Fragment 528

Notes on Dickens 7

Tolstoy's answer to the problem of how to deal with the gross injustices of his time and place was to focus on those immediately around you and to help those you can, personally and immediately according to the demands of your conscience, eschewing systematic attempts at social and political reform, which he saw as at best useless, and at worst iniquitous.

I think Dickens's aim was similar. He wanted his readers to open their eyes and hearts to what was happening around them. I think he hoped that by moving his readers to tears or laughter or anger he would arouse their human conscience, provoking a practical personal response in them. This response, multiplied among thousands, would eventually amount to an irresistible pressure for social change.

This is why he focuses on the creation of character rather than launching a critique of systems or putting forward alternative ideas. His characters as individuals speak to his readers as individuals, and it’s this connection which spurs the reader to action. In this, Dickens is one of the supreme humanists of his age: the human individual always comes before the system, whether the system is legal, religious or moral.

However, the rage the individual feels as he suffers at the hands of the system is quite modern, and in many ways prefigures Kafka’s battles against nightmare bureaucracies: ‘The System! I am told on all hands. It’s the system. I mustn’t look to individuals. It’s the system. I mustn’t go into court, and say, ‘My Lord. I beg to know this from you –is this right or wrong? Have you the face to tell me I have received justice, and therefore am dismissed?’ My Lord knows nothing of it. He sits there to administer the system.

In Dickens, the system dehumanizes both those who suffer under it and those who administer it, the first by removing their freedom, the second by removing their conscience.

"V" Thomas Pynchon

Events seem to be ordered into an ominous logic.

In many ways this, Pynchon's first novel, is the most conventional of his novels. A double plot, one set in the present (1956) one in the past (1890-1940) laid out over alternating chapters. The one set in the present details the life and adventures of Benny Profane and his pal Pig Bodine and their friends in the Whole Sick Crew during one hot summer in New York. The one set in the past deals with the story of Stencil and his attempts to uncover or track down the mysterious V all over the antebellum world. Who or what is V? A place? A woman? The spirit of the age? History itself?
Perhaps history this century is rippled with gathers in its fabric such that if we are situated at the bottom of the fold, it’s impossible to determine warp, woof pattern or anything else. By virtue , however, of existing in one gather it is assumed that there are others, compartmented off into sinuous cycles each of which come to assume greater importance than the weave itself and destroy any continuity. History as a wave of repeating Vs.
At various times and places V appears as an automaton, a spy, a mysterious femme fatale. Gradually, as in the most conventional 19th century novel, the two plots come together, although nothing is ever clarified or made plain.

Of course there is the usual Pynchon madness: great riffs of language in which Pynchon revels in his Dionysian vision and his halucinatory ability to describe that vision. There are fantastic set pieces: Mondaugen’s vigil in the siege in south Africa, shore leave in Malta at the height of the Suez crisis. There are the strange alternative histories, whacky science. As with his other novels, one is never quite sure what is real and what is not. The vision encompasses a moral relativism that is only matched by its paranoia : He had decided long ago that no Situation had any objective reality: it only existed in the minds of those who happened to be in on it at any specific moment, Since those several minds tended to form a sum total or complex more mongrel than homogenous, The Situation must necessarily appear to a single observer much like a diagram in four dimensions to an eye conditioned to seeing its world in only three.

There is some breathtaking writing.
I am the twentieth century. I am the ragtime, and the tango; sans cerif, clean geometry. I am the virgin’s hair whip and the cunningly detailed shackles of decadent passion. I am every lonely railway station in every capital of the Europe. I am the Street, the fanciless buildings of government; the café-dansant, the clockwork figure, the jazz saxophone; the tourist-lady’s hairpiece, the fairy’s rubber breasts, the travelling clock which always tells the wrong time and chimes in different keys. I am the deal palm tree, the Negro’s dancing pumps, the dried fountain after tourist season. I am all the appurtenances of night.

However, there is a strange coldness at the heart of this novel, a lack of inwardness. Many of the characters in the Whole Sick Crew appear to be interchangeable: Pig Bodine, is not very different from Benny Profane; the women Esther/ Rachel/Paola/Mafia all seem to be facets of one woman, and in fact do dress up as each other. There are so many minor characters, that one gives up after a while trying to assimilate them into one’s imagination, and one just revels in the mad strangeness of their names. Even Stencil, marvellously named as he is, refers to himself in the third person all the way through his sections, as if to underline the lack of inwardness.

There are traces of groundbreaking works from the generation of writers immediately prior to Pynchon: the late 1950s. William Burroughs is present in much of Pynchon’s tone: the opening sentence alone could come from a Burroughs novel:
Christmas eve, 1955 Benny Profane, wearing black levis, suede jacket, sneakers and big cowboy hat, happened to pass through Norfolk, Virginia.
And perhaps more surprisingly, Durrell's Alexandria Quartet is also present in much of V. Not only in the Alexandrian section of the novel, but also in the way Pynchon writes about Malta and the Mediterranean. The search for V, the mysterious, eternal feminine, is also a theme of Durrells’s work.

To have humanism we must first be convinced of our humanity. As we move further into decadence this becomes more and more difficult…. A decadence is a falling way from what is human, and the further we fall the less human we become. Because we are less human, we foist off the humanity we have lost on inanimate objects and abstract theories.

There is much wisdom in this. In its lack of inwardness, lack of centre, this novel seems to enact the very decadence it describes. In the debate about who is the greater, Bellow or Pynchon, on the evidence of this book, I would side with Bellow. Pynchon seems to lack a morality: he is too inclusive in his vision, too promiscuous in his piling on of theme and detail. He seems to contribute to the decadence, while Bellow seems to stand like a giant against it.

Thomas Pynchon's Theory of History

All political events: wars, governments, uprisings, have the desire to get laid as their root; because history unfolds according to economic forces and the only reason anybody wants to get rich is so he can get laid steadily, with whomever he chooses.

Gore Vidal's Theory of History

Man plus woman equals baby equals famine.

"Functional English Grammar: an introduction for second language teachers" Graham Lock

Reading this book has induced in me a kind of giddy nausea. Here’s why:

“Note also that the speech act exclamation is also often realized by a clause with no Subject, Finite, or Predicator (technically a minor clause) as in the following.
(28) What a mess!
(29) How stupid!
Such clauses cannot be analyzed for mood at all.”

This little extract chosen at random reveals the underlying assumptions behind this book: a) grammar is a discrete, unified conceptual system onto which all languages can be mapped; b) it is useful and correct to analyse bits of language in terms of their single word units Subject, Predicate etc; c) analyzing grammar consists mainly of sticking labels on bits of language: exclamation; d) the close analysis of grammar in the way put forward by this book is useful for language learners.

Hence the nausea.

For a book which purports to "be intended for teachers rather than linguists or text analysts", Lock does a truly dreadful job of clarifying grammar for those involved in the pedagogical process. His book covers much of the same old ground in the same old way as other descriptive grammarians, and it is hard to see why his understanding and presentation of grammar merits the title 'functional', or why we needed this book at all. However, dear reader, all is not lost, for the book has brought into articulation my own thoughts on the answers to three questions: What is grammar? What is it for? Who needs to study it? (Normally I despise rhetorical questions in writing as being the mark of a lazy intellect, but as Lock has allowed himself so many errors of analysis in his exposition of English grammar, and so many errors of judgement in the pitching of his tone and content to his audience, that I have decided to allow myself a little leeway in my review of his book). It might be useful to start by answering in the negative.

What is grammar?
Grammar is not a discrete, unified conceptual system –like a Platonic form- onto which all languages can be mapped. It is rather the underlying structure of each language and each language has its own grammatical concepts. The only grammatical concept which I suspect has any real transferability across all human languages is the noun/verb distinction (I name the object I see, I name the action I do). Other concepts such as adjective, predicate, clause, tense and aspect etc may not exist for all other languages. Chinese, for example, has no linking verbs, no tenses and no articles. Any attempt to impose these so-called universal grammatical constructs onto all languages, or to map divers languages onto one grammatical system ultimately derived from the Latin language is an act of grammatical imperialism. Ahem.

What is grammar for?
Grammar is not for deciding what is correct or not correct. It is not for passing tests and getting good grades. It is not a system of rules, but a system of laws, as in the laws of physics, or the law of gravity, or the second law of thermodynamics.
Grammar is for clarifying meaning. Grammar is meaning. ‘I go swimming in the afternoon: I went swimming in the afternoon’. The selection of tense allows both sender and receiver of the message to understand whether the action was carried out on a particular afternoon, or on every afternoon as a matter of routine. Of course, on a deeper level the grammatical categories that underlie each language give fascinating glimpses into the profoundly foreign ways that other cultures see the world. (c.f. Lakoff & Johnson).

Who needs to study grammar?
Native speakers do not need to study grammar. They already know it. It already informs and creates the structure of their mind, the way they communicate with themselves. Writers do not need to study it. Most writers can manipulate language on an instinctual basis for certain effects. Shakespeare went to grammar school certainly, but he did not study English grammar. Dickens did not go to school for very long or very often. He also did not study English grammar. If the two greatest verbal artists in the language did not study grammar, why should other writers bother with it? Children do not need to study it beyond the mere fixing on of labels: verb noun adjective adverb sentence clause, and perhaps other labels of other parts of speech. Why? Because it will help them to learn other languages. In fact, the only people who need to study grammar, are grammarians, and language learners, and grammarians only need to study it so that they can produce grammars for language learners!

So if the only people who need to study grammar are those people learning and teaching languages, then why is it that all grammars fail so dreadfully in their aim of clarifying how a language works for a person learning or teaching it? (Another rhetorical question, note how I indulge myself.)

The answer is the absence of understanding of the pedagogical process. There is lacking a pedagogical grammar; in other words, a way of describing the laws of creating meaning in a foreign language which can lead the learner to accurate and fluent production of that language. Grammar should be a simplification. Not a dumbing down, but a stripping down to the bare essentials. Grammar is a tool for learning language. Any tool must be simple enough to effectively perform the task it was designed for. The problem with most grammars is that the tool is so complex, that all attention is focussed on learning how to use the tool, rather than what to use it for. Lock’s functional grammar is no exception.

Bearing in mind that (probably) 95% of English teachers in the world are non-native speakers, and that the 2% of native speakers who decide to become EFL teachers are only doing it until something better comes along, Lock is hopelessly, madly, burningly naïve if he thinks teachers are going to be able to understand much less be able to use in the classroom descriptions of the language such as he puts forward:

"…clauses like 63 through 65 do not simply assign an Attribute to a Carrier. They identify one participant by equating it with another participant. This is why they are called identifying process clauses. And if participant A equals participant B, then of course participant B also equals participant A. "
(Got that, class?)

While the applied linguist in me (perversely perhaps) enjoys this kind of stuff, the pedagogue in me is literally sickened by it.

Fragment 515

Notes on Dickens 6

When Dickens is writing from the heart, reaching for an emotional power of expression in his own voice, and succeeding in avoiding the baleful influence of Carlyle, his writing takes on a splendid power of rhythm. Here he is on the clock of St Paul’s:

Heart of London, there is a moral in thy every stroke! As I look on
at thy indomitable working, which neither death, nor press of life,
nor grief, nor gladness out of doors will influence one jot, I seem
to hear a voice within thee which sinks into my heart, bidding me,
as I elbow my way among the crowd, have some thought for the
meanest wretch that passes, and, being a man, to turn away with
scorn and pride from none that bear the human shape.

It’s in moments like this that Dickens is at his most Shakespearean. Look at this:

Heart of London,
There is a moral in thy every stroke!
As I look on at thy indomitable working,
Which neither death, nor press of life,
nor grief,
Nor gladness out of doors will influence one jot,
I seem to hear a voice within thee which
Sinks into my heart, bidding me,
As I elbow my way among the crowd,
Have some thought for the meanest wretch that passes,
And, being a man, to turn away
With scorn and pride from none that bear the human shape.

It’s iambic blank verse, generally pentameter, but occasionally alternating with tetrameter or hexameter: the rhythm of Shakespeare. It’s as if Dickens has absorbed Shakespeare’s influence to an extent where it seeps unnoticed into his writing.

Iambic pentameter is also the rhythm of natural spoken English. We produce iambic pentameter all the time without realizing it. Oliver has just said the following sentences as I write: I think I’ll just pop out and by some fags. I’m going to clean the bathroom after this.

Both writers employ the same means: at moments of specific power, they reach down into the natural rhythms of the language, the rhythms based on the breath and pulse of the spoken word.

Saint Iris on the relationship between Art and Morals

Art and morals are one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the preception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.

Fragment 514

Reading Oscar Wilde’s Portrait of Mr. W.H.. Haunted by the absence of proof of the existence of the young actor. Marked by layers of disguise and dissembling. An academic thesis embedded as a conversation disguised as a short story; the main idea told through reported speech of another character, who then dies, mirroring another death; repetition of obsessions; the ‘love that dare not speak its name’ constantly being masked by passionate outbursts about the maleness of the Renaissance, neo-Platonism and the ideal of friendship and wonderful witty, true attacks on Puritanism and the Philistine (…the place of the portrait in Wilde’s fiction…) Idea for a book about the absences at the heart of literature by gay men, the unnamed but nonetheless intimated (perhaps?): the hollow cave at the heart of Passage to India, the constant layering and disguise, like Wilde, of Gide’s The Counterfeiters. The unspoken secrets that mark the centre of most of James's fiction. I begin to feel that all fiction is built around an absence. What’s there? (Beckett: “Who’s speaking?”)

"History: A Novel" Elsa Morante

The great Italian novel of the Second World War, is ostensibly the story of Madonna and Child. It focuses on Ida’s struggles to survive the Nazi occupation and bombing of Rome, and to ensure the survival of the child conceived during a rape by a German soldier in the early days of the war.

At the same time, as the colon in the title intimates, it is an examination on a larger scale than Levi’s The Juggler of the relationship between literature and history: history is a novel, so horrific are the events portrayed in it that they beggar disbelief. The novel becomes history, reflects it, stores it, (re)creates it. The book is framed by a summary of the main historical events starting from 1900, from a Marxist point of view, in which humanity is described as the victims of the capitalist war industry, that wars are started not as conflicts over territory but as ways of consuming the products of an already existing war industry. Who is to say that she is wrong? This summary is then intensified in a month-by-month break down of each year before each of the seven parts into which the book is divided. Against this historical ‘background’ the gritty details of Ida’s story are set in context. And yet what is the real history? The events described in the summary, or the real suffering undergone by the victims of war – as fictionalized in this novel.

The story is an inherent criticism of theories of history in general, and of Marxist historical theory in particular. History is the accumulation of detail, the layer of suffering, and only the artist can recreate it. Morante’s position is in fact closer to Collingwood or Benjamin than Marx. Like that of Brecht, Morante’s Marxism is undercut by her genius for language and the humane selection of detail.

Morante's prose veers from the coldly clinical objective journalism of a war correspondent, to richly evocative and symbolic descriptions of character, psyche and dream: Grandfather … in his waking intervals did nothing but hawk and spit. His long body, thin and bent, was a cavernous well of catarrh that could never be drained. The old man kept always beside him a big chipped basin and hawking, he emitted sounds of extreme anguish, like donkey’s braying, which seems to charge the silence with the total sorrow of the cosmos.

The book really picks up after Ida moves back into the city out of the liminal space where she has been living for the first two years of the war. The characters she lives with – the Marroccos - are wonderfully described, and the descriptions of the devastation of Rome approach Becket’s bleakness, Kafka’s nightmare, and the gothic evocations of Piranesi. The book packs a punch in the descriptions of the Jews’ return to Rome, the lost voices echoing in their heads that no one can bear to listen to, and the images left forever in the retinas of the eyes of the survivors, their extreme isolation. One has heard it all before, and read about it all before, but here it recovers the full freshness of its horror and banality. Like Arendt, Morante is convinced that the evil in men is product of the lack of imagination.