The Topic of Exchange Between Human Beings

This has been my favourite piece of fiction of the last few weeks: Omar Aziz's "A Discussion Paper on the Local Councils in Syria." Calling Aziz' urgent and practical paper, shared posthumously among revolutionary organisations across Syria, a "fiction" may seem derogatory, as if I were calling it a lie. But I mean the word in its richest sense: an imaginative extension of real circumstances, a carefully-structured narrative of potential change. Signifiers of reportage are common in work published as fiction, from Daniel Defoe's cross-genre work to Jennifer Egan's use of PowerPoint in A Visit from the Goon Squad, setting up a framework for the reader's reality-testing. Even (or perhaps, most especially) speculative fiction employs the language and even layout of the newspaper or the scientific report, as - magisterially - in Christa Wolf's "Self-Experiment: Appendix to a Report" (jstor sign-in required, alas).

But what if we take the reverse proposition for consideration? That part of the work done by essays, science experiments, and even news articles, is that they are fictions: not only in the Frankfurt School sense that they emerge from (and cannot stand outside) social constructions, but if we imagine them as, like all human acts, powerful wish-fears. And beyond that: as proposals for realisation within the imagination first. When we read about a new scientific development or proposal for a government bill, or even the agenda for a meeting, we envision/construct/imagine it ahead of its taking place - or imagine its implications and consequences for ourselves and others. Even watching actuality, we are in the realm of fiction (not as in Baudrillard's negatory "welcome to the desert of the real" take, only): we are interpreting others' emotions, putting forth hypotheses, seeing around the edges of the frame.

It's this imaginative action that I'm so drawn to in Aziz' paper: that it so powerfully connects pragmatic reality with utopian ideology. In particular, the repeated articulation that the actions of revolution form revolutionary subjects. You can't, he suggests, pre-claim yourself as revolutionary, or deny that others are revolutionaries: it's a doing, not a being. In fact, its only being is in action: it finds its form and meaning through the strategic collectivities - talking, thinking, imagining together - that he proposes. We need fictions to help us walk out in fear, and to change the story as told by the government and media.

But most stories of revolution focus only on violent ways of becoming, or on the traumatic violence that causes a collective or individual break, or on the heroic individual (often forged in violence) -- and not on the collective and interconnected social formations that emerge from this, or how. We are socially conformed to narratives shaped and paced by adrenal charge, or to a verisimilitude that is stylised to the point of caricature. Who wants to read a bunch of people sitting around in a room talking - even if what they're talking about is what, as Aziz argues, replaces the security of the state, the fear of whose loss (even though the security itself is unequal and faulty, if not entirely a fantasmatic construction) is what keeps people from engaging in revolutionary action?

Educator Paolo Freire proposed a distinction between organisation and control that's as useful a way of thinking about how an artistic experience works on us as readers/viewers as it is of thinking about how the state works on us. Hard and fast distinctions between fictional and factual writing, with negative and positive values attached respectively, are where state and aesthetic control meet. This is pervasive in Anglocentric thinking (although frequently attributed to totalitarian Soviet 'socialist realism'). The recent, much-hyped-by-liberal-writers findings by Emanuele Castano and David Kidd, that literary fiction improves readers' empathy (compared to genre fiction) is a peculiar example of this: under the guise of claiming value for fiction, it actually solidifies unhelpful distinctions (literary fiction is a genre, and not all of it is well-written or psychologically accurate because it universalises) - but also remands the work of art and literature to the zone of affect.

Or rather, disconnects affective intelligence from political and social intelligence. The idea that fiction makes us feel and factual writing makes us think is a way of preventing us from really doing either. The topic of exchange between human beings is never purely empathic or purely political: it's where subjectivity and sociality meet. We need to think with both.

Paranoia in Translation, or Lisbeth Salander in the Land of Green Plums

Actually, this post could equally be called Schizophrenia in Translation: the sensation that derives from reading two (very different) books concurrently to the point that they seem, if not to merge, then to be deeply intertwined (litzophrenia?). Not that I'm looking to make light of mental illness by using terms like paranoia and schizophrenia out of context, but sometimes an encounter with a book will remind me what a weird process reading actually is -- that sitting silently over some marks on woodpulp, muttering and laughing to oneself while entering into a fantastical world and often into the persona of an invented person, is a pretty wacky thing to do.

It's hard to stand outside reading as an activity: I've been doing it since literally before I can remember anything else. One of my first and only toddler memories is of putting together the blobs on a flashcard into a word. Après ça, there was no stopping me: by the time I was in infant school, I was teaching the other kids to read. I think my mindbrain has probably been so shaped by reading that it's what I am in the same way that Usain Bolt's musculature and neurons have been sculpted by running. Culturally, reading has pretty much set in for the long haul. We all (84% of UK 16-65 year olds in the UK have literacy at GCSE grade G or above) do it inadvertently from the cereal box to the end credits every day, and many of us do it advertently (a word? And if not, why not?) most days as well.

Maybe it's because I've been hitting the poetry like a poetaholic (with events at PoetryFilm and at Keats House for Brittle Star, and reviews due to Staple) that I contracted reading-dissociation when I switched back to novels -- and a big fat novel at that, purchased especially for a weekend of train journeys and a solo hotel stay. I'm hardly the first person to be bowled over by Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (an established fact, since half the people at PEN have been telling me to read it for at least a year), but I might be one of the least likely. After (because of? despite?) a brief (and disturbing) devotion to the work of Andrew Vacchs when I was about sixteen, and an obsessive interest in Twin Peaks and The X Files, I have never been much for thrillers, either in codex or on celluloid.

Both my parents were big with the mysteries, 'tec series and all things investigative, but my love of noir begins and mostly ends with Laura (a major influence on Twin Peaks). That's right: I don't have the hots for Hitchcock, and I've no remorse for yawning at Morse. It's a failing, I think, as a reader, to exclude a genre from your library, but Delirium's mystery/thriller shelf is entirely reserved for the splendid Sherlock Holmes, a detective I encountered almost as early as I began reading (those shadowy semi-memories of The Hound of the Baskervilles starring Basil Rathbone as Holmes still give me nightmares). I've tried Rebus and Whimsy and Wallander and Dirk Gently, and no-one has ever come close to the idiosyncracy and intellect, the conviction and addiction, of Holmes (especially Jeremy Brett in the role).

But I have to confess: Lisbeth Salander, the eponymous "girl with the dragon tattoo" comes close. Despite Larsson's info-dumping, despite the financial shenanigans that make as much sense to me as Ikea self-assembly diagrams, even despite the relentless snö (and equally persistent mosquitös) that falls on all Scandi detectives, I found myself hooked until 3 am, reading with the covers drawn up to my chin -- except when I leapt out of bed to check the door was locked. I couldn't sleep until I finished the book, and then I couldn't sleep some more. If my bag hadn't been full with a print-out of my own novel (which I'd promised myself I'd edit on the train home, come hell or inconveniently located rabbis), I would have bought The Girl Who Played With Fire in WH Smith's in Manchester Piccadilly station that very morning (possibly even before breakfast at the excellent Koffee Pot).

Because here's the thing: I don't read thrillers because they *get* me. Rewatching The X Files (series 1-3 1/2) recently, I found myself almost choking on my fingernails even in episodes that I'd seen half-a-dozen times before. I suffer from what's known in my household as "narrative tension." Hell, I couldn't even watch Sense and Sensibility at the cinema without getting fahrklempt about whether Marianne would see that Alan Rickman, I mean Colonel Brandon, was infinitely superior to stupid-haired Willoughby. And I'd read the book only six months previously (I also clearly have an appallingly lax narrative memory). I'm like the goldfish in Ani Difranco's song for whom the little plastic castle / is a surprise every time. Or a terrifying shock.

It's not so much about guessing whodunit as worrying in every fibre of my being about who's going to be next and what horrible defilement will be described. Worrying, I suppose, that I'll be next. Larsson's thrillers fit very much in grim miserablist realism tradition of writers like Ian Rankin where a city like this harbours people like you living next door to psychos like him. Not so much plausible deniability as undeniable plausibility. Larsson's obsession with Ikea furniture may be a running footnote on the commercialisation of Scandi design, but it's also an arrow pointing at our own living rooms (and particularly at the Swedish airport minimalism of the hotel room where I was holed up). What with financial crashes, banker bonuses and inter-generational sexual abuse, Dragon Tattoo felt like reportage as much as fiction -- and who doesn't feel tense thinking about how the house of cards (economic, political, environmental) is about to crash down on us?

Despite the expertly-generated tension, the novel lacked two aspects that mar most thrillers for me: punitive manipulation of reader expectations (and of vulnerable female characters), and stupidity dressed up as fearlessness (goading the reader to follow the investigative character into the darkness). It also lacked any sympathy for, or glamorisation of, the killer(s), and in a way any curiosity about them. They were dead space, plausibly drawn characters exerting zero narrative fascination rather than the devilish figure who haunts so many contemporary thrillers. Coupled to that lack of interest is an abiding, energising fascination with -- and fury about -- the systems of fear that make possible sexual abuse and murder, and the silence surrounding them. Industry, politics, the law, the family, the state: these are the real abusers in Larsson's books, the facilitators who empower the bit-part players who carry out the social will, whom Salander fights against with every sinewy ounce of her 4"11 being (Kate Mosse made the point well in a Guardian review entitled (although it's lost its title online) The Man Who Liked Women). I've never encountered a mainstream fictional work that lays out as clearly the effects of state power, in particular its impact on those considered less than full agents of the state: women, children, those with (perceived or actual) disabilities, those who dissent.

OK, Larsson was no Herta Müller and contemporary Sweden is not Communist Romania, but I can't help feeling that their books have something in common -- and not just because I've been reading The Land of Green Plums this weekend as well (props to Haringey Libraries, incidentally, for having a copy of the Nobel prize-winner's book, which is incidentally out of print). It's a book so powerful that I had to return it to the library the minute I finished reading it: not just because I wanted other people to have the chance to read it, but because it felt dangerous to be carrying it, as if it were one of the banned books that the characters hide in the summer house. Or even as if it might infect me with the green plum-death or cancerous nut or the dream of the sack that variously afflict characters. It's an extremely calm nightmare of a book, where the narrative tension happens on a word-by-word level, as if the novel is in code. There's no secret who the bad guy is (the state and its agents) even as the protagonist investigates every detail of her life exhaustively to find it/him out, but almost any character could be a spy, even Elsa the white cat, creating an extraordinary atmosphere of anxiety, as in the novels of Ismail Kadare (although unlike Kadare, Müller does not see women's genitalia as both the salvation and betrayal of every man).

In both books (both of which are, of course, in translation, by Reg Keeland and Michael Hofmann repectively), the tense mood of the thriller and the anxiety of the reader act as political critiques, engendering the desire for relief through change. In both, the female protagonist is almost unbearably unknowable, courageously unpredictable, and hyper-alert to the tentacular enemy with which she battles. Or maybe I'm just hyper-alert to their similarities after my weekend of sleepless paranoia, and hyper-alert too to the possibilities of thrillers to challenge my thinking, and experimental novels to have me on the edge of my seat.

The Winter Vault

In a sense, this is a DL book because it has been imaginatively on my shelf since I finished Fugitive Pieces -- I have imagined it each time I re-read Michaels' earlier work. Its presence became more anxious when I saw a sung performance of her libretto for The Passion of Lavinia Andronicus, which made me feel ill in its replication of violence against women as high art. Anyway, I'd much rather be writing about why orphans have become the hot new thing in film and fiction (more on that soon): for now, my review of Winter Vault because I have to get it off my chest and I'm sick of listening to all the simpering about how wonderful the book is because it dares to tackle important topics using poetic language.

*

@Caroline McElwee mentions her commonplace book when reviewing this novel: I have to say that The Winter Vault read like a commonplace book to me: beautifully turned phrases (and some that are gramatically opaque: why does Michaels have such a problem using parts of the verb 'to be') are beautiful to the exclusion of all else. Often, I felt that the narrative had been shaped to hinge around these insights rather than their emerging from the characters.

I have nothing against aphoristic fiction, but I feel that this patina of linguistic elegance detracts from the moral seriousness that the novel wishes to convey in its catalogue of displacements: in fact, these aphorisms are one more displacement, in this case for action, relation, engagement, life. The characters are languid indeed: almost doll-like in their perverse unreeling of memories, spoken in highly stylised paragraphs.

Sorry: amendment. The male characters. Michaels appears to have taken as fact John Berger's bizarre and essentialist belief that women function ONLY to salve men's wounds by being receptive (or receptacles). Women are the wound, for Berger, and this openness makes them the healing ear/cunt that men need. Which is absolute bullshit -- and as the narrative principle in The Winter Vault, it's not only false but squeamishly so. I started to wonder if Jean's mother had died to get away from the endless drone of her husband's voice -- which pursues her even in her grave. By the end I was so sick of the sound of the Avery's and Lucjan's voices I wished they would disappear instead of all the people whose disappearances they mourn (yet do nothing about).

Ah yes: the disappeared. Michaels writes with statistical precision about the displacement of Nubians from the area that is now covered by Lake Nasser, and the similar removal of villages along the St. Lawrence Seaway. She writes with more emotive drama about the emptying of Warsaw, which echoes material in Fugitive Pieces. Perhaps it's that she's on less confident ground with the material in the first section, but it is frequently distributed in paragraphs with no narrative anchor - no voice or point-of-view implied or stated - and so feels like chunks of regurgitated textbook. Like the aphorisms, it lacks roots in the characters.

I wonder if this is because the author is, in some way, aware that her chosen displacements are themselves narrative displacements, choices that (struggle to) conceal two other historical mass movements and destructions beneath them: in the case of the Nubians, I constantly felt the (unaddressed) echo of the Nakba at the other end of the Nile; in the case of the St. Lawrence Seaway, the much more massive and total displacement of the areas' First Nations, whom Michaels mentions in a glancing aside.

She asserts that they were themselves interlopers of recent vintage, having walked across the landbridge twenty thousand years ago (disproved by far older fossil records discovered recently) -- as if that makes the colonial displacement and genocide more acceptable, making way for a) the sentimental apprehension of the villages that are washed away, few of which could be more than 100 years old and b) the all-too-familiar gesture by which the white settlers become "indigenous" (doubled by the parallel of the Nubians and the white Canadians) and holders of native knowledge, perpetrated through Jean's collection of her mother's seeds.

I did feel in two minds about this novel for a while, partially out of loyalty to Michaels' earlier work -- I have read Fugitive Pieces and The Weight of Oranges many, many times -- and partially out of a respect and hunger for serious, eloquent, involved and attentive writing. But the torch has passed: while Michaels was almost alone as an Ondaatje female impersonator in 1997, we now have writers of the calibre of Kamila Shamsie, whose recent Burnt Shadows makes as explicit use of The English Patient as Michaels made of In the Skin of a Lion in Fugitive Pieces. Moreover, Shamsie critiques the ethical violence of Ondaatje's poetic style when she extends the story beyond the suspended ending of The English Patient to imagine that which Ondaatje leaves out (marriage, childbirth, postcolonial life, dailiness, the present, women as actual characters) in his fastidious ellipses and allusive phrasemaking.

Loyalty, as Jean discovers, is not enough: you listen and listen and the speaker kicks you out when he's used you up. It's too extreme to say that I feel dispossessed by The Winter Vault, because I doubted it could reach the heights - the exactness, the incendiary images, the perceptive characters - of Fugitive Pieces. Without those qualities, this is collection of beautiful words: a vault of dried seeds with no ground to stand on.

Sensitive Modernism

Frost in May by Antonia White, Land of Spices by Kate O'Brien, Saraband by Eliot Bliss (a nom-de-plume; although oddly it's the "Eliot" that's adopted, not the Bliss) ... Forgotten Modernist classics (all republished by Virago) connected by teenage girls' hearts aflame with Catholic school and lesbian desire. But these are no L-Word meets the Chalet School. Along with novels by Elizabeth Bowen and Rose Macaulay (especially the wonderful The World My Wilderness), these novels approach adolescent girls' desire in a totally unique way.

While James Joyce's heady Portrait of Stephen Dedalus' becoming is widely-read and highly regarded, these novels fell out of favour despite being popular (incredibly so, in the cases of Frost and Bowen) when originally published. It's the old double standard, of course, where an account of masculinity is supposedly of universal interest, whereas an account of femininity has limited itself to a niche.

But these books offer an incredible portrait of what could be called sensitivity or sensibility, something finer, harder, clearer, rangier, fierier, more elemental than the word "sentimental" with which Suzanne Clark tags them. "Sentimental" suggests heaving bosoms and fluttering hankies, a show of attentuated emotion (it's hard to really cry when you're wearing a corset) that conforms to the "angel in the house." The young women in these novels are defiantly unsentimental; they look balefully on their mothers, resist all attempts at femininity like dresses or good behaviour, and have little time for young men. They are artists, musicians, writers, all caught in a moment of potential.

White, O'Brien and Bliss all use the sensations of listening to classical music (a space where the sacred and profane edge into each other) to describe and analogise the flood of feeling each of their protagonists experiences as she comes to consciousness of herself -- in each case, through a nascent desire for a schoolfriend, slightly older, somewhat exotic (tempestuous Spanish girls in both Frost in May and O'Brien's Of Music and Splendour). Homoerotic desire, the rapture of music, and the sense of oneself as an artist are all bound up for these young women.

They are -- and are mocked by adults for being -- exquisitely sensitive. But that's what makes these books so wonderful, as descriptions of their own writers' deep and broad sensitivities to the world, both internal and external. The books are all-involving reading experiences, but also stilling. Unlike most contemporary fiction, they are not driven by incident, but rather feeling as an internal narrative pacing. Their language is sensuous but never indulgent, attuned to adolescent excess of sensation in each fresh encounter with the world. And their expressions of desire are deeply felt without being blunt. Through their layered evocations of the rarefied world of Catholic schooling, they catch the dense and infolded nature of first love, a secret that each protagonist can barely admit to herself -- even as she feels it suffusing her whole being.

Awkward and graceful, knowing and naive, investigative and inward, these are the first teenagers in the literary canon and - inarticulate and fiercely expressive -- they have so much to say to us about how desire enmeshes us not just with one person, but through that person with the sensate world.

New Blog, Old Books

... which was always the intention of this blog, but being Delirium sometimes the excitement of the new and curious overtakes the best of intentions. Here at DL I've begun the new year by admitting to myself that my knowledge of books written before I was born is, erm, slightly selective despite having studied English Literature at university for about a thousand years. I largely skipped eighteenth and nineteenth century fiction, and admit to some bourgeois/humanist anxiety about the fewness of the European classics in translation on my shelf. Unlike my friend Steve, I don't have the iron will to conceive a program of reading including a moratorium on the new, but I am trying, piecemeal, to spend some time with the Classics shelf in the bookstore.

And it's very seductive, not least because it's one of the few places that classic paperback design persists, with the elegant black Penguin Classics spines dominating at my local independent bookstore (I never liked the garish yellow and red of the 1990s Oxford World Classics redesign). Penguin is rightly celebrated for its excellence in book design, which makes its venture into ridiculous celebrity cover art (Manolo Blahnik for Madame Bovary) seem slightly childish, totally a product of Blair's obsessive "Brand Britain" type of design fetishism. Meanwhile, in the background, they continue to provide an astonishing kaleidoscope of foundational texts from many cultures, including a new translation of the Shahnama (Persian Book of Kings).

That's one for another day. At the moment, my lacuna-filling has brought me to George Eliot. I tried to read Mill on the Floss when I was eighteen, and threw it out of a coach window after about seventy pages. Boooooooooring. Bonnets and Pilgrim's Progress and moors. Where was the wuthering? In the spirit of Alice, I found it hard to see the point of a book with no shagging and no pop culture references. I was obsessed with Kathy Acker, the Sandman, and Michael Ondaatje. I wanted wild poetry, rebellion, experimentation, and general naughtiness.

George Eliot, though, she knew all about naughtiness: how it lives in the smallest acts of rebellion. How it has to stay small in a society as constrictive as hers. And how, in a society where women could only be bodies, perhaps the greatest act of transgression was to stay true to a life of the mind. That's what I learnt from Middlemarch, which I read on something of a dare by my friend Kate. It took me nearly two weeks of reading several hours a day, but I got obsessed with it: not so much with Dorothea but with the catty, arch voice of the omniscient narrator which seemed to speak for/from Dorothea's secret heart. I did in fact once play Dorothea in a play set after the end of Middlemarch, but never read the book. What I mainly remember from that play is the sense of constriction, and the childlikeness attributed to her, which I can now see as misogynistic bobbins. Although everyone considers her unworldly, I find Dorothea - certainly by the end of the novel - one of the most grown-up characters I've ever encountered. Her seriousness of purpose is breathtaking.

Romola, which I'm reading now, seems like a sketch for a novel focused on a serious woman. It's not considered one of the Eliot canon (except by Henry James, who loved the Florentine setting - and probably the tortuous sentence structures) but there's a perverse pleasure in its oddness, the way in which Medicean Florence is turned into Middlemarch, with its churchy faction and its bold young men, its dry scholars and beautiful country women. Romola is a Dorothea who married Lydgate, a serious young woman discovering that a bold, popular young man in probably extremely shallow. It's fascinating to see the pieces played differently.

But it's more of an academic exercise than a pleasurable fiction. My current pleasure read is Alberta and Freedom by Cora Sandel, perhaps Norway's most celebrated woman novelist. I had never even HEARD of her until I encountered a new edition of Alberta in the Galignani bookstore in Paris, which is a treasure trove and possibly heaven. I'd never been there before and it was good enough to distract me from the promise of "Paris' best hot chocolate" at Angelique's next door, which looked like something out of Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoninette.

Alors, Alberta. Cora. According to the introduction to Virago's English translation, they are one and the same: a Norwegian woman who has fled a marriage to learn French in Paris, writing occasionally and modelling for artists. It's Paris between the wars, the literary era that most makes me wish for a time machine, and Alberta is part Jean Rhys and part Jean Seberg. There's something in both the mordant observation and cultivation of solitude that reminds me of Tove Jansson.

Is it a Scandinavian thing? I haven't read enough Scandi literature to know. Will I ever? Delirium's Library stretches to the vanishing point...