Lydia Davis: What She Knew

I’ve been thinking about identity and the internalised object following the PsyLitFilm symposium at Sussex University on Monday. I’ve been wondering, in particular, about a Lydia Davis vignette used to illustrate a loss of perception between the interior and the exterior in a paper given by Professor Josh Cohen on Bion and Laplanche and externalisation in literature and psychoanalysis. Here is the vignette:

What She Knew

People did not know what she knew, that she was not really a woman but a man, often a fat man, but more often, probably, an old man. The fact that she was an old man made it hard for her to be a young woman. It was hard for her to talk to a young man, for instance, though the young man was clearly interested in her. She had to ask herself, Why is this young man flirting with this old man?

It’s only four sentences – a wisp of smoke, maybe – but there’s so much happening that it seems a shame to stop at using it to make one point about a problematic situation: a young woman who has not been able to communicate all of herself to a young man and the resulting breakdown between a “perfect” interior and an “imperfect” exterior. It’s amusing for a start. If the young woman is conscious of her external identity and if she is so acutely aware of the object she has internalised that she can describe his characteristics, then it is not really necessary for her to ask herself why the young man is interested in her, except to draw on irony when he flirts with her. There is also a suggestion that the internalised object is a changeable entity. That the object is “often a fat man” tells us that sometimes he is not – he might be a thin man or a muscular man, or even a woman. That he is “more often, probably, an old man” implies that he might be a young man, or, perhaps, a young or old woman during the times when he is “more often, probably” not an old man. The old, fat man isn’t therefore a prisoner of the young woman, or vice versa, if the object shifts and changes – perhaps as quickly as it takes to follow the meaning of the sentences. And what about the internalised object of the young man? Maybe it’s an old woman? Or a young woman? Or maybe not. Maybe the young man is as he appears. Maybe he is even aware of the young woman’s internalised object when he flirts with her. Maybe she knows he knows this too and this is why she finds it difficult to talk to him.

Literary Cliches

Since yesterday literary clichés have been bugging me. After reading Philip Hensher in the Telegraph today and listening to Martin Amis in the Guardian Book’s podcast yesterday, it seems that writing in a straightforward fashion risks being cliché. (Martin Amis: “Whenever a novelist writes ‘she rummaged in her handbag,’ this is dead freight.” Zadie Smith’s makes the same point, which I’ll return to in a minute.)

Here is Philip Hensher in the Telegraph (tweeted today) reviewing Tea Obreht’s novel The Tigger’s Wife:

And it suffers slightly from banality in the writing. The literary novel has its own dreaded clichés by now – “These stories run like secret rivers through all the other stories of his life” – to which Ms Obreht adds universal clichés – “Dobravka was a woman possessed”. Her editor might have told her not to use the expression “I thought to myself,” too.

I wonder if it will become cliché to write, for example, that she sat down and drank a cup of coffee? It’s an activity that many people do often. How else should writers describe it? One of the reasons Stieg Larsson’s books work so well is that the picture is clear: “He put down his coffee. He got up from the chair. He opened the door. He walked down the street.” (Those are paraphrases.)

Going back to Zadie Smith and her 2007 essay "Fail Better":

“With a cliche you have pandered to a shared understanding, you have taken a short-cut, you have re-presented what was pleasing and familiar rather than risked what was true and strange. It is an aesthetic and an ethical failure: to put it very simply, you have not told the truth. When writers admit to failures they like to admit to the smallest ones - for example, in each of my novels somebody "rummages in their purse" for something because I was too lazy and thoughtless and unawake to separate "purse" from its old, persistent friend "rummage". To rummage through a purse is to sleepwalk through a sentence.”

Alternatives are not suggested. Perhaps there is a fear that they too might become clichés? The key here is “true and strange”. A writer might be describing a scene that is true and strange, but reaching for the thesaurus won’t necessarily help a writer to communicate the event’s truthfulness or strangeness. I am not arguing for novels full of aphorisms and empty clichés; I am questioning whether we will see writers dressing up scenes or ideas with fancy language.

Are we far away from reading that “he said” has become a literary cliché?

Lost Daphne du Maurier story found after 70 years

I love stories like this one: a literary gem unearthed after so many years. Over the past year I have been collecting newspaper cuttings of similar stories: an 1848 Emily Bronte letter going on display at the Parsonage Museum in Haworth; letters by Ted Hughes being bought by the British Library; a postcard written by a Titanic passenger auctioned at Henry Aldridge and Son; etc. I imagine it was just as thrilling for Ann Willmore to find the lost Daphne du Maurier story in an online publication as it would have been for her to find it in a cemetery of forgotten books.

Love Letters

A sub editor has asked, “Have we lost the art of writing love letters?” in today’s Independent. If the headline had been, “Why we ditched the art of writing love letters” then John Walsh’s piece provides an explaination:

Another favourite approach was the whine of masochism, as the lover suffers torments that his lady love may leave him, and receiving her letters becomes a form of torture. As Denis Diderot, the French encyclopaedia compiler, pointed out in his letter to Sophie Volland in 1759: "How impatiently I waited for it! I am sure my hands trembled when opening it. My countenance changed; my voice altered; and unless he were a fool, he who handed it to me would have said – 'That man receives news from his father or mother, or someone else he loves.' I was just at that minute about to send you a letter expressing my great uneasiness. While you are amusing yourself, you forget how much my heart suffers."

Jason Wallace Wins Costa Literary Award

Now here is someone who won't take “no” for an answer: writer Jason Wallace finally got his novel recognised after being turned down by ONE HUNDRED literary agents. One hundred! He could use those rejection letters as wall paper. Amazing. I think I am going to cut out that article and stick it on the wall - or keep it filed away somewhere at least.

Kafka's Legacy

I don't think there is anything missing in this story ran in The Independent and The Guardian today. It has all the parts for an epic.

Reason, Fiction and Faith

Cognitive theorist, Steven Pinker, drew me to the RSA this lunch time. I was wooed by the title of the debate: “Reason, Fiction and Faith – Are any of the arguments for the existence of God any good?” as well as the chance to see a fellow Romantic in the flesh. However, it wasn’t Steven who was doing the talking. He was there to give his wife, the philosopher and novelist Rebecca Goldstein, a boost by sharing a platform with her and acting as her interviewer. A powerful partnership.

But it was by no means disappointing to listen to Rebecca (with Steven at her side). I was particularly interested in the way she described Plato’s influence on her work. She went as far as to say: “I write novels and short stories he would approve of. He is the father figure whose approval I want.” In the Q&A after the 35 minute interview, I asked her whether she saw Plato as her superego or as her muse. If she answered superego, then I would have wondered where her inspiration came from. If she answered muse, then I would have been inclined to alter my understanding of the role of the muse: not only called upon to inspire, but also to grant approval. Her answer was “both” so, in my understanding, the literary and psychoanalytic definitions remain distinct friends.

Other revelations Rebecca made on her insight into her own creative process included the reflection, “some issue compels me to write” alongside eulogistic anecdotes about how Plato awakened her when she was a girl. She made a valid criticism of Gertrude Stein: "Who wants to read Gertrude Stein? Fiction should be about enchantment." And she laid into Kingsley Amis: “I am not motivated by posers. I want to present characters for whom this is a life and death struggle”. Amen.

As for religion, Rebecca said it was much more than just belief. She said that, for her, religion was wrapped up in questions of self-identity, group identification, loyalty to a community and loyalty to historical narratives. She said she saw parallels within the academic world to the religious community in terms of its hierarchal structure. For example, a professor and his “disciples”; graduate students who hang on his every word, changing their opinion whenever he changes his. I can understand why an American academic might look to religion for examples of just about any working structure. Religion is so much more dominant in the US and is related to differently. In the UK, for instance, we can look to the monarchy for hierarchal parallels.

Then there was her argument that romantic delusion takes on from religious delusion. I am currently critical of clichés like “sex was her religion” or “romanticism was his religion”. It’s not really helpful to say, for instance, that “science is Dawkins’s religion”. It clearly isn’t or he wouldn’t attend an Anglican Church services.

I thought Rebecca’s observation that “philosophers are seen as heretics” was more interesting as it reminded me of Jonathan Sacks and his desertion of philosophy.

It was Steven, however, who made me rethink my attitude towards agnosticism’s present status as the comic fool. He retold a joke about how a Jewish couple consulted an agnostic chaplain for advice about their crumbling marriage. The husband goes to see the agnostic chaplain first. The chaplain listens to his point of view and his complaints about his wife. When the husband has finished his story, the chaplain says, “You know what, you’re right”. Then the wife comes to see him and he listens to her take on the situation. When she’s finished, he says to her, “You know what, you’re right.” The agnostic chaplain’s wife has been hiding in the wings and has heard the whole thing. She confronts her husband and says: “How can you say that?! How can you tell them they are both right? They can’t both be right!” And the agnostic chaplain says to her; “You know what, you’re right.”

I thought that was funny. Humour is a great peacemaker.

The Romantic Manifesto

I have been asked to recommend a work by Ayn Rand, so I recommend The Romantic Manifesto, which would stimulate anyone with an interest in the arts.

It has a purist thrust and an intellectual vigour and integrity that is admirable. I do not agree with everything she argues, for instance, her disapproval of the historical novel, which she dismisses as a work by a writer who does not possess volition; a writer incapable of abstract projections and confined to "representations of concretes" because of his (she uses the male pronoun throughout) crippled intellect. This is not a universal truth that should be applied to a historical novelist, or playwright for that matter. Any historical figure acting as a muse becomes an abstract projection; it does not necessarily follow that a historical novel denotes a biographical or journalistic style that will diminish both its subject and the reader, offering only second rate metaphysics.

The Romantic Manifesto doesn’t discuss the make-up of the imagination at length, but Ayn does talk about a subconscious process of emotional abstraction that gives man his individual sense of life. If his value judgements develop in the integral, rational manner Ayn believes they should, then this sense of life reaches maturity in the form of a conscious philosophy where the mind leads and emotions follow. This should have happened by the end of adolescence. Sadly, Ayn believes only a few of us achieve a conscious integration of reason and emotions, of mind and values. All sorts of neurotic afflictions cloud the minds of those who don't. Many of us are walking around tortured by contradictions or guilt or delusions. An example of a work of art created by a man whose mind has not reached a normal, fully focused, mental state with a clear-cut identity is the recreation of a fog of feelings in which A is not A but any non-A one chooses; where nothing can be known with certainty and nothing is demanded of one’s consciousness.

I have challenged the idea that a rose is a rose is a rose, or A is A is A, in this blog before by pointing readers in the direction of Rachel Campbell-Johnston's review of this year's Turner prize winner (Ayn would have loathed Richard Wright’s work anyway because she despised all genres of modern art). Yet you can even find the building blocks of the “A is B” argument played out in The Romantic Manifesto. In an anecdote, Ayn writes that when she was 16 she attended an art class where she fell in love with the artistic style of her teacher who taught that every curve must be drawn, not as a curve, but as broken facets of intersecting straight lines. So, a curve is not a curve, but a tapestry of intersecting straight lines; A is B.

Read this book for its attack on mysticism, its insightful definitions of art forms, the images used to describe literary experiences, its love of America, but most of all for Ayn's definition of love.

Library Protocol

Here is a snippet of the conversation I had with one of the two security guards on the door to Humanities 1 at The British Library today:

Security Guard: "You can't take that handcream into the library because you might smear it on our books and the repair work costs thousands of pounds.
Me: "I'm not here to smear handcream on to the books, I am here to read them."
Security Guard (grunts and, with no glint of humour in his eyes, says): "Yeah well, someone might say they want to take a machine gun into the library, but they aren't going to use it."
Me (bewildered): "Excuse me?"
Security Guard (sighs): "If you use the handcream make sure you rub it into your hands before coming back into the reading room."
Me: (I was walking off by this point.)

Unbelievable. I guess the British Library is still reeling from the news that it has managed to "mislay" 9,000 books.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/mar/17/british-library-books-mein-kampf

The irony for me was that in the book I came to read at the BL today, there was a sentence in which the author declared she had taken a book she was sent and did not want to read and submerged it in water.

Cue the resurfacing of the idea of waterproof books!

Arthur Rimbaud Biog Reviewed In Catholic Press

In a week where The Pope has come out and shown the world just how inhumane his sexual ethics are, it was refreshing to open The Tablet (weekly UK Catholic magazine) and find a review of “Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel”.

Edmund White has written a short biography of the French poet who, it turns out, was a Catholic; or an “improbable” one, if you go by Hilary Davies’ review. It is hardly surprising that Rimbaud was a Catholic. In mid 19th century France, most people would have been. And it is also nothing new that a homosexual poet would have a religious affinity.

What made me smile was the last paragraph is Davies’ review:

“There are times when private passions should remain just that. This is a quite unnecessary book.”

The rest of Davies’ review preceding this paragraph is a robust critique which seemingly displays a thorough knowledge of Rimbaud’s poetry, as well as his older lover Verlaine’s, alongside what appears to be an informed opinion about better biographies to read on Rimbaud.

Clearly, some passions are not so easily satiated!