James Gould Cozzens, ‘Castaway’ (1934)

Something has happened in the outside world, although we’re not told what. This is how the book opens:

Supported against the stair rail, Mr Lecky might have been sick; but his stomach was empty. When he retched all that rose was a bloodwarm lump—perhaps his heart bounced on the firm spurt of his terror … his utmost mental feat was to recognise, as he finally did, that he had reached the basement of the department store. [3]

He’s listening out for ‘running footsteps, the brush or bump of a quick search for him’. So: he’s being chased, or at least believes that he is. The department store is empty of people. Something in the world outside has changed: ‘there was nothing in sight and no more sound than before; yet his impression of something happening, some important change in progress, had been no illusion’ [5]. Lecky flees through the store, smashes the glass case that contains the shotguns (shotguns for sale in a department store: ah ... America!) and, armed, finally calms down enough to realise that he is hungry.

Most immediately at hand was one side of a bright pyramid of shelves surrounding a pillar. They were entirely filled, he saw, amazed, with sardines. In jars, with olive oil, with lemon and truffles: French fish in tins; Bordelaise; boneless and skinless; Portuguese packings; smoked Norwegian Bristling; sardines in wine sauce, in every shape of tin and glass. … He began to snatch them while he moved in a nervous anguish of greed, disclosing to himself the pyramid’s right size. This was black with caviar in glass of descending size. [21]

He makes a den for himself in one of the store toilets, barricading the entrance with ‘a number of heavily upholstered chairs’ [36] from the furniture department. What has happened outside? We’re not told, but we might take this paragraph to be suggesting some kind of collective madness, perhaps involving (there are scattered hints as to this) cannibalism:

A great evil—no more to be named than met, to be escaped—waited fairly close. … About his madmen Mr Lecky was no more certain. He knew less than the little to be learned of the causes or even of the results of madness. Yet for practical purposes one can imagine all that is necessary. As long as maniacs walk like men you must come close to them to penetrate so excellent a disguise. Once close, you have joined the true werewolf. [46]

One day Lecky encounters a stranger in the store (‘the person he saw faced the other way … twisting back on its key the cover of a sardine tin … he instantly dug out the contents with his fingers, thrust the animal-like, into his concealed mouth’ [50]). Lecky shoots and wounds this person, afterwards pursuing him through the store. He catches up with him as he crawls towards the stairwell, collapsing on the top step. Lecky kicks his body down the stairs, ‘sent it tumbling to the bottom, where it brought up, supported against the stair rail’ [73].

Lecky spends quite a lot of this novel making his way through the store, lingering over various items (the perfume department makes him think of ‘women, young but unlovely and unloved, women, whatever they had been, now at the end of it, and ruined by years or thickened to caricature by fat, ought to be the ones called to mind by perfumes. But they were not. Lecky held the bottle in his hand a long while’ [92]). A bell starts ringing, somewhere below: a ‘sinister, never-explained bell’ [100]. In addition to his lavatory-redoubt, Lecky makes for himself a dining room and a bedroom from what the store avails him. 

Eventually he decides to go down to the basement to see what the ringing is all about. Here he encounters the body of the intruder, lifts it and turns it over to discover, in a Prisoner-esque touch that—you're ahead of me here, aren't you—it is himself.

The moral seems to be: the thing that keep us from contentment, even in the midst of all our modern plenty and wealth, is our terror of ‘the others’, which is really a terror of ‘the Other’, which turns out to be a terror of ourselves. Is this profound, or only faux-profound? There’s perhaps a proto-Ballardian quality to the conceit here, although Cozzens' novel is more fruitily written, and less barren in its vision that Ballard. That debateable land between science-fiction, horror, allegory and roman à these.

So, yes: James Gould Cozzens. Until a couple of years ago I had, to my shame, never heard of him. In his time people seriously pondered whether he was the greatest living American novelist; multiple Pulitzers, considered for the Literature Nobel (until he made it plain he would reject it if offered). Why has he dropped so comprehensively off the radar? I'm wondering (and of course my own left-wing political views will bias my sense of things) whether he was just on the wrong side of the political divide—the triumphs of the 20th century were progressive after all: feminism, fighting racism, the liberalisation of sexual life, embracing diversity. Cozzens was not just right-wing, he was right-wing in a way that misinforms his condition-of-America novels of the necessary grounds of their mimesis. Perhaps he simply missed the larger point of the age through which he lived. There are other right-wing writers still in general esteem, of course; but conceivably those sorts of figures either happened to fall in with the grain of the age; so, Kipling's Kim (amongst others) shows a deep fascination with and joy in multiculturalism, for example. Or else writers who were right-wing in way that seems centre or even centre-left today (Updike maybe). That said, there’s also Saul Bellow … 

My ignorance of even the existence of this writer was punctured when a few years back, randomly curious, I was in a charity shop and picked up an old ‘Writers and Critics’ introductory volume on him from 1964.

From this slim volume I learned that, after a below-the-radar career through the 30s and 40s, Cozzens unexpectedly hit the big time with a novel called By Love Possessed (1957), a bestseller which was ‘condensed for Reader’s Digest (£100,000)’—isn’t that a splendidly of-its-era datum!—and which sold film rights for $200,000. D.E.S. Maxwell notes that this one novel ‘advanced Cozzens from decently successful obscurity to popular acclaim and the fastidious regard of critics previously indifferent to him.’ This latter proved a double-edged sword: left-wing critics soon lined-up to attack him for his imaginative paucity, his ‘morbid or neurotic fear of life’ and for his tendency to praise ‘conformity, the safely patriotic “American virtues”’. Maxwell is superbly, not to say hilariously, high-handed and baroque in his dismissal of these brickbats:

Examining the argument more closely, however, it is clear that the real issue is not the imaginative lesion at which these critics ostensibly cavil. Certain of their own preconceptions are at work. … Cozzens being, for considered reasons suspicious of the blither liberal optimisms, finds himself, despite the manifest angularities and reticences of his conservatism, identified with the extremists of the right … where even such lightweights as John O’Hara and John Steinbeck come in for a reasonable share of earnest attention, Cozzens is ignored.

Yeah, Steinbeck, you lightweight! Nobel prize? What’s that?

I can’t comment on By Love Possessed which I have not, and may never, read. I picked up Castaway intrigued by its Ballardian premise, and thinking it might be a significant piece of overlooked 1930s SF. I’m not sure it is. Cozzens style is elaborate, showy, even indulgently puddingy, nothing like the utility, sometimes awkward declarative prose that works so well to situate Ballard’s various deracinating oddnesses. The obvious comparison here might be High-Rise, although the focus of that novel is on the whole community holed-up in the tall building; in fact Castaway is more like Concrete Island, which is to say, it's a Concrete Island with a larger supply of luxury consumer goods.

In fact my main thought reading this was not Ballard so much as this question: what happened to ‘Department Store Fiction’? Was that even a thing? It’s a question worth asking now that, what with Covid and (I say this not to tempt fate, but) post-Covid, it seems clear that the old culture of town-centre shopping, of collections of retail outlets clustered around one or more gigantic multi-storey department store or stores—that that’s all gone now. It’s a historical, not a current, culture. So how might we sketch the cultural discourse that put such, in their day, massive artefacts at their centre? The starting point I suppose would be Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames (1883), but what are the other key texts? Cozzens novel is 1934. What else? Are You Being Served was big in the 70s, and essentially took ‘the department store’ as a type of the whole world, its serving staff a microcosm for society more generally, and parlayed Mrs-Slocombe-feline hilarity out of its premise. James Lovegrove’s excellent though underrated Days (1997) is a late example of the mode, more properly Ballardian than David Croft and Jeremy Lloyd, or indeed than Cozzens. What else though?

Patricia Lockwood, "No One Is Talking About This" (2021)

 

No One is Talking About This is an ironic title, but ironic in a tricksy ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ sort of way—because the novel is about all the stuff people talk about all the time on Twitter et al, but also about how this isn’t really talking. Which is to say: it's about the way the ‘this’ people talk about all the time isn’t the actual This. This? I’ll come back to that.

So, yes: Twitter. ‘This hellsite’ we call it. Is it hell? ‘Not hell,’ says Patricia Lockwood’s narrator, ‘but some fluorescent room with eternally outdated magazines where they waited to enter the memory of history, paging through a copy of Louisiana Parent or Horse Illustrated.’ She calls Twitter ‘The Portal’ (presumably names have been changed for legal &c). To be precise, ‘The Portal’ is not just Twitter; it's everything online, especially everything to which people who are Extremely Online devote their time. But the first half of Lockwood's novel reads like a Twitter feed, and that's what interests me here.

No One is Talking About This is about ‘The Portal’ and about Real Life, and disposes itself into two parts, one for each. The first, which I enjoyed the most—atomised and tweetsaturated as my consciousness doubtless is—reproduces something of the drip-drip-drip, or smack-smack-smack, of being on Twitter all day. There’s no real story, the characters can only dimly be discerned behind the narrator’s droll, weary, rat-paw-on-the-pellet-switch persona. It’s bitty, but designedly so, and although the actual paragraphs are, taken one by one, hit and miss, I found the overall effect fascinating and striking, a kind of textual pointillism that ended up achieving a strange and compelling effect.

Then there’s a second part: the protagonist’s niece is born with ‘Proteus syndrome’, a kind of elephantiasis that causes excessive and sometimes disfiguring tissue growth. The narrator loves her niece, and the situation drags her away from the ephemerazone of the internet.

“I just don't want people to be scared of her,” her sister had said when they first received the diagnosis, but now that the baby was here the whole family had turned to a huge blue defiant stare that moved as a part through the waves, with the fear of the world curling tall on either side of them. They wanted—what?—to take the sun by the face and force it down: Look at her! Look! Shine on her! Shine! Shine!”

It’s well-written and moving, this Part 2; though I want to dwell on Part 1. But before I do that, a brief personal note. This isn’t exactly by way of ‘full disclosure’; I don’t know Lockwood, don’t have a review-dog in the fight, and haven’t read her first book, the memoir Priestdaddy, though I read a number of praising reviews. Her Parts 1 and 2 jar together somewhat awkwardly, and I take this to be deliberate. My current novel Purgatory Mount (available from all good bookshops) is likewise laminated out of two deliberately contrasting narratives, so obviously I’m not averse to writers doing interesting things with juxtaposition. More strikingly, in the coincidence derby, my next novel is also a novel about Twitter. Because it’s science fiction, in my novel Twitter (which I call ‘The This’, names having been changed for legal &c &c) may or may not be a nascent hive-mind poised to amalgamate all of humanity into a Borg-like synthesis. 

My point is that Lockwood’s two-ply novel, by juxtaposing her ‘Portal’ and ‘Real Life’, works to suggest that the former is atomising and deracinating the latter, whilst at the same time suggesting that the latter still has unifying and indeed transcendent potential. My ‘Thissy’ novel tends, I think, to suggest the opposite: Twitter only looks like it’s atomising. In fact its massively unifying: it’s ‘Life’ that is increasingly scattered, isolated, rootless. Social media glom us into one alter- and therefore self-hating blob. I do not like or trust the unifying tug. ‘Join us’ they chant, and I’ll whisper … ‘no.’ 

 Still, I enjoyed No One is Talking About This very much. Lockwood has a knack for the Twitter idiom she is inhabiting, and is especially good in finding a tone that snarks in a way that might be left-ish or right-ish, twoke or wingnutty, and is likely to irritate partisans of either wing:

Capitalism! It was important to hate it, even though it was how you got money. Slowly, slowly, she found herself moving toward a position so philosophical even Jesus couldn’t have held it: that she must hate capitalism while at the same time loving film montages set in department stores.

Revolutions—I mean actual Bolshevikky political revolutions—require above all commitment. Commitment and solidarity. Twitter is hospitable to neither.

Inside the portal, a man who three years ago only ever posted things like “I’m a retard with butt aids” was now exhorting people to open their eyes to the power of socialism, which suddenly did seem the only way.

The novel is also about Trump, of course:

Politics! The trouble was that they had a dictator now. … The problem was that the dictator was very funny, which had maybe always been true of all dictators. Absurdism, she thought. Suddenly all those Russian novels where a man turns into a teaspoonful of blackberry jam at a country house began to make sense.

We’re tempted to retort: really? Trump is clownish—although perhaps it would be more accurate to say he’s a carnival barker. Idi Amin clowned about, and Mussolini aimed for Caesarian dignity and hit pompous-ridiculous, Alexi Sayle in jackboots, which is certainly clownish. But there was nothing funny about Pol Pot, and though Stalin could be avuncular and Hitler sometimes smiled neither clowned. Big Brother is watching you, not capering for your entertainment. Or I suppose that’s Lockwood’s point. That things have changed. Big Brother found it not only impossible to stay on the far side of the one-sided viewscreen, he found it actually advantageous to be out in front of the camera with the rest of us.

Still, there are I think a few things Lockwood gets wrong, or not quite right, about our current—what shall we call it? predicament? Take this:

The amount of eavesdropping that was going on was enormous and the implications not yet known. Other people’s diaries streamed around her. Should she be listening?

But Twitter is not other people’s diaries, and the first half of No One is Talking About This does not read like a diary. This novel is a much more striking, and disconcerting, thing, I think. It’s the unending stream of other people’s apothegms. It is the aphoristic apocalypse. 

The main thing that distinguishes Lockwood’s fictional recreation of that aphoristic discourse is that her aphorisms are, by and large, witty and perceptive, where most of Twitter is either massively banal or else massively angry—although almost always angry in a banal, blinkered, hermetic kind of way.

The people who lived in the portal were often compared to those legendary experiment rats who kept hitting a button over and over to get a pellet. But at least the rats were getting a pellet, or the hope of a pellet, or the memory of a pellet. When we hit the button, all we were getting was to be more of a rat.

Every day their attention must turn, like the shine on a school of fish, all at once, toward a new person to hate. Sometimes the subject was a war criminal, but other times it was someone who made a heinous substitution in guacamole.

How dare you reveal you've been spying on me, with this thing in my hand that is an eye?

“Colonialism,” she hissed at a beautiful column, while the tour guide looked at her with concern.

As she began to type, “Enormous fatberg made of grease, wet wipes, and condoms is terrorizing London’s sewers,” her hands began to waver in their outlines and she had to rock the crown of her head against the cool wall, back and forth, back and forth. What, in place of these sentences, marched in the brains of previous generations? Folk rhymes about planting turnips, she guessed.

Excellent stuff.

Reading this made me think about the aphoristic style more generally. If it’s not too much of a stretch, I’m tempted to compare the kind of thing Lockwood is doing with Nietzsche. I’ve read reviews of No One is Talking About This that complain the first part is not only very inside-track Twitter, but very mid-period Trump-era inside-track Twitter. Which is to say: it’s liable to date quickly and catastrophically. That it's full of references that require debilitatingly specific context to work, a you-had-to-be-there quality (the fatberg, above, say). That may be true, though it’s also true, of course, of Nietzsche. We extract ‘that which does not kill us makes us stronger’ and the like from his corpus as if that’s the characteristic Nietzschean aphorism, when many more of them are, as it might be: ‘Goethe has represented in “Antonio” the scientific spirit in man as an object of provocation for all Tassos’—doubtless snappy and hilarious to an 1870s German, less so today.

There are several ways of reading Nietzsche’s aphoristic style. Perhaps (say some) his aphorisms develop the tradition's pedagogic form (since, historically speaking, aphorisms have generally been boiled-down and memorable forms of some principle or observation to be memorised) into something more exploratory, a way of reasoning with oneself and inviting the reader to exercise her own reasoning faculties unpacking and developing the thought. Others—this is the whole Blanchot and Derrida way of reading Nietzsche—argue that he was drawn to the aphorism because it is incomplete, fragmentary, because individually and in larger accumulations it deconstructs continuity and logical argumentative development, previously the mainstays of philosophical writing. A labyrinth. Blanchot compares Nietzsche to Heraclitus (whose fragmentariness is an aleatory artefact of time’s depredations, of course, not an intentional textual strategy; but that doesn’t stop Blanchot seeing Nietzsche’s aphorisms as being akin). Derrida goes further, taking all of Nietzsche’s oeuvre as consisting of separated, discontinuous sentences, such, famously, or infamously if you dislike Derrida, as the one he chanced upon in Nietzsche's notebook, in quotation marks and without further context: “I forgot my umbrella.”

What I want to suggest here is something a little different. I’m wondering if we could theorise Twitter itself as a huge, sprawling and continually refashioning sequence of aphorisms, as, that is to say, a text in the Nietzschean tradition. And, as a regular user I know that from time to time a tweet does hit the sweet spot that Lockwood captures so well in her Part 1: a tweet pops into your feed that is funny, or clever, or thought-provoking, or poignardesque, or even Nietzschean. But most of Twitter, the overwhelming majority of it, is drivel. Chaff. Irritable gestures, smugnesses, narcissisms, randomness, phatic fumbles of the finger on the iPhone typepad. But still all aphorisms. The form of the website mandates that. Which gives us a huge unspooling aphoristic megatext that is neither pedagogically worthwhile, metaphysically tantalising nor even deconstructivistically labyrinthine. That is, rather, just banal. Banal on an epic scale. A huge ongoing drama in which the aphorism has become the main vehicle for the radical, collective banalism of life today. Perhaps the reason ‘we’ (for certain metrics of ‘we’) are so addicted to Twitter is precisely because it satisfies our yearning for an aphorism of banality rather than an aphorism of profundity; an aphorism that closes down rather than discloses, that glues us together in our shared pettiness. There is something more important than this, something bigger, and Lockwood's Part 2 deals with that. Indeed, I'd hazard a guess that it was Part 2 that persuaded this year's judges to longlist the novel for the Man Booker. But it's Lockwood's Part 1 that really interests me: more apropos, perhaps even more mimetic. LOL. WinkyFaceEmoji. HashtagReadThisNovel.

Damon Galgut, "The Promise" (2021)

Here’s one promise: this review contains spoilers.

The Promise is another piece of elegantly turned Galguttian neoFaulknerism. It’s very finely written and insightfully done, and it has striking and I daresay important things to say about race relations and social change in South Africa 1984-present. Not a bag of laughs, but that’s understandable given its subject.

At any rate, it strikes me as a notably Faulknerian novel, as did the last Galgut I read, In A Strange Room (the title itself is a quotation from Faulkner), not just because specific elements from the Yoknapatawphanian scribe’s oeuvre are reworked, and not just because Galgut’s fluent, nimbly perspective-shifting prose traces similar rhythms to Faulkner’s (though it does), but in the larger sense that this is a novel about racial tension in a segregated white-run society. Maybe Faulkner is a good model to follow for a writer interested in writing about that. I suppose he is.

What specific elements? Well, The Promise struck me as a kind of midrash on As I Lay Dying. Galgut’s novel doesn’t have eighteen (or whatever it is) stream-of-consciousness narratorial focal-points — there are eight, or maybe nine, I think. But still. The book is divided into four sections, each one centred on the death of one member of a particular South African family, the Swart clan, who are, despite their ironically chosen name, not black. The Swarts are, most of them, old-fashioned, racist, white South Africans.

The book starts starts with the death of the mother. ‘My mother is a fish’, says Faulkner’s Vardaman, drilling holes into her coffin. ‘I heard that my mother is dead’ says Faulkner’s Dewey Dell. Galgut’s son character, Anton, is serving in the SA army and recently shot a woman dead as part of riot control, something about which he is hugely if secretly guilty: ‘my mother is dead,’ he thinks; ‘I killed her. I shot and killed her yesterday morning’ [36]. Amor, one of two daughters, is more direct: ‘my mother is dead and she lies inside that box’ [70]. Faulkner takes Addie’s coffin on a long physical journey. Galgut takes his novel on a long temporal one, from apartheid-era South Africa to the modern day.

The titular promise is one that dying Rachel extracts from her reluctant husband Manie: that their black servant, Salome, be given the deeds to the annex (off the family home) in which she lives — given, that is, a house of her own. Over the course of the novel this promise is ignored, or deferred, or denied (it would be strictly illegal under apartheid laws it seems; and even after the fall of that regime it seems other people might have prior claim on the whole estate, preventing Salome from inheriting).

Rachel’s death leaves behind her husband Manie and three children: Anton, Astrid and Amor. The first part of the novel, ‘Ma’, set in 1984, is an 85 page account of Rachel’s funeral. Part 2, ‘Pa’, starts with Manie ‘unconscious in the ICU at H F Verwoerd Hospital in Pretoria’. Over the following 70 pages we follow his death and funeral, events Galgut uses to give us a sense of South Africa in 1995, and we catch up, with ever-so-slightly soap-opera-y interest, with what’s happened to the other family members. Part 3, named for Astrid, tells of her death (murdered during a carjacking) and follows-through with her funeral. Finally, part 4, is named for Anton, is set in 2018, and narrates his death and its aftermath.

Some wag online — I’m not sure where I saw this, and Google’s not helping me — described this four-part novel as ‘not Four Weddings and a Funeral so much as Four Funerals and a Partheid’. There’s something in that.

Poor old Anton. In the novel’s final section he has moved back on his dead parents’ farm. He has spend decades trying to write the great South African novel, without success. Unhappily married, alcoholic, still haunted by the woman he killed when he was a kid in the army, he reels home late one night, gets into an inconclusive fight with his wife’s lover, and falls asleep. This is what he dreams:

Anton in a hotel room, trying to get money out of a safe, but the bloody thing won’t open. He tugs at it, his hands are slick and sweaty, can’t hold on to anything, and now there’s a knocking at the door. Blam blam! He freezes in fear, because the money in the safe isn’t his, he shouldn’t be here, and the person knocking doesn’t mean him well. Where will I hide?

Blam blam! The sound, some sound, yanks him from the hotel room, drops him back in his body, half capsized on the sofa at home. [246]

The anxiety-dream marks impermanence — a hotel room rather than a home, ‘he shouldn’t be here’ — that speaks both to the white presence in South Africa and something broader, more existential: we are all renting our spaces in this life, we will all die. Something is knocking on our door and it doesn’t mean us well, for it is death. The money that dream-Anton is trying to extract is what is owed to Salome, from Rachel’s promise; and it is more generally the wealth white settlers appropriated from Africa. Back in the real world nobody is knocking, though paranoid Anton takes a double-barrelled shotgun and goes patrolling the outside of the house to check. Blam blam anticipates the sound of his gun when he puts it into his mouth.

After his suicide his wife, her lover and the one surviving sister Amor converge on the farm — Amor has been away for many decades, hiding away in a different part of the country, trying to escape her family and their racist inertial past. She comes back after her brother’s death to make good, if she can, on the book’s titular promise. Desirée, Anton’s widow, offers Amor the spare bedroom but she asks to sleep in her own room: Anton had been using it as a study, so she has to clear a lot of junk away. ‘The room you grew up in is a room you never leave and Amor has been living here for forty-four years’ [275]. We all end up in a grave room we never leave.

Houses, property, the material stake people have in a country — which is wealth, among other things — is partly what this novel is about. But Galgut’s austerely existential Weltanschauung sees the epitome of all houses, and all belonging to the land, in the coffin. That’s what the room of In A Strange Room is: a coffin. Here the floating promise of a house for Salome is grounded, settled, and ultimately evaded, by a smaller ‘house’ for Rachel: ‘as they drive away, Rachel’s body is already being lifted into its final container and the lid screwed down. For ever.’ Every section begins with a key character in a house, and moves them in a coffin: Part 1 in Amor’s school, when the tannoy calls her to the headmistress’ office where she is to be informed her mother has died (‘the moment the metal box speaks her name,’ is how the novel stars, ‘Amor knows it’s happened’). Part 2 opens in an apartment in Johannesburg (‘He [Anton] has just come out of the shower when the phone rings’ [91]); part 3 in ‘a modest, two-bedroom home in the Berea area of Durban. Susan’s place’ (‘She [Amor] gets back from the hospital to an impatient message from Astrid on the answering machine’ [164]). Finally the novel returns to the family farm: ‘Anton wandering around his house’ [235]

There is much to admire in this novel, although it’s hard to love, or at least I found it so. The tone, generally one of Galgut’s strong writerly suits, wobbles ever so slightly: arch little twists when the narratorial voice addresses the reader (‘you get the idea’ and so on) and gestures that we readers are complicit with the Swartzs' attitudes, which I found a little irksome. There are occasional, jarring moments of sentimentality, as when Rachel’s ghost wanders nostalgically around her house after her death. And when the sister-in-law, obese, elderly Tannie Marina, sleeps Galgut reports her dream: ‘she’s on a picnic with P. W. Botha and he’s feeding her strawberries with thick white fingers’ [34] and it’s like: yes, we get it, she’s an old racist. I don’t mean to overplay this element, mind you: there are a great many finely observed and expertly written moments too. I don’t know though: I’m not sure it’s a novel that quite lives up to [clears throat] its promise.

Andrzej Sapkowski, "The Tower of Fools" (2002/2020)

 

Coincidentally I have just read another historical novel set in 15th-century Europe: Walter Scott’s Quentin Durward, a classic of world literature about which I wrote at, I confess, too great a length here. To turn from that to Andrzej Sapkowski’s (non-Witcher) novel The Tower of Fools (2002; translated into English by David French 2020) is to be struck by the things Sapkowski emphasises that Scott tends not to dwell-on. For example: naked ladies (‘Adèle was utterly, completely, totally naked’ [8]), amply-bosomed boatwomen (‘Reynevan did his best not to stare at her sturdy thighs, visible beneath her rolled-up skirt … her shirt clung to breasts worthy of Venus’ [84]) and sexy flame-haired witches (‘the woman was sitting with legs casually sprawled, allowing them an impressive eyeful of things normally kept covered’ [167])—not to mention sexy flame-haired lesbian witches (‘the witches were kissing passionately and voraciously … the one behind was utterly preoccupied with the breasts of the one in front, which she had pulled out of her unbuttoned blouse’ [429]). There’s also quite a bit more piss than is the case in Scott: ‘the urine matured for around two weeks in large vats’ [120]; ‘there were a great many horses, stamping their hooves in puddles of urine’ [515].

Sapkowski’s two slightly gormless but up-for-it young heroes, Reynevan and Scharley, gallop around Europe having various adventures, encountering all sorts of people, and meeting various freaks, devils, hamadryads and monsters. You can read a long way in Walter Scott without encountering a buggering werewolf (‘“as a human being it had perverted tendencies, which remains with it in wolfish form; it lies in wait for someone to drop their trousers and expose their privates—the wretch usually seizes its victim from behind, holds him fast … and then … you understand”’ [218; ellipses in original]). You will be relieved to know that this creature is dealt with promptly: ‘a punch on the nose made the werewolf howl’.

Every cliché of medieval-set historical fiction is supplied: people carouse in taverns, old hags cackle, brigands roar, sinister priests plot. ‘The black knight thundered at them with upraised sword and cloak flowing behind, so fast he was tossing up divots of turf’ [452]. The Hussite wars are raging, the Inquisition is torturing people—‘red hot irons, and the standard strappado and screws on the fingers and toes’ [231]—and there’s a lot of violence and death, all described with a kind of gurning, adolescent glee:

The ball struck Ekkehard of Sulz in the chin and tore off his head. A fountain of blood gushed from the neck of the advocate of the anti-Hussite crusade; his head slapped against the wall of the barn, rolled across the field, finally coming to rest in the grass, its dead eyes watching the dogs as they sniffed it. [290]

And let’s not forget the constant supply of ladies who are not only naked, but utterly, completely, totally naked (‘her small round breasts with nipples hard with desire, her slim waist, her shyly clenched thighs, full, beautiful’ [446]). Scott, it’s not.

The Ingenious Gentlewoman Florence Foster Jenkins of La Mancha

We watched Stephen Frears’ 2016 Florence Foster Jenkins the other night. It’s an enjoyable movie, sometimes funny, always charming, with a splendid main performance by Meryl Streep that expertly balances real pathos with actual ridiculousness, and sterling support from Hugh Grant doing his Hugh Grant act (the film includes yet another splendid scene of Hugh Grant Dancing Badly, which has clearly become a thing). Simon Helberg, also up there on the poster, does less well, I’d say: over-playing his character: mugging and exaggerating his role. Less is more for this kind of comedy I think. But the movie has some splendid moments, not least a doubled-up The Producers-style punchline. First Cosmé McMoon (Helberg’s character), hired to accompany Jenkins on the piano, walks into her luxury hotel room for the first time believing her to be a proper singer and realises, as the rehearsal proceeds, how dreadful she is. And then, later in the movie, there’s a repetition of this on a larger scale: Jenkins has hired Carnegie Hall and a large audience turns up to hear her sing (badly). The audience are mostly in on the joke this second time round though, so this scene doesn’t have the sheer glory of the moment in Brooks’ film when the curtain falls on the first scene of Springtime For Hitler and the camera pans across an absolutely silent audience, every jaw slack and every eye wide. But there’s some of the same pleasure to be had here.

About halfway through our collective watch, my daughter asked: ‘but doesn’t she realise now bad her singing is?’ This, it seems to me, is the really interesting thing about Florence Foster Jenkins, and what, in one sense at least, elevates it above The Producers. I mean The Producers is a sort of masterpiece, don’t get me wrong. Still, it is a film that can comprehend only three kinds of character: the innocent (Bloom), the schemer (Max Bialystock is really quite a simple figure: in thrall to his appetites — ‘if you got it baby, flaunt it!’ — and desperately casting-about for a way, howsoever shady, to indulge them) and the actively bonkers (several characters in this film are hilariously deranged of course). There’s something that Frears’ film does that is both fascinating and insightful, in a way that goes beyond the simple generation of laughs.

I’d put it this way: Frears’ Florence Foster Jenkins is a version of Cervantes’ Don Quixote.

There’s, perhaps, a less commendable gendered aspect to this. Quixote flees the oppressive, depressing mundanity of reality into a fantasy life and it’s riding around as a knight errant, fighting giants and freeing slaves. Florence Foster J. does the same thing, but it’s dressing up in pretty frocks and singing for applause. I’m not convinced that reality-fugitive fantasy falls quite so neatly into boy/girl-coloured boxes for actual boys and girls, actual men and women in the world. But put that on one side for a moment.

I’ll say something very obvious about Cervantes’ 1605 novel: it is not really a story about the comic misadventures of a loony who thinks he’s living a real-life chivalric romance, accompanied by his trusty, unillusioned sidekick Sancho Panza. Which is to say, the novel obviously is about that: a series of episodes based on that premise and those characters. Read on this level the book is sometimes entertaining, although it is also (we can be honest) often over-extended and tiresome, and the whole thing is too samey and broken-backed to really work as a novel, for all that it retains its place in the panetheon as a timeless classic of European literature etc etc. But there’s something else going on in this text, and it’s exactly about Cervantes’ relationship to ‘the novel’.

So: one of the things that ‘the novel’ innovates, in terms of representation, is the interiority of characterisation, or more precisely the sense that characters are complex rather than simple entities (Shakespeare also does this of course, and there’s a book to be written on the way the 17th- and 18th-century habits of reading Shakespeare’s plays as quasi-novels fed into the development of le roman as such. But not to get distracted). In pre-medieval and medieval romance, allegory or epic narrative, characters are what they are: heroes are heroic, villains are villanous, not only action but subjectivity is exteriorised (epic doesn’t ‘do’ interiority: I talk about this a little here). But then along comes the novel, and in particular the development of the Bildungsroman (from the later eighteenth-century, if you believe Franco Moretti), and now character becomes understood in a new way. It is no longer typologically ‘fixed’, no longer an iteration of a divinely-gifted and therefore fundamentally unchangeable ‘soul’ (unchangeable except along one axis, sin/repentence); it is now something dynamic, a process, a growth, an iteration of change, and moreover something that contains multitudes, complexities, even contradictions and paradoxes. Then we’re on the road to the nineteenth-century dramatic monologue, which sees those contradictions and paradoxes as constitutive, actually, of our subjectivities, and which, as Ekbert Faas argues convincingly in his Retreat Into the Mind, feeds directly into Freud. (Faas’s argument is that Wordsworth and Coleridge sort-of invented the idea of the unconscious mind, which Arnold, Tennyson, and Browning developed in their poetry, so that it was ready for Freud to pluck from the tree and put in his books. Arnold’s “Buried Life” is 1852 and it’s all in that one poem). We’re all post-Freudians now. We take it as axiomatic that human subjectivity — the characters we are in life, as well as the characters we read about in fiction — are complex, not simple.

But this reaches backwards too. Quixote models his adventures on the simple characters of medieval chivalric romance, but he himself is not simple, and that’s what makes the novel in which he appears so interesting. Now it’s true that other characters in the novel think he is simple: that he is simply ‘mad’, let’s say (early in the story his niece, housekeeper, the parish curate, and the local barber burn his books, beliving that reading these romances has driven him from his wits and that destroying them will return him to sanity). We could follow this ‘simple’ reading of him. Or we could, though it would be more of a stretch, follow a different ‘simple’ reading — believe, with Terry Gilliam, that Quixote has accessed a simple truth about the world, that it’s better to live in fantasy than in reality, and all the other characters, who refuse to play along or who actively try to stop him, are in the wrong. But here’s a more plausible reading of Quixote as a character: he both knows his knight-errantry is a mere fiction, and he absolutely believes he is a real knight errant. It looks contradictory, but that’s the nature of consciousness.

Indeed, asserting X whilst knowing, ‘on some level’ (it’s a beautifully Freudian phrase, that: our consciousnesses layered like parfait) that X is what we wish to be true not what is actually true, will, when other people contradict us, only make us assert X more vehemently. This is how people are. Point out the facts to a Trump supporter and they will only yell more loudly that Trump won the election. ‘On some level’ they know he didn’t; but they want it to be true so very much.

This isn’t a very profound or original observation, really. It’s just to say that the way the world is and the way we want the world to be are so very often in conflict that we must develop, as we grow up, a psychological dynamic for dealing with that fact —and that this dynamic cannot either simply dismiss the world, nor abandon our fantasies (what would we be without our fantasies? Not fully human, certainly).

It’s a negotion between the two, something actually dialectic, and it informs both Don Quixote and Florence Foster Jenkins. In the latter case — and to return to my daughter’s question — it is clear from the movie that Jenkins not only loves music, but that she has herself a significant musical education and skill. As a girl she played piano for the President, until syphilis (contracted on her wedding night from her deplorable husband) caused chancres that ruined her left hand and she couldn’t play any more. She turned to singing even though she can’t sing, because singing is a way of making music that doesn’t need hands. It’s true that she has musical ability; it’s false that she can sing; and the dialectic of these two things, propelled by the intensity of her desire to make music, results in the charade, or ‘play’, by which she sings badly and people are paid (by her complaisant partner, Hugh Grant’s St. Clair Bayfield) to act appreciatively, or else people act appreciatively because her singing, by being so bad, is delightful and cheering to them. It’s, to use the cliché, a victimless crime; everybody wins — until the spoilsport New York Post columnist Earl Wilson ruins everything by writing a ‘truthful’ review and puncturing the bubble. The film plays several variations on this. A ‘simple’ reading of Hugh Grant’s character, for instance, would be: he is exploiting Jenkins’ love for him, cynically enabling her fantasy so as to extract money from her to fund his luxurious New York lifestyle with his actual girlfriend (Kathleen Weatherley, played by Rebecca Ferguson). But in fact the movie makes it clear that, although he is doing this, he also genuinely loves Jenkins, and genuinely cares about maintaining the Quixotic fantasy that she is a great operatic soprano. Likewise Cosmé McMoon agonises that becoming known as the accompanist of so terrible a singer will damage his reputation as a serious pianist — although, at the same time, he really needs the money , and so is on his dilemma’s horns, trying to resolve to give up the money and retain his integrity. But in the end, he steps up, not for ‘simple’ reasons for greed but because, like St. Clair, he has in some sense fallen in love with the old woman.

The ‘act’ here is a performance, one that requires, in order to uphold it, a good deal of running-around and financial redistribution by St. Clair; and it’s particularly nice that this performance — upholding Jenkins’s fantasy version of herself over the cruelities of the reality principle — involves, precisely, a performance: standing on a stage in front of an audience. It is, in a sense, a more radical version of Quixote than Quixote, whose adventures always happen in front of only a few random people encountered on his journeys. This, in Frears’ film, pushes Quixotism to a kind of extreme. People will play-along with your fantasy (if you pay them, if it makes them laugh, if they love you) or else they won’t. If they don’t you can simply dismiss or ignore them, which is what Don Quixote does; for there are only ever a few of them at a time, and Quixote can always tell himself they are mistaken, or mad, or wicked, or else they have been enchanted by an Arabian enchanter not to see what he, the Don, plainly sees. But when you are faced with Carnegie-Hall quantities of people, or New York Post-readership quantities of people, them not playing along becomes harder to integrate into your fantasy, to the point of collapsing the fantasy altogether. Frears (or rather his screenwriters Nicholas Martin and Julia Kogan) twist reality a little here: in the movie the bad review leads, the day after the concert, directly to Jenkins’ collapse and her death bed. In real life she had an unrelated heart-attack whilst shopping and died a month after the concert. But the movie is saying: this balance we all must maintain, of which Jenkins’ case is only a more extreme version of our common state of affairs, between keeping our fantasies alive and encountering the reality principle — this complex negotiation — is so fundamental, it’s necessary to our very continued life. That seems to me both true and, actually, rather moving.

A brief coda to this post. After watching the movie, and thinking a bit about its relationship to Don Quixote, I remembered another version of that so-often reworked and reconfigured novel: Graham Greene’s late work Monsignor Quixote (1982). It’s not Greene’s best, it must be said — and it’s been many decades since I read it — but one thing I remember from it is the way it recasts Cervantes so that its mild-mannered Spanish priest protagonist (notionally a descendent of the ‘actual’ Don Quixote) is the sane one, and the various organisations that misunderstand and persecute him — his own Church, the Spanish police, respectable citizenry — are out of touch with what really matters. My memory of the novel is that Greene is using this Quixotism as a way of talking about religious faith, as he understands and practices it: not as an absolute and unwavering certainty but as a set of desires about the nature of the universe. Greene's Monsignor exists half-way between dogmatic assertion of faith on the one hand, and the grimly ‘reality principle’ denial of spirit and miracle on the other, and in this novel Greene honours his half-belief: ‘How is it that when I speak of belief, I become aware always of a shadow, the shadow of disbelief haunting my belief?’ the Monsignor asks at the tomb of Unamuno in Salamanca. ‘I am riddled by doubts. I am sure of nothing, not even of the existence of God … Oh, I want to believe that it is all true — and that want is the only certain thing I feel.’