A Brief History of Western Culture

Alex 'Hurricane' Higgins

[Image source: http://www.irishnews.com/sport/2016/03/18/news/on-this-day-march-18-1949-iconic-snooker-player-alex-higgins-was-born-454325/]








Since there's no time to write anything new (the TEFL course is reaching its long-delayed climax), I'm fobbing off my readers with four more paltry notes that I wrote back in 2002-ish.


All of them were inspired by the same relativistic and universalist idea: that any and every artefact (no matter how humble, ephemeral or trashy) contained the whole of human history,  had limitless horizons and could sustain a lifetime of study and interest. In principle. You may feel I've demonstrated the opposite!

The Orbis Pocket Encyclopedia of the World (London, 1981)

 

This has rather a complex history of compilation. The cartography apparently comes from Prague (many of Britain’s cheap factual books from this era originated in Eastern Europe). Someone unnamed, nevertheless, must be responsible for all the English translation, anglicised names on the map (e.g. “Black Sea”) and additional material. The quantity of aggregated labour in the pages of this book is astonishing, as much so as in those Victorian factual books with their impeccable proofreading, exhaustive indexes and thousands of engraved illustrations.

 

The hybrid origin of the book is subtly betrayed in a map such as the one of Europe. I was at first puzzled by the prominent naming of places I’d never heard of, such as Duncansby Head (we always say “John o’ Groats”). I now see that these are vaguely intended to demarcate the physical limits of Europe. Both “Nordkapp” and “Nordkinn” are shown - the latter name (I think describing the most northerly point in Europe, which is not the North Cape) is not even shown on my large motorist’s map of Norway. The White Sea appears as “Beloje More”.

 

On the Spanish coast there is no Torremolinos or Benidorm or Lloret de Mar.

 

Production looms large in the accounts of nations - somehow, archaically so.

The UK produced 124 billion cigarettes p.a, Sweden 11.3 billion (USA 627 billion, USSR 378 billion). China is the leading producer of a tobacco crop - more than a million tons a year.

 

I really bought the book to understand the moon and skies, but the explanations are, to me, incomprehensible - perhaps they are just not complete enough. 

 

Alex Through the Looking Glass: The Autobiography of Alex Higgins (Alex Higgins with Tony Francis, 1986)

 

 

If the only worthwhile communication in art is not what is said but what is betrayed, this should appeal. The book is narrated in the first, i.e. Alex’s, person (except for an introduction in which Francis speaks for himself). As we read we believe in the persona, and Francis is quite unobtrusive. That it is more or less an understood intention to betray is clear from the often discordant intrusions of Alex’s wife and relatives. Did Alex himself intend to speak frankly, or intend to reveal himself frankly (a different thing)?

 

“That night the lid blew off. It was the culmination of four years of pressure. The whole episode was so preposterous you’d hardly believe it. One thing I will not stand for is being accused of something when I’m fairly and squarely not guilty. I lost control. That’s why the television set went out of the window. I had to vent my fury somehow. It was better than hitting Lynn. What is a fellow to do when his wife is behaving like this?”

 

Seeing Alex play snooker was electrifying, but not friendly. He was not really an intentional entertainer. His belief is in who he is - a phenomenon, a person whose every act in some way typifies his unique style. He takes curiously little pleasure in his two world championships. His apparently intense love for his children is unconvincing - it convinced me, iconically, when he wept and beckoned for Lauren on TV. The autobiography assumes that Alex will settle down calmly into middle age - but we know better. Such religious egotism requires disaster. The inevitability is perhaps unwittingly alluded to in one of the sentences above: “It was the culmination of four years of pressure”. Alex grasps that the cause of the outburst is not altogether the immediate events but his own history, which is absolutely real to him. The next sentence makes light of the circumstances. Then he asserts: “One thing I will not stand for...” as if it was a matter of principle. Such principles are always witnesses to a life being desperately shored up. 

 

That Alex could learn from such an incident is precluded by the very personality (or life-strategies) that caused the incident. “Snooker is show business and the show had to go on. I even managed a humorous interview with Dickie Davis before the match and put on a pretty good act I think. That was the professional in me. Others might have thrown in the towel under that pressure, but the old survival instincts saw me through.” The “survival instincts” is an accurate phrase, but what is enabled to survive is the destructive self.

 

The Danbury Mint (2001)

On the table is the Christmas 2001 Catalogue of the Danbury Mint (“Heirlooms and Treasures”) - an astonishing publication. I can’t tell the difference any more between the artistic effect of this incredibly rich and complex commercial enterprise and - well, last night it was Rimbaud and Tomlinson, for example. The latter have more re-sale value, but that’s the only thing that occurs to me.

I realized I was drinking my tea from the wrong mug. This one was bought in Magalluf, not in Alcúdia. Dabbled green background, blue and burgundy flowers with yellow centres. I like those cheap hand-painted mugs much more than anything in the Danbury Mint catalogue. In fact the one from Alcúdia was not so cheap, it has an abstract design and is signed “Figas”. I wonder about the life of Figas and the people who produce all those oil paintings of white houses and boats drawn up on the beach. And the photographs of the artists in the Danbury Mint catalogue; the pleasantest, happiest people, with the nicest names, a bit like the writers of romances too.

 

Walking somewhere, I was struck by the headline

 

      TIMELESS CLASSICS COME OF AGE

Climate Change - Our View (pamphlet in Esso service stations, 2002)

 

The question of who “We” is in corporate speech is no mere semantic puzzle when “we” start delivering “our” views. Who is speaking here? The directors in chorus? But this statement was drafted by junior employees, altered at will until approved by someone at a high level. It does not represent the opinions of the juniors (I know how easy it is to distance yourself from words that you write as part of your job). Nor does it represent the opinion of the seniors, which are kept very private indeed (company confidential at least, and probably personally confidential too). In fact it is not the statement of a person (or persons) at all. Does it represent, perhaps, “what the shareholders would want to be said at this time”? We are getting closer, so long as we don’t confuse this with “what they believe”, which is (as with most people) no doubt the usual mixture of imponderable, unconfessable and tamely unconsidered.

 

One of the things that bothers me about institutions is that they automatically generate “statements” which have no necessary relation to any individual’s opinions. The human beings who comprise Exxon’s workforce are not in control here. I suppose analysis would show that the potential (say, for malevolence) of a corporate is in the end sustained by millions of tiny moral decisions, loosenesses, allowances, etc by thousands of individuals. Within the context of each person’s life, they are not significant, they are easily outweighed by the larger kindnesses and generosities common to most human beings; they are only significant when co-ordinated; when drilled and trained together along one line of least-resistance; i.e. by a system. This is what happens in a corporate, and the effect can be positively referred to as synergy. I do concede the lack of individual responsibility. 

 

So the corporate statements... who is speaking then? If not a person, then a personification. Which means that the statement has a fictional element. Yes, it goes unnoticed, it is an absorbed convention. The serious matter is that fictions have a complicated relationship to truth.

 

The pamphlet appears to be addressed to “the public” - it is meant to be “heard”, that is to say to be skimmed, to have a positive influence, to reinforce support from sympathetic motorists and employees; just as important it is meant to be “overheard”, e.g. by regulatory bodies and competitors.

 

The pamphlet is functional, it is a move in a game. Mere factual communication ranks fairly low in its functions. For instance, one can make nothing of the quoted statistics, because they are decontextualized. They are there to be half-remembered and repeated, not understood. And the pamphlet doesn’t begin with its own background, as thus:  “A lot of people are saying that Exxon should be boycotted because they consistently fight against the implementation of the Kyoto protocol”. That would be highly unstrategic. Anyone who knows the background can work it out for themselves, but the last thing Exxon wants is to enlighten the ignorant. On their own paper, they have no reason to print accusations.

 

The first section runs, in actuality, as follows:

 

There is much concern today about man’s potential role in climate change, often referred to as ‘global warming’, and the long-term risk this may pose.

 

Man-made greenhouse gas emissions occur primarily from the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas). So we take climate change very seriously. There are still many gaps in the understanding of climate change, but it poses serious long-term risks and uncertainty is no reason for inaction.

 

Action is needed, but as greenhouse gases arise from everyday energy use, it is important that actions should address environmental concerns but not threaten standards of living or economic growth. A focus on new technology will be essential.

 

The first paragraph recognizes “concern”. This is a word for possible loss of revenue, and so we can easily believe that it is taken seriously. Yet to recognize people’s concern (if “we” was a human being and not a corporate) is also a pleasant, human trait. The reader who is inclined to support Exxon feels rather warmer towards her/himself because of this sentence. S/he too is “serious” and recognizes that there is “concern”. All the warmer because it is more than possible that the “concern” is all stuff and nonsense. “We” are so human and sympathetic that we take the concern seriously anyway, even if it’s all nonsense. “You need say no more - It’s enough for us that you are worried.” (Which is true, but only because of the revenue.)

 

The second paragraph says, easily, that “uncertainty is no reason for inaction”. In fact, it would be a very good reason for inaction, if the uncertainty was radical. The important thing, though, is to make sure the uncertainty is emphasized. The reader is given the tools to draw the “stuff and nonsense” conclusion, though the statement is too politic to do so. (Actually, this is a measure of change. It is not so very long ago that Matt Ridley in the Telegraph, for example, was saying quite plainly that the “science” behind predictions of climate change was naive and fatally flawed.)*

 

*[Since writing this, some newspaper articles have appeared, in the wake of an industry-sponsored collection of papers, which repeat the accusation. But this was very low-key.]

 

The third paragraph means “we are against any legislation that interferes with our business”. But “means” has several senses. Exxon do not really want such a blunt interpretation to be advanced. The important positive word in this paragraph is “everyday”. It implies that the world in which “we” freely pursue profits is the world that you enjoy with all its benefits. You don’t want that to be threatened, do you? The obscure threat is that actions that hinder the activities of Exxon are likely to bring our merry western existence into catastrophic decline. That argument would, of course, have no force unless Exxon’s operations permeated our lives in the way they do. It is an argument from global spread. It would not be admitted, for example, in defence of seal-clubbing; or if it was, we would laugh. To spell out the implications more clearly, we might put it like this: It’s dangerous to do anything about BIG companies.

 

The “focus on new technology” is a way of diverting the reader (or over-hearer) from a “focus on legislation”, which of course could be imposed right now without any reliance on the promise of new technology.

 

In the next section (“The way forward”) this focus is further specified. The list is in fact a series of diversionary tactics (do anything except legislate!). For example, the first item on the list is:

 

- Vigorous pursuit of energy efficiency. Saving energy reduces emissions.

 

But this seems the least seriously meant sentence in the pamphlet. If TOTAL emissions were actually reduced, that would be bad for Exxon’s business, as bad as legislation which imposed a reduction of emissions. The only reason for Exxon supporting it, therefore, must be their confidence that it won’t succeed in achieving what legislation would.

 

A much more seriously intended item is this:

 

- Promotion of carbon ‘storage’ through forestry and agriculture.

 

This, of course, would not harm Exxon’s business, since it would allow emissions to continue at the current (or greater) levels. It would also be environmentally disastrous, but only the hopelessly unregenerate will grasp this, and the pamphlet is certainly not intended for them.

 

The final section of the pamphlet (“Actions we’re taking”) is intended to be read quickly and without much attention to detail. For example, the deliberately boring sentence:

 

It (i.e. the type of actions we are taking) is consistent with Esso’s longstanding commitment to the environment, reflected in our track record of leading our industry in introducing ‘cleaner’ fuels to motorists in the UK, our global record of excellent environmental performance and the recent confirmation by the international quality assessor Lloyd’s Register that our company is ‘among the leaders in industry’ in integrating environmental management into our business.

 

From this turgid uninterpretability, the reader is invited to mine a vein of positive connotations: longstanding commitment, excellent, environmental performance, leaders...  

 

These, as the composers of the text might say, are the “messages”.

 

Me n my blog

While I was on my recent travels, one of the cloudy ideas that kept coming back to me was that I would try to put in order some of the ideas that lie behind the rather large body of posts (some 700) that I've amassed over the last eleven years.

It was my intention, early on, that the blog would have no unifying topic. But in effect it does keep being, with only minor exceptions, about the same topics. Reductively speaking, it's a flowers and poetry blog. And the point is --- what?

We can begin, tediously enough, with relativism. From my distant academic grounding in literature (especially medieval literature), I wanted to stretch myself to look at all sorts of literature, from all ages and places. I wanted to look outside the canon as well as within it. My old-fashioned question was, is it meaningful to designate some writing as good and some as bad? I thought not. I thought everything deserved attention. I considered it as a reverence that we ought, ideally, to feel and express for all human artefacts.

I've made my peace with the canon now, to a large degree. I see that selection is an inevitable social process. We need to be able to converse about the same things, or our conversations will be very limited indeed. Yet it's salutary to see that greatness has its arbitrary side. I often think of Malvolio: "some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them". The great authors that I love to write about have become great, not only because of the personal genius that I try to reverence, but also by being read and written about. Greatness, that is to say, is a social construction.

The connection with flowers is, I suppose, obvious. We don't call one plant good and another bad, in themselves. If you are like me, you love all plants. It's only when we have a particular end in view that one plant becomes better than another: better, that is, for our purpose.

But let's come back to artefacts, which in this blog tends to mean literary artefacts. Another of my very few ideas is about a comparatively definite distinction between the outer view and the inner view. The outer view is the one we take of artefacts in which we have no engagement; and the inner view is the opposite. Traditionally, outer views are dismissed. For example, we don't take much interest in someone's opinion about Tristan und Isolde if they don't care for opera. But none of us is inward all the time. And a dialogue that takes place entirely within a circle of fans soon becomes unhealthily isolated from the largeness of the world. So I believe that a dialectic between inner and outer is a necessary aim for a critic. Not just for a critic. It's also how we should negotiate life.

*

Life... I believe we are products of our environment and never fully know ourselves. I believe we inherit, from our past and from the tribe and from our environment, very large parts of our thinking, and it's a difficult but vital practice to try and look at these thoughts from a different perspective than when we are helplessly thinking them.

Consequently, I think that I believe much the same as what many other people believe. And the comments stream beneath Guardian articles tends to confirm that. I should like to be more radical and original than I am, but actually nearly everything I think is being thought by lots of other people at the same time. And yet, what we think isn't true, or is only a very partial truth at any rate.

Of course I believe that biography is shaping, so my own life story is relevant. One side of my family is English, the other Swedish. My upbringing is middle-class, but only the English side of my family were middle-class. My friends are mainly working-class. I live on a council estate. My job is a bit in-between. Naturally enough I'm fascinated by the different cultures and behaviours that surround me. Naturally enough they question my own assumptions sharply.

As I grow older (I'm 58) I become more aware of the limitations, helplessly imbibed, of my generation. For example, I believe that everyone of my age, certainly every white male, is to some degree racist and sexist. We have to strive against these attitudes, but it requires a certain self-honesty, not easily achieved, to recognize how deeply they're ingrained.

My interest in plants and nature provokes another line of questioning about this human life. Dante speaks of man's triple soul: vegetable, animal and rational. I decline to order these in ascending value. Much of how we live can be seen as exemplifying the vegetable soul working itself out; and much more the animal soul. The fundamental differences between how plants live and how animals live is, of course, a perennial meditation of mine. (And of course I believe in plant intelligence.) How we humans live is partly an elaboration of these elements within ourselves, partly too (as Dante rather neglected) a necessary accommodation with the ways of plants and animals in our environment. Of course I lament the lack of interest in or contact with nature in our urban lives. But at the same time I read these urban lives as in themselves profoundly natural (that is, part of nature), and as continuing to express the needs of the vegetable and animal elements within us.

The vegetable element of fixedness, solidity, home, a base, roots; and the animal restlessness of emotions, movement, energy, violence and petrol. (It's perhaps the rational soul that I feel is the least well-founded part of Dante's conception.)

*

And so, finally as far as this hasty post is concerned, to nations and languages. Among the kind of people that I exemplify, the nation-state has long been the subject of severe critique. We try to look at things more globally. My own smatterings of half a dozen languages (regrettably, all European) reflect a moderately sustained effort to see things from outside the English-speaking world and its literatures, at any rate. And of course I've especially used the feelings I have about Sweden, a permanent frozen need to inhabit the Nordic world where I've never lived and whose languages I'm far from fluent in, in order to investigate what is meant by love for own nation or nations, an emotion I feel in a very strong degree. How does this work with the global outlook that we seek, however feebly, to cultivate?

I am not an academic, and I have to make the best of that. I've written about many things, but there's no subject, no field, not even one area of a field, that I really know a lot about. Those inadequate smatterings of languages are typical of my knowledge generally. I'm not a botanist and I haven't read most of the modern poetry that a scholar of modern poetry would consider as a necessary basis. I'm theoretically uninformed, and am often worrying over questions about which a large body of debate, almost unknown to me, has certainly accrued already. Often the best thing I could say, the thing I ought to say, is: go and read about it elsewhere. But of course I have to hope that there's a place for my kind of ignorance too. It appears to me that most of our fine ideas are ultimately grounded in trying to valorize our own life-choices, and my own ideas are certainly no exception to the rule.

*

If I could have continued with this beyond my bed-time, I'd have liked to get on to other preoccupations: birth and growth, the seasonal cycles, waste and death and decay and the washing clean of water and ice. And love: our need to give it and to receive it; the reason, so often confused, for almost everything we do. Self-love and self-centredness, too. Change, and extinction. Climate change and greed and our other violences and cruelties. Duty. Drugs. Being here. Health.

This is becoming vague and poetical. I think it'll be back to specifics for the next 700 posts.

Two arguments for literary relativism

estate fence through rainy windscreen

1. Greatness is not absolute. One person builds a cathedral, and another makes a table-fork. A cathedral is a far greater thing than a fork can ever be, but it isn't so good for eating with. In short, a fork is a better fork than a cathedral is. Even a plastic one.

(This argument is adapted, or rather misremembered, from something C.S. Lewis wrote.)

2. I am fond of wild flowers. A few flowers are special favourites of mine, but for reasons that I recognize as purely personal. Generally I have no need to choose among them. My interest in, and enjoyment of wild flowers goes along quite nicely without any thought of comparative judgment. Why then should a reader feel compelled to describe one book as better or worse than another?

*

The two arguments are complementary. The analogy in the second argument (i.e. wild flowers) is carefully chosen. Wild flowers don't have a use, or rather, their use is principally a matter for themselves. They may appeal to you, but whether they do or not, we aren't interested parties. As soon as we become engaged, for instance as gardeners or farmers, plants begin to take on comparative values. (Some become judged as weeds.) The argument "I am fond of people..." is not so self-evident since most of us are highly judgmental of people.

But the first argument specifically addresses use, and asserts that the relation of reverence to use is not simple. Indeed disuse makes meaning, as happens, according to Lars Gustafsson, with obsolete machines. And a Marxist view of art as surplus value would also be consistent with that.

  

Yoshino Cherry (Prunus x yedoensis) in the Moredon Tree Collection

Folk-poetry - another point about relativism

I've been reading the Kanteletar recently. Specifically, I'm talking about Keith Bosley's translation of (I think) about a quarter of the collection, which was published in the Oxford World's Classics in 1992. The collection was put together by Lönnrot as a companion to the Kalevala. These are the short songs and ballads of the oral Finnish tradition.

Of course they have been through quite a bit of literary transformation - both Lönnrot and Bosley took quite a creative hand - but that's a complication I ask you to set aside for the purposes of this note. Just take it that I'm reading folk-poetry (or folk-lyrics i.e. the words of folk-songs - there's no real distinction in this case).

I have hugely valued (and in that sense enjoyed) my copy of the Kanteletar in the twenty years since I got it. I have, as you know, a strong not to say obsessive allegiance to all things Fennoscandic. And I've dipped into it dozens of times. But the dips were always pretty short. And basically, it's only now that I'm reading it. And, no great surprise, I'm loving it.

Image from http://luovaapuuhastelua.blogspot.co.uk showing two pages from a collection of Kantetetar poems for children, with illustrations by Kirsti Gallen-Kallela.


 *

Anyway it's started me thinking about art-relativism again. In previous notes I've spoken about a basic distinction between inner and outer audiences. The inner audience is e.g. film fans, and the outer audience is e.g. people who don't give a stuff about films, don't go to the cinema, and usually change channels when a film comes on the telly. The point I made then was that arguing about the merits of The Wolf of Wall Street only makes sense within the inner audience. So far, so obvious.

I don't know if I stated, but I certainly implied, that the enjoyment of art only took place within the inner audience. The arguments about the merits of such-and-such a film matter because all  the audience members know what it's like to enjoy a decent film.

As for the people in the outer audience, I took it as definitional that they could look at and enjoy a whole load of other things (perhaps the film posters, the music, the popcorn, people-watching...), but not the artefact in question.


I now realize that this is too simple. (By the way, you can forget about films from here on in.) I realize, because I'm experiencing it, that there is a pleasure in stepping back from the bull-pit of that inner audience. And that  it can become habitual. And this is what happens when you become a  student of folk-poetry.

You are, almost certainly, only distantly part of the inner audience for which the folk-poetry came into existence.

Basically, you decide to view art as nature. In normal circumstances you no more think of debating the relative merits of Kanteletar 2:220 and 2:234  than you debate the relative merits of a teazel and a dandelion. There's no-one to debate it with, for a start. Instead, your general premise is, that if a folk-poem is available at all, it is in the world of nature and justifies your interest. 

Does this mean that there is no enjoyment in reading the Kanteletar? Well, a doubt about that probably does explain why I've left it twenty years to really settle down and read it. I sensed the need, if I was going to read the Kanteletar, to put a different hat on, to be no mere voluptuary.

There's a certain one I know
a honey-berry I like
a pet bird I'm attached to
a wild duck I hold on to
   who is keen on me
   and I'm keen on him.

   He has lovely eyes
   I have a warm heart;
he has not thrown me over
nor left me alone: he has
taken me to be his own
  called me his treasure
looked me out as his fair one
chosen me as his white one.

   I'll hang on to him
   both hang on and swing
like a bird in a green tree
a squirrel on a spruce bough.

(Kanteletar 2:31, trans. Keith Bosley)

NB "honey-berry" = literal translation of Mesimarja, the Arctic Bramble (Rubus arcticus), most esteemed of northern berries.

(Rubus arcticus, image from http://www.luontoportti.com)

[Rubus arcticus formerly grew in Scotland  but has not been seen there since 1841. E.g. Thomas Walford recorded it in his checklist of rare plants in The Scientific Tourist Through England, Wales and Scotland  (1818): "Rubus arcticus. Dwarf Crimson Bramble. - Perth." .... "high regions of Ben-y-glo at Blair.".... i.e. the 40 km2 triple-Munro mountain of Beinn a’ Ghlò.]

Of course there is enjoyment. You can love spending time with a folk-poem, you can love a folk-poem, you can even appreciate what it's possible to glimpse of the folk-poem as an artwork, which it certainly is. But in a way these matters are secondary. The enjoyment is not isolated from interests whose tendencies are all outbound: understanding the common ways of life, discovering how the Finnish folk lived, learning how to play the melodies, savouring the marked differences (and occasional resemblances) between Finnish folk-expression and the Swedish and English folk-cultures in which I grew up. The enjoyment is as it were dispersed; it is not so much an appreciation of the folk-poem itself as an enjoyment of occupying the same world in which the folk-poem exists.

The quality of audience that I'm talking about here has, of course, far wider ramifications. We could call it "student" - it seems to me that a lot of students of classics are more often in this state of mind than in a traditional poetry-reader's world. They've left behind matters of literary value. Homer and Hesiod matter to them just because they exist.

You can see why, for some poetry-readers, this cooler but perhaps more integrated engagement with poetry begins to take over from the fan-fervour with which most of us begin. It draws some people away from controversy towards translation, or from poetics to literary history.

But "student" really breaks my binary paradigm of  "inner" and "outer", which however I'm unwilling to give up. I think what I would now say is that inner and outer are the poles of a spectrum of natural responses. This picture of inner and outer audiences arose, not from movies (I'm afraid I've always been rather in the outer camp when it comes to movies) but from formative experience of the art that mattered most to my generation in its teens, pop music. E.g. puzzling over why the value-difference between Stealer's Wheel and the New Seekers was a matter of intense significance to me when it was a matter of complete indifference to my mum and dad.  In those days the true "student" position, as defined here, hardly existed vis-a-vis pop music, at any rate it was hardly visible to us teens.

The point is, there's a lot of attractions that draw me towards the "student" position. But still, it is not natural. And to move away from nature, though it gives us a steadier view, always exacts a cost. So I won't be permanently spending my time with the Kanteletar. We need a living involvement with art. Tomorrow I'll be back with Tim Allen's poetry, and a controversialist once more.

IS - Ink Sculptors

Over at Intercapillary Space I've posted a mini- bibliogaphy raisonee of Patricia Scanlan's Ink Sculptors press. http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/patricia-scanlan-ink-sculptors-press.html  . I'll try and keep it updated with any more information that I get (for example, in the past couple of days I added in a bit of information about Máire Bradshaw, one of the authors). Seems a pretty nice example of a small art/poetry press (1988-94). What led me to check it out was reading through a volume by Scanlan herself; I became even more intrigued when I found Richard Makin and Jeremy Reed among the authors. In my personal pyramid of greatness, Makin is near to the very pinnacle. Some of the others are the kind of thing that I might in the past have put by as ephemeral, domestic, amateur, of strictly local or temporary interest. (And I suppose I still make those kind of judgments when I'm rummaging in a second-hand bookshop.) But as a relativist, I have to consider that all the other authors are each just as great as Richard Makin in their own ways. How can this be? That's the kind of thing that fascinates me: what relativism does to your perspective, the questions it asks.

anne brunty

Reading Anne Brunty's Agnes Grey last night, because I couldn't sleep, and a chap from Nidderdale - I'll fill in the name when I get home* - complaining about Charlotte's undervaluation of both her younger sisters' writings. Which certainly is striking, and painful. Does anyone accuse Charlotte of having destroyed the Gondal writings? I feel almost certain of it - until I speculate that Emily, sufficiently rattled by Charlotte's publication of her Gondal poems, might on her deathbed have asked Anne to get rid of the rest. But he tells us as a certainty that at any rate Charlotte did destroy the manuscripts of their published novels, so I suppose that is authoritative, though I don't know on whose authority.

[Brontë - I know, they changed the last name like u creatively re-spell a first name today, Erykah. But "Brontë" is difficult to type into Blogger when you're in a rush.]

*[Arnold Craig Bell. An enthusiast from outside the universities, he lived in Nidderdale at Folly Lodge. Between 1950 and 1992 he wrote studies of Alexandre Dumas, Handel, the songs of Schubert, as well as Anne Brontë.. -- all published by small presses, e.g. Merlin Press in this case. Also several volumes of poetry, which were published by Outposts.]

Writing about Anne Brontë is almost inavariably about REPUTATION, because of her unusual situation, for a novelist, of being always damagingly compared with two more famous sisters. Not that you find many people explicitly stating that Anne is a lesser author than the other two. That is, as it were, a judgement that doesn't need to be spelled out. I suppose it is a judgement secretly felt - and thus made - even by those very people who are very fierce in her defence. Bell writes about reputation for pages. The Internet, as regards authors, is always boringly obsessed with this theme. I am thoroughly weary with hearing about George Moore. Subtract that theme from writing about Anne Brontë, and what else are you left with? That Agnes Grey is a powerful statement about governesses. That The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a powerful statement about debauched behaviour and a wife's right to escape it. All this is true, but it's not very exciting or original. I should want to say something else, but I too feel the blankness, the - What to do with this text? What to do with this babied Anne, whom we must refer to by her first name?

Yet, after all, when we entered the lofty iron gateway, when we drove softly up the smooth, well-rolled carriage road, with the green lawn on each side, studded with young trees, and approached the new but stately mansion of Wellwood, rising above its mushroom poplar-groves, my heart failed me, and I wished it were a mile or two farther off.

(Chapter II)

This is Agnes, aged 18, arriving at the Bloomfields. "Wellwood" is one of those names that might in earlier fiction promise a Jonsonian image of abundance and moral strength. Here the symbolism is replaced by realism. Of course they would give it a nice name; they have a nice name themselves. "Lofty" and "stately" are staples of idealistic description, words later used in tourist literature. But somewhat complicating this is the daylight clarity of the estate's newness; those studded beginnings of a park, and the "mushroom poplar-groves". The adjective refers not to shape - these might well be Lombardy Poplars, widely planted after 1800 - but connotes "sprung up in a night" (poplars being all fast-growing trees).

Agnes' feelings are, naturally, aroused from the weary journey into active fear at the thought of meeting strangers and having to rely on unaided powers as never before. But this sentence also describes the dwindling of fancy into fact - not alarming fact, but specific, and different from what could have been imagined.

Her thoughts on education are about to be severely shaken up.

Whatever others said, I felt I was fully competent to the task: the clear remembrance of my own thoughts in early childhood would be a surer guide than the instructions of the most mature adviser. I had but to turn from my little pupils to myself at their age, and I should know, at once, how to win their confidence and affections...

(Chapter I)

Ideas beloved of authors and romantic poets, ideas supposed adequate, still, by most parents. In a family, buttressed by instinct, affection, and the child's utter dependence, they work out all right, a lot of the time. Agnes did not go to school herself, she was taught within the family. But now she is to find that the governess's role places her in the family but emphatically not of it. She is repulsed by these children, and all thought of identifying them with her own younger self is immediately blown away.

Relativism values All literature, in a way that is supposed to be unsustainable, like an economy with roaring inflation. Every instance of destroyed literature is thus equally regrettable, whether it's Anne's 4-volume Henry Sophona sensation or Byron's diary or the business papers drafts and junk emails that we destroy every day. In principle.

But ignoring those, what we might well excuse to ourselves on the basis that their composers probably have copies, and ignoring also our own writings, which we may feel are a special case that we are allowed to destroy without compunction - perhaps even meritoriously - we do sometimes end up being the sole possessor of papers with a little more relevance to the Gondal analogy - dead and not widely-remembered creative people who sometimes wrote things that looked like poetry. Sometimes I glance at those papers (e.g. when moving house) and I think, no-one cares whether this exists or not.

Or our children's drawings, how many boxes of them will we hang on to?

Selection is everywhere, tidily scissoring and sometimes leaving a bleeding lobe.

relativism

Go Jenson!

My word, Tom. You really are a mine of useless information.

Look, Dad, Kids Eat Free!
Ah-ha! I hope you're not going to make quite such a mess of it as that little girl. (laughter)
No we're not!
Yes, I am Dad, I'm going to make a great big mess!

I am not a huge fan of folk music, but these guys were really good.

...120 bpm which then slows down to 116 bpm, and on the whole I found the album very poor value for step fans. (from a review of Prince's "Sign o the Times" in Aerobics and Jogging magazine)

Never judge a book by your own standards.

In each of these cases the Q1 version crudely damages the tone and mood of the earlier scene by confusing it with the later: so Capulet becomes impolite, the Nurse a tippler, the light poise of Romeo prosaic. .... The middle of the sppech in Q1 is not Shakespeare; for his still impatient and headstrong Mercutio, suddenly caught by spasms of physical agony and anguished thoughts, Q1 substitutes pedestrian hack-writing in regular dull rhythm, concluded with a dismally banal sententious couplet. ... (Brian Gibbons, 2nd Arden edn of Romeo and Juliet, 1980)

Every so often I jot down materials for an essay about - in fact, a defence of - critical relativism, but I'm sure I'll never write it. That's partly because I suppose that everything in my Defence must have been said about a thousand times already, and perhaps refuted a thousand times too, but I can't really be bothered to check because that kind of writing bores me. I like the idea of writing it, though. And whatever may have been said before, it's obvious that an unrelativistic view of art continues to flourish fiercely in some parts of the poetry world where plodding schoolmasterly chastisings and furious line-by-line tu quoques are clearly intended seriously by their authors.

I would have mentioned Fish's "Is there a text in this class?" as the only book on the subject I've ever willingly read (and I think basically I just agreed with it).

I would have quoted that bit in Borges' "Tlön Uqbar Orbis Tertius" about how no argument is considered complete until its refutal has been completely worked out.
(that would amount to fully understanding why each of your favourites might seem like shit to someone else, and why all the things you hate might seem wonderful to someone else...).

I would have written about "hard cases", where the relativist argument might seem counter-intuitive: for example, that there exists a possible understanding of the world, not necessarily yet instantiated, but no more nor less correct than our own, in which

the "Bad Quartos" of Shakespeare's plays are more valued than the good;

or

Mozart's juvenile symphonies are rated above the Six (or how about this one: Beethoven's "Battle Symphony" above the Nine?)

or

the money-spinning gestures of Wilkie Collins' terribly ill later years seem more interesting than Armadale...

(I sometimes get so absorbed in this matter that no sooner have I thought up some unthinkable reversal of our consensus, than I try and work out the kind of way you'd need to see the world in order to believe these things. Surprisingly often, this procedure leads me to a mental place that is both sensible and revelatory. Surprisingly often, a little inspection reveals that the opinion I once considered so outrageous is in fact not just defensible but already widely held, and my supposed consensus depended on a highly selective sample of the earth's inhabitants.)

In fact these are not really such hard cases. The necessary perspective for a simple reversal of canonical judgment is often quite easy to imagine. For example, "All Shakespeare's plays are wonderful" is a common canonical view, but far more common is the inverse judgment, "All Shakespeare's plays are boring". Such judgments never exist in a void. Thus the latter view commonly exists within a larger framework of "All old plays are boring", "All old books are boring", "Books are boring" etc. -all views of the world that there's no disputing. Thus, if we try and imagine a context for the view of Mozart proposed above, the easiest solution is to place it within a larger belief about youth - in effect, a denial of the values encoded in the very word "juvenilia". That wouldn't really be very hard to conceive - views about youth have been through many well-documented changes in the last few centuries. Like when you look at a sheep field and reflect that the skipping, curious lambs seem a whole lot more intelligent than their stodgy parents.

A really hard case might be something like: "All Shakespeare's plays are deadly bores, with the shining exception of the absorbing Two Gentlemen of Verona." This is an opinion that is tough to imagine being held, because its sole exception seems to imply literary values that, you'd think, would be bound to find something to admire in a few other Shakespeare plays as well. What could you value in the Two Gentlemen that you couldn't also find reasonably executed elsewhere? So perhaps it might be possible to construct composite and artificial judgments of this sort that are really impossible to hold, inextricably mired in self-contradiction? (I am far from conceding it.)

I would also have written about the basic differences in character between inner and outer views of some category of artefact - as rather neatly summed up in that "I'm not a huge fan of folk music" remark.

And I would have talked about the secrecy of artefacts, why audiences can never understand them nor authors come out and sit among their own audience.


[One reason I won't ever write this essay is that its cultural moment has passed... There's a faded, period feel to arguments that (even hypothetically) discuss the ranking of Shakespeare's plays. In practice everyone knows that we relativists have already won the argument, even if we've never really had it...]