The irony of Britain topping the polls in a survey on literary travel destinations is that the British themselves are such thumping philistines when it comes to literature. Or just about anything, come to think of it. Oh, also, in my opinion, English literature is amongst the most desiccated and boring in the entire world.
Last night I spoke to an old friend on the telephone. He asked if I watched S4C, the Welsh TV channel. I replied that I did not have a television. Flabbergasted, he then asked, "But what do you do with your flippin' time?!" I hope and expect that there was at least some alloy of satire in this remark, but these days, who can tell? I replied, "Well, nothing really, just write lots of stories that no one will ever read because they're too busy watching television."
The British, well, specifically the English, like to be 'amused', and can't stand metaphysics, which is why English literature is so shallow. 'Amusement', a la Jane Austen, is considered the height of cultural endeavor. What this boils down to is a kind of conceitedness, and belief that one is cleverer than everyone else on Earth, and will certainly not get tricked into taking anything but one's own cleverness seriously. Of course the evidence for that cleverness consists of nothing but the fact that one refuses to take anyone else's concerns seriously (on this score I'm recently less and less impressed with brittle British comedy). The conceitedness of English cynicism is therefore as airtight and self-perpetuating as American patriotism.
But the English are, in fact, so downright crap that we even have to get a bloody foreigner in to manifest English cleverness for us; Oscar Wilde, the epitome of the English wit, was, of course, Irish. The English themselves would have found actual manifestation of this vaguely held cleverness to be beneath their dignity. (In other words, they didn't have the ability.)
These days, even the very hollow cleverness that once existed has been dumbed down, so that the conceitedness and cynicism are as dull as some blokey journalist's warm beer.
Can you tell how much I hate this country?
To be fair, in terms of literature, we do have a certain amount of variety on our side. The desiccated nature of our culture sometimes gives rise to a kind of stilted eccentricity that does not seem to have a counterpart elsewhere in the world: A.A. Milne, Lewis Carroll… Er, maybe that's it, actually. And perhaps the best English literature is children's literature, since the tyrannical and very tiresome light of reason reigns elsewhere with such completeness, it seems as if it is only in or through childhood that the English imagination can be expressed. I'd favour E. Nesbit's The Enchanted Castle over, say, Thomas Hardy, any day.
And as to Shakespeare, I remain unconvinced. He still seems to me like a bloke who could write some good one-liners, but I've never found the stories at all engaging. What did he actually convey, apart from the fact that he was the Bard, and therefore pretty damned clever? People (and critics) will sometimes give someone like H.P. Lovecraft as an example of a bad writer, because of certain things that, stylistically, you are apparently not supposed to do, and because he didn't flatter society with amusing comedies of manners, but at least Lovecraft conveys something in particular, whereas, to me, Shakespeare conveys nothing at all. And Shakespeare is the jewel in the passage to India of English literature, apparently. No wonder all the rest of it is so crap.
Justin Isis writes:
A lot of the time when people talk about H.P. Lovecraft, even if they claim to like him, they something like “I know he’s a bad writer, but I still enjoy reading his stories.”Or if he gets reviewed in The New York Times or The Guardian or something, the writer will always find some way to make fun of him for having monsters in his stories. No one actually looks at what he was saying, or why he was important. The fact that out of any writer in the 20th century, he had by far the most wide-ranging perspective on existence, and that he understood better than any other writer what the consequences of absolute materialism were, is completely ignored. Milan Kundera is taken really seriously, for example, but Kundera’s worldview looks incredibly limited and even childish compared to Lovecraft. Even Modernists were just fulfilling and extrapolating on trends that already existed in the 19th century. Stream of consciousness and similar techniques were already present in Symbolist writing of the period. Joyce, Woolf, Laurence, etc. could conceivably have existed in the 19th century. H.P. Lovecraft couldn’t. Even when you look at his influences, he still comes out of nowhere in terms of combining irrationality and dream-consciousness with scientific concepts. The first three pages of “The Silver Key” alone render Existentialism irrelevant, and make the books of Sartre and Camus look bloviated. I would put Burroughs maybe second in terms of importance.I’m not saying that either Lovecraft or Burroughs are my “favorite writers,” just that in terms of the 20th century, they were the most important.
Well said. Needless to say, I agree completely. “No one actually looks at what he was saying, or why he was important.”I think that’s basically because no one actually knows how to read. I’m not sure that they ever did. But reading comprehension generally seems to be close to zero around the world. I think people just pick up on a few key words, and don’t actually take in anything else. That’s why August Derleth, one of Lovecraft’s biggest fans, could completely misunderstand the Cthulhu mythos, and think it was about the battle of good and evil.
Justin Isis writes:
For anyone else reading this wondering what I’m talking about, I’ll explain in some more depth by quoting the opening of “The Call of Cthulhu.” Again, this is the FIRST paragraph of the story, it’s right up front; how can people NOT GET IT?”The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”What he’s saying here is that scientific progress will ultimately lead not to utopia or enlightenment, but to anomie and destruction as we realize not only how much we DON’T know, but how little our knowledge matters in the face of what might actually exist.Think about this. It runs counter to almost all Western thought up to the 20th century. The dominant idea from the Enlightenment onwards has been that reason, science, and technology will lead to some kind of salvation, and that people who thought otherwise were deluding themselves by trying to escape reality. But Lovecraft doesn’t arrive at his conclusions through some kind of Luddite “technology is bad” or “forget science, let’s go back to nature” approach. Instead, he takes scientific materialism to its logical conclusions. Again, look at something like Arthur Machen, there’s hints of science in The Great God Pan and some of the other stories with brain surgery, but it’s nowhere near the level of how Lovecraft integrates his concepts. The actual monsters or Old Ones hardly matter, except as a metaphor for things which don’t make sense or can’t be reduced to human meaning. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Cthulhu or just the abstract shapes described in “The Dreams in the Witch-House.” Again, almost everyone completely missed this. The supposed greatest literary critic ever, Edmund Wilson, didn’t get it either. “A giant octopus isn’t scary, so H.P. Lovecraft isn’t a good writer.” (close paraphrase of what he said).
Yeah, I think he said, “giant, invisible, whistling octopus”. Here’s a bit from Wikipedia on Edmund Wilson:He wrote many letters to Anaïs Nin, criticizing her for her surrealistic style as opposed to the realism that was then deemed correct writing, and ended by asking for her hand, saying he would “teach her to write”,[citation needed] which she took as an insult. He later married Elena Mumm Thornton (previously married to James Worth Thornton), but continued to have extramarital relationships.Looks like he was just another of the ‘sensible’ playground bullies who are in charge of all ‘intellectual’ life in this world. But you could have guessed that from his supercilious criticism of Lovecraft, anyway, which typifies the “I’m clever, and this is not amusing, and let’s have some clever and amusing social realism” school of thought that makes Britain such a vile place (although Wilson was American). What we have to remember about people like Wilson is that they have never ridden with the mocking and friendly ghouls on the night-wind, and played by day amongst the catacombs of Nephren-Ka in the sealed and unknown valley of Hadoth by the Nile. They know that daylight is for them, and have never seen the moon over the rock tombs of Neb, and their gaiety is not that of the unnamed feasts of Nitokris beneath the Great Pyramid; they do not know the wildness and freedom that almost make the bitterness of alienage welcome.
I found Shakespeare horribly hard to read and understand in high school. But, of course, I HAD to read it. Then in college I took a class called Literature and Film and the class read four different novels and watched the film after each book was read. Taming of the Shrew was one of them, the classic w/ Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. After the film, we then discussed and compared. Then much later I saw a couple different versions of Hamlet, the film w/ Mel Gibson and a play at the college. My favorite is A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Of course, anything with Kevin Kline acting in it is great. I think, for me anyway, that seeing the visual, then reading Shakespeare, helps me to understand what the heck he is saying.
Anonymous writes:
I must admit that as a teenager, I refused to take Lovecraft seriously because of what I then considered turgid, adjective-burdened prose. It seemed to me that Lovecraft had tried so hard to be elegant in a baroque sort of way that he had failed to be even vulgarly euphuistic and fallen into an amateurish love of polysyllabic qualifiers. I failed to notice how his method of stringing together long, uncommon (or at least self-consciously “literary”) adjectives added to the febrile, hallucinatory tone of his stories. The effect, lost to me back then, is that one gets the impression of a refined and gentlemanly lunatic tripping over florid hyperbole in a desperate, futile effort to describe something far beyond his understanding. It doesn’t even matter that on occasion one of the adjectives doesn’t even make much sense in context. That just adds- appropriately – to the impression that the speaker is trying to express something so shocking as to be ineffable.
Justin Isis writes:As for Lovecraft’s writing style, I like that he at least claimed his own style. I mean, whether you think it’s a good style or not, you have to admit that someone trying to write in a “Lovecraftian” manner is instantly recognizeable. And he pretty much OWNS certain words: “tenebrous,” “nameless,” “Cyclopean,” etc. How many other writers can you say that about, where they more or less permanently altered the connotations of words in the English language? Not many, I think (Shakespeare would be another).
“I must admit that as a teenager, I refused to take Lovecraft seriously because of what I then considered turgid, adjective-burdened prose. It seemed to me that Lovecraft had tried so hard to be elegant in a baroque sort of way that he had failed to be even vulgarly euphuistic and fallen into an amateurish love of polysyllabic qualifiers.”The first Lovecraft prose I ever read was the paragraph extracted by Justin Isis above, and I thought it was the best thing ever written. It seemed to me like prose that was chiselled in stone. I only became aware of the ‘Lovecraft is a bad writer’ attitude later, from people I knew (many of whom said the same kind of thing as Edmund Wilson, that writing about monsters was childish and not frightening), and from critics. I think one thing that people don’t understand about Lovecraft (and I seem to remember someone else mentioning this) is that he writes lyrical prose. People complain about his use of adjectives, but part of their function in the sentence is rhythmic. If you take them away, the sentences lose that rhythm. The reason that people tend not to get this is, I think – and I find this somewhat sad – that hardly anybody writes lyrical prose. I find most writing styles lacking in flavour because there is no awareness in them of lyricism. Also, as you suggest, it’s often the sound (or feeling) of the word, in Lovecraft’s prose, rather than the conventional meaning, that he makes use of. I think I could write an essay on his use of the word ‘blasphemous’ alone, which in the context of his stories seems to mean something quite different to what it does in the dictionary. “I found Shakespeare horribly hard to read and understand in high school. But, of course, I HAD to read it. Then in college I took a class called Literature and Film and the class read four different novels and watched the film after each book was read. Taming of the Shrew was one of them, the classic w/ Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. After the film, we then discussed and compared.”We were never made to read Shakespeare at school. That’s how bad my education is. However, I have read some Shakespeare, seen one or two productions, seen numerous films, and even acted in some Shakespeare plays. People do say that you have to see Shakespeare performed to really get it, and I certainly have no objection to the idea that someday I might have a revelation about Shakespeare and how wonderful he is. At the moment I suppose my impression is that there are certain assumptions underlying the fact that he is generally favoured above other writers as being the greatest writer in the English language, and that these are assumptions I don’t share. I think people have ideas about eternal themes, such as love and so on, and generally prefer things about these eternal themes written in a transparent style. I just don’t find that interesting. Shakespeare still seems pretty flavourless to me (despite being lyrical). I suppose I’m more interested in the kind of writers that tend to get called ‘obsessive’, who are very much exploring their own particular interests, in previously unexplored corners and crannies, rather than hanging up some grand everyman sort of canvas.
As for Lovecraft’s writing style, I like that he at least claimed his own style. I mean, whether you think it’s a good style or not, you have to admit that someone trying to write in a “Lovecraftian” manner is instantly recognizeable. And he pretty much OWNS certain words: “tenebrous,” “nameless,” “Cyclopean,” etc. How many other writers can you say that about, where they more or less permanently altered the connotations of words in the English language? Not many, I think (Shakespeare would be another).I can’t actually add anything to this.
Peter A Leonard writes:
:jester: Ahhhhh – Shakespeare and the magic of theatre, yes, even the most naturalistic of theatrical productions seeks to convince us the stage is someplace else, sometime else, here, there, neverwhere – what can be more spellbinding than when an author waves that magic wand of imagination, eh?Shakespeare of course has become something of an industry worldwide. The Washington Library of Congress lists over seven thousand works on Shakespeare – twenty years worth of reading at the rate of one per day while the Shakespeare quarterly lists on average four thousand new works a year on our Bill – books, studies, monographs. And there seems no sign of a let-up to this incredible outpouring of words on a playwright, ultimately, we know hardly anything about, other than he was the originator (or first written user) of no less than 2,035 words in the English language and just loved to attach un- prefixes to words – where would we be today without the word undead? Or unmask? – although some of his words didn’t catch on, for instance, insultment has proved a non-runner, sadly.But it was his gift as a phrasemaker that still astounds us today – “vanish into thin air” or “one foul swoop” or “play fast and loose” and thousands more. In fact one-tenth of the Oxford Book of Quotations contains the utterances of our Bill – quite an achievement, eh? He takes the blame for a tenth of the most ‘quotable utterances written or spoken in English since its inception’!With such achievements we can forgive him the many plagiarisms, the borrowed plots and the borrowed lines – he even borrowed from Kit Marlow – even the ‘lifting of passages of text verbatim’ from other works, histories and plays, are as nothing when confronted with his actual achievements all those years ago.But I’d have to agree, there’s no comparison between the creative genius of Shakespeare and H P Lovecraft. One only has to read H P’s poem “A Year Off”, 44 lines in quatrains, composed July 1925, for the Blue Pencil Club, to witness first-hand the gulf existing between these two talents – though H P, too, was not adverse to a bit of borrowing; for example from H B Drake’s “The Shadowy Thing”, and Henri Beraud’s novel “Lazarus” both providing the literary “sources” for “The Shadow out of Time”, as does de la Mare’s “The Return” to a slightly lesser extent.But ultimately we must ask the question: Where on earth would all H P’s wonderful adjectives be if our Bill hadn’t invented them first, eh? Don’t bare thinking about, do it?Regards:jester:
Peter A Leonard writes:
“But the English are, in fact, so downright crap that we even have to get a bloody foreigner in to manifest English cleverness for us; Oscar Wilde, the epitome of the English wit – ”:jester: While Wilde enjoyed some success in the English theatre, English society in its turn did all it could to destroy him – a destruction made so much easier to realise with his penchant for attractive young men – which apparently included a veritable army of rent boys – pretty Boise and litigation proved a poisonous cocktail indeed for poor Oscar.But you make no mention of true English talent: Laurence Sterne, for example, or Jerome K Jerome, even P G Wodehouse. And to omit William Ernest Bowman (especially his masterpiece “The Ascent of Rum Doodle”) is little less than culture crime (committed hopefully in ignorance or as an oversight).Obviously you have dismissed the satirical talents of Fielding and Richardson, bye-passed Evelyn Waugh – which I s’pose is fair enough, but what of poor old Joe Orton? What’s he ever done to deserve such instant dismissal? His play “Loot” is a comic masterpiece.I think if nothing else your comment perhaps serves to reinforce the oft quoted view: “Beware of generalizations”.“specifically the English, like to be ‘amused’, and can’t stand metaphysics, which is why English literature is so shallow – ” :jester: Really? So what of John Cowper Powys, for example? His work is full of paradoxes and surprises. And Mervyn Peake? Robert Aickman? Julian Maclaren-Ross? Sterne? Oh, dear, there are just so many examples that contradict this (generalized) interpretation.Now if you’d written “Sun” readers like to be amused and can’t stand metaphysics – well, that’s a different proposition, in’it?Regards. :jester:
But you make no mention of true English talent: Laurence Sterne, for example, or Jerome K Jerome, even P G Wodehouse. And to omit William Ernest Bowman (especially his masterpiece “The Ascent of Rum Doodle”) is little less than culture crime (committed hopefully in ignorance or as an oversight).Well, there’s much to reply to in your comments, but I’ll start here (and maybe do some more later). I think that the generalisation you mention is just one of the curses of this blog. I make occasional mention of the fact that I write almost all of these entries in one sitting – and the reason I do mention that is because I’m aware of the deficiencies in what I write. Or, at least, of some of them. I seem to be someone who can only sit in front of a computer for so long before I need to go elsewhere, and on the occasions I’ve tried to write articles for this blog over a length of time, and post them when they were good and ready, I’ve never finished them. But comments such as your own are welcome, because they supply my deficiency. In terms of English talent, there is some, but I suppose the reason that I feel there is something in what I’m saying (about English literature being dry, shallow and boring) is that if you compare the mainstream of English literature, whatever sample of it is readily to hand, with the mainstream of other literary traditions, and if you also happen to be me, you will find that there is immediately material of greater interest in the other traditions. Laurence Sterne has long been on my ‘to read’ list. I’ve read excerpts and thought they were wonderful. P.G. Wodehouse, I like the idea of more than the reality, I think. I’ve read a couple of his books. I enjoy his wordplay more than anything, I think (and come to think of it, there is some excellent wordplay in English literature), but I didn’t draw great sustenance from his work. Jerome K. Jerome I have yet to read. I’m afraid that I am ignorant concerning Bowman. Mervyn Peake and Robert Aickman, whom you mention later, I am familiar with, and I almost mentioned the former as an example of English talent. I think, like Carroll, he’s one of the great abberrations. He’s not part of any particular movement, for instance, and it’s possible that he’s ignored by academia (and even by others), because he does not therefore seem to contribute to the ‘history’ of literature (as if all writing had to be a means to furthering academic theory). But just to prove that I am aware of English talent, I’ll try and come up with some decent English writers that you haven’t mentioned:William Hope Hodgson, Mary Shelley, William Blake…Actually, I’m not sure I can go further at the moment. The thing is, I generally enjoy reading books, even if I think they’re rubbish, or if I think they’re indifferent fare, but there are very few books that I come to have any kind of personal attachment to. So, for instance, when I was trying to be good (and also just being curious) and reading through Thomas Hardy and the Bronte sisters, and so on, although I could admire the turn of phrase, the dramatic scene, and so on, I don’t think I ever really understood why the works were held in such high regard. In other words, I never understood how Tess of the D’Urbervilles could be anybody’s favourite book, and the same goes for most of the other English classics. And if they are nobody’s favourite book, why are they so famous? Presumably some people do think, “Thomas Hardy is my favourite writer,” but I don’t get it myself. These books were never really like friends to me. They were slightly more like relatives that you were made to visit. However, if we take the equivalent in Japanese literature – Natsume Soseki, whose portrait is even on a Japanese banknote – his works are fantastic, and have very strong personal resonance for me. (Soseki, incidentally, felt cheated by English literature.) So, I do enjoy some English literature (quite a lot of it), but I tend to feel something like, “Well, if they have such ability to write, why don’t they write about something interesting? Why don’t they put their heart and soul into it?” For the most part, I don’t feel like they do that.But, some more English writers that I have enjoyed in more of a personal than a formal way include:Tennyson, Larkin, Dickens (to some extent), M. John Harrison, John Hegley… I even liked Jane Eyre.
Robin Davies writes:
I would nominate Algernon Blackwood as a great visionary English writer. Though often described as a ghost story writer the bulk of his work (and there is a lot of it!) is a less categorizable and very personal form of mysticism that he brought to vivid life.Speaking of visionaries, I have to mention the mighty J. G. Ballard though I suppose it’s a bit of a cheat calling him English as he was born in Shanghai. In my defence I would say he grew up in a very English enclave of that city.As you say, England throws up very few of these distinctive talents but when it does they tend to be really brilliant. In the field of cinema I would nominate Nicolas Roeg and Michael Powell.
“I would nominate Algernon Blackwood as a great visionary English writer.”Please do. I discover that there are dusty old hardback copies of The Centaur and Julius LeVallon on the bookshelves here, so, when I have waded through some of my current reading, I might turn to these.J.G. Ballard is someone who I must be destined to read at some point, just because I’m surrounded by people who recommend him enthusiastically. I even went along to a reading, book-signing thing he did not far from the British Museum a while back, but still haven’t read anything except excerpts here and there.Of course, I also failed to mention M.R. James, who, of course, really was a ghost story writer. I think the ghost story, as typified in the work of James, is one area where that very dry, cigars-and-brandy-in-the-old-boy’s-club style of prose actually comes into its own. Either Thomas Ligotti or Mark Samuels, I believe, once remarked that, if you took away the golf clubs and brandy-at-the-fireside elements to the works of M.R. James and H.R. Wakefield, they’d be indistinguishable from some kind of bleak, East European expressionism, like this:http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/de-profundis/Well, he’s Austrian, but that kind of thing, I suppose.”Now if you’d written “Sun” readers like to be amused and can’t stand metaphysics – well, that’s a different proposition, in’it?”The interesting thing is that – I fear – many tabloid readers in Britain are being laughed at by those who write the rags. I’m not sure exactly how much the writers believe in what they’re writing. Or at least, I think they’re deliberatly talking down to their readership, and a mark of how craven and ignoble the readership is is the fact that they seem to love having their intelligence insulted in this way. On the other hand, if these tabloids are written ironically (or not), I’m personally acquainted with people who read them ironically. I have to say, though, I’ve always thought, even if you do read them ironically, you’re contriburing to their wealth in a fairly un-ironic way. I’ve always looked at my hands after reading one of these rags, and noticed how filthy I’ve become merely in touching the object. However, one aspect of English culture that does afford some interest is the intellectual that seems to lurk vaguely in the heart of the pig-sty of ignorance, as if we would all be writing existentialist novels and essays on post-structuralism, if only we could be bothered. In the documentary Crumpet, for instance, Tony Livesey, a journalist, I believe, associated with such papers as The Sunday Sport, refers to his first viewing of Barbara Windsor losing her bikini top in Carry on Camping, as “a Proustian moment”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCIsol59UdAI might return to these diverting themes later.
Robin Davies writes:
As Lovecraft noticed there seemed to be a golden age of British fantasy in the early 1900s – M. R, James, E. F. Benson, Machen, Blackwood, Dunsany, Hodgson, Shiel, Hartley, de la Mare, Wells, Doyle… The Centaur and Julius Le Vallon contain some great passages, though you might find the books a tad overlong. I think his best work was at novella length like Ancient Sorceries, The Damned, The Nemesis Of Fire, Sand, The Man Whom The Trees Loved etc.I’m not sure what to recommend for a Ballard beginner. All of his short story collections are worth a go, but I think War Fever contains a wonderfully varied mix of stuff from the bleakly disturbing (The Air Disaster) through the hilarious (The Secret History Of World War 3) to the lyrically surreal (Dream Cargoes). Of his novels I’d suggest The Unlimited Dream Company if you fancy a bizarre light fantasy, Crash if you want hardcore erotic weirdness and The Day Of Creation, er, just ’cause it’s one of my favourites…
http://www.frieze.com/comment/article/genuinely_rude/Sorry to be brief. I’m a bit behind with things today, so have to be quick.I read that article earlier, about criticism, and thought it was very good.I think that where I am critical, it’s a kind of defensive criticism (in terms of literature anyway), just because I see a self-satisfied mainstream in English language literature (and especially English literature) that rests on certain assumptions that I would like to point out are merely assumptions. So, although I realise my criticism here on this blog tends to be, well, not very sharp, there is an underlying intention that has (I think) some value. To put it briefly, I’m not so much arguing that “literature should be like this” as I am that literature shouldn’t have a load of people saying “literature should be like this” and stifling the talent that is actually there because it doesn’t fit in with “like this”. Thanks for commenting. I’m sure I’ll write more later.
Peter A Leonard writes:
“I think that the generalisation you mention is just one of the curses of this blog.”:jester: It’s the curse of most (if not all) blogs, I think. Your original blog entry was titled “Literary Britain” and contained a link that suggested Britain topped the polls for a literary destination – you then claimed Wilde, an Irishman, as “the epitome of the English wit”, I assume to highlight a paucity of “English” talent in humour or possession of wit?But, as suggested in my response, this isn’t wholly accurate.There’s a huge difference between the concept “Literary Britain” and “Literary England”. For an example the author Salman Rushdie (Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie) is most usually described as a “British” or an “Indo-British” writer. Yes, he was born in India but most of his education and his life has been spent in Britain. Interestingly enough his early influences were Lewis Carroll, Jorge Luis Borges, James Joyce, Mikhail Bulgakov and Gunter Grass. Anyhow, my point is there’s a vast pool of contemporary creative talent falling under the banner heading “Literary Britain” – some good writers, some brilliant, some poor, and some who should have remained readers.There is also a corresponding audience for each of these writers (size of audience will obviously vary) within Britain, within “England”, too, no doubt, and internationally for the lucky few. So this would lead me to believe (some) people in “England” are still reading books – which has got to be a plus, hasn’t it? Historically “Literary Britain” is vast. It’d be possible to organize tours by county lasting two or three weeks per tour and still not exhaust the pool of talent available – agreed that the talent is much varied and not to everyone’s taste. But that’s the main point –Taste. To like or dislike a work of art, written or otherwise, boils down to individual inclination. Even the best of critics will create a system or a philosophy of art to encompass those works of art the critic is most attracted or attached to. No matter how hard we try, our criticism of a particular book or painting or piece of music tends to be subjective. I like the Liverpool poets Adrian Henri, Roger McGough and Brian Patten. So why doesn’t everyone else? Probably because the “English” are dull. Although to be fair, this said, the “English” have provided the these writers with an audience. Understanding a work of art often entails a substantial knowledge of the context in which that work was created. I am amused when people say they find Shakespeare hard or difficult. Obviously his plays are “hard”, great art is “hard” especially when written in the language and idiom of the fifteen hundreds. To understand effectively, we need to know background. I’m attracted to the works of Thomas Love Peacock. Critics in the main dismiss him as a crotchety, unserious hedonist whose tastes are antiquarian and whose political views are irrelevant. So what? I still like Peacock. Most of the critics of his works are lacking in knowledge of the political and historical background to them. This knowledge is essential to a fuller understanding of what he and his books were about.So I’ll correct myself – there’s nothing wrong with generalizations providing we recognize them for what they are. They make good opening points for further discussion.Ultimately I think I agree with Voltaire’s comment on critics: “The infamous trade of vilifying one’s colleagues to earn money should be left to cheap journalists…it’s those wretches who have made of literature an arena for gladiators.””The interesting thing is that – I fear – many tabloid readers in Britain are being laughed at by those who write the rags. I’m not sure exactly how much the writers believe in what they’re writing.”:jester: Well, my experience has been they write what they have to write to provide cover sales. Sensationalism rules okay.Thanks for an interesting blog entry.:jester:
“I am amused when people say they find Shakespeare hard or difficult. Obviously his plays are “hard”, great art is “hard” especially when written in the language and idiom of the fifteen hundreds. To understand effectively, we need to know background.”I agree knowing the background of Shakespeare helps. However, seeing a performance also helps. Being a visual person, I understood him much better when I see a play or a film AND here his words.
“Being a visual person, I understood him much better when I see a play or a film AND here his words.”People are, it seems, differently focused in the ways in which they take in and understand the world, and this is often expressed in terms of the senses – for instance, being a visual or a tactual person. I think that I am actually a verbal person, in some peculiar way. Not that I talk a lot. I even think that words are a hopelessly inadequate way of understanding the world. Still, there seems to be a verbal emphasis in my brain and my interaction with the world. I think that seeing productions of Shakespeare has helped me in understanding them, but not that much. I don’t think that my own problem with Shakespeare (if not being especially excited by a particular writer is a problem) is to do with the fact that his work is ‘hard’, though. I’ve been more excited by more difficult writers. He does have an astounding way with words, but for me that has only ever existed at the micro-level, from line to line, and has never added up to anything on the level of an entire play. Presumably, for other people, the plays do add up to something. But, again, perhaps this is due to different emphasis in ways of interacting with the world. I just find Shakespeare to be all about ‘society’ and the panorama of human nature, in a way that simply does not interest me. It’s unfortunate for me that this model of literature seems to blot out almost everything else in the English speaking world, as it’s not what I really want to write or read, and life becomes difficult when one is marginalised. Having said that, it’s always possible I’ll pick up a copy of The Tempest or something tomorrow, and read it and be captivated. (I want to read The Tempest actually. I think I’ve only seen some weird Peter Greenaway production of that.)
“All of his short story collections are worth a go, but I think War Fever contains a wonderfully varied mix of stuff from the bleakly disturbing (The Air Disaster) through the hilarious (The Secret History Of World War 3) to the lyrically surreal (Dream Cargoes).”I might go for that, then. Obviously, he’s written a great deal. Something that gives a range might be the best thing. “Ultimately I think I agree with Voltaire’s comment on critics: “The infamous trade of vilifying one’s colleagues to earn money should be left to cheap journalists…it’s those wretches who have made of literature an arena for gladiators.””I’m not sure I do actually agree with this. I mean, I tend to find myself disagreeing with the actual opinions expressed by professional critics, even by amateurs. And there is something revolting about the way that critics, in tandem with academia, have bolstered a kind of establishment of literature, a citadel with near impregnable castle walls (for most living writers). So, in a sense, I don’t have that much sympathy with professional critics who find their profession currently in decline. On the other hand, at least they encouraged the idea of critical thinking. Well, I haven’t even had breakfast yet, so I can’t solve a problem like this right now. But I don’t think that the existence of professional critics is something entirely bad. Having said that, I generally enjoy what are called ‘appreciations’ of a writer’s work more than I do someone textually tutting and wagging a finger, or aggrandising themselves at the expense of another. But the gladitorial arena thing… Maybe that just wouldn’t exist if there were not a particular way that one were supposed to write (for instance, if you were to believe most critics, one should never even attempt to write science fiction, which is clearly ludicrous narrow-mindednss), so maybe Voltaire is right, after all. Except that he says this should be left to ‘cheap journalists’, which means that the arena still exists. If it does exist then I am – good or bad – a gladiator in that arena, and if I do offer my own criticism now and then (actually, it’s basically just an expression of opinion), it’s because I hate the way the game seems to be rigged, and I don’t like those who are rigging it and those who seem to be favoured by that rigging.
Relevant and of interest:http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25336-2064344,00.htmlhttp://www.knibbworld.com/campbelldiscuss/messages/1/615.html?1219062292I’ll quote the passage from George Steiner quoted at that second link:But this does not mean that this jeweled and coruscated style springs full-armed from Durrell’s personal gift. He stands in a great tradition of baroque prose. In the seventeenth century, Sir Thomas Browne built sentences into lofty arches and made words ring like sonorous bells. Robert Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy, used the same principal device as Durrell: richness through accumulation, the marshaling of nouns and epithets into great catalogues among which the eye roves in antiquarian delight. The feverish, clarion-sounding prose of De Quincey is a direct ancestor to that of Justine. And more recently, there is the example of Conrad. In the later parts of Lord Jim and throughout The Rescue, Conrad uses words with the sumptuous exuberance of a jeweler showing off his rarest stones. Here also, language falls upon the reader’s senses like brocade.
This baroque ideal of narrative style is, at present, in disfavor. The modern ear has been trained to the harsh, impoverished cadence and vocabulary of Hemingway. Reacting against the excesses of Victorian manner, the modern writer has made a cult of simplicity. He refines common speech but preserves its essential drabness. When comparing a page from the Alexandria novels to the practice of Hemingway or C. P. Snow or Graham Greene, one is setting a gold-spun and jeweled Byzantine mosaic next to a black-and-white photograph. One cannot judge the one by the other. But that does not signify that Durrell is a decadent show-off or that his conception of English prose is erroneous. We may be grateful that Hemingway and his innumerable imitators have made the language colder and more astringent and that they have brought back into fiction the virtue of plain force. But they have done so at a price. Contemporary English usage is incredibly thin and unimaginative. The style of politics and factual communication verges on the illiterate. Having far fewer words at our reach than had the educated man of the seventeenth and even of the late nineteenth century, we say less or say it with a blurred vagueness. Indeed, the twentieth century has seen a great retreat from the power of the word. The main energies of the mind seem directed toward other modes of ‘language,’ toward the notation of music and the symbol-world of mathematics. Whether in its advertisements, its comic-books, or its television, our culture lives by the picture rather than the word. Hence a writer like Durrell, with his Shakespearean and Joycean delight in the sheer abundance and sensuous variety of speech, may strike one as mannered or precious. But the fault lies with our impoverished sensibility.– George Steiner, “Lawrence Durrell I: The Baroque Novel” (from Critical Essays on Lawrence Durrell)I have a personal hatred of Hemingway based on very little really, since I’ve always hated him too much to read any of his books. I think watching a documentary of his life did it for me. I expect I will read an actual book of his at some point. I’m fairly sure I’ll hate it.
Peter A Leonard writes:
:jester: Obviously we should all be able to express an opinion. Voltaire’s comment was aimed at those individuals who aspire to the profession of “literary” critic, and who delight in the deconstruction of individual works in order to demonstrate shortcomings, or conversely strengths. Frequently this involves an element of character assassination – even in our own enlightened times, the cult of personality often dictates the shape and content of a “review”, rather than the merit or lack of it of particular works.I wonder would we have heard of D H Lawrence today if not for his championing by that academic and literary critic F R Leavis? Lawrence died in 1930. Between his death and the start of world war two, he was generally dismissed by the critics as a man who wrote a dirty book or two and whose exhibition of dirty paintings was raided by the police. One could argue I suppose that James Douglas, one of Beaverbrook’s editors, eventually created interest in Lawrence by the sheer bloody vitriolic tone of his attacks on the man – Douglas we should be aware was responsible for the double page spread reviewing (Rubbishing)Huxley’s “Brave New World” boldly titled “The Man Who Hates God!”.Henry James writing in the Times Literary Review in 1914 dismissed Lawrence as a talentless also- ran. Interestingly he also expressed anger at Hugh Walpole’s praise of the “life” in Dostoevsky, finally dismissing Walpole as a catamite – thus imparting the important lesson to the readership of TLS that an author’s sexual preference or private life is the standard bench mark by which his or her work should be judged, a very Anglo-Saxon outlook this.So moving on to the type of criticism that on the surface ignores the cult of personality, the criticism of deconstruction if you will, I offer a single example of a less exalted work, more recently reviewed, titled “Death in a Sunny Place”, a mystery story. With penetrating wisdom our August reviewer describes the work as “Absolute drivel in broken sentences – repetitious…padded to the gills though only 180 pages long.”Oh dear – is there any point in reading on?The job of the critic should be to describe what he’s read. And that ain’t as easy as it might seem. The reality (as described above) is an obsession with the author under review which consequently provides an excuse to discuss his/her politics, lifestyle, sexuality, whatever. Implicit in all this is the question where does this author sit in relation to our Anglo-Saxon, middle-class mores? Does the face fit? Does it not? This will more often than not determine a good or bad review.Oh, yes, and it often helps to be a friend of the reviewer!Today’s passion for the superficial, for the immediate has resulted in a decline within all the arts of technical virtuosity – it’s not even seen as desirable in popular culture. We listen to singers who sing little better than we can sing ourselves, we watch actors who don’t act but are “Stars!” Writers whose writing is not subject to conscious thought – which probably doesn’t much matter, as reading levels are in decline anyway; paradoxically despite huge numbers of GCSE passes in the UK, literacy levels continue to fall as they do in the States– perhaps it was this trend years ago that led us to adopt those male and female symbols that appear with repetitious monotony on the doors of all our public conveniences? Well, s’pose it saves embarrassment if you can’t read “Ladies” or “Gentlemen”?As for reading Hemingway, if you do, avoid the novels; head for the short stories would be my advice.:jester:
“One could argue I suppose that James Douglas, one of Beaverbrook’s editors, eventually created interest in Lawrence by the sheer bloody vitriolic tone of his attacks on the man…”Well, to quote Morrissey, who must surely be paraphrasing someone else here:”The critics who can’t break you/They somehow help to make you.”I think I’d like to write critism some time. I even have a title for a long critical work in mind, and made a few notes some years back. The title is: ‘The Principle of Fiction’. I was working up a lot of ideas in my head about what fiction actually is, its value and so on, and these ideas were very much anti-academic. But I wrote down very little of what I was thinking, and I’m not sure I could reproduce it all now. There is a part of me that is very drawn to the building of theories, but I think I see them as temporary frames, to be taken up and discarded as necessary. Oscar Wilde, I believe, once said, “I cannot think but in stories”. This is something I understand very well. I do get the impression that there are those in this world who don’t see that the production of fiction is a way of thinking – not only that, but that it is a way of thinking that is different to other ways of thinking, and therefore cannot be wholly understood within the framework of other ways of thinking. Someone very well-versed in logic might possibly admire the suggestion of intelligence about a certain writer’s work, but then be appalled to find their conversation illogical, not realising that conversation (which generally demands a kind of orthodoxy of expression similar to logic) is not the element in which the writer best thinks. And on this basis they might believe the writer’s works then are meretricious. But if I did write ‘The Principle of Fiction’ some day, I think it might be a work that defeated itself, since some of the orthodoxies of academia might be inherent in the whole idea of criticism. In order to attempt to show the inadequacies of the critical approach, it might seem or be necessary to adopt the critical language comprehensible to critical minds – a language suited to expressing critical ideas, and not best designed for demonstrating the virtues of ways of thought other than the critical. In other words, it could all be Catch-22.”reading levels are in decline anyway; paradoxically despite huge numbers of GCSE passes in the UK, literacy levels continue to fall as they do in the States– perhaps it was this trend years ago that led us to adopt those male and female symbols that appear with repetitious monotony on the doors of all our public conveniences?”Yeah, it’s depressing. And it seems to be the over-privileged countries where literacy is declining – the countries that have no excuse besides the now ubiquitous, “Whatever!”