Trigger happy

Last year a regular correspondent sent me a link to an op-ed piece in the online Columbia Spectator, co-authored by Kai Johnson, Tanika Lynch, Elizabeth Monroe and Tracey Wang (April 30, 2015). It reported a student's contribution to Columbia University's Multicultural Affairs Advisory Board on Literature Humanities, an advisory panel of which the co-authors are members. The MAAB, an extension of the Office of Multicultural Affairs, is "an advocacy group dedicated to ensuring that Columbia’s campus is welcoming and safe for students of all backgrounds."

MAAB were concerned by what appeared to be happening in campus classrooms "where transgressions concerning student identities are common". Such a transgression occurred when a  student was instructed by her professor to read Ovid's 'Metamorphoses', including the myths of Persephone and Daphne, both of which involve episodes of assault and rape. The student in question was herself the survivor of sexual assault and described being "triggered" while reading Ovid's account. She was dismayed that her professor focussed on the language and imagery when lecturing on the text and as a result the student felt "completely disengaged from the class discussion as a means of self-preservation. She did not feel safe in the class".

The co-authors add that "like so many texts in the Western canon, [Metamorphoses] contains triggering and offensive material that marginalizes student identities in the classroom. These texts, wrought with histories and narratives of exclusion and oppression, can be difficult to read and discuss as a survivor, a person of color, or a student from a low-income background."

These are serious matters, and unsettling. My immediate reaction was to sympathise with this unfortunate student and to wonder why she was not the real focus of the co-authors' concern, rather than 'Metamorphoses'. If the rape of Persephone is enough to prompt feelings of exclusion and oppression one wonders how on earth she manages to negotiate her daily life. If a two-thousand-year-old myth prompts such terrible memories of personal violation one can't help feeling she should leave Literature alone alone and study Science, or Technology, or Engineering, or Maths. And never go to the movies. 

In this case it is surely the student who needs careful handling by college authorities, not the curriculum. Of course this is about much more than one unfortunate student's background. It's about academic politics and the increased commodification and commercialisation of Higher Education. The learning contract has utterly changed since my day and students now feel they have the right to respond, to call the shots - they are paying for their education after all. But professors need to be able to function within their capacity too. It seems to be a show-down between the self-absorbed and the no-longer-relevantly-experienced.

It may well be the case that some of the Western Canon 'can be difficult to read and discuss' for some students, but that's hardly a question of ethnicity, or economic status, or being a 'survivor' - it's a question of difficulty full stop. And it's the difficulty that makes the effort worthwhile. 

I had quite a strange childhood and I suppose that makes me, in current thinking, both a victim and a survivor, although reading Gawain and the Green Knight never triggered a post-traumatic reaction in me. I don't have a history of exclusion and oppression so my views have less weight, and rightly. My concern is what will happen when, say, Eimear McBride's debut novel takes its place on college curriculums in the States and elsewhere? What impact will the visceral and harrowing prose of A Girl is a Half-formed Thing have on a student who thinks the rape of Persephone is a forensic report?

Art isn't about reassurance and consolation and it isn't about making people feel safe or 'empowered'. Art isn't about therapy or empowerment or counterweighting the horrors of history. Art isn't a bromide or a poultice or a sticking-plaster because, as Beckett put it: 'the syndrome known as life is too diffuse to admit of palliation'. A combination of victimhood and entitlement has distorted a non-negotiable truth - that Daphne and Persephone are myths, that Ovid is a writer from another age and culture and that anyone who feels unsafe in a lecture hall might just be in the wrong place.

Later in the Columbia article the co-authors claim that Toni Morrison's works are 'founding texts of the Western canon'. Presumably they mean 'foundational' (itself a critical judgement open to discussion),  but I don't want to come across as pompously pedantic. 'Metamorphosis' certainly is a founding text of the Western tradition - so what are we to do?

There is a terrible moral vanity and condescension in judging past writers by our own contemporary standards and - predictably, inevitably - finding them inadequate or offensive. It's hard to think of any writer, of any artist at all from any era. who isn't in some way horribly flawed. Which is another way to say terribly human. T. S. Eliot was anti-Semitic (though not as nasty in that respect as Ezra Pound); Dylan Thomas was a spongeing drunk; Virginia Woolf an appalling snob and Ayn Rand a complete maniac. You'd have to dig deep into the past to find a writer who can escape our thin-lipped censure, and the chances are that he or she would be a complete bore. 

The MAAB planned to circulate "a letter to faculty about potential trigger warnings and suggestions for how to support triggered students." The assumption here appears to be that some unfortunate students have been brutalised into becoming, or have elected to become, mechanised, unthinking respondees to anything that challenges their highly developed (yet simultaneously fragile and unstable) sense of what is right for them, not what matters.

On Lyse Doucet and juncture

The BBC's distinguished Foreign Correspondent Lyse Doucet appears on Rafio 4's Today programme regularly. She has an accent that I've never quite been able to place - there are traces of Northern Irish and Canadian. She sounds like a citizen of the world, and quite right too. Whenever she is on air (often reporting from a war zone) I brace myself for her enunciation of the phrase 'peace talks' as I am never able to hear her say the words without mentally reconfiguring them as 'pea stalks'.

This is, I'll admit, trivial in the extreme. It's an example of juncture - the gap between spoken words - affecting their meaning. I once heard a lecturer employ the phrase 'cube analogy' which sounded to me more like 'Cuban allergy' (or what a friend amusingly dubbed 'Castro-enteritis'). 

Then there's the American publishing house New Directions . . .

King Herod complains

In Britain we are now fast approaching the end of a period of welfare philanthropy and the decline (or privatisation) of the institutions charged with its delivery. All the pre-war challenges are facing us again, and have never really gone away - education, health, housing, nutrition, employment. Today's fresh, eager and telegenic politicians, faced with such long-established challenges, tend to describe the multiple crises in health and housing as 'unprecedented' (a favourite word), yet even a cursory consideration of the social issues addressed by 1930s documentary film makers will confirm that this is not the case. The challenges facing our nation and our leaders today are all entirely precedented - but while the old questions are once again looming what is no longer available is a public language capable of tackling the issues, and the knowledge and experience upon which such a public language draws for its meaning. We seem also today to lack the consensus for change, a consensus based around shared values, shared assumptions, shared constitutive stories. One recalls T. S. Eliot's dictum: 'of course we know more than the past did because they are what we know'. But it seems too me that 'they' are what our leaders don't know, or don't care to know. We are destined to make the same mistakes, adding some new ones for good measure.

W. H. Auden anticipated this malaise in a wildly eccentric stretch of prose towards the end of For the Time Being (1945) and I'd like to quote the passage at length to give a sense of its accumulative satirical power and particular strangeness

The speaker is King Herod, justifying his command to slaughter the firstborn of Judea and predicting the dire cultural consequences of any failure to carry out the order. Herod is (as John Fuller observed) 'rational, liberal and humane: he cannot bring himself to believe something without proof and so unhappily is forced to order the Massacre of the Innocents that his reasoning demands.' Herod, in other words, embodies precisely those liberal values - the values Auden shared - which are incapable of opposing a Hitlerian tyranny:

Reason will be replaced by Revelation. Instead of Rational Law, objective truths perceptible to any who will undergo the necessary intellectual discipline, Knowledge will degenerate into a riot of subjective visions - feelings in the solar plexus induced by under-nourishment, angelic images generated by fevers or drug, dream warnings inspired by the sound of falling water. Whole cosmogonies will be created out of some forgotten personal resentment, complete epics written in private languages, the daubs of schoolchildren ranked above the greatest masterpieces. 

Idealism will be replaced by Materialism. Priapus will only have to move to  a good address and call himself Eros to become the darling of middle-aged women. Life after death will be an eternal dinner party where all the guests are 20 years old. Diverted from its normal and wholesome outlet in patriotism and civic or family pride, the need of the materialistic Masses for some visible Idol to worship will be driven into totally unsocial channels where no education can reach it. Divine honours will be paid to silver teapots, shallow depressions in the earth, names on maps, domestic pets, ruined windmills, even in extreme cases, which will become increasingly common, to headaches, and malignant tumours, or four o'clock in the afternoon.

Justice will be replaced by Pity as the cardinal human virtue, and all fear of retribution will vanish. Every corner-boy will congratulate himself: 'I'm such a sinner that God had to come down in person to save me. I must be a devil of a fellow.' Every crook will argue: 'I like committing crimes. God likes forgiving them. Really the world is admirably arranged.' And the ambition of every young cop will be to secure a deathbed repentance. The New Aristocracy will consist exclusively of hermits, bums and permanent invalids. The Rough Diamond, the Consumptive Whore, the bandit who is good to his mother, the epileptic girl who has a way with animals will be the heroes and heroines of the New Tragedy when the general, the statesman, and the philosopher have become the butt of every farce and satire.

What a marvellously unsettling piece of prose - wildly funny, deadly serious and weirdly prescient. The petulant, childlike Herod anticipates the comprehensive collapse of humane values that throws up in its wake 'a riot of subjective visions'. From Herod's perspective any rumour of an Incarnation is a threat to his secular, ordered, rational world, and his dilemma is one with which we can all identify. The monologue concludes in a desperate serio-comic flurry of regrets:

I've tried to be good. I brush my teeth every night. I haven't had sex for a month. I object. I'm a liberal. I want everyone to be happy. I wish I had never been born.

In Britain today, liberal ideals - indeed any ideals - are unlikely to be promoted and circulated by appealing to a commonly-held set of assumptions based on such nation-defining historic episodes as Magna Carta, Balaclava, Waterloo, Peterloo, the Suffragette Movement, the Battle of the Somme, D-day and so on. In the past half-century the population of Britain, and more specifically the urban population, has become ethnically, religiously and culturally diverse, a transformation that has brought with it a multitude of self-evident benefits and not a few problems. Although a shared sense of national identity based on existing constitutive stories is still seen as a desirable and practical approach to achieving social cohesion, precisely what stories are appropriate for circulation is a subject for continuing debate, not least when it comes to the content of school history curricula and the kind of tests (if tests are really required) that should be set for migrants wishing to live and work in Britain. 

For the Time Being © The Estate of W. H. Auden

On Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco died on Saturday. By way of tribute here are two paragraphs indebted to Eco and to the late Gilbert Adair from my forthcoming book About a Girl: A Reader's Guide to Eimear McBride's A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing:

At this point I'm happy to admit that I owe Gilbert Adair a double debt - for the term sillage and for introducing me to the Perfect Specific. Both of these appeared in two of the many brilliant essays included in Myths and Memories, published the year Eimear McBride was born. I've been re-reading this and his two subsequent collections The Post-modernist Always Rings Twice (1992) and Surfing the Zeitgeist (1997) ever since. Few cultural commentators can match Adair's range, knowledge and intelligence - he writes in a way I'd like to think I think, and his cool ironic voice is much missed. I want to rope in Adair a third and final time, because he memorably summed up the shortcomings and attractions of post-modernism in  Flickers: An Illustrated Celebration of 100 Years of Cinema (1995). In a short piece about Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven, he references Umberto Eco's Reflections on the Name of the Rose in which Eco, describing the genesis of his most celebrated novel, defines the postmodern attitude 'as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, "I love you madly", because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still,' continues Eco, 'there is a solution. He can say, "As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly."

Thus, Adair argues, the speaker avoids any false innocence and, in stating clearly that it is no longer possible to speak with true innocence, he is nevertheless able to say what he wants to say to the woman: that he loves her sincerely in an age of lost innocence, an age in which sincerity has been compromised by a pervasive and ironic self-consciousness. I'd suggest that in her writing McBride has shown us a way in which we can say, unironically, 'I love you madly' or (if we adhere to the Adair/Eco principle) she has given us an alternative to the ironic detachment of 'As Barbara Cartland would say, 'I love you madly' (which is me quoting Gilbert Adair quoting Umberto Eco quoting an imaginary suitor quoting Barbara Cartland). What we can now hypothetically say is (for instance) 'As Eimear McBride would say: 'There's no reason in the wide wide world' (to take a favourite phrase from the book). In other words she has given us a new literary standard against which human experience can be measured, and in doing so has stripped language of its disabling post-modern irony. That's quite something. More, she has introduced feeling to modernist writing, combining virtuosity with tenderness. She has brought life to the avant grade, and brought the avant-garde to life. 

About a Girl is published on 17th March by CB editions.

On Jonathan Meades

‘The title is grossly inaccurate,' the author assures us. 'The book is, rather, a portrait of a disappeared provincial England, a time and place unpeeled with gruesome relish.’ This is Jonathan Meades, introducing his 2014 book An Encyclopedia of Myself. 

Gruesome relish has been a Meades trademark since Filthy English (2003), a spectacularly nasty collection of short stories featuring no end of squalid transgressions - incest, addiction, zoophilia, murder, the lot, all lovingly depicted. For earlier evidence of his guignol tendency we have to go all the way back to 1979, and his little-known debut publication. This is Their Life - An Insight into the Unseen Lives of Your Favourite T.V. Personalities "including details of their hobbies, habits, and home lives". Sharing the bright red and orange cover are Max Boyce, Leonard Rossiter, Benny Hill, Noel Gordon, Yootha Joyce and the comedy impersonator Mike Yarwood, who provides the foreword. Not simply a hack's cut-and-paste job, the volume's witty and sardonic potted biographies ('For years Nerys Hughes was 28 . . .') anticipate to a quite terrifying degree the inanity of contemporary celebrity culture. This might might not feature on his CV but is of interest - a cut above the usual  showbiz hack froth. You can pick up a copy for less than three quid on www.abe.com and it's an essential purchase for Meades completists.

                                                           Image © Salamander Books

If a sequel were commissioned today would Meades's mugshot be on the jacket, alongside (say) Jeremy Clarkson, Sandi Toksvig, Piers Morgan and the stars of Eastenders? Unlikely, because while he is an established broadcaster, and a distinguished one, he's never been and is never likely to be a family favourite, never a crowd-pleaser. Surrounded by anodyne telly peers who are personalities, he has a personality. He's too bright, too trenchant, too much his own man, but the telly Meades in Ray-bans, baggy black suit and moth-eaten pompadour, chronically loquacious, biliously erudite, is an artful construct that we should be wary of mistaking for the real thing, 

An Encyclopedia of Myself is ostensibly a memoir of growing up in Salisbury in the 1950s and the form - essays alphabetically arranged and chronologically deranged - suits Meades's strengths as a writer: short (or shortish) riffs with an autobiographical theme, many of them candid and moving. The first entry can stand for the rest. Under the heading ABUSER, SEXUAL, the author confesses to (and appears to regret) the absence of any personal history of childhood abuse.

'Paedophilia' is, he says, a misnomer since it means nothing more than the love of children, but he doesn't  offer 'paedomania' as the proper term for the sexual abuse of minors. It may be too late in the day for such lexical pedantry, and in any case he has other big words up his sleeve. Within the first ten pages of this, the first entry, we get gingivitic, naugahyde, mnemonic (twice), endogamy and albinism (the congenital disorder also known as achromia, achromasia, or achromatosis, terms which one imagines Meades only decided to omit after much soul-searching). Admirers of Meades' prose will be as happy as pigs in clover, and readers of this blog will have no need of a dictionary to look up such words, but others may feel there's a stink of the lamp. Vocabulary aside, his argument is that, lacking any experience of childhood abuse he has no commercially-exploitable trauma to proffer his readers, and that, further, genuine victims of such abuse are (a) complicit in their victimhood and (b) at a commercial advantage in the marketplace for miserabilist memoirs. Fair enough.

What works best are those moments when he ditches the thesaurus and speaks clearly and plainly: 'There were children before there was childhood' is the promising opener to an airless and unfocussed monologue on the corruption of the innocent under industrial capitalism. The paragraph collapses under its own lexical weight when the author deploys, in quick succession, the words 'telluric' (a low frequency subterranean or subacquatic current) and 'anthropocene' (referring to human activities that have had a significant impact on the Earth's ecosystems). Meades confidently attributes its coinage to the Nobel Prize-winner Paul Crutzen. He's wrong - it was the late Eugene F. Stoermer. 

If I settle on this opening entry it's because it is entirely representative of this marvellous yet frustrating book as a whole - a mixture of show-off virtuoso prose, unreliable factoids and occasional moments of real candour and insight.

As a Francophile gourmet Meades will know all about gavage, the French term for  the delivery of food by means of a tube passed through the nose or mouth into the stomach, be it of suffragette or farmyard fowl. In the case of Périgord geese, gavage is performed between two and five times a day for anything between two and five weeks, depending on the size of the bird. A funnel attached to a thin tube is employed to force an enriched grain mash containing fats and vitamin supplements directly into the bird's crop. It's an unattractive practice but the results are sublime - the grotesquely distended and fatty liver of the slaughtered animal is known to the world, and favoured by depraved trenchermen, as foie gras. You can see where I'm going with this . . .

Meades has to date published only two novels - Pompey (1993) and Fowler Family Business (2002) - both overwrought and written in the kind of prose that makes the reader may feel like a French goose. If, like me, you find Meades the novelist hard going over a distance then you are likely to enjoy as much as I did the fragmentary approach to be found in An Encyclopedia of Myself.. Meades works best at short essay length (see the bumper anthology from 1989 Peter Knows What Dick Likes) because his prose can be so dense, so bludgeoningly erudite and prolix, his tone so consistently de haut en bas that one struggles after a few pages - the surface dazzle doesn't have a purchase on the underlying, often very straightforward, thesis. 

But that's what we expect from the author - whether in front of the camera exploring the built environment as heir to the great Ian Nairn or, in print, rogering the thesaurus, writing and re-writing the world The author deploys a colossally rich and dense vocabulary, and can use it to drive home propositions which, on dazed reflection, are perfectly unexceptionable but barely audible under the blare and dazzle of his prose. A Meades sentence is lexically steroidal, pumped-up, glistening, fit to burst like an artisanal pork sausage. We can agree to admire the barnstorming erudition, the carnival barker's resistance to empirical fact, the bilious eloquence, the quick intelligence and engagement with the subject. In this he reminds me of Anthony Burgess.

If he sometimes seems clever-clever (which the great Gilbert Adair defined as half-clever, not double clever), Meades is nevertheless essential, for all the crushing hauteur, the connoisseurial sneer and the hectoring public manner. He is an outstanding writer on three subjects - food, buildings and himself. 

Meades lives today, enviably, in a real architectural masterpiece: le Corbusier's Cité radieuse in Marseilles, a serene proto-brutalist epic with rooftop creche and pool, running track and superb views of the Mediterranean. Built as workers' housing, the generously-proportioned apartments have now been taken over by affluent middle classes professionals and there's a gourmet restaurant called (with a nod to Peter Greenaway) The Belly of the Architect. It's known locally as La Maison du fada (Provençal for 'The Loony Bin') and construction began in 1947, the year Meades was born. 

Dylan Thomas and Maya Deren

Dylan Thomas was the only British poet apart from Auden to engage so professionally and productively with cinema - the lightly-edited edition of his film scripts runs to over 400 pages, including fourteen wartime propaganda films shot by Strand Films for the Ministry of Information.  I wrote about one of these for the TLS here.

Later on came telly programmes with John Betjeman and Tony Harrison (very different talents), and the occasional one -off (such as the wonderful screen version of Christopher Reid's log poem The Song of Lunch starring the late Alan Rickman, the performance of his I most admire). But lets get back to the Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive.

On 28th October 1953, twelve days before he died, Thomas contributed to the Cinema 16 Symposium in New York. Sharing the stage were the playwright Arthur Miller and the influential avant-garde film maker Maya Deren, who at one point asserted somewhat cryptically that drama in film was horizontal, while poetry in film was vertical. At this point Thomas broke in:

‘Well I’m sure that all Maya Deren said was what I would have said, had I thought of it or understood it [laughter and slight applause]. I was asked, on the side, whether that meant that I thought that the audience didn’t understand what Miss Deren was saying. I’m sure they did, and I wish I was down there. But it sounds different from that side, you know. Now I’m all for (I’m in the wrong place tonight) . . .  I’m all for horizontal and vertical [laughter], and all for what we heard about in the avant-garde. [...] But I don’t know. I haven’t a theory to my back, as they say. But there are, all through the films that I’ve seen all my life . . . there have always been . . .  bits that have seemed to me . . .  Now, this is a bit of poetry.’

 (Dylan Thomas: the filmscripts edited by John Ackerman (London: J. M. Dent, 1995), p. 407.)

I admire Deren's work, but side with Thomas. Here's her celebrated short film Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), a fluid blend of the vertical and horizontal.

Yabba Dabba Doo

I have a letter in the current issue of the Times Literary Supplement and here it is:

________________________________________________________________________

Yabba dabba doo

Sir, – In his absorbing review of Eric C. Brown’s Milton on Film (February 12), Neil Forsyth mentions two chapters in which the author “explore[s] the appropriations of Milton in sci-fi and horror films”. Does this study extend to a Miltonic presence in other branches of popular culture?

It was Armando Iannucci who first pointed out that the opening lines of “Paradise Lost” (“Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit / Of that forbidden tree . . .”) can be sung to the theme tune of The Flintstones, a discovery that reportedly prompted him to abandon his PhD in seventeenth-century religious language and get a job in television, a decision for which his many admirers have reason to be grateful. 

________________________________________________________________________________

I hope I don't come across here as a 'Mike Giggler' type - the imaginary Private Eye correspondent who makes humdrum wisecracks about current affairs, the magazine equivalent of the chortling and unbearable office joker. My letter appears in the bottom right hand corner of the page, the spatial equivalent of the upbeat 'And finally . . ' report on the telly news, or the sports pages of a national daily (which in turn correspond, surely, to the idea of desert, or pudding, or sweet, or afters (depending on your background), a consolation after the unpalatable nourishment of news and current affairs).

This week a new editor of the TLS was announced who will take over from Sir Peter Stodhardt when he retires in April. The new man os Stephen 'Stig' Abell, former head of the Press Compaints Commission and managing editor of The Sun. I wish him well, although I confess to having a slight wobble at the prospect of any TLS editor being young enough (at 35) to be my son. I've grown up (so far) in a world dominated by my elders in politics especially, but also the arts and sciences. Suddenly I seem to have been promoted (or demoted) into the outgoing generation, and have a sense of premature usurpation or disenfranchisement. I hear that Abell is a bookish type (and so was I at his age, but am glad nobody entrusted me with editorship of 'the leading international forum for literary culture').

A question: in the event of the TLS appointing a female editor (and this hasn't happened yet) what convention would apply in correspondence? Should a letter to a female editor begin 'Madam'? Surely not! But what . . .?