The Soul of Kindness

Elizabeth Taylor, born in 1912, was one of the most accomplished English novelists of the Twentieth Century. She can be thought of continuing in the way pioneered by Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf of depicting people’s inner lives but extending this to include several characters’ thoughts in relating and conversing with a set of other people who include relatives, friends, and lovers. She published twelve novels, a children’s book, and many short stories, which she conceived and thought about while bringing up two children. She was outraged by the fact that most male writers have not needed to divide their time in this way. So here, from her A View of the Harbour (1947) is Beth, a novelist on her way up to London on a train to see her publisher. "A man, she thought suddenly, would consider this a business outing. But, then, a man would not have to cook the meals for the day overnight, nor consign his child to a friend, not leave half-done the ironing, nor forget the grocery order as I have now forgotten it" (p. 186). 

 

Elizabeth Taylor’s The Soul of Kindness (1964) can be regarded as a variation on Jane Austen’s Emma, in which the protagonist encourages others to marry. Elizabeth Taylor's novel starts with the wedding of Flora Secretan to Richard, a businessman. In the early part of the book Flora influences her best friend Meg to yearn for a sexual relationship with Patrick, a novelist, without seeming to know that, although he is willing to take Meg out for an occasional meal, it won’t go much further because he is gay. She also influences Richard’s father to marry his mistress, Ba; they do so and both find their lives much more boring than they had previously been. Meg’s brother, Kit, adores Flora and thinks of her as a goddess. He has been to drama school and has had one or two tiny walk-on parts. Although no one else thinks he has the slightest chance, Flora encourages him to believe that he will triumph and become a great actor. In Chapter 2, (p. 14 in the Kindle version) we read this: “she had inconvenient plans for other people’s pleasure, and ideas differing from her own she was not able to tolerate.” Then here, at the end of Chapter 2, are Flora and her new husband, Richard, in bed.

She was glad that there was a way of coaxing him out of his black humour. She turned him to face her, her silky arms around his shoulders. An end to the sulks. Benignly, she made a present of herself.

Flora … the soul of kindness.

 

Flora’s friend, Meg, works in an office in the middle of London but cannot afford to live in Kensington. So, with a small amount of money inherited from her father and some encouragement from Patrick, she moves into a little house that allows an occasional distant glimpse of the funnel of a ship passing on the river in an area that seems to be somewhere between Greenwich and Woolwich. Near this house lives Liz whose studio is upstairs from a deserted shop that is scheduled for demolition. Liz lives in the most awful mess: dead flowers, cow parsley, some feathers, dinner plates, sea-shells, all over the floor. But she paints pictures:

The rubbish on the floor and about the room had been re-created, reassembled over and over again, into delicate and intricate patterns … there were also some pale girl children, with staring eyes (p. 39).

 

The artistic arrangements are beautiful. It doesn’t seem to be an accident that the painter is called “Liz,” because here is a quote from the end of the Wikipedia article on Elizabeth:

The whole point is that writing has a pattern and life hasn't. Life is so untidy. Art is so short and life so long. It is not possible to have perfection in life but it is possible to have perfection in a novel.

 

I don’t think The Soul of Kindness is quite perfect, but it seems to me that aspects of it are. It does have a plot, but that’s not really what it’s about. It is a book that one needs to read slowly; it’s unlikely to work if you skip or speed-read. It depicts characters’ thoughts, then thoughts of what they might or might not say, maybe could say or should say … but instead they say something else which is sometimes a cliché, which isn’t quite what they meant to say but, because it’s been heard before, could possibly be alright. People’s beliefs and ideas about each other and about themselves also get passed around. At this book’s centre is the issue that although we human beings are completely dependent on our relationships, we often don’t quite know, and some of us seem unable to know, what effects we might have by saying certain things to others.

 

In this novel, too, are observations: as characters look at gardens and shops and houses. What they see, mingled with their thoughts of what they might say, is a multitude of English peculiarities. The result for the reader (at least this one) was quite a bit of giggling out-loud as I proceeded. In this book as well—rather touchingly depicted—there’s loneliness, particularly for Flora’s mother and for Flora’s friend, Meg.

 

The book’s principal focus is on self-absorption. Although, in Elizabeth Taylor’s Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (1971), there’s affection, there’s not much of it in The Soul of Kindness. Instead there’s reflection … prompted by the question of what we human beings are up to in our lives, and on how we search for meaning within ourselves and with each other.

 

Jane Austen (1816). Emma. Oxford: Oxford University Press (current edition 2003).

 

Elizabeth Taylor (1947). A view of the harbour. New York: New York Review Books (current edition 2015). 

 

Elizabeth Taylor (1964). The soul of kindness. London: Virago (current edition 2010).

 

Elizabeth Taylor (1971). Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont. London: Virago (current edition 1982).

 

 

 

Eleanor Oliphant

Gail Honeyman said that the idea for her first novel, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, came from two sources. One was reading an article about a woman in her twenties who lived alone in a big city. She would leave work on Friday and would often not speak to anyone until she returned to work on Monday. The other was how someone might manage if they were conversationally awkward. Eleanor Oliphant’s work and home life are similar to those of the woman in her twenties. And she is not just conversationally awkward but often inappropriate, sometimes rude. 

 

Eleanor was hired by Bob to work in the accounts office of a graphic design company in Glasgow. She has been there for nine years. She is clever and did a degree in classics. She gets the Daily Telegraph, not because she likes the newspaper but to do its cryptic crossword. She thinks she isn’t liked by the others who work in her office, which is probably right, because she can’t do small talk. At weekends she drinks vodka, so that Saturday and Sunday pass in a bit of a haze. 

 

On television one evening, she sees Johnnie, a musician. Immediately, she falls in love with him, because she can see from the three-piece suit that he wears and the way that he leaves undone the bottom button of his waistcoat, that he is a gentleman. He’s the one for her. He’s a musician and she knows that the moment they meet he will fall in love with her. She starts to make preparations to make herself look more beautiful. 

 

Every Wednesday evening, Mummy gets in touch. In Chapter 4, Eleanor thinks that it was hardly surprising that her mother had been institutionalized, given the nature of her crime. During these conversations, Mummy is scathing and horrible but Eleanor tells her about this chap she is thinking of, and Mummy is encouraging. 

 

In her office, Eleanor’s computer malfunctions. She gets in touch with Raymond, a new bloke who has come to work in IT. He fixes the computer. Eleanor observes that he has scruffy hair, and a bit of a paunch. He wears running shoes, and silly t-shirts. He shaves infrequently and looks unkempt. Not only that but he smokes cigarettes. 

 

“How disgusting,” says Eleanor. “The chemical constitution of cigarettes includes cyanide and ammonia. Do you really want to willingly ingest such toxic substances?”

 

Eleanor receives a visit from a social worker. This occurs every six months. She was in foster care from the age of ten. She lived with several families and didn’t get along with any of them. Because of her background she has been housed in a low-rent flat. This time the social worker is new; during her visit, as she flicks through her file on Eleanor, a look of shock comes over her. 

 

One day, although they have only just met, Eleanor and Raymond find themselves leaving work at the same time. As they walk along, they see an elderly man staggering, then falling down in the street. Raymond goes to help him and gets Eleanor to do so as well. Although reluctant, she does. They call an ambulance, and the man is taken to hospital. They find themselves making visits to the old man in hospital. His name is Sammy. He tells them they saved his life. Just before they leave, one day, he takes Eleanor’s hands in his. This feels to her very warm and cozy.

 

Although love is the most popular topic in stories from all round the world—love of the sexual kind—this story is not about that. It’s not a love story, it’s a friend story. 

 

In Chapter 10, Raymond has invited Eleanor to go with him to visit his Mum, which he does nearly every Sunday. It involves Raymond going around his Mum’s house and doing everything that needs doing. She has terrible arthritis, but she keeps everything clean and neat, and is able to look after the vegetable garden in the backyard. Eleanor is asked to stay for tea, which she does. It’s soup with stock and vegetables from the garden. Lovely. Afterwards Raymond says he’ll do the washing up. Noticing Eleanor’s hands have eczema, he says that he would wash and she could dry. At one point, conversation among Raymond, his Mum, and Eleanor, turns towards Raymond’s dad, and how he lived long enough to see his daughter get married. Eleanor wonders why Raymond had not mentioned that he has a sister.  His Mum asks her if she has any brothers or sisters. She says she hasn’t. She says that this is a source of sadness for her, and bursts into tears. Apologies all round. She says she never knew her father, and that she talks to her Mummy once a week. It all seems perfectly ordinary … it IS perfectly ordinary, except this is the first time that Eleanor has ever talked about herself to anybody.

 

The novel also has an aspect of mystery. We wonder what happened to Eleanor, what had shocked the social worker, what the Wednesday evening conversations with Mummy are really about. We ask ourselves why Eleanor burst into tears when asked about a sibling. 

 

Towards the end of the novel, Raymond says this: “I remember when I first met you … I thought you were a right nutter.”

 

“I am a right nutter,” she says.

 

Then Raymond says: “Aye, sure you’re a bit bonkers—but in a nice way.” 

 

And maybe that’s a bit like some of the rest of us.

Gail Honeyman (2017). Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine. Toronto: Viking. 

Modes of Life

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Literary fiction has a main concern with character. Literary characters are made up of sets of features that enable us to make mental models of them, to understand them in ways that—if we knew them in daily life—would enable us to interact with them. Character, in fiction, has aspects of the psychological traits of personality, but enhanced by influences of specific events. A less-noticed aspect might be called "modes of life." People with particular traits adapt to, or are unable to adapt to, different modes, such as being married or divorced, being a parent, being employed as a civil servant or a shop assistant, being unemployed, living here or living there. A writer who is particularly good on such modes is Penelope Lively, whose most famous book is Moon Tiger. Born in Cairo in 1933, she continues to write and, on 4 May this year, a thoughtful and engaging profile of her was published in the New York Times, Sunday Book Review Section, by Charles McGrath.

One of Lively's interests is in how events that may seem small at the time can have large effects, and—as it were—jolt people from one mode into another. In her most recent novel, How it all began, she pushes this idea towards a certain edge. A random event occurs when one of the novel's characters, Charlotte, is mugged on a London street. We don't know about the mugger, but the event prompts changes in several other lives. Charlotte is taken to hospital and a phone-call is made to her daughter, Rose. She works for an academic, Henry, who likes being famous, and likes to mix with famous people. She deals with his correspondence and accompanies him to important events. The mugging means that Rose has to look after her mother, Charlotte, and therefore cannot accompany Henry, next day, to Manchester, to give a distinguished lecture. Another person has to be called in to accompany him: his niece, Marion. Without the presence of Rose, Henry messes up his lecture, makes an utter fool of himself. He has an idea of how to reinstate himself, but following the debacle, his life starts to unravel. Rose accepts her mother coming to stay in her house, and move about on crutches. This has a substantial effect on Rose and her husband. As to Henry's niece, Marion: because she has to escort Henry to Manchester, she isn't able to meet her lover, Jeremy. Thinking Jeremy to be in his flat, she leaves a message to tell him she can't see him. But he's not in the flat. He is at home where he lives with his wife Stella. Without thinking, he leaves his mobile phone in the pocket of a jacket he has hung on a door, while he nips out on an errand. Stella finds the phone and the message. She realizes her husband is having an affair. She throws a wobbly, and starts proceedings for a divorce.

In an earlier novel, Consequences, Lively traces the influence of events, and the ways in which they precipitate people into different modes of life, over three generations of women. Lorna is born in privilege. As she sits on a bench in St James's Park, she sees Matt an artist, who is making drawings of ducks on the pond there. The two start going out, then get married, and go with almost no money to Somerset, to live in a tiny cottage. On the walls of its upstairs room, Matt paints murals: love scenes of Lorna and him. Matt is killed in Crete, in World War II. When she is grown up, their daughter, Molly, comes across a discarded newspaper, and happens to see an advertisement for a job, for which she applies, and is accepted: the job changes her life. Molly's daughter, Ruth, who considers her own birth to have been an accident, finds out about some of these events. She retraces the footsteps of Matt to Crete, and of him and Lorna to the Somerset cottage, where she sees the murals. This last part of the book, I found, was very moving.

We each enter into a different mode with each kind of person with whom we interact: parent, child, employer, someone we are fond of, someone we don't like. As Erving Goffman (1961) says, with each person it's as if we pass through an invisible membrane that separates one role from another. These roles can expand into modes. An engaging aspect of Lively's work is that she concentrates on these modes in ways that enable us to reflect upon them in our own lives.

Goffman, E. (1961). “Fun in games” in Encounters: Two studies in the sociology of interaction (pp. 15-81). Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill.

Lively, P. (1987). Moon tiger. London: Deutsch.

Lively, P. (2007). Consequences. Toronto: Key Porter.

Lively, P. (2011). How it all began. New York: Viking.

McGrath, C. (2017, 4 May 2017). "A writer writes:" Penelope Lively's fiction defies the test of time, New York Times Book Review Section.

Open Mind

The story of Haruki Murakami's novel Colorless Tsukuru Tasaki and his years of pilgrimage is that of a quest. In late adolescence, Tsukuru had been one of a group of five young people who were very close. They were not just friends, they thought and acted almost as one. Then, in his second year at university, his four friends cut him off, and told him not to get in touch with any of them again ... ever. It seemed as if he had done something, but he did not know what it was. For months he was extremely depressed. He wanted to commit suicide. The novel is a pilgrimage in which Tsukuru journeys through his life, and tries to find out what the meaning of all this had been.

In his twenties Tsukuru meets Haida, a young man of about the same age as himself, and they become close. Haida is a graduate student who says that his idea in life is "to think deeply about things. Contemplate ideas in a pure, free sort of way ... kind of like constructing a vacuum" (p. 48).

I think what Haida is talking about here is a kind of reflection, a kind of contemplation, a kind of mindfulness, in which in the "vacuum" one lets thoughts just come into one's mind. I think this is the mode in which Murakami may write his books. It is the mode in which I write mine. It's the mode one enters when one takes up a literary novel or short story, and lets it in. One puts aside one's mundane concerns and goals, and opens one's mind to whatever may occur.

Whereas in the East, a kind of meditation has grown up in which one concentrates on one particular thing, perhaps one's breathing, and allows other thoughts that enter the mind just to drift out of it without paying attention to them, this kind of mode is an opposite. It is a welcoming of all the thoughts that come into the mind, an allowing of them to move around in there, to make associations with other thoughts, with memories, with ideas. It's on these kinds of associations, when they are meaningful to us, that we may concentrate, whether we are writing or reading.

We have featured Murakami's short stories before in OnFiction (click here). In some of these he starts by depicting what seems to be an ordinary world. Then, one finds that growing out of it, or growing alongside it, is an extra-ordinary world, something like a dream world. This idea is developed further in Colorless Tsukuru Tasaki. Just as, in A midsummer-night's dream, Shakespeare was able to present us with a dream world, in order to see our day-to-day world more clearly, so too is Murakami. The dream-world is something like the unconscious. It's composed of inward meanings. Moving between the two—the ordinary world and a dream world—is part of this novel. By means of such movements Tsukuro, and we, are able to think about ourselves, and each other, and our relationships with others, in new and clarifying ways. In life, or as one makes one's own pilgrimage through this book, in the vacuum that one may create in the mind, thoughts and memories can connect with each other and, by means of associations between and among them, we can change from the sometimes colourless, to the more colourful. That is to say that among our thoughts, memories, and reflections, we can choose what is important for us, and understand it more deeply.

Murakami, H. (2014). Colorless Tsukuru Tasaki and his years of pilgrimage (P. Garbriel, Trans.). Toronto: Anchor Canada.

Shakespeare, W. (1600). A midsummer night's dream. Oxford: Oxford University Press (1995).

Ibsen and the Provisional

In Henrik Ibsen and the birth of modernism, Toril Moi proposes that Ibsen was the most important playwright since Shakespeare, and that his work was critical to the coming of modernism in the West. Last month, I was pleased to give a talk at the Centre for Ibsen Studies at the University of Oslo. I wanted to explore with the people there a theme of Søren Kierkegaard's Concluding unscientific postscript and the seeming opposite, Ibsen's plays about science.

On the theme of science, Ibsen had written Ghosts, about the discovery of syphilis in a family. Following the shock provoked by that play, in 1882 he wrote An enemy of the people, about the discovery by Dr Stockmann that, in the town baths which were central to the economy of the town where he lived, the water was contaminated.

Dr Stockmann thinks at first that his discovery will benefit the town. But the town's mayor, his brother, thinks otherwise, and the local people come to think of Dr Stockmann as their enemy.

A huge concern of Ibsen's time was the spate of five cholera epidemics that swept through Europe in the nineteenth century, killing hundreds of thousands of people. In the 1850s, cholera was discovered to be spread by contaminated water, but it took years for the discovery to be accepted. It was, however, this discovery that enabled the inference that infectious diseases are spread by germs. Cholera and its implications caused great public consternation, and were discussed in newspapers much as AIDS was discussed in the 1980s, and cancer is discussed today.

A source for An enemy of the people came from a friendship with the poet, Alfred Meissner, which Ibsen had formed in the 1870s when he was living in Munich. H.G. Kohler recounts how Meissner told Ibsen that his father, Dr Eduard Meissner, had worked in Teplitz, in Bohemia. In the middle of the summer of 1832, he had diagnosed a case of cholera. The mayor of the town tried to get him to change his diagnosis, but he refused. A mob besieged his house, smashed his windows, and demanded that he leave the town. In a two-faced way, the town's mayor professed friendship with Dr Meissner, but endorsed the crowd's demands, so Dr Meissner and his family were forced to leave the town.

This conflict is replayed in An enemy of the people, with Dr Stockmann's diagnosis of contaminated water in the town's public baths. He becomes increasingly assertive, and is rejected by everyone in the town except his wife and children. The climax comes at the end when Dr Stockmann proclaims: "the strongest man in the world is the man who stands most alone." 

Science is based on evidence and is provisional. At the same time one can meet scientists who believe they are absolutely right, who confront every attempt to ask questions, or to offer suggestions, with vehemence.

Søren Kierkegaard proposes the idea of indirect communication in a passage of some eight pages in Part Two of Concluding unscientific postscript. His idea is that indirect communication is a mode in which a person communicates with someone else not to persuade, not to try to get the other person to think as the person wants, not to coerce, but to enable the other to think and feel what she or she wants to think and feel. Kierkegaard links it to inwardness, which is fundamental to modernism in literature.

One implication of the idea of indirect communication is that as audience members and readers of artistic fiction we are not instructed, not persuaded what to think and feel. Instead, we are invited to think and feel for ourselves in the circumstances of a play, short story, novel, or film. And rather than being unscientific, as Kierkegaard may seem to imply from the title of his book, the idea is also at the centre of science because although a scientist offers evidence, and suggests inferences from it, science is provisional. The scientist does not stand alone. Changes of interpretation can be suggested by other people when new evidence is discovered, when new inferences are offered.

Ibsen, H. (1882). Ghosts, and A public enemy. (usual translataion An enemy of the people) In P. Watts (Trans.), Ibsen, Ghosts and other plays (pp. 101-219). Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Kierkegaard, S. (1846). Concluding unscientific postscript (D. F. Swenson & W. Lowrie, Trans.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press (Currrenl work published 1968).

Kohler, H. G. (1990). Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People and Eduard Meissner's expulsion from Teplitz. British Medical Journal, 300, 1123-1126.

Moi, T. (2006). Henrik Ibsen and the birth of modernism: Art, theater, philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press.

Alternative Worlds

Haruki Murakami is acclaimed as one the most interesting present-day writers of short stories and novels. He is Japanese, but influenced by Western writers such as Flaubert and Kafka.

"The elephant vanishes," title story of a collection of short stories, is set in a small town in a suburb of Tokyo. The town used to have a zoo, but it closed. Only an elderly elephant remains, living in its own elephant house and looked after by its 63-year-old keeper, Noboru Watanabe. The outside part of the elephant house is solidly built cage, surrounded by a strong fence, ten feet high made of iron bars anchored in concrete. In addition the elephant has a steel cuff, a shackle, round its right hind leg, attached to a 30-foot-long chain. Between the evening of 17th May and the next day, the elephant is found to have vanished, along with its keeper.

Murakami is good at depicting the everyday world, and he is engaging to read. This story includes the political controversy in the town about whether to keep the elephant when the zoo closed and, when it vanishes, he depicts newspaper stories of a recognizable kind about the disappearance. The narrator is interested in the elephant and keeps a scrap-book of the published newspaper articles.

As readers we are on the edge of the ordinary: a small suburban community with a lone African elephant. But why the iron-bar fence and the steel shackle? We barely notice when the almost ordinary becomes strange, the barely plausible becomes impossible. The elephant did not escape. It is no-where to be found, despite extensive searches. And no large elephant footprints are seen on the muddy grounds around the elephant house. The steel shackle that used to be round the elephant's leg is still intact. It is still locked, and there are only two keys, both still in place, one locked up in the police station and one locked up at the fire station.

Then the narrator meets a young woman, as part of his work life. The two get on well together. They like each other. and something seems to be developing between them. They go out for a meal. The narrator cannot help talking to the woman about his preoccupation: the vanished elephant. The evening before it disappeared, after opening hours, he tells her, he was on a cliff overlooking the elephant house, observing the affection between the elephant and its keeper, which was not expressed during the day when the public would visit, and he noticed that the size difference between them started to get less. The elephant seemed to be shrinking.

Did the elephant get so small that it could slip out of its cuff and squeeze through the bars of its cage, and the bars of the fence, and go off with its keeper, of whom it seemed so fond?

The young woman avoids seeing the protagonist again. 

As it seems to me, Murakami is doing what the surrealists were trying to do, in depicting how the unconscious seeps into consciousness, and sometimes even pervades day-to-day life, though he does it better. His ordinary world and the alternative world interpenetrate in ways that enable each to throw light on the other, and enable us to think about our minds and ourselves in new ways. And, far more interesting than the surrealists' mere depictions, with Murakami there is always the relational. How does our individuality, with its peculiarities and unconscious aspects, affect our lives with others, and how do our relationships affect our sense of self?

Murakami, H. (1994). The elephant vanishes: Stories (A. Birnbaum & J. Rubin, Trans.). New York: Vintage.

Writing as Exploration

At the Morgan Library in New York, one of the exhibitions is of some of Jane Austen’s letters and some drafts of her fiction. Her letters are, for the most part, continuous. As in conversation, the words seem just to have flowed. By contrast, Austen’s drafts of fiction are full of crossings-out. Some people might think of this as trial-and-error, but a far better way of thinking about it is as exploration. When one reads a novel or short story, or watches a film, one wants to engage in something that had been explored, thought about, written, re-written, explored again, explored widely.

With her colleagues, Sabina Bourgeois-Bougrine of Paris Descartes University conducted 90-minute interviews with 22 recognized French screenplay writers. The interviewers asked about:

information input (where and how the scriptwriter gets information and inspiration), mental processes (reasoning, planning, thinking, daydreaming, problem solving, decision making), relationships with others, job context, and constraints (p. 385).

The authors of the paper propose a metaphor: writing is traversing a maze of creativity. It is as if writers make a journey in which they navigate several segments, going up blind alleys, doubling back, finding the best pathways. The authors propose three phases. First there is a long and enjoyable phase of what they call “impregnation,” which often involves making maps of the coming journey. This is followed by a phase that the authors call “structuring,” which for screenwriting involves writing an outline and/or treatment that a director, a producer, or a sponsor, must accept before a project can be financed to go forward. In the third phase there is intense writing and re-writing of the script.

Writing scripts and writing for print fiction are in many ways similar, but whereas those who write novels and short stories often work mostly alone and at a certain stage with an editor, scriptwriting is a journey with several others. The authors of this paper say: “The process of rewriting several versions of the script seems to be universal among screenplay writers, engaging often the producer of the film, actors, and so forth (p. 396). The moral standpoints, the views, the ideas, and the preferences, of these people need to be taken into account. Successful scriptwriting depends, in part, on being able to maintain good working relationships with all of them.

In addition, they [the scriptwriters] reported that as one “gets into the skin of the main character,” “understands the character,” and “makes him talk,” they often experience enjoyable moments in which intuition, unconscious, and automatic process take over the generation and selection of creative ideas (p. 397).

The authors offer many other fascinating quotes from the scriptwriters. Here’s one about the first phase:

when I find a good idea, or a scene that I like, I turn around it. Generally, I do a lot of things that are indirectly related to the work, I read a lot, I copy many texts that interest me, I see a lot of movies, I listen to a lot of music (p. 390).

Here is a quote from a scriptwriter about the second phase:

You can have all the talent and all the literary imagination—which are two essential components of the profession—if you don’t have the skills for this tedious task of structuring, you cannot go far. This is something that has more to do with math, a kind of mental structure or consistency: such cause produces such effect (p. 392).

And, here’s a quote from a scriptwriter about the final phase:

There is a constant fluctuation. There are only manic-depressive people in this profession! (laughs). It’s like climbing stairs toward an untouchable star, because in fact at each step we need to climb another one, and as the goal is to reach an untouchable star, we are always in this situation (p. 395).

One reason why Bourgeois-Bougrine and her colleagues’ metaphor of the maze is such a good one is that, although they don’t say this, for a really good story nearly the whole maze needs to have been explored. When this has happened, the watcher of the movie (or the reader of the book) will get the sense that the route taken in the story is a good one in comparison with all the less-good turnings that could have been taken.

Bourgeois-Bougrine, S., Glaveneau, V., Botella, M., Guillou, K., De Biasi, P. M., & Lubart, T. (2014). The creativity maze: Exploring creativity in screenplay writing. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 8, 384-399.

Image: Cawthorne Maze, South Yorkshire.

Quick Hits: Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew, How to get children to read during the Summer

Many of us grew up on the books of Franklin W. Dixon (The Hardy Boys) and Carolyn Keene (Nancy Drew). But as we grew older, we soon realized that these weren't real people and that the books must have been written by someone else. Who did write these books? How did it all work? This article in The Atlantic magazine solves the mystery. 

Elementary school students who don't read over the Summer fall significantly behind their peers who do. This is just one reason why many have fretted over how to create a love for reading. How can we encourage students to read on their own time? This article in the Washington Post provides a great summary of research that points toward an enticingly simple solution: stop assigning books and let students choose their own.

Project Bookmark Canada

A lovely idea of Miranda Hill was to start and continue to administer Project Bookmark Canada. (We had a Quick Hit on the Project in April last year, click here.) Each bookmark is a plaque on a sturdy metal post set into the sidewalk at a particular place. The first Bookmark was to Michael Ondaatje. It’s on the Bloor-Danforth Viaduct in Toronto. Ondaatje wrote about the viaduct in his novel, In the skin of a lion, which is about about workers involved in the building of the city. There are bookmarks across Canada, from Vancouver in British Columbia to Woody Point in Newfoundland.

When I am out walking and I see a plaque, I stop and read it. In London, England, I like the many blue plaques on the sides of houses. They began to be set up by the Society of Arts. Then the scheme was taken over by the London County Council, and more recently by English Heritage. 

If I move to a new place, even for a short time, I feel at first without bearings. To combat this disorientation I read writings of people who lived there, and plaques are wonderfully helpful. When I lived near South End Green in Hampstead, London, for three months, I saw a plaque to George Orwell on a building at the corner of Pond Street and South End Road. The place is now a café, Le Pain Quotidien. It used to be the second-hand bookshop, Booklovers’ Corner, in which Orwell worked during the afternoons for 15 months. The job allowed him time to write in the mornings. A short walk away, at 77 Parliament Hill, on the edge of the Heath, is a house in which he had rented a furnished room. It has a plaque put up by the Hampstead Plaque Fund. The book Orwell was writing when he worked at the bookshop was Keep the aspidistra flying. I hadn't read it, so then I did. I went to look at 31 Willow Road, not far away, which I imagined to be 31 Willowbed Road, the house in which Orwell has this novel’s protagonist, Gordon Comstock, rent a room. Comstock works in a bookshop in the afternoons, so that, like Orwell, he can write in the mornings. The novel helped give me a sense of that place.

To track down what Orwell had been writing when he worked at South End Green, I had to do a bit of research. I didn't mind doing that, but a very good idea for the Canadian plaques, which can give a start to one's research, is not just to give the name and dates of an author, but to have some 500 words of a piece of poetry or fiction that relate to the spot where the plaque is set up. I feel very pleased to have been present at the unveiling of the Bookmark at the corner of College Street and Manning Street, in Toronto, which bears a passage from Anne Michaels’s book Fugitive Pieces. Here is part of the passage that the plaque bears.

Up Grace, along Henderson, up Manning to Harbord I whimpered; my spirit shape finally in familiar clothes and, with abandon, flinging its arms the stars. 

But the street wasn’t empty as I thought. Startled, I saw that the blackness was perforated with dozens of faces. A forest of eyes, of Italian and Portuguese and Greek ears; whole families sitting silently on lawnchairs and front steps On dark verandahs, a huge invisible audience, cooling down from their small hot houses, the lights off to keep away the bugs.

Image: Anne Michaels on the left and Miranda Hill on the right, at the unveiling of the Bookmark at College Street and Manning Street in Toronto.

"On or about December 1910": When and Whence Literary Modernism, Really?

It has been a pleasure this week reading and rereading two articles, written 90 years apart, by authors who are both trying to figure out, or at least to present what they presume they have figured out, concerning when literary Modernism happened and what it was exactly. Both articles approach the question by using a sieve method, asking what it is that Modernism was not trying to do or could not do, and then trying to patch together and coherently present what’s left.

In 1924, Virginia Woolf’s cryptically seductive, and arbitrary but bold selection of a year and month, even, when “human character changed” (5) referred to a moment in cultural history when novelists were discovering and producing novels demonstrating that “there is something permanently interesting in character in itself” (5). Understanding how to present that interest and ensuing observations was “an absorbing pursuit” and articulating it “an obsession” (6) for the group of writers (only later to be called “High Modernists”) most of whom had begun writing “on or about December 1910” (21), Woolf notes.

Woolf has not very nice words to say about novelists immediately preceding her generation. They give the public too much of what they want to hear; they respect too much the contemporary cultural “common ground” that values objects, social utility, tradition, and geneaology, over individuals and their emotional and psychological experiences. What she thought necessary was a closet clean-up through the slow but determined development of a “code of manners which writers and readers accept as a prelude to the more exciting intercourse of friendship” (21), an interaction that she compares to talking about the weather as an accepted way of seeking to make a stranger aware of one as a thinking and feeling other (as opposed, I should think, to simply an annoying occupant of a much-coveted seat on the subway, or the person in front of one in line to order a hamburger). Woolf does not fault her predecessors because their writing is not timeless, but precisely because it is timely. These writers knew what contemporary cultural code language invited readers to a more intimate relationship with writers and which frightened them away. But they did not take it upon themselves to change that code. But Woolf also admonished readers in words somewhat to this effect: don’t let yourself be frightened away – what’s coming up next among novelists will astound you. Woolf was trying to identify not only what the new tenor of the novel and poetry was, but what had led up to it.

Likewise, Melanie Conroy (2014) recently conducted a study in which she sought to discover in which decade(s) of the French novel there is empirical evidence of what critic Erich Kahler had called the “inward turn of narrative”, which was precisely what Woolf had been trying to account for. Conroy’s field is French literature, so she sought evidence of linguistic innovations in 384 French novels contained in the ARTFL-FRANTEXT database of French literature. This database contains digital versions of texts from the twelfth to the twentieth century and was developed and is maintained by the University of Chicago. She wanted to test whether linguistic innovations could account for the eventual movement toward a modernist aesthetic in the French novel. Conroy conducted a database search for instances of reporting clauses (specifically, se-dit-il, se-dit-elle, pensa-t-il, pensa-t-elle, pensa, se disait and pensait) and then created the metric of “Common reporting clauses per 10,000 words” for each decade of the period from 1800-1929. She found several peaks in the data, in the 1830’s, 1860’s, 1890’s, and 1920’s, and she found two “large increases” in this set of phrases, in the 1830s and between 1910 and 1929 (165). She says that the “inward turn” of the 1830’s was larger than that of the later period. The earlier increase comes at the beginning of French Realism, and the second within the period of high Modernism. She then analyzed individual novels within each decade span and focused on particular authors who most frequently used these reporting clauses.

I admire Conroy’s efforts to try to identify through linguistic markers the most intensely focused historical moment of literary Modernism in French novels, as well as the ingenuity of using the ARTFL-FRANTEXT database to pursue that objective. However, as Conroy’s study stands, it cannot comment on the questions it asks, because of both theoretical difficulties within the conception of the project, and empirical and statistical methodological problems.   

There is a deep wavering on Conroy’s part, it seems to me at least, concerning whether she believes that the linguistic markers she searches are evidence of the “inward turn” or that they are just pre-“inward turn” awareness of authorial concern with characters’ mental states. Are reporting clauses and mental state verbs more valuable for their absence in the early twentieth century, when examples of free indirect thought might be more in evidence, than for their presence in the nineteenth?  She calls the two peaks in reporting phrases and mental states “rival ‘inward turns’” (166). The article is entitled “Before the ‘Inward Turn,’” but she says her research question is “do reporting clauses and mental verbs occur more frequently in some authors, texts, or decades than elsewhere? If the frequency of these markers is significantly higher in them, these authors, books, or decades quite possibly engage in more thought representation and thereby strengthen the ‘inward turn’” (134). 

But is the strengthening by constituting the turn, or only by making possible the arrival of the more developed free indirect thought which itself constitutes the turn? How can free indirect thought be argued to be more developed than just using lots of reporting phrases and references to characters’ mental states? And if they are so very different, does one have anything to do with the other at the level of the reader’s sense of intimacy with the author, which was so important to Woolf in the article discussed? These questions are important, because if the marked phrases themselves are evidence of the turn, the tables will mean one thing, but if they are precisely evidence against the literary period having arrived yet, we might as well turn the line graphs upside down and read the lows as highs and the highs as lows. 

My concern with the data analysis is that it is essentially just counting, even when ratios, as opposed to straight counts, are being compared. Though the author mentions that comparisons are “statistically significant” (137, footnote 50 on 147) on two or three occasions, I find no evidence of statistical tests having been done. Did the numbers beat out chance? If they did, what was the value of the effect size? It seems to me that time-series analysis would have been most appropriate, but I imagine that there would be problems with meeting the assumptions of that line of testing. For example, in a number of “counts,” the period 1900-1929 is treated alongside other slices of time that are only a decade long. Auto-correlation might have posed a problem as well. Perhaps the statistical tests were done, but not reported. In either case, these findings cannot be used to build further results upon until they are substantiated.  

What exactly is that “code of manners which writers and readers accept as a prelude to the more exciting intercourse of friendship” (21) the understanding of which Woolf takes to be key for understanding the clinamen that occurred “on or about December 1910” (4)? Can textual analysis of databases of literary works help us to learn more about that code? It seems to me that a study like Conroy’s that included many more instances of different kinds of mental states of characters might be helpful in this pursuit. Inevitably one would need to count also instances of free indirect thought, not a possibility using digital techniques alone, it would seem to me. But the questions are well worth asking and well worth tackling large databases and sophisticated statistical techniques to get to the bottom of.

Conroy, Melanie. (2014). Before the “Inward Turn”: Tracing Represented Thought in the French Novel. Poetics Today (35): 117-171. 

Woolf, Virginia. (1924). The Hogarth Essays: Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. London: Hogarth Press.   
   

A thread to W.G. Sebald

W.G. Sebald is thought by many to be one of the great writers of the last part of the twentieth century. He was tipped for the Nobel Prize for literature but sadly he died at the age of 57 on 14 December 2001. He had emigrated from Germany in his twenties, and worked as an academic at the University of East Anglia, where in 1987 he became Professor of German Literature and, in 1989, Director of the newly established British Centre for Literary Translation. Although he had published energetically on German literature, his career as a literary writer started in 1990 and lasted only eleven years. His books in the newly-invented genre that he called prose fiction were Vertigo, The Emigrants, Rings of Saturn, and Austerlitz. The genre is part travelogue, part history, part fiction, with an intense inwardness and, every few pages, a diagram or photograph, perhaps blurry, perhaps sharp, invariably without caption, invariably suggestive.

Ariadne’s thread: In memory of W.G. Sebald is a memoir, based on diaries and reminiscences, by Philippa Comber. Although without pictures and without much fiction, her book is Sebaldian in style. It’s not a memoir of the ordinary kind, based on a sketch of events in a person’s life. Far more engagingly, it’s a memoir of a friendship, of Comber and Sebald—Max as he liked to be called. Comber had trained in psychology and psychotherapy, and had moved to Norwich to run a day centre there. By chance in August 1981, with a group of friends who went to a movie together, she met Max.

Comber thought Max to be “kindly, yet rather aloof and formal,” He spoke “perfect, slightly dated English … with a distinctive South German lilt.”

Six days after the movie, Comber receives a phone call. It’s Max, who says he would like to see her again. She invites him round to the flat that she is in temporarily. They talk about parallels between natural disasters and man-made disasters. A week later, there’s a tap on Comber’s door. It’s Max with a selection of vegetables that he has grown in his garden. He’s a very practical person, a tinkerer; as well as gardening, he likes “fixing things, mending things.” A week later,  Comber moves into a house she has just bought. Max visits and takes an immediate interest in it. He has ideas about what to do with it, and brings more vegetables … Comber writes that she feels “at ease in his company … perhaps I’m falling in love with him.”

Max Sebald is very proper. In Ariadne’s Thread nothing physical between him and Comber is mentioned. Instead the book depicts an intimacy of affection and an ability shared by both to take part in meandering conversations. This is one of the best books I know about a relationship of this kind.

In his essay Sur la lecture (On reading) Marcel Proust wrote this:

In reading, friendship is restored immediately to its original purity. With books there is no forced sociability. If we pass the evening with those friends—books—it’s because we really want to. When we leave them, we do so with regret and, when we have left them, there are none of those thoughts that spoil friendship: “What did they think of us?”—“Did we make a mistake and say something tactless?”—“Did they like us?”—nor is there the anxiety of being forgotten because of displacement by someone else. All such agitating thoughts expire as we enter the pure and calm friendship of reading (my translation).

In reading, we can befriend a book. At the same time we come to know a certain aspect of the book’s author. So social are we human beings that, just as with a new friend, we often want to know not just that aspect, but all about the author, his or her day-to-day social world, habits, vicissitudes. Comber’s book offers readers of W.G. Sebald some of that: in his social life Max was rather diffident, among his habits were hoarding things in case they might come in useful, among his vicissitudes were that although he was close to his grandfather he did not get along at all well with his father. Proust pointed out that an author’s self-whom-we-meet-when-reading is very different from the author’s day-to-day-social-self. Without contradicting what Proust says about relationships with books, or with authors, it seems to me that Adriadne’s Thread gives us a welcome triangulation with Sebald as Max. In her book, Comber extends the friendship we have with Sebald’s books. By identifying with her, she enables us to take part in a friendship with his social self.

When we read a piece of artistic literature, we can take it in so that it becomes a piece of our own consciousness. The accomplishment of Sebald in his prose fictions was to offer us such pieces of consciousness with, as I remember he put it, a certain density of thought. The accomplishment of Comber, in her memoir, is to write about her friendship with Sebald in the same kind of way. The book offers an intimacy with us readers such that its happenings, revelations, and thoughts, can gently become our own. It is reflective, and of a kind that we can take into our mind. Lovely!

Philippa Comber (2014). Ariadne's thread: In memory of W.G. Sebald. Norwich: Propolis.

Marcel Proust (1905). Sur la lecture. Amazon Kindle.
 

Scripting Embodied Experience: Table Manners as Written in Linens (and playing cards)

Annie Smart's set design for To the Lighthouse, Berkeley Rep

Given my thoughts last week about how understanding experience as embodied can matter to the way we model interactions, I am returning this week to my ongoing project of mapping out food interactions. I attempt this through some food infrastructure that is at once inordinately mundate and evocatively mysterious: the supports for meals that usually take the supporting role in the food dramas we enact throughout the day, such as table linens and utensils. (These jive well with my usual underdog-cheering affection for place and setting in preference to character and plot in the analysis and construction of stories.)

I am here considering a series of lines directly quoted from Chapter 17, the dinner scene in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse.  Each of these "playing cards" blocks out some movement, some table manner, some deliberate scripting of meal relationships--and I can imagine each being part of a deck of role-playing cards, for example, that might begin a compelling dinner party:

Co-opting our gadgets in the service of "the habits of long-term attentiveness": Alan Jacobs' reflections on reading

Don’t worry. In his book-length set of reflections, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (2011), Alan Jacobs is not telling us to abandon our gadgets. In a compelling section called “True Confessions” the author shares how he experienced a period of getting less and less pleasure from reading as he was reading less well and taking less time to do it, all occasioned, it seems, by a steadily greater involvement with his RSS reader and the two hundred feeds he subscribed to, along with his twitter account, numerous e-mails, and enticing iPhone apps. He did not engage in an intentional program to get back to reading long-form works. It was an interesting encounter with an e-reader, where he found himself forced to simply read a page at a time – no flipping back and forth, no becoming uncomfortable with the thick slab of unread pages on the right-hand side of the book, no slavish procedure of consulting the glossary for specialized words used in the fiction he was reading (the consultation required a few too many clicks away from the text). He found the zeal for reading he had had when much younger when he regularly read long narratives for the sheer pleasure of it. 

I find it interesting how the central idea of a book is often more clearly and fully articulated in the two or three pages at the center of the text than at other points. This seems to be the case in Jacobs’ engaging set of reflections on how reading relates to the other activities in our lives. There, Jacobs enjoins us to limit our gadget time to get back to the deep engagement that books afford, especially fiction, not because any particular work is good for us, but because the absorption itself is good for us. He reports being remarkably impressed with the novelist David Foster Wallace’s 2005 commencement address, where the crucial point is that “learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience” (cited on p. 85). 

Jacobs argues that absorption in long-form narratives is training for exercising control over what we pay attention to in many other areas, and especially in how successfully we pay attention to our own mental events: “to read in this utterly absorbed way… is to collaborate with a book on the conquest of time. The book you read – or whatever you read—becomes your ally and your chief support as you take ownership of your inner space and banish those forces that would rule your consciousness” (p. 89). For Jacobs, it is not our duty to simply to let go of our gadgets. 

What he’s recommending is much more subtle and life-invasive than that. He would have us creatively co-opt them in the more challenging pursuit of developing “habits of long-term attentiveness” (p. 82), which in turn re-organize and reassess the contributions of each of these apps to our thinking, planning, and enjoyment of life. 

Jacobs, Alan. (2011). The pleasures of reading in an age of distraction. New York: Oxford University Press.

Quick Hits: Daily habits of famous writers

Maria Popova over at Brain Pickings has a fascinating post on the daily habits of famous writers. By pulling relevant quotes from interviews published in The Paris Review, Popova manages to capture just how much diversity there is in approaching writing by these authors. Fascinated by this diversity in daily routine, she wondered whether there might be a relation between the sleeping habits of writers and their productivity. To explore this, she enlisted the help of an Italian information designer to create an infographic that visualizes the two variables. The full post is worth reading, so I won't ruin it for you. Both efforts reflect a desire that I think is common in writers. Since many struggle to write, we endeavour to understand just how the others manage to "do it." 

The interviews upon which she drew for this data include, as might be expected, many gems of advice. Take, for example, E. B. White's proclamation that "A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper." 

In ending this post, I will leave you with an excerpt from an interview with Maya Angelou, who left us so recently but will never be forgotten. 

"I write in the morning and then go home about midday and take a shower, because writing, as you know, is very hard work, so you have to do a double ablution. Then I go out and shop — I’m a serious cook — and pretend to be normal. I play sane — Good morning! Fine, thank you. And you? And I go home. I prepare dinner for myself and if I have houseguests, I do the candles and the pretty music and all that. Then after all the dishes are moved away I read what I wrote that morning. And more often than not if I’ve done nine pages I may be able to save two and a half or three. That’s the cruelest time you know, to really admit that it doesn’t work. And to blue pencil it. When I finish maybe fifty pages and read them — fifty acceptable pages — it’s not too bad. I’ve had the same editor since 1967. Many times he has said to me over the years or asked me, Why would you use a semicolon instead of a colon? And many times over the years I have said to him things like: I will never speak to you again. Forever. Goodbye. That is it. Thank you very much. And I leave. Then I read the piece and I think of his suggestions. I send him a telegram that says, OK, so you’re right. So what? Don’t ever mention this to me again. If you do, I will never speak to you again. About two years ago I was visiting him and his wife in the Hamptons. I was at the end of a dining room table with a sit-down dinner of about fourteen people. Way at the end I said to someone, I sent him telegrams over the years. From the other end of the table he said, And I’ve kept every one! Brute! But the editing, one’s own editing, before the editor sees it, is the most important."