Pass the Glue Please

We talk nonsense and call it sense. And the room claps and cheers… Ideology becomes conventional wisdom when the even most absurd statement is accepted as simple fact. Daša Drndić posits a lunatic idea, Amanda Hopkinson quotes it as if she’d said oranges are orange.

“None of us are ‘fully developed characters’, nor do our lives have a beginning, middle and end. We are all composed of fragments”.

Are we not born? Do we not die? Is there no middle bit in between… And while that ‘fully developed’ contains a host of ambiguities it certainly does not follow that we grow in a random, chaotic way; we get our 2:1 before learning the alphabet. E.E.E.D.G.R.. You juggle the letters around as you wait to collect your scroll: D.E.G.R.E.E.. No no, no; that’s not right… G.R.E.E.D.E.. That’s more like it! As you say thank you to the chancellor. Is every page to be a lottery? Are we juggling the lexicon when we read? These questions answer themselves. Without the words and sentences to enclose them A J Q et al. can have no life; left random and meaningless they make for poor novels, abysmal friends. Words. Fragments. Bits & pieces. Always they need some pattern. And what interests us - as with our certificate we walk the campus, heading for the lake, throwing in our textbooks, delighting as they drown - is the order of the words, the location of those fragments, the presentation of these pieces. Nor do we forget their position and intensity and force. Altogether these form tendencies from out which we read the pattern of a character’s life. Our friend has shape and continuity; a stranger but some chance event on the street. We want to… Oh, hallo Elizabeth, how you doing…

She is our teacher and muse, telling us to ignore the crude banalities of university lecturers, their confusions over words and things. Do you know, they really think Frances Rutherford is not real. Yes. It’s true. Made of paper and ink, is what she told me. A Professor of English Literature - she always enunciates the capital letters. Not real! I was too soft, I was, I really was, to tell her that she doesn't exist in the minds of literature’s lovers. That her students dump her once out of class.

Elizabeth reminds us of the contrivance (as well as the self-importance) of the university educator. It is E.E.E.D.G.R. that requires an effort of mind not “degree”, which we read without any thought at all. Fragments have to be created, they are not found. To break our lives down into pieces, as Elizabeth so perceptively notes in writing about Renata Adler, is to perform a highly conscious activity. 

To be interesting, each page, each paragraph—that is the burden of fiction composed of random events and happenings in a more or less plotless sequence… A precocious alertness to incongruity: this one would have to say is the dominating traits of the character of the narrative, the only character in the book. Perception, then, does the work of feeling and is also the main action. It tends to stand there alone, displacing even temperament. (The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick. The second italics are mine.)

Humans are not just a collection of scraps, each one sharing an ontological equality; a lover’s impress no deeper than an advert’s as it passes us on the street; these young legs stretching along the double-decker lovelier than Anke’s, who we left in bed this morning, reading our latest novel. Anke? Staring at the wooden cowboy with mutton-chop whiskers inviting us to the vape shop. Anke… I cross the street and say hello to a stranger. No, not Anke, who I first kissed amongst the library shelves, ten years ago. Do you remember the book, how it fell…its title… Alas, I forget, as I recall that skirt in Selfridges; a rich yellow, with its purple lily curling up from ankle to waist. Shall I buy her? Oh good, the bus has stopped, and we follow the legs to a fringe of black lace, the thigh resting comfortably upon the driver’s cabin; we imagine its softness and warmth. We want to… I hope he doesn’t fall asleep. I think of a crash, those legs wrapped around a heap of passengers, broken and bloody; it is a mess, the thing looks alive, I think of a gigantic octopus. Their cries. Those sad faces. Help the victims or stroke that silky skin… Hello, so good to see you. Anke. Anke? A character in a Claude Chabrol movie, so little affect does she have. One monad of perception, whose impact soon fades. The bus starts, and those long lovely legs drive off to Clapham Common. We wave goodbye like a child. A child smiles and waves back at us. A cloud of melancholy drops its shadow. Our dream is driving away. Anke! Yesterday’s assault  - two grannies attacked me in Tesco for quoting James Joyce  - overwhelmed by today’s parking fine, the evangelical knocking on the door selling Buddha, the suicide in A Wreath of Roses… Poor Anke. She is on that bus. I imagine her now, rushing down the aisle… A black stiletto flashes out. She falls. Legs like tentacles wrap around her, the thighs smothering her last forlorn cries…

In a life composed of fragments a tweet trumps our wedding day; Leopold Bloom never makes it home to Molly (and he wouldn’t recognise her if he did); while Anke is but a scrap of paper we throw into the rubbish bin. Do we really have no stories? Again the question prompts its own answer. Life’s details are more gloopy than this: they insist on sticking to our bodies, our minds, our memories. Hard as we try to scrub them off…always there will be some that remain. And an artist should delight in these sticky bits, it is the source of their patterns and meanings, those intoxications of spirit and form. We are generous and grant Daša Drndić the same aesthetic intelligence as Frances Rutherford.

As a child, beguiled, enchanted, she had drifted from one object to another - the little treasures of childhood, the veined pebbles, the raindrops lying like mercury on hairy leaves, shells, whorled fossils, waxen petals - holding them in her hands, not knowing yet what to make of them, but pained by her inadequacy.

This sensibility alone isn’t enough to make Frances a painter. Nor is the mere transposition of these things onto canvas. She wasn’t content until “the inward, invisible transference” had been made. Only when she could create the objects with her brushstrokes, transforming them into her own aesthetic medium, that product of her artistic soul, did she know she was a real artist; only then had she transversed that “distance between charades at parties and Sarah Bernhardt as Phèdre.” We will have to read Daša Drndić to find out if she too is a performer of literary miracles. Unfortunately, her quoted pronouncements are not encouraging. This is stale stuff:

“I don’t think story-telling is important. I don’t believe in ‘character development’. 

Monsieur Nouveau Roman is due for his pension. Once a Young Turk, who wrote some great things - there is Robbe-Grillet’s In The Labyrinth and Claude Simon’s The Georgics - the nouveau novelist is now a garrulous old man, whose talk has become tiresome; all those repetitions and wanderings, and still he can’t get past that white chair, the mirror, the bedroom lamp, the steps of a stranger…

A stranger… Yes. When we ditch the novel’s form - its growth, its meanings, the tensions between things and feelings, contingency and continuity - we lose the feel for the human. A sad day in our culture. Historically we have gone to fiction to discover our fellow species; think of those eighteenth century novels, each one named after an individual: Moll Flanders, Pamela, Camilla, Jonathan Wild… This was a new world then. And the people in it! But such characters are not welcome today. Are there none left? Have they been wiped out, shipped off to another country? We suspect not. Novels exist within an ecosystem that determines both the inhabitants and vantage point. The new novelists of the eighteenth century lived on the street and in country houses; they worked at court and were printers; some mingled with crooks, others shagged prostitutes. They had to barge and fence their away around a crowd of individuals, many of whom were nasty and dangerous. Pamela was kidnapped, for Christ’s sake! It made for fine observers and robust storytellers. But these tough souls have been replaced by…those who Camilla ridicules as the fools of life…yes, the whores, buffoons, ladies and rapscallions of the eighteenth century have been elbowed aside by graduates and teachers; it is they who nowadays decide who enters a book. No longer do we go to life to write novels. We learn to write them at school; which itself has become a very odd place, terrified of the crowd, so rumbustious and out of its control. Is this true? Let’s talk to an inmate. Oh yes, of course, the universities can’t risk having these characters about. Think of it… He wants me to interject, to speak his sentences for him. I desist. I want to hear what he thinks. The words begin in a whisper, but quickly reach high pitch as his head wobbles around in mania… We can’t let him wander about campus. Think of the students, they are innocents, not much more than children; and then there’s the parents; you do know they track their kids like Amazon parcels… How would they cope with a young tough? Imagine. Just imagine it. Inviting Tom Jones into the English faculty…

We have our own reasons for this “radical” turn against the fictional.

“The Christian Scriptures alone comprise many genres, and the philosophical tradition which responds to this particular canon of texts offers a rich variety of possibilities: the memoir (Augustine), the prayer (Anselm), the dialogue (Hume, Herder), the geometric treaties (Spinoza), the sermon (Kierkegaard), the novel (Dostoevsky). Yet contemporary philosophers of religions tend to be remarkably unreflective on this point. Many labour under the assumption, deeply embedded in academic culture, that argumentative prose is the only respectable form for philosophical discussion on any topic - including God.” (Clare Carlisle)

Christianity’s textural evisceration has long been the sad fate of literature. Reviewers are academics now, and so of course they turn the novel - and poems and essays - into a reflection of themselves…they look into a shattered mirror. For their tendency is to atomise experience, that automatic reflex of the analytic mind, greatly facilitated by the medium upon which it operates; for once a life is transferred from the street into text the words can be broken apart and arranged into almost any order the mind chooses. Deconstruction was a fantasy about life but it is a hyperrealist account of academic method. Oh my god! Yes, you are right to exclaim. It is a common oversight of the academic to mistake paper for reality, paragraphs for people. And it is this error, in conflating words with living beings, that accounts for their inhumanity. Thus when Tony Judt writes - in his extremely useful Past Imperfect - that the intellectuals were the tyrants of the twentieth century we accept his conclusion with equanimity. Of course they are! Exercising a total control over the printed page, cutting it up into all kinds of shapes - though, curiously, most follow a fashionable pattern - the academic is apt to forget the real men and women who live outside the book. They are not so malleable, for they have a structure of experience that, fortunately, is resistant to such glib manipulations. Language is not life. But a professor has to believe the opposite. Career and status depend upon it.

Today we have gone beyond this academic appropriation of Lit Crit. Now, it is not just the critics who turn novels into treatises the novelists too have succumbed to the university disease. No wonder they get the highest marks…

[Daša Drndić]…was a voice of – and for – our times..

… when writing the clichés of the age:

…taking on the complexities of her time. These complexities apply to her subjects (“I like to tackle big issues: totalitarianism, migration, refugees”)… 

They depict the lives of ordinary “little” people with assumedly insignificant careers and lifestyles, who are easily ignored even by near-neighbours, but who provide the raw material for history’s violent game-changers. The period and place into which each of us is born is, naturally, a source of fascination, never more so than when that period, like Drndić’s – who was born in 1946 – is the aftermath of the Second World War, and that place is the Balkans, often sidelined in modern history and literary translation.

We must assume Amanda Hopkinson doesn’t read novels. For the number that are not about ‘ordinary “little” people’ is very small indeed. I ransack the library to return with half a dozen books. And do you know… I’m not sure I like that “little”. Is an ordinary person a dwarf? Is my essence to be a pigmy? And no Amanda, your quotation marks will not save you here. A sense of superiority always shows. Clearly, it’s a class thing. We think of Camilla, that daughter of dons, in A Wreath of Roses.

…all of his clothes and his bearing depicting a kind of man who could never have any part in her life, whose existence could not touch hers, which was thoughtful rather than active and counted its values in a different way.

Literary history too seems beyond Professor Hopkinson, who appears unaware of those vast numbers of unknowns who populate postwar British fiction (my monument to them is here). But these “little” people are not to her taste (while I assume Guy Pringle & Co are too “big” to squeeze into a present PHD). No. She wants the exotic… And she clamours for importance! Dong! Dong! the big bell sounds their approach. Hurrah! We’re going to have the really tremendous stuff now: “totalitarianism, migration, refugees”. But isn’t this just the usual Poshlost fare; the kind, as Nabokov once noted, that sells well to the middlebrow? Such “complex” subjects are surely best studied by history, whose analytic framework is essential to their understanding. Should our novelist be an historian…but then Cambridge University Press isn't much seen on the bestseller list.

Her books contain memories and conversations, bus tickets and envelopes, torn pages and ghostly photographs and lists – near-interminable lists, consisting mainly of names of those forcibly disappeared into camps, of whom all other traces may have been systematically erased.  

We were too kind. This is the sort of stuff to be found not in history books but in the newspapers and on television. A writer has mistaken the corporate media for the world it constantly edits, distorts and caricatures. We should not be surprised, for we have been told - Amanda Hopkinson tells us - that Daša Drndić belongs to her country’s elite. Of course this is how she will see the “little” people. She has been trained to pulverise us into linguistic fragments, which she then plays with in anyway she will, although always there is the ideological frame; these fragments given meaning by the day’s big celebrity themes, the Holocaust, Totalitarianism, Refugees… We can’t help but feel that it’s all just a game, as Tony Tanner once said of American post-modern fiction. Yes. Daša belongs to an international elite; America has at last captured Croatia. 

To look down from the media centre is to see us all as simple objects to be re-arranged at the camera’s call. Yes yes yes. Just move to the side just a little; put the old crone there; and move that shattered Kalashnikov next to the shopping basket. Damn! What you’re bloody well doing. Get that f***ing Audi out of here… I want to see the vegetables strewn across the floor; from a certain height they’ll look like heads, if we can get the lighting right. Chuck in a few tomatoes won’t you. And no smiling please. 

Outside this magic circle the “little” people persist in telling their stories: of marriage, work, birth, retirement, and, at the last, death. The latter told by someone close who knows them well. Shalom.