, and will never be one himself.<br />
<br />
Love fails in <i>The Great Gatsby</i>. Nick still has some of it - enough to remember his father's advice, if not enough to be sure what to make of it, nor enough to make a relationship with Jordan Baker that doesn't end in hurting her, nor to do more for Gatsby in the end than bring his solitary presence to the dead man's funeral. Gatsby has too much of it - though whether for Daisy the woman or Daisy the social symbol, the feminine embodiment of his class aspirations, we never know: the class-born 'vast carelessness' of the Buchanans kills him before he can try the reality of her. Advice fails too: nothing would talk any sense into Gatsby, nor any 'fundamental decencies' into the Buchanans, nor does it keep Nick out of disasters, his own or other people's, until it's too late. What is the point, after all, of turning things over in your mind if nobody else is thinking? 'You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver,' Jordan reminds Nick, and thoughtlessness here careens out of too many side-streets for a single piece of advice to do anyone any good. There are the vulnerable and the invulnerable, and it's not age but money that makes them immune - money, and class, and 'carelessness'.<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;<br />
If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,<br />
Till she cry 'Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,<br />
I must have you!'</blockquote>
<br />
So goes the opening quotation from 'Thomas Parke D'Invilliers' (which is to say, from Fitzgerald himself: 'Thomas Parke D'Invilliers' is a fictional character from his own first novel <i>This Side of Paradise</i>), and before it, the dedication: 'Once again to Zelda.' A declaration of love from a writer to his wife - his fated wife, we know in sad retrospect - followed by the half-comic, half-wistful tribute to Gatsby's aspirations. You can bounce high - but a bounce is not flight: eventually, you fall back down. Nick can fall back on his wealthy home and his reserved, communicative father. Gatsby does not have that luxury: what he had at home, he gave up for a greater luxury, the gold hat that might one day win him that fine morning. It doesn't, of course; Daisy isn't capable of creating a communicative home even with her vast wealth: her child isn't a protegee to advise but a doll to dress, display and dismiss, and whatever she feels for Gatsby isn't enough to outlast real trouble. She keeps moving forward as long as she has a place to go, and that is always. Gatsby does not have that endless horizon, except in his own hopes.<br />
<br />
'So we beat on, boats against the current, borne ceaselessly back into the past,' Nick famously concludes. What we hear in the first sentence is our only hope of perspective: someone who is actually prepared to take seriously something what was said to him in the past, said by somebody <i>from</i> his past, and which in fact is an exhortation to remember the fact of other people's pasts before you draw any conclusions. Henry Gatz looks back to his lost Jimmy with helpless bewilderment; Gatsby runs into the future until he falls off the edge; Daisy hesitates and then keeps walking. Nick is the only anchor to our little boat in <i>The Great Gatsby</i>, not because he's a particularly good man, nor because his father or his forefathers were, nor even because his father's advice or his reaction to it were necessarily good, but for one reason alone: he's the only person who can both understand the impulse to race for the receding future and can look back into the flowing past.Kit Whitfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623432518060526692noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31552467.post-77235075146692991412013-03-12T13:05:00.003+00:002013-03-12T13:05:20.204+00:00First sentences: Middlemarch by George Eliot<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: xx-small;">This site is undergoing some revision; a temporary archive of the first sentence pieces can be found <a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/first-sentence-posts.html" target="_blank">here</a>. </span><br />
<br />
Where do we begin on this one? <i>Middlemarch</i> is one of those books that mounts its beginning slowly: two pages of 'Prelude' that set out its central theme - an infinitesimal proportion of the whole massive tome - before drawing the curtain back on the opening chapter. Dorothea Brooke is our central character in a large and closely-studied cast, and when we first see her, she is carefully mounted for our consideration in a firmly-delineated context. If we consider a book as beginning in its first sentence, the first sentence of the book proper is that of the opening chapter; the 'Prelude', as Eliot musically termed it, is more in the nature of preparation, directions for how we should read the book once it really begins.<br />
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Which is, in itself, rather a fascinating device. Eliot is an author loved by many readers as compassionate and insightful, while others find themselves disliking her, resistant to the pressure of her prose and uneasy with the personal passion that sometimes animates her supposedly omniscient narration. 'Those who fall foul of George Eliot do so, we incline to think, on account of her heroines; and with good reason; for there is no doubt that they bring out the worst of her, lead her into difficult places, make her self-conscious, didactic, and occasionally vulgar,' <a href="http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/woolf/VW-Eliot.html" target="_blank">wrote</a> Virginia Woolf, and Dorothea, the most heroic of Eliot's heroines, can occupy that disquieting space, that literary uncanny valley between author and character that is merely ridiculous when created by a lesser author but in hands as formidable as Eliot's can polarise readers to passionate identification, revolted contempt, or the kind of forgiving ambivalence that no careful critic feels impudent enough to bestow on such a writer with anything resembling ease.<br />
<br />
Dorothea is a mixed blessing, in other words, and the more so because we're told who she is and how we should regard her before we ever see her move a limb or speak a word. For us, confining ourselves to the question of first sentences, the very fact that she gets two whole pages of Prelude preparing us for the first sentence that introduces her is symptomatic: we are not permitted to enter this book with the freedom we ordinarily expect. Later on in the novel Eliot's grand morals relax enough to enjoy some gentle ironies at Dorothea's expense, and in those moments she becomes a loveable creation in the good old Eliot style and we draw a breath of relief - a personal favourite is the comment about the conflict between her imperfect asceticism and her genteel skill at riding: 'Riding was an indulgence she allowed herself in spite of conscientious qualms; she felt that she enjoyed it in a pagan sensuous way, and always looked forward to renouncing it,' - but as <i>Middlemarch</i> opens, we feel the full weight of its ambition, the massive scope both of scale and subject. As we begin <i>Middlemarch</i>, we have to decide whether to accept Eliot on her own terms, and if not, what terms we can strike with her mighty shade.<br />
<br />
<br />
This is the opening of the Prelude:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Who that cares to know much of the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors?</blockquote>
<br />
The story is of the Carmelite founder, who ran away at the age of seven with her brother Rodrigo, 'hearts already beating to a national idea; until domestic reality met them in the shape of uncles, and turned them back from their great resolve.' Eliot's point, which she advances like an essayist, is that in the absence of a 'coherent social faith and order', a woman of Saint Theresa's disposition will simply yearn for 'an unattained goodness' and stumble over hindrances - 'domestic reality' preventing great spiritual accomplishment. There is no question as to how we should regard Dorothea when we meet her: she is an uncanonised saint, unable to do great deeds because of the chafing realities of contemporary life. Or at least, not quite contemporary - the book was begun in 1869 and set in the 1830s - but close enough that the contemporary reader could recognise their own society, and hear the voice of a female author addressing grievances and controversies not yet settled.<br />
<br />
What we can see straight away is that Eliot has no intention of holding back on the didacticism. To a modern reader the sentence is classical, with its Chinese-puzzle-ball subclauses within subclauses, its reliance on the patience of the audience with a long and measured stretch of neatly comma'd prose, its personification of 'Time' as a quasi-mythological figure for a readership raised on the Greek and Roman authors ... but at the same time, just as she alludes to historical figures and invokes the leaning figure of Chronos, she is equally prepared to seize upon authorities and insights that were new and compelling for her day. We do not hear of the 'trials of Time': we hear of the '<i>experiments</i> of Time', trying out 'how the mysterious mixture behaves'. We are not in Time's amphitheatre here: we are in Time's <i>laboratory</i>. In a stroke, Eliot showcases both traditional and progressive learning, an almost-surreal juxtaposition and almost-wry nod to the way that Time itself is changing, that social forces come and go and it may be our good or bad fortune to find ourselves born amidst them - and, too, an unambiguous display of her own intelligence and learning, a confident assertion of her authority. Later in the novel, of course, we will meet Dorothea's closest counterpart in Dr Tertius Lydgate, an aspiring man of science whose great ideals come to no grander achievements than Dorothea's spiritual ones, faith and reason alike falling by the wayside of human mistakes and social pressures: in beginning with science, Eliot places herself just a little on the side from Dorothea even as she rails against her frustrations. There's a little humour and a little distance here, a lightness of touch with the imagery that grants the sentence a sprightliness that belies its length.<br />
<br />
Sprightly though it is, however, we are still to take it seriously. If we do not smile with some gentleness and take some interest in the case of Saint Theresa, we stand accused of being outside the honest ranks of those who 'care to' know much of history or human nature. We are exhorted to share Eliot's favouritism and partake of her education: if we accept her assumption of our complicity it reads as benign, a kind of rhetorical figure bestowing on us intelligence and good will; if we don't, on the other hand, the sentence doesn't seem to think very well of us. In other words, there is an implicit assertion in this sentence that there is <i>a right way to think</i>: right subjects for contemplation and right feelings to have towards them. Eliot is generous with her pretence that we, the readers, must already think in this right and well-informed way - even a brief moment thinking kindly on the infant Saint will do - but there's no room to differ with her.<br />
<br />
This is a big sentence talking about a big idea, and it encompasses a great many moods: the didacticism of Eliot's tone tempered by her mild amusement at shaking the metaphysical together with the chemical, and in the midst of it, the 'gentleness', the compassion, towards the vulnerable child. It's a very Eliot sentence.<br />
<br />
We have two pages along these lines, and then we move to the first chapter - but even then, we aren't allowed to start without some further clarification. Middlemarch begins its chapters with quotations - and if Eliot couldn't find one that suited her, often enough she'd simply make one up and have a dialogue between a 'First Gentleman' and a 'Second Gentleman' to make sure that we don't miss the point (for instance, in defending Dorothea's foolish first marriage, these shadowy philosophers tell each other, '"Our deeds are fetters that we forge ourselves." / "Ay truly, but I think it is the world / That brings the iron."') - but this one is attributed, not an Eliot invention:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Since I can do no good because a woman<br />
Reach constantly at something that is near it."<br />
- The Maid's Tragedy, Beaumont and Fletcher</blockquote>
<br />
We've already been told in no uncertain terms that the lack of social outlets may make of a saint a 'foundress of nothing'; here, it's made even clearer exactly what the problem is: in this world, a Saint Theresa will be held back 'because a woman.' Even if we aren't familiar with the play itself, there's the word 'Tragedy' right in its title. We're well and truly primed to meet our maid.<br />
<br />
So the first chapter begins, thus:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.</blockquote>
<br />
After all the rhetorical weight of the prologue, a sentence as simple as the 'poor dress' it invokes. Grammatically simple, that is; there's nothing simple about its content.<br />
<br />
Character names are always important in fiction, and it's interesting that we first meet the woman who will be referred to as 'Dorothea' hereafter as 'Miss Brooke.' 'Dorothea' is a fairly obvious reference to her religious disposition: the name means 'gift of God', and a reader with even the most modest knowledge of Classical tongues or etymology will recognise the feminised 'theos', the same Greek root that gives us 'theology' and 'monotheism'. It's a name that elevates female frustration to Christhood, really: Dorothea is a gift that the world does not appreciate. 'Brooke', though, has the same simplicity as her dress, a natural and unpretentious - though not plebeian - surname. It's significant, perhaps, that the final image of Dorothea compares her to a river: 'Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth.' The final estimation of Dorothea is more optimistic and less angry than the prelude, regarding her virtue as 'incalculably diffusive' and benefitting 'the growing good of the world' in small ways, but whether provokes hope or despair, the book opens and closes with the image of a forceful nature thwarted and dissipated. Dorothea may be 'like that river', but her surname does not allow for anything more surging than a quiet brook. She is bigger than her name, but will have no greater channel, and we know this straight away.<br />
<br />
We could get all this from 'Dorothea Brooke', though; instead, we get 'Miss.' This tells us two things. First, she is either the only or the eldest daughter of the family: the convention of the time was that the oldest daughter would be 'Miss Brooke' and younger sisters would be, for instance, 'Miss Celia Brooke', distinguished by their Christian names while the oldest unmarried woman would showcase the surname. (You can see the same thing in <i>Pride and Prejudice</i>, where Jane is Miss Bennet and Elizabeth is Miss Elizabeth Bennet.) Second, Miss Brooke is a lady, and seen by the eyes of the world: it's not quite George Eliot's voice that speaks of Miss Brooke's beauty, but the society that knows her only well enough to use her formal name, and consequently notices her beauty before anything else.<br />
<br />
Eliot is at pains, meanwhile, to point out that Dorothea, unlike a conventional young woman of her time, is not inclined to accentuate her beauty with finery. It's 'poor dress', we notice, not 'plain dress', but 'poor', deliberately mortifying the vanity: the sentence is fraught with ambivalence. Dorothea gets the best of both worlds, above the trivialities of beauty both because she disdains to cultivate it and because she already has it: her beauty to us, it's implied, rests at least in part <i>because</i> she prefers the spiritual path. But at the same time, her inner beauty is frequently expressed in the book through her outer beauty; when she first meets her future husband Will Ladislaw, for instance, he is inclined to dislike her because she is engaged to marry his disliked cousin, but is unable to avoid noticing her outer loveliness - and in a way that hints at inner depths: 'But what a voice! It was like the voice of a soul that had once lived in an Aeolian harp.' Hostile as he is, Will's reaction can at this point be little more than physical attraction, but even so, her charm is cast in terms of 'soul' - is written, in fact, as provoking a physical attraction that correctly recognises the outer beauty as an expression of inner grace, even though Will doesn't believe it to be so at the time. Dorothea's external beauty often is written as if it sprung from inner qualities, in fact, even though it shouldn't be so in a novel that punishes men precisely for the sin of conflating the two, where plain, shrewd Mary Garth is Fred Vincy's salvation and beautiful, shallow Rosamund Vincy is Lydgate's destruction.<br />
<br />
What are we to make of this unnerving dance between the physical and the spiritual? It makes sense on simple plot terms: when marriage determines women's fate, more things happen to a pretty woman than a plain one, and Dorothea herself has three serious suitors of very different temperaments, an unlikely quantity for an unattractive girl. It's a novelistic convenience as well: to hint at the internal through the external is an almost unavoidable task for a writer in the third person, and a beauty that thrives on asceticism not only gives Eliot more scope to express her essential approval, but also saves Dorothea from the danger of comedy that always hovers over the ungainly female in fiction, makes her charming to picture however earnest or ill-advised she behaves. But can we, the contemporary readers who know 'George Eliot' to be a pseudonym, separate our image of 'finely formed' Dorothea from the woman Henry James famously described as 'magnificently ugly'? Frederick William Burton's image lingers in all our minds, and this:<br />
<br />
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<br />
<br />
is not a face we can impose upon Dorothea.<br />
<br />
Nor should we, of course; people do not generally go around struggling to separate Charles Dickens's face from David Copperfield's or, indeed, Henry James's from Roderick Hudson's: James's patronising assessment of Eliot as 'deliciously hideous' was made from a position of masculine freedom, a license to write novels without people comparing them to his face, that Mary Ann Evans did not enjoy. But then again, there are some famous portraits of the Bronte sisters, and people do not generally spend much time wondering whether Jane Eyre's plainness or Cathy Earnshaw's beauty have any deep relationship to their creators. Why should this be? Possibly it may just the the relative drama of different faces; Branwell's portrait -<br />
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<br />
<br />
- shows three young women who could be called either plain or pretty depending on taste and attitude, or perhaps are best suited by the mid-point of Jane Austen's deadpan scale in <i>Emma:</i> 'very pretty indeed, or only rather pretty, or not pretty at all'; none possessed Eliot's unforgiving features. There's something about that portrait of Eliot, that soulful gaze and nicely-arranged hair, that makes us want to find beauty in it, to try to look back at it with the same sad tenderness that she watches us, and frustrates us when we can find only the charm of expression and intelligence. Those thoughtful eyes make us ashamed of ourselves both for being unable to find beauty and for looking for it in the first place; what we cannot do is study the image dispassionately. It's too evocative.<br />
<br />
So maybe it is just that George Eliot had a memorable face that comes between us and her heroines. Or perhaps it may be the difference in a portraitist's skill: Branwell was gifted and his portrait is piquant, but he could not create the breathing likeness that Burton did: those assessing, appealing eyes gaze out at us more vividly than out of most author portraits, female or male. But at the same time, we have to admit that Eliot does <i>dwell</i> on the beauty of her protagonists, and uses it to express things about them. (It occurs to me that the only other author I've seen people compare to her characters in this way is Ayn Rand, another emphatic, didactic author who made much play of appearance as a kind of human pathetic fallacy, bestowing an ideological aesthetic on her characters that she herself lacked. Rand was unquestionably the inferior author and the lesser judge of human nature, but it is, at least, a thought-provoking comparison.) What are we seeing in this whole essay, after all, if not the fact that Eliot chose to open her most famous and ambitious novel - one of the most famous and ambitious novels in the history of literature - with the statement that her heroine is beautiful? For a plain woman to give her protagonist the beauty she herself lacks is by now a common joke, and George Eliot herself was witty enough in poking fun at the fantasy in her notorious essay '<a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/28289/28289-h/28289-h.htm" target="_blank">Silly Novels By Lady Novelists</a>', lambasting the dreamy heroine thus: 'Her eyes and her wit are both dazzling; her nose and her morals are alike free from any tendency to irregularity; she has a superb <i>contralto</i> and a superb intellect; she is perfectly well dressed and perfectly religious; she dances like a sylph, and reads the Bible in the original tongues.' Dorothea is, of course, a far more human creation than this: her intellect is frustrated by lack of education (she can <i>not</i> read the Bible in the original tongues; she can't even read enough German to save her first husband from his ignorance of modern scholarship), her dancing and singing and ornamental arts are nothing to the purpose (her sister's piano playing being curtly dismissed as 'a kind of small tinkling which symbolized the aesthetic part of the young ladies' education'), and she makes mistakes because her wit and her morals can lead her astray. But on the other hand, are the conflation of eyes and wit, nose and morals, except in their bathetic phrasing, entirely absent from Dorothea's beauty that is all the more flattered because she is not 'perfectly well dressed'? Except, moreover, that she actually is perfectly well dressed to suit her own style of beauty, and her 'poor dress' is partly a sign of genteel taste, Dorothea and Celia both being well-born enough to have 'regarded frippery as the ambition of a huckster's daughter'? Dorothea <i>is </i>perfectly well-dressed, right there in the first sentence; just more subtly than a silly heroine bedecked with endless frills. Dorothea's eyes <i>do</i> express her wit, or rather her soul; she <i>is</i> perfectly religious - or at least, explicitly saintly, and the story begins by blaming her imperfect religious accomplishments on her circumstances before we ever meet her. And the very first thing we do meet is the blunt statement that her beauty, her ladylike tastes and her religious aspirations all accessorise very nicely, thank you.<br />
<br />
It provokes the insolent question that no conscientious reader likes imposing on so obviously superior an intellect: is Dorothea simply a better version of the same fantasy girl of the silly lady novelists? Bestowed with beauty of person and mind, but placed in circumstances to make mistakes and endure consequences that are still, in the end, mostly favourable? In the silly novel, 'the tedious husband dies in his bed requesting his wife, as a particular favor to him, to marry the man she loves best, and having already dispatched a note to the lover informing him of the comfortable arrangement'; Dorothea's marrying 'the man she loves best' involves the contrary arrangement, a codicil in her first husband's will disinheriting her if she marries Will Ladislaw - but then, she explicitly has her own modest fortune on which the Ladislaws can 'live quite well', and her 'tedious husband' does indeed die. He dies laying down inconveniences, but they do not, in the end, prevent her from a happy second romance.<br />
<br />
Is Dorothea's poorly-dressed beauty, then, an expression of the same hunger that silly lady novelists more crudely communicate? Or else, perhaps, is that the wrong question? It is, instead, that Eliot, having written the satirical essay in 1856, set out a decade later to grapple with the same questions that beset all 'lady novelists' of the time, the sheer fact that what you looked like mattered a great deal and that marriage was usually the centre of a woman's life, and decided to do it properly? Eliot's pious pretty women, Dorothea Brooke and Maggie Tulliver and Dinah Morris, all have to navigate beauty and its temptations; only Dinah has the simplicity to disregard it entirely (and it's notable that not she but her future husband, the more complex Adam Bede, is the protagonist of that novel); the social pressures of which Eliot wrote were the same social pressures that afflicted all women 'because a woman'. As Woolf commented in her essay quoted above, 'The ancient consciousness of woman, charged with suffering and sensibility, and for so many ages dumb, seems in them to have brimmed and overflowed and uttered a demand for something - they scarcely know what - for something that is perhaps incompatible with the facts of human existence. George Eliot had far too strong an intelligence to tamper with those facts, and too broad a humour to mitigate the truth because it was a stern one.' Woolf is speaking of unfulfilled emotional drama there, Eliot's heroines whose stories end with less grandeur than their beginnings promised, but we can perhaps draw the same conclusion about her relationship to beauty: it simply was to her what money was to Jane Austen, an inescapable fact of life all the more urgent, and thus all the more artistically undeniable, because she did not have enough of it. We think much of what we lack, and the sheer injustice of beauty or ugliness is an impossible question to settle.<br />
<br />
For to view Dorothea merely as a fantasy, a higher-order heroine of a silly lady's novel, is to ignore the sheer artistry of her creation - which is, after all, the ultimate issue in fiction. To say that Dorothea resembles a silly lady heroine except that she's well written is to miss the whole point: we might as well say that Eliot resembles a stupid writer except that she isn't stupid. The only distinction in art that is finally meaningful is whether it is good or bad. And even in this first sentence, there is no question that Dorothea is an artistic creation, taking shape under our very eyes. 'Dorothea is posed statically, as if sitting for a verbal portrait, and is actually compared to a figure in a painting,' David Lodge remarks in Chapter 14 of <i>The Art of Fiction</i>, but in this first sentence, note the use of the phrase 'thrown into relief'. It's a convenient figure of speech, but there's nothing casual about it: 'relief' refers to a specific artistic method, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relief" target="_blank">sculptural technique</a> of raising a figure above its flat background. She's a sculpture in the first sentence, a 'Blessed Virgin' of 'Italian painters' in the second: while she lives in a relatively modern era - which will be precisely the problem for her as she tries to live a worthy life in mundane surroundings - she is verbally and visually tied to more heroic eras, the Classical and Renaissance traditions that her sculpted, painted echoes invoke. Every era is mundane to the majority of people living in it, of course, but Eliot is openly linking Dorothea to a grand <i>artistic</i> past, and a past of religious art at that, hinting at the ambition she has committed herself to - and an ambition that will come far closer to fruition than Dorothea's unfocused yearnings ever will.<br />
<br />
Eliot is such an essayist as well as such a novelist, so open in her assertions of principle, morality and insight, that it's unusually difficult to separate Eliot the novelist from Eliot the person; George Eliot and Mary Ann Evans seem to jostle for our attention on these pages. It can be a disquieting experience if we resist being swept away, for this is a novel of undoubted and extraordinary accomplishment, and to find the fundamental question of how much is novelist and how much is novel - and if some of it is both, how much of this is strategic and how much unconscious - is not something we normally have to worry about in novels this bloody <i>good</i>. Drawing an unclear line between writer and narrative voice is supposed to be the province of incompetent dabblers, not titans like George Eliot; it can be uncomfortable wondering something so personal, so basic, about a writer so obviously more intelligent than ourselves. We sit at the feet of a teacher, and wonder exactly what we're being taught.<br />
<br />
But this, in the end, is for our own good. As Woolf says, <i>Middlemarch</i> is a novel for 'grown-up people', and a good teacher requires us to grow up in relation to her lessons as well as the world. Eliot's subject is always the question of steering a soul through wayward waters, the difficulty of distinguishing between what we know to be true and what we merely wish, and her characters were so revolutionary precisely because it was she who, as D.H. Lawrence put it, 'started putting all the action inside,' pioneering with headlong mastery the art of treating internal conflicts as plot events and people's partial blindness to themselves as an essential quality of being human. We can accept her without question and have a marvellous, insightful read. If we choose not to, then we must grapple with her. But who taught us how to grapple with a written person's self-knowledge in the first place? Eliot.<br />
<br />
There's a popular saying that there's no point arguing with an idiot because they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience; resisting Eliot's rhetoric, though, is far closer to wrestling with Jacob's angel. She doesn't drag us down to her level, she drags us <i>up</i>, and even if we do end up questioning some of her choices - her shifting partisanship towards her characters, her contradictory handling of beauty, her passionate, earnest moralising under the guise of omniscience - we can question without drawing conclusions, grapple and pause and draw breath, stronger and sharper for the experience. It's Eliot's intelligence, not our own, that gets us even asking whether she was a little blind to herself, because it's Eliot's prose that teaches us how to ask and consider that very question; whether we consider the answer to be yes or no, it's her score off us, not ours off her, that we ask it at all. We are only following the lessons she taught us.<br />
<br />
Look at this essay, for example. It's supposed to be a simple question: what does the first sentence of a famous novel teach us about writing? Yet to answer the question in any kind of responsible way, I wasn't able to confine myself to talking about a single sentence. Two pages of prelude, one quotation and a seventeen-word sentence with no subclauses, and I've had to go ten rounds with George Eliot and emerge still questioning whether I had any right to question her in the first place. This is the genius of Eliot: whether we question her or not, she will not leave our intelligence alone. She overwhelms us with hers and forces us to engage our own. In the fullest sense, she does what great literature is supposed above all to do: she makes us think.<br />
<br />Kit Whitfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623432518060526692noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31552467.post-57416541899016076562013-03-11T17:36:00.002+00:002013-09-09T11:07:01.578+00:00First sentence posts!A friend of mine called attention to <a href="http://www.tor.com/blogs/2013/03/mermaid-science-fiction-kit-whitfields-in-great-waters" target="_blank">a very nice review</a> from Tor which made mention of the series of first-sentence analyses I've been doing, and it occurs to me that some people may click over in search of them. My blog in its current form is not brilliantly easy to navigate - I've got someone working on that, actually - but I thought it might be a courtesy to any new viewers to make the first sentence posts a bit easier to find. I'm currently working on the next one, which will be <i>Middlemarch</i>, but till then, consider this an ad-hoc archive page:<br />
<br />
So, in order of publication:<br />
<br />
<a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/first-sentences-fountainhead-by-ayn.html" target="_blank"><i>The Fountainhead</i> by Ayn Rand</a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/first-sentences-jane-eyre-by-charlotte.html" target="_blank"><i>Jane Eyre</i> by Charlotte Bronte</a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/first-sentences-gone-with-wind-by.html" target="_blank"><i>Gone With The Wind</i> by Margaret Mitchell</a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/first-sentences-watership-down-by.html" target="_blank"><i>Watership Down </i>by Richard Adams</a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/first-sentences-rebecca-by-daphne-du.html" target="_blank"><i>Rebecca</i> by Daphne du Maurier</a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/first-sentences-handmaids-tale-by.html" target="_blank"><i>The Handmaid's Tale</i> by Margaret Atwood</a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/first-sentences-tale-of-two-cities-by.html" target="_blank"><i>A Tale of Two Cities </i>by Charles Dickens</a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/sourcery-and-pyramids-by-j.html" target="_blank"><i>Sourcery and Pyramids</i> by Terry Pratchett</a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/first-sentences-lolita-by-vladimir.html" target="_blank"><i>Lolita</i> by Vladimir Nabokov</a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/first-sentences-trial-by-franz-kafka.html" target="_blank"><i>The Trial </i>by Franz Kafka</a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/first-sentences-haunting-of-hill-house.html" target="_blank"><i>The Haunting of Hill House</i> by Shirley Jackson</a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/first-sentences-pride-and-prejudice-by.html" target="_blank"><i>Pride and Prejudice</i> by Jane Austen</a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/first-sentences-five-children-and-it-by.html" target="_blank"><i>Five Children and It</i> by E. Nesbit</a><br />
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<a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/first-sentences-collector-by-john.html" target="_blank"><i>The Collector</i> by John Fowles</a><br />
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<a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.com/2012/01/first-sentences-i-capture-castle-by.html" target="_blank"><i>I Capture The Castle</i> by Dodie Smith</a><br />
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<a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/first-sentences-anne-of-green-gables-by.html" target="_blank"><i>Anne of Green Gables</i> by L.M. Montgomery</a><br />
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<a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/first-sentences-one-hundred-years-of.html" target="_blank"><i>One Hundred Years of Solitude</i> by Gabriel Garcia Marquez</a><br />
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<a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/first-sentences-brave-new-world-by.html" target="_blank"><i>Brave New World</i> by Aldous Huxley</a><br />
<i><br /></i>
<a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/first-sentences-nineteen-eighty-four-by.html" target="_blank"><i>Nineteen Eighty-Four</i> by George Orwell</a><br />
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<a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/first-sentences-nervous-conditions-by.html" target="_blank"><i>Nervous Conditions</i> by Tsitsi Dangarembga</a><br />
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<a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/first-sentences-waiting-for-barbarians.html" target="_blank"><i>Waiting For the Barbarians </i>by J.M. Coetzee</a><br />
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<a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/first-sentences-picture-of-dorian-gray.html" target="_blank"><i>The Picture of Dorian Gray</i> by Oscar Wilde</a><br />
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<a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/first-sentences-lord-of-flies-by.html" target="_blank"><i>Lord of the Flies</i> by William Golding</a><br />
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<a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/first-sentences-little-friend-by-donna.html" target="_blank"><i>The Little Friend</i> by Donna Tartt</a><br />
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<a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/first-sentences-stalky-and-co-by.html" target="_blank"><i>Stalky and Co</i> by Rudyard Kipling</a><br />
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<a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/first-sentences-frost-in-may-by-antonia.html" target="_blank"><i>Frost in May</i> by Antonia White</a><br />
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<a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/first-sentences-name-of-rose-by-umberto.html" target="_blank"><i>The Name of the Rose </i>by Umberto Eco</a><br />
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<a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/first-sentences-thousand-acres-by-jane.html" target="_blank"><i>A Thousand Acres</i> by Jane Smiley</a><br />
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<a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/first-sentences-little-women-by-louisa.html" target="_blank"><i>Little Women </i>by Louisa May Alcott</a><br />
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<a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/first-sentences-catcher-in-rye-by-jd.html" target="_blank"><i>The Catcher in the Rye</i> by J.D. Salinger</a><br />
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<a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/first-sentences-in-cold-blood-by-truman.html" target="_blank"><i>In Cold Blood </i>by Truman Capote</a><br />
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<a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/first-sentences-clockwork-orange-by.html" target="_blank"><i>A Clockwork Orange</i> by Anthony Burgess</a><br />
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<a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/first-sentences-wide-sargasso-sea-by.html" target="_blank"><i>Wide Sargasso Sea</i> by Jean Rhys</a><br />
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<a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/first-sentences-of-mice-and-men-by-john.html" target="_blank"><i>Of Mice and Men </i>by John Steinbeck</a><br />
<i><br /></i>
<a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/first-sentences-notes-on-scandal-by-zoe.html" target="_blank"><i>Notes on a Scandal</i> by Zoe Heller</a><br />
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<a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/first-sentences-middlemarch-by-george.html" target="_blank"><i>Middlemarch</i> by George Eliot</a><br />
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<a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/first-sentences-great-gatsby-by-f-scott.html" target="_blank"><i>The Great Gatsby</i> by F. Scott Fitzgerald</a><br />
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<a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/first-sentences-gullivers-travels-by.html" target="_blank"><i>Gulliver's Travels</i> by Jonathan Swift</a><br />
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<a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/first-sentences-brighton-rock-by-graham.html" target="_blank"><i>Brighton Rock</i> by Graham Greene</a><br />
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<a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/first-sentences-to-kill-mockingbird-by.html" target="_blank"><i>To Kill a Mockingbird</i> by Harper Lee</a><br />
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<a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/first-sentences-i-claudius-by-robert.html" target="_blank"><i>I, Claudius</i> by Robert Graves</a><br />
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<a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/opening-line-catch-22-by-joseph-heller.html" target="_blank"><i>Catch-22</i> by Joseph Heller</a><br />
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<a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/opening-line-beloved-by-toni-morrison.html" target="_blank"><i>Beloved</i> by Toni Morrison</a><br />
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<a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/opening-line-harry-potter-and.html" target="_blank"><i>Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone</i> by J.K. Rowling</a><br />
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<a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/opening-line-paul-clifford-by-edward.html" target="_blank"><i>Paul Clifford</i> by Edward Bulwer-Lytton</a><br />
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<a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/opening-line-fingersmith-by-sarah-waters.html" target="_blank"><i>Fingersmith </i>by Sarah Waters</a><br />
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<a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/opening-line-persuasion-by-jane-austen.html" target="_blank"><i>Persuasion</i> by Jane Austen</a><br />
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<a href="http://kitwhitfield.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/opening-line-visit-of-royal-physician.html" target="_blank"><i>The Visit of the Royal Physician</i> by Per Olov Enquist</a> (trs Tiina Nunally)<br />
<br />
I take requests, so if anyone has a particular first sentence they'd like to see analysed, mention it in the comment threads. Some requests I do, some I don't; my criteria are twofold.<br />
<br />
First, having tried to do it with books I haven't read and found I churned out worse analyses in consequence, I'm less likely to tackle a book that I haven't read already. I have a book to rewrite and a toddler to raise, so reading an entire book just for one of these posts is unlikely to happen unless it's a book I've been meaning to read for my own satisfaction. So if someone requests a book, I haven't read it and I don't feel a burning desire to do so, there won't be much I can say.<br />
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Second, I don't analyse first sentences or books that I don't think are good; I'm not interested in scoring cheap points off bad writers when there are so many good writers I could be talking about instead. Sometimes there are things to be said about the implications of poor work, and I've done that now and again here, but when it comes to close analysis I want to talk about the good stuff. At some point in the future I might try analysing what's wrong with some bad prose, but in that case I'll be favouring dead authors as I have no desire to take pot shots at the living either. The upshot is that if you request a book by a living author and it's a book I don't like or admire, chances are I won't do that one either.<br />
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So, if you came over from Tor, hello and welcome, and I hope you enjoy this series.Kit Whitfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623432518060526692noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31552467.post-59374224509851852272013-03-06T12:54:00.000+00:002013-03-06T12:54:00.360+00:00Mikalogue with corpsesAnother old Mikalogue with no pictures:<br />
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Kit: Good grief, another dead mouse?
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Mika: Mika the Merciless strikes again!
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Kit: Honey, what's with all the hunting lately? This is the third mouse this week.
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Mika: First dead one. You is bad kitten.
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Kit: I think you mean 'Kit', honey.
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Mika: No, is bad kitten. Mika the Master brings in mousies to show you how to hunt. And what does you do?
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<br />
Kit: We rescue the live ones and release them in the garden?
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Mika: Exactly. You takes Mika's mousies away. Will never learn if keep doing this.
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Kit: Well, honey, we feel sorry for them. And we worry that if they run away and die in the house, they'll rot and stink. You rememeber what happened last year. It was like a charnel house.
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Mika: Go stand in corner or cuffs your ear.
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Kit: Mika, darling, you aren't our mother.
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Mika: Behave yourself!
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Kit: And I'm worried about your health. You remember the vet this week?
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Mika: Aaagh! Trauma! Horror! Disgrace!
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<br />
Kit: They had to treat you for constipation? And they said it might be because you had mouse bones in your gut?
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Mika: You delivers Mika over to enemies!
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Kit: That's enemas, sweetie. You were throwing up all over the place.
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Mika: Is awful, awful world. And why you get Mika if you don't want mouser?
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<br />
Kit: I know, sweetie. It's just finding their exploded corpses under my chair wheels that upsets me.
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Mika: How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless Kit...Kit Whitfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623432518060526692noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31552467.post-82777394413692625852013-03-05T08:59:00.000+00:002013-03-05T08:59:00.607+00:00I found an old MikalogueWritten back in 2008, in fact, which I think I didn't post because I couldn't get an appropriate photo. However, if you can imagine a cat scratching a sofa, you will get the picture:<br />
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Kit: Mika, stop clawing that sofa at once!<br />
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Mika: Ah good, you hears my summons. Mika wants food. <br />
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Kit: Mika, did you claw that sofa just to get my attention?<br />
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Mika: Food!<br />
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Kit: Mika, that's naughty. It's an expensive piece of furniture, not a bell-pull.<br />
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Mika: Mika mewed, you did not immediately do biddin. You is poor servant. Shouldn't have to tell you twice.<br />
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Kit: Well, if you're going to scratch the sofa, I'm not going to pay attention to you.<br />
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Mika: Oh look, Mika is scratchin sofa! Claws make lovely noise! La la la, scratchy scratchy...<br />
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Kit: My, what a quiet evening it is, with nothing to disturb my attention.<br />
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Mika: Scratchy scratchy...<br />
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Kit: Yes, I do love a serene evening with no one bothering me. <br />
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Mika: Poo. Wants fooood!<br />
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Kit: Oh, hello, sweetie. Was that you mewing? Do you want food?<br />
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Mika: Yeeesss!<br />
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Kit: Well, you had only to ask.<br />
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Mika: Come revolution, you will be first against the wall. Oh look, food! Kit Whitfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623432518060526692noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31552467.post-60294082159433901072013-01-07T18:41:00.000+00:002013-01-07T18:41:23.686+00:00First sentences: Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>March 1, 1998</i><br />The other night, at dinner, Sheba talked about the first time that she and the Connolly boy kissed.</blockquote>
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<i>Notes on a Scandal </i>(or <i>What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal </i>in the US) is a book with a Foreword and a first chapter, but in this instance, I'm going to focus on the Foreword. The narrator, Barbara Covett, is telling us this story with a clear aim in mind: she is in the middle of a national scandal and, without confiding her plans to the woman on whose actions this scandal has turned, plans to publish this account for the public eye later. A history teacher with a tremendous, judgemental preoccupation with education and its power to save you from the 'terrible fate of being "common"', Barbara is clearly an author aware that Forewords are a literary convention. We begin with a Foreword because she knows that books often have them. And it's the act of writing this book itself - or more broadly, the act of inserting herself into Sheba's story - on which the whole disaster rests. Barbara's voice is what we need to understand in order to follow this tale, and Barbara's voice begins in the Foreword.*<br />
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For<i> Notes on a Scandal</i> is a classic example of the unreliable narrator. 'I am presumptuous enough to believe that I am the person best qualified to write this small history,' Barbara declares with false humility in the foreword, and so she is - not because she is the most neutral or perceptive observer, but because Sheba Hart's fall has not only been witnessed but precipitated by Barbara's intervention. This, we will not know until later in the story; later still, the narrative itself, Barbara's 'small history' that we are reading, will be found by Sheba and become a plot point in its own right. There are character narratives like <i>The Turn of the Screw</i> where the speaker's unreliability is seen from above as we peer into their psyches, hearing their accounts as if hearing their thoughts, and there are character narratives like <i>Les Liaisons Dangereuses</i> where the unreliable accounts are part of the story, where the act of writing is an event and forms part of the volatile relationships between character and character. <i>Notes on a Scandal</i> is of the latter kind: both Barbara's personality and her decision to write at all are crucial deciding factors in the course of events. Dark echoes of this outcome resound through her opening statements.<br />
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The opening of the foreword is both tidy-minded, docketing the dates with neat precision, and intimate: confidences are taking place over dinner, and confidences of a scandalous nature: 'Sheba' is named simply, as an adult, while Connolly is a boy, younger. At once it's clear what scandal Barbara is noting, an age-inappropriate relationship between a woman and a boy. What's just as clear, though, is that this intimate confidence is dangerous one, for whoever this narrator is, she is not as sympathetic as one would need a listener to the private details of such an explosive encounter to be. 'The Connolly boy' is dismissive, contemptuous: Barbara speaks of him generically, not as a personality but as a member of a family and an age range, an example of a type who does not merit the use of his first name. It's the voice of a teacher, which Barbara is, used to seeing an ever-changing room full of adolescent faces, and the fact that he has been kissing her confidante evidently does not change her resolution to keep him in that disposable role.<br />
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Barbara's narrative is at once highly emotional - you can hear the bitterness and disgust in every sentence - and superficially calm. Consider the punctuation: 'The other night, at dinner, Sheba talked...' she begins, commas correctly laid out, tenses correctly placed - not 'Sheba was talking', the colloquial tense that would actually be more appropriate considering that in the next sentence Barbara acknowledges that in talking of kissing 'the Connolly boy', Sheba is mostly repeating herself, but the formal 'talked', old-fashioned and purist and studiedly educated, resolutely unstained by the 'proletariat' pupils she teaches. Barbara, class-conscious to the point of paranoia, is not going to be mistaken for an ill-educated person. Though the flow of conversation is continuous, she assumes the storyteller's past perfect 'talked', a grammatical putting down of her foot: an ongoing discourse is clipped into single conversations and pasted down, complete and documented, in this book. Sheba's words are, unbeknownst to her, being collected, and by a woman who is highly aware of the minutest possibilities for self-betrayal that language provides.<br />
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Against the contemptuous, defensive precision of Barbara's narrative, Sheba's name stands out. What to make of it? Contrasted with the ordinariness of the surname 'Connolly', it's exotic to the point of pretentiousness. In a North London context, 'Connolly' has a working-class air; it's a common Irish surname, and while there are plenty of middle-class Irish immigrants in England, the Irish diaspora consisted of many poor people seeking work outside their impoverished homeland; placed alongside the generic 'the ... boy', there is a strong hint that 'Steven Connolly' is not a name that would impress a snob. Sheba, though, is full of implications.<br />
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The names in this book are symbolic, and 'Sheba' is an important choice. Named Bathsheba, invoking both the Biblical adulteress and the mis-marrying Hardy heroine (and referred to, formally, as 'Bathsheba' early in Barbara's foreword, so we immediately know what we're dealing with, a name of marital disaster), this character actually has a variety of presentations. We first see her as 'Sheba' to her colleagues at school, a name less of adultery and divine displeasure than evoking the Queen of Sheba, a name that sounds luxurious and grand, too warm and colourful for her dingy environment. Later, we learn that her family treats her with no such romanticism, shortening Bathsheba to the Beano-style casualness of 'Bash'. Sheba is who she prefers to be, choosing to risk the knockabout family life for an affair with a younger boy to whom she can be, at least for a while, the glamorous Sheba, and it's Sheba that Barbara sees. Bash, the woman with a family and a real life, is not what Barbara is interested in.</div>
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On one level this makes narrative sense: we know people by the names they give us, and if a woman introduces herself to you as one name, you don't start calling her by her family nickname unless she asks you to. On the other hand, the implications of the name are clearly intentional - we are hearing from a woman called Barbara Covett, after all, the sharpness ('barb') and envy of her personality right there on the page - and certainly Barbara is not at all happy to see Sheba in her family setting. Also interesting is that Barbara does not, for several pages, trouble to record Sheba's surname, recording eventually that 'It was at St George's, a little less than eighteen months ago, that I met Bathsheba Hart. Her name will be probably familiar to most of you by now.' 'Hart' is a highly coded choice of name, with its double implication of emotionality, the heart ruling the head, and of potential predation, the hart - that is, the deer - pursued by the hunter who is telling us this story. By leaving this surname out of her first mention of Sheba, Barbara both invokes an assumption of friendship with a woman she is clearly not as sympathetic to as Sheba, sharing scandal, believes her to be, and spreads the symbolic load over a few pages, giving us time to absorb it. </div>
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Sheba, with her not-entirely-likeable name - overblown, too sensuous to fit comfortably with a story of intergenerational sex, and in the England where this story takes place it's also the name of a brand of gourmet cat food besides, an earthy undertone that makes the name wobble on the borderline between romantic and ridiculous - is in trouble. She's confiding not just the facts, but the close details, of a course of action one can most sympathetically consider rash and, if unsympathetic, predatory and corrupt. (And whether or not her affair with Steven Connolly is indeed harmful to him is hard for the reader to judge, dependent as we are on Barbara's perspective, for Barbara has absolutely no interest in his wellbeing and speaks of him only to sneer; to her, he is a rival for Sheba's affection, and she has about as much sympathy for her rivals as Catullus.) Sheba has done something illegal, something undoubtedly harmful to her husband and children, and potentially harmful to her young lover as well, and she's talking all about it to someone who may be eager to refer to her on first-name terms and to listen to her over dinner, but who does not have any patience with the feelings so so intimately discloses. She is far more vulnerable than she realises. </div>
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Do we like Sheba in this book? Not necessarily. It's hard to like anyone in this book, presented as they are through Barbara's acid prose; Sheba's actions are hard to defend, and her justifications, such as we can understand them based on Barbara's account, are not very sympathetic. (Mostly, she tends to veer off into abstractions about the nature of love, attraction or morality as quickly as possible so as to avoid the concrete issue of what she's actually doing.) But we are afraid for her. She is caught in the first sentence like a butterfly in a web, and she will never escape.<br />
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*Interesting side-note - I originally looked up the book on Amazon 'read inside' rather than getting it up off the high shelf it occupies in my house. Don't do that: Amazon landed me on the first sentence of the first chapter, not the Foreword, and I wrote several paragraphs on it. Having realised my mistake, I then rewrote ... and having done so, I found that the paragraphs on the first chapter's first sentence had been rendered moot. Evidence, I would suggest, that the 'Foreword' is, functionally speaking, a first chapter rather than an aside.Kit Whitfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623432518060526692noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31552467.post-42340368891151348682012-12-31T09:46:00.002+00:002012-12-31T10:11:29.422+00:00First sentences: Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck<blockquote class="tr_bq">
A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green.</blockquote>
<br />
The landscape outlasts the characters in this book: we begin with a future death scene.<br />
<br />
According to his star, John Wayne, the famous Westerns director John Ford used to say (quoted from memory, as I no longer have the video on which he said it), 'Give them the scene then give them the scenery, give them the scenery then give them the scene, but you can't give both at once.' Whether or not this dictum was influenced by the novels of John Steinbeck, that great maker of Americana, it's probably hard to say, but Steinbeck is writing of the people of a place, and even in so short a book as <i>Of Mice and Men</i>, the place must have its moment before its people if we are to feel, as they do, the weight of the landscape. We begin in the big, empty landscape that will loom against the loneliness of every soul in this book.<br />
<br />
What we don't know, until we reread the novel, is that we're seeing a place that is, pre-emptively, haunted. The two men who will enter it on the next page will finish the story here too, and one of them will die at the hands of the other. Not a murder, but something sadder: a man whose mental incapacity has finally created a situation that will destroy him, and his best friend offering the only protection left to him - a quick, kind death at his hands rather than a slow, cruel one at the hands of his pursuers. Inevitability is in the wind, and tragedy. This isn't just a setting: it's a warning, a funeral in advance, like a river flowing uphill.<br />
<br />
Even the name of the landscape is melancholic and forboding: 'Soledad' may be a town in California, but the word itself means 'solitude'. 'Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world,' George tells his simple-minded friend Lennie in a practiced, repeated bedtime story, and the setting does not contradict him. Etymologically, we're a few miles south of solitude, just about as alone as it gets.<br />
<br />
We are alone here, without even the characters to keep us company. More than that, we are alone in the same way the characters will be: in the present tense. They will be written in the past tense, but we see things as if we were standing right there, characters in our own right. The Salinas river 'drops in' - not 'dropped in', but 'drops', a river that will outlive the men who pass it: Lennie and George may go in and out of the landscape, but its time will exceed theirs, and probably ours too. What we see is a place that exists outside the human span. Lennie and George will bring with them the conventional narrative past tense - though even then, their past-tense coming will be heralded by the landscape: 'Evening of a hot day started the little wind to moving among the leaves,' the third paragraph begins, and we hear their footsteps and see the birds take flight before they finally enter the book in its last sentence - but what we are seeing is a place that just <i>is</i>. It has melancholic human names, but it doesn't care about people. We see it first as if we were walking through it, for everyone lives in their own present-tense narrative, and it feels eternal. We come to it, and it is unaffected by our presence. <br />
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The present tense also gives the feeling that the narrative is informing us - which it is, of course, but informing us about more than just geography. While Steinbeck's language is plain, it is also evocative - and after the bleak name of 'Soledad', we see unions begin to creep in. The river 'drops in close' and 'runs deep', language that, while not quite metaphorical, suggests a river in motion not just in the flow of its water but in the curve of its bed, as if the river itself were walking through the landscape, hugging the hill for company - almost as if its depth were refreshed by the hill's companionable presence. The rhythm of its movement is balanced, almost musical, the three beats of 'drops in close' balanced by the three beats of 'hillside bank', followed up by the sweet assonance of 'deep and green': while 'Soledad' is lonely and 'Salinas', 'salty', sounds sterile (the river actually isn't, but it's there in the name), there is a sense of revival by the linking of these two geographical features. Likewise, there's a sense of pairing between those two names - both foreign to us, readers of English confronted with a double strike of Spanish, but there's consistency between the two. It makes the landscape sound the more alienating to our Anglo protagonists, hiking as they are through a land named by another culture, but this is a sentence, nonetheless, of pairings. Beginning with solitude, we see a world where even the geography seems to hunger for company - where to be 'close' to something, even something as dissimilar as a hill to a river, makes experience 'deep and green', less parched than before.<br />
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Which is, of course, a foreshadowing of the novel's theme: burdensome and maddening though George often experiences Lennie to be, he is a companion in a world of isolation, a bringer of meaning and comfort even with all the discomforts that life as the protector of an overgrown child can involve. As the paragraph continues, the water begins 'twinkling', we see trees, lizards, rabbits, racoons, dogs, deer: in a big landscape, this is a place of relative comfort. The river hugging the hill has created a place that draws people, as the second paragraph shows us with a path 'beaten hard' by workers and tramps coming to rest here. The shadow of solitude falls over us, but this is a place where things come together, and their union - hill and bank, trees and animals - creates a kinder environment that people seek out for comfort.<br />
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We are without people in this first sentence, entering the landscape slowly - it's a big place, and it takes time to travel. What we see is a place of lushness, despite the harsh human names, a place where things can act together to create a sweeter space. But the sweetness won't last; in the end, it will be a place of peace, but only the peace of death; a place of comfort, but only the comfort of a few last seconds of company before the horror falls. What we are hearing is not a celebration, but an elegy, and the companionable landscape only makes the coming failure of human relationships, the impending solitude, all the more poignant.Kit Whitfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623432518060526692noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31552467.post-61720830303199915062012-12-26T12:34:00.001+00:002012-12-27T09:51:56.293+00:00Mikalogue - happy Christmas Tracy!First of all, apologies to Tracy and Jolyon: somehow your request for a charity Mikalogue ended up in my spam filter and I've only just come across it. Tracy: Jolyon has bought you a Mikalogue for Christmas!<br />
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Mika: ...Is dreamin of a dry Christmas, just like the ones Mika used to know...<br />
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Kit: Do you mean a white Christmas, sweetheart?<br />
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Mika: Nope. Is rainin and rainin and rainin Christmas. Need to go out and patrol, but world is throwin water! Not fair.<br />
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Kit: Do you really need to go patrol, honey?<br />
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Mika: Hasn't Kit heard? Is goin to be foreign invaders!<br />
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Kit: Honey, are you getting paranoid again?<br />
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Mika: No! Is big spiky cats with horns on heads going to land and eat mince kibbles! Got to patrol! Defcat One!<br />
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Kit: Do you mean Santa's reindeer, honey? I think you've got it a bit mixed up.<br />
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Mika: Is you cat?<br />
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Kit: Well, no.<br />
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Mika: Then knows nothin! Territory disputes General Mika the Mighty's province. Got to go and shoo off spiky invaders or will have shame before neighbourhood cats. Make go away!<br />
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Kit: Um - General Mika, field scout Kit reporting. It seems there may have been some disinformation spread in recent months concerning reindeer.<br />
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Mika: SPY!!!<br />
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Kit: What? I'm not a spy!<br />
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Mika: Is too! Heard you sayin to Daddy that Santa should come cos you've been good all year.<br />
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Kit: Well, I have been soldiering away on rewrites and trying to be a good mum, yes...<br />
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Mika: YES! Heard you with big military-issue fluffy ears! You KNOW the clawheads is comin and you pretend otherwise! REPORT YOU! SPY! DOUBLE AGENT KIT! Court martial and stockades! You is for it, spy Kit!<br />
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Kit: Er - would you settle for some extra Christmas fish treats instead?<br />
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Mika: Ooh, fish treats! Gimme.<br />
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Kit: There you go, puss.<br />
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Mika: Mmmm. God rest you merry fishy treats let nothing you delay, Remember Mika Mighty Puss must always have her way, And reindeers do not mess with Mika for it doesn't pay, Oh tidings of fishy treats and kibble, fishy treats and kibble, oh gimme more for Mika deserves fishy treats!Kit Whitfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07623432518060526692noreply@blogger.com1