Life Unfurnished

No Means No

2012-01-27T05:12:00.000-08:00

A couple of evenings ago, BBC2's Newsnight featured a discussion of information recently released on those who have said no to the offer of one of the Queen of Enlgand's honours, one of those OBEs, or CBEs, or other kinds of distinction that she has at her disposal.

The tone of Newsnight's piece was one familiar to viewers of the programme: amused irony, a sense that no response to the topic can rise above it and so any response is laughable. As part of this atmosphere of snide resignation, it was suggested that those who say no to the offer of an honour are guilty of snobbery as much as those who say yes, and then we were subjected to the director Michael Winner, seated at the doorway of his comfortable London home and personifying the tone of Newsnight's report by seeming to be unable to rise to, or sink from, any demeanor other than that of knowing amusement. We are SO beyond this sort of thing, the whole report suggested, that we understand that it is utterly pitiable to pretend that we're beyond it.

A couple of evenings ago, Newsnight was in the grip of an emotional state that Paolo Virno characterizes as the defining feature of our times: a certain brand of cynicism, uniting a jaded acceptance that all of the options before us are only one skewed and interest-serving set of options among many, and an irrepressible opportunism, the sense that one might as well take whatever comes one's way and abandon or carry on with that depending on conditions that subsequently arise. We are, in this sense, too sophisticated for engagement, too knowing for commitment; yes and no are mere variables, interchangeable responses that combine the cynicism of knowing that neither represents anything stable or meaningful, and the opportunism of opting for whichever one at that moment serves one or other of our interests.

In this cynical mood, one cannot say no to the Queen. This is not because of her sovereign power, but because of the extent to which power has ceased to have any face, and ceased even to be administered by faceless systems and institutions. We cannot say no to the Queen because we are just too amused by the offer she makes us. An offer we literally cannot refuse.

Saying no, really saying no, is now impossible. Or, if not impossible, then only to be achieved as one achieves knowledge of the existence of God, that is, by belief. We can say no only in spite of what we know. Never mind grand religious visions of punishment and redemption; just to say no now requires an unimaginable leap of faith.

Life Inhuman

2011-12-16T20:36:00.000-08:00

A local Waitrose is currently featuring a hedgehog sanctuary among its three charities of the month, which shoppers are asked to choose between by contributing the token they pick up at the cash desk when they pay for their groceries. The hedgehogs are competing with charities dedicated to giving relief to those suffering from some kind of palsy and to children growing up under some kind of disadvantage. And the hedgehogs are winning. Amidst poverty and illness, only the hedgehog is really deserving.

To the outsider, one of the most striking features of the British is their affection for animals. Another striking feature is their lack of affection for each other. People carry dogs in their arms as they would (elsewhere, at least) a child; and they charge rent to children who remain in the "family" home as they would (and even this might not happen elsewhere) a stranger. People are strange, and animals are kin.

The imperative to consume is here and now so all-consuming, that the overlay of thought and feeling that has distinguished the human from the merely animal is being eroded. When nothing but instincts remain, hitherto-humans become endlessly manipulable by their arousal and satisfaction; so long as hopes and dreams, principles and commitments, are recast as basic needs, they can be sold and sold and sold again: this is what Mark Fisher calls "capitalist realism." But the other side of this coin is that, unless something "adds value," which is to say, unless it feels like the satisfaction of a basic need, it is so excessive as to cease to mean anything, so surplus as to cease to exist. In this category are increasingly interned all of the higher, that is, human, achievements: loyalty, care, protection, patronage, love.

The only real tie that binds us now, above and beyond the quasi-instinctive consumption practices that we share so utterly and completely, is the tie between parents and their young children. But dogs too care for their young. As do hedgehogs. And only for so long. When animals come of age, the bond between adults and their offspring falls away, to be replaced by and by with an entirely new bond between the now-adult offspring and their young. Instinct will only spread so thinly. To the outsider, the absence of anything like family cohesiveness in Britain is remarkable. Parents appear, if anything, over-"invested" in their children, but the tie seems astonishingly to weaken as the children grow older, and children are finally dispatched to the world as if this were the wilderness and survival of the fittest were the best we have to hope for. Small wonder, then, that ageing parents get left behind (for the state to take care of badly). As for siblings, they are a matter of almost total indifference; and friendship is all but a myth. It turns out that instinct is a poor foundation on which to form our bonds; it would as soon set us against each other as it would appear to unite us in pursuit of the same ends. A world of consumers is a dog eat dog world. Except that, here, no-one would dream of eating a dog.

The infamous British reserve has few cracks. Rather incongruously to the outsider, however, it does give way very quickly when the opportunity arises to be naughty about private body parts, intimate sexual acts, and basic biological functions. All of a sudden, what had seemed buttoned-up fortresses of inhumanity leave down their guard wholly, light up their eyes brightly, and giggle like eager schoolgirls, as if to say, "Mummy, I'm home!". And, in the animal world, it seems indeed that they really are.

Our Lovely Vulgar And Most Human Art

2011-11-14T04:54:00.000-08:00

In 1967, Gore Vidal wrote:

The portentous theorizings of the New Novelists are of no more use to us than the self-conscious avant-gardism of those who are trying to figure out what the next ‘really serious’ thing will be when it is plain that there is not going to be a next serious thing in the novel. Our lovely vulgar and most human art is at an end, if not the end. Yet that is no reason not to want to practice it, or even to read it. In any case, rather like priests who have forgotten the meaning of the prayers they chant, we shall go on for quite a long time talking of books and writing books, pretending all the while not to notice that the church is empty and the parishioners have gone elsewhere to attend other gods, perhaps in silence or with new words.

Our lovely vulgar and most human art? Vidal's tone reminds one of Aristophanes' Socrates, swinging aloft in his basket in the sky and addressing poor Strepsiades down below, exclaiming "short-lived one, creature of a day! Why do you call me?" Short-lived literary form, mere human mode of reflection, how do you continue? Vidal's reply: only as a habit not broken; only as a form of words emptied of all they might ever have meant.

This is the oldest sleight of hand in all the world. The novel, like all of human endeavour, did not begin as a hymn to the gods. Dr. Johnson, who was there at its inception, called the form (and he did not mean to compliment it) "familiar history." Its practitioners were not priests, merely women, writing what was effectively an entertaining version of the conduct book for girls. But that art went the way that all arts go in the end, in a confidence trick that is as ancient as our civilization.

When Socrates came on the scene in Athens, some thinking fellows were spending their life by giving answers to the big questions of life and other teaching fellows were earning their living by showing people the skills for the business of living. And then Socrates, in one clever move, cleared a space for a way of doing things that has dogged our steps ever since. By admiring but placing himself below the thinkers, and denigrating and placing himself above the teachers, he constituted a way of life that neither claims to have answers to the big questions (on the grounds that only the gods can have those) nor devotes itself to the practical skills of living (on the grounds that we ought not to be merely human just because we are human). This way of life is called philosophy, and it purchases its alleged remove from the business of living, not by attaching itself to pieces of wisdom it will defend but by claiming to love a wisdom it will not (because it says it cannot) name. It is a way of life that is led between the claims that godly things are too good for us and human things not good enough.

And so the women who dominated the novel form for the first twenty-five years of its existence went the way of Socrates' teachers, condemned for claiming to disseminate (and for money too!) skills with which to negotiate this life. And the men who dominated the novel for the following hundred years or so went the way of the thinkers, admired in their way but judged to be naive in their belief that answers to the big questions of life can be represented by mere humans. Surviving them both were the philosopher-novelists, too in love with the godly to submit to the market, to entertainment, to instruction, to the mere business of living and writing, but too self-consciously humble to lay claim to any world view, defend any vision, or pin their colours to any mast.

Of course, since these philosopher-novelists are only a confidence trick (albeit the very oldest one in the book) they have almost nothing to give content to their writing other than a chastened admiration of the thinkers and a patronizing contempt for the teachers. And so they run out of steam, of course. But not quite as Vidal describes it. The parishioners, as Vidal has them, have all abandoned ship quite some time ago. They, after all, go in for being instructed and inspired; the one is not below them nor the other mystified so that it lies above them. They have moved on elsewhere. For them, if an art is dead and gone, then there is a reason not to want to practice it and to read it. But they have not moved in search of other gods, as Vidal would have us believe. Because only the priests believe in gods. And only they will eventually go to another place in search of them. There, they will, once again, call the place a church and those gathered there "parishioners," whose words they will call prayers, in worship of gods whose absence will empty those words of all meaning. The parishioners will not stay for the end game. The philosophers will. Until they too up and move elsewhere, to empty out another form of words of all its meaning and another building of all those gathered inside.

It is a rather easy thing, this swinging around between heaven and earth, calling down in pity at those who would learn the business of living well and looking up in knowing nostalgia at those who would answer the big questions of life. An easy thing, but not a serious one.

Pretty Useful

2011-08-02T04:15:00.001-07:00

In "The Beauty of Life" (1880), William Morris names his golden rule: "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful." This, to trump the trend, growing fast in his time, of separating use from beauty, such that the former - use - was gradually relinquished, to the demand of industry that the end product be realized as efficiently as possible and the demand of capital that the end product be replaceable as infinitely as possible, and the latter - beauty - was gradually isolated, in frames, on walls, in museums, among the privileged, where its remove from use was its defining feature. In this way, the set of objects and field of practice that emerged as the province of beauty - that is, art - came to be understood as that set of objects and field of practice outside of the merciless proliferation and pursuit of ends that came to dominate everywhere else. Only art - broadly understood as that area of human interest in which experiment, invention, originality, and freedom reign - was thought to resist the subordination of means to ends and ends to profit that was, already in Morris's time, coming to define human life in all other respects.

But it was precisely this seeming promise of art that, given its provenance, given its having been constituted by overspill from the paring down of means and leveling out of ends so necessary to the flourishing of industrialized capital, gave Morris pause: for, the other side of the enjoyment of objects and events free of the pursuit of ends, was the utter subjection to the pursuit of ends that prevails in every other sphere. More than this, the elevation of those objects and events free of the pursuit of ends, as the greatest site of resistance to utter subjection to given ends, slowly but surely took from the appeal and the practice of those other possibilities for resistance, which would undercut the dominance of given ends, not with a total abandonment of purposefulness, but with a refusal of anything other than a purposefulness for which purpose is not the only determining factor, a purposefulness for which process is also significant, a purposefulness for which ends and means are not separate but rather so completely involved with one another that the distinction between use and beauty, between efficiency and pleasure, does not arise. It is because we visit the local art gallery during our weekends, because we hang prints of our favourite paintings on our walls, that we have lost the talent and the requirement for receiving pleasure from weekday life or from the walls themselves. Life is stripped bare, with just a few pretty useless things cobbled together and kept in one place for those still minded to have a look at them.

But there is worse, worse even than the demise of lifestyle that Morris regretted. For art does not operate only as the safety valve for a lingering requirement for the kind of aesthetic pleasure no longer available from the things one sees and does in general. Or, as this safety valve, through which the pressure of engaging in the business of life is relieved, there flows out much much more than one might have imagined necessary: the desire for beauty is given an outlet in the eschewal of purpose that is art, but the practice at eschewing purpose that art provides has so corrupting an effect that we have become accustomed to doing without purpose even in matters purposeful, to performing meaningless jobs, to buying things that don't work well or at all, to wearing clothes that do not keep us warm or make us look good, to engaging with technology that will not be usable next year for reasons of fashion or of "progress." In other words, the practice art gives us, at pleasure in the absence of purpose, is perfect preparation for that essential aspect of capital and its demand for profit and growth: obsolescence.

Art must begin at home, as Morris warned, if any of this is to be remedied. We must find, in the things we see and use and make and do, when we are oriented towards even our most basic ends, a kind of pleasure that is not accounted for merely by the attainment of those ends (as if the pleasure would necessarily be increased if the ends were attained as quickly and as frequently as possible). But, so far are we from having, any more, the language with which even to describe what this might involve, we are driven to resort to negative description, in this case to the V&A's "pretty useful" tools, which - surprising, given the nature of the objects - represent the perfect fruition of the separation of use from beauty by which we are every minute so degraded. In this case, no need even for obsolescence: here we have almost quintessentially useful objects made beautiful precisely at the expense of their use. One strike at a nail, and a chip will come in Morris's "Anemone" print; another strike, another chip, in a perfect performance of use as anathema to beauty. No greater insult to the memory of Morris could be devised; no clearer statement of the now almost total absence of pleasure in the useful; no more striking summary of the extent to which the arts that ought to begin at home in fact suck out the life from home and everywhere else.

The Knowing of Jane Austen

2011-07-21T06:04:00.001-07:00

"She knew what she knew, like a sound dogmatist: she did not know what she did not - like a sound agnostic," G. K. Chesterton wrote of Jane Austen, in his The Victorian Age in Literature. A tiny, but pretty clear, portrait of unreasonableness: Austen, sufficiently provincial to believe that the confines of her time and place are all in all: knowing what lies within them with unquestioning certainty; utterly ignorant of what might lie outside them, ignorant even that there is an outside them.

But, I wonder whether this really describes the limits of Austen. Perhaps she did know what she knew, but she also, sometimes, did not know what she knew, being prone to lapses into that kind of knowing for which the things we humans know are to be held in some contempt and at a remove. At the close of Mansfield Park, Austen writes thus of the final union between the protagonist, Fanny Price, and her long time love, Edmund Bertram:

I purposefully abstain from dates on this occasion, that every one may be at liberty to fix their own, aware that the cure of unconquerable passions, and the transfer of unchanging attachments, must vary much as to time in different people. - I only intreat every body to believe that exactly at the time when it was quite natural that it should be so, and not a week earlier, Edmund did cease to care about Miss Crawford, and became as anxious to marry Fanny, as Fanny herself could desire.

No dogmatism here, Mr. Chesterton: only the most open and inclusive of knowing, only a knowing so aware of its not knowing that it will presume to sketch but the mere outline of a plot, leaving the reader, with all of her knowledge, to fill in the rest. No agnosticism, either: but the explicit statement that she knew what she did not know, humbly handing over to every reader the determination of appropriateness in the timing of true love, aware that her sense of timing would have its limitations and not ring true for all.

A great show of reasonableness, then, to counter Chesterton's portrait. But what kind of reasonableness is this, that is so knowing as to back away from its task, so knowing as to relinquish its duties? It is the reasonableness of knowing you don't know, the reasonableness so knowing of the partiality of human ways and means that it holds them at an arm's length, in some disdain.

It is, perhaps, for this reason that Austen has been more or less plucked out of that tradition of women novelists clustered around the end of the eighteenth century (they have not been taken very seriously on account of the limited nature of their work) and transplanted into the Victorian Age, as befitting a writer of our time, a writer who too showed contempt for her trade all the better to raise herself above it.

We might turn here, at last, to Aristotle, in whose Poetics it is written that the superior forms of poetry give precedence to that which is universal in their story, turning only then to the particular episodes that go to elaborate it. That which is universal, Aristotle explains, is that which is integral to the story, in the case of Mansfield Park, the simple event that the heroine wins the hero of her desires, unalloyed with the mere elaboration of that event in terms of when and how it took place. It is for this reason, for Aristotle, that "poetry is more philosophical and more serious than history": for poetry makes salient the universal features of what happens or might happen, whereas history is bound to the detail, arbitrarily (Aristotle's judgment) unfolding, without necessity, sometimes even without probability, merely of what actually takes place.

Aristotle explains this point by analogy with painting, observing that there is little pleasure to be had from the painter who applies (even exquisitely beautiful) colours at random, when compared with the effect produced by the outline of an image in black and white.

In 1816, Austen famously wrote to her nephew, James Edward Austen, of "that little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush as produces little effect after much labour": a comfortingly artisan image of the writer at work, painstakingly constructing a likeness in tiny scale and with fine materials; but Austen's contempt for this process, the contempt that changes her image of the artisan into that of the artist, is expressed, not just with the tone of irony with which Austen so frequently positions herself above the arbitrary vicissitudes of the events and the characters that elaborate her plots, but also with the account she gives of her nephew's writing style, with which the description of her own style is intended to contrast: "strong, manly, spirited sketches, full of variety and glow." With which style of writing would Aristotle have approved? Certainly not, the one characterized by variety and glow; much more likely, the one undertaken with a fine brush (to keep the lines sharp) on pale background and with a view (this was why "miniatures" of their daughters were often commissioned by noblemen, to encourage the ardour of potential suitors) to achieving, not a mere likeness of the subject (the stuff of "history"), but the essence of their personality as well (the stuff of "poetry").

There is a kind of knowing that is mostly attributed to young women, who are perceived not only to employ their feminine wiles but to do so in a manner so conscious of their attractions that the effect is unpleasant, as if the young woman in question were setting herself above the round of human relations even as she also engages in it. It may be this kind of knowing that separated Austen from her contemporaries, and made her much more a writer of our time than she was a woman of her own.

Literature's Humble Uniform

2011-07-20T05:14:00.000-07:00

We might take the problem of contemporary literary fiction back just one step further, to Plato's teacher, Socrates, and his famous statement of the merits of knowing you don't know. Socrates seems, by this, to name a kind of humility as essential to human knowledge, presumably because mere humans, by contrast with their gods, are never capable of more than partial insight; to give proper expression to this limitation, it is necessary, so Socrates teaches, to build into any and all of our pursuits the acknowledgement that they are undertaken in merely human style.

But there is no longer any humility about this Socratic move - perhaps there never was. Why not, is a matter of logic: if not knowing is an essential aspect of all human knowing, then not knowing is also an essential aspect of knowing you don't know; it is not a case, then, of knowing you don't know but also of not knowing you don't know. This kind of logic is rather dreary, of course, seeming bent on being so clever as to efface the spirit of Socrates' claim. But it is precisely the spirit of Socrates' claim that is at issue. For the truth is, that knowing you don't know can only be the superior mode of knowing that Socrates claims it to be, if it is characterized by an inhuman certainty, which, for Socrates, comes from the juxtaposition of human knowing with godly knowing. In other words, as a perpetually present "humility," knowing you don't know is really a piece of hubris, always relativizing of human achievement as a means of rising to a godly one.

The fact is that we do know. Not in a godly way (what might that be?) but in a human way. The idea that this, the fact that we humans know in a human way, ought to be perpetually made present in our knowing implies that there could be another way. If we relinquish that final piece of hankering after divine truth, then we can launch ourselves into our human ways, without having to show contempt for them, or remove from them, unless, that is, they come into conflict with other human ways that we might value more.

Shuffle off this mortal humility, then, and our writers might be free again, to launch themselves into their projects without having to posture at a contempt for them even as they pursue them, without having to sacrifice their human talents to appease the gods they no longer believe in.

But why now, for Socrates' saying to have become the style? Why now, for the so-called "humility" of not knowing to be in vogue? Because we live in a condition that is premised upon the quiet suppression of any kind of launching in, any kind of knowing that might be considered to merit being acted upon; and it is a condition for which the "not-knowing" intellectual classes, too knowing to feel that anything is really justified, are the perfect embedded army.

Contemporary literary fiction is one division of this troupe: a very loyal one, whose "new clothes" are the uniform of the obedience it fosters in the "hearts and minds" of its target population.

Baby-Led Oppression

2011-07-08T04:38:00.000-07:00

An important element in current doctrine on child-rearing is what is called "baby-led weaning," whereby, as the name suggests, a baby is encouraged to determine what, when and how she will make the transition from a milk to a solid-food diet. This means that at "mealtimes" - and it is important now to distance ourselves from that term, for such times are not baby led - the only person in the room yet to have reached the age of reason is the one who determines the amount and kind of calories to be consumed and, in the process, distributes those calories in a manner that constitutes them as things to play with as well as to eat, things to ingest in jest.

The most recent large-scale survey on the topic in the UK revealed that one quarter of all boys, and one third of all girls, between the ages of 2 and 19, are overweight or obese, and the problem, we are told, is getting worse, another recent survey predicting that the numbers are set to rise to 63% of all children in the not too distant future.

How, we might ask ourselves, when we are making such strides in knowledge of how best to initiate our babies into the world of eating and drinking, are those babies getting fatter and fatter as they grow up?

But this is the wrong question. We should rather ask: why do we continue to give up responsibility for the rational determination of our children's relationship to food when we can, at the very least, observe that the baby-led approach does not improve that relationship?

If we ask the question in this way, then an answer does quickly present itself. And it is: the commitment to baby-led weaning continues, not in spite of the fact that it hands over the determination of meal-times to someone whose IQ, we are told, is less than 20, not in spite of the fact that it results in food wastage and mess, not in spite of the fact that it makes it almost impossible to monitor the amount of food one's baby consumes in any day and therefore more concerned about her nutrition, not in spite of the fact that it is time-consuming and frustrating, not in spite of the fact that meal-time loses its defining characteristics and flows out into the whole of the waking day, and not in spite of the fact that it is at least not reductive of the kind of problematic behaviour around food that leads to overweight and obese children, but actually because of these effects. Baby-led weaning, like many of the practices recommended to child-rearers these days, is a very good way of keeping people occupied by minutiae, generally anxious, guilty, and, yes, too overweight to fight what seems like a naturally-given apathy. Not much will change, politically, socially, culturally, economically, when those already grown are preoccupied with the anxious relinquishment of their responsibilities, and growing generations are too sluggish to do anything much at all.

Baby-led weaning: it's surely too innocuous an ideal to produce such sinister effects, one might object. But, it is precisely by these apparently innocuous commitments that a liberal democratic population, with its antennae raised for large-scale and explicit restrictions on its freedom, must be kept down. Indeed, the extent to which baby-led weaning is actually liberating - of children, from culturally determined restrictions on eating and drinking; and of parents, from the requirement that they assume authority - makes it that kind of control that is the most effective of all: by removing the boundaries around that time of day when food is prepared and consumed, and around the various stages of maturity (which are put into a melting pot out of which babies emerge as leaders and parents as helpless), it constitutes a grazing populace unused to the deferral of gratification that is part of what separates us from the animal and that allows time and space for the pursuit of those higher pleasures that make us more than mere cows out to pasture. Add to this effect, the immeasurable increase in anxious guilt that is generated by the proliferation of norms - how many calories your baby ought to consume, what range of food and textures your baby ought to encounter, how lumpy your baby's dinner ought to be, when your baby ought to hold her bottle, when she ought to hold her spoon, when she ought to hold her cup, and so on and so on - norms, whose increase is not objected to as the unacceptable restriction on your baby's particular make up and circumstances that a regimen of mealtimes and menus is regarded as: and you have the parallel loosening of traditional structures and undermining of reason and experience that is the perfect recipe for a population of under-confident and acquiescent child-rearers, and confused and resistant children.

Did Elizabeth David wean herself? Did Delia? Did Jamie? Did Hugh? I think not. What nonsense, then, to admit for a moment that the rage for "baby-led weaning" is anything other than that combination of freedom-where-there-should-be-constraint and normalization-where-there-should-be-responsible-judgment, that are the ties that bind us in our liberty.

Literature's New Clothes

2011-07-04T04:00:00.000-07:00

Contemporary literary fiction is a case of the Emperor's new clothes. It is time somebody shouted out from the crowd: "But they aren't writing anything at all!"

Plato distinguished the products of what we now call "art" as those whose appearance alone is of interest. These days, we may quickly move to dismiss this definition, given the iconic status attributed to several twentieth-century artworks that seem to undermine it, not least those indiscernibles whose appearance cannot be definitive, or those conceptual pieces which do not appear at all. But even these artworks have entered the fray broadly as examples of visual art. And, for visual art, the challenging of Plato's claim, that art is appearance alone, has about it just that kind of apparent impossibility that suits so well the spirit of the avant-garde.

But what of literature? Not so easy for literature to position itself in respect of Plato's claim - and it was a claim originally intended to be true of poetry more than of any other art form - given that appearance would seem almost the preserve of the visual. We might say, then, that, as the visual arts pursued an almost impossible antipathy towards appearance, the literary arts pursued an almost impossible affinity with appearance, through that aspect of appearance that was, happily, both the perfect mode of appearance for literature and the favoured mode of appearance for Plato: form.

But has not literary form had its day? Have the formalists, and the structuralists, and the post-formalists and the post-structuralists, not been and gone? True, but something still remains of form: not any literary form, but the form of literature itself. Contemporary literary fiction continues the attempt to live up to Plato's definition of art - which, for Plato, made art true - by writing in a manner to give the appearance alone of literature. The effect is a genre in which, for the writer, the sense of Writing Literature is dominant, and, for the reader, the sense of Reading Literature is dominant. And this effect is produced, not simply by the abandonment of most of the elements of character and plot, not simply even by an avoidance of high-literary language and style, but by a self-conscious juxtaposition of the signs of excruciating effort - short, elliptical sentences; absence of fulsome description; muted tone of painful sublimation - with the signs of iconoclastic casualness - colloquialisms; lack of trajectory; air of the incidental. This is how the appearance alone of literature is pursued: by the combination of painful retention, of a Literature that will never appear, and easy production, of a Literature that need only appear.

The Emperor ordered his new suit of clothes to appear invisible only to those stupid and incompetent subjects not fit to remain at their posts. And there does seem that kind of intellectual stake in contemporary literary fiction, that those who cannot appreciate it are those too stupid to do so. But stupid people too can read and write. It is just that, for now, they must do so without giving the appearance of doing so. They must wear clothes that people can see, which leaves them far more exposed than they would be if they wore clothes that only appeared.

Brian Haw: Did We Kill Him With Kindness?

2011-06-30T03:55:00.000-07:00

Before the death of Brian Haw is entirely forgotten, and with it the man and his campaign, we would do well to include in our brief respectful acknowledgment of the merits of his cause and the courage of his methods a moment of regret, not just for the manner in which we sometimes handled him too roughly but also for the manner in which we generally treated him so well. It is said that a man can be killed by kindness; certainly, a man’s protest can be silenced by tolerance.

On 16 January 2007, The Guardian reported Tony Blair as saying: “When I pass protestors every day at Downing Street, and believe me, you name it, they protest against it, I may not like what they call me, but I thank God they can. That’s called freedom.” In this short statement, B.liar, as Haw liked to call him, enacted the mode of oppression characteristic of the political system of which he was a very fitting leader, a system that makes capital out of criticism by its performance of tolerance towards efforts at resistance. The more explicit the resistance, the more political advantage to be gained because the more “liberal” the regime is proved to be that allows the resistance to proceed. In this way, the implicit display of political tolerance will always trump the explicit display of political resistance, as the content of particular protests is neutralized by the political effect of their form as protests. “You name it, they protest against it,” is about as near as a good liberal democracy will come to paying any attention to the particular grievances of discontented citizens. As Robert Shrimsley (FT.com, 21 June 2011) observed of Haw: “Ironically, he may be remembered less for his protests against the British government than for the way Britain ultimately protected his right to protest.”

One moment during Haw’s decade-long campaign crystallized this oppression-by-tolerance of our political system: the moment in 2007, when Mark Wallinger won the Turner Prize for an artwork comprised of a faithful reconstruction of Haw’s Parliament Square protest, much of which had recently been dismantled under the new Serious Organized Crime and Police Act. The difference between art objects and other kinds of object is a question that continues to exercise many in the artworld – it is a question that arises most pressingly around the justification of “indiscernible” art objects, that is, objects like Wallinger’s that look just like an object that is not considered art. One influential answer comes from Plato: art objects, unlike all other objects, are those whose appearance alone is of interest. And here lies the solution to the killing-by-kindness of Brian Haw, for the so-called “tolerance” of liberal democracy amounts to the transformation of life into art, of ways of life into appearances of ways of life, of points of view into representations of points of view, of beliefs into performances of beliefs, of principles into forms of principles, of relationships into hallmarks of relationships, of achievements into certifications of achievements, of thoughts into the documentation of thoughts. In this way, no matter how oppositional one’s beliefs and actions, they are not only tolerable but crucial to the appearance of tolerance of the regime in which they can, apparently, flourish. The official Turner Prize pages on Tate Britain’s website report that the jury recommended Wallinger’s artwork as a “bold political statement.” What nonsense. It is, rather, the appearance of a bold political statement, whose only real merit is its making explicit the extent to which bold political statements, in our British liberal democracy, are only ever allowed to be appearances of bold political statements anyway.

While Brian Haw must be honoured for his commitment to resisting the wrong-headed and immoral foreign policy of Britain, he must also be honoured for unintentionally showing up its very objectionable domestic policy; that moment when his protest against the state of Britain was transformed into an artwork called State Britain revealed something startling about the conditions of our time and place: the fact that protest against our liberal democratic government is not actually – at least not straightforwardly – possible, given that any protest, whatever its content, unwittingly lends support to the apparent liberality of the polity that non only permits it to happen but “thanks God” that it can. And that’s what we call freedom.

The Art Kettle

2011-06-10T06:05:00.000-07:00

The Art Kettle is due for publication by Zero Books at the end of this year or beginning of next. Its aim is to demonstrate the manner in which art operates as a "soft" discipline, comparable in its nature and effect to the police tactic called "kettling," and the controlling counterpoint to our liberal democratic polity's promise of "freedom" and "tolerance."

At Last, Something for the Digestion

2011-01-21T05:44:00.000-08:00

Minister for Education, Michael Gove, is introducing changes to the second level curriculum that, for once thank heaven!, are not being greeted as another daring move towards the future but rather, at last, as a reanimation of the past: students of Geography will be expected to know the names of capital cities, students of English the novels of Austen, students of History the chronology of kings. Those so blinded by New Labour as to think that anything Old is regressive may say what they like, this is so hopeful a development as to amount to the possibility of a reopening of the channels to education that have been so surely closing over the last couple of decades or more.

And this too, at a time when what is called "higher" education has sacrificed itself so entirely to determining the extent of its quantity and, what is not, in the New Labour target culture, qualitatively different, its "quality," that it is no longer much else but the detemination of the extent of its quantity and quality. Open the pages of Times Higher Education these days, and what you see advertised in its jobs pages are lectureships in Higher Education. No, not lectureships in the higher education of students in Philosophy, or English Literature, or Physics, but lectureships in the higher education of students in Higher Education. In these times of unprecedented university cuts, when education has become so utterly defined by targets that the survey of students' sense of satisfaction as they sit in their "Introduction to Phenomenology" class is taken to constitute the success of their introduction to Phenomenology, the university has nothing but itself left to teach its students. The question is whether students' sense of satisfaction will be taken as constitutive of their higher education in Higher Education; if so, the university may find itself hoist by its own petard. Having savaged the possiblity of education in all disciplines but itself, the university may finally, having had to turn on itself for sustenance, end in savaging the university. It is too late, now, to feel that such an end would be anything but welcome.

But perhaps there is hope in the surprising guise of Gove: hope that, as education consumes itself at the top, it opens up again, nearer the bottom, to a healthier set of foods - including the recommended daily amount of roughage that has been utterly neglected by the over-refined, over-processed offerings of New Labour; hope that what had appeared as a devastatingly over-involved eating itself to death is only the last stage in a peristalsis that begins anew, now, to improve all our intellectual diets.

Classy Dress

2011-01-15T05:31:00.001-08:00

Immediately outside the university library, there is collected a small number of students, third years perhaps. Your eyes come to rest on one member of the party, because she has pretty features and healthy, long, blond hair. And then you take stock of the rest of her, and what you see is this: dark green, rectangular-cut jacket with diamond-patterned quilting, such as people wear on TV programmes about horses; a foot, or less, of visible denim; and then the Hunter wellington. And you think: "Why would a pretty young woman dress in a jacket for which her shape is irrelevant, and a pair of wellingon boots?" And the answer follows fast: this is the uniform of a certain class of young woman, one who has horses, if not quite in her stables, then at least on her list of hobbies, one who wishes to attract a man to, if not quite yet, then at least very soon, keep her in the manner to which she is, if not quite accustomed, then at least determinedly aspiring. That she judges her chances of attracting this man to be greater when attired in a quilted green rectangle and boots for mucking out in than it would be in a mode of dress designed and worn to, say, emphasize her femininity, to - let's keep this very general - make her look nice, speaks volumes for the manner in which class has trumped style, of dressing and probably too of other aspects of living.

During the nineteenth century, when industrial modes of cloth production began to undermine the distinction that had been easily available to those who could afford dresses made of fine fabrics, middle class women became fearful of being mistaken for their servants and, what was almost worse, of their servants being mistaken for themselves. There promptly followed the introduction of the servant's uniform so that style continued to remain the preserve of the privileged. Society has changed sufficiently for the imposition of a class uniform to have become outrageous. But it has not changed so much that the benefits of such a uniform are no longer felt. It is simply that, now, the middle classes, constrained from dressing others in it, consent to dressing themselves in it, and opt to preserve a badge for their position in society by claiming as their birthright, no longer style but rather a green-quilted absence of it.

The National Health Service?

2010-12-15T02:59:00.000-08:00

You feel mildly unwell and attend the doctor for her opinion. She takes a blood sample so that a complete blood test can be done. A few days later, you are asked by the secretary at your medical clinic to make an appointment for one of the next ten days, so that another blood sample can be taken and another complete blood test done. She is not able to explain why this is necessary, but only reads the doctor's note, which states nothing more than that another test is required within that duration of time. You attend the clinic again the following week, and this time meet a nurse who reads from a screen that a blood sample is to be taken in order to be sent for a complete blood test and that this is a repeat procedure because some readings from the last blood test were "borderline." She is not able to tell which readings were "borderline," nor, therefore, what problem may or may not be at issue. Blood is taken and you are asked to ring for the results in two days' time. You do, to be told by the secretary that the doctor has noted "No further action required" next to your name.

Emma's Mr. Woodhouse is badly served by the history of Austen appreciation, summarily dispatched as a prosing hypochondriac, a caricature background for the protagonist's domestic life. He is all absorbing interest in draughts, and gruel, and the dampness of the dew and the oppressiveness of the summer sun. He objects, though always mildly, to the late nights and rich food in which his neighbours indulge and battles to reconcile his sense of hospitality with a grave concern at his guests' propensity to eat the oysters handed round by his servants. But the fact that only Mr. Woodhouse shares with Mr. Knightley the distinction of having judged correctly of the "not quite the thing"-ness of Frank Churchill's character before, towards the end of the novel, it is revealed for everyone to see, might give pause to his too hasty dispatch; Mr. Woodhouse may be dull and wordy, he may be over-gentle and unadventurous, but this effective semi-retirement from the social world does provide him with a certain perspective, which facilitates his withstanding the storm of Frank Churchill's brisk manners and involving humour to see the man's character for what it really is. And this perpective also gives Mr. Woodhouse what we might do well to think of, less as an irrational hypochondria and more as an attentiveness to his and others' wellbeing, less as the constant imagining of illness, actual, remembered, or imminent, and more accurately as a disposition towards health. What we have in Mr. Woodhouse, we might consider, is: an example of the experience of and care for health; a demonstration of a mode of attentiveness that has no real object - only illness, for the most part, manifests itself objectively - and no real end - there is no "cure" for health - and so can never be finished with; a kind of knowledge - of health, that one is healthy - that is also a way of life. If Mr. Woodhouse is a caricature, then, it is of a life lived for health, and not a life lived in illness.

This relatively minor point of interest with regard to interpretations of Emma has a surprising significance for the quality of our lives. It shows us that our National Health Service is, in fact, our National Illness Service; unless our experience of living congeals into a "case" of something, unless there emerges an object to be named and treated, there is "no further action required." Anything on the other side of the "borderline" - that is, all those endemic but undramatic conditions, of anaemia, depression, anxiety, excema, and so on, which affect the quality of our lives more even than we ourselves are able to know (we are no Mr. Woodhouses after all) - anything that might impact on that enigmatic experience that is the experience of health, is of almost no concern. Perhaps there would be nothing wrong with this in itself - after all, it is comforting to think that there is a National Illness Service, for illnesses are common and need to be treated - except that at its frontline is a set of professionals - the General Practitioners - whose title indicates that they would be much better placed in a National Health Service rather than a National Illness Service, so that the general character of the experience of health, or lack thereof, and the in-practice nature of the work required to understand and improve this experience, is not undermined by the expectation that only that which can be tightly specified and, ideally, automatically treated is worth attending to.

Pin Your Colours To A Mast

2010-12-12T03:05:00.001-08:00

William Morris advised: "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful." How much better had he said: "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful and believe to be beautiful." After all, it is the separation of use from beauty, being raised to a principle of existence around his time and, by ours, so embedded as to be the central regulator of our experience and of our capacity to imagine outside of it, that Morris dedicated his time and his talents to protest against; for him, the idea that orientation towards an end reduces an object, a labour, a person to a mere means was alienating in the extreme, and the idea that beauty is, if not anathema to utility, then at least utterly indifferent to it, was artificial in the extreme. Alienation and artificiality: the pincer movement of modern life; how nice it would have been had Morris given us a slogan to rally round in our efforts to raill against it. For the want of a word, the slogan was lost; for the want of a slogan the battle was lost...and all for the want of a word...

But slogans are very passe these days; we've so outgrown them, what with their seeming to reduce complex programmes to a single dimension and their expectation that the blood in men's veins, and not just the brains in their heads, are conscripted to fight for the cause. No, we've grown too civilised for such things, too open-minded, too tolerant, too liberal. Not for us the bitesize mouthful of the catch-phrase; we're far too busy listening to alternative perspectives, gathering and collating various points of view, negotiating with others and accommodating those who disagree, far too engaged in sorting through the fusion of flavours on our plate, too involved in anticipating each one on its own, and in company with combinations of the others, to ever be reduced to actually taking a bite. As Lord Byron used to do when women were eating their meals, at the thought of a slogan to get behind we take our urbane sensibilities and leave the room in disgust: that women should be so beastly, that free and educated people should be so committed.

For it is the mark of a truly liberal democracy, that it is so permissive of different views, so non-committal, that it becomes difficult actually to hold a view, actually to commit: first, because there seems nothing against which to define one's view or commitment and, second - which is really the first reason, another way around - because to hold a view or to have a commitment in any manner that stands out, that would define itself, is to show an unacceptable intolerance of everybody else, is to be unreasonably aggressive. Not only this: in fact, to be anything becomes an increasing impossiblity, as the option to become changed as a person by what one does - to become, to really become, a baker, or a housewife, or a doctor, in a manner that strikes to the core of one's identity and is not simply a means to another of those ends we are everywhere told are so worthwhile to pursue - begins to stand out as itself also an act of agression. To be a teacher is now defined by the fulfilment of certain standards (and there are so many of them), imposed externally to define what it is to be a teacher; that one would actually be a teacher, live as one, think as one, act as one, that one would be what one is, is now unnecessary, excessive, belligerantly unnecessary and excessive. Today, we are all transferable skills and no true learning, all open education and no real knowledge, all the better to be formed as adaptable, multifunctional, instruments of the system with no resources to question our condition.

Set against this trend the practice of what Aristotle named as "the stochastic arts," defined by the relative independence of excellence in them from what might be thought of as "success" at them. Such an art is the art of medicine, or of teaching, or of childrearing, where wisdom gained from practice is not necessarily undermined by the death of a patient, the failure of a student, or the immorality of a child. In these arts - and, if we are sensitive to the contingencies of context and the indeterminacy of human existence more generally, they might profitably begin to be seen as exemplary of many more practices: cooking for company, plumbing old houses, the law, tax consultancy for small and medium sized businesses, trading in second-hand goods, etc. - inheres a direct challenge to the increasing alienation and artificiality of existence against which Morris sought to protest, for their end is not only difficult to define as an object apart from their processual realisation, but is, if defined for the sake of argument, not actually determining of excellence or otherwise in the field. In these arts, in short, is exemplified a kind of knowing that is also a kind of "feeling for," a kind of usefulness in which the aesthetic considerations of appropriateness, fittingness, measuredness, moderation, of balance, symmetry, timeliness, of beauty, are central: not merely ornamental or decorative, not of secondary consideration and dispensable, not submissive to ends, nor excessive, but actually constitutive of truth, of knowledge, of right. And by these arts is exhibited a kind of "feeling for" the rightness, the appropriateness, the fittingness, of an object, a method, a procedure, a way of doing, that has utility as integral, a kind of beauty that has use at its core.

At stake in the challenge posed by stochasticism to the transferable skills of a society given over to the realisation of certain ends, is not only the nature of work, then, but also the nature of play, that is, the manner in which those activities that are not regarded by us as ends oriented, nevertheless do, in our society, function within the means-end paradigm of modern living. Foucault's brief genealogies of literature, dotted sporadically around his much more fulsome genealogies of other modern institutions, would trace its provenance to the Rennaissance practice of making linkages between words and things that do not presuppose that "reality" is tied only to the latter, of ranging between language and world in a manner that does not distinguish between them by allowing all the force of truth to one and only the effect of representing truth to the other. In our world of means and ends, Foucault always implies, literature stands firm as that realm in which words continue to have virtues and vices of their own, in which combinations of words, in which phrases and their rhythms, retain the power they had in former times and are effective in themselves, and not just insofar as they point us to something else.

But Foucault misses the point that Morris was so persistent, but so far ineffective, in making: the literary use of language, of the materials of art more generally, the literary life even, which Foucault looks to as a stay upon the separation of means from ends that is the premiss of modern living, is not quite the refuge he thinks it, for it is in fact the symptom of a trauma which Foucault then looks to it to cure. Rennaissance times, as Foucault himself describes them, did not have literature. Why? Because life was "literary" and "literature" was life; the poverty of this description merely reflects the extent to which, by now, our language will not describe the fusion of the functional and the aesthetic, the purposeful and the beautiful, from the dissassociation of which it has emerged. The world was an aesthetic resonance chamber in which handkerchiefs were embroidered with lace and medical treatments bore similarities to the parts of the body they were used to cure. To look now to art, to literature, as in some sense a return to these times and a defiance of instrumentalisation is to look to that whose condition of possibility is this very instrumentalisation. Art, literature, has emerged precisely as the other side of functionality's coin; it is far from demonstrating the fusion of means and ends because it is defined as that which has no end. Art is for nothing; we may retreat to it for some ease from a constant pressure to fulfill given purposes, we may feel for it all the enthusiasm of one at last on a long-awaited and much-needed holiday, but we cannot, then, by definition, have it inform the conditions of our everyday existence. It may ease our pain, relax our bones, and provide us with a temporary escape, but it cannot change our lives.

And all of what we call avant-garde activity, all of art's radical critique, has operated only to exacerbate this situation. For art has directed its critical skills, not to the questioning of its condition as useless, but to questioning the conditions of uselessness: the constitution of art was achieved, by the eighteenth century, as the identification of the conditions necessary for purposelessness; the avant garde has operated to question the supposed necessity of one after another of these conditions - traditional perspectivism is not necessary, line is not necessary, colour is not necessary, the canvas is not necessary, an object is not necessary, an artist is not necessary, and so on and so on - but it has never operated to question its condition as purposeless. Because in purposelessness, in uselessness, lies the condition of its very existence, and it is interested in perpetuating that, at the very least. And so avant-garde activity operates as a useful device for letting off steam, for channelling the frustrations of an over-functionalised existence into a mode of critique that is, by definition, without function; it is a good playground for those who need time off from lives that can never be realised because they must always be ready to be for something else.

The revolution, then, will not look like we expect it to: it will not arise from the occupation of fine arts buildings on university campuses, or from lengthy meetings to resolve the various interests of the various interest groups, or from a melee of posters on which everyone's message is given a right to be seen and be heard. This is far too liberal, far too open, far too purposeless a mode of activity to issue any kind of serious threat to the simultaneous underdetermination and overdetermination of modern life. Far better to knit a jumper and then wear it, or knead some bread and then eat it, or learn to teach and then try your best to be it, or invent a slogan and get behind it. Pin your colours to a mast and do it so tightly that to take them off again becomes all but unimaginable. There's risk in this, no doubt. The colours might be the wrong ones or the mast not, after all, that strong. But these things may be worked on along the way, and, at any rate, it is for the most part better to be wrong than forever transferable.

Kettled and Scuttled

2010-11-26T06:01:00.000-08:00

Student protests in England were this week treated to the recent enthusiasm of democratic governments for what is called "kettling," that is, for the police practice of shepherding protestors into a designated public space, there to spend the chief of their anger in relative containment. Much shock and outrage has been expressed at the undemocratic nature of this procedure, seeming as it does to restrict the right to freedom of speech and movement that is supposed to be a founding principle of democracy. What goes unnoticed, however, and partly because of the outlet for outrage provided by the very marginal constitutionality of kettling, is the extent to which protest is, in a general way, kettled by liberal democracies whose tolerance for protest works to make protest effectively impossible. If one feels bemused at the manner in which the fervour of protests against the invasion of Iraq or, in this case, against the removal of the cap on student fees, is followed, as night follows day, by an almost total apathy, certainly by no further action or "protest," one might reflect on the fact that a political regime built on the toleration of different viewpoints is in this sense highly pernicious: it is impossible to criticise it without supporting it, impossible to protest against it without buttressing it. A politics of tolerance fulfils itself most completely, is justified most totally, in the performance of its tolerance towards opinions directed in protest against itself; the more powerful the criticism, the more jusified the regime; the louder the protest, the more secure the establishment. A more thorough kettling is impossible to imagine. What is interesting, however, is that in this context the small-scale kettling of students two days ago is the nearest we have come to real protest, in that it reifies the endemic kettling of a liberal democratic state in a way that no amount of free-ranging marching about Whitehall could achieve. In being kettled, the students' protest became effective in a manner that it never could have on its own. Which leads one to think that the practice of kettling will not longer be employed by liberal democratic governments, who will no doubt justify its relinquishment on the grounds of its removal of the right to protest...

...but we can turn to find that this very same equation regulates the matter that the students were protesting about: the future rise in student fees. Students are angry that, from now on, they will have to pay more for their education and that they will spend many years in more debt than they do now. Here again, the students are being kettled, herded into a small space and made to feel outrage at it, when there is a much graver herding, a much more general kettling, going on, unseen, all around. For the issue of what students pay for their education, the concern being felt that they will be made to pay too much, provides a useful defusing of what out to be outrage at the extent to which, irrespective of how much they pay, students in England are not being educated at all. Here is another exerpt from "The Browne Report":

Higher education matters because it transforms the lives of individuals. On
graduating, graduates are more likely to be employed, more likely to enjoy
higher wages and better job satisfaction, and more likely to find it easier to
move from one job to the next. Participation in higher education enables
individuals from low income backgrounds and then their families to enter higher
status jobs and increase their earnings. Graduates enjoy substantial health
benefits – a reduced likelihood of smoking, and lower instances of obesity and
depression. They are less likely to be involved in crime, more likely to be
actively engaged with their children’s education and more likely to be active in
their communities.

Again, the naivite of a Browne who gives not a nod to the fact that the socio-economic conditions that make people more likely to participate in higher education are also those that make them less likely to be obese or commit a crime, the fact that participation in higher education is an effect of money and class much more than it is of some simplistic notion of aspiration and choice, must be glossed over for the moment, in order that we give due attention to the manner in which what is termed "higher education" in this excerpt is defined implicitly as "higher education to..." realise certain goals, the goals of money, status, physical and mental stability, and children who will want money, status, and so on. The idea that education, real education, true education, "higher" education, ought to teach people to identify and pursue their own goals, to identify and pursue the guiding principles of their own lives, to work out what the good life is and to learn to live it and to justify it to others, evidently is not one that Browne understands, and, given that the government has announced that it is to take on board the recommendations of the Browne report, not one in which our government is interested either. No, in England at least, one is "educated" in order to fulfil the life to which one is assigned, in order to submit to the demands of capital, in order to be obedient, in order to get into debt and spend a lifetime repaying it, in order to contain one's mental life within the parameters of "normality" and one's girth to 34". In England, education is kettling on a grand scale; that it requires the intermittent apparently draconian measure as an outlet for the steam of a populace that would otherwise explode with containment is in the nature of things, and resultant in nothing more than the whistling of an orderly kettle, boiling away to make a pot of good English tea.

But, if "education" is kettling, it is a kettling far more serious than any other, for it kettles the very skills that we require to identify and to question our kettlings. It is, in fact, more like a scuttling than a kettling, for we are left, after an English "higher" "education", as emptier vessels than we were beforehand, with nothing much more than water between our ears.

There may be an interesting post script to this, however: if the rise in student fees really does have the effect of preventing quantities of people from attending university, the resulting diminishment in the government's effectiveness in thoroughly kettling its population may eventually produce a reversal of government policy so as to make "education" once more more affordable. If so, the reversal will no doubt be advertised as the government's acknowledgment that a "higher" "education" is something that none of its citizens should be made to do without...

Pigs Will Fly

2010-11-11T05:08:00.000-08:00

The Browne report confirms a trend long in the emergence: the commodification of learning and the elevation of "student satisfaction" to the standard of educational success:

Higher education in England has a reputation for high quality. Student satisfaction is high, high enough that England is one of the four countries in the world that feels able to survey students and publish the results. But the system should not be complacent about quality. Student satisfaction has not improved significantly in recent years.

Leaving aside the hopeless myopia of a Lord Browne who cannot see to consider the possibility that only four countries in the world are misguided enough to judge the sense of satisfaction of students as an appropriate measure of the quality of their education, it is strange that, in a country whose famous philosopher's most famous words warn us to prefer to be Socrates dissatisfied than a satisfied pig, the grotesque equation of satisfaction with learning continues to flourish unchecked. Since ancient times, it has been accepted that the price of a true education is precisely the comforting sense that our needs are being satisfied, that we are provided with all we could wish for, that nothing else remains to be done. Socrates was known as the gadfly, that tiny, persistent and deeply dissatisfying insect that drives the animals it preys upon to a constant changing of position, swishing of tail and general hunt for another kind of life. That, for Socrates, was what true education involves: a never-ending needling, a persistent sense of unease, a constant searching for a better place than this one, for a truer time than now.

But Socrates was put to death, and, since then, all gadflies have been gradually banished, so that educators, as they are still called, are more like the masseur than the gadfly, smoothing away what remains of human pain at what we have and human ache for something better, oiling us up so that our cog doesn't stick the machine. But Browne, like the machine he serves, is subject to an endemic absurdity: he must see more and more satisfaction, just as the machine must make more and more profit; to plateau, even to improve "insignificantly," is to fail. And so he commits our education system to cranking itself up again so that students feel more satisfied, and then cranking itself up again so that students feel more satisfied, and on and on and on. Even the sky's no limit, so pigs will fly but then they must go into orbit.

Don't Laugh in Bed

2010-11-02T07:37:00.000-07:00

There is a stock device of comedy which juxtaposes the precautions usually taken by, say, householders to protect their property, with the success sometimes wrought by the one who, rather than erect his defences, goes out to meet the intruder with such an unexpected degree of alacrity, with such oddity and force, that the tables are turned and the intruder scampers off with great speed and in high dudgeon at the indignity that his attempt at crime has just suffered. For an offensive enthusiasm can, on some occasions, function better than anything else to vanquish our would-be assailants; and it is, in the main, a funnier prospect than the other option.

And this, it turns out, is the principle behind that quintessentially British humour that seems never to outgrow what, in other cultures, remains a largely teenage phenomenon: delight, almost hysteria, at references to sex. Take Bridget Jones: a "loose" remake of Austen's Pride and Prejudice, both in the sense of bearing an only shadowy resemblance to the earlier work, and in the sense that its greatest departure is probably constituted by the altogether less uptight antics of its characters and the generally indulgent attitude to sexual behaviour of the society it portrays. It is cut through and through with would-be humorous episodes and observations concerning, for the most part, something on the theme of sex: Bridget hasn't had any for a while; Bridget played naked in Darcy's paddling pool when young; Bridget is stared at in a deliberate manner by Mr. "Titspervert"; Bridget indulges in what is still an illegal sexual practice in Britain; Bridget's uncle, who is not her uncle, enjoys placing his hand on her behind; and so on it goes, involving not just Bridget, but all its characters, in what are intended to be funny conversations and situations of a softly sexual nature. And then, we remember Austen's Elizabeth, patently not given to engaging in any such conversations or situations, and thereby, in contrast with her modern-day counterpart, revealed to be altogether repressed.

So we might think. And so we would be very wrong. Austen's characters and their society certainly do seem to have had the most wonderfully complex ways of hiding from sex in all its forms - the fact that Pride and Prejudice's Lydia must, in preparation for her marriage but subequent to having already eloped, remain with her uncle rather than returning to her father's house is one very ordinary example of this - but Bridget and her lot are just the same. For the British association of sex with humour is the contemporary equivalent of what we now identify as the Victorian assocation of sex with sin. Bridget actually laughs in bed, while having sex, which is about as likely (arguably, far less likely) to contribute to the success of the occasion as her quoting from some religious treatise on the evils of what was about to happen (or, in this case, about, embarrassingly, not to happen). Bridget, with so many of her compatriots, is like our besieged but eccentric home owner, holding her fort, not by erecting a set of complex and stalwart defenses but by riding out to meet the enemy with an eager gusto that will dampen his spirits by too concentrated a dose of his own medicine. But wait. This suggests that the practice is a gendered one, the preserve of women when confronted with men. Not at all: it is the strategy of both British men and women, when confronted with sex, that is, with sex as intimacy, sex as skill, sex as complex adult relation, sex as highly-involved exchange, sex as anything other than the enthusiastic-aggressive mania that is sex as joke.

The Victorians tended strictly to conceal their legs (and those of the furniture on and at which they sat) to defend against thoughts of what lies between them (a very good device, we might think, to interestingly generate such thoughts); their descendents tend to demand a constant and almost total revealing of legs (the current fashion for wearing tights as if they constitute the complete clothing of the lower body is the concession made to winter by this demand), and every other body part, if possible all at one time and with great hilarity, which is a very good device, we must concede, to kill stone dead any interesting thought about what might lie between them. Sex may no longer be a sin, but it is more effectively forbidden by having becoming a great laugh.

Throw a Sop to the Masses: Sponsor "The Arts"

2010-10-28T03:32:00.000-07:00

William Morris, at the height of the Victorian age, when the old practice of living over, in, or very near, one's workplace was giving way to a new desire to live elsewhere than where one plied one's trade, walked out one day to one of the newly established London suburbs. The advent of extended street lighting was not the least important factor in the new enthusiasm for living on the outskirts - previously, travel to and from such places relied upon either the sun or the moon - but its primary motivation was, of course, the growth of industrialised modes of production: one could not live in or over the factory in which one worked as one of a large, anonymous group and one would not, if at all possible, live near its often belching unpleasantness. That this was often not possible for the workers meant that it became desireable for their superiors; the middle classes, because they could, ceased to live near their places of work and traded the hustle and bustle, the mixed economy, of city living, for the quiet and almost entirely residential areas growing up around its margins.

And so one day, William Morris finds himself in an almost silent street, lined on either side with the new Victorian villa, a detached residence on a relatively small piece of land, similar to its neighbours in style but suggestive at least, in its qualified independence from the homes around it, of the privileges of the independently rich. There is nobody to be seen but gentlemen and their ladies and servants, no tradesmen at their work, no shops selling their wares. Those are to be found on the main street, a new invention of the new lifestyle and intended to act as foil for the genteel retirement tucked away behind it. "A beastly place to live," Morris thinks to himself, and quits it almost at once.

The beastliness of such places was, for Morris, guaranteed by their operating to segregate, not only the population but the processes of production and consumption upon which the population generally relied. Those in the villas ate, of course, they sat on chairs, dressed in gowns and puffed on pipes, but, contrary to former times, they felt it desireable to remove themselves as far as possible from the sources of their food, chairs, gowns and tobacco. In many cases, this desire was purely aspirational; not all could afford the move outwards. But what mattered to Morris was less the fact of people's removal than the attitude towards labour and its materials from which it sprang, or to which it contributed, an attitude that, for him, was bound up with the interests of capital, of labour for profit alone, and therefore opposed to the integration of production, consumption and practised artistry that a fully human existence, as he thought, requires.

Let us name another beastliness, then, which Morris should have shuddered at had he lived to see it: goverment funding of the arts. The Arts Council England (ACE) has announced that it is to cut funding for the arts by 29.6%. In fact, it has also decreed that only 15% can be passed on to what it describes as "frontline" arts organisations. And there is outcry, at the predicted closing of museums, bankruptcy of publishers, penury of artists. But we should stand with Morris, and feel glad at this development, for state funded arts are a sop, thrown at us by the government and its system, much as large corporations that suck the life from their workforce concede a monthly "dress down" day, or organise the odd "team building" hike, as a safety valve for employees who might otherwise explode from feelings of alienation.

What was it that Morris found so beastly in that suburban street?: its incubation of a mode of living premised upon the conception of human flourishing as anathema to involvement in, or even remembrance of, the craftly labours on which lives then, at every turn, had to rely but which they were being taught to despise the sight of. Women learned to be proud of their ignorance of the patterns for shifts and chemises, and boasted of it; men grew angry if any detail of the workings of their households, the cycles of their gardens or the picklings of their kitchens came before them in any manner other than as good fires, fresh flowers and fine meals. In short, it grew to be accepted that the highest form of human existence knew nothing of the labours whose fruits it enjoyed and ought to get as removed as possible from the materials and processes on which its satisfaction in life relied.

The end result of this trend is inevitable when one realises that knowledge is a skill, that knowing that this gown is most becoming or that sauce tastes best or those colours look finest is impossible without knowing how gowns are sewn or sauces made or colours chosen: what we call taste is lost, and (it cannot be a coincidence that this is the end result of a process that was incubated so carefully by capitalist values) the stays upon consumption are delivered entirely into the hands of profit. The highest form of human existence, it seems, quietly interred in the leafy streets of an undisturbed suburbia, having lost its connection with the sources and processes of its health and wealth, has lost itself to all but the highest bidder.

And the last move in this vicious game is government sponsorship of the arts. We have become so inured to our alienation from our selves and our lives, so used to having companies tell us what looks good, tastes good, feels good, that we have lost the capacity - which Morris would have placed at the very core of a fulsome human society - to produce, desire, even to recognise, what is beautiful, what is good, what is tasteful, what suits. All of that is consigned to the "fads" that keep our market moving, and meanwhile we have forsaken what we ought to have insisted on: art, beauty, as a feature of human experience generally. Instead, what little need we still have for the beautiful, for the ornamental, or merely for the non-utilitarian, is "satisfied," even "supported," by "the arts," that field of objects and events that are not part of the means-end system to which all other aspects of life appear to have been subjected. Of course, the extent to which "the arts" have been integrated into the marketplace, the extent to which they have blended so well with capital, ought to make us more suspicious than we ever tend to be. For "the arts" are a way of quelling the populace, of answering to that very small remaining need for beauty, for craft, for a break from the pursuit of ends, and of making us feel that all of this is there to be had, at our fingertips and mostly for free, and that it is our own fault if we do not avail ourselves of it.

But small wonder that most of us don't. Aleks Sierz recently posted a piece of outrage at the apparent relief felt in some quarters that government cuts to the arts have not been higher, reminding us that those touched by the arts will also be touched by government cuts to other areas; they too live in houses, have children and fall ill. That Sierz feels it necessary to point this out, that he judges it to be an opinion held widely enough to merit contradiction that "people who work in the arts are only sustained by the arts," is interesting, for it indicates the extent to which the arts are so removed from the business of living and us engaged in it, that they seem a little island unto themselves, to which we are free (but not so free anymore, let us hope) to retreat and regenerate and engage in a little "team building" perhaps. Meanwhile, back at the business of living, nothing need be beautiful at all. No wonder the government sponsors "the arts," and thank heaven it can no longer afford to do so.

What Ever Happened to Criticism?

2010-10-06T06:11:00.000-07:00

Austen, writing in an age that allowed women mostly no voice at all, in a sitting room that was throughway for the busyness of domestic life, in a genre widely held to be at once insignificant and corrupting, a woman whose future stood to the attention of the many contingencies that operated upon the men of her family, and whose home was, by today's standards, continually shifting its scope, location, and contents, was still, according to Josipovici's recent What Ever Happened to Modernism?, a writer whose most central characteristic is that she was sure of the ground under her feet. Dickens too, Josipovici insists, despite the former's lowly beginnings, frequently precarious finances, ever expanding family, crowded commitments, uncertain health, and never abating drive to remove himself, both literally and figuratively, from the unprepossesing prospect of his father. "The more I see of the world, the less I am satisfied with it": Austen's Elizabeth Bennet testifies to the effect of the contemporary stultification of women that is the theme to dominate Austen's oeuvre; but still, Josipovici tells us, Austen shows none of that disenchantment of the world that he regards as so essential to good, to true, to real art. Similarly Dickens, notwithstanding what must be one of the most comprehensively dark visions of Victorian society and its institutions of change; "all that David Copperfield kind of crap" - Josipovici quotes Salinger's Holden Caulfield - is still too complacent, altogether too comfortable, to share in the disillusionment that Josipovici so values.

How are we to understand this? Why would a woman writing under and about conditions of almost impossibility, why would a man writing in a space as actually and as metaphorically cramped as it could be and in a spirit so continually depressed by endemic evils, be accused of unadmirable assuredness and insufficient disenchantment? The answer according to Josipovici would lie in the category mistake that regards precariousness in one's material circumstances or the haphazard crowdedness of one's daily existence to address the kind of uncertainty that goes to produce good art, the mistake that assumes disappointment, however well-directed, at the conditions of women or anger at the major socio-political institutions to have relevance for the kind of disenchantment exhibited by great artists. For it is not uncertainty per se that Josipovici values in the artists he admires, but uncertainty about art, just as it is not disenchantment with the world that he looks for in the artworks he encounters but what he calls disenchantment of the world, which amounts to a disenchantment with the world of art. Poverty and poor health do not the artist's assuredness dampen, Josipovici implies; the despair of irony and the humour of darkness do not the artist's disenchantment make: for the world is the world, and art is art, and never the twain should meet. Austen and Dickens, by being too much of the world, are too little for art.

And therein lies the reason for Josipovici's distaste for all but the "Modernists"; only the "Modernists" exhibit disenchantment itself, because only the "Modernists" have no ground at all under their feet, because only the "Modernists" despair, not merely at this or that message, but at the medium through which any message might, must, be transmitted. That, for Josipovici, is real disenchantment: not the having of something disenchanted to say, nor even merely the having of nothing to say, but the having of everything to say and nothing with which to say it.

Austen and Dickens, then, and those more contemporary authors who Josipovici identifies as their descendents, are, in effect, all too human: too directed in their uncertainties with too much purpose to their disenchantment. Austen, a woman in a time of men, intervened in that time both by the fact of her writing and by its content, demonstrating in what she says and does women's claim to greater consideration and the continuity that exists between daily life and the creative spirit. Dickens, for his part, performed his creative practice in the same manner and with much the same motivation and effect as he had, early on, fufilled his post as court reporter for the newspapers. Just as, then, he wrote for cash and on schedule, often completing his report to the rhythm of the jolting carriage that was carrying him back to London, so later he wrote to keep his children in clothes and his father from debt, to strict and regular deadlines, with the helter skelter of domestic life and a busy social diary all round, with the noise from the street and the stench from nearby tenements never relenting . And as his reporting functioned to inform people what went on in court, so his novels functioned - albeit at greater length and with conventional devices employed - to show people what went on in their world, a world with which Dickens was anything but enchanted. But all of this has little to do with art, Josipovici implies; for art does not function, art does not intervene, art does not seek to profit, art does not have deadlines, art has no concrete conditions and effects, art is disenchanted with nothing. Art, rather, pursues the "relentless contact with reality" that too much contact with the world would suppress. By being too real, it would seem, the novels of Austen and Dickens are not then real enough.

Because in the end, Josipovici would have us believe, the novels of Austen and Dickens suffer by not being the things they describe: they are not the feeling of muslin on the skin, nor the stench of sewage, nor the taste of madeira, nor the sight of rotting flesh. But that is not it, of course; words can never be such sensations. Austen and Dickens, then, fail in being too complacent in the face of this never, in being too at home in the language they write, as if that language were somehow capable of representing the things to which it points. Everything happens exactly as and when it should in their novels, Josipovici bemoans: the carriage pulls up at five minutes to nine; the gown is let down another two inches; the marriage occurs at just the moment it ought. There are no doubts, no hesitations, no "examining of what's going on in their own minds" as they imagine, no ability "to question what it is they are doing" as they write. Instead, there is mere anecdote, the telling of stories to lure us into a world that is not real, the use of the past simple to tempt us to think it's all true, the production of "reality effect" as evasion of "reality itself." From being, in one sense, too real, then, too fulsomely of and in the world and its ways, the novels of Austen and Dickens move to being, for Josipovici, far from real enough. Content, as he describes it, with mere representation, they never face the challenge of representing reality, of showing "the trembling of life itself," a challenge that can never be truly responded to except, indirectly, as the suggestion that there is something that cannot be done. Hence the greatness of Beckett's avowed weariness of "going a little further along a dreary road," and the all but impossible, quintessentially "Modernist," search, through art, for that which refuses to be turned into art. Austen and Dickens, by taking artifice at face value, by resting within that which art allows to be possible, act in bad faith, Josipovici tells us; they employ their arts to do what can be done and neglect altogether to use them to do what cannot.

Which gives us a timely entrance to criticism of Josipovici's commitment to what he calls "Modernism," for it is a commitment ultimately to a curious determination to continue to engage in an activity that is rather an indulgence than anything else (for Josipovici, art does not make a living; it is not fitted kitchens), but in a spirit of begrudging despair at the value of that activity, rather as if one spent one's time on the golf course in Marbella doing nothing but despairing at the impossibility of achieving anything by playing golf. Don't go to play golf in Marbella, we might advise, but spend your time more productively; similarly, put down your pens and your paints, we might counsel, and get out there and do something else with your life. But that's just it. Doing something else with your life is equally irrelevant, equally distant from reality, equally merely human, Josipovici believes; in fact, it is much more irrelevant, much more unreal, much more human, insofar as it occupies one's mind with concerns other than the conviction that nothing mere humans can do or say is anything but incomplete, prejudiced, contingent, grubby...well, human. Effectively, then, "Modernism," for Josipovici, is the discontent with the merely human; and art, for Josipovici, is that realm of activity where this discontent finds expression.

But, if Josipovici feels impatience at what he perceives to be certain supposed artists' sense of assuredness of the ground beneath their feet, we might pause here to, with far greater reason, accuse Josipovici of something similar. One experience of staying with, of operating within, the "merely human" is the experience precisely of the shifting nature of the ground on which one stands, the sense that one only ever has an insufficient amount of evidence for one's claims and a finite capacity to justify one's beliefs. This is the experience that the human is all there is, the experience that one must pull oneself up by the bootstraps, the experience of the lack of any superhuman ground for human existence that would remain stable through all our vicissitudes, a foundation for all our relations. But it is precisely this superhuman ground that Josipovici imagines himself and his "Modernists" to stand upon, as they try to recognise "that which will fit into no system, no story, that which resolutely refuses to be turned into art," as they try to give voice to the "inhuman," to Reality, to Now, to Nature: how to capture the landscape without humanising it, how "to see it as it is and not as I see it" is the challenge that faces Cezanne, as Josipovici describes it, a challenge, to put it bluntly, to see the view from God's seats. Neither the "reality effect" of the realists nor the flights of the fantasists can do anything but grate upon Josipovici's sensibilities therefore, not, he explains, out of some Puritan disdain for the imagination or for the craft of letters "but out of respect for the world." But belief in this "world," to which human efforts to think and do are so offensive, can finally rely for its effect only on exactly this disdain: for the finitude of human existence, for the partiality of human achievements, for the relativity of human truths, for the contingency of human successes and failures.

Josipovici is, in the end of all, a fairly straightforward Platonist. For Josipovici never questions the assumption - which is quintessentially Platonic, although it has had its more recent proponents - that humans use their arts to represent. It is true he makes distinctions between the tradition of representing character and his more favoured practice of representing action, and between those artists who think of their work as mirroring reality and those - the "Modernists" - who know that their words function merely as "emblems" or "signs" of reality; but these nuances do not take from what is Josipovici's basic belief: that the primary character of art is its representation of the world. And his Platonism does not stop there. For - and this is the inevitable consequence of believing, as Plato did, that the reality that humans see around them is but a dim representative of Truth itself - Josipovici also believes that the representations of artists will always fail because, even at their most faithful, they will only succeed in representing human truths and inevitably fall short of representing Truth itself. He goes further: insofar as art multiplies the number of human truths around us, insofar as it points us again and again towards the human world, and especially insofar as it does this "faithfully," it is actually corrupting, actually damaging of our capacities to sense that, beyond the human, there lies a Truth that is inhuman, a reality that is infinite. Hence, Josipovici shares with Plato a rather negative view of the value of art, a conviction in its degrading effect.

But this is not all: Josipovici also shares with Plato the elevation of a certain kind of artwork - for Plato, this was the highest form of poetry - which employs its arts to represent not human things but some inkling of the inhuman. For Plato, great poetry gives an idea of Love itself, of Hope itself, and so on. For Josipovici, great art - "Modernist" art - gives a sense of reality itself, which turns out to be the realm in which no possibility is annulled by the commitment to any particular possibility; rather, possibility itself - which, we are asked to accept, is the most real of conditions - is suggested through the annihilation of, the utter disregarding of, any particular possibility. Hence Josipovici's admiration of Henry James who, according to Maurice Blanchot's reading, wrote in a manner characterised by an allegedly "pure indeterminacy," and who we are told managed, "behind the constructed work which he brings into being, to allow us to feel other forms, the infinite yet weightless space of the narrative as it might have been, as it was before all beginnings." Certainly, on this model, Austen and Dickens, do, spectacularly, fall short: Dickens, because of the explicitly interested, determined, aspect of his novels, their frequent dialogue with contemporary developments, their address of socio-political events, and their explicit submission to the requirement of regular remuneration; and Austen, perhaps primarily because hers are novels of which we might particularly remark that, before all beginnings, they might have been nothing at all, such were the unfavourable chances of being a woman and a writer at that time. For neither Dickens nor Austen, then, was the weightless space before all beginnings in itself of any significance at all, let alone of the infinite significance that Josipovici would attribute to it. But that is because their living conditions or their livelihood depended on it; and only if one's life depends on it is one capable, in Josipovici's view, of making good art.

For this is not fitted kitchens, Josipovici tells us; this is not package holidays (golfing in Marbella nothwithstanding): this, we are asked to believe, is the stuff of life and death. The lives of the "Modernists" depend on it, on answering the call to write while knowing that to write is fruitless, on taking up the pen while aware that pens are no use, on going a little further along that dreary road. But the problem is that all of this is rather unconvincing to the unconvinced. Josipovici and his "Modernists" have got themselves into a little loop: beginning with the assumption that art differs from fitted kitchens in having no use (and this is an assumption, for art - that is, the artificial generation of meaning - has often, as in cases as well known as Austen and Dickens, had its uses), then they avail of the general uselessness of art - its remove from the world - to indulge in the very-removed-from-the-world leisure activity of descrying the world for not being enough; but, of course, art - human artifice - will always, to some extent, be of the world, and so the loop goes on, as the leisured artists of our time bemoan the mere humanness of the world with its least human of pursuits and then bemoan the humanness of even this pursuit. But it is not a mere leisure activity, we are told, for their lives depend on it. But in what sense? In no sense that can be made to sound reasonable: the "Modernists" do not write because they would champion the female intellect in a world of men, they do not write because the legal system is so involved and corrupt as to make misery among the people; no, they write because they have to, but the "have to" cannot, by definition, be given further content. But this makes "Modernism" into a belief system and the "Modernists" into alleged prophets, called by the gods to do their work, and looking all over for inhuman, immaculate, conceptions.

Which brings us back to Plato, but with more force than Josipovici is ready for. For, of course, it is not necessarily a bad thing to be a Platonist like this, to hold that the world makes sense only in the context of an Other World in which things are not merely human. But, if you are one - and Josipovici does not write as if he thinks of himself as one - then you must accept: firstly, that you have a ground beneath your feet that is as solid as any that can be imagined - you have a fully worked out belief system at your disposal; and, secondly, that your experiences will be, for the most part, unreasonable, that is, incapable of justification to those who do not share your belief. Now, Josipovici's book does not read like the work of one who is indulging in the expression of what is consciously held as a belief, nor does it read as the work of one who regards "Modernism" as anything other than the effect of the waning of belief - the dissolution of grounds - that is often regarded as the defining feature of the modern age. Josipovici finds himself in a difficulty, therefore, defending a mode of creative practice that relies upon nostalgia for necessary truths and a sufficient distance from the world of human wants and needs to feel that nothing is worth saying when nothing absolute can be said. Meanwhile, the world goes on all around: successful interventions are made, bad books are written, the health service is reformed and a bestseller comes from nowhere, and nobody thinks, for a moment, that any of this is the result of activity too human to have any value.

Where do we start to unpack this misguided account? Jane Austen's novels are not representations; Charles Dickens' novels are not representations: that is the first thing. If one were to say "You're a pig!," although one element in this event is the fact that the word "pig" "represents" a fat, pinkish animal, this is by no means of central importance. Because "You're a pig!" is not primarily representational; it is a performative utterance, it produces an effect, it expresses anger, it intervenes to increase the tension, it is something itself. Similarly, Austen's novels do not primarily represent a particular village in late-eighteenth-century England. They are the effort of one woman to stake a greater claim on intellectual life; they are the intervention of one voice in the changing of women's position in society; they function to criticise the system of class, and so on; they are something themselves. And similarly Dickens' novels, which urge the poor to revolt, shame us all to greater benevolence, make some peldge to live better lives, intervene in the contemporary debate over the possibility of spontaneous combustion, and so on: they are something themselves. Josipovici's idea, then, that such novels are like drugs, tempting us to a half-life of unreality, is preposterous. On the contrary, the novels of Austen and Dickens are compelling, not in the way of drugs but of stories - yes, anecdotes in the past simple tense - that change us, that goad us to action, that inform us of times and their people; they are more likely to prod us awake than they are to lull us to sleep.

A second thing: in casting such novels aside as corrupting in their temptation of humans to humanness, Josipovici curiously reenacts a move that was made at the very inception of the novel. Austen's Northanger Abbey subjects the move to no small degree of irony, when her heroine, Catherine Morland, an increasingly enthusiastic novel reader, is depicted as a naive girl full of nonsense and fancy, and placed by the plot under the supposedly more mature capacities of Henry Tilney, who laughs at novels to begin with but then seriously warns Catherine of their perniciousness when he judges them to have led her so astray as to have suspected his father of gross philandery and the possible murder of his mother. But the criticism of the novel in this novel is highly ironic, and, in the end, implicitly trounced when only Catherine, and as a result of her education by novels, turns out to have been able to read the character of General Tilney, who, if not quite a murderer, is revealed to have treated his wife, when alive, most cruelly, and who pursues Catherine for her wealth and throws her out of his house without provision and in the dark when he discovers her penniless state. For novels can educate, can inform, can enlighten, can cultivate, can inspire one, can change things. Only a society like that of Jane Austen, with one view of what's right and real, and we might say only a position like that of Josipovici that holds there at least to be one right and one real (even if he has learnt to give it no content), can judge of this education as inevitably negative, can feel threatened by the exposure if offers. That Josipovici has, at the moment he likens novels to drugs, to caricature the novel as the thing that would tell us what it's like to be a tiger or a lobster, shows, I think, the desperation of a critic who has no more reasons to give.

Which brings us, at last, to the question of our title: whatever has happened to criticism? Well, what has happened in this case is the result of a curious commitment to the notion that the good critic "makes us see through their eyes." In this notion is lodged the key to what is ultimately the unreasonableness of this piece of criticism, for it suggests that the good critic operates in that most unreasonable of middle grounds between the subjective and the objective, that place where one has allegedly no reasons to hold the views one does hold apart from subjective impressions and yet all the reason in the world - as a result of the privileged status of those impressions - to claim the right to "make us" see what one sees, the right of objective truth. This explains the marked tone of Josipovici's book, which unites the assertiveness of subjective experience with the imperiousness of objective fact. Of the original version of Duchamp's Large Glass, indistinguishable from other versions except that its panels were shattered by accident, Josipovici asserts that, while other versions may be beautiful, only this one "lives." We are given no argument to persuade us of this: it is asserted with all the immediacy of a subjective impression and assumed with all the confidence of a clear cut case of fact. Similarly, Josipovici points to Duchamp's and others' alleged commitment to the imitation of action as superior to the traditional tendency to imitate character, without once proposing any reasons why it should be considered so. And yet, in his closing comments, Josipovici recognises that some may not share his views on "Modernism," on art, or even on the world, and that all he can try to do is to persuade others to see things as he does. But this is precisely what he has not done, has not even tried to do. For, being too much of an unwitting Platonist, he is also too much of an unwitting Kantian in relying upon that mode of aesthetic experience that Kant so cleverly devised, which is both purely subjective and universally true. Of course, Kant, like Plato, thought that the human world was but a poor, merely human, representation of the World-in-itself, because Kant, like Plato, in the end had a God to defend. Josipovici has no such God, but he does keep the space where that God used to be; his task, like that of all good critics on his account, is to fill it. But Gods rarely deign to persuade; and so they make very bad critics.

"I Think, But I'm Not," Said The Headless Chicken

2010-08-26T04:17:00.000-07:00

When Descartes, in his moment of greatest doubt, consoled himself with the insight that, so long as he experiences himself thinking, which he cannot but do, then at least the fact of his existence cannot be doubted - "I think, therefore I am," in its summative form - he went a giant leap too far. Kant, a century and a half or so later, saw his precursor's mistake: we have no right to conclude the existence of that I from the experience of ourselves in thought, because the I that is concluded to exist is not identical with the I that, in any given moment, thinks. The I that Descartes proposed to exist, the I of "I am," is, as Kant called it, a transcendental I, that is, an I that unites our various moments of thinking, of wishing, doing, believing, intending and so on, in a higher, coherent, unified, self. The I of "I think," is, for its part, what Kant would call an empirical I, that is, an I in the world, now, operating for the moment, subject to contingency, consisting only of the particular thought it is having or the act it is doing, with no expectation of continuation attached to it, certainly no cohesiveness with another moment of thought or action guaranteed. Two different Is: therein Descartes' error in assuming that, because one functions at this moment, the other must exist.

Only so far did Kant depart from the insights of his predecessor, however; for, according to Kant, although we cannot, as Descartes thought we could, be certain that our transcendental I, a unified self in which our various moments of thought and action are gathered together, actually exists, we must continue to think and act as if it exists. In other words, for Kant human being in the world can only realise its potential (in fact, can only make sense of itself) insofar as it assumes that its individual actions, its various thoughts, its beliefs, desires, hopes and dreams, are those of a self that transcends them all and wraps them in its grand, unifying arms. Without the assumption of a transcendental self, empirical thought and action is degraded, inhuman.

But the practice of believing, of faith, which allowed Kant to continue to think and act (and continue to expect others to think and act) as if something exists that we cannot know to exist, has since waned (and Kant is, in many ways, part of the drive for "enlightenment" that has been the great cause of this waning), so that, in Britain at least, the ability to imagine a trancendental self, let alone to think and act as if it exists, is largely in abeyance. Coming from a Catholic country in which the transcendental self is written into every nook and cranny of socio-cultural existence - the experience of conscience, and the guilt with which this experience is famously associated, is impossible unless one regards individual instances of one's thinking and acting in the context of a larger whole to which they contribute and which, in many cases, they function to corrupt and degrade; think of it as Dorian Gray's portrait, which operates as the transcendental self to the empirical actions that are unleashed upon an unfortunate world - what strikes one in Britain is, most immediately, people's lack, in the main, of self-doubt, of self-consciousness, of self-awareness, of self-knowledge. Coming from a culture in which thoughts and actions are almost impossible to experience without the attendant judgment of those thoughts and actions as contributors to the self that is ultimately to appear at the gates for judgment (and whether or not one actually holds to the belief system that encourages this, its effect is now endemic), it is extraordinary to see before one's eyes people (that is, what one takes to be transcendental Is) apparently unattached to what they have just said or done, to the extent that something said in anger or error, even at those times when the anger or error is identified and apologised for (this is, after all, a good country for politeness), appears to have no effect on the person who said it. It is as if what was said has no relation to the sayer, as if she is as unresponsible for it as the person to whom it was said, such that the identification of it as, for instance, unfair or hurtful, is somehow an event in which neither of them really participates.

Disconcerting and all as this is in the moment, it is even more confusing taken as a general condition. For what is absent from a society of empirical Is, in which there is no capacity for belief in trancendental Is, is any real ability to reflect on one's behaviour, to alter it, to learn from it. If one changes, it is only as an animal changes, because one has been beaten again and again, or rewarded again and again; empirical Is respond to circumstances - responses to circumstances is, in fact, all they are - but those circumstances cannot be reflected upon but only reacted to. There is, in a society of empirical Is, so little capacity for self-analysis, that the idea of reasoning with someone, of trying to make them know you (never mind making them know themselves) is utterly misplaced; all one can do is to talk about the weather, or some other standard topic, and hope that, today, in this place at this time, one encounters an I that's not too hot to handle.

Kant was right: we cannot be sure that any such thing as a transcendental I actually exists. Philosophers since Kant are right too: the heuristic benefits of assuming that such an I exists are not as certain as Kant thought they were, and we would do well to loosen our expectation that we, or others round us, must think and act - and understand our and their thoughts and actions - as if they must always cohere. But from the loss entirely of the capacity for reflection, for knowing ourselves and others, that practice at belief in a transcendental self or selves affords, emerges a situation of, as Kant would describe it, deep immaturity, a world of almost literally headless chickens.

Natural Childbirth Mistrust

2010-08-23T04:49:00.000-07:00

Queen Victoria, notwithstanding her nine children, was no enthusiast for pregnancy and childbirth, and, at the first possible moment and although that moment only arrived for the birth of her eighth child, availed herself of the benefits of chloroform as a pain relief during labour. This was much to the outrage of various interest groups of the time, and in particular of church leaders who held the view that God would not have made childbirth painful if it were not meant to be so and if the pain were not necessary to the production of healthy infants and devoted mothers. Even Victoria was unconvinced by this argument, and today it will seem to many one very weak indeed. And yet, much of the substance of the mid-nineteenth century church's view is sustained by the notion of "natural" that continues to emerge as the dominant contemporary ideology surrounding labour and birth. Today, a woman often finds herself with feelings of guilt and inadequacy at opting for one of the pain relief methods available to her - most usually, the epidural - because of the tacit assumption that a birth without pain relief is a "natural" birth, and therefore a more successful birth, a healthier birth, a more autonomous birth, an easier birth, a better birth.

Now, given the fact that most women who have the option open to them do continue to avail of pain relief in labour, we might conclude that, much as the church's argument in the nineteenth century that the pain of labour is in some sense necessary failed to produce its effect, the "natural" position has not gained its point. But this would be to move too quickly. For, it is actually crucial to the "natural" position that most women do not opt for a "natural" birth; its effectiveness lies not in its increasing the number of labours and births that take place in pain but rather in the dissemination of a view that there is a way of giving birth "naturally" and that not to do so is to have fallen short of our "natural" potential. Why should this be? Why should it be essential to the "natural" position that most women do not opt for a "natural" birth? Well, much of the rhetoric of the "natural" position focuses on the lack of autonomy available to a woman under epidural (she will have delivered herself into the hands of the medics, will no longer be able to move about as she chooses, and will have all key decisions in the birthing process removed from her jurisdiction) and on her inevitable retreat from the experience of her own body, so that the only person who can really know what is happening is taken out of the equation (the woman can no longer feel when and how to push). These two effects are also said to attach to other, less complete, forms of pain relief; diamorphine, for example, tends to make a woman feel detached from her physical existence, and gives rise to a demotivation that can make her more malleable in the hands of professionals. In short, then, the "natural" position argues that reason and experience are bracketed by pain relief during labour and birth; a woman sacrifices both her freedom to judge and her capacity to feel. Implied in this argument, of course, is that reason and experience, autonomy and feeling, would, if allowed to operate, function during labour and birth; without epidural, a woman would, it is claimed, judge for and feel for herself...

...which is why it is important to the "naturalist" that women do not generally undergo labour and birth without some form of pain relief: for, one of the most startling aspects of labour and birth that is undergone without pain relief is its revelation of the very limited nature of the human capacity to reason and experience. Once in the throes of labour pains, a woman unmedicated will often, and very quickly, have reached the limits of her ability to conduct herself, will often, and very quickly, cast about for some person in whom to place all of her trust and who will subsequently work, more or less well, to be the woman's judgment for her. Herein lies the challenge to the midwife, who must - although he or she is not always able to do this - exercise the woman's supposed autonomy on her behalf. And herein lies the rage for "birth-coaching," which the "natural" position recommends as facilitating a "natural" birth and which conceals the fact that a woman in labour will often outsource her supposed capacity to judge for herself as soon as ever she can; if this fact has been buried in a previously worked out "birth plan," it is less likely to strike us as an abdication of reason. So much for the rational birth. Even more surprising is the extent to which a labour and birth without pain relief, far from revealing the woman as a "natural" child bearer, shows up the extent to which we are alienated from our most basic of phsyical experiences. Without numbing, it is said, the woman can judge for herself when to push, can report to the midwife the nature of her experience, can shift her position so that the baby's passage is easier, and so on and so on. What is never said is that it is very unlikely that a woman who has never experienced the need to expel a baby from her body will recognise the need to do so. The what-it-is-like of needing to push is something with which she is not familiar, is something not "natural" to her, and therefore something that she is not necessarily the best person in the room to be the judge of. In fact, it is most likely to feel to her like the desire to defecate, which, given the strength of the taboo against public defecation, is likely to make the woman not want to push just at those times when she ought to push; seen in this light, the person supposedly experiencing what it is like to give birth is the last person in the room whose experience should be given priority.

What a labour and birth without pain relief reveals, then, is that the autonomy and rational judgment that we often regard as definitive of humanity is but a thin and fragile layer atop a deepseated irrationality that is no longer that of the animal (we have, in many ways, been alienated from our animal capacities) but much more like that of the child, and that our ownership of our bodily experiences is very very tenuous, subject, like our ownership of the more intellectual, less supposedly immediate, aspects of our lives, to habit and convention. What a labour and birth without pain relief reveals, in short, is that there is very little "natural" about us - we are neither naturally thinkers, nor naturally feelers; which is why, together (but this is another story) with its implicit disciplining of women by feelings of guilt and inadequacy, it is essential to the "natural" childbirth camp that relatively few women live up to its expectations.

Please Sir, We Want Some More!

2010-08-18T05:22:00.000-07:00

There are few more moving moments in the history of the novel than that in which little Oliver - unlucky enough in life to have found himself at the mercy of state provision in the workhouse, and unlucky enough in that to have drawn a straw so short as to have been elected by his fellows to be the one to do the asking - presents his empty bowl, raises his hungry eyes, and says "Please sir, I want some more." Food and shelter are said to be our birthright; to have one so young left so short of both is pathetic indeed. But there is something more pathetic, and it is not to be found in the workhouse, and it does not even know its own name.

The National Student Survey results released this week show that third level students in Britain are, on average, 82% satisfied with their educational experience. In a country where education - that very next phase of our birthright, after food and shelter are assured - is at this stage more or less unavailable, this level of satisfaction represents a degree of want that not even Oliver could imagine. For it is one thing to know what you lack, to have a very clear sense of the object of your longings and to be able to hold out your bowl to receive it; however hopeless your holding out, however unquieted your longings, however unanswered your knowledge, there is a satisfaction and a dignity in naming your want. It is quite another thing, and another thing much more degrading, to have no idea at all what you lack, to have a general sense of want but no particular notion of anything wanting, to have a free floating sadness with no object to which to attach it, to have a bowl that needs filling, a hunger that gnaws, a vague sense that not all is right, but no means to pull it all together, nothing to make you stand up and ask, in fact nothing to prevent you from declining the ladle when at last it comes round with more gruel, while all the while feeling that something falls short and that life is not all that was promised.

It is worse than that, in fact. In many cases, the survey shows that students' dissatisfaction is felt at the poverty of what are called "learning resources" (Blackboard is a popular one) and the failure of lecturers to highlight what are called "key concepts" (all the better for Wikipedia-ing, one supposes); but, to the extent that education - that is, the training in abstract thinking, in reasoning, in argument, the communication and critique of ideas, that defined education for most of human history - is not only not facilitated, but is actually diminished, by the demand that understanding be summarised in a drop-down list and posted for students to see on their own terms, students' current use of the National Student Survey is tantamount to Oliver actually emptying the contents of his bowl on the ground as irrelevant to his general malaise and a distraction from his efforts to set things to right.

Students these days are on unprecedented amounts of prescribed and unprescribed drugs, are in astonishing depths of therapy, show unimaginable levels of ennui, and continually describe themselves and their friends as suffering under a mental illness of some kind; meanwhile they declare themselves very satisfied with their educational experience. All of a sudden, Oliver and his bowl seem a story of hope in a time of plenty; for nothing is worse than the one starved with hunger who does not even know where his stomach is, never mind what a bowl and a ladle might have to do with it.

The Big Self

2010-08-12T04:22:00.000-07:00

We hear much nowadays about "The Big Society," a - perhaps conveniently timed with the requirement for cuts to public services, but not necessarily pernicious on that account - reconception of social responsibility, as increasingly devolved upon communities and smaller groups within them rather than the property of The Big State. Society, on this vision, is far less an achievement of central administration, and far more the concrete, experimental, piecemeal, and much more meaningful and effective, process of people in cohort engaged in their own lives and those of others around them. Aside altogether from matters of political ideology, which have too preemtively tarnished this new vision with the old wire brush of Thatcherism, there is a very pressing question of whether The Big Society is possible in the country of The Big Self.

No doubt, the Enlightenment expectation of the coherent self, constituted by the by definition reconcileability of its various, and changing, components, has long been subject to suspicion; Freud's notion of the unconscious, for instance - a deeply divided and divisive force in the human psyche - is so accepted an account of the self as to have entered the set of tacit assumptions that go to make up our very basic understandings of ourselves and others. And yet, it is not wrong to say that some sense of a unitary self, however shifting and difficult to maintain, often continues to regulate our lives: it lies at the root of efforts to overcome various of our impulses because of the difficulty of making them coexist with characteristics of ourselves that we would like to flourish; it explains our sustained attempts to reconcile others' views of us with the views we would have them hold; and it of course solves the conundrum of why a society so fed up on Freud would continue to try to make one of what are almost, on his account, of necessity in tension. Doomed and all as these efforts may be, prejudiced and all as they undoubtedly are by the traditional expectation that Reason conquers all, they do have some positive effects, not least of which is the manner in which the striving after some kind of coherence for ourselves makes us, to some extent, independent of the whips and scorns of time, of place, and of other people: one is not, though it takes effort, merely three - or ten times three - sheets in the wind, but a force of at least partial resistance to changes, to misunderstandings, to attempted cooptions, to prejudices, to people; one has something - some one thing - to present to people, to have them try to understand, to tread upon their presumptions, and, yes, to stimulate their own conceptions of themselves and others.

True, all of this means that human association is less a "There's room for everyone in the pot" scenario that postmodern fluffiness would have us believe is a desirable condition, but one can look at the situation also from another angle. Not striving for this sense of self, not working at a version of oneself with which to meet the world and those in it, can give rise to a kind of lazy subcontracting of oneself out to various interests, commitments, values, occupations, and groups; with no effort made to gather together these subcontractions, to prioritise some over others, to negotiate a deal between them so that no one of them becomes definitive of, or even necessary to the continuation of, one's sense of self, one is, in a sense, everywhere and nowhere. Being nowhere, one becomes rather odd in association with others, with little to present, with nothing to defend, generating a feeling in one's potential, but unrealised, interlocutors, of a strange dislocation, of a virtual encounter, of a shady deal, in short of anything but a fair exchange; but, being everywhere, one is then also always at stake, so that the views of others on a disparate and unpredictable range of even apparently neutral topics can, without warning, tread upon something so essential to a local shard of self - which, without some centralised administration, is free to run amok and feel itself to be of central significance - that one is constantly being trodden on by innocent interlocutors who did not even know there was anyone nearby. Postmodern fluffiness - and the cotton wool "isn't everything lovely" that is its everyday representative - is therefore trumped by the existential anguish of encounters with no one and the unmanageable outrage of unpredictable annihilations.

Many avoid the novels of Dickens on account of their being peopled largely with characteristics, interests, foibles, eccentricities, virtues, vices, and tastes, rather than with actual characters; those who like their novels realistic are turned away. And yet, British society is riven so through and through by strata and their categories - class, sex, race, being the three big ones of course - that trump what might have seemed the untrumpable human self, that novels filled with identifications rather than identities have a strange, and inverse, realism about them after all. But not even Dickens could imagine the full horror. Martin Chuzzlewit, early on, reports on a sudden and fraught meeting of the extended Chuzzlewit clan, who anticipate the death of their relative and expect some benefit therefrom. Around the table sit the usual splendid array of identifications, in precisely the kind of discord that can result when one's self is all in one, very local place. But among the crowd is also one whose visage is so uncertainly drawn as to give one, Dickens says, the impression that his maker sketched his outline but forgot to fill him in; he is a strange presence, necessarily (it seems) linked with another more fulsome and contributing nothing in particular to the discussion but a moment, and a chair, full of a strange kind of absense. What Dickens did not predict, however, is the grotesque coincidence of strong identifications with the outline of a self that comprises many of this country's wandering souls; what he could not have seen is the strange, and horribly unsettling, experience of meeting one who seems not to be there and then all of a sudden, and inevitably unwittingly, seeming to have killed them with one blow. The outlined man is also, today, the outlying man; you will meet him everywhere and nowhere, and though you will never see him before you, you are bound to wound him to one of his cores.

Come Back Ozymandias, All Is Forgiven

2010-08-09T05:35:00.000-07:00

What is one to learn from Shelley's "Ozymandias" but of the futility of attempts to transcend the finitude of human existence: Ozymandias, king of kings, would have his stone carved legs made massive and planted wide apart in the centre of his kingdom; but his land is now desert and his legs two trunkless stumps whose faded stridency is mocked by the cold sneer of his wrinkled mouth, which will erode no faster than the legs from which it has fallen. It is, to our modern ears, a by now familiar lesson. We are not made for lasting; we are human, all too human.

But what, then, of the contemporary mania for recording ourselves, for producing image after image in a manner that increasingly takes the place of experience? Are we Ozymandias, over again, destined to have our soft-toned smiles made a mockery of by the inevitable brevity of our lives? Curiously, no, and that is our tragedy. Ozymandias was of an age in which the contingency of human existence was regarded as the merely human reflection of inhuman, of infinite, truths; human demise was, then, to be overcome by a reaching toward the inhuman, finitude by a striving for the infinite. A hopeless pursuit, we might now think, with our modern wisdom that knows there's nothing but humans and lies; and yet the yearning for something transcendent, the grasping at something beyond, did at least tend to elevate, to educate, to enlighten, to broaden the horizon of our minds. What is characteristic of the modern Ozymandias - the child, aged but eight, whose image is posted worldwide and weekly, and who knows more of how to perform her childhood than she does of anything childish - is that her image is not any striving but rather a rooting in the basest of human possibilities: our drive to capture ourselves, instead of being an effort to overcome death with Truth and Beauty, with Right and Good, is a defiant bedding down in the moment, as if we are not only incapable of reaching beyond ourselves to something greater but are entirely described by cliched smiles, on Hallmark occasions spent in standardised relation. This is all we are, our images say of ourselves: as wrongheaded a view as that of Ozymandias, but worse, so much worse, in its reduction of human existence to a stock of pre-packaged experiences and consequent removal of the possibility of our being taken out of ourselves to something different, and, yes, maybe better.

Two massive legs in the desert tell of a man who got far too above himself; but better that than a constant picturing of ourselves out of the experiences that might, just might, make us learn something new. We may well be human; but must we be all too human?

Life Unconversational

2010-08-06T11:14:00.000-07:00

There exists, in Britain, such a fear of conversation that what one says is allowed to produce an effect in inverse proportion to the effectiveness of the saying.

The Curious Tale of Our Loss of Taste

2010-07-06T06:35:00.000-07:00

The Curious Tale: Once established as leading dressmaker of his day, Charles Worth abandoned the conventional attire of the gentleman - at that time, nothing but sombre black suits and tall black hats - for clothes still readily identifiable as those of the artist; he began, in short, to dress like Rembrandt, all beret and bow and flowing velvet lines. In so doing, Worth was both true to, and treacherous of, his vocation as couturier. On the one hand, he was setting himself up as no longer simply a craftsman, albeit of superior technique, but as an artist in his own right, whose work no mere technical skill could account for or reproduce; and he was doing this in the manner he knew best, through a dramatic transformation of his mode of attire. On the other hand, Worth was himself leaving behind the endless play of convention and invention that had come, largely in his hands, to define couture, by adopting a type of dress to transcend the vagaries of fashion and partake of the timelessness that, at that time, was coming to define the existence of art; in this, he coincided with the "aesthetic dress" movement then alive in England, which recommended attire expressive of ageless values to operate as a corrective to the perceived triviality of contemporary dress. (The fact that "aesthetic" dress was characterised by the long flowing lines reminiscent of the clothing of ancient Greece shows that values defended as timeless and true were adopted from the time and place usually resorted to by Western efforts to transcend the changes of humans in history.) Worth, the man of fashion, began to dress in contempt of his trade...

Our Loss of Taste: ...and to function thereby as both orchestrator and sign of an aporia that comes to define his time: between artist and common man; between timeless values and fleeting enthusiasms: between the truly classic cut and arbitrary, transient fashions; and between the faculty of taste and the acquiescence of all those increasingly content to sacrifice theirs in imitation of, or obedience to, an allegedly higher standard. Of his Empress, Eugenie, Worth said in interview: "Not that she is indifferent in the matter of dress. Quite the contrary...The point is that she trusts our judgment rather than her own." If even the Empress relinquished her right to judge what and how she would wear, what hope then for all of her subjects? No, taste was being given up as an achievement of everyday life, and placed in the hands of professionals, the artists whose judgment was more true than yours or mine, by virtue of being more free of the prejudices and purposes, the petty concerns and the small economies, of even an imperial existence. And yet what is it exactly to have taste, if it is not to take from the options before one what appears to be the most fitting, if it is not to reconcile conditions that prevail with hopes for a different future, if it is not to work with the means one has round one and try to produce something better, if it is not, in short, to have everyday thoughts, and everyday means, and everyday things? The freedom so valued in the newfound professional man of taste in fact would remove the conditions for taste; and when the final constraint imposed on Worth's artistry, by what was at least the form of subjection to royal command, was, in 1870, to disappear with the Second Empire, the one in whom good taste had been entrusted had nothing more left him to require it: both the triviality of the high street and the timelessness of high art had come clean away from all mooring, and taste would soon have had its day.

Dress to Excess

2010-06-10T07:57:00.000-07:00

Once the house of Worth et Bobergh was established in 1858 and gained the patronage of court essential to the prosperity of any fashion house of the time, it was guaranteed a constant supply of business from the contemporary rage for fancy dress. The challenge presented by this enthusiasm was comprised by the simultaneous necessities of varying one's costume with commitment and aplomb and of yet not offending moral sensibilities by appearing in garments of a colour or cut now considered inappropriate - the full skirts of the middle of the century would look askance at the Grecian outlines of its very beginning, for instance. But Worth flourished under these conditions, for the knowledge of historical styles of dress gleaned from his early and sustained interest in the history of art provided him with an almost endless stream of ideas for costumes that would enliven but not affront the eye.

But mid-nineteenth century France was in a rage for fancy dress in another sense: the dresses worn by women, not only to evening occasions but for everyday purposes too, were, by modern standards, just very fancy, excessively ornamented and elaborate. And here too, Worth found his opportunity, for he introduced to French high society an appreciation for the reserved, the modest, the simple that won him a reputation and clientele in proportion to the real novelty of his sartorial values. Worth executed the essential lines with true expertise and the resulting elegance of his creations began to quickly expose the fussy inferiority of previous modes. Simplicity trumped excess, and Worth was the man to do it.

But there is more than one side to excess, as there was more than one sense of fancy dress. Worth's designs may indeed have been simple but the manner in, and pace at, which he made them to change, replacing the fitful and mostly purposive movements hitherto native to dress with an increasingly rapid and regular motion that cut its ties with larger scale socio-economic conditions in order to chase the new for the sake of the new, was excessive to its very very core. Rummaging through the wardrobes of history for ideas for colour and cut, with neither rhyme nor reason to answer to and only ever decreasing social constraints to limit his options, Worth's house of fashion grew more and more like the National Gallery of his youth: filled to the brim with periods and styles, juxtaposed without judgment; history, flattened out and hung on the wall for all to see.

De Marly, Worth's biographer, describes his maison as "not a dress shop but a palace of costume," which tempts one to observe that Worth, for all his tasteful rejection of the age's rage for fancy dresses, remained strangely in thrall to the age's rage for fancy dress, with all its indifference, its randomness, its impropriety, its triviality; by Worth, history was reduced to a mere dressing-up box and life - at least insofar as life gets dressed - to no more than a costume party.

Not Fit to Wear

2010-06-07T06:32:00.000-07:00

Worth, the first couturier, emerged from the obscure side of the counter at Gagelin of Paris on the strength of his quite startling talent at crafting gowns that fit; the few simple dresses, made by him and worn by his wife, Marie, in order that she might best display whatever hat or shawl a customer wished to see modelled, became themselves the objects of customers' desires, for they fit so well and moved so fine that neither hat nor shawl could outshine their superior cut. And then Worth was suffered to sew, and to refine so the making of dresses that nothing less than a perfect fit was soon considered tolerable by those who could afford the luxury of discernment.

These days, fashion houses no longer demand profitability from couture, which is rather regarded as a symbol of status, speaking in all its excess of the profit that mounts up elsewhere, and successful in this in almost direct proportion to the extent to which the dresses it makes eschew the demands of mere function. This produces the surely very curious category of "Ready to Wear": curious because it contrasts, not with designs that wait to be tailored to personal fit but with garments not fit to be worn.

What began as the work of refining a craft so that dresses would fit wearers well, is now all defined by a grand scale contempt of such mundane requirements as dressing in clothes that are cut for the purpose.

Worth

2010-05-26T07:31:00.000-07:00

In the 1830s, when dressmaking was still for women only, Charles Frederick Worth used to scurry from his workplace at Lewis & Allenby on Regent Street, complete whatever errand he had been sent on, and spend the time saved by speed and a skipped lunch in a guilty lingering around the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square. Such a variety of pictures, in so many colours and such different styles, treating of such diverse subjects, the provincial young Worth had never conceived. And it gave him an idea: that the lugubrious pace at which fashion then rang its changes might be set to a headlong rush of enthusiasm for the rejuvenation of past styles, and replicate the indiscriminacy of the National Gallery's archiving in an only barely chronological juxtaposition of colour and cut that would purchase its freedom from the heavy skirts of social more and utility with the transformation of fashion from a craft to an art. Thus the first haute couturier set in train a process that culminates in the simultaneous removal of high fashion from the demand that it be worn, and relegation of what's worn to the tat of the high street, so that the proximity of Trafalgar Square to Regent Street becomes, rather surprisingly, a matter for regret.

life

2010-05-05T07:25:00.000-07:00

Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich shows how it is that death is killed by life. Between talk of who is to succeed him at work, and worry over the fate of his children at home, between plans for his wake and the card game that might be had after, between talk of his illness and news of his end, the death of Ivan Ilyich falls into a strange non-existence, even for Ivan himself, who struggles, towards the end, not with the inevitability of his death but with its impossibility: Ivan Ilyich cannot die, for death is that which is ever displaced by the force of its representations.

It is a grand story, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, with its "It" and its final struggle and its great moment of revelation. But a related effect is wrought more modestly by Dickinson's having heard a Fly buzz - when I died. For Dickinson, death is displaced, not agonisingly as Tolstoy would have it, not in such a way that death retains Its full force, to circle Its representations about It so tightly and still have Its subject in anguish, but amusingly, anonymously, diminutively, by a Fly, whose uncertain stumbling Buzz - interposed between the light and me - functions at once as high comic precis of the nothings that weave round the dying Ivan and as dead-pan deflation of the event to which Tolstoy would still give the full centre stage; for this Fly is uncertain and stumbling, dying too it would seem, so that Death is displaced by small deaths, and our speaker is not simply blocked from seeing but unable to see to see. Dickinson's modest episode reveals what Tolstoy's grand spectacle would continue to hide: that the events which we tend to efface in our headlong pursuit of life's purposes, are not royal affairs - when the King be witnessed in the room - but tiny, uncertain, stumbling, and like many many others before and after. Ivan Ilyich cannot die, not because humanity is unable to confront the great Truth of its Death but because it will not accept the hum drum of its deaths. That is the It we displace with our endless representations of it: we are born, we labour, and we die, and the ways that we do so are homely and unoriginal.

But if, to this extent, Tolstoy was overambitious, he also went not far enough. He follows the trend of Western philosophical thought in staking all claims on the fact of our death, but forgets in so doing that fact of our life, and all of the ways - more troubling, perhaps, than our wont for neglecting demise - in which we signify ourselves out of it. Dickinson is our instructor here, for these ways are most often forged from as grand a conception of Life as Tolstoy's conception of Death: Life, as punctuated by great moments of celebration, by birthdays, anniversaries, mothers' days and holidays; Life, as captured by some lens or other so that it is no longer mortal; Life, as reported so that it's gone Public, on networking sites that are always switched on; Life, as acknowledged by cards of appropriate theme, carefully sought out and written in and sent off in a task that acquires greater substance than the event to which it would give expression.

To this frenzied party for Life, there is somebody left uninvited and increasingly likely to decamp elsewhere so empty has grown his social calendar. Dressed in clothes too ordinary, blessed with features too undistinguished, with manners more heartfelt than fashionable and tastes too concrete for company, with spirits too temperate and temper too even, life is left out in the cold, and Life, jaunty Life, so sure to arrive in fine style, to say the right thing and to leave just on time, is invited to dine in his stead.

A Place to Come Out Strong

2010-03-23T06:10:00.000-07:00

Dickens' Mark Tapley's is a conundrum with which anyone might sympathise: he's looking for a spot to be jolly in; a place where he can come out strong. It's what drives him far off from the fulsome, warm fires and welcoming breasts of his landlady-lover, and out from the cellars and jovial toasts of the pub he revived with his presence. It's what leads him to cast in his lot with a one who has learned to think little for others, and be Martin Chuzzlewit's "& Co." in a project ill-planned to bring fame and small fortunes. It's what makes him so strangely alive in the coffin in which they traverse the Atlantic, and brings him so brightly to bear on the back-stabbing Boston that meets their arrival. But all the time, still, Mark desires to move on, to a place where a man can be jolly, to a spot he can come out and strong! To Eden he must therefore go, for only such promise of heavenly earth will answer to Mark's life's ambition.

And to Eden they finally make it, having bought "some of the finest land in the country" from "one of the most remarkable men in the country," to start life in "the finest darned country of all." Throttled with dankness and dark, sodden with damp and disease, circled by wild beasts and wilder-still men, fit for no growth but the strangling kind, dotted with hovels that sink as they're built, and peopled with shadows that wait for their death: Eden is Mark's looked-for home, and almost - not quite, but really almost - a place where there's credit in coming out strong and reason to feel oneself jolly. Through sickness, depression and hopeless despair, he steps forth with a grimly bright eye; through early death, crop failure, rot and ruination, he sings us a steely bright tune: Mark Tapley is coming out jolly and strong, at last in a place that allows it.

In the end, our two travellers, Martin and Mark, turn their gaunt eyes and thin cheeks towards home, though our hero (that's Mark) feels some twinge of regret that his jolly ol' junket is over. But, wait! Mark, some hundred years and then a half, and it will only just now be beginning. For as the hallmark of Eden is its pure disregard for the gap 'tween what's sold and what's bought, and the stamp of America its endless immersion in reports of great men and their visions and values; if what's said in The Standard is what really counts, and what's down on the contract is what really is, and what's hoped for by settlers is what's really there, and what's canvassed by public men what's really on: then Britain will let you be jolly, and its Great be no less a true herald of promise than was Eden a picture of heaven. As Mark passes back through the town they were duped in to purchase their wet, rotten plot, he's struck no more forcibly by the sad contrast between its adverts for heaven and the dull death they've just left behind than he would be, right now, by the manner in which representations of wealth and health, of learning and friendship, which are what we here learn to pursue, are so starkly accompanied by their foils: poverty of outlook; medicalisation; functional illiteracy; and networks.

This is a spot to be jolly indeed; a place made for coming out strong.

Put Thought to Work

2010-03-16T06:44:00.000-07:00

The separation of labour from thought is one of the tragedies of the modern age, famously identified by Marx as effecting the mode of alienation peculiar to industrialised capitalism, whereby the worker is so far expected to leave her thoughts at home that processes of production abound actually premised upon the inhuman capacity to not think. Today, as Britain faces the prospect of unprecedented cuts in the public sector, there curiously arises the opportunity of restoring labour to thought.

But only if we cease our presumption that thought - Thought Itself, as we learn now to think it - is its own kind of labour. This is the nonsense of contemporary academia, where "staff" - to the extent that this word implies work done, it is often the wrong word - begrudge every hour that takes them from their "work," by which they mean to resent every task that disturbs their research. Teaching is an inconvenience, for students cannot understand - let alone contribute to - the thoughts of thinking men. (Hardly surprising, when those thoughts are Thought Itself, and share the distaste of their originators for all things concrete and worked.) As for administrative duties - and they do proliferate obscenely under contemporary forms of institutional control - these are judged so to humanise the inhuman thinkers of our universities that the very memory of them, the very prospect of them, disturbs thought in its tower and weighs it right down with two feet made of clay.

From Marx, we have learnt that work without thought is the way to make machines out of men; and yet, in those very university departments where such insights are said to be cherished, thought without work would make monsters of men. Trollope worked in the Post Office for most of his life, writing when time would permit him; no task in his many enterprises was beneath the attention of Dickens, who endured unanaesthetised rectal surgery in the middle of his working week; and Emily Bronte kept her household in bread, of a quality for which (oh! the shame - how can Thought Itself bear it?) she was locally famed.

For thought, if it's worth it, will out, and be all the more substantial for being the fruits of some labour!

We, Poor Victorians

2010-02-16T07:09:00.000-08:00

Smut: the characteristic humour of the British. Whereby grown men and women (but mostly grown men; women are not expected to be humorous here, nor to harvest a great deal of pleasure) relentlessly expose random words and their phrases to the most tangential of sexual association, and derail what might otherwise have emerged as conversation. One had best have one's say here as fast as one can, for the time one will get is curtailed: by the fact that most no word will not speak of sex and the fact that most no one forgets it. All the better, indeed, to throw off for all time the last vestige of awkward commitment; it will not get heard and will fit, in the effort, like a grand old square peg in the round holes (ahem) through which social intercourse (dear me) here must so labour (now, really).

"We, Other Victorians," Foucault names us, in describing that ambiguous transformation from the nineteenth century's apparent repression of flesh and its sex, infamously represented by their enthusiasm for drapes of all shapes and sizes, all the better to camouflage those wood legs and brass feet whose inanimate natures were still insufficient guarantee against the natural drive of the body. They dared not to speak out its name, of course, but did so in every piece of their dress, every sweep of their limbs, every trope of their speech; the walls of their hospitals, houses and schools no longer had ears but loud mouths shouting out, in the careful divisions of women from men and of girls from small boys and of sickness from health and of mind from the flesh, that sex is our innermost truth, our deepest dark secret, that which we must take great care to suppress and then take great cares to look into.

But what cunning and skill there grow up around this curious pincer-like move, which at the same time says that sex is our secret and endlessly that it's our truth. For guilt is its primary product, and guilt makes not one kind of pleasure but all of the ways in which pleasure is felt. And it's oh! such a genius inventor: wily and sly in the placing of byways around the main business of sex, we are told, but really the business of sex lies no place than the byways that guilt builds around it. The richness of fabric and deep swathes of colour and curved, fulsome folds which Victorians swirled around even their solid oak limbs are not richer, nor deeper, nor rounder and full than the sacred rites by which we learned not to show and the ceremony that, at great volume and length, spoke so softly and short of our secret. The East has its nuggets of erotic art; we stored our riches in guilt.

But smut knows not how best to wear this bequest and runs naked without its rich robes; it blusters about on the empty town square when the pleasures are had on the sidestreets; it has at the most but a scanty loin cloth, which it pulls back again and again in one gesture whose sameness is poor, so poor, of the art, the deft touch, with which pleasure arranges the folds of its heavy and much-patterned guilts. Now, here, that damned puritan impulse, the loathing for form and for image, the fervour for literal truth, means that even our guilt looks us straight in the eye.

If pleasure is the endless saying what is not said but said, then so, exactly, be it: here, pleasure is endlessly saying what is not said but said; take a word - any word - and enjoy saying it said what it didn't.

Thus, rich folds of flesh are stripped down to a figleaf by we, oh so poor, Victorians.

A Friend

2010-02-12T02:13:00.001-08:00

"She's my friend, Rose, she's my friend": thus Gilbert Markham to his concerned sister, in explanation of his visits to Mrs. Graham, an apparently widowed woman, recently moved to the village, and around whom there has crept an air of scandal attributable by her neighbours to nothing more concrete than an enthusiasm for living alone and a marked protectiveness over her only son. Gilbert's protestation rings false in the ear of the uninitiated: here is a man who has lived on, and worked, a farm in the village for all of his life, whose father did all this before him, who appears even to be destined for marriage with the rector's daughter, and whose relatively open, somewhat careless, nature cannot have prevented these circumstances from having generated a wide circle of true, of lifelong, friends, to supplement the support of the mother, brother and sister with whom he appears to live on good terms. Are we to believe that such a one can, over the course of the very few meetings that have taken place between Mrs. Graham and himself, have formed a friendship, of any significance in comparison with those he already enjoys and of sufficient substance to merit the setting of village convention at nought? The reader of Anne Bronte's Tenant no doubt shrugs her shoulders in disbelief, divines that our Gilbert has fallen in love, and anticipates his progress to greater self-knowledge.

But this would be going too quick and roughshod over the frequent and curious mentionings of a friend in the novels of Victorian Britain. Lizzie Hexam clings to her Jenny in defiance of brotherly advice, and protests, in justification, that Jenny is her friend; and Betty Higden in the same novel wards off the attentions of the townsfolk she meets on her travels with assurances that she does have some friends, whose names she carries on a piece of paper in her dress. Jane Eyre, for her part, denies having a friend in the world; and hers is a condition almost definitive of the nineteenth-century protagonist, for whom a friend in the world is something to be fought for and won, irrespective, mind you, of her having a family living: whether one's family provides one with friends or does not is entirely a matter of circumstance; if it does not, then it seems to have little of comfort to offer on its own accord.

One has no grasp of this state of affairs until one lives for a time in Great Britain, and sees for oneself that a friend there is rare - for reasons perhaps of the Protestant ethic that sets one alone before God; for reasons, perhaps, of those "liberal" codes that seem to allow little merit to that which does not produce "value"; for reasons, maybe this most of all, of that terrible system of class, which strips all encounters of all but those small, mindless details, lest one reveal (oh! so gauchely) one's level, or inquire (oh! so offensively) too close into that of the other; for reasons, the effect of such stripped down sociability, of the trend to crawl early and irrevocably into a mania for this or that thing (this music, this lifestyle, this dress code, this accent), in which nutshell such souls as are possible here are kept in a kind of half-life, but which shuts out all casual common rapport, gives hellos! on the street existential effect, and dissolves all those ties that might be assumed between those by and with whom one grew up.

In a place such as this, a friend is uncommon indeed, and worth courting censure to find and to keep.

Madwoman in the Attic

2009-12-08T04:23:00.000-08:00

Who was Grace Poole? There’ll be no one in future will ask that question, to be sure.

Who was Grace Poole?

Or, happen they will ask. I mean, they’d have to, for if the name came before them, how would they ever guess the character it names? If the name came before them, that is.

Let me say, then, that, if, by some chance (and maybe that chance’s not such a small one, given the occupants of this great house), my life was to be in some way attached like to the life of one famous – or infamous more likely – the question ‘Who was Grace Poole?’ might come up when my name come up in that regard. Of my own, though, I’ll not make any big splashes and the world will not have cause to ask.

And if it did? What would be the reply, after all? Grace Poole. The old seamstress at Thornfield. Queer sort, all in all. Keeps to herself up in that attic of hers. Talks to herself, they say. Communes with the dead, as may be. Drinks a bit. Rough looking. Wouldn’t cross her, really, though I can’t say as I’ve heard any harm of her myself, mind.

Not what you might call a pretty portrait, is it? Right enough, though, as far as it goes. And maybe I’ll add a bit to it, as far as it doesn’t. Maybe. For I’m not sure, as yet like, what sort of thing this’ll turn out to be. This writing. Up here. In my attic.

Mine and Bertha’s attic, I mean.

Now, what about this?
Who was Bertha Mason?
There’ll not be many to bother themselves over that inquiry either, I’d say. And if they did, there’d be but two answers to it. ‘I couldn’t rightly say’ from those have never heard her spoken of nor seen her in the flesh. ‘Madwoman, disgusting sight to see, piece of the devil’ from those few has had dealings with her these past few years and those yet to come.

Mad. Disgusting. Lunatic. Foul. This is Bertha Mason, as I’m told. That’s why I’m here. To look after the madwoman, to care for her if I can, to keep her quiet and secret as if my life depended on it. Well, my livelihood does, and that’s life to me.

So, I do it.
I keep her secret.

But I know better.

I know the secret that I keep. And it is not the one they think I keep.

Bertha Mason is not mad.

Not mad now, nor ever was mad as far as I can tell, and I’ve seen enough madness of the sane sort in my time to feel fair sure I’d know the real thing if I was locked up with it most hours of most days.

Bertha Mason’s not mad.
I’d risk my livelihood on that.

To look at her now – sitting on the floor against the wall and near the fire as she’s wont to do, quietly mind – it seems to my mind most incredible that this woman – I’ve said woman, for she’s all but thirty years old, though even my hand stumbles at the word in her regard, for she is a child to me – that this woman is kept here, incarcerated, up an uneven staircase at the top of this dark old pile and in this room by the turrets where the only escape is by flight. Out of harm’s way. To look at her now, most anyone might laugh at the idea that such a one had to be locked up and in out of harm’s way. Large sized, a full head above my own (though I’m not an undergrown sort myself), with dark, thick, curling hair as was plaited and wrapped like a queen first day she set foot in here, but now hangs over her shoulders and down almost to her waist in tangled rags, for she cries so when I’ve tried to brush it out that my heart won’t bear my going on, and for what should I do it anyhow? There’s no one to look but me, and I’m not one for braided hair and corset waists and that’s sure. So we’ve let it be and, though ‘tis knotted now and no mistake, there’s a kind of nesty volume to it, a static kind of energy that is most comforting to look at and to touch too, without fear of undoing any intricate styling or ought of that nature. That’s what Bertha’s doing right at this minute, with one hand anyhow. Playing with the mass of her hair that’s fallen over her right shoulder and resting on her swollen belly. For Bertha’s fat now. Not from overeating, mind. I’m hard put to feed her at times, and no doubt. No, Bertha’s fat is more like the fat of a baby than the lard that settles unevenly on a grown woman. Her hands have dimples for knuckles and her face is round and full, her belly’s soft and her thighs too and the whole picture is one of a pleasant, comfortable smoothness that neither the slenderness nor the plumpness of young ladies and their matrons can match, whatever might be said of their beauty. That’s my way of thinking, anyhow. Bertha’s been here in this room for nigh on nine years now and has found again, in her confinement, the attitudes and appearance of an infant in its cot. For hours, I’ve seen her sitting on the floor, like now, placed firmly on her tail, back straight and head erect without any effort at all, legs spread out along the floor for balance, and intent on some object of interest, a spider spinning its web perhaps or a picture book, of birds and their habits, which time and again has absorbed her for hours on end. Whether she reads much or no, I’ve not taken many pains to discover – it’s of little use to her here at any rate. But the pictures of plumage and flight seem to hold some fascination for her that no actual flight seems to hold, though I’ve directed her eyes out of the small window in the other room once or twice, to see whether the originals of her pictures might produce the same effect.

With her other hand, Bertha matches the playing of the hand that winds round the tangle of her hair that rests across her belly, but down further, with hair that’s coarser still, more wiry, more curly, blacker than the hair on her head and near flesh that’s softer than the flesh on her belly. The ends of her shift (we no longer do with petticoats and dresses, for who’s to hear their rustle from this distance and they’re a hazard with the fire always so near) have rode up along her calves to the softness that marks the beginnings of her thighs, for she wriggles on the floor at times, with restlessness or bad humour, and spreads her legs to support her large body. At first, some time ago now, when she began to sit on the floor and not her chair, and ceased to wear her stockings and her shoes and learned again the natural way to sit that young children’r taught to forget, I found myself uncomfortable at the sight. First, her bare shins with the dark hair growing thin and downward to her ankle, then her knees with their childish indents growing deeper by the day, then the heaviness of her thighs, then the place half way up along where their fatness joins together, then at last that place we’re not s’posed to know exists though it calls us to attention regular enough. At first I was uncomfortable, I say. But I’ve grown accustomed to sights more unnatural than a woman’s private parts in my time and, as I say, Bertha’s so much more child now than grown woman, it seemed ‘twas I committing the wrong in feeling uneasy at her display. But then, you know, there is that full tuft of black hair as no child is born with, as only woman can show, which gives a difference to her playing, as she is now, twining her fingers round the wires, burying them in their thicket and its flesh. Always quietens her, this, soothes her like, and I’ve not stopped it. I’ve never stopped it. After all, there’s young children play like that too – how often have I heard my own mother reproach one of her charges with the offence. So I’ve not intervened, not reproached, and I dare say we’d be a picture now, right enough. An ill looking scribe, not in the first flush of her youth you might say, sat at her table with her pint pot and her pen, making a word picture of her own charge as sits with her back flat against the wall, legs straight out and apart, folds of flesh stretching the linen that’s bundled up about the base of her belly, two hands busy in her coarse thatches of hair with fingers going lithely and with regular motion about their work, and a smile of placid forgetfulness and a flush spread across her full face.

*

Remember directions, she says. ‘Too much noise, Grace. Remember directions.’ I’m not likely to forget ‘em, now am I, in this Godforsaken room here, with nought to take my mind off ‘em from morn til night. Remember directions. I was told ‘em often enough, no doubt about that. Was there a week went by, the first year or so, I didn’t get a run down of my duties, in his voice or hers. Keep her quiet, was all they came down to. Keep her very quiet. Whatever you think is needed in the way of her care and comfort, you can have of course. But keep her very quiet. She’s no more than an animal, at times, in her instincts and actions, and we have it on best medical advice that total retirement and quiet is the best course of treatment. Best for who, is what I’d have liked to ask. But I kept my mouth shut on it, as I always do, and kept her quiet, as I still do, though there’s little enough keeping in it. The whole first six months she was here, I don’t believe I heard her make a single sound except in her sleep, and then only a kind of crooning noise as would’ve escaped my ears if I hadn't been awake and listening for it. She’s come out of herself bit by bit since then, but I’ve yet to see signs of the animal I’m told is locked up inside. She hardly forms any words, still, but I’ve a mind ‘tis because she knows they haven’t served her any good so far, nor are likely to in future neither. She has her own noises, at any rate, as I can understand now as well as if we’d sat down and worked them out between us as a sort of code like, to confound the others in the house. And she might have a point there, for, far and all as we are from the rest of the place, up here in our room, still there does always seem to be one or other listening, for any little noise is bound to be followed by a sharp knuckle on our outer door or a disapproving ‘Grace’ from the bottom of our little stairs.

‘Twas only my laughing. Bertha’s taken to tickling me under my arm of a sudden, as I arrange her hair behind her head before eating lest it be mixed with her food. She don’t laugh herself, but seems to like to hear me make the sound. Her eyes grow large and bright, her whole face looks like the proper home of my sound as if it has its part in the event and I have mine. A laughter rationed out between two people as wouldn’t ever find cause enough to have one each to themselves. And then, there it is. ‘Too much noise, Grace. Remember directions.’

As if it were likely they’d slip from my mind. As if they was the ones as had right on their side.

Don’t they know I know their secret? Bertha Mason’s not mad, not now, not ever so far as I’m concerned, and all their instructions is for their own comfort and convenience, and has done little to favour my charge except, happily, to have returned her to her childhood from where her small world seems more bearable, no doubt, than it would, than it did, to the grown woman she was when she first set her foot inside here.

How she did look that first day! I’ve told of her lustrous hair, so black and shining that it looked like some grand sort of jewel, with hills and valleys carved out of it and into it where her plaits wound round the base of her crown. So striking, it were, that first day, it were some time before I gathered myself to take in the woman standing beneath. But it were some woman I saw, when at last I did take notice. Tall, as I’ve said, almost of a height with her husband (that’s right, her husband, as stood beside her then as never again, lending her his arm like they was surveying the room for a guest, about to arrive for some weeks’ stay perhaps). Her dark dark hair came almost to the level of his own, not so dark, though as groomed and lustrous in its way as his wife’s. Her figure was what they call fine, which usually means, in my books, about to grow fat. No so hers (though twas soon to have a fatness about it, after all) – hers was that kind of fine figure as you’d feel was almost born to itself, so easy did it carry its weight and its shapes. The fullest bosom I ever saw on a lady so young, and full half of it visible above the low neckline of her dark, crimson gown. Not cheap looking, mind, but making the girl of one and twenty into a woman, and no mistake. Waist, narrow, without being delicate or even very slim – the rest lost beneath the folds of her gown, full skirted as was the latest fashion. Right arm drawn through her husband’s, with the left hand clasped also upon it in such a way as could show a dependence, a possessiveness, affection even, but also fear and foreboding as may be.

But there was no mistakin’ the look on her face. For I came to look at her face, at last. Not that she’d been in any way hiding it, mind, but I, knowing what was arranged for time to come and thinking I knew the nature of her who was to be the subject of those arrangements, had hesitated to look at it in the full, had deferred it by taking in the rest of her, had prepared myself like, to meet the eye of the madwoman with enough composure as would not endanger my new livelihood nor start me on the wrong footing with my charge.

And what’s to be found in the eye of a madwoman?
Fear, mostly, it would seem.
There were fear in her eye at that moment, and no mistake. What she had been told to explain her excursion upward and upward in this, her mansion home, I can’t guess. Whatever it were, it weren’t enough to make her confident in her escort or his plans. As I came to meet her eye, it had just wandered off from observing myself and came to rest on the deep, dark folds of the red tapestry that hung on the wall to her right hand, and so widened and stared and so forebode the watching and dread that was to be its part in this whole charade that we were all in that room, I think, set back a bit. For behind that tapestry hid the door to Bertha’s quarters, to the room with no window to which she, and I for that matter, had been assigned, in which the mistress of the house and her lady’s maid would receive no visitor. None, that is, but the master at his pleasure. There had been no shouting that I could hear as they stepped slowly up the staircase to our third floor; no objections were sounded and no admonishments issued. But Bertha stepped in like one being punished and looked around like one imprisoned and cast her eye, that black eye grown shallower now from its dearth of encouragement but deep as the night at that time still, like one whose power to direct herself and things around her was now at last draining off and away. Following closely the movement and mood in her eyes as I did, Bertha and I gave the one look to the red hanging tapestry cloth, the shroud of her whole future life, and saw in its tight woven branches with their too thick coating of leaves the worst sort of cage, with light nor space for body nor soul.

Rations

2009-11-10T04:43:00.000-08:00

What strikes one about the literary diet of the Brontes is its apparent narrowness when compared with the panoply of stimuli thought essential to effect a modern education. A single Latin textbook, the smallest selection of poets, Blackwood's magazine for entertainment...from such meagre resources had they to cultivate their skills, to constitute their knowledge, and to hone their fine judgment. But does not the wealth of their brief lives' great output prove over again, that the chink must not dare be too wide if wonder is something we value?

Wonder: that sense of not knowing what's there to be known, without which there is no true learning, which these sisters did feel in such famous abundance, and which fades to the sight of those half-lidded eyes before which, in these days, small digestible pieces are placed for straightforward consumption, and ever more colourful, crazy concoctions are needed to make them stand open.

The Other One

2009-10-27T04:59:00.002-07:00

Who really remembers to read Agnes Grey? Is it in any man's library? Certainly, it isn't in Everyman's Library, the only one of the Bronte novels to be left so unbound and unshelved. Paired with Emily's Wuthering Heights on first publication, to make up the third in the requisite three volumes of the period, and muted even then by the clamour that greeted Jane Eyre, Agnes Grey is mere filler, mere matter, under-praised, overlooked, and - the fate of all thirds - in the way and thought dull. Agnes herself opens her history with the modest retraction of hopes for some depth or for truth, and the careful suggestion that the return for her reader may not even match his investment; her dry, shrivelled kernel may hardly be worth the small effort that goes into cracking the nut. If Anne is, as Elizabeth Langland would have it, nothing much more than 'the other one,' then Agnes has all the ignominy of being nothing much more than the other one's other one.

Obscurity

2009-10-12T02:25:00.000-07:00

...except that not all of the Bronte family were carried to their final resting place through this gate. Poor Anne languishes in Scarborough: to where she was transported in a performance of treatment when all treatment was really in vain; where, on her last day, she was carried, coughing, down the boarding house stairs on Ellen Nussey's back; where she was buried with few of her family in attendance, her father Patrick having known that his cheery goodbye at the door of their high Haworth home was really the last rite of rector to sinner with the hope of a father to child overlain; where now she rests in the peaceful obscurity that can only be known in a place by the sea, to which the world throngs but not for thee.

The Metalocution Office

2009-06-24T03:27:00.000-07:00

The Office of Circumlocution, rendered by Dickens in all its fine print, is a chamber of endless frustration. With Barnacles bound to it, Tite lipped and fast, it serves its old Ship of State well, making just enough breeze between passings of papers to ensure a continuing motion and with just that right number of short, aimless tracks to head off the thought and the verve of its public, too focused and tired out for choppy revolt. Just think of the strangeness of Clennam, arriving and wanting to KNOW!, you know, and, stranger, demanding it DONE!, you hear? Well, he met with short shrift, and endless lined forms, and learned of the roundabout circles of life that kept his Queen safe on her Throne and his Government safe from Reform. It had its full stops, no doubt, this place, and was not all industrious rounds; the spiralling staircase down which Clennam walked in the BBC version last year gives sinister sense of the madness induced by too constant attendance on forms and submissions. But Meagles, for all his despair at the circus, regains his good humour outside; and Doyce, whose life's work is wrapped up in its coils, is not broken down by its ways. For at least it has papers for one who would claim, and a next step to take after this one. So, if one forgoes the hope of completion, of absolute knowledge and positive action, Circumlocution will do.

But Metalocution: now that is a quite different story. For its office has no ways at all by which a man might set to moving his case, not even the Barnacles' roundabout routes, not even the tracks that go nowhere. In Circumlocution, one submits one's claim on a form that will go to the next place, at which place it will be translated to code to render it fit for the next place; at the place after that, or the place after that, one may meet with one's claim once again, for the purpose of ticking another ten boxes, of changing one's mind or of logging one's hopes. All going nowhere, of course, as we said, but all at least full up with purpose. In Metalocution, one submits just once, and never one's own claims and never one's own words. This office is concerned with only its archives, with nought but the ways it reports and it files. In this place, no concession is made to one's ends; it hears only that which it sets up as Good, as Transparent, Impartial, Progressive. One talks in it, writes in it, thinks in it too, in only the ways that are Public; one meets in it, not to say what's to be done but to say that which, archived, will fit with what's Public. One speaks to the minutes, and minutes Public-speak, and the frustrated ends of the Circumlocution begin to seem all very well; at least they would leave to a man his endeavours, and give him ways to set about them. Metalocution is deaf to all labours and keeps men to headless ventriloquy.

The Common Room

2009-06-10T05:54:00.000-07:00

It is (Quite a beginning, for one seated in the common sitting room, road side and wood panelled, quick to put pen down for the common woman's work of domestic meetings and greetings, of tea to be served and talk to be made; a phrase full of poise, a stake driven deep in a world that was scarcely hers to claim.) a truth (But claim it she does, with both hands, eyes fixed on that age old concern that beauty and truth might ally, that art might not simply please, but, in pleasing, reveal what is real; this old hope is worn here, not quite on the sleeve but in the first line that was written and read.) universally acknowledged (Trumpets of Enlightenment: truth is proclaimed as that which implies the agreement of all humankind. Out with the changing, the local, the brief, and in with the lasting and true. Out of the common room, too close, too ad hoc, and into the light of all reason. But already a cloud: this phrase goes to qualify truth and in doing so shows there are truths (not in heaven, but on earth) undreamt of by all those philosophies. And already a blind spot: for what force can the act of acknowledgement have for the absolute nature of truth? If the true is the true, or is taken as true, only once it's acknowledged as true, then the universality claimed by the true is reliant once more on mere common consent...) that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. (Pure Austen, this cool undercutting of grandeur with the small ins and outs of real life. But so much more subtly done than the simple reversal it seems; for critique of pretensions to grand, lasting truth is implied, not exclusively on her own terms of homely concerns and polite social scenes but also within the short opening clause that comes, word for word, from that ivory tower for which novels, and women, and the common rooms in which they were written and sat, are exemplars of all that's untrue.)

Jane takes a small piece of that ivory - two inches wide, that is all - and brings it indoors, to her common sitting room, where its truth must make talk and make tea, and respond to the meetings and greetings that give substance to commonplace life, whose business it is to get five daughters wed and whose solace is visits and news.

Crinoline

2009-05-20T02:28:00.000-07:00

As many as twelve whole feet in circumference; stiffened almost beyond its control; a tortuous constructon of whalebone or steel; ill-fashioned for throughways and commonplace seating: the 19th century crinoline took no little part in its era's containment of women. No need in this case to resort to the tropes of imprisonment, bondage, and cages. Comprised of stiff bars running down and across; strapped onto the bodice, pulled tight and laced up; laid over a petticoat woven from hair: the garment interprets itself. The Victorian woman, daily and by her own hand, donned her garment of crime, shame and madness. And pity the beau with an amorous heart who chanced to approach his beloved: it formed her small waist and her childbearing hips, but it wound round her virtue a fence made of iron.

Yet what abandon was there underneath its harsh frame, as limbs that had formerly lived out their sentence in swathes of weighty, encircling clothes that clung close and cloyed like a sickening child were all at once freed by their self-contained skirt for motion not hitherto easy. Eugenie of France, who made crinolines famous, began strenuous walking for health, and housemaids all over, and factory hands, felt a newfound release at their work.

Not even a decade would pass 'til a system of pulleys and ropes was designed by which a lady might raise all her skirts for pursuit of more vigorous games. Thus the habit par excellence of her detention was her first fitting out for release.

Persuasion

2009-04-30T05:10:00.000-07:00

The enthusiast for 19th century fiction may often neglect to discriminate. After all, no new publication that is just to her taste is likely again to appear. In consequence, imagined sequels and prequels are very acceptable, and TV adaptation often a treat. Even a modern-day take has its attractions (although travel through time and/or Space will not do!).

Bridget Jones, then, may be a source of delight, perhaps especially for the starved traditionalist; rather frothy, of course, and thin on the ground, but with a just sufficient vestige of that combination of romance and reserve that defines so the 19th century's novel, not excepting its more apparently cerebral examples: 'You'll forget all about me,' suggests Eliot's Dorothea upon Ladislaw's making farewells. His reply: 'How can you say that, as if I were not in danger of forgetting everything else?' Is there anything superior to this burgeon of sentiment in its tightly laced corset of words? Is there anything quite like that symbiosis of feeling and phrasing brought so to perfection by the 19th century writer?

If one's answer is 'No,' then even Bridget Jones may be comprised in one's enthusiasm; its imitation of one of the 19th century's classics will do, in these spartan days, to occasion the kind of enjoyment that only yet another aspect on one's favourite landscape can give. Which is why it seems incomprehensible that the trick was not tried out again. The Age of Reason, Bridget's sequel, fails miserably, as if all but the film had turned up for the filming.

Of course, Bridget begins her sequel having already secured the young man in possession of a large fortune: therein, no doubt, lies The Age of Reason's rub. But let us imagine the following:

Having given her consent to a man outside her station in life (it is no easy thing, after all, to picture Mark Darcy slamming tequila with Bridget's three mates), Bridget is quickly persuaded by her friends that the relationship is unpromising and that more suitable offers are bound to present themselves, that she is, in short, too young and too fun to settle for the staid life of the staid wife of a top London lawyer. Consulting neither Darcy's opinion nor his feelings, Bridget breaks with him, consoled by the sense that the camaraderie that has been so central to her formation as a young, social, single woman in London is preserved - even strengthened. Shortly afterwards, Mark takes a job in New York to work at the cutting edge of human rights law (and this time he stays there), and Bridget hears nothing more of him than newspaper reports of the success of one of his high profile cases and his subsequent accession to something of the status of star in his native land, not least due to his marked and widely reported ability to lay aside the wigs and powder pretensions of the law and enjoy the grass-roots celebrations of grateful immigrant clients.

In the meantime, Bridget deteriorates somewhat: the flush fades at last from the fast London life, as her two girlfriends get, respectively, married and bitter, and her gay boyfriend drifts into the Scene. Recession hits hard and, to save her diminishing earnings, Bridget spends most nights of most weeks at her parents' house, where the food and the bills are for free. Through all of these trials, it is needless to add that her self-image suffers, as the short skirts and see-through blouses are replaced by clothes more appropriate to her new pounds of flesh. In all, Bridget's lot becomes a rather unenviable one, too often dominated by the caprices of her dissatisfied mother and with little real prospect of a mode of escape. To make matters worse, she finds herself frequently called on by the friend who got married (and who has moved with her family to a place close by the Joneses), ostensibly to help care for the children but really to hear lengthy and exaggerated accounts of the grand career she left behind for all this, and repeated complaints at her neglect by the bitter friend whose feminist views have become so extreme as to make motherhood nought but a treason. But, her own patchy career and humble retreat to the family home bring Bridget herself in for feminist ire and make her a less than effective, and excessively harried, intercessor for her two former friends.

It is into this situation, after some years have run past, that the triumphant, and humanized, Darcy returns. Having made a name, and a fortune, for himself in New York, he has come back to England, where he plans to work pro-bono and far less, and where, most importantly, he intends to settle down, get married, and start a family. As he returns initially to his parents' house, Bridget, who has engaged to stay with her married friend as a companion during her husband's protracted business trip (a trip that has done nothing to improve the married friend's spirits, but has rather added to her round of complaints the suspicion that her husband is having affairs), finds herself unwittingly and helplessly close to Darcy and likely, given the fact of her married friend's desire to resurrect the grandeur of her own lost law career in interaction with England's star lawyer, to be brought into regular contact with him and his circle. Efforts to forestall this contact by means of a sudden willingness to babysit her married friend's children can only delay the inevitable, and Bridget and Mark find themselves, once more, in the same room together.

It is Christmas Day, a day now painful to Bridget in any case, but this time made all the more painful by Darcy's polite but distant attitude to herself despite an obviously improved general sociability. The pain is acute when Bridget's married friend, prompted by a default jealously of Bridget's single status and elated at the intermittent law talk she has had that day with a reluctant Darcy, takes the earliest opportunity that evening to report having overheard Darcy remark on how he should hardly have known Bridget had she not been pointed out to him, so greatly had she changed since last they met. Facing herself in the mirror that night, Bridget admits to herself the grounds for such a remark; what were fabulous curves have grown frumpy and dull, and the finished effect is: decline.

As time passes, and the comings and goings of the circle of family and friends continue apace around the holiday period, it becomes clear that Darcy is beginning to enjoy the rather overt attentions of one member of their party in particular: a young woman who has been renting the converted-garage attached to his parents' house. This young woman is a very nice young woman, and has been especially friendly to Bridget, not simply because Bridget's television connections might open career doors but because she feels genuinely warm towards a person whom she regards as requiring cheering up. Bridget, however, while acknowledging to others and even to herself the many merits of the young woman of their party, feels the insurmountable distance that must separate a personality bouyed up by a natural optimism and apparently independent means, and a nature, such as hers, bound to find out the opportunities for resigned melacholy in every situation that offers itself. In consequence, she and the young woman of their party are not on the terms of intimacy that the latter had hoped for. This is not helped by the ongoing and generally apparent flirtation between the young woman and Mark Darcy, with which the latter is whiling away the holiday period in pleasant style.

Come New Year's Eve, however, a change of scene and society becomes necessary to all the younger members of the Christmas gathering. Bridget travels to London, where she has planned an old-style get-together with her friends, married, bitter and gay. Along too have come Mark and the young woman, the latter having promised to show Mark something of the London scene from which he has been so long removed but having had, to fulfill her promise, no actual knowledge of the scene other than that Bridget and her friends are the best ones to follow. They manage to wedge themselves into a newly opened and fashionable bar for the occasion and Bridget and her friends succeed in resurrecting old times sufficiently to guarantee a thoroughly enjoyable night. Bridget, who has half-consciously given more attention to her appearance during the holidays and as a result of Mark's presence than she has for some time, is looking very well and has unearthed an outfit of her old sexier clothes for the occasion. For the first time in a long time, she feels something of the old enjoyment in life. The general effect of this does not go unnoticed by Mark, who appears - though not yet to Bridget - to be more and more aware of the merits of the woman for whom he had not, a few years ago, been sufficient. Perhaps to counteract this growing effect, perhaps unconsiously to bring it to a climax, he continues, almost by default, his flirtation with the young woman of their party, whose eagerness to be seen as an accomplished reveller on the London scene is leading her to imbibe too much too soon, as Mark, at her request, provides her with drink after drink from the bar. He, for his part, is beginning to tire of the over eager, over youthful, spirits of the young woman of their party and beginning to compare her rather unfavourably with the reanimated Bridget.

And then who should pass by but Daniel Cleaver, who gives such a long, appreciative look at Bridget that Mark, had he not already begun to feel its stirrings, could have remained unaware for no longer of the old attraction of Bridget's real-woman's curves and down-to-earth, melancholic, humour when compared to the too enthusiastic, too readily pleased, too slender, too unformed, young woman getting drunk at his side. Cleaver looks tanned, healthy and well, and his sudden and brief appearance causes great interest amongst Bridget and her friends, whose enjoyment of the evening is gradually marking them off from Darcy and his young woman and growing none the less enviable to Mark as a result...

...the tale writes itself. With only one snag: what can that circumstance be, that results from mere heedlessness on Darcy's part, that is so insubstantial as to wane in the course of a month, but that binds him in honour for life while it lasts? What in our time can rival the threads by which a man then could be tied? Tis a riddle whose key would complete what, in a parlance too modern for even our starved traditionalist, might be termed: Bridget Jones: The Reboot.

Metawriting

2009-03-16T02:27:00.000-07:00

The little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces so little effect after so much labour: like so many of Austen's so succinct sayings, to be read with the sense something else is being said. For what are the bounds of powers of expression but the form of an expressive subject; and what is so fine a brush but the tool for exquisite perception? And what are those two inches wide but the waiver of that awareness that makes it so hard to write without watching the writer: the fetish of modernist authors was, after all, no modern effect.

Metawriting: condition of all would-be authors, and their curse. For two inches wide is too small a space to be seen past the bulk of one's sense that one writes. There are, of course, as many ways to cope with this bulk as there are risks that one just never will; but Austen's is a curious way, and works. Northanger Abbey, her first completed novel, does not try to escape its self-aware, self-conscious, stasis but looks what surrender will do.

Picture the scene: the common sitting room, the small writing desk, household life all about in and out, and nothing in view but oneself as the woman who writes in the common sitting room, at the small writing desk, and so on. Surrender! What is it that this woman writes, who writes? Mrs. Radcliffe et al...Gothic Romance, of course! Surrender! Just write what you see if you cannot see past it. Submit to the reader, every line of every page, that this story, which is not Gothic Romance, has nothing to say but that which it would say were it just such a Gothic Romance. And do not stop it at that. Surrender! Let the thinly drawn plot that would not run like this if it were the Romance it is not, draw from Gothic Romance its few small motifs: let its innocent youth learn a lesson from age and let threatening secrets uncover.

Surrender! So laboured, so much labour, I know; but with oh! such little effect: that two inches wide, space cleared and in view.

Length and Breadth

2009-02-26T01:55:00.000-08:00

The year 1817 brought the deaths of two prominent English women: Jane Austen, in July, and Princess Charlotte, in November. No surer death knell of an age, still rural and feudal, could have sounded, nor could a new era have been so hurriedly, so unexpectedly, ushered in. Jane, after all, was but 42; Charlotte a mere 21. And yet both, in their way, succumbed to the most mundane, most expected, of conditions. Childbirth took Charlotte, after fifty long hours and a small, still born son. Jane, for her part, combined an array of complaints that, separately and in milder doses, she had visited with irony upon a host of her fictional women: faintness and wan looks, lethargy and headache, loss of appetite and recollection. (On Jane they worked without irony, to the death, and their toll on her looks, as her face lost her bloom to black and white blotches, would not do for romance.) Victims of their female condition, at its most pervasive and most ordinary, these two nonetheless brought an age to its close.

For who would rule England now? George III, with all his fifteen legitimate offspring, had now none with an heir to the throne; Charlotte had been one of a kind, and with her died the hope of royal, permissive, continuance. But her agonizing labour almost literally yielded Victoria, for the vacuum created at its close gave rise to such a flurry of jiltings of mistresses and marryings of eligibles and such a rush of pregnancies, among George's until now rather licentious sons, that Victoria's christening table might almost have coldly been furnished with the meats baked for young Charlotte's wake.

And who would write England now? Jane's tiny round table - placed by the window of her cottage, situated at the turn in the road through Chawton, with green open aspect without and crisp painted wood round within - is larger than two inches square, but not much; and the epigrammatical style of her novels more expansive than daubing on ivory, but not much. What could her offspring possibly be?

Yet, as sovereignty grew constrained and its power contracted, the novel swelled out and its impact expanded: no less did Charlotte's lengthy labour straighten England's rule than Austen's tiny worktop swelled out England's fiction.

A Progress

2009-02-17T08:06:00.001-08:00

In the very last year of her life; when her legs would not walk and her eyes would not see; when news from the front was bewilderingly bad and even triumph seemed protracted and bloody; when her eldest daughter, Empress of Germany, wrote of all but her own fatal illness; and her eldest son, Prince of Wales, was not ripe for the throne despite bearded and bald middle age; when children and grandchildren were dying before her: Victoria resolved to retrench. It was not forced upon her; the day's government, prematurely nostalgic for her dignified rule and somewhat wary of Edward's succession, had grown indulgent. But the country was broken by war with the Boers, in money and in spirit. And the queen would partake of the cost.

But here arose a great disparity between the plethora of expenses incurred by a state that would not relinquish its monarchy - expenses reluctantly borne because so often the price of uncecessary flourish - and the range of tiny outgoings that, by virtue of their nearness to the queen whose vista contracted with age, occurred as occasions for the proper self-mortification. Her bed, she declared, would not yet be mended; and the selection of bread on her table at breakfast would be taken to serious review. Her bed and her bread: small change for an empire, no help to the war; but the greatest sacrifices conceived by a queen, aged, infirm, and so born to her station that its great and costly indulgences came not before her to question, perhaps because even they, at their surface, produced kinds of discomfort.

Her bed and her bread: privation came to her as it came to the many; for the Queen goes a-progress through the lives of her people.

Courtship

2009-02-04T08:55:00.000-08:00

"Victorian" is the byword for prudery; yet, Victoria was far from a prude. The era is famous for moral constraint; yet, Victoria would not be constrained. During a neverending reign, she never relinquished her infantile will, though - refracted through sovereignty - this might be taken for royal command. And despite expansions of empire, family, and waistline, she never outgrew the flattery of gallant and powerful men.

Lord Melbourne was first: Prime Minister at succession, he was father, advisor and lover all in one, spending hours of most days in her company, instructing her, explicitly, in the business of government and, implicitly, in the pleasures of courtship when one rules in the court. Albert next - intensified Melbourne - in whom Victoria took a marked and persistent physical pleasure and to whom she turned for all cues to her rule. John Brown after that, the warmth and strength of whose broad kilted body grew necessary to the Queen, over 2o years of her widowhood in which he carted her weight into carriages and onto horsebacks and entered her bedroom at will; soon, no intercessions might be made with her that were not passed by this loyal, alluringly impudent, servant.

Last was Disraeli, his part played out so late that it needed the momentum of 35 years of courtship to suspend disbelief. Victoria: increasingly immobile, red-nosed, more like a cook than a queen; Disraeli: bronchial and ageing. But he smoked nonchalantly in defiance of health, and dyed his hair black in defiance of age, and altogther did for the final hurrah. She was his Faery Queen: boxes of primroses went to his door, notes of submission made their humble reply, and courtship continued, as nervous of Gladstone and his plans for reform as it was dimmed by the shade of the last curtain fall.

Disraeli would not see the Queen at his deathbed, though she made the request.

Virtue

2009-01-26T04:32:00.001-08:00

'I do not wish to consider myself, nor yet to be considered, in a bony light': thus Pleasant Riderhood to Mr. Venus, articulator of bones in London's East End. And thus Mr. Venus - though made, it would seem, for true love and surrounded by trophies of his art - loses his domestic chance. He may scuttle its image in the fathoms of his teacup and read in the residue there of twists and turns in its future dearth. But he cannot wash out the taste of its truth: that Venus must never trump Virtue.

Pleasant is in love with Love, no doubt. But Pleasant knows that Love is a virtue; Love is what you do. And if what you do is articulate women, bone by bone, then all the professions of Love in the world will not override the sense, primary and strong, of woman as so many tarsals and carpels, as so many shillings and pence, with no sense nor worth until spoken for.

A woman may be Pleasant; but she must not forget her Virtue: if she does not, then she may win her Love (who agrees to articulate only men, children and the lower animals) and may reasonably hope to keep him.

HM's Chamber

2009-01-19T03:54:00.000-08:00

In March 1870, Dickens met Victoria. Her husband's death had left the queen alone in the world, as she considered it, and loath to perform any but the most perfunctory rites of her sovereignty, for which she found excuse in a various and almost wholly elective ill-health. She was, in fact, stout of constitution and, out of respect for an author whose writings she had enjoyed and who had so captured the Victorian age, she remained standing for the course of their interview. He, whose decline in health was no less marked than his determination to suppress the fact in a frenzy of continued exertion, no doubt wished they might both take a seat.

But they stood: a writer, born into the shabbiest of gentilities, who attended to the minutiae of Victorian poverty, to its shawls and its smells, with the careful, expansive, eye of one for whom it was, had been at least, personal; a queen, born into the shabbbiest of sovereignties, whose horizons had narrowed to the diameter of her dead husband's chamber pot, daily scoured out in a mourning that, by now, replaced ruling. London, reeking with river and fog and misery; and a pristine pot, never to reek no more. A man, desperate to bury bad health in a fever for more of his audience; a woman, recoiling from hers in a fiction of nerves and disorders.

Dickens died 3 months later. Victoria reigned for 30 years more.