Anonymous: A Treatise on Vampires

In posting this piece as Prose of the Month, I'm really just maintaining continuity. Its main virtue is that it makes some attempt to analyse the psychology of vampirism, which has received less attention than its well-known physical manifestations.

Wyndham Lewis' Taxi-Cab-Driver Test: 3. "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit" by Sloan Wilson.

For an explanation of the Test, see the first number in this series. Here now is the first page of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit by Sloan Wilson (no relation).

By the time they had lived seven years in the little house on Greentree Avenue in Westport, Connecticut, they both detested it. There were many reasons, none of them logical, but all of them compelling. For one thing, the house had a kind of evil genius for displaying proof of their weaknesses and wiping out all traces of their strengths. The ragged lawn and weed-filled garden proclaimed to passers-by and the neighbors that Thomas R. Rath and his family disliked "working around the place" and couldn't afford to pay someone else to do it. The interior of the house was even more vengeful. In the living room there was a big dent in the plaster near the floor, with a huge crack curving up from it in the shape of a question mark. That wall was damaged in the fall of 1952, when, after struggling for months to pay up the back bills, Tom came home one night to find that Betsy had bought a cut-glass vase for forty dollars. Such an extravagant gesture was utterly unlike her, at least since the war. Betsy was a conscientious household manager, and usually when she did something Tom didn't like, they talked the matter over with careful reasonableness. But on that particular night, Tom was tired and worried because he himself had just spent seventy dollars on a new suit he felt he needed to dress properly for his business, and at the climax of a heated argument, he picked up the vase and heaved it against the wall. The heavy glass shattered, the plaster cracked and two of the lathes behind it broke. The next morning, Tom and Betsy worked together on their knees to patch the plaster, and they repainted the whole wall, but when the paint dried, the big dent near the floor with the crack curving up from it almost to the ceiling in the shape of a question was still clearly visible. The fact that the crack was in the shape of a question mark did not seem symbolic to Tom and Betsy, nor even amusing - it was just annoying. Its peculiar shape caused people to stare at it abstractedly, and once at a cocktail party one of the guests who had had a little too much to drink said, "Say, that's funny. Did you ever notice that big question mark on your wall?"
   "It's only a crack," Tom replied.
   "But why should it be in the shape of a question mark?"
   "It's just coincidence."
   "That's funny," the guest said.

   The response of some readers may be that, in contrast to the previous two novels tested, this is not a literary novel. I would contend that such a response represents a vulgar idea of the 'literary' as something dense and overstocked with conceits. By the 'literary' I would rather understand writing in which the subject-matter and the surface of the words are given equal attention, with neither predominating. In the present case, the author's art takes the form of making this surface completely transparent, virtually avoiding metaphor and other rhetorical figures (the only conspicuous example of rhetoric is his personification of the house as vengeful and having an evil genius) , concentrating on putting the right word in its right place, and ensuring that his sentences are well-balanced and sinewy. In further pursuit of this ideal, Wilson also avoids encumbering his two opening paragraphs with a mass of personal background material. Thus, the characters are introduced en passant, and the reader is left, for instance, to make the inference that Betsy is Tom's wife.
   Who, then, are these characters? In Tom and Betsy we encounter a couple for whom the American Dream has not quite materialised. They lack the disposable income even to get the plaster repaired in their living room. They appear to emulate smart society by holding cocktail parties, but only because they haven't the resources to give their guests dinner. Is all this about to change, and if so, for the better or for the worse? Does either of them have a past? To find out, you'll have to read the novel. Anyway, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit passes the Test, and I'm currently reading it.
   The novel was reissued as a paperback in 2002, but as it was a best-seller when it was first published in 1955, there are second-hand hardbacks to be had online. It was also made into a film, released in 1956.

Flaubert and the Bible

I've been thinking about Flaubert - I always return to thinking about him from time to time. Everyone knows him as the author of Madame Bovary, a work that (according to his own account) bored him to near-suicide during the writing of it. He really wanted to write imaginative works, principally The Temptation of St. Anthony, which appalled his literary friends when he read it to them. They persuaded him that he should write about his own time - the result was Madame Bovary. Another book that he wanted to write was the three novellas published under the title Three Tales. I've long wanted to imitate him by writing (before the darkness closes in) a Biblical tale modelled on Herodias (the third of the three) - something totally unpublishable, of course, except on the Internet. Unfortunately, I've also come to fear that Flaubert collared the only tractable subject-matter in the Bible, that is, the only story amenable to fictional treatment.
   Biblical characters fall into two main kinds: people who are legendary, and have no insides, like mobile statues; and supernatural beings, whose bodies are mere simulacra, and have no 'lives' in the human sense at all (in The Library of Babel, Borges quips about 'the autobiographies of archangels'). You have to rewrite the Bible, like Robert Graves in King Jesus, in order to deal with them. In contrast, Herod Antipas and Herodias were historical characters: we know something about them, apart from their brief appearances in the New Testament (Antipas puts John the Baptist to death at the instigation of Salome and Herodias, and later turns up during the last days of Jesus). We even know something about their end. Antipas was banished to Gaul by Caligula, who suspected him of plotting rebellion, and was voluntarily accompanied there by his wife Herodias. They never returned to the Holy Land. This, by the way, is evidence that the Herod family was not always wildly dysfunctional. But where else in the Bible can one find literary inspiration? I've written a short story about 'life' in the Heavenly City called The Crystalline Piazza (the title story of my recently published collection), but that's a treatment of a Biblical idea rather than a Biblical tale. Nevertheless, I still have hope that inspiration lies there, in some tiny seed, perhaps consisting of a single verse.
   In conclusion, let's just remind ourselves of how little Flaubert's story was based upon:

3. For Herod had laid hold on John, and bound him, and put him in prison for Herodias' sake, his brother Philip's wife.
4. For John said unto him, It is not lawful for thee to have her.
5. And when he would have put him to death, he feared the multitude, because they counted him as a prophet.
6. But when Herod's birthday was kept, the daughter of Herodias danced before them, and pleased Herod.
7. Whereupon he promised with an oath to give her whatsoever she would ask.
8. And she, being before instructed of her mother, said, Give me here John Baptist's head in a charger.
9. And the king was sorry: nevertheless for the oath's sake, and them which sat with him at meat, he commanded it to be given her.
10. And he sent, and beheaded John in the prison.
11. And his head was brought in a charger, and given to the damsel: and she brought it to her mother.

(Matthew 14:3-11)

Palindromic Poetry

Every time I read Montaigne's essay Of vaine Subtilties, or subtill Devices, I feel a little ashamed of my continued interest in this subject. Should I feel more or less ashamed that there are only a handful of successful attempts at this genre? More ashamed to contemplate such a waste of ingenuity; or less ashamed, as there is so little to detain my interest? Let me make one thing clear before I go any further. By a palindromic poem, I mean one that is a palindrome from start to finish, not the inferior sort (which I don't regard at all), made up of a series of palindromic lines. You'll now begin to understand why there are so few attempts on record, let alone successful attempts.
   Both kinds are a species of Pattern Poetry, since the requirement to read the same both ways is a visual, not a poetic limitation. Some will cavil at this judgement. "Wait a moment," I can hear someone saying, "isn't a rhyme-scheme a visual limitation? This would make anything but blank verse into Pattern Poetry." I reply, that with a rhyme-scheme it is the repetition of sound that determines it, not the repetition of letters. So, "tough" and "ruff" are perfect rhymes, while "flaunt" and "aunt" are not (at least, not in Standard English). All the same, the unity conferred by the palindrome cannot compare with other patterns, such as being squeezed into a lozenge, or having to seek meaning in a labyrinth of letters. The palindrome meanders through the verses like the constellation of Eridanus across the night sky, until it reaches the centre, whereupon it meanders back to the inevitable conclusion. This unity gives it the charm of an amulet or mantra. But is this all I mean by 'success'? Emphatically not. It must also be a poem, however understated or obscure. It must also have at least one image, however veiled or disjointed. This is why there is one palindromic poem that stands above all others. I mean, Hymn to the Moon by Graham Reynolds. It could have been written by an Ancient Greek and engraved on a stone mirror; it could be a lost fragment of Sappho. Instead, it first appeared in "New Departures", an avant-garde poetry magazine, in 1960.
   Who knows, perhaps Montaigne might have conceded that it is not vain, and that its subtlety, like the best subtlety, lies submerged beneath the limpid surface of a forgotten pool.

HYMN TO THE MOON

Luna, nul one,
Moon, nemo,
Drown word.
In mutual autumn
I go;
Feel fog rob all life,
Fill labor,
Go, flee fog.
In mutual autumn
I drown.
Word; omen; no omen.
O, Luna, nul.

   As for the composition of palindomic poems, I can't give any advice, other than the obvious recommendation, to begin in the middle of the poem and work outwards, hoping that you will eventually find a way to open (and, of course, close) it. Here is one of my own efforts, which began from the single word 'turnip'. Its reverse, 'pin rut', could obviously be expanded into other words, and the rest of the poem crystallised around it. It also suggested an agricultural labourer working in the fields, and this provided the theme of the poem. You'll notice too that it shares a certain melancholy character with Hymn to the Moon.

THE LABOURER

Loop mid a sun ever up, say bees won,
I draw; snowed on, flow,
Live on rota. Red now is eve:
Too far its stars.

Worn, I turn,
I spin ruts,
Turnips in rut, in rows.
Rats stir afoot.

Eves I wonder at, or no evil:
Wolf; no dew on sward.
I now see by (as pure Venus)
A dim pool.

Wyndham Lewis' Taxi-Cab-Driver Test: 2. "Possession" by A.S. Byatt

I explained the principle of the Test in the introduction to No. 1 of this series (see below). So, without further ado, let us have the first page of Possession by A.S. Byatt:

These things are there. The garden and the tree
The serpent at its root, the fruit of gold
The woman in the shadow of the boughs
The running water and the grassy space.
They are and were there. At the old world's rim,
In the Hesperidean grove, the fruit
Glowed golden on eternal boughs, and there
The dragon Ladon crisped his jewelled crest
Scraped a gold claw and sharped a silver tooth
And dozed and waited through eternity
Until the tricksy hero Herakles
Came to his dispossession and the theft.
--Randolph Henry Ash, from The Garden of Proserpina, 1861


The book was thick and black and covered with dust. Its boards were bowed and creaking; it had been maltreated in its own time. Its spine was missing, or rather protruded from amongst the leaves like a bulky marker. It was bandaged about and about with dirty white tape, tied in a neat bow. The librarian handed it to Roland Michell, who was sitting waiting for it in the Reading Room of the London Library. It had been exhumed from Locked Safe no. 5 where it usually stood between Pranks of Priapus and The Grecian Way of Love. It was ten in the morning, one day in September 1986. Roland had the small single table he liked best, behind a square pillar, with the clock over the fireplace nevertheless in full view. To his right was a high sunny window, through which you could see the high green leaves of St. James's Square.
The London Library was Roland's favourite place. It was shabby but civilised, alive with history but inhabited also by living poets and thinkers who could be found squatting on the slotted metal floors of the stacks, or arguing pleasantly at the turning of the stair. Here Carlyle had come, here George Eliot had progressed through the bookshelves. Roland saw her black silk skirts, her velvet trains, sweeping compressed between the Fathers of the Church, and heard her firm foot ring on metal among the German poets. Here Randolph Henry Ash had come, cramming his elastic mind and memory with unconsidered trifles from History and Topography, from the felicitous alphabetical conjunctions of Science
and Miscellaneous--Dancing, Deaf and Dumb, Death, Dentistry, Devil and Demonology, Distribution, Dogs, Domestic Servants, Dreams. In his day, works on Evolution had been catalogued under Pre-Adamite Man. Roland had only recently discovered that the London Library possessed Ash's own copy of Vico's Principj di Scienza Nuova. Ash's books were most regrettably scattered across Europe and America. By far the largest single gathering was of course in the Stant Collection at Robert Dale Owen University in New Mexico, where Mortimer Cropper worked on his monumental edition of the Complete Correspondence of Randolph Henry Ash. That was no problem nowadays, books travelled the aether like light and sound. But it was just possible that Ash's own Vico had marginalia missed even by the indefatigable Cropper. And Roland was looking for sources for Ash's Garden of Proserpina. And there was a pleasure to be had from reading the sentences Ash had read, touched with his fingers, scanned with his eyes.

The epigraph with which the novel opens is offered as an extract from the work of Randolph Henry Ash, a mid-victorian poetaster of Swinburnian tendencies. Only, it is doubtful whether Byatt intends Ash to be thought of in that light (someone whose only attraction is his obscurity), or whether she intends him to be a good poet but lacks the ability to write a convincing pastiche of Swinburne. Certainly, Ash's blank verse, eked out with line-filling phrases such as "These things are there" and "They are and were there", and depleted by weak imagery ("grassy space"), shares with Swinburne only its mythological stage-properties - though even in this department it confuses the Garden of Proserpina with the Garden of the Hesperides, the one that has the golden apples and the guardian serpent.
   Quantities of verse in novels (such as the cantos of John Shade's autobiography that precede Nabokov's Pale Fire), can usually be skipped; the prose narrative cannot. When we turn to the first chapter proper, we are introduced to the scholar Roland Michell, who has gone to the London Library in order to consult a book once owned by Ash. The book arrives, and Michell examines it. It's obvious at once that not only is Byatt's prose as pedestrian as Ash's verse, but that it lacks the editorial input (Byatt is rumoured to resist creative editing) that would have red-pencilled the repetition of "high sunny windows" and "high green leaves", hackneyed phrases such as "alive with history" and "unconsidered trifles", and the polysyllabic humour of "felicitous alphabetical constructions". A good editor would also have pointed out to the author that a book stored in a locked safe would not be covered in dust. But to sharpen up the slack sentences that follow one another in no particular order would go far beyond an editor's normal role. The book would have to be rewritten. In fact, it would have to be written by somebody else.
   The cynical calculation might have been made that the target readership of the novel would not notice such things. The first page tells us at least something about what they would be looking for. One of the components of the High Ladylike Style (which is the arrow that is being aimed at this particular target) is an undue reverence towards its subject-matter that some might also call sentimentality. Thus, the Library, the world inhabited by Roland Michell, is described not as learned, secluded, or monastic, but as 'civilised', and the author shows no awareness of the comic possibilities of its inhabitants as she describes them, squatting on its iron walkways like Barbary apes. On the contrary, the reader is expected to admire them, as well as, of course, the stumbling poetaster Ash himself, with his 'elastic mind and memory'. The general tone of the writing is one of confidence that the novel's readership will reward this reverence with corresponding reverence for the author. This confidence proved to be well-founded. Possession was awarded the Booker Prize for 1990. It was listed by Time Magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the Twentieth Century. "The Times" named Byatt as one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.

Geulincx: "Miscellaneous Questions"

The philosophy of Arnold Geulincx is lately becoming somewhat better known, with English translations of his Ethics and Metaphysics now available. His two favourite mottos, which pervade his philosophy like a pair of refrains, Wherein you have no power, therein you should not will, and What you do not know how to do, is not your action, are not (as I have remarked elsewhere) doctrines to be set before persons of a nervous disposition - and this is as it should be. But in Quaestiones Quodlibeticae (1653), an early work, we find Geulincx in a much lighter mood.
The Quaestiones are not so much philosophy as exercises in cleverness. They are intended to display the fact that the author can argue for and against a thesis with equal facility, and in language whose changes of pace and verbal pyrotechnics seek to dazzle the reader. The one that I have chosen to translate here (no. 20) as Prose of the Month, under the title of The Tedium of Life, perhaps comes closer to philosophy than any of the others. And indeed, it contains some sound proverbial advice. Moreover, Geulincx was to rework some of its ideas in Treatise IV of the Ethics, in the sections on The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, where the Devil is daringly defined in an abstract way as the temptation to 'continue with what you have begun', a sentiment placed here in the mouth not of the Devil but of Melancholy.

Wyndham Lewis' Taxi-Cab-Driver Test: 1. "The Spire" by William Golding

In Men Without Art (1934), Wyndham Lewis proposed the "taxi-cab-driver test" for fiction. The idea is that one should examine a random page from a novel (though the two examples he selected were both opening pages) on the assumption that it represents the kind of intellectual object that the novel is as a whole (even, whether it is fiction at all). I am shortly going to apply the test to the first page of William Golding's novel The Spire (1964).
   There are some novels for which the choice of the first page would be inappropriate. I mean those novels where the author has expended what was probably an enormous effort to make the first page or first paragraph a prose poem that is quite unrepresentative of the rest of the novel. Such novels then commonly lapse into something else, such as pages of dialogue or background material. In this case, however, it is quite appropriate. Golding goes on exactly as he begins, and the first page displays the faults and virtues of the novel to an extraordinary degree. (And by the way, I intend to make the taxi-cab-driver test a regular feature of the blog). So here is the first page of The Spire. Note that, as the text begins an unusually long way down the first page, I have included a portion of the second page in order to bring the sample up to page length.

He was laughing, chin up, and shaking his head. God the Father was exploding in his face with a glory of sunlight through painted glass, a glory that moved with his movements to consume and exalt Abraham and Isaac and then God again. The tears of laughter in his eyes made additional spokes and wheels and rainbows.
   Chin up, hands holding the model spire before him, eyes half closed; joy -
   "I've waited half my life for this day!"
   Opposite him, the other side of the model of the cathedral on its trestle table, stood the chancellor, his face dark with shadow, over ancient pallor.
   "I don't know, my Lord Dean. I don't know."
   He peered across at the model of the spire, where Jocelin held it firmly in both hands. His voice was bat-thin, and wandered vaguely into the large, high air of the chapter house.
   "But if you consider that this small piece of wood - how long is it?"
   "Eighteen inches, my Lord Chancellor."
   "Eighteen inches. Yes. Well. It represents, does it not, a construction of wood and stone and metal -"
   "Four hundred feet high."
   The chancellor moved out into sunlight, hands up to his chest, and peered around him. He looked up at the roof. Jocelin looked sideways at him, loving him.
   "The foundations. I know. But God will provide."
   The chancellor had found what he was looking for, a memory.
   "Ah yes."
   Then, in ancient busyness, he crept away over the pavement to the door and through it. He left a message, in the air behind him.
   "Mattins. Of course."
   Jocelin stood still, and shot an arrow of love after him.

   The Spire is set at an unspecified time in the Middle Ages. Jocelin, the Dean of a Cathedral, is obsessed with building a four hundred foot spire on top of the Cathedral. All the men around him have misgivings about the wisdom of this enterprise. It has often been stated that Golding was inspired by Salisbury Cathedral, but there are reasons for supposing that the true inspiration came from Wells, not Salisbury. Wells Cathedral was begun in 1180, but much of the construction, including its spire, took place under Bishop (not Dean) Jocelin, who held the See of Bath from 1206 to 1242. His spire caused the central pillars of the Cathedral to sink, and the vaulting had to be reinforced. When the spire was destroyed by fire in the Fifteenth Century, it was considered too risky to replace it, and Wells remains spireless to this day. So much by way of background.
   At the beginning of the novel, we meet two of the principal characters, Dean Jocelin and the Chancellor, standing beneath the glory of the stained-glass windows of the Chapter House. This glory is marred by several elements of the writing: the shocking carelessness of "moved with his movements" (why not simply "moved with him"?); the melodramatic gestures of Jocelin ("laughing, chin up, and shaking his head"); and the awkwardness of the imagery in "The tears of laughter in his eyes made additional spokes and wheels and rainbows". But it is not only the sunlight pouring in through the stained-glass windows that moves Jocelin to such transports. The model of the new spire is now complete.
   This would naturally have been an opportunity for the author, through Jocelin, to make known to the reader the justification for the enterprise. But the brief conversation that ensues is inarticulate, frigid, and abruptly terminated, after an 'I must be going now' moment, by the unconscious humour of "He [the Chancellor] left a message, in the air behind him." Finally, another comic line follows, calling up an unwanted image of Cupid and his bow: "Jocelin....shot an arrow of love after him."
   The novel was neither a critical nor a popular success, though for creditable reasons and not because it is badly written, or because it has characters who are given to throwing back their heads and laughing. The age did not want to read about the ambition of a mediaeval cleric to celebrate in stone the greater glory of God. Golding, I need hardly say, was a much better writer than the evidence of The Spire would imply. His first published novel, Lord of the Flies, has rightly become a classic, and he followed up The Spire with the excellent The Scorpion God (1971), a collection of three imaginative novellas. During the 1980s he lapsed again, and devoted the rest of his career to writing tedious Booker Prize novels. The Spire is still in print, and continues to divide readers.

The Prating Portmanteau: can anything be saved for the reader out of Finnegans Wake?

...And I mean for the reader for pleasure, not for the academics who spend their careers studying the book. In a moment, I am going to quote a readable passage from Finnegans Wake. Of course, it's tolerably well-known that when the book was in its inception as Work in Progress, it had many readable passages, some of them published as standalone pieces. But they were then systematically obscured and obliterated by the hyperallusive word-formation with which Joyce processed the hell out of them. Here is one (pp380-82) that escaped only lightly touched - it is, in fact, the germ of the work. It's a whimsical portrait of how, after a banquet, when all the guests have departed, Roderick O'Conor, the High King of Ireland, laps up the spillages left by the drinkers.

King Roderick O' Conor, the paramount chief polemarch and last preelectric king of Ireland, who was anything you say yourself
between fiftyodd and fiftyeven years of age at the time after the
socalled last supper he greatly gave in his umbrageous house of
the hundred bottles with the radio beamer tower and its hangars,
chimbneys and equilines or, at least, he wasn't actually the then
last king of all Ireland for the time being for the jolly good
reason that he was still such as he was the eminent king of all
Ireland himself after the last preeminent king of all Ireland, the
whilom joky old top that went before him in the Taharan
dynasty, King Arth Mockmorrow Koughenough of the leathered
leggions, now of parts unknown, (God guard his generous
comicsongbook soul!) that put a poached fowl in the poor man's
pot before he took to his pallyass with the weeping eczema for
better and worse until he went under the grass quilt on us,
nevertheless, the year the sugar was scarce, and we to lather and shave
and frizzle him, like a bald surging buoy and himself down
to three cows that was meat and drink and dogs and washing
to him, 'tis good cause we have to remember it, going through
summersultryngs of snow and sleet witht the widow Nolan's
goats and the Brownes girls neats anyhow, wait till I tell you,
what did he do, poor old Roderick O' Conor Rex, the
auspicious waterproof monarch of all Ireland, when he found
himself all alone by himself in his grand old handwedown pile after
all of them had all gone off with themselves to their castles of mud, as best they cud, on footback, owing to the leak of the McCarthy's mare, in extended order, a tree's length from the longest way out, down the switchbackward slidder of the landsown route of Hauburnea's liveliest vinnage on the brain, the unimportant Parthalonians with the mouldy Firbolgs and the Tuatha de Danaan googs and the ramblers from Clane and all the rest of the notmuchers that he did not care the royal spit out of his ostensible mouth about, well, what do you think he did, sir, but, faix, he just went heeltapping through the winespilth and weevily popcorks that were kneedeep round his own right royal round rollicking toper's table, with his old Roderick Random pullon hat at a Lanty Leary cant on him and Mike Brady's shirt and Greene's linnet collarbow and his Ghenter's gaunts and his Macclefield's swash and his readymade Reillys and his panprestuberian poncho, the body you'd pity him, the way the world is, poor he, the heart of Midleinster and the supereminent lord of them all, overwhelmed as he was with black ruin like a sponge out of water, allocutioning in bellcantos to his own oliverian society MacGuiney's Dreans of Ergen Adams and thruming through all to himself with diversed tonguesed through his old tears and his ould plaised drawl, starkened by the most regal of belches, like a blurney Cashelmagh crooner that lerking Clare air, the blackberd's ballad I've a terrible errible lot todue todie todue tootorribleday, well, what did he go and do at all, His Most Exuberant Majesty King Roderick O'Conor but, arrah bedamnbut, he finalised by lowering his woolly throat with the wonderful midnight thirst was on him, as keen as mustard, he could not tell what he did ale, that bothered he was from head to tail, and, wishawishawish, leave it, what the Irish, boys, can do, if he didn't go, sliggymaglooral reemyround and suck up, sure enough, like a Trojan, in some particular cases with the assistance of his venerated tongue, whatever surplus rotgut, sorra much, was left by the lazy lousers of maltknights and beerchurls in the different bottoms of the various different replenquished drinking utensils left there behind them on the premisses by that whole hogsheaded firkin family, the departed honourable homegoers and other sly-grogging suburbanites, such as it was, fall and fall about, to the brindishing of his charmed life, as toastified by his cheeriubicundenances, no matter whether it was chateaubottled Guiness's or Phoenix brewery stout it was or John Jameson and Sons or Roob Coccola or, for the matter of that, O'Connell's famous old Dublin ale that he wanted like hell, more that halibut oil or jesuits tea, as a fall back, of several different quantities and qualities amounting in all to, I should say, considerably more than the better part of a gill or naggin of imperial dry and liquid measure till, welcome be from us here, till the rising of the morn, till that hen of Kaven's shows her beaconegg, and Chapwellswendows stain our horyhistoricold and Father MacMichael stamps for aitch o'clerk mess and the Litvian Newestlatter is seen, sold and delivered and all's set for restart after the silence, like his ancestors to this day after him (that the blazings of their ouldmouldy gods may attend to them we pray!), overopposides the cowery lad in the corner and forenenst the staregaze of the cathering candled, that adornment of his album and folkenfather of familyans, he came acrash a crupper sort of a sate on accomondation and the very boxst in all his composs, whereuponce, behome the fore for cove and trawlers, heave hone, leave lone, Larry's on the focse and Faugh MacHugh O'Bawlar at the wheel, one to do and one to dare, par by par, a peerless pair, ever here and over there, with his fol the dee oll the doo on the flure of his feats and the feels of the fumes in the wakes of his ears our wineman from Barleyhome he just slumped to throne.

   There you have it: a slice of the 'blarneyest blather' in all Ireland (see the second quotation, below). "Whoi, listen to me, and oi'll tell ye something that after ye've heard it, ye'll be wanting that I should have told it to ye, etc." (It's a commonplace that Finnegans Wake makes better sense when read out in a stage Irish accent). Some, taking it more seriously, will see it as an allegory of the process of composition of Finnegans Wake itself. But it is all the same fairly readable. A few references might require a little dipping into works of reference, but they eventually yield up their meaning. If Joyce had persisted with this vein, he might even have developed into a comic writer in the manner of Flann O'Brien. But he had larger ambitions.
   One should note that there are a number of plain passages in Finnegans Wake, passages where the process has not been used at all. These are where the purpose was to imitate other styles (such as the complex case in Roman Law on pp572-3), where processing them would have defeated the purpose. What I have looked for is passages like that quoted above. Unfortunately, there seem to be very few of them. But can one make anything of somewhat denser portions of the text? For example, this passage that follows the Fable of the Ondt and the Gracehoper on p419,

In the name of the former and of the latter and of their
holocaust. Allmen.
-- Now? How good you are in explosition! How farflung is
your fokloire and how velktingeling your volupkabulary! Qui
vive sparanto qua muore contanto. O foibler, O flip, you've that
wandervogl wail withyin ! It falls easily upon the earopen and goes
down the friskly shortiest like treacling tumtim with its
tingtingtaggle. The blarneyest blather in all Corneywall! But could you,
of course, decent Lettrechaun, we knew (to change your name if
not your nation) while still in the barrel, read the strangewrote
anaglyptics of those shemletters patent for His Christian's Em?

Unlike the earlier passage quoted, this is more typical of the Wake as a whole. It's akin to a cryptic crossword puzzle, with this difference, that it demands of the reader an encyclopaedic degree of knowledge ('how farflung is your fokloire and how velktingeling your volupkabulary'), not excluding knowledge of James Joyce himself. 'Lettrechaun', for example, is made up of at least leprechaun, lettre, and Shaun, the last being the twin brother of Shem, who throughout the Wake represents Joyce ('Shem the Penman'). This also explains how Shem knew Shaun 'while still in the barrel' (the womb). Again, 'volupkabulary' includes at least Volapük (the artificial language), voluptuous, and vocabulary. 'His Christian's Em' is one of the innumerable acrostics for Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, the dreamer of the dream that is Finnegans Wake. And so on. Another century of Joyce scholarship might tease out every last allusion in the text, barring thoughts that flashed across Joyce's mind in the course of composition, and which cannot now be reconstructed. But this will not make it more interesting to read. Perhaps less interesting, conceivably, because what emerges after even a partial lifting of the veil is little better than chatter. On the other hand, by then, perhaps, they will have invented a machine that will read books for us as well as write them.

Walter Pater: Marius the Epicurean, Chapter 27 (extract)

I don't need to say much about my choice of Prose of the Month for December, which speaks eloquently for itself. Its theme is the melancholy that is likely to overtake someone who knows that he will have no descendants, whenever he confronts his ancestors (including his younger self), having failed in his principal duty to them - to perpetuate them. Pater has sometimes been criticised for his fussiness and digressions, but here, in this passage from Marius the Epicurean that I have selected, is a great writer in full flight.

The place he was now about to visit, especially as the resting-place of his dead, had never been forgotten. Only, the first eager period of his life in Rome had slipped on rapidly; and, almost on a sudden, that old time had come to seem very long ago. An almost burdensome solemnity had grown about his memory of the place, so that to revisit it seemed a thing that needed preparation: it was what he could not have done hastily. He half feared to lessen, or disturb, its value for himself. And then, as he travelled leisurely towards it, and so far with quite tranquil mind, interested also in many another place by the way, he discovered a shorter road to the end of his journey, and found himself indeed approaching the spot that was to him like no other. Dreaming now only of the dead before him, he journeyed on rapidly through the night; the thought of them increasing on him, in the darkness. It was as if they had been waiting for him there through all those years, and felt his footsteps approaching now, and understood his devotion, quite gratefully, in that lowliness of theirs, in spite of its tardy fulfilment. As morning came, his late tranquillity of mind had given way to a grief which surprised him by its freshness. He was moved more than he could have thought possible by so distant a sorrow. "To-day!"-- they seemed to be saying as the hard dawn broke, -- "To-day, he will come!" At last, amid all his distractions, they were become the main purpose of what he was then doing. The world around it, when he actually reached the place later in the day, was in a mood very different from his: -- so work-a-day, it seemed, on that fine afternoon, and the villages he passed through so silent; the inhabitants being, for the most part, at their labour in the country. Then, at length, above the tiled outbuildings, were the walls of the old villa itself, with the tower for the pigeons; and, not among cypresses, but half-hidden by aged poplar-trees, their leaves like golden fruit, the birds floating around it, the conical roof of the tomb itself. In the presence of an old servant who remembered him, the great seals were broken, the rusty key turned at last in the lock, the door was forced out among the weeds grown thickly about it, and Marius was actually in the place which had been so often in his thoughts.
   He was struck, not however without a touch of remorse thereupon, chiefly by an odd air of neglect, the neglect of a place allowed to remain as when it was last used, and left in a hurry, till long years had covered all alike with thick dust -- the faded flowers, the burnt-out lamps, the tools and hardened mortar of the workmen who had had something to do there. A heavy fragment of woodwork had fallen and chipped open one of the oldest of the mortuary urns, many hundreds in number ranged around the walls. It was not properly an urn, but a minute coffin of stone, and the fracture had revealed a piteous spectacle of the mouldering, unburned remains within; the bones of a child, as he understood, which might have died, in ripe age, three times over, since it slipped away from among his great-grandfathers, so far up in the line. Yet the protruding baby hand seemed to stir up in him feelings vivid enough, bringing him intimately within the scope of dead people's grievances. He noticed, side by side with the urn of his mother, that of a boy of about his own age -- one of the serving-boys of the household -- who had descended hither, from the lightsome world of childhood, almost at the same time with her. It seemed as if this boy of his own age had taken filial place beside her there, in his stead. That hard feeling, again, which had always lingered in his mind with the thought of the father he had scarcely known, melted wholly away, as he read the precise number of his years, and reflected suddenly -- He was of my own present age; no hard old man, but with interests, as he looked round him on the world for the last time, even as mine to-day! And with that came a blinding rush of kindness, as if two alienated friends had come to understand each other at last. There was weakness in all this; as there is in all care for dead persons, to which nevertheless people will always yield in proportion as they really care for one another. With a vain yearning, as he stood there, still to be able to do something for them, he reflected that such doing must be, after all, in the nature of things, mainly for himself. His own epitaph might be that old one -- ΕΣΧΑΤΟΣ ΤΟΥ ΙΔΙΟΥ ΓΕΝΟΥΣ -- He was the last of his race! Of those who might come hither after himself probably no one would ever again come quite as he had done to-day; and it was under the influence of this thought that he determined to bury all that, deep below the surface, to be remembered only by him, and in a way which would claim no sentiment from the indifferent. That took many days -- was like a renewal of lengthy old burial rites -- as he himself watched the work, early and late; coming on the last day very early, and anticipating, by stealth, the last touches, while the workmen were absent; one young lad only, finally smoothing down the earthy bed, greatly surprised at the seriousness with which Marius flung in his flowers, one by one, to mingle with the dark mould.

You don't need to subscribe to learned journals or websites...

...or pay for papers. You can read them here for nothing.

Some Reflections on Borges' "A New Refutation of Time"

I've read most of Borges' fiction several times over, but I've never seriously applied myself to his essays. To rectify my neglect, I've been reading A New Refutation of Time, whose significance for the understanding of his fiction can hardly be overestimated. As he himself remarks in a Prologue, "This refutation is found in some way or another in all my books."
   The essay is divided into two parts: an earlier version (published in 1944), and a reworking of it from 1946. Borges explains that instead of merging the two versions or suppressing the earlier version in favour of the later version, he decided to publish the two versions side by side, in order that "the reading of two analogous texts might facilitate the comprehension of an indocile subject." However, there is no material difference between the ideas in the two presentations, and I shall treat the two texts more or less as one.
   In the essay, Borges defends theories of the nature of time that could have come from some of the characters in his stories, such as Nils Runeberg in Three Versions of Judas or the Histriones in The Theologians. And indeed, the first sentence of the Prologue echoes the first paragraph of Three Versions of Judas. As a preliminary, however, he runs through the tenets of Idealism as propounded by George Berkeley.
   My own view of Berkeley is that he belongs to the class of persons that Plato and Aristotle inveighed against in their time, that is, Sophists, pseudo-philosophers who present clever but fallacious arguments leading to annoying paradoxes. Of "unthinking things" (I shall come shortly to the question of "thinking things") he maintained that "their esse is percipi, nor is it possible they should have any existence out of the mind of the thinking things which perceive them." Thus, he begins from perceptions, but concludes that there can be no such thing as a perception, if by this we understand an idea in the mind of something existing outside the mind. He attempted to evade this contradiction by supposing that God, who is always perceiving everything, keeps the world in existence - though why keeping it in existence for God keeps it in existence for another mind, he does not explain. Berkeley has the reputation of being a Solipsist, though in the passage quoted above he seems to leave open the possibility of 'thinking things' other than himself, that is, other minds. In any case, the distinction between Idealism and Solipsism strikes me as more a matter of philosophical respectability than of Metaphysics. On an idealist understanding, I have no way of distinguishing an idea of another mind from an idea originating in my mind. If the image of a face speaks in my own language, that is only what I would expect from one of my images. If it speaks in another language, which I have to learn laboriously, then that is because there is an unknown world in my mind.
   Without Idealism we have no platform from which to ascend to a denial of space or time, but these denials are worth examining as pathological specimens. We should note at once that Idealism precludes the existence of space, since space (as Geulincx says in his Metaphysics, II,5) is a kind of body. Borges too takes this as read, and proceeds to the main burden of his essay, that is, whether the existence of time is also precluded. "Once the idealist argument is admitted, I see that it is possible, perhaps inevitable, to go further....Once matter and spirit, which are continuities, are rejected, once space too is negated, I do not know with what right we retain that continuity that is time." It is necessary to pause here and reflect on what exactly we mean when we speak of our consciousness of time.
   We (I and all you other minds, if any) have two kinds of idea. Some of them we can modify: I can close my eyes or switch off the image on the television set - though for an idealist, of course, those operations would take place solely in the mind). Others, I cannot modify - though they may get modified in an inexplicable way. I propose that the former kind of idea may can be called ideas of the present, the latter kind ideas of the past. (In Idealism there is no future, or future tense). On this understanding, time is a predicate of ideas, or events (to an idealist these are synonymous). On this understanding also, the contention that a single repetition refutes time is itself refuted, as the same idea can reappear in both modifiable and unmodifiable forms.
   Borges also cites the Sophist Sextus Empiricus, who refuted time as follows: "[He] denies the existence of the past....and the future, and argues that the present is divisible or indivisible. It is not indivisible, for in such a case it would have no beginning to link it to the past, nor end to link it to the future, nor even a middle, for what has no beginning nor end can have no middle. Neither is it divisible," for that (to summarise) would lead to the absurdity of a present that itself has a past and a future. However, if (as Sextus Empiricus assumed) the past and the future do not exist, there is no requirement for the present to have links to them, so that the correct conclusion is that the present is indivisible.
   At the conclusion of the essay, Borges admits that Idealism and the denial of time are not only unbelieved, but unbelievable. They are "apparent desperations or secret consolations." In other words, they are material for fiction. In the only story of mine in which I imitate Borges, called The Heretics, the heretics of the title deny time. Unfortunately, after writing Part I of the story, I became completely blocked. I therefore have no idea how Theophano eventually puts to flight the heretics (who are probably not susceptible to logical arguments).

Would anyone like to start a topic?

If so, please let me know in a comment. If it's suitable to the blog (literature, the arts in general, philosophy etc), then I'll strongly consider it.

Abstract Poetry

Free of the curse of Meaning (that bane of literature), Abstract Poetry (or Sound Poetry, as it is also called), should, we might suppose, be easier to write than its semantics-bound rival. Being supposedly easier to write, however, is not the only reason why it has enjoyed, if not exactly a bad name, certainly a lack of critical respect. More tellingly, it can be dismissed as inferior music. It craves the condition of music in the most obvious way possible, but its melodic resources are limited by the internal imperative to avoid becoming song, and so losing its identity as Abstract Poetry.
   I contend that Abstract Poetry can be divided into two main categories - though it is often identified with one of them. This category is exemplified by the Ursonate of Kurt Schwitters. Here is a sample of it:

Fümms bö wä tää zää Uu, pögiff, kwiiee.
Dedesnn nn rrrrr, Ii Ee, mpiff tillff toooo, tillll, Jüü-Kaa?
Rinnzekete bee bee nnz krr müüüü, ziiuu ennze ziiuu rinnzkrrmüüüü,
Rakete bee bee.
Rrummpff tillff toooo?
Ziiuu ennze ziiuu nnzkrrmüüüü, ziiuu ennze ziiuu rinnzkrrmüüüü,
Rakete bee bee.
Rakete bee zee.
Fümms bö wä tää zää Uu
Uu zee tee wee bee
zee tee wee bee
zee tee wee bee
zee tee wee bee
zee tee wee bee
zee tee wee bee Fümms...

   As you can see, it's quite uninteresting to read to yourself. It calls for a bravura performance, such as that provided by Schwitters himself in a classic recording. To compose Abstract Poems of this kind, it is probably best to start with a purely metrical scheme, perhaps one borrowed from an existing poem. The other category uses words and phrases that may have isolated meanings to create a succession of transitory images, while the poem as a whole is nonsense. (Cynics may pause to observe here that this describes quite a lot of contemporary poetry, though its authors would doubtless bridle at the suggestion that they are writing Abstract Poetry). The exemplary work in this category is Edith Sitwell's Façade. Here is Black Mrs. Behemoth from Façade:

In a room of the palace
Black Mrs. Behemoth
Gave way to wroth
And the wildest malice.
Cried Mrs. Behemoth,
"Come, court lady,
Doomed like a moth,
Through palace rooms shady!"
The candle flame seemed a yellow pompion,
Sharp as a scorpion,
Nobody came...
Only a bugbear
Air unkind,
That bud-furred papoose
The young spring wind,
Blew out the candle.
Where is it gone?
To flat Coromandel
Rolling on!

   To write this kind of Abstract Poetry in a fluent way, one has to devise a Cythera that is filled with sonorous-sounding things. The world of Façade, for example, is that of country-houses, parks, nurseries, formal gardens, and luxury hotels. This is similar to the Cythera of some poems that I also believe to be Abstract Poems, though they are not usually thought of as such. I mean, for example, the poems in Paul Verlaine's collection Fêtes Galantes. Here is Colloque Sentimentale from Fêtes Galantes:

Dans le vieux parc solitaire et glacé
Deux formes ont tout à l'heure passé.

Leurs yeux sont mort et leurs lèvres sont molles,
Et l'on entend à peine leurs paroles.

Dans le vieux parc solitaire et glacé
Deux spectres ont évoqué le passé.

"Te souvient-il de notre extase ancienne?"
"Pourquoi voulez-vous donc qu'il m'en souvienne?"

"Ton coeur bat-il toujours à mon seul nom?
Toujours vois-tu mon âme en rêve?" "Non."

"Ah! les beaux jours de bonheur indicible
Où nous joignions nos bouches!" "C'est possible."

"Qu'il était bleu, le ciel, et grand, l'espoir!"
"L'espoir a fui, vaincu, vers le ciel noir."

Tels ils marchaient dans les avoines folles,
Et la nuit seule entendit leux paroles.

(In the old park's frozen solitude
Two shadows lately passed.

Dead of eye and slack of mouth,
They murmured without sound.

In the old park's frozen solitude
Two ghosts invoked times past.

"Are you reminded of our ancient ecstasy?"
"Why would you have me put in mind of it?"

"Does mere mention of my name still thrill you?
Do you still have visions of my soul?" "No."

"Ah! Happy days of pleasure beyond words,
When our lips still touched!" "Perhaps so."

"How blue it was, the sky, how high our hopes!"
"Our hopes, defeated, have fled into the dark."

Thus they walked amidst wild oats,
The night their only audience.)

It can be seen from this last example that Abstract Poetry is capable of great poignancy, melancholy, and nostalgia.

Socialist Realism, 2010 style

The shortlist for the annual BBC Short Story Competition 2010 has just been announced. I daresay that some visitors to this blog may have entered this contest at some time or other. However, they shouldn't imagine that the quality of their writing would have carried the most weight in the selection of stories and the award of prizes. One of this year's judges, Owen Sheers, has been explaining (Today programme, 12.11.10) what he has been looking for in the stories submitted. It's that they 'reveal some kind of victory of the human spirit'.
   One could, of course, treat this as just a throwaway remark of no great significance - if it didn't share in a tendency that I've come to notice more and more in recent years from both Left and Right (in this instance, I would surmise, from the Left). But the curious thing about it is that it echoes the notorious ideology of Socialist Realism.
   This was promulgated as the ideal for all the arts (though I shall speak here only of literature) in the Soviet Union, and later in the Soviet Bloc. It's to be distinguished from Social Realism, which conveys what the author intends to be a truthful account of society, and is further distinguished from Naturalism, which depicts surface features accurately without necessarily penetrating to any deeper truth. (A point strongly made by the Marxist critic György Lukács). Dickens was a Naturalist: though described minutely, his characters, especially his grotesques, are very unrealistic.
   In contrast, Socialist Realism was purposive. Its guiding idea was the advance of Socialism, and the writer was expected to be positive (always look on the bright side of life) and optimistic, even when dealing with calamitous events such as wars, and the misery they bring. There's nothing wrong with this in principle. After all, you can make a case for Virgil's Aeneid as Augustan Realism. Whatever Aeneas (the man of destiny) does, or befalls him, is directed towards his divinely appointed goal of founding a new Troy in Italy that will evolve into, and culminate in the Roman Empire and the rule of Augustus. It's just that, with the Soviet Bloc, totalitarian control crushed the imaginative life out of genuine artists and fostered politically correct hackwork. The products of it were unreadable, and have not survived.
   Socialist Realism 2010 style, which I suggest we call Humanist Realism, sets its sights lower than the old article. 'The Human Spirit' could be glossed as Hegelian, but it does not develop. It can be victorious, steadfast, or alternately give way a little and spring back, when it is called resilient. The positive and optimistic imperatives remain, and attach to the conviction that the human spirit will overcome all adversities and that we shall be left with a tolerable world to live in. Finally, though, Humanist Realism lacks (so far, at least) the totalitarian power of Socialist Realism. The worst that can happen to writers who don't conform to Humanist Realism is that their stories won't make it into any shortlists.

The Man Who Wanted His Head Cut Off

It's time to confront myself - though not yet my published self. I decided, at a late stage, to omit two stories from my collection The Crystalline Piazza (published last year); one of them because I thought the ideas were commonplace (it was cast in the form of a mock-treatise), the other, The Man Who Wanted His Head Cut Off, because it had a botched ending. (It was also written in a mock-style, though that was not necessarily an objection). I was satisfied with Part I, which I reproduce here, and it seemed a pity that it should go to waste.

Prose of the Month (November 2010): The Hermit's Oration

This piece is not easy to obtain without buying an expensive book, so I like to think that I'm performing a service by making such a little gem of late Elizabethan prose available to followers of this blog. And it's the work of a politician! (Hard to believe, now that our politicians compete to display their low level of taste). In 1593, the Queen was entertained at Theobalds, the country house of Lord Burleigh (her Lord High Treasurer, the equivalent of Prime Minister today). One morning, she went forth to be met by an actor dressed as a hermit, who delivered a speech of welcome. It was written by Robert Cecil, Burleigh's son, who in the subsequent reign became Lord High Treasurer himself. I'll leave the political allusions in the Oration to historians, but say something about its style. The dominant literary style of the period was Euphuism, an extremely artificial style, producing bizarre (though often enjoyable) effects in novels. But in prose drama (and the Oration is a dramatic monologue) it was ultimately far more influential on the development of English prose. Lyly's court dramas (especially the intoxicating Endimion, or The Man in the Moone ((1591)), have the balance and sweetness of Euphuism without its formal excesses. The Hermit's Oration (Prose of the Month for November) displays these same qualities.

Alice Truscot's Almanac

I find myself attracted to the Early Tudor period - roughly the time before Henry VIII began his wrecking work. There was the chance that anything could have happened. England could have become a great power (as she eventually did), or she could have stayed on the periphery of things, and remained culturally insignificant, her language unknown outside part of an island. And this would have been good, too. Later, Alice Truscot (who sounds like the first of the professional Northerners) would have been hanged as a witch, or suffered an even crueller death as a traitor for making political predictions.
The following is the kind of story that Borges might have selected for Extraordinary Tales or A Universal History of Infamy.

Mother Shipton was not the only prophetess of the Early Tudor period. In 1505, in the reign of Good King Henry VII, Alice Truscot (or Truescot) came to London from Lancashire and caused a sensation by intoning nursery rhyme-like prophecies such as, "When penguins do nest in t'ould clock tower/Then shall there be full many a shower". She was received at Court, and given money, and even featured in Court masques, where she played the part of the Wise Woman of the Woods. Outside Court, some accused her of witchcraft, and said that her prophecies were whispered into her ears by her familiar spirits, who infested her matted hair in the shape of fat lice. But at last it emerged that her prophecies, which sounded so much like nursery rhymes, were, in fact, nursery rhymes of her native county. This was revealed by a gentleman of Lancashire, who had learned them as a little boy from his nurse. Alice was given a whipping for her effrontery, and sent home to Lancashire. But her prophecies were printed in some of the earliest chapbooks, and enjoyed some currency, before they were eclipsed by Mother Shipton's bolder pronouncements. In the nineteenth century they were rediscovered, and some of them were added to the traditional stock of nursery rhymes.

(Henry Curtis: The History of Popular Prophecy in England)

Hemingway's use of the MacGuffin

Re-reading Hemingway's story Hills like White Elephants (published in Transition in 1927), I could not avoid the melancholy reflection that today it's as if Hemingway had never lived. (Literary fiction has generally reverted to nineteenth century rhetoric and copiousness). Hemingway himself is not forgotten, of course, but he is insufficiently appreciated as a modernist.
   The story consists mostly of dialogue. A man and a woman are waiting at a Spanish railway station. The man seems to be trying to persuade the woman to have an abortion - though in such elliptical terms that you have to read the piece carefully and more than once even to become aware of this possibility. (In 1927, you couldn't even mention abortion in fiction, let alone discuss it openly). Reference is made near the beginning of the story, and then again later on, to a distant range of hills, which the woman has compared in appearance to a herd of white elephants. The story ends inconclusively.
   The view from the railway station that gives the story its title has inevitably been regarded as a symbol, and subjected to elaborate and (to my mind) unconvincing analyses. Here are some samples. 'That she perceives the hills as being like white elephants can be her taste of her drink being described as liquorice.' 'The implication is that, just as Jig [the woman] thinks the hills in the distant look like white elephants, the American views the couple's unborn child as an approaching obstacle.' 'The symbolism of the hills and the big white elephant can be thought of as the swollen breasts and big abdomen of a pregnant woman.' 'The reference to the white elephants may also bear a connection to the baby as a valuable possession of which its owner cannot dispose and whose cost (particularly cost of upkeep) is out of proportion to its usefulness.' In short, you can read into it whatever you like, disqualifying it as a symbol of anything. I want to propose, in contrast, that in this story, and in some others that I shall discuss, Hemingway is not a symbolist but a playful cheat. This brings us to the concept of the MacGuffin.
   It is most often cited in connection with the films of Alfred Hitchcock. "Where's the MacGuffin?" he would ask, when a screenwriter was pitching a story to him. He meant a plot device that drives or gives shape to the narrative, but which in the end may turn out to have little or no importance, or not even make sense at all. In Notorious (1946), a group of expatriate Nazis has been prospecting for uranium in Brazil. The samples of uranium ore are hidden inside champagne bottles in the wine-cellar of Alex Sebastian, a prominent member of the group. The bottles become the focus of a near-farcical series of incidents, without which the plot would not amount to much more than 'expatriate Nazis in Brazil'. Yet a little reflection reveals the absurdity of hiding the ore inside champagne bottles. In plant-pots, maybe, or in sacks of fertiliser in a garden shed. And what are the Nazis going to do with the uranium? (The Third Reich has fallen). But connecting it with a glamorous, luxury-lifestyle enables Hitchcock to develop the plot in a way that holds the audience's attention and generates suspense. But the MacGuffin is not uncommon in literature also. In Henry James' story The Figure in the Carpet, a distinguished novelist, Hugh Vereker, confides to the narrator that a single theme, or general tendency, pervades his work, 'like a complex figure in a Persian carpet', but that the critics have all missed it. However, he declines to say what it is. For the remainder of the story, it becomes the object of pursuit of the other characters, who either die or clam up when asked about it. This story also ends inconclusively, leaving the reader with the impression that James has been toying with him in much the same way as Vereker toyed with the unnamed narrator.
   Consider what Hemingway's story would have been, unbookended by the image of hills that look like white elephants - or as the woman later remarks, don't really look much like white elephants. A stretch of enigmatic dialogue, hardly a story at all. Put as simplistically as that, it makes the story sound deceitful. But literature is not life, and deceit can be an authentic literary device. Besides, there is, or was, a three-tier readership for literature of this kind, an arrangement that mimics the social order. The vulgar taste is for plots; the educated middle-class have nothing against plots, but like to feel that they are reading something significant, represented by the presence of symbols; the cognoscenti have nothing against plots, and nothing against symbols (though aware of their falsity), but above all admire the deftness with which the writer handles his material. It was advantageous for Hemingway to produce stories such as Hills like White Elephants that appealed to all three constituencies. These stories were also a magazine commodity, written when Hemingway was living in Paris between the Wars. At that time, there were innumerable general interest magazines published in the USA, and many of them included at least one short story. The exchange rate between the dollar and the franc was so favourable that by selling a story every month, Hemingway was able to support himself and his family in the modest circumstances of a 5th Arrondissement apartment - a life that he celebrated in his posthumous memoir A Moveable Feast. Another of the stories that Hemingway published around this time was the much better known (it was made into a film in 1952) The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1936).
   In The Snows of Kilimanjaro, the snow-capped mountain functions as a MacGuffin so large that it almost qualifies as a Big Dumb Object. At a bush camp in a remote region of East Africa, a writer is dying of a gangrenous leg. He seems unwilling to avail himself of any chance of getting medical help, as though expiating a guilt that he is unable to express. In his last, delirious, hours, he comes to understand (and regret) that he has wasted his life on commercial ephemera instead of creating works of enduring value - works that would not have brought him fame or wealth, at least not in his lifetime, but which would have brought him fulfilment. In a brief foreword to the story, Hemingway himself offers the reader a symbolical analysis. "Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude." But this analysis attempts to sneak falsity past the reader. The leopard has aspired to something beyond its nature, and there is something noble about its fate. This is far from the fate of the writer in the story, who has betrayed his natural talents. What Hemingway has really been up to is to enclose the writer's predicament in a structural device that stands as a detached commentary on it. The mountain is eternal, his life is transient. And this how he transmutes the base metal of self-pity into art.
   My final example is The Sea Change (1931). This story follows the same pattern as Hills like White Elephants. Again, the story consists mostly of dialogue, and again a man and a woman are talking, this time in a Paris bar. The woman seems to have had an affair, not with another man, but with another woman, so that again we have a forbidden topic (lesbian love) discussed in elliptical terms. The woman departs, leaving their future relations unresolved. The MacGuffin is here represented by a barman. Until about halfway through, the couple and the barman are the only people in the bar. Then two other men enter and order drinks. We also get a snatch of the barman's stream of consciousness. At the end, the man goes up to the counter to pay both bills (his own and the woman's). He insists that he is now 'a different man' (he has suffered a sea change), with which, after some prompting, the barman concurs. I need hardly say that everything beside the central conversation is pure bluff, pretending to the reader that it provides a mysterious key to the significance of the story, which it patently does not. Here then, we see the MacGuffin in its purest form, providing the illusion of a plot when a plot is lacking, and the deceptive symbol needed to turn the monthly trick with a sophisticated but gullible readership.
   It may seem to you that, despite what I have said to the contrary several times, I am accusing Hemingway of something - perhaps of lack of integrity or seriousness. In fact, such stories as the three that I have analysed give me personally all the more pleasure for knowing that I don't have to try to read meaning into what I recognise as something of deceptive importance, something whose audacity lies in its artistry rather than its symbolism. I have even tried to make use of the MacGuffin myself, though without conspicuous success. I hope in due course to post one of these attempts, so that you can judge the matter for yourself.

Prose of the Month (October 2010)

'Fragment on Mummies' is now ready to read.

According to Geoffrey Keynes, the editor of Browne's Works, it is probably spurious, but "the reader may be left to judge whether Browne would have owned to its verbal extravagances, or would even have gusted so irreverent a pleasantry."

Whatever its true status, it's a delicious piece of pastiche.

How to begin?

How to begin? It seems obvious to begin by making a statement of purpose. To publicise myself. Not myself personally --- that would be clownish --- but my stories, novels, and translations. So other pages will contain extracts from these, including unpublished and unpublishable stuff. But I shall also be posting extracts (or even whole works, if they are short enough) from some of my favourite writers of the past. I shall call this feature "Prose of the Month". In fact, this will be, in a vanity-denying ordinance, the first feature to appear, later this month (September 2010). My ideals of what literature should be will emerge from the choices I make here more clearly than mere critical statements can say. There will be other stuff too, such as my opinions on some of the most celebrated writers of today, most of them not celebrated by me, I should say, and on anything else relevant to the arts. Lastly (I hope I haven't forgotten anything), there will be your comments. Review the work in full, if your patience will stretch to that, or just post an opinion, appreciative or dismissive, as the case may be. Try doing that on most writers' websites!