Rags of Time

Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

2012-01-12T17:20:00.000+08:00

Another gift from my mother. An old copy of the famous Fitzgerald translation, now considered inaccurate by most scholars. But who cares. The poetry is is transcendental and Willy Pogany's illustrations have never been surpassed.

2012-01-12T17:14:00.002+08:00

2012-01-12T17:13:00.000+08:00

Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes

2012-01-12T17:04:00.002+08:00

2012-01-12T17:00:00.004+08:00

My mother gave me an old copy of this gem recently, printed in 1912. It is one of Stevenson's early works originally published some forty years earlier, and a forerunner in a genre which came to be known as Travel Writing. It's a great little read, with some glimpses of a corner of France whose history has long been forgotten.

Bob Andrews / 9V1RA, Bristol, August 2011

2012-01-11T12:28:00.000+08:00

Met Bob in Bristol and walked around the city and saw my old haunts, including the college we both attended for our R/O licenses (Brunel Technical College).It is now a posh condo.

I had several beers in the old pubs with Bob and went back to Reading in the evening. It was a brilliant sunny day, and the first time I had been back to Bristol (my favourite English city) for thirty years.

The graffiti may be a rare Banksy?

Bob lived in Singapore for several years working in the media industry, and returned to his home town of Bristol a couple of years ago. He was very active on CW from 9V.

Although we both attended the same radio college in the 70's, we never met there. His year was few before mine. Bob never went to sea.

New Zealand South Island, Christmas and New Year

2012-01-09T12:12:00.000+08:00

With Neville Baker (ex-ETO "Rockwater 2") in Napier, North Island, on the way back home. His lovely wife Fiona too. I hadn't seen Neville for ten years.

With Jens Jorgensen (ex-ETO "Rockwater 2"; "Mermaid Asiana") and his wonderful missus Margaret, in Auckland, New Year's Eve. A great re-union.

Dad's 90th birthday. Ashford, Mddx, Aug 2011

2012-01-06T12:34:00.008+08:00

Hyderabad (1976)

2011-10-13T11:56:00.003+08:00

Before the Coonoor steam train trip, I passed third class though the central Indian twin cities of Hyderabad and Secunderabad, spending a few days there. My memories are few. Polluted skies and a hellish industrial sprawl. Oddly enough the moment I remember vividly is one glimpse of a beautiful Indian girl on a crowded bus. She was waiting at the exit door, dressed in jet-black purdah except for her exquisite face and fiery eyes. She caught my glance and held it for perhaps three seconds, then disappeared into the streets, an eternal vision. It is indeed odd what we remember, and even odder are the things we forget, which on the face of it should impress us more. I can hardly recall anything about the Golden Temple at Amritsar, for example, but I recall that girl as if it were yesterday.

Nilgiri Mountain Railway

2011-06-18T16:29:00.003+08:00

After McLeod Ganj I made my way south, 3rd class, on long distance steam trains all the way to Bangalore. You could only find a decent resting position by handing out bidis, exchanging them for two hours of horizontal bliss on a luggage rack. This was pure luxury compared with squatting for hours on the shaking floorboards, or crammed into the rough benches designed for four people but occupied by six or seven.

After two days or so of this kind of travel you are pretty exhausted, and extremely smelly. The soot from the smokestack would pour into the open windows, sometimes still glowing red, making small scorched holes in your khadi shirts and pajama pants, which is all anybody wore. The toilets were a real trial. You had to walk on tiptoes to avoid the piles of excrement which the Indians seemed to deposit everywhere except the open hole to the tracks below.

Bangalore was a real surprise. Even in 1976 it was cosmopolitan, air-conditioned and relaxed. There were good bookshops, cafes, clean restaurants and cosy guest-houses. I spent a whole afternoon watching a game of cricket dreaming I was back in Surrey on an English summer’s day.

I met a very unusual traveler near the central bus station, John Clay, an Englishman about my age. Friendships are made fast on the trail out east, although just as easily they fade into memory. He was not your usual seeker of quick enlightenment or psychotropic ecstasy. He was quite the most normal traveler I had met. It turned out he was on a very unique kind of pilgrimage to the East; the search for steam perfection. He was a steam-train enthusiast.

I was also fascinated by steam, although not able to name the train types, years of manufacture, modifications or engineering innovations. John advised me to go south to the Nilgiri Hills in Tamil Nadu, which fitted in with my plans to go further to Sri Lanka. The cool Nilgiri hills would be a good place to rest up before continuing on.

He put me in touch with Walter Gillhooly, the station manager at Coonoor which is just one stop down the mountainside from Ootacamund on the peak.
I traveled up from the hot plains by the Nilgiri rack-and-pinion steam train to Coonoor, where Walter put me up at his bungalow for a couple of weeks.

By day I stoked the boilers on the trains and by night I slept in a cot in the living room. The trains were rattling, snorting, beasts with personalities all their own. Ancient and pockmarked they laboured up the steepest slopes in Asia at barely walking pace as three of us stokers fed the hungry flames. On the way down it was easy. We almost freewheeled with the pinions screaming on the rack. From Ooty at the top to Matapalayam on the plains was a roller-coaster ride, from delicious cool to the searing heat of the Deccan plain.

Walter would get his housemaid to make hot baths with great bunches of eucalyptus leaves soaking for an hour before I stepped in. It was heaven after a grimy hot day on the tracks. I had the tendency to confuse the house servants with his family members, he was so natural and friendly with everyone he met. The food was delicious southern Indian fare, home cooked and nourishing.

Walter took me to a posh, run-down gentlemen’s club up in Ooty where I met the local dignitaries and sipped gin and tonic on the verandahs. The place had a history of course. It had once been where Raj notables gathered in summer with their families to escape the heat of the cities.

Walter told me that his grandfather had been an Irish train engineer, and I heard many stories about the glorious Nilgiri past. There was a strong Irish and Anglo-Indian community in those hills, with the railway still binding everyone together.

I took my leave and continued south, with fond memories of Walter and the magical fire-breathing trains.

Nilgiri Mountain Railway

2011-06-18T16:27:00.002+08:00

9V1VV Amateur Bands Receiver Part One

2011-06-02T10:33:00.008+08:00

Over the past 40 years or so I have built several receivers, some for general coverage using the old 3-ganged tuning capacitor scheme, some single band DC receivers, and a few regens for fun.

I had always wanted to make a quality receiver for all 9 amateur bands but never got round to it until recently.

DC receivers are worryingly complex for decent all-band receivers, and the results are not really any better than a modern single conversion superhet.

SDR radios are OK if you want the RF from the heavens digitised and sent to you on a PC. I'm an old analog man.

Modern practice is to use a single conversion superhet with a high IF between 4 to 12 Mhz. This is more easily achieved these days due to the cheap availability of lattice filters and low-noise passive mixers. Double and treble conversion superhets are becoming a thing of the past. The more mixers, the more noise.

The LO scheme for a single superhet is necessarily fairly complex if one does not want to use noisy synthesisers but stick to a purely analogue design.

Markus / VE7CA produced an excellent all-band transceiver which uses 9 switched xtal oscillators. This is the scheme I decided to adopt.

It is quite tedious to construct all 9 oscillators, and after the first one is complete you must put the brain in neutral and listen to your favourite music. The same goes for the corresponding 9 front-end bandpass filters and LO filters. I was lazy and got all my filters as kits from RF parts and Kits.

All these assemblies are controlled by a single rotary switch connected to relay banks on the various filters and oscillators. Care must be taken to de-couple all these control lines using pi-networks of .01 uF/100uH/.o1 uF.

The same is true of all assemblies in the receiver. Using a first mixer LO at 7dBm and tightly packed construction, decoupling is essential.

Markus / VE7CA opted to use a +17dBm mixer, SRA-3 I think, but this is a lot of RF power and construction techniques would involve shielding most assemblies. I am not convinced that higher level mixing is necessarily an advantage, when you consider that some of the best receivers available use +7dBm, like the Elecraft K2 and K3.

I own a K2 and it is a great receiver, but I believe compromises were made in the IF and Product detector areas. My design uses the K2 front-end and mixer topography but from then on changes to a better IF system and more stable detector. But that is only my opinion.

I have kept front panel controls to a minimum. AGC is always on - it is such a stable system that I would never need to to turn it off. There is no front-end attenuator which I never use on the K2. Similarly I have dispensed with AGC attack/decay switches etc that are found on many communications receivers. Who really uses them?

Receiver control is achieved through IF, bandwidth, and AF controls. These are all I ever need as a CW operator.

Many ideas on the web were incorporated into the final design. I particularly like ARRL's Progressive Communications Receiver ( but see notes later), the Norcal Club 2n2 receivers, and of course VE7CA.

My radio station uses two separate antennas, a big doublet for transmission and a small loop for reception. This makes my receiver designs a lot simpler than most because there is no need for T/R switching and full break in is easily achievable just by muting.

The next obvious step is to make a full 9-band transceiver, which would not be too hard in my case.

Finally - how does the receiver perform? I have to say it sounds a lot better than the K2 and the IF amplifier and product detector are responsible for that. I can resolve weak CW signals more easily. The audio quality is far superior and it is a joy to use the receiver on air.

No independant tests have been made, but considering that the front end is basically Elecraft which is then followed by what I believe are a superior IF, agc and product detector, the specifications will certainly equal the K2 if not exceed them.

It remains to finish off the front panel and to thank a few people;

Pete / 9V1PC for the loan of his Anritsu Spectrum Analyser ( it is impossible to set up the LO bandpass filters and oscillator drive levels without an analyser)

Neil at AADE who was very helpful when I ordered the wrong display!

Roger / KA7EXM who helped me with the Hycas IF

Atsu / JE1TRV who trawled the streets of Tokyo for my varactor diodes.

2011-06-02T10:11:00.003+08:00

9V1VV Amateur Bands Receiver Part Two - Block Diagram (click to enlarge)

2011-06-02T10:00:00.001+08:00

9V1VV Amateur Band Receiver Part Three -Front End, Mixer

2011-06-02T09:41:00.000+08:00

The front end is very similar to the Elecraft K2 receiver, and uses an RF Parts and Kits switched bandpass filter for each of the 9 bands. The RF amp can be switched in or out of circuit, adding 15dB. I have used 2N3866 transistors for all power amplification. These transistors are very cheap in Singapore and I have found no difference in performance with the more expensive 2N5109 which is often specified.

No RF input attenuator has been used; in actual practice I have found I never use this facility in my station. Others may need it.

The SBL-1 passive mixer is driven by +7dBm from the LO amplifier, which is a MOSFET 40673 followed by 2N3866.

The mixer losses are compensated by another 2N3866 amplifier which also presents the correct impedance to the mixer output port. The amplifier is terminated by a pad network which enables the lattice filter to be driven without the need for a transformer. This is also a copy of the K2 circuitry.

9V1VV Amateur Bands Receiver Part Four

2011-06-02T09:02:00.006+08:00

Xtal Filter

Previous receivers I had build all used commercially available filters, but for this project I decided to use cheap PC crystals available locally in Singapore. My main source is Hamilton Electronics on the top floor of Sim Lim Tower, run by a lovely old couple who let me root around for hours. I bought 20 crystals at 50 cents each, all from the same batch at 11.0592 MHz. Of these 20, I chose 5 that resonated at the same frequency, +/- 20 Hz or so, tested in a simple Colpitts oscillator. I have no accurate frequency meter so I just used another receiver to pick up the oscillations and used my ears for the best match. I did not attempt to measure capacitance etc and in the end it was not necessary.

I used a version of the Elecraft K2 filter - 6 varicap diodes ISV149 and a potentiometer in a divider chain. The useful capacitance is from 35-200pF which corresponds to 3-8 VDC. Any higher capacitance enters the ripple zone and is unusable. 200 pF gives me 700 Hz bandwidth with steep slopes outside -6dB. 35pF gives me 2.7 KHz with much wider skirts outside -6dB. This is not a problem ; on the wider bandwidth setting you can hear signals 8 KHz away, which allows you to monitor stations outside your working frequency. By reducing the bandwidth to less that 1 KHz the skirts are much steeper and you can filter out all other signals except the station you are working.

This of course is only useful for CW, and this receiver is primarily designed for CW use.

The di0des are as rare as hen's teeth and I was lucky that Atsu / JE1TRV was able to find some in Akiharaba, Tokyo, and mail them to me.

It is great to be able to use continuously variable bandwidth rather that switched filters, which all my other homebrew receivers use. I can understand why in homebrew and QRP circles, cheap PC crystals are now the first choice when designing IF filters.

The input and output impedances are well matched. The output is terminated by 510 Ohms which works well, and the input circuitry of the Hycas IF amp has been modified to accept this.

Hycas IF Amp

In my professional radio days I had used SP Radio receivers from Denmark and I had always been inpressed by the dynamic range of the IF amps. The circuits they used were very similar to W7ZOI's hybrid cascode amplifier. I had planned to homebrew this amp myself until I came across Roger / KA7EXM's website offering a kit. I was reluctant to homebrew an amplifier with such a high gain myself. 90dB is a lot of gain and I know from experience that instability would be the result, owing to my breadboard construction techniques. So pure laziness drove me to buy the kit from Roger, who was very helpful.

The original Hycas is designed for 9 Mhz so I did replace the load chokes with 39uH instead of 47uH, which improves gain at 11 MHz. Other than removing the input match for 50 Ohm to suit my lattice filter at 510 Ohms, no other mods were made.

The IF amp works extremely well and has excellent overload and agc performance. Gain is linearly adjustable using the front panel IF gain control.

Product Detector

I wanted to use another passive mixer and copied the design taken from the ARRL's Progressive Communications Receiver. (This is an odd design as a receiver, using single conversion for some bands and switching in converters for others, very messy). The product detector is very good however, and is well terminated by a 2-transister circuit which feeds the AF amp.

BFO

This is a single oscillator set to IF + 450 Hz to get a good CW tone. For SSB two more BFO's would need to be switched in, set to the correct offset frequencies for USB and LSB.

At first I tried the design from the Progressive Communications Receiver but it was very unstable. I could not get the required frequency swing and the output levels varied from 0dBm to 7 dBm at will. Eventually I gave up and used a simple Colpitts, similar to the ones used in the excellent Norcal 2N2 series of single superhets. This gives me a solid and pure oscillation variable through 5 KHz and at a constant 7dBm to drive the SBL-1 product detector.

AF Amp

At first I was lazy and tried an LM386 amplifier which for some unknown reason crops up everywhere in homebrew designs. However, it was hopelessly unstable, bursting into motorboating and creating loud thumps and clicks, even when adjusted down to a gain of 50 and employing the bypass circuitry on pin 7. I even tried chokes on the supply line, RC filtering and every other remedy known to man. All to no avail.

Eventually I solved the problem by using a big hammer and destroying the useless thing on my workshop floor. A most satisfying experience, after which I felt much better.

I built a simple AB amp with 4 transistors which gives me a gain of 50 and an output power of around 750 mW.

This is the ideal gain to use for high quality headphones. It is my practice to set AF gain to maximum and adjust overall receiver gain using the IF gain control. An old CW dinosaur's habit.

Muting/AGC

The front end is not muted. This is common practice these days where low-gain RF stages are used. The only RF protection is provided by 2 back-to-back diodes across the antenna input.
The Hycas IF amp is completely muted with a +12VDC line, and I have also included the usual QRP-style JFET audio mute in series with the audio input. I had to design a simple transistor logic circuit to enable both mute systems to work off the key. Keying is very quiet; there are no pops or clicks.

9V1VV Amateur Bands Receiver - Underside View (click to enlarge)

2011-06-02T08:54:00.003+08:00

9V1VV Amateur Band Receiver Part Five - The LO system

2011-06-02T08:00:00.000+08:00

The LO architecture follows the old Ten Tec Argosy and VE7CA system. In order to achieve 9 amateur bands without using a synthesised oscillator, the best method is to use 9 separate switched xtal oscillators, which are then mixed with a VFO. The resultant products are filtered and amplified to 7dBm to drive the SBL-1 passive mixer.

This is probably the most expensive part of the receiver because xtals must be ordered cut from one of the few remaining crystal suppliers. I used Quartzlab in UK but purchased the xtals a few years ago. The price is now about $15 each.

Some are 3rd overtone, (those above 20Mhz) the rest are fundamentals. Using an IF of 11.0592MHz and a VFO of 5.0-5.5 MHz, the 9 xtals range from 18 to 44 MHz approx. When ordering I worked out the exact frequencies required so that the lower ends of the bands all fell in the same place on the dial when changing bands.

The xtal oscillators are all simple Colpitts, buffered with FET source-followers then through the relays to a dual-gate MOSFET mixer. MOSFET mixers can be noisy when used in receiver signal paths, but I think they are a good solution in the LO system.

The unwanted image and other products are filtered through 9 switched bandpass filters which I got from RF Parts and Kits. Bandwidth is about 350 KHz at -3dB. The unwanted fundamentals, image and harmonics are all at least 80 dB down on the wanted signal.

The wanted signal at the filter output is about -15 dBm and is boosted up to about 10dBm using a wideband MOSFET amplifier followed by the ubiquitous 2N5109 amp, used in just about every modern receiver known to man.

A small feed is taken off to the AADE digital display via a 10pF capacitor.

The VFO is from an old marine communications receiver, vintage 1971. It uses a very stable oscillator, being solidly and professionally built and employing permeability tuning. The coil was wound to produce a linear analogue scale for the old receiver. I probably destroyed the linearity by having to install a coil in parallel to increase the frequency slightly. But when using a digital frequency display, linearity is not so important. The VFO is geared down 5:1 using an old Jackson drive. The VFO is very stable. Drift is less than 20 Hz during the first hour, then negligible.

Receiver Top Side View (click to enlarge)

2011-06-01T14:00:00.001+08:00

Input

2011-05-27T23:35:00.002+08:00

An annoying example of sloppiness, which I hear everyday, even on the BBC. Technocrats are hijacking the language;

"Thanks for your input"

When of course they mean -

"Thanks for your contribution".

McCleod Ganj 1976

2011-02-18T15:52:00.004+08:00

I picked up Iris Murdoch's The Sea The Sea and got through the first 100 pages and realised I had read it before, years ago. Unlike Silas Marner I can't be bothered to finish it again... but the book is a fictional autobiography by a retired theatre impressario. Well written ... for some odd reason it reminded me of my visit to McCleod Ganj in March or April 1976. I think it the whole idea of idle reminiscence which prompted this piece of scribble.

I had come overland through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan and after a few days getting my bearings in Delhi I made the trip up to Dharmsala. The Dali Lama was not in residence at that time and was travelling to Europe, as I recall, which meant that the town and it's outlying villages were less populated than usual by pilgrims of all kinds wishing for an audience with the great man.

I put up in a stone cottage above Dharmsala in McCleod Ganj, a sprawling town thrown over the lower Himalayan slopes like lego bricks. My immediate neighbours were all young travellers like myself, from Australia, Austria, Canada and England. Those in the further huts came from I know not where. We were a happy band. Most of us were through with the well-worn hippy trail which ran through Goa, Manali and into Katmandu. We had done dope and acid to varying degrees in our home towns and wished to find a better, more natural way... apart from some guiltily smoked Ganesh bidis, the strongest drugs we took were gurum chai and coffee.

In the evenings we would retire to our huts to cook one dish each and share our offerings together in the largest dwelling, which was rented by two Australian girls. My speciality was a thick yellow dal, cooked with ghee, onions, garlic and pepper. After supper we would get out our various musical instruments and raise a cacophony. Some of the travelers were not bad musicians. I remember a Swiss girl who played a divine Indian flute. There was another, a Canadian, who had the most angelic voice I have heard to this day. She wore Kashmiri shawls and pastel khadi skirts, with long wavy light brown hair to her waist, and the deepest blue eyes I have ever seen. With my pounding accompaniment on tabla, she would sing out joyously across the mountains;

You take a stick of bamboo
You take a stick of bamboo
You take a stick of bamboo
And you throw it on the water

Hosanna !
River
She comes down

My house is on the river
my house is on the river
my house is on the water

Hosanna!
River
She comes down...

(This repeated ad nauseum like a mantra.)

One fine spring morning an Australian friend and I decided to trek over the snowy pass which separates McCleod Ganj from the nearest mountain ranges. I think the highest peak in that area is around 10,000 feet. We were incredibly lucky not to get killed when I stop to think about it. We wore only light clothes and sandals - pure madness if the weather had come down hard, as it often does. But the Gods were kind that day and there was not a breath of wind. Only the azure blue sky over a dazzling white snowscene. At midday one of us had the foresight to suggest turning back - we had done what we thought was impossible- and returned home to our cheerful wood fires just as the sun was setting. In those days there always seemed to be a benign guiding hand at work.

I can't remember any of their names, these starry-eyed seekers after the truth, and often wonder what became of them. Did they go mad with disorientation on their return to their humdrum, provincial lives? Or did they somehow muster up enough courage or conceit to feign respectability? Perhaps they managed to escape into the world once more. I was lucky; I ran away to sea. Merchant ships are manned by men (and women) who share a great deal in common with stoned, raving old hippies. I feel at home on the sea.

There was a tall, aristocratic Englishman in our McCleod Ganj encampment, the son of a minister. Well spoken, erudite, went to Cambridge I think, but turned his back on the Christian ministry and became a Buddhist (or more probably, he combined the two disciplines). He would spend half the year in McClead Ganj and the other half in Sri Lanka, following his various teachers. A gentle soul. I often wonder where his path has taken him.

After McCleod Ganj I took an insane 3rd-class steam-train journey to South India. Another story.

George Eliot - "Silas Marner"

2011-02-16T11:27:00.004+08:00

Today I finished re-reading Silas Marner, for the second time since my late teens many years ago. This novel is sometimes much derided by students who are forced to study it as part of English O or A level examinations, or as a fragnent of a university module on literary realism. For myself I chose to read it uncoerced and will probably return to it a third time at some point.

Henry James considered it to be as near to a masterpiece as it is able to approach. Certainly for this humble reader it takes a place in the heart close to Anna Karenina or War and Peace, for although on a much smaller scale than these two novels , it evokes similar lofty and noble sentiments. Much as the human condition is expressed with great clarity in the large scale symphonies of Mahler, so the same is achieved with far more economy in the tiny, jewel-like harpsichord suites of F. Couperin.

The novel is supremely successful in the way it combines plot with character formation, religious conviction with changing times, and also manages to describe rural England during the Napoleonic wars so compellingly. Human weakness and imperfection are personified in the characters in a great economy of words. We feel nothing but sympathy for Godfrey Cass and his loving, faithful but childless wife Nancy, despite Godfrey's mistakes in life. The culture and society of a small English rural village are encapsulated in only a few short chapters by relating commonplace gossiping at the local pub, or by the solitary ruminations of simple country folk.

The central relationship between Marner and his adopted daughter Eppie is lovingly told, and brings tears to the eyes of even the most hardened of readers.

Such well-wrought sentences as "Perfect love has a breath of poetry which can exult the relations of the least-instructed human beings" convey the economy of words which Eliot uses
so skillfully in this tale, which is essentially all about human relationship.

In fact the novel is ripe for a major film adaptation. Let us hope that it is never attempted by Stephen Spielberg, who, bless him, would sentimentalise the story to such a degree that saccharinne would coat the story in thick, sticky dollops.

Nan Riverside Gallery

2011-01-30T16:56:00.004+08:00

This is probably a view of the Nan river where the gallery stands. There is a lovely cafe and souvenir shop located at this vantage point along the river.

You need to drive about 45 minutes to the north of Nan in order to spend an afternoon at this fascinating art gallery. There was an artist in residence conducting a tour of his work. I forget his name. My traveling companion has it noted down. I must ask.

I had wanted to engage the artist in conversation but my Thai is not up to the level where I can discuss art and literature. Friends say I speak good Thai but it is not true. My farang friends think anyone who can string a sentence together is a fluent speaker. The Thais are just being polite, and probably smile to each other thinking that I sound like a 3-year old.

Nan Riverside Gallery - Wat Pumin?

2011-01-30T16:52:00.002+08:00

This canvas is probably a study of Wat Pumin, one of the most famous temples in Nan town.

Nan Riverside Gallery - Erotica

2011-01-30T16:50:00.000+08:00

Lotus Pond - Nan

2011-01-30T16:49:00.003+08:00

A cool, rainy day in the grounds of Nan Riverside gallery.

Davitt Moroney plays Louis Couperin's complete harpsichord works

2011-01-28T15:24:00.003+08:00

From the Gramophone review, 1984.

Davitt Moroney (hpschd). Harmonia Mundi ®
H Mu 24-8 (five records, nas). Notes included.

A five-record album comprising the complete solo harpsichord music of Louis Couperin might, on the face of it, seem a daunting issue. Let me admit at once that this repertoire, by the second most celebrated member of an illustrious family, held my closest attention from the start of Side I until the last echoes had died away on Side 10. If I can say that I found myself frequently wondering whether Louis Couperin's art is really in any sense inferior to that of his famous nephew Francois, you will have some idea of the enormous stature of this music.

Louis was a pupil of the great Chambonniéres, who is commonly considered the founder of the French harpsichord school; but master cannot hold a candle to pupil in matters of melodic grace, harmonic finesse or, to use an English word of the period, in fancy. In other words, Louis Couperin's music immediately attracts our attention on account of its sheer inventiveness, its variety and, above all, perhaps, for its elegiac grandeur. That is a quality, together with expressive restraint, which it shares with some of the music of Couperin "le grand".

Davitt Moroney, an Englishman, studied under Thurston Dart, Gustav Leonhardt and Kenneth Gilbert. The influence of Gilbert whose inclination towards modest, self-effacing gestures, amounting almost to understatement, is familiar to many of us, seems particularly strong. In French keyboard music of this period such an approach has virtues for it both underlines a thoughtfulness of purpose and emphasizes a pervading melancholy which runs, at any rate, through Couperin's pieces. This album, a vast undertaking is, furthermore, no mere blockbuster but the result of extended research which has culminated in the first complete modern edition of Louis Couperin's harpsichord music.

Amongst the almost infinitely varied movement types explored by Couperin in these Suites de pièces, the Preludes non ,nésurés, the Chaconnes and the Sarabandes are perhaps the most consistently interesting; but I have been forcefully struck by the invention of this music in general and by Couperin's adventurous turns of phrase, in particular. There is, of course, no one correct way of performing the carefully wrought un-measured preludes, which derive from the lute tradition. Moroney himself went to some lengths to expound his own views on the subject in an article in Early Music (April 1976). Here he is able to put them into practice though I regret that he never allows us to hear an alternative reading of the same prelude.

In general the tempos of the dance movements are convincing and their spirit vivacious. The Gigue, No. 122 in the 1983 OiseauLyre edition (DSDL7I2, 11/83), is a good example of Moroney's playing at its liveliest whilst in the following Chaconne in D minor (No. 57), he captures the resplendent and detailed nature of the music. For the most part I found this playing both technically assured and musically convincing. Undoubtedly there are some movements which fare better than others; Moroney is, perhaps, inclined towards blandness at times in his playing of Allemandes and Courantes; but Couperin, too, had his 'off' moments, though in the course of some 134 movements, I encountered remarkably few of them.

Three different harpsichords were used for the recording of this project. The earliest of them, built in Antwerp in 1671, passed through the hands of two great French harpsichord makers of the following century, Messrs Blanchet and Taskin; the remaining instruments belong unequivocally to the eighteenth century. To sum up, then, here is an immensely worthwhile project, thoroughly prepared and imaginatively executed. Recorded sound, whilst not quite the best I have heard from this enterprising company, is clear and resonant. Pressings are silent in all but a few places where it seems that the exceptional length of playing time—several sides last well over half an hour each —has taken its toll in a mild way. N.A.

Wat Phayawat - Central Buddha Image

2011-01-28T14:54:00.004+08:00

About 1 KM south of Nan town, Nan Province, North Thailand, rests the praeternaturally beautiful Wat Phayawat.

It is neither ancient nor famous. It is built on simple lines with no hint of opulence.

It is actually a copy of a well-known Mon style temple in Lampang.

But of all the temples in Nan, this struck me as the most perfect and harmonious.

Maybe it was the way the monks left you alone to sit and make a pretence at mindfulness, or the way the temple dogs slept peacefully at your feet, or the sigh of the wind through the mango trees.

Of all the dozens, if not hundreds of temples I have visited in Thailand, Wat Phayawat is the one I will best remember - and to which I will return one day before I die.

Wat Phayawat - Chedi and general views

2011-01-28T14:48:00.003+08:00

The chedi is quite delapidated and probably dates from 15th century CE. Much earlier than the temple structure itself.

Seminary

Wat Phayawat - detail

2011-01-28T14:45:00.002+08:00

There is a sense of perfect harmony created by the contrast of colours here; red ochre laquered eaves against a whitewashed wall.

Wat Phayawat - Murals

2011-01-28T14:39:00.004+08:00

The murals seemed familiar - could these have been done by the same artist whose work appears in several Nan temples I have seen?

They describe aspects of the Buddha's life as well as scenes from secular village life.

Such as it should be - no distinction between the sacred and the profane.

Wat Phayawat - the Reliquary

2011-01-28T14:34:00.002+08:00

Rooftop nagas rising like flames from the sultry whispering trees.

Wat Phayawat - External Views

2011-01-28T14:29:00.004+08:00

The perfect symmetry of the design lends itself to peaceful contemplation.

Wat Phayawat - Frangipani

2011-01-28T14:26:00.004+08:00

What more beautiful flower could one expect at this magical temple? The heady perfume is transcendentally exotic.

Wat Phayawat - Dhamma Wheel

2011-01-28T14:24:00.001+08:00

Beckett and Gurnah

2010-11-06T08:41:00.005+08:00

This is my final essay in the module. It was quite an enjoyable one to write probably because I admire these two writers a geat deal. I could have chosen Seamus Heaney instead of Beckett, but at the time the essay was due, I had not read enough Heaney to make an impact. I have since come to the conclusion that Heaney is another damned genius. I could have chosen Pat Barker instead of Gurnah, but I had already absorbed what little wisdom The Ghost Road has to offer. She has some good ideas and writes well, but ruins it all by falling back on that old sure-fire sales guarantee, gratuitous obscenity.

This will be the last literary analysis of the course. The final module is all about Professional English Writing, whatever that is.

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Question;

The selection of texts in the Judging Literature section of the course displays a bias in the judging process in the Nobel and the Booker toward the preoccupations and styles of western literature. Do you agree with this statement or not? Refer to at least two of the following texts (ONE from each award) to support your argument – Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, the poetry of Seamus Heaney, Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise, and Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road.

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In this essay I will discuss this question with reference to Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Gurnah’s Paradise, and argue that because both prizes are awarded from centres of metropolitan literary tradition it is almost axiomatic that bias will exert pressure towards these focal points. The Nobel is perhaps less culpable in this respect because the prize is given for an entire body of work by an author, and is therefore less prone to the influence of ephemeral popularity or the shifting niceties of correctness, whereas the Booker seizes upon a single novel in a moment of time when a text may or may not resonate with the prevailing literary trend. I will also try to show how both texts were intrinsically worthy of the prizes, in terms of style and originality. I will argue that Paradise failed to secure the Booker prize due an inherent bias in the judging, and explore the ways in which the style of the postcolonial novel has sometimes succumbed in the past to preconceived western ideas of what these novels should write about.

The Booker prize has long been controversial and has tended to rely on scandal and internal squabbling for publicity, which actually increases its profile and adds to the marketability of its contenders and the celebrity judges. It has become a virtual media circus, a literary equivalent to the Academy Awards, where embarrassing rants by authors and judges are privately encouraged. The winner in 1972, John Berger, stated in his acceptance speech that “the competitiveness of prizes I find distasteful…the whole emphasis on winners and losers is false and out of place in the context of literature” ( Nasta p300). Berger went on to emphasize the dubious origins of the Booker company itself whose profits were earned on the backs of Guyanan plantation workers, and donated half his winnings to the Black Panthers. However, the row (one amongst several to follow in later years) had the paradoxical effect of increasing the entertainment and commercial value of the prize. It is against this background that Paradise was shortlisted in 1994, but lost out to an “outsider”, James Kelman, a Scots writer (again causing a furor because of the 4000 instances of the “f” word, and the use of incomprehensible Glaswegian slang). Kelman was an outsider because, ironically, he was writing very close to the metropolitan centre, whereas it had become the rule, rather than the exception, for writers from the colonial and commonwealth backwaters to be nominated (Rushdie had started this trend in 1982 for Midnight’s Children). However, Paradise failed to win principally due to the author’s studied refusal to conform to the accepted genre of the postcolonial novel.

Chinua Achebe’s ground-breaking Things Fall Apart, published in 1958, could be said to have been the first canonized postcolonial African novel, dealing with the disorientation and disintegration of an entire people through a relentless colonial hegemony, dealt out by the “civilizing” influence of the Christian missionary. This was the “empire writing back’, as outlined in Iyer’s essay (Gupta and Johnson p272). The novel turned history around by re-writing it from the viewpoint of the oppressed, rather than of the victors. Paradise, on the other hand, does not appear to admonish the British or German colonizers in East Africa in the way Achebe does in Nigeria. In this respect Gurnah is not “writing back” to empire, but rather, he is moving the discourse away from an overtly binary conflict towards an internalized world of myth and fable. He creates a lyrical and poetic narrative which explores the hegemony of the Arab slave trade, and its inexorable reduction of human life to a commodity.

The tendency of some western literary critics to homogenize postcolonial literature is perhaps one of the reasons why Paradise failed to win the Booker prize. In a panel discussion on BBC’s The Late Show (11 Oct 1994, cited in Nasta, p334) not only did the panelists fail to place the novel in the correct frame of reference, claiming it was set in the 1940s instead of the immediate period prior to 1914, but many of them dismissed it as obscure simply because it did not forcibly denigrate the colonizers. Tom Paulin completely misses the point “… I think the problem is that you are led into thinking there’s going to be a big colonial focus…and the problem with this novel…is how does the novelist go beyond Chinua Achebe’s great seminal founding novel….and actually show a traditional society disintegrating under the impact of colonialism?”. The only panel member to recognize Gurnah’s originality was A.S. Byatt who was outnumbered and outvoted; “But all novels nowadays by persons of African origins…are about the colonials…This is actually a novel about the enslavement of a black man by a black man…” She goes on; “… But can he not make a beautiful hybrid? He’s mixed in Conrad. He’s mixed in ‘The Arabian Nights’. He’s mixed in the Koran. He’s mixed in the Bible, and you are telling me he ought to be doing something else!”

Gurnah’s appropriation of the ancient Abrahamic myth of Joseph/Yusof, which is common to all three Semitic religions, is just one of many devices he uses to divert the reader from any preconceptions of a stereotypical anti-colonial tract. The Garden of Eden is realized on earth as the slave trader Aziz’s walled garden, and becomes a metaphor for Yusof’s emerging sensual desires and for the ways in which the Arab slave trade enslaves not only workers but their families as well. Whole lives are incarcerated and broken by the cruel reality of this garden. But the reader finds a fascination with this place as well as horror. The garden is a reminder of ancient and deeply-rooted myths and folk-tales which are shared by many cultures, and which foreground the brutal nature of man’s essential inhumanity to man. Gurnah paints a bleak portrait of a world where men are born and die in slavery, and whose children are in turn enslaved. At the end of the novel when Yusof escapes from the genial Arab trader Aziz by joining the German army as a foot soldier, he is in fact exchanging one form of slavery with another.

The novel subverts expectations in other ways; although it is structured in a conventionally linear way in the style of a classic Bildungsroman, times and dates are often poetically glossed over; “Unexpected flowers bloomed and died…The sun made distant trees tremble in the air”. There are in fact no dates specifically mentioned in the novel, although the approximate year can be gleaned from a thorough reading taking into account the appearance of the German armies. Spatially there are no fixed reference points either; place names are vague and fictional. The coast is a place of comfortable refuge whereas the mountainous interior is a place of mystery and danger. Gurnah tends to make exotic not only the black tribes outside of Yusof’s familiar world and the Indian merchant settlers, but the European colonizers as well. This is a reversal of Edward Said’s “orientalism’ in which western writers portray the colonized as “others” in a purely binary relationship to the metropolitan centre. Gurnah prefers to highlight differences between indigenous tribes and between these tribes and the Arab and Indian traders, rather than to foreground a postcolonial perspective of the East African population as a whole. As Gurnah writes (in Gupta and Johnson p285), “ One of the myths of colonial construction is the homogeneity of the colonized territory and its natives, simultaneously with their complex unknowability except by the initiated colonizer, who can only seek to know their difference disparagingly and instrumentally.”

Curiously, it is the refusal to follow the example set by Achebe which may have prejudiced Gurnah’s chances of winning the Booker prize in 1994. As Nasta argues ( p309), “there was a need to move beyond a culture of blame and address the fact that the psychic damage wrought by history extends to both colonizer and colonized.” At the time the novel was written there seemed to exist, in western literary circles, a need to satisfy a sense of collective guilt concerning the colonial domination of the past. As Huggan puts it (in Gupta and Johnson p277); “Not that postcolonial literature offers harmless escapism: on the contrary, it repolitcizes the act of reading, providing an opportunity for focused rage or an outlet for indefinite liberal guilt.” By canonizing certain works, such as Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, the guilt was to some extend expurgated. Gurnah’s novel failed to provide the necessary painful reminders of despotic colonial rule. This state of affairs may have changed by 1997 when Arundhati Roy won the Booker prize for her novel The God of Small Things, which, like Paradise, moved away from a purely binary focus on the colonized and the colonizer. Ironically, Gurnah’s novel may have been written a few years too early.

Whereas it could be argued that the Booker is attuned to the whims of unstable literary fashion, the Nobel is perhaps more eclectic in its outlook. Alfred Nobel’s will stipulates that part of his estate should go every year to “the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”. (cited in Gutpta p210). Unlike the Booker, this is taken to mean a body of work rather than a single novel, and does not preclude non-English texts (hence writers as diverse as Sholokov writing in Russian, Asturias in Spanish, and Kawabata in Japanese has won the award). The phrase “ideal direction” has proved ambivalent at times, with some critics equating it with “idealism”, but in general the term has come to be associated with aesthetics rather than any political or philosophical bias. Beckett’s Waiting for Godot was first published in French in 1949 and Beckett himself wrote the first English version in 1956 (as such the English versions should not strictly be classed as translations.) The prize was awarded thirteen years later, when the writer had already produced several of his best known plays. There was thus a gestation period which enabled the texts to be fully realized in many performances worldwide and in several languages. Sartre had refused the prize in 1964 on grounds of ideology, and Beckett had considered doing so, but felt that the point had already been made by the French writer. Beckett had always eschewed ideological categorization in any case, and studiously avoided aligning himself with any particular literary movement, although many critics would argue that his plays are fundamentally existential.

I would argue that the dilemmas facing critics who attempted to classify Waiting For Godot as conforming to a particular style, or to identify any clear philosophical message, contributed to the dynamic of the work and the manner in which it has now entered the literary canon as a quintessentially ambivalent text. Much of its enduring appeal lies in its tendency to promote debate not only about what theatre actually is, but also about consciousness and the nature of existence. There is a certain iconoclasm in the way the stage is set up, bereft of any props apart from a bare tree and a low mound, although the tree gains few leaves in the second act. This minimalisation tends to foreground questions of theatrical convention and the audience has no choice but to infer that in some respects, this is theatre about theatre. As Gupta notes ( Gupta p218), “Plays that question theatrical conventions and compel renegotiation and readjustment from the audience are inevitably about theatre itself to some extent”. In terms of structure, the lack of any clear plot development in either act not only raises the same debate but encourages the audience to ask questions about the apparently cyclical and habitual relationship between Estragon and Vladimir, and the power play between Pozzo and Lucky. In this respect the empty stage forces engagement in the plot (or lack of it) because there are no external references available. It is therefore probable that the Nobel judges saw Beckett as the natural successor to Chekhov and Brecht, both of whom had redefined theatrical conventions.

The ambivalence of the text has led to several interpretations, and it is this open-endedness which has fomented discussion to the present day. The Christian allusions, especially in Act 1, to the two thieves crucified with Christ, have encouraged a moral reading, but conclusions must be necessarily vague;

Vladimir; Our Saviour. Two thieves. One is supposed to have been saved and the other…damned.
Estragon; Saved from what?
Vladimir; Hell
Estragon; I’m going.
Vladimir; And yet….how is it – this is not boring you I hope – how is it that of the four Evangelists only one speaks of a thief being saved. The four of them were there – or thereabouts – and only one speaks of the thief being saved. Come on, Gogo, return the ball, can’t you, once in a way?

The dialog tails off into a cul-de-sac. No conclusions are drawn. Not only does this fragment of philosophical debate lead to inconclusiveness, it also shows the pessimistic nature of Beckett’s discourse. There are no answers. There is a sense of intense realism created here because the dialogue mirrors our everyday discourse, much of which ends fruitlessly. Vladimir’s attempts to engage Estragon in philosophical discussion always end in failure, but they cling to each other for years, each afraid of leaving the other. There is a sense of absurdity in the exchanges, heightened by music-hall slapstick comedy, for example the ridiculous hat-swapping episode in Act 2 which seems to continue forever. The play is a continuous mockery of the audience’s expectations; plot progression is continuously curtailed, abruptly and without subtlety. Philosophical premises are introduced but not worked through to satisfactory conclusions. Arguments are posited on unstable ground. As Gupta notes ( Gupta p249) “there is an air of deliberate strangeness about the performance of the play that makes us reflect on theatre and communication, and on the ideas underlying them”. This original technique, a form of defamiliarisation, probably impressed the Nobel judges who recognized it as moving literature in an “ideal direction”.

The central expectation in the play is that Godot will arrive at some point to relieve the tension which Beckett has worked into the text. That he does not arrive in Act 1 is a disappointment, that he fails to materialize at all may be an oblique allusion to the general condition of humanity, which is in a perpetual state of expectation for someone (a Saviour?) to arrive to resolve all conflict. Beckett is thus perhaps illustrating the absurdity of mundane existence which waits eternally for a religious or philosophical resolution. It is this play more than any other by Beckett which gave rise to the term “theatre of the absurd”, first coined by Martin Esslin in 1961 ( Gupta p249). Hence by the time Becket was nominated in 1969, the “theatre of the absurd” was a central debate in metropolitan theatrical and literary circles. It would therefore seem that Beckett’s nomination was not a controversial one; on the contrary, he would have appeared as the ideal candidate.

As Gupta notes, “the Nobel prize is now widely regarded as giving a stamp of universal literary value that is untainted by commercial considerations or insular social or political affiliations” (Gupta p211). Apart from Sartre’s refusal to accept the prize in 1964, there has been little scandal or controversy surrounding what has now become an annual institution. The selection process appears to cast its nets widely, and the prize has escaped many of the criticisms aimed at the Booker, including the main one that the judging process is biased towards a contemporary western literary outlook. I would argue that this perception in the differences between the impartiality of the two awards stems from the narrow focus of the Booker on a single work, whereas the Nobel considers an author’s entire body of work. Hence Arundhati Roy would not qualify as a Novel laureate simply because of her tiny output (she has only published one novel). Another difference between the two awards is the comparatively narrow and parochial literary community who could qualify for the Booker; writers mainly from Britain or the Commonwealth. The Nobel has managed to escape the blatant commercialism associated with the Booker, with its celebrity judges and glitzy televised banquet, where scandal and controversy are actively encouraged in order to promote publicity.

To conclude I would argue that the Nobel escapes the central criticism of western bias, but up to a point. It is an unavoidable fact that its judges are usually members of the western literary elite, and to what extent each can remain impartial is a matter of trust. Waiting For Godot has become canonized in the western literary tradition, which was perhaps an unwelcome reality for its author. It deservedly won the Nobel for its revolutionary reassessment of the theatrical genre, its refusal to conform to categorization either stylistically or philosophically, and for its influence on a generation of playwrights to follow. The Booker, on the other hand, has become an enterprise of dubious merit. Its bias tends towards the writer of the moment who resonates with whatever happens to be the prevailing literary fashion. In the case of Gurnah’s Paradise, the novel was judged according to preconceived ideas of what exactly a postcolonial novel should look like. Instead of conforming to this model, Gurnah creates a skillfully crafted and original tale of great depth and ambivalence. He constructs a view of East African history which is often uncomfortable to behold, a vision fashioned from ancient koranic myth and fable. Gurnah’s landscape is entirely alien to western liberal sensitivities.

2950 Words not including title and bibliography

References
Beckett, S Waiting for Godot (1954) Grove Press, New York

Gupta, S. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot In Johnson, D. The Popular and the Canonical. (2005) Open University, Milton Keynes.

Gupta S, and Johnson, D (Eds) A Twentieth-Century Literature Reader (2005) Routledge, Oxon.

Gurnah, A. Paradise (1994) The New Press, New York

Nasta, S. Abdulrazak Gurnah, Paradise. In Johnson, D. The Popular and the Canonical. (2005) Open University, Milton Keynes.

Puig and Dick

2010-11-04T12:28:00.005+08:00

My second essay in this module which gained me high marks again, I am sure unjustifiably. I had never read Kiss of the Spider Woman before this course and it was a lesson in fine writing. The political and sexual politics were marvelously described, but in tasteful and oblique references. I did find Androids a litlle hard-going. The American vernacular is sometimes jarring and the structure of the novel is a bit muddled I think. Once again Bakhtin emerges with the best tools with which to analyse these texts.

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Question:

Postmodernism celebrates self-conscious hybridity in text and moves away from the need for “unprecedented originality.”

Compare the extent to which Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman conform to this statement.

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In this essay I will try to show how the modernist literary movement, broadly defined as an aesthetic approach with an emphasis on originality, gave way during the 1960s to a more eclectic view of how texts should be constructed. These texts, now termed “postmodern” tended to utilize elements of literature from many sources which lay between the extremes of the elite literary tradition on the one hand, and the popular commercial and consumerist narratives on the other. Intertextuality and hybridity became the norm rather than the purely experimental, and to varying degrees Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Kiss of the Spider Woman demonstrate this new literary dynamic. I will argue that Puig’s novel is more consciously postmodern than Dick’s, which tends to be an unconscious response to the problems of urban American society, but which nevertheless draws on intertextuality and hybridity to no less an extent.

The emergence of hybridity in literary texts was recognized in the mid twentieth century by the cultural theorist Mikhael Bakhtin who argued that the essentially static and homogenized narrative voice of the earlier realist writers was being undermined by a plurality of voices in the newer texts. As Young notes ( Young 1955, quoted in Post Colonial Studies 2000 p110) Bakhtin saw that “ hybridity sets different points of view against each other in a conflictual structure, which retains a certain elemental, organic energy and openendedness”. (Later theorists such as Bhabha and Spivak extended the argument from this starting position to include discussions of the representation of the Other in postcolonial literary theory). Bakhtin argued that the new texts showed greater ambivalence and less overt didacticism, and relied on the reader to add meaning to the texts in a more dialogic and dynamic manner. He likens this process to an earlier mediaeval “carnivale” where “the public space is not singular as in the classic state but rather is constituted in many overlapping domains, each having its own logic yet liable to be entangled with other logics” ( Bakhtin 1941, quoted in Post Colonial Studies 2000 p177).

Intertextuality follows naturally from hybridity. Writers draw an any appropriate contemporary or historical genre in order to set up a dialogue within the text, and between the text and the reader. Puig’s novel is painstakingly constructed from several different narratives often in opposition to each other. He includes letters, lists, boleros, Hollywood films, the officialdom of the prison authorities and of the surveillance police, as well as the main dialogue between the two principal characters. Underlying all of this (literally) are the erudite footnotes on homosexuality and its origins. Puig had intended to work the sexual theory into the main narrative but decided it would make the dialogue sound too weighty. In separating this element from the main body of the text he sets up an external commentary on the main plot. (The footnotes can in fact be ignored completely and the novel read in isolation from them.). As Bakhtin notes as a general condition of postmodernist writing ( Dunne 1995) “ The novel permits the incorporation of various genres, both artistic (inserted short stories, lyrical songs, poems, dramatic scenes etc) and extra-artistic (everyday, rhetorical, scholarly, religious genres

I would argue that Puig’s use of hybridity and intertextuality was a conscious artistic decision. He was well grounded in the traditional Latin-American canon represented by Luis Borges and others, as well as the techniques of film production and script writing which were an earlier vocation. His love of the simple bolero which Molina says “contain tremendous truths” is also woven into the narrative, thus incorporating genres more associated with “low art”. As Puig himself often professed, he was as a writer “profoundly vulgar” (Gramich 179). By this he meant that he was upholding the right to introduce all forms of popular “low” art in his texts, probably as a way of reflecting the personal realities of his central characters. The lack of an authoritative narrator’s voice in the novel is a technique designed to free the narratives from a central focal point, enabling them to interact with others in an almost infinite number of possibilities.

Many separate layers of intertextuality lay within the separate narratives, as well as between each layer. Molina’s re-telling of Hollywood B-movie plots contain within them a world of ambivalence. The characters in the films can be seen to represent Freudian archetypes; the glamorous leading lady with whom Molina usually identifies is usually associated with mystery or evil, as in the Zombie woman or the panther woman. They are either predatory or in some way threatening, or else passive and submissive. For Valentin, Molina becomes the Spider Woman – a type who is both a predator and a victim. At once she is the femme fatale and the woman trapped in her own form. These readings are not definitive however; Freudian analysis can suggest some interpretations and these are outlined in the footnotes. Gramich (161) points out that the Spider Woman takes her form from the much earlier classical myths of Arachne and Ariadne, perhaps drawing on ancient stored memories for allusion and effect. Hence there is intertextuality in this particular narrative which reaches back to antiquity for its reference point..

There is an inherent lack of dictacticism in that the author, although known to be left-leaning in his politics and homosexual in his personal life, is allowing the reader to construct his or her own meaning or “message” from the text. What emerges ultimately from the novel is a tale of great courage on the part of the two main protagonists, often against great odds. The weak, effeminate Molina ends up sacrificing his life for his friend and lover, Valentin. His character changes perceptively throughout the novel from victim to hero. Valentin changes from being the stoical Marxist revolutionary with reactionary homophobic prejudices to a more complete human being, able to express love and appreciation openly and without constraint. Although tortured and dying at the novel’s end, he has in fact gained true freedom. This of course is only one reading among the many possible ones; there are a multitude of meanings which can be constructed from what is essentially a polyphonic, multi-layered and dynamic text.

Dick’s Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep? also deals in the currency of hybridity and intertextuality, but in some respects the genres he draws upon in his text appear shallower and less profound than Puig’s. Dick’s writing was very much in the style of the sub-culture of Science Fiction, the origins of which can be traced back as far as Swift in Gulliver’s Travels through to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and probably attaining a recognized form as a distinct genre in Well’s The Time Machine. There has always been an overlapping between genres however, with Huxley’s canonical Brave New World attempting to combine a vision of the future with ethical questions concerning the nature society. Arguably, some “pure” Sci-Fi writers have entered the mainstream of “high” literary achievement, including Isaac Asimov for his Foundation trilogy. As Brian Aldiss suggests ( Butler 112) “the purpose of science fiction is to define the status of man in terms of rational science, as opposed to showing him as a spiritual being or one connected to a God.” In this sense, Androids does not perhaps seek to address it’s protagonists characters in a fundamentally spiritual manner, nor does it attempt to unravel the deeper conundrums of sexual morality and relationships. It does however explore one of Dick’ principal concerns; that of the nature of reality.

Dick’s novel lays down a hybrid network from such sources as the TV ( which was and still is ubiquitous in American society), evangelical sermon and an underlying narrative tone of reportage which is strongly reminiscent of the newspaper hack. The sentence structure and syntax is sparse and matter-of-fact – a technical device which lends itself easily to be transferred to film. Dick seems to be raising questions about the nature of perceived reality versus truth. He appears almost to be parodying the consumerist texts which “forms part of the ruling class’s means of mental production” ( Butler 121). In this respect it could be argued that Dick foregrounds the narrative tone in order to expose the tyranny of a popular fiction which is produced simply to entertain and subdue the working classes. This is of course the Marxist view, and although Dick did not openly subscribe to Marxism it could be argued that he was following in this general direction. However there are no radical reversals of gender or power roles in the novel; Rick Deckard’s wife remains for the most part submissive, and Rick is the breadwinner in the relationship. Rick’s role as android killer is portrayed as a fairly mundane blue-collar existence, the rewards of which are a “real” animal as opposed to the socially unacceptable “false” version. There is a religious parallelism to Christianity offered by Mercerism and the daily proselytizing by Mercer and his followers on TV, as well as a set of opposite possibilities proposed by the irreverent and iconoclastic Buster Friendly. The philosophy of Mercerism is also actively disseminated and reinforced by a machine which induces emotions at will, to be dialed up as whim dictates. This is an allusion to Hollywood and the entertainment industry, which is Marxist terms are seen as the instruments by which the ruling class subdues the masses. However, in true postmodernist tradition, this machine owes much of its existence to Huxley’s “Feelies” in Brave New World - a futuristic cinema which gave the audience total sensual involvement rather than just the visual and aural. In this way, Dick’s version of the “Feelies” is unashamedly borrowed from Huxley, but he makes no apologies for it. Hence, in the postmodern psyche, originality is not necessarily a prerequisite for artistic merit..

Androids demonstrates many of the attributes of postmodernism. As Butler notes, ( Butler 130), “postmodernism is characterized by a mood of uncertainty and doubt”. We can never be quite sure of what Dick was trying to say. He does tend to cast doubt on the validity of the accepted wisdom and certainties by which we live. Lyotard ( Butler 130) argues that “we no longer trust metanarratives, those ideological structures which reassure us that what we do is legitimate”. There is a touch of the iconoclast in both Dick and Puig; nothing is taken at face value, least of all the apparent truths handed down from society and culture. In Androids, we are never quite certain which is real, which is false.

The earlier modernist writings starting perhaps with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in the late 19th century, followed by the great novels of Joyce, Woolf and D.H Lawrence, and the poetry of T.S. Eliot, tended to emphasize consciousness of the “self’ in often purely aesthetic terms. Good writing was viewed very much as “art for art’s sake”. Originality was a prerequisite for truly great writing. Post modernity on the other hand is marked by a departure from this static position towards a more eclectic and a less elitist one in which the reader is invited to participate in a more active and dynamic creative process. In order to achieve these ends, the writer does not feel constrained by a perceived necessity for an original utterance, but rather, he relies on the effects of intertextuality and polyphony to construct the narrative, (what Bakhtin would call a multivoiced and dialogic narrative).

In conclusion I would argue that Kiss of the Spider Woman combines and juxtaposes several genres, both “high” and “low”, and that these genres are themselves borrowed from other writer’s narratives, but that the manner in which these elements are jostled together is entirely original. This is less true of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? ; the structure of the novel is conventionally linear and it does not offer any radical alternatives to the accepted form of the genre. Nor does it address human relationships in any intimate or revolutionary way, but it does raise important questions about how we view reality and truth. Both novels therefore borrow heavily and unashamedly, but for entirely original purposes.

1999 Words not including title and bibliography

References

Ashcroft,B., Griffiths, G., Tiffin, H., Post-Colonial Studies – The Key Concepts (2000) Routledge, Oxford.

Butler, A.M. Dick, P.K Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in Johnson, D (ed) The Popular and The Canonical(2005) Routledge and Open University, Milton Keynes

Dick, P.K Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (2009) Orion Publishing Group, London

Gramich, K. Puig, M. Kiss of the Spider Woman? in Johnson, D (ed) The Popular and The Canonical(2005) Routledge and Open University, Milton Keynes

Puig, M. Kiss of the Spider Woman (1991) First Vintage International Edition, New York

William Byrd

2010-11-04T11:58:00.003+08:00

I returned from the ship last night. It's great to be home, although the house is in a mess with renovations underway. Em and Jaye pleased to see me, and I them.

This morning I started to listen to Byrd's complete keyboard works played by Davitt Moroney, ten years late of course. The 7-CD collection won much praise when it was released for the excellence of its artistry, and by the way in which it enhances Byrd's position in English music.

Moroney's playing is superb and I am astonished by the complexity of the compositions, and by the harmonies and melodies which are quintessentially English of course.

I can foresee years of listening pleasure ahead with this collection, if the snippets I have so far heard such as John come kisse me now and the early galliards and pavans are anything to go by.

A complete musical world, revolving in the eternal heavens, in the illustrious company of Bach and Couperin .

Godot and Paradise

2010-09-17T16:58:00.003+08:00

Hooray !

Finally finished the third assignment for this course, six weeks early. Now all I have to do is revise for the exam when I get back from the ship. Couple of days reading in November... then off on a busman's holiday on board the cruise liner Star Virgo with Em and Jaye.....

Can't believe this part is over. Five weeks of struggle....

Waiting for Godot and Paradise are both masterpieces of course, so this assignment was enjoyable.

The course has introduced me to some great writing I would otherwise not have come across.

Time for a whiskey.

Ginsberg and du Maurier; Strange Bedfellows

2010-09-14T16:05:00.004+08:00

I received my mark from the course tutor today - far too high. I think she is being very generous. The question asked for a comparison between these two diametrically opposed writers. I found that rather difficult. I enjoyed Rebecca. Reading it feels like a guilty pleasure, like eating chocolate. Allen Ginsberg on the other hand is more of a challenge. It's odd - maybe I'm becoming a closet conservative. Thirty years ago I would have championed Ginsberg and denounced du Maurier. It's a worry....

“The ‘popular’ is a site of ideological struggle between resistant subordinate groups/cultures in society and the dominant groups/cultures who perpetually endeavour to incorporate them” (Johnson 54). To what extent do you find this definition appropriate when analyzing Rebecca and the poetry of O’Hara OR Ginsberg?

In this essay I will discuss du Maurier’s Rebecca and Ginsberg’s poetry with regard to the way these texts either subvert or conform to the aesthetic, social and political ideas promoted by a literary elite, or dominant ideology. I will try to show how the status of these ‘popular’ texts is subject to change over time, and that their position within or outside the circle of a literary canon is subject to constant shift and reappraisal. The concept of a ‘site of ideological struggle’ seems to suggest a consciousness on the part of the authors to position themselves in opposition to the prevailing dominant culture, and I shall argue that this may be true of Ginsberg to a degree, but is certainly not applicable to du Maurier .

Rebecca’s nameless narrator seems to have been created in order to mirror the social sensibilities of the typical white, heterosexual middle-class housewife of the mid-war period. This hypothetical reader sees herself as inferior to a semi-aristocratic world represented by Manderley and its embodiment, Maxim de Winter, who is portrayed as remote and patriarchal, an archetype in literature perhaps most famously represented by Rochester in Jane Eyre. The parallels with Brontes’ classic novel are too close to ignore , but du Maurier extends and expands many of the stock gothic clichés into themes which are more readily analyzed in terms of Freudian psychoanalysis . To what extend the author is consciously inviting the reader to make these associations is far from clear. The very namelessness of the narrator has been said to represent the subjugation of the female psyche by the dominant male , but du Maurier has said that this literary device was purely a technical challenge she wanted to set for herself. I use this as an example of the tendency for analysts to assume that the author was entirely conscious of the psychological allusions which they recognize in the text, whereas it may be that Freudian stereotypes automatically exist as part of a dominant literary and social ideology of which du Maurier is a natural follower. To some extent, it could be argued that the author of Rebecca herself inhabited the social and sexual microcosm which is represented by Manderley. Hence, by extension it could be argued that a Marxist analysis which insists on there being a capitalist conspiracy by the way in which values are imposed on the proletariat from above is even more insidious if this transmission of values is unconsciously performed. As Watson reminds us ( Watson p32), du Maurier’s perspective is ‘essentially conservative’, relying as it does on a discourse of ‘memory and regret’. Hence she conveys in her writing the hallmarks of a canonical methodology, drawing on the classic forms of romance and gothic epitomized by Austen and the Brontes.

Allen Ginsberg’s ideology is in many ways the antithesis of du Maurier’s. Not only is he writing from the lower stratum of literary topology rather than from the peak, but he is also consciously struggling against not only the oppression of a perceived capitalist hegemony, but against the weight of accepted literary norms. His poetry is an attack on the conventions of poetic form and of the dominant political ideology. His major work, “Howl’, is an indictment of the status quo which he sees as marginalizing entire sub-cultures and subordinate groups. These groups include the Beat poets and the gay subcultures of the 1950s in urban America. His target audience was limited to a small group of like-minded political and literary radicals which included William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, as opposed to du Maurier’s which was an audience of conservative, presumably heterosexual middle-class women. Hence history and location are important when discussing these two writers. Ginsberg wrote from the fringes of mainstream society whereas du Maurier wrote from the centre .

‘Howl’ is essentially confrontational. It catalogues the aspirations of a generation of poets alienated by McCarthyism and the Cold War, who “burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of capitalism” and “let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy”. The content is therefore much more overtly political and sexual than that of Rebecca . Part 1 of the poem is virtually one long line, being perpetually extended until the last stanza. It can be seen as a defining moment in literary history when poetry became a powerful struggle against the prevailing ideology of a post-war America which seemed locked in a perpetual state of paranoia. The perception of the poem is subject to constant change as it becomes distanced in time from the events which gave rise to its creation. On the other hand, Rebecca appears to be more ‘fixed’ in literary terms, although as Watson has observed, the novel may in future become an accepted classic in canonical terms rather than a ‘popular” classic which is the tag usually assigned to it . But the transition would be slow whereas the position of ‘Howl’ seems infinitely more unstable.

Ginsberg’s poem ‘America’ was written in the same year as ‘Howl’ but takes up a far more conciliatory tone. It is less confrontational and declamatory, more engaging and conversational. ‘Howl’ can sometimes read as a mere diatribe whereas ‘America’ is a dialogue between a disenchanted citizen and an all-powerful State. Here there is more reason than anger. The poet is attempting to engage the dominant ideology represented by America in a reasoned debate, and although America remains silent we assume that it is listening; “I’m addressing you. / Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time Magazine?” Here, Ginsberg equates Time Magazine with a perceived tendency of American culture to reduce society to simple questions of business and the latest developments in the entertainment industry . Ginsberg seems to be saying that efforts to radically change society for the better are absorbed and ultimately defused by the dominance of media and indoctrination. I would argue that here, the ‘subordinate culture’ represented by the Beat poets, rather than being incorporated by the ‘dominant culture’ of America, is actually being neutralized. In the final stanzas of the poem, Ginsberg claims there is another way to attack the status quo; “It’s true I don’t want to join the Army or turn lathes / in precision parts factories, I’m nearsighted and / psychopathic anyway. / America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.” It is ironic that sixty years after the poem was written, academics are now engaged in a process of re-evaluating Ginsberg’s work and are indeed incorporating it into the general body of literary achievement, whereas at the time of its conception, the poetry was regarded as dangerously subversive in many literary circles. This would be anathema to F.R Leavis who asserted that literature should be measured against a canonical yardstick upheld by Shakespeare, Hardy, Coleridge et al.

Leavis would probably have objected not only to the content of Ginsberg’s poetry, but to the style and form. ‘America’ uses repetition to an unusual degree, and the word America is used many times. The poem is in free verse with no attempt at a rhyme scheme. So in this respect, not only is the content quite revolutionary and provocative, but the technique is as well . The genre of poetry is thus subverted to such an extent that was difficult for any dominant literary group to incorporate it at the time it was written. Years later this is no longer true and Ginsberg’s poetry is in danger of becoming mainstream . Du Maurier’s Rebecca, on the other hand, was written very much in a conventional literary style. The romantic gothic novel may actually have reached its stylistic zenith in this work. Contemporary literary taste has somehow confined the novel within this narrow genre, and which is often termed ‘popular’. But as Watson has noted, Bronte’s Jane Eyre is just as popular if a comparison of copies of books sold is considered the criterion for popularity.. But posterity has afforded Bronte’s work the status of a classic. It would seems highly likely that this will apply to Rebecca in time, especially if one considers the subtle syntax and metaphorical complexities of the novel’s structure.

In conclusion I would argue that Ginsberg’s poetry challenged the dominant social and literary culture of America at the time in which it was written. The texts were conceived in a maelstrom of political and social discontent, but posterity has shown that they have now become absorbed into mainstream academia. This is borne out in part by the very existence of university courses such as this which include Ginsberg as worthy of serious study. Du Maurier’s Rebecca was conceived in an entirely different literary community. Her novel conforms with a dominant ideology in that it reinforces not only the Freudian analytical model, but Marxist and conservative readings as well. The premise that ‘The Popular’ is a site of ideological struggle is a useful one but rather limited when applied to a conservative writer such as du Maurier.

1497 words not including the title and bibliography

References

Ginsberg, A . (2006) Howl and Other Poems City light Books, San Francisco.

du Maurier, D. (2010) Rebecca. Virago, London

Watson, N. Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca. In Johnson, D. The Popular & The Canonical. (2005) The Open University, Milton Keynes.

The Grand Design

2010-09-14T13:54:00.004+08:00

My love-hate relationship with the Economist continues. In this week's edition there was a scathing review of Stephen Hawking's new book, which claims that philosophy is dead and casts doubt on the existance of a creator. In this instance it is a case of love.

I have always found Hawking's pronouncements to be populist and muddled. He puts forward arguments that will "soon" be backed up with theory. I am not holding my breath.

Hawking is the darling of the post-60's hip generation. A dumbed-down universe is the general direction in which his hype leads us. Pink Floyd, a once inspiring band that turned English middle-class melancholy into a psychedelic art form, used Hawking's voice on an interminable anthem entitled "Keep Talking", or something like that. It confirmed Hawking's place in the cool, hip set. (Sounds like a rant , and it is rather beside the point, so I should stop here).

Stephen Hawking ; the J.K Rowling of physics.

From the Economist ;

The Grand Design. By Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow. Bantam; 198 pages; $28 and £18.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

IN 1988, Stephen Hawking, a British cosmologist, ended his best-selling book, “A Brief History of Time”, on a cliff hanger. If we find a physical theory that explains everything, he wrote—suggesting that this happy day was not too far off—“then we would know the mind of God.” But the professor didn’t mean it literally. God played no part in the book, which was renowned for being bought by everyone and understood by few. Twenty-two years later, Professor Hawking tells a similar story, joined this time by Leonard Mlodinow, a physicist and writer at the California Institute of Technology.

In their “The Grand Design”, the authors discuss “M-theory”, a composite of various versions of cosmological “string” theory that was developed in the mid-1990s, and announce that, if it is confirmed by observation, “we will have found the grand design.” Yet this is another tease. Despite much talk of the universe appearing to be “fine-tuned” for human existence, the authors do not in fact think that it was in any sense designed. And once more we are told that we are on the brink of understanding everything.

The authors may be in this enviable state of enlightenment, but most readers will not have a clue what they are on about. Some physics fans will enjoy “The Grand Design” nonetheless. The problem is not that the book is technically rigorous—like “A Brief History of Time”, it has no formulae—but because whenever the going threatens to get tough, the authors retreat into hand-waving, and move briskly on to the next awe-inspiring notion. Anyone who can follow their closing paragraphs on the relation between negative gravitational energy and the creation of the universe probably knows it all already. This is physics by sound-bite.

There are some useful colour diagrams and photographs, and the prose is jaunty. The book is peppered with quips, presumably to remind the reader that he is not studying for an exam but is supposed to be having fun. These attempted jokes usually fuse the weighty with the quotidian, in the manner of Woody Allen, only without the laughs. (“While perhaps offering great tanning opportunities, any solar system with multiple suns would probably never allow life to develop.”) There is a potted history of physics, which is adequate as far as it goes, though given what the authors have to say about Aristotle, one can only hope that they are more reliable about what happened billions of years ago at the birth of the universe than they are about what happened in Greece in the fourth century BC. Their account appears to be based on unreliable popularisations, and they cannot even get right the number of elements in Aristotle’s universe (it is five, not four).

The authors rather fancy themselves as philosophers, though they would presumably balk at the description, since they confidently assert on their first page that “philosophy is dead.” It is, allegedly, now the exclusive right of scientists to answer the three fundamental why-questions with which the authors purport to deal in their book. Why is there something rather than nothing? Why do we exist? And why this particular set of laws and not some other?
It is hard to evaluate their case against recent philosophy, because the only subsequent mention of it, after the announcement of its death, is, rather oddly, an approving reference to a philosopher’s analysis of the concept of a law of nature, which, they say, “is a more subtle question than one may at first think.” There are actually rather a lot of questions that are more subtle than the authors think. It soon becomes evident that Professor Hawking and Mr Mlodinow regard a philosophical problem as something you knock off over a quick cup of tea after you have run out of Sudoku puzzles.

The main novelty in “The Grand Design” is the authors’ application of a way of interpreting quantum mechanics, derived from the ideas of the late Richard Feynman, to the universe as a whole. According to this way of thinking, “the universe does not have just a single existence or history, but rather every possible version of the universe exists simultaneously.” The authors also assert that the world’s past did not unfold of its own accord, but that “we create history by our observation, rather than history creating us.” They say that these surprising ideas have passed every experimental test to which they have been put, but that is misleading in a way that is unfortunately typical of the authors. It is the bare bones of quantum mechanics that have proved to be consistent with what is presently known of the subatomic world. The authors’ interpretations and extrapolations of it have not been subjected to any decisive tests, and it is not clear that they ever could be.

Once upon a time it was the province of philosophy to propose ambitious and outlandish theories in advance of any concrete evidence for them. Perhaps science, as Professor Hawking and Mr Mlodinow practice it in their airier moments, has indeed changed places with philosophy, though probably not quite in the way that they think.

Poem

2010-09-08T11:40:00.003+08:00

This was composed by someone very special. It does not pretend to be great art, but the sentiment is all. Let it just remain anonymous.

"The cold winds of Time
Blow all our lives away
Uncounted and ever lost
In the deserts of eternity
All our loves and striving
Thoughts deeds and yearning
Unrecorded come to nothing
Lost in the void for evermore
Can you hear those winds?
Sighing in bitter loneliness
In the dark night of the soul
Bearing thoughts of despair
For what might have been
But now sad winds

Enough of misery
My thoughts turn to love
And send you balm
To sooth your misery
Other winds there are
With different ways
So come friendly Zephyr
Warm and joyful
And tell me truth
About our lives
We live again my son
And love remains
To give us hope
That we may make A better world."

Paradise

2010-09-07T22:11:00.004+08:00

I re-read most of Paradise by Ablulrazak Gurnah today, in conjunction with the course guide notes, which are excellent.

Once more I was struck by the skill in the storytelling and the concepts which presented themselves. Gurnah seems to be moving away from the African postcolonial histories posited by the great Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe. Gurnah's world lies far to the southeast and deals with the exploitation of the Arab slave traders on the Zanzibar coast. It is black man oppressing black man and hardly touches on the colonial invasions. Myths and legends are interwoven magically into the narrative. Nothing is fixed in time or space. The antiquity of the tales told reaches back to prehistory.

I learned that the word paradise is derived from Farsi, and that the Garden of Eden is another version of the ubiquitous walled garden found in Muslim myth. Adam and Eve are mirrored by the mysterious maiden Zulekha and the interloper Yusof of Persian and later Muslim poetry. In fact the "Garden of Eden" itself is Jennet el adn in Arabic.

As a piece of fictional history Paradise is exceptional in its breadth and scope, and creates an entirely new world of possibilities for anyone interested in postcolonial writing and the representaion of the "Other".

It seems incredible that the book lost out to a lesser work in the 1994 Booker Prize circus. Paradise does not conform to accepted Western liberal notions of what the postcolonial writer is supposed to discuss, and it is for this reason that the book was dismissed.

Godot

2010-08-28T08:53:00.005+08:00

A few days ago I submitted my essay on du Maurier and Ginsberg - a very odd couple indeed. It was again difficult to say all I wanted to in a mere 1500 words.

I have re-read Beckett's Waiting for Godot again with fresh revelations. It is like a good piece of music; the first time you hear it you think "this is intriguing -there may be something in this". Then after a second time you are hooked.

It's a little like Mahler - the whole world is in the work.

The dialogues between Vladimir and Estragon seem to sum up the hopelessness of existance, the rootlessness and chaotic indetermination of everyday life. Clinging on endlessly to the old belief that someone will arrive and sort out the mess, or at least explain it. But of course, there is nobody, and we wait and wait.

The play ties in neatly with discussions on postmodernism and poststructuralism. Both "posts" in fact.

Beckett was a genius. Now there's a statement.

Banded Woodpecker ( Picus Miniaceus )

2010-08-24T16:34:00.004+08:00

This morning the cleaning lady came. She comes every Tuesday. She looks formidable with her stony expression and big bony countenance, but I am told by Em that she has a heart of gold. She is like something from the 1950's, the last of the old style amahs. We call her "One Stick" because her Mandarin name sounds like that. She can't speak of word of English but I know by her black looks that I am not wanted around the house. I know my place.

So after dropping Em at work I drove to MacRitchie Reservoir and did the long 3-hour walk which includes the suspension bridge. I came across a banded woodpecker quite close up. I had heard them before but never seen one. There were some kingfishers flashing by as well. A granddad monitor lizard came out for a stroll. The park was empty, it being a quiet weekday morning.

Alex Higgins

2010-08-17T12:22:00.005+08:00

Earlier this year I forgave The Economist for supporting the invasion of Iraq, and took out a one-year subscription. My job entails working abroad for six weeks at a stretch, so the weekly editions pile up when I'm away. I take great delight in arranging them chronologically and starting from the oldest issue, reading forwards to the present day.

(This reminds me of the rubber planter in Malaya in one of Maugham's short stories, who receives copies of The Times by boat six weeks after publication, and gets his manservant to iron them flat. He then dresses in black tie and tails for a solitary dinner in his colonial bungalow and afterwards spends the evenings reading.)

Alex Higgins died a few weeks ago. He was a part of my mispent youth and he was responsible for turning me into a couch potato when the Snooker World Champinships were on the telly, like thousands of others, mesmerised by his impossible talent. He was a rebel and a genius. I always loved to see him play. The last time I saw him play was in 1984 with Steve Davis in the final, I think, and it was the end of an era. The magician subdued by the cool tactician. Higgins never really came back after that but when he was in the zone, nobody could touch him.

The Economist included his obituary in one of their issues. Nice of them to do so, I thought. The consistent high standard of the writing is there to see. I wish they weren't such knee-jerk supporters of the big military gesture and of the unregulated free market, but there are encouraging signs that they are mellowing a little these days.

Quote:

Alex “Hurricane” Higgins, transformer of snooker, died on July 24th, aged 61, Aug 5th 2010

THE game of snooker is a curious one. Professional players wear black waistcoats and bow ties, as if they have been waylaid on their way to a funeral. The referees, similarly attired, also wear white gloves with which to replace the balls upon the table. The green baize cloth, much like the smooth lawn of a bowling green, enforces quiet, concentration, care. Only the odd nervous cough, soon suppressed, breaks the glacial atmosphere.

But snooker grew up in Britain’s working men’s clubs as something rough, rude and rambunctious. Beer fuelled it, cash betting underpinned it, and scores were settled with fists in the street outside. Speed was a virtue; safety, beyond a certain point, just sissy. The good player took on all comers and dispatched them, mercilessly, one by one.

Most professionals learned to establish a prudent distance from that world. Alex Higgins never did. The man who reached the heights of snooker in the 1970s, and turned it into a global phenomenon in the 1980s, was always the edgy, jigging teenager who haunted the Jampot Billiard Hall off the Donegall Road in Belfast’s Shankill. There he would keep the score for pocket money and, little by little, start to play himself, a scrawny creature with fast, feline grace who would prowl around the table and seem to know at once how to build a break or make a clearance, always three balls ahead of himself. He’d play for anything: Mars Bars, fizzy drinks, a packet of Player’s, a smooth pint of Guinness down the throat. He was a Protestant boy who would even take on a Taig if there was money in it. He would take on anyone, because he knew within a short time that he could beat them all.

This was the world he brought with him like a gale into the sacred halls of the sport, such as the Selly Park British Legion Hall in Birmingham, where in 1972 he won his first world championship at 22, then the youngest winner ever. At the time he was homeless, moving from squat to squat through condemned streets in Blackburn. He appeared for the final, fingers stained with nicotine, in white trousers and a tank top. The World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association ruled these “clothes unbecoming to a professional” and, after his victory, fined him.

This was the first of many, many run-ins. The WPBSA tried to make him wear a tie; he would tear it off, and sit on the sidelines at matches with a pint and a cigarette, seething. He was disciplined for punching officials in the stomach, twice; head-butting a referee who asked him to take a drugs test; trashing hotel rooms; telling a Catholic rival he would have him shot, and pissing into pot plants. Drink and womanising destroyed his two marriages and landed him in court for offensive behaviour. One girlfriend stabbed him; another locked him in her flat, from which he tumbled 25 feet. He broke his foot then, but it never stopped him playing. Nor did the fall he took once over a wall outside a pub in Blackpool, though his arm dripped blood afterwards onto the smooth green baize.

Despite all this, probably because of it, the public loved him. In the years of his best form (helped by the advent of colour, which made sense of the balls), snooker became a television sensation. Viewers agreed with him that he was hounded by officialdom, and crowds urged the rebel on. They liked his emotion at the table, the undisguised fire and grief; they fell for his murmuring, boyish charm, and most of all they admired the matador beauty of his play. This seemed almost reckless in its certainty, with screw shots, multi-cushion shots and backspin that appeared impossible to mortals. Opinion was divided over whether the peak of his game was the 1982 world championship semi-final, when he rescued a deficit of 59-0 with a break of 69 to reverse the match entirely, or the final, when he made a total clearance of 135 in the final frame (his opponent, Ray Reardon, sitting pale with disbelief) and then, in tears, called his wife and baby daughter out of the crowd to hug them.

Celebrity, though, didn’t suit him. He didn’t know what to do with it, except to put more money on more horses, or drink more vodka, or buy more fedoras, until there was nothing left of the £3m he had earned in his career. Wild behaviour hurt his form; punishment meant long bans and loss of rankings, so that he had to slog time and again through grimy qualifying rounds. But he would have done it anyway, since he would play stark naked in a coalhole if there was a stake on the table.

At 60, shockingly gaunt from throat cancer and with his voice reduced to a rasp, he found himself back in Belfast, cadging money from friends for a drink and a copy of the Racing Post. He didn’t play much now, the local snooker halls had barred him, but he was still sure he could beat almost everyone. He had been “mesmerising” at the table, he told the Telegraph in his last whispered interview, and with practice he could be so again. He told others that snooker was “dying”. This was obviously untrue; professional snooker would never again, after him, be the funereal affair of old. But without him that electric charge was missing from the sword-like pointing of the cue, and from the click of the White propelling perfectly to the pocket the Blue, the Pink and the Black.

unquote.

RIP Alex Higgins

DSV "Mermaid Asiana"

2010-07-28T15:06:00.001+08:00

I joined the new vessel "Mermaid Asiana" last month in Maptaphut, Thailand, where we have been alongside for the past few weeks waiting for a job.

Literally

2010-05-19T15:26:00.002+08:00

This word has become another major annoyance.

Heard on the BBC -

" I was literally climbing the walls in frustration"

When the word is used in such a manner it makes the speaker sound foolish.

I am literally fed up to the teeth with it.

The Lake and some flowers...

2010-05-17T17:19:00.004+08:00

Today's walk yielded a troupe of white-crested laughing thrushes ( the proper collective noun should of course be flock, but troupe sums up the way they root around in the undergrowth in groups), several kingfishers and lots of hornets, but my camera is too simple to snap them unless I am really patient and wait until they get up close...

Here's a view of the lake and some flowers. Like Maugham, I don't know the proper names of the flora and fauna I encounter along the way. In his entertaining travel book The Gentleman in the Parlour he apologizes not only for his complete ignorance of their Latin names, but for not knowing their common names either.

I do know that one of them is bougainvillea. It grows everywhere.

Clock No.4 - IN18 from Tube Hobby

2010-05-12T13:27:00.004+08:00

This is the latest clock built in just a few hours, again from Lithuania. Although the depth of fade is not as deep as that of the German clocks, it is nevertheless attractive and has some useful software features. I have added LED underlighting which I find enhances the appearance.

The case was made by a local Singapore company for S$25 and the base is solid copper bar that I had in the junk box. All my clocks are weighted with either copper or brass to add stability because they are otherwise a little top-heavy.

Walks In Kent Ridge park

2010-05-10T13:42:00.007+08:00

When I am home I try to climb the hill behind my house to Kent Ridge Park every day. This is one of Singapore's best-kept secrets; an oasis of peace just to the west of the city. Most days I see white-throated laughing thrushes, kingfishers and grey squirrels, but as fate would have it, I always tend to see these animals when I am not carrying my camera. When I do take the camera I am sure they hide ! But I will persevere.

This is a view at the lower end of the slopes towards the south, looking over towards Pulau Bukom and the Indonesian Islands.

Clock No.3 - IN18 Nixie Clock with Blue LEDs

2010-05-03T20:06:00.005+08:00

This is a clock I built from a German kit. The brightness and fade are controlled by a light-dependant resistor so that during the day, when most people are out of the house, the numerals revert to the dimmest possible. In the evening as the ambient light falls, the numerals are at their brightest. The clock turns off from midnight to 0700. The combination of these features ensures that tube lifetime is stretched as far as possible.

I have used LED under-lighting which looks great in the evening.

Clock No.2 ( Kit from Tube Hobby, with some modifications)

2010-05-03T13:48:00.003+08:00

Home At last / Eliot, Auden, Thomas, MacNiece

2010-05-02T23:04:00.004+08:00

I got back on Friday night late... the previous 36 hours or so were interesting. A 6- hour voyage on a Vietnamese fast rescue craft from Ruby Oil Field to a hotel in Vung Toa, a quick shower and shave, and a 5 minute walk to an offshore bar with some of the chaps from the Rockwater 2. Beers only $1 a bottle, girls all over the place... some very beautiful ones too... ah in a previous life, but all that has been swept away.

The next morning a 4-hour car journey to Ho Chi Minh City and a decadent afternoon walking through the old French centre, with its miniature replica of Notre Dame built in 1888, wide boulevards, and fine French cuisine. An evening flight back to Singapore and home again.

Here's the 3000 word essay I submitted as the final marked assignment for this course. It was more or less a straight comparison between Eliot and the socialist Thirties poets. I hope the tutor thinks W.H. Auden is a windbag too, or I am in trouble.

In this essay I will discuss poems written in the 1930’s by Auden, MacNiece and Thomas and try to show how these poets differ from Eliot in terms of technique and tenor. The question of self-consciousness arises from motivation. The group known as the Thirties poets seemed driven to communicate strongly-held socialist views through the medium of their art, and it is the transmission of politics through art which seems inevitably to lead to a sense of self-consciousness. The conflict of a duality of aims, on the one hand didactic, on the other, aesthetic, is a problem that the Thirties poets wrestled with through much of their output. Eliot’s seems less hindered by such tensions, enabling him to write unconstrained and aesthetically satisfying poetry.

W.H. Auden is probably the most influential of the Thirties poets, and indeed, his contemporaries, Spender, MacNiece, Cornford and others are often placed at the periphery of a central Audenesque consciousness. Virginia Woolf was a harsh critic of Auden et al , and her essay “The Leaning Tower” (1940) is replete with some rather sweeping statements deriding their work as “oratory, not poetry”. She does, however, raise some difficult questions which are at the heart of the poets’ dilemma; “And yet – here is another tendency - how can you altogether abuse a society that is giving you, after all, a very fine view and some sort of security? (ibid). Her argument is an old one and which has never successfully been rebutted ; how can an Oxbridge-educated middle-class poet write socialist verse for the working classes without appearing either condescending or hypocritical? It could be argued that Auden never really countered this criticism until he turned away from political themes towards more religious ones in his later years. Auden’s early self-consciousness stems from this fundamental dichotomy.

Auden’s “Spain” (1937) is a case in point. For the poets, the Spanish Civil War had become a symbol of the fight against Capitalism. The war was an almost apocalyptic struggle against the powers of darkness and oppression. “Spain” can strike one as over-simplistic in the way in which it divides time into neat parcels of Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. “ Yesterday” is a potted history of Spain, from the trade routes to China, the classical influences of Greece, through to industrialization, and a brief allusion to the Moorish invasions thrown in;

“Yesterday the prayer to the sunset

And the adoration of madmen”

These lines now appear out of step with contemporary views of the Muslim Iberian era as a period of great social, scientific and cultural advance. The present is depicted as a necessary struggle, with the usual excuses for unavoidable atrocities;

“ Today the deliberate increase in the chances of death,

The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;”

These lines have often been quoted as an example of the poet’s acceptance of political expedience, which negates all his higher aims. In fairness it should be noted that Auden later regretted this poem and disowned it as “trash”, but perhaps too late and the damage done.

The overall tone of the poem can seem as somewhat hectoring - “loudspeaker poetry” to use Woolf’s phrase. Auden uses the plural first-person narrative in an attempt to draw us in, but the device can seem condescending in such lines as –

“Our thoughts have bodies; the menacing shapes of our

fever

Are precise and alive. For the fears which made us respond

To the medicine ad, and the brochure of winter cruises

Have become invading battalions”

Thus Auden is lecturing “us” by attaching causality to our yearnings for material comfort and claiming that the consequence is war. He may be right, but is poetry the appropriate genre for such expression? The poem verges on propaganda – surely the genre of the political tract and the penny pamphlet. Free-verse is used throughout the poem and includes many workaday phrases ( “Fumbled and unsatisfactory embrace before hurting”, “the eager election of chairmen”). Such syntax would seem more at home in pure prose. The word “unsatisfactory”, for example, is excessively polysyllabic, too cumbersome for poetry. So it could be argued that notwithstanding ideological concerns, the didacticism of the message could be better conveyed using the techniques of pure prose.

“Spain” adds weight to Auden’s detractors who claim that his poetry was a continuance of the typical undergraduate’s immature first attempts in the genre. The future, for Auden, is an idyllic Utopia ;

“Tomorrow the rediscovery of romantic love… all the fun under Liberty’s masterful shadow…The beautiful roar of the chorus under the dome… the weeks of perfect communion”

The lines now seem naïve in the extreme and are reminiscent of a later generation of poets in the 1960’s who regarded Allen Ginsberg as their prophet. The central problem for Auden is that his views were typical of a specific period in time, and were directed towards a contemporary audience of the converted. The poetry now appears dated and anachronistic.

As if by an accident of birth, Dylan Thomas is included in Skelton’s anthology. Thomas was an admirer of Auden but not passionately so, if we read his contribution in New Verse (Skelton p34). Thomas’s work stands outside the central political ethos represented by many of the Thirties poets, and he was mercifully absented from Woolf’s withering attack on the poets in her “Leaning Tower.” Compared with Auden, Spender, Day Lewis and the others, Thomas’s education was humble. Many of his poems seem born of a Welsh sense of earthiness and spirituality which approaches religious conviction, probably enhanced by copious quantities of alcohol, for there is something of the whisky-priest in Thomas. His poetry was not overtly political and hence does not suffer from the anxieties faced by his left-wing contemporaries. It is therefore less obviously self-conscious in this respect, and more aesthetically pure as a result.

There are a several poems in Thomas’s output which form the central core of his work. Amongst these are “ And Death Shall Have No Dominion”, “The Force that Through the Green Fuse”, “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London” and “Do Not go Gentle into that Good Night”. The first two are included in Skelton’s anthology. All four poems seem to have an elemental power at work within them, a kind of religious certitude. The spirituality is universal and secular, and avoids proselytizing. There is no self consciousness apparent here. From “The Force that Through the Green Fuse” ;

“The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees

Is my destroyer.

And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose

My youth is bent by the same wintry fever”

The first and last lines of each stanza are in iambic pentameter, adding emphasis to the rhythm and tone. There is a sense of the inevitability of aging and death, also shown in “ Do not go Gentle” which is an appeal against inevitable mortality. The structure of “The Force” is meticulously controlled, far more so than many of the Thirties poets, and seems to reach back to Donne or Marlowe in its use of classical imagery. The fourth stanza starts with the masterful line “ The lips of time leech to the fountain head” which is astonishingly evocative. Brown ( p199) discusses the influence of the European surrealist on the Thirties poets, and Thomas shows tendencies in this direction here, but this is probably coincidental.

The poem ends on a note of cruel, perhaps morbid inevitability;

“And I am dumb to tell the lover’s tomb

How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm”

“And Death Shall Have No Dominion” is imbued with the same elemental power, but the tone is a complete reversal of “The Force” and is a refreshingly optimistic view of death. The poem, as in “A Refusal to Mourn”, is a clarion call, a statement of unshaken belief in immortality.

“Dead men naked they shall be one

With the man in the wind and the west moon”

and-

“Under the windings of the sea

They lying long shall not die windily”

- which employs a clever pun on "wind”. Both examples show an almost biblical belief in the immortality of the soul, and the poem uses Christian allusions to drive the point home. The refrain “And death shall have no dominion” is repeated at the start and end of each stanza, reinforcing the impact of each utterance and reminding us of the repetitions and cadences of a Welsh hymn. Thomas was not typical of the Audenesque Thirties poets; he was in many respects an individualist who stood apart from them.

It could be argued that Thomas’s contemporary, Louis MacNiece, was another Thirties poet who stood apart from the main cohort. ( Somewhat unfairly, MacNiece was not spared the wrath of Virginia Woolf in “The Leaning Tower” ) . MacNiece had the benefit of an English university education but hailed from Ireland, hence he was “spiritually hyphenated” to use Terence Brown’s phrase ( Brown, p 207). The tensions which can arise from cultural displacement often produce a heightened sense of ambivalence, whether it be in the genres of theatre, prose or poetry. MacNiece’s Autumn Journal has been called “autumnal and melancholy” (Hynes, 1992) but the poem includes some striking insights into the psychology and collective consciousness of the common soldier, especially in part XV. His singularity of purpose is best illustrated in the poem Meeting Point, which is quite unlike any other poem in the anthology. It is a love poem – love being a concept which the other poets largely avoided.

But perhaps more than being love poetry, it embraces the modernist ideal of capturing the moment, of stopping time for a brief instant to experience the only reality which can truly be known – the present.

“Time was away and somewhere else,

There were two glasses and two chairs

And two people with one pulse

(Somebody stopped the moving stairs);

Time was away and somewhere else”

Each stanza starts and ends with the same line, which frames the interior. There is some skillful imagery of a moment in time which is held in suspension, for example the bell which was “silent in the air” , the refrain continues in “the clock / Forgot them and the radio waltz/Came out like water from a rock”.

There is a slight hint of Surrealism in the way MacNiece conjures a sense of eternity by using the image of an expanse of desert sands in juxtaposition with the mundane:

“The camels crossed the miles of sand

That stretched around the cups and plates”

There is the repetition of the hypnotic “Time was away and somewhere else” throughout the poem, which finally modulates into “ Time was away and she was here” in the final stanza, like the ticking of a clock. MacNiece betrays his agnosticism and humanity in the lines;

“God or whatever means the Good,

Be praised that time can stop like this”

NacNiece’s choice of words stands in stark contrast to many of his contemporaries. He prefers classical rhyme schemes and sparse vocabulary, much as Thomas does. The final stanza is memorable in its simplicity and heartfelt sentiment:

“The bell was silent in the air

And all the room was aglow because

Time was away and she was here.”

T.S Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is certainly not a love poem. The title is misleading but purposefully so. From his collection of early poetry “ Prufrock and Other Observations” it has acquired a reputation as one of the pivotal works in modernism. Written some twenty years before Auden and his followers started writing, it is unencumbered with political or socialist pretensions. What first strikes the reader is the erudition and intellectual rigour employed in the work. This can be confusing for the average reader who would probably recognize some of the literary allusions which infuse the poem, but be unable to place them exactly. Even the opening Italian epigram is puzzling to the monolingual reader, but it transpires that the poem can be appreciated without necessarily being au fait with all it’s heteroglossic distractions. What emerges is a clearly delineated poet persona, not necessarily that of the author, one who is detached, superficial and urbane. The use of vocabulary is laconic, sharp and cutting.

There is no sense of self-consciousness here. The phrase is somewhat tinged with a negative connotation. Rather, the term should perhaps be inverted as a “consciousness of self” when discussing Eliot’s work. He draws on Shakespearian and other literary archetypes in order either to define who the persona is, or who he is most certainly not:

“No! I am not Prince Hamlet , nor was meant to be;

Am an attendant lord……

Almost at times, the Fool”

Thus the persona is likened to a cynical observer, a stock Shakespearian character most famously personified by the sardonic Jaques. The persona is certainly self-absorbed, even self-obsessed. There are occasional diversions which show his vanity and the self-doubt about the appearance he presents to the world:

“Time to turn back and descend the stair,

With a bald spot in the middle of my hair –

(They will say: ‘How his hair is growing thin!’)”

Eliot presents the man as complete with all human vanities and foibles in place, and as such there is stark realism in the piece as well as a purely aesthetic edge. There has been much conjecture over Eliot’s apparent misogyny in this and other poems , but his detractors may be confusing the poet persona with the author, whose aim seems to be to represent the human condition as it actually exists, stripped of traditional poetic niceties;

“In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo”

The couplet seems to mirror the internal chatter within the mind of the poet persona, a casual put-down of women perhaps. And again women are blamed for distracting him from reaching a coherent conclusion. It as if each time he draws close to a resolution he is thwarted;

“Is it perfume from a dress

That makes me so digress?

Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.

And should I then presume?

And how should I begin”

Eliot’s technique is to mix philosophical argument with the mundane. This is in fact a reflection of how things really work in life; we are forever distracted from our intentions by the clamour of external reality - “ I have measured out my life with coffee spoons” . His depictions of a cold urban environment contrast sharply with the pastoral serenity of the Romantics;

“The yellow fog that rubs its back along the window- panes,

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes…”

This in itself was an innovation. Reality in all its grossness was not considered a poetic subject until Eliot arrived, making it describable and almost appealing. But at the same time the persona is engaged in internal philosophical argument. As Brown points out ( p246), Eliot was heavily influenced at this time by the French poet Leforgue, who was concerned with the construction of a self-image and of a philosophical position. Eliot gleaned much from his work, and indeed his “Conversation Galante” is almost a re-writing of Laforgue’s “Autre Complainte de Lord Pierrot”. Eliot and Laforgue both deal with metaphysics and abstractions. In “The Love Song” these moments of introspection are interrupted by distractions of reality as well as by reflections on mortality. Eliot is thus tempering altruism with brute reality;

“ I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,

And I have seen the eternal footman hold my coat,

and snicker,

And in short, I was afraid.”

In his early career. Eliot was influenced by the theories of Henri Bergson, and attended several of his lectures in Paris. Bergson was interested in the nature of time and how it is experienced and processed by human consciousness. Eliot’s poems ebb and flow with the transitory, insubstantial fragments of time and memory described by Bergson. Time is mentioned frequently in “The Love Story”, and the reader is made aware of its ephemeral nature by a disorientating tendency to confuse location and personality with seemingly irrelevant images arising from memory, almost at random.

The second poem in the collection, “Portrait of a Lady” probably lends its title from the Henry James’s novel. The subject matter here is narrower, the poet persona more superficial. The piece may have been based on a Eliot’s meetings with an elderly literary lady whilst at university in America. There is ample use of imagery and simile to convey the lady’s dimly-lit apartment:

“And four waxed candles in the darkened room,

Four rings of light upon the ceiling overhead,

An atmosphere of Juliet’s tomb”

Throughout, the persona is detached, supercilious and rather condescending towards his host. Once again, as in “The Love Story”, the conversations are disrupted by references to mundane reality – “ I smile of course/ And go on drinking tea”. The persistent encroachment of time and memory again interrupts an internal philosophical debate;

“I keep my countenance,

I remain self-possessed

Except when a street-piano, mechanical and tired

Reiterates some worn-out common song

With the smell of hyacinths across the garden

Recalling things the other people have desired.

Are these ideas right or wrong?”

Eliot is regarded as revolutionary in the way he described the chattering mind which is continually pulled one way and another by external distraction. Although not entirely a stream of consciousness, the technique anticipates Joyce and is the true foundation of modernism.

In conclusion I would argue that didactic or instrumental art, whether it be a canvas by David, a Lewis Grassic Gibbon novel, or a poem by W.H. Auden, cannot escape the taint of self-consciousness when it tries to marry two irreconcilable opposites; aesthetics and politics.

Eliot and Thomas were apolitical and their intentions purely aesthetic. When MacNiece turned his attentions away from the Spanish Civil War he too was capable of creating some great work. Eliot was a literary revolutionary – surely a more noble achievement than a propagandist could hope for.

(3020 words)

References:

Brown,R.D. and Gupta, S. (eds) Aestheticism & Modernism, (2005) Open University Press

Eliot, T.S. Prufrock and Other Observations (1969). Faber and Faber, London.

Skelton, R. Poetry of the Thirties (2000) Penguin Books, London

Woolf, V. The Leaning Tower (1940) Reprinted in A Twentieth Century Literature Reader, (2009) Open University Press, London

Lewis Grassic Gibbon vs Katherine Mansfield

2010-04-10T07:43:00.003+08:00

This is my second essay of three for the module I am doing now. In essence, the question asked for a straight comparison between the styles of Gibbon and Mansfield. I found it hard not to avoid a tone of arrogant dismissal for the Gibbon style or a gushing tone for the Mansfield. I am sure there are very few readers of this blog, which is really just a personal diary, but if there are any I do recommend they pick up a copy of Mansfield's short stories. They are superb.

My tutor gave me very high marks for this essay but I think she is far too generous.

Gibbon states in his Contribution to the “Writers’ International Controversy” (quoted in Gupta and Johnson p 49) that a union of revolutionary writers would “consist only of those who have done work of definite and recognized literary value” and that his own books are “explicit or implicit propaganda”. In this essay I will argue that Gibbon’s Sunset Song falls substantially short of these two aims, and I would also argue that it is perhaps unwise for writers to make statements of intent, and that rather, it is better to allow the texts to speak for themselves, as Katherine Mansfield does. Good writing does not require justification or explanation by its authors. Further, I will argue that Gibbon’s novel fails to develop character in the way that Mansfield excels, this being somewhat ironic when the genre of the novel has a scope and breadth denied to the short-story writer. By attempting a politically didactic piece of propaganda, literary innovation eludes Gibbon.

Gibbon’s novel does however include some elements of experimental literary technique, including internal focalization and the second-person confidant addressee, especially in the construction of Chris’s character. The wry, and at times untrustworthy third-person narrator gives way to the second-person characterization is several passages, especially in “Ploughing” as in “ you hated the land and the coarse speak of the folk and the learning was brave and fine one day” (Gibbon p 32). This “you” refers to the consciousness of Chris rather than the reader, and the technique could be seen as innovative were it not that Gibbon’s contemporaries ( Joyce, Woolf, Mansfield), had taken the device much further. For these writers, internal focalization was more accomplished and assured and continued towards it’s natural culmination in the stream of consciousness. In Gibbon, the occasional use of internal focalization can appear more as novelty than true innovation.

Gibbon recreates the essence of the Mearns community during the early part of the 20th century by allowing his narrator to speak in local dialect. This was perhaps somewhat of an innovation given that the only Scots writer of note to attempt this was Burns, although he was a poet. Many English prose writers ( Dickens, Lawrence, Kipling) had used vernacular in their texts when delivered by characters, but the narrators, usually omnipotent, had used standard English. To this extent at least, Gibbon has perhaps achieved something rather unique. However, the text can appear cumbersome in places, with such sentences as “ And the book she’d thought fair daft, Alice in Wonderland it was, and there was no sense in it.” (Gibbon p31). Speed-reading is probably the key to enjoyment of Gibbon’s colloquial Scots narrator, but his use of italics for reported speech, far from appealing as an innovation, can seem contrived.

The character of Gibbon’s heroine, Chris, emerges by the use of internal focalization, and by the end of the novel she has real presence. But it has taken the full length of the novel to entirely realize her character, and very few other characters acquire real depth. The exceptions are probably Chae and Long Rob, but the reader is still left with little more than slight impressions of them. In aesthetic terms, Gibbon has failed to really engage the reader in this respect. Where he is more successful in his plot development which sees Chris emerge through adolescence to womanhood, in the manner of the Bildungsroman. There is a sense of epiphany too in Harvest when Ewan returns from army training a changed and brutalized man. His cruelty towards Chris is entirely unexpected, and it seems Gibbon may have intended to foreground the debilitating effects of the war on decent men by including this incident, although he does not overtly refer to this in any of his letters or commentaries. The plot culminates at the end of the novel in the Epilude ( the term itself is rather incongruous, seeming contrived, and should perhaps have been dropped in favour of the conventional Eplilogue). The newly appointed church minister delivers a eulogy to the “Last of the Peasants” who died for “a world that is passed… beyond it and us there shines a greater hope and a newer world”. This is Gibbon’s didactic plot summation, his allusion to the evils of capitalism and land speculation which ends the era of the noble crofter. But the eulogy seems overwrought and somewhat simplistic, like a set-piece, as if attempting to equate divine providence with socialist ideals. For many readers unaware of Gibbon’s intentions, it simply brings the novel to a neat close, and in this respect Gibbon has failed in his aim of producing a work which could be read and understood as a socialist tract by the working classes. Indeed, the novel was introduced in Scottish schools as required reading in the 1960’s, (Dixon 2003, in Gupta and Johnson p 63) but the intention was to highlight its literary attributes, such as they are, rather than its socialist pretentions. In this respect Gibbon’s “politics and religion are too transparent… and have not been transmuted into art form by imagination”. Ironically, not only has Gibbon failed to communicate his central philosophy to the majority of his casual readers, but his very attempt to marry literature with politics has fallen far short of his aims. Where he has succeeded, to some extent, is in his experimental use of the colloquial tone in the voice of his narrator. But this novelty alone is perhaps unlikely to qualify the novel as “art” in the view of many critics.

In contrast to Gibbon, Katherine Mansfield makes no claims of literariness or didactics in her work. As Bennet and Royle point out (Pleasure, 1995, in Gupta ands Johnson p43) “At the heart of asceticism is a focus on the beauty and power of the present moment”. This view of art stems principally from an essay by Walter Pater in his conclusion to Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1893). Pater was widely admired by Mansfield’s circle of writers, and is acknowledged by Woolf as a major influence. Mansfield’s short stories are often ‘plot less’ in that they avoid beginnings, a middle and an ending, but rely on impression and symbolism for much of their effect. Mansfield’s early stories were often concerned with issues of gender, as Kaplan points out ( Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction, 1991), but her later works tended more towards encapsulating moments of time, often with a central moment of epiphany. Her technique was an extension of interior monologue, perhaps more appropriately termed ‘free indirect discourse’, as pointed out by Correa (Brown and Gupta ). This technique was taken a step further by Woolf and Joyce towards the stream of consciousness. In many stories, for example, “Prelude”, the narrator’s persona shifts imperceptivity from third person through second person into free indirect discourse, and the reader is often not quite sure of his vantage point. This creates surprise and at times disorientation. In other stories the narrator is firmly anchored in space and time, one such example being Je ne parle pas Français, where the voice is unequivocally first person.

Je ne parle pas Français is a powerful reminder that the reader can be manipulated by a narrator into feeling that he is immersed in the consciousness of the persona, no matter how obnoxious it may be. It is a disquieting sensation; on the one hand there is revulsion, on the other, fascination. The narrator is sitting in a small café relating his or her impressions of the waiter and proprietress. At this point we are unsure even of the gender of the persona – we are confused and perplexed. The impressions are uncharitable and cruel, as if the people in the café are objects to be despised. There is an arrogant sense of aloofness and superiority, and of a life of idle superficiality. “Art can’t and won’t stand poverty”, he pronounces as an aside, but this is before the narrator introduces himself as a man. He goes on to reminisce about a childhood uneventful apart from a black servant who molested him, as if this were the only part of his being which held any significance. He is a writer with a high opinion of himself, a narcissist even to the extent of prostituting himself as a gigolo. We are introduced to his English writer friend who he treats merely as an instrument of amusement. The friend leaves and returns some time later with his fiancé, but then abandons her in Paris to return to his mother. The narrator sidles off without helping the woman. So the story ends, not entirely plotless, but more concerned with the narrator’s impressions of reality than with the events themselves. What strikes the reader is that for a brief few moments, merely the time it takes to read the story, he is immersed in the consciousness of another. This realization can be disconcerting, especially when one considers the essential nature of Raoul Duquette, Mansfield’s narrator. Mansfield has achieved the unlikely synthesis of two minds, that of the reader and a thoroughly despicable narrator. This could be compared with Gibbon’s attempts to engage the reader in the consciousness of the humble Scottish crofter, a much more appealing subject. But where Gibbon has likely failed, Mansfield has achieved a meeting of minds, even between two complete opposites.

In Bliss, Mansfield uses third-person narrative in the main, but the narrator seems to reflect or to absorb Bertha’s persona, almost as if it is Bertha who is speaking. Again, the reader is drawn in to closely identify with the main character. The story could be read as vaguely instrumental, and there is possibly even a moral at the end.. It is perhaps a warning that all is not what it seems, and that reality has more than one face. The moral being that perceived reality is in fact an illusion; that self-delusion is destructive. However, this is only one reading, and the story works on several levels. The figure of the pear tree in full bloom is symbolic of perfection. It becomes the point where the story’s primary illusion is at its most absolute, where the minds of Bertha and Miss Fulton supposedly merge into some kind of transcendental harmony. The shattering of the illusion at the close of the story is Mansfield’s characteristic epiphany.

But as in Je ne parle pas Français, Mansfield could also have been engaging in a parody of the literary elite in her portrayals of the dinner guests and their pretentious mannerisms. There is also a question of gender roles and their abnegation, with the nurse taking over maternal duties from Bertha, and the slight, barely perceptible allusions to lesbianism in Bertha’s feelings towards Miss Fulton. Unlike Gibbon, Mansfield refrains from directly addressing an issue. She prefers to allude, hint and suggest, leaving the reader to decide. There is no outright instrumental message in her work, but neither could it be said that her stories are completely devoid of a “message”. On the other hand, it would be difficult to treat Mansfield’s stories as pure exercises is aestheticism. Pater has argued that “the love of art for art’s sake has most; for art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake”. ( Gupta and Johnson p34). But these sentiments border on hedonism and, paradoxically, are in danger of encouraging their opposite – the love of pure sensation and entertainment.

Gibbon aspires to literariness, whatever he may mean by that, but if we take him to infer aestheticism, he has missed the mark by his insistence on didactics, notwithstanding some striking lyrical passages in Sunset Song. Mansfield somewhat ironically avoids claims of aestheticism but is patently closer to this ideal than Gibbon.

(1968 words)

Brown,R.D. and Gupta, S. (eds) Aestheticism & Modernism, (2005) Open University Press

Gibbon, Lewis Grassic, Sunset Song, (2006)Cannongate Books, Edinburgh.

Gupta, S. and Johnson, D. (eds) A Twentieth century Literature Reader, (2005) Open University Press

Mansfield, K. Selected Stories, (2008.) Oxford University Press.

Chekhov - 'The Cherry Orchard'

2010-03-13T15:04:00.001+08:00

This is my first submitted essay in the course. I enjoyed this one - Chekhov is a great writer who blurred the classical distinctions between comedy and tragedy forever, leading to the Modernist movement. Katherine Mansfield was an admirer and there can be no greater recommendation. There are a few typos in here that I was too lazy to correct. My tutor gave me good marks for this, but it is unlikely that I will live up to her expectations in following essays - I am back at work on the Rockwater 2 slaving away in 50 degree heat for 12 hours a day. I have to force myself to read for a couple of hours in the evenings.

In this essay I will discuss the question ‘What is Literature For’ with reference to the given extract from Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, and will take into consideration the language and dramatic structure used in the extract. I will go on to consider wider aspects of the question which encompass issues of whether Chekhov’s play was written as a consciously instrumental text or as an exercise in pure aesthetics, or if indeed it is possible to categorize the play as an example of either of these two approaches to literature. I will also try to apply an historical approach to the question, and include the social and political changes at the time which may have influenced Chekhov’s writing.

The extract is taken from Act 2 as Mrs Ranevsky, Lopakhin and Gayev arrive at the chapel in the grounds of the Ranevsky estate. Dunyasha has just departed after a brief flirtation with Mrs Ranevsky’s manservant, Yasha, leaving Yasha behind in a mood of mischief and sly disrespect for his masters. Lopakhin tries once again to make Mrs Ranevsky and her brother face their predicament, but they insist on avoiding the issue. Mrs Ranevsky ignores Lophakin entirely, diverting her attention to the lingering whiff of Yasha’s cheap cigar. Gayev seems intent on a frustrating insistence on trivializing the issues which face them, talking instead of the new train service, the lunch in town, and his obsession with billiards, as if he is playing a game in his own mind. Lopakhin ‘imploringly’ asks for a simple answer, but none seems forthcoming. Gayev’s response is a dismissive yawn. The dialogue here is reminiscent of the realist novels of the late nineteenth century, where classical stereotypes are eschewed for a more natural reflection of everyday discourse. As Smeliansky notes ( Gupta and Johnson p. 20) “ (Chekhov)…deliberately obscured plot, refused to express his own ideas through the dialogues and monologues…not identifying with any of them”. Hence in this abstract we see the characters as autonomous individuals, not conforming to easy classifications of type, and therefore not identifiable as the stereotypical stock characters we find in earlier theatre. This ambivalence of character representation in The Cherry Orchard prevents its classification as either a comedy or tragedy in the classical Aristotelian scheme.

To return to the extract, Mrs Ravensky reflects on her spendthrift ways and her habit of showering money on the peasants whilst neglecting her household. Whether this character trait could be construed as showing and instrumental tendency in Chekhov is far from clear. The play is dialogic in the Bakhtinian sense ; it relies on oblique suggestion rather than direct reference. More than prose narrative, the didactic message of theatrical performance, if one is indeed intended, is filtered and in many ways altered by numerous interlocutors. These include the interpretation of the director, the nuances, pauses and intonations of the actors, the stage set, and the resultant dialogic interpretation of each member of the audience. Thus it cannot be certain that Chekhov was commenting on the degeneration of the aristocracy as shown by Mrs. Ravensky’s apparent mismanagement of her affairs. Yasha offers to pick up the coins she has scattered in a manner which seems mockingly obsequious. Here too, the actions are left to speak for themselves with no moral or social commentary offered by Chekhov.

Mrs Ravensky’s tirade on her brother’s behaviour at lunch is dismissed by Ganev with a quip “I’m a hopeless case obviously”, which again reveals his character as somehow irresponsible in his refusal to take anything seriously. It is as if the social and political upheavals in pre-revolutionary Russia were ignored to a large extent by the aristocracy. The events which finally overcame them and consigned their class to history could appear as cruel and inevitable justice in the face of such complacency, but again, this conclusion is not overtly apparent in the play, and arises purely with the benefit of hindsight. Chekhov died before the 1919 October revolution, which lends more fascination to the debate which followed the play’s publication concerning it’s intended message.

Yasha continues to act the sly, obsequious servant and is openly disrespectful to Gayev. If Chekhov is commenting on the dissolution of serfdom some fifty years earlier is unclear. Again, we have the sense of monumental social change merely obliquely referred to, almost in passing. As Haslam reminds us ( Brown and Gupta p35) Chekhov was an “historian of small deeds”, with Chekhov himself stating that the aim of his art was to present “the truth, unconditional and honest” ( as quoted by Andrews in Brown and Gupta p 35).

Lopakhin, the nouveau riche businessman, attempts once again to turn the discussion towards the central dilemma by mentioning by name a rich man called Deriganov who is thinking of buying the property. Mrs Ravensky seems at last to prick up her ears, but Gayev diverts the dialog once more by mentioning an offer by an aunt to send a small amount, clearly insufficient to meet their needs. Mrs Ravensky knows it is too little, and the offer is paltry owing to the disfavour in which the aunt holds the Ravensky family. This is another oblique reference to Gayev’s earlier ruminations on his sister’s bohemian lifestyle. Chekhov has introduced here another thread in the plot; an implication of the decadence and immorality of the noble classes. Although alluded to, it is neither commented on nor in any way expanded upon, as if Chekhov is merely throwing out ideas which intermingle and give rise to conflict within the play.

The conflict of ideas represented in the extract include the rebellion of the proletariat as represented by Yasha’s disrespect for Gayev, and the unwillingness of Mrs Ravensky and Gayev to face fundamental changes in their status and lifestyle. There is regret too at the trifling sum offered by the aunt (probably as a result of Mrs Ravensky’s “loose” ways). The compulsion to throw money at the servants is here too. Perhaps on a more universal level, it could be argued that this shows the complacency of the aristocracy towards the impending destruction of Russia’s entire political and social fabric. Mrs Ravensky’s cherry orchard could be seen as a metaphor for the Russian nation itself, soon to be cut down and transformed entirely. The conflicts are not clearly resolved in the short extract, nether is there any climax or dramatic denouement at the end of the play itself. Rather, the audience is left with a series of impressions, fleeting glimpses of reality, and small conflicts which indicate larger ones. It is the dramatic tension arising from such small conflicts which has made the play so enduring.
.
To conclude, it is difficult to categorize the play as either a comedy or a tragedy. Neither is it possible to argue conclusively that it is exercise in pure aesthetics, or one of instrumentalism. The frequent use of farce and realism lends weight to the idea of Chekhov as an “historian of small deeds”. The Cherry Orchard was not highly regarded by Chekhov’s great contemporary Count Leo Tolstoy, who according to Julian Connolly ( Brown and Gupta p62), regarded art as “ transmitting feelings flowing from a religious perception of our filial relationship to God and our fraternal relationship to our fellow humans”. Nor can Chekhov’s art be regarded as “art for art’s sake”. It could be argued that there is far more to Chekhov than an outpouring of aesthetic sensation as described by Pater in his famous essay “Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) – ( Brown and Gupta p34). Oscar Wilde would also take issue with Chekhov; The Cherry Orchard is not “useless” as all pure art should be. ( Brown and Gupta p8). Conversely it is difficult to argue for a purely instrumental reading of The Cherry Orchard. From an extremist Marxist perspective there is a lack of a clear political argument in favour of the proletariat in class struggle. None of the characters in the play are imbued with simple righteousness or downright evil. In the given extract they are presented as merely human, with all their foibles and illogical mannerisms in place. Therefore a more moderate instrumental reading of the play would also cause difficulties. The absence of a proselytizing tone in the text, and a complete avoidance of didactics, leaves the audience free to frame their own conclusions.

The question “what is literature for” is therefore not easily answered when one considers Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard . The play seems to anticipate a move towards what is now termed “modernism”. As Chekhov remarks (Brown and Gupta p64), “everything in the world is changing… everything in this world is mutable, approximate, and relative”. There were, for Chekhov, no “absolute truths”. Systems of government, of society and of morality are in a constant state of flux. Chekhov probably saw the artist’s role as an impartial observer of change, one who mirrors the minute details of ordinary lives with all their quirks and imperfections. In this sense Chekhov holds much in common with his contemporaries, the impressionist painters of France and the Netherlands, who strove to capture an ephemeral moment of time, fixed on a canvas for eternity.

(1530 words)

References

Gupta, S. and Johnson, D. (eds) A Twentieth century Literature Reader, (2005) Open University Press

Brown,R.D. and Gupta, S. (eds) Aestheticism & Modernism, (2005) Open University Press

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Currently

2010-02-19T08:00:00.002+08:00

The word "currently" leaps out of our computers at an alarming rate.

"I am currently not in the office"

"The Prime Minister is currently in Japan"

The word is completely redundant.

I am currently fed up with this word.

Having Said That

2010-02-19T07:54:00.002+08:00

"Having Said That" is becoming a very irritating cliché. It is another sign that colloquialisms are invading language at every level. Even the BBC, that bastion of received pronunciation, is succumbing to the onslaught. The reporter usually starts his piece with a summation and then interjects with "having said that" and continues to qualify or modify his statements.

The correct term should be NEVERTHELESS.

Lecture - Katherine Mansfield

2010-02-12T08:02:00.005+08:00

Despite my last posting, I was curious to meet the course lecturer and tutor assigned to my group, Coleen Angove from South Africa. We had exchanged brief emails, initiated by me, when I explained that my work prevented regular attendance.

The lecture last night was all about Katherine Mansfield's short stories, concentating in the main on "Bliss", which is probably her most famous one. It certainly is a masterpiece, with it's shifting patterns of free indirect speech, third person and direct speech. But the techniques are secondary to the overall impact, which is one of a moment of clarity which hits Bertha, the main character, in a most unexpected way. This is short story writing at it's finest, notwithstanding my penchant for Someret Maugham.

I mentioned that I enjoy Maugham's work to Coleen Angove, and said I was surprised that he was not mentioned anywhere in the course book, especially in the genaral summary of notable 20th century short-story writers. She reckons that there may be an element of political-correctness in the curriculum, and that fashions are cyclical.

We agreed that Lewis Grassic Gibbon's novel Sunset Song is rather second-rate. I was pleased to hear that from her, off the record. The next essay asks for a comparison between Gibbon and Mansfield. There is simply no contest.

IN14 Nixie Tube Clock

2010-02-04T12:44:00.012+08:00

I bought a kit from the USA a couple of months ago and managed to build it in two hours after returning from a trip at sea....

I have always been fascinated with nixie-tubes, ever since radio college days in the 70's when one of the the state-of-the-art receivers we had was a Marconi Apollo.

It's all old-hat and retro now, but there is a beauty to the way the digits melt into each other.

Perhaps nixie-tube clocks will replace Amateur Radio as an obsession. Lately I am tired of trying to find any good conversationalists on CW. It is all rubber-stamp QSO's.

The next leap forward for me would be finding a source of large nixie tubes, like the beautiful IN18s.

Time is a remarkable thing in my family. My father also built clocks (and had a small commercial repair workshop) before his eyesight started failing. Although of course his clocks had traditional clockwork mechanisms. He made one or two carriage clocks under the name J.R. Davies, Reading and sold them too. He actually cut the cogs and pinnions and made the faces for those clocks. It was real craftsmanship.

Arun Kolatkar

2009-11-17T00:51:00.006+08:00

This is the essay I wrote in answer to a SIM requirement. I feel a little frustrated because the question demanded a comparison between two Indian poets. I would have prefered to have concentrated solely on Kolatkar. Eunice de Souza is a good poet but too full of feminist angst for my liking. Call me an old colonial if you like.

Kolatkar is a personal discovery. I have grown to love his work ( I even got the complete "Jejuri" via Amazon ). All my time in India and I find someone has enunciated everything I felt. But isn't that the mark of a great artist?

Rest in peace Arun Kolatkar ( died 2004 )

++++++

In this essay I will concentrate on the works of two poets, Arun Klolatkar and Eunice de Souza, and attempt to show how the concept and actuality of displacement is apparent in their writing, and how they respond to this condition. Displacement is inherent in the tone of many Indian poets writing from the Diaspora, but it is also discernable from those writing from within the Indian subcontinent, as these two poets are. I will try to show that displacement is an outcome not only of geographical dispersion, but also of the appropriation of the colonizer’s language in post-colonial discourse. It is indeed a paradox that some writers find the English language is their most effective means of shaping and expressing their innermost concerns, and I will argue that the use of English leads to poetic tension and ambivalence, adding depth and colour to their work. l will also try to show that these poets have succeeded in deconstructing “orientalism” to a great degree, despite the fact that influences of colonial literature such as binarism and ”othering” are still evident in post-independence Indian literature.

Unlike some of his contemporaries, Kolatkar appears comfortable using the English language, and he is equally at home when using Marathi. In this sense he is ambidextrous: there is no guilt or need of apology when he writes in English. De Souza often feels the need to justify her appropriation of English, almost to the point of defiance. There is no such tension in Kolatkar’s work. The crisis of representation, as Said puts it, seems absent, at least on the surface. Further, V.S. Naipaul’s observation that Indians in a post-independence India are condemned “to use a telephone, never to invent it” (as quoted by Said) seem unjustified in Kolatkar’s case, where the poet is indeed inventing unique ways of using the English language. Kolatkar manages to create some illuminating vignettes in his poetry, which portray the essence of the “man in the street” with a skillful economy of words. In this, he has succeeded in overcoming the barriers created by “othering” the indigene, a trait which was apparent in the fashionable writings of dispossessed Frenchmen in Algeria, most noticeably by Albert Camus in his celebrated novel “The Outsider”, where the local inhabitants were largely ignored. As a small digression, it is interesting to note that a generation ago, Camus’ novel was a celebrated example of a fashionable genre forged in the fires of displacement and alienation. Nowadays, a postcolonial reading will reveal the “othering” of the indigene as represented by the author; a classic instance of orientalism. It can be argued that Kolatkar has undermined such orientalism unequivocally, a “structure which represented and elaborated not only scholarship but a partisan ideology”, to paraphrase Said. Kolatkar is perhaps one of the few Indian poets to have successfully deconstructed colonial discourse, whilst others (Das, de Souza, Dharker) still seem to suffer self-recrimination, sometimes agonizing over their appropriation of the English language.

Displacement can be seen in Kolatkar’s works not as an overt sense of “not belonging”, but in his persona’s sardonic tone which is one of a man somehow removed, distanced from what is observed. It is this objectivity which sets off the ironic tone and humour of some of his best work. “Biograph” for example is a life-story in eight short stanzas leading to a possible haphazard death on the roads at the hands of a reckless driver. The poem is a headlong rush from birth to death, foregrounding the chaotic course of a life shaped by a series of coincidences rather than by self determination.

“Stepping on my toes, a guy said,
Sorry man, I’m sorry.
Sticking an umbrella in my eye, another said,
I hope you aren’t hurt.
Bearing down on me, full tilt, a trucker said,
Can’t you see where you are going you motherfucker?”

The poet uses irony and humour to catalogue a wasted life, one which is propelled into senseless action by events out of his control. The persona is displaced from a position of coherence and stability by a series of accidents which shape his destiny. Perhaps Kolatkar is commenting on the transitory nature of a life which is prey to circumstances beyond control; a total absence of determinism.

It is in the poems from “Jejuri” that we see the concept of displacement in its most tangible form. The persona in these poems is detached, sardonic, and almost cynical at times. The ambivalence of Kolatkar’s attitude to religion is also apparent. The poems can be read either as an affirmation of Hindu ethics or as a denouncement of them. They show a duality which is engaging and intriguing. As in much of Kolatkar’s work, he uses experimental techniques borrowed from the recent western canonical tradition, including surrealism and semiotics ( the iconic patterns and layout of the poems on the printed page). At no point does the reader detect any sense of uncertainty or inappropriateness here. Kolatkar is assured and confident in his usage of such techniques. “Between Jejuri and the Railway Station” is a good example of this. It is written in 2nd person narrative, which in itself is an unusual poetic form. The page layout is semiotic, suggestive of an ebb and flow, finally disintegrating into the seemingly random sequence of “up and down”, which mimics not only the seven cocks and hens in a field of jowar near the station, but the persona’s “monkey mind” – the mind of the average onlooker which flits from one subject to another, uncontrollably. The poet lists the houses and their occupants he encounters on the road to the station, stopping here and there to offer tantalizing glimpses and hinted suggestions of impropriety;

“You pass the sixty fourth house the temple dancer
who owes her prosperity to another skill.
A skill the priest’s son would rather not talk about.
A house he has never stepped inside
and hopes he never will.”

The subject persona ( you ) is left with a priest’s visiting card and “a few questions knocking about in your head”, all of which gives the impression of a fleeting visit, a trivial adventure. The poet engages with the townsfolk and yet at the same time seems somehow distanced, adding to an impression not quite of alienation, but of detachment and displacement. It is the sight of the cocks and hens that takes his breath away, not the trials and tribulations of the townsfolk.

Kolatkar builds on this tone of detachment in “The railway Station” and it is most apparent in “4 : the station master”, where a lack of punctuation reminds one of e.e. cummings, delivered in a stream of consciousness, parodying to comic effect a style of writing which characterizes the bureaucratic footnotes and disclaimers found in Indian train timetables;

“all timetables ever published
along with all timetables yet to be published
are simultaneously valid
on any given time and on any given track….”

Here, the persona is omniscient, displaced in time and space, a neutral observer.
However, in “5 : vows” the observer is more involved. One can sense the frustration as he waits for a coherent answer to a simple question “when will my train arrive?”. Kolatkar’s ambivalent attitude to Hinduism is reflected in his comic mock-seriousness when offering to appease the Gods, if only an answer could be forthcoming;

“smear the indicator with the blood of a cock
bathe the station master in milk…..”

Kolatkar’s depictions of Jejuri’s townsfolk are rarely stereotypical, nor do they evoke a sense of “othering”, which is often the case in characterizations offered by colonial writers. An exception would be the use of irony in an earlier poem, “Woman”, which is deliberately designed to foreground the “othering” inflicted on the colonized woman, not only by the colonizing powers, but from within Indian society itself;

“a women may shave her legs regularly
a woman may take up landscape painting
a woman may poison
twenty three cockroaches”

In “Jejuri” the poet must have been aware of the linguistic paradox which finds him writing in cultured English about priests and pilgrims whose mother tongues and cultures may have differed from his own. There is no apparent dichotomy in his work however. On the contrary, there is a naturalness and a flow of thought unimpeded by the guilt of association, unlike the angst and self-recrimination we sometimes detect in the works of Dharker and Das. He is speaking from what H. K. Bhabba calls “the third Space of enunciation”, an ambivalent space of cultural identity which overcomes the exoticism of cultural diversity, leading ultimately to a “recognition of an empowering hybridity within which cultural difference may operate”.

The Goanese poet Eunice De Silva writes with a greater sense of tension and conflict in her work, and she holds this in common with many female Indian writers, most notably Dharker and Das. Whilst these female writers explore subalternity and female sexuality to a greater extent than de Souza, both de Souza and Kolatkar avoid attempts to speak for people who are “othered” by the disadvantages of poverty and of poor education. De Souza prefers to write in tightly controlled verse of her own experiences, and eschews the rather obsessive and confessional style typical of Das. In De Souza’s own critique of Das’s poetry she writes “ When the poet loses control, the work ceases to be poetry, and becomes more like automatic writing”. Whereas Das’s harrowing accounts of personal sexuality and a prevailing tone of self-absorption can sometimes pall, De Souza prefers at times to soften the blows by switching gender and speaking with a man’s voice in order to foreground the marginalization of women, as in “He Speaks”;

“….She was an affectionate
creature and tried hard, poor dear,
but never quite made the grade.”

De Souza uses gender-switching to expose the put-downs and masculine oppression meted out to women in relationships, revealing the callous and demeaning attitudes of some men in Indian society. However, as the study guide writers note, this escape, one of using the man’s voice, can only be temporary.

When De Souza uses her own voice, the sense of displacement felt by a woman in a community arising from a complex history is strikingly apparent. “de Souza Prabhu” exposes several instances, delivered in a tone of alienation which characterizes her work;

“….Prabhu was no fool
And got the best of both worlds.
(Catholic Brahmin!
I can hear his fat chuckle still.)”

The sense here is one of a desperate compromise; Prabhu aspires to the status of Brahmin whilst at the same time claiming a Catholic identity. We get the impression he does not fit in; despite his efforts he is alienated. She goes on;

“No matter that
my name is Greek
my surname Portuguese
my language alien.

There are ways
Of belonging.

I belong with the lame ducks.”

Here we have the transcultural associations of her name, and the self-destructive conclusion she reaches, delivered with ironic force. The use of the word “alien” to describe her chosen language, English, shows a tantalizing ambivalence; we are not sure if the writer feels that the language is alien to her, or alien to her culture. As is the case with many Indian poets, she probably feels she has no choice but to use English; whether she feels comfortable with the choice, as Kolatkar appears to, is not immediately apparent. We are left with a sensation of displacement, an uncertainty of exactly where her roots lie. Given the complex milieu of cultural influences she has inherited, this is not unexpected, and leads to a tension, a pulling in different directions, which is the mark of much post-independence Indian poetry and prose.

She continues in this poem to describe the shame bestowed on her at birth by being born female, a powerful allusion to the subaltern status of women which is still found in some sectors of Indian society. But for de Souza, it is rare to comment on subalternity. As with Kolatkar, she is more comfortable with personal observation and reflection.

The poem raises the question; when was colonialism? When referring to modern Indian writers we tend to draw a line between those working in pre-independence times, and those working in the 60 or so years since independence from Britain, as if styles changed overnight. But in De-Souza’s case, it could be argued that her community was founded during a much earlier colonization, that of the Portuguese in the early 16th century. As Stuart Hall reminds us, the transition from the colonial to the postcolonial ….”is not only marking it in the ‘then’ and ‘now’ way. It is obliging us to re-read the very binary form in which the colonial encounter has for so long been represented”. Hall argues here that space and time are blurred markers between colonial and post-colonial eras, and that paradoxically colonialism itself has sometimes been represented in binary terms by postcolonial writers. The displacement felt by the Goanese, a small community within the much larger Indian entity, has probably existed for much longer than the 60 years since independence. The Goanese Catholics are a separate identity within Indian society, a predicament felt by many minorities including the Parsees, Zoroastrians, and to some extent, the Muslims. It is a further paradox that these communities are sometimes “othered” by Hindu extremists within the modern Hindu nationalist movements, such as the BJP. Edward Said’s seminal work “Orientalism” has often been criticized for not defining or discriminating between different imperialisms, and it should be remembered that the French conquests of North Africa and that of the British in the East Asia are not the only forces acting on colonized peoples. It is against this wider background that we should view the work of De Souza.

The tone of displacement in De Souza’s work does not therefore derive from “place”; alienation is not the sole preserve of the Diaspora. However, the poems often allude to a need for survival within a postcolonial “place”, as if the persona has endured an alienation both personal and cultural. In “One Man’s Poetry” she writes;

“Irony as an attitude to life
Is passé. You said.
So be it, friend.
Let me be passé and survive.”

De Souza uses irony is a defense not only against the onslaughts of racism and sexism, but as a means of foregrounding the displacement she experiences within her own country. Paradoxically, irony is often associated with a quintessentially English consciousness. By adopting this tone De Souza shows how transculturalism has infused her writing, and how she uses not only irony, but the act of writing itself as a weapon of self-defense. Again in “de Souza Prabha” we have;

“Words the weapon
To crucify.”

Women’s writing often wages war against the binarism imposed on the female gender.
( Kolatkar, interestingly for a male writer, used irony in his defense of women in his poem simply entitled “Woman.”). Binarism was a condition imposed on colonized men and women by colonial discourse, and became embedded in western consciousness by the works of writers such as Kipling and Rider Haggard.. The effects of the black/white, female/male, weak/strong categorization of colonized subjects lead inexorably to a hierarchical structure which is inherent in English usage to this day. De Souza, (as well as Das and Dharker), uses irony to undermine the structure and logic of imperial binarism. This exposure of binarism is used to great effect in the closing lines of “He Speaks” ;

“After that pathological display
I decided there was only one thing to do: fix her.
The next time we were making love
I said quite casually:
I hope you realize I do this
with other women.”

The male persona has “fixed” the woman – put her firmly in her place, thus perpetuating the hegemony of male dominance over females, the enduring binary nature of relationships.

Both Kolatkar and de Souza are engaged in a process of representation, but unlike the writings of colonial literary interlocutors, most notably Kipling, Rider Haggard, and Fitzgerald in his exotic English translation of “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam”, the Indian poets’ representations have succeeded in deconstructing what Said has identified as Orientalism. Said’s primary concerns were with the representations of the colonized state by anthropologists, or interlocutors as he sometimes prefers to call them, but his arguments apply equally to literature. If we transpose anthropology with literature is the following quote, we can see how representation is tainted and compromised by colonial literature; “The point is that anthropological representations bear as much on the representer’s world as on who or what is represented”. Said argues that this misrepresentation will eventually fade in the postcolonial world, and quotes from Cesaire as follows; “and man must overcome all the interdictions wedged in the recesses of his fervor and no race has a monopoly on beauty, on intelligence, on strength/ and there is room for everyone in the convocation of conquest.”

Both de Souza and Kolatkar are appropriating English, the language of a colonizer, for their own purposes. Kolatkar, it has been argued, experiences displacement by his erudite use of the English language to portray the commonplace men, women and temples within the town of Jejuri. De Souza is displaced by her ambivalent relationship with masculine hegemony and by a personal alienation both within her own culture and the wider Indian state. But I have argued that they have broken through the delusional representations inherent in orientalism, and moved towards a discourse which in Fanon’s words ”will disrupt literary styles and themes…create a completely new public, and mould the national consciousness, giving it form and contours and flinging open before it new and boundless horizons.”

(2952 words, not including references)

References

Babbha, H.K. “Postcolonial Criticism”, in Greenblatt, Stephen and Gunn, Giles (ed) “Redrawing the Boundaries; the transformation of English and American literary studies”.1992. ” Reprinted in “Post Colonial Writings from India and Australia”, (Study Guide,) 2001. SIM University.

Fanon, F. “Les Dames de la terre”, 1976, Paris, in Hall, T. “When was ‘The Post-Colonial’? Thinking to the Limit” Reprinted in “Post Colonial Writings from India and Australia” (Offprints Collection), 2001. SIM University

Hall, T. “When was ‘The Post-Colonial’? Thinking to the Limit” Reprinted in “Post Colonial Writings from India and Australia” (Offprints Collection), 2001. SIM University

Kolatkar. A. “Poetry” in A.K. Mehotra (ed) “Twelve Modern Indian Poets”, 2008. OUP

Said, E.W. “Presenting the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors” Reprinted in “Post Colonial Writings from India and Australia”, (Offprints Collection,) 2001. SIM University.

de Souza, E. “Kamala Das” Reprinted in “Post Colonial Writings from India and Australia”, (Offprints Collection,) 2001. SIM University

de Souza, E. “Poetry” in A.K. Mehotra (ed) “Twelve Modern Indian Poets”, 2008. OUP

de Souza, E. “Selected Poetry” in “Gender and Experience – Women Poets” Reprinted in “Post Colonial Writings from India and Australia”, (Study Guide,) 2001. SIM University.

Philip Jayaretnam - Abraham's Promise

2009-10-28T10:40:00.003+08:00

I submitted this essay a couple of weeks ago on line, when Rockwater 2 was still in Australia. It was put together in an evening which was disrupted by calls to connect up deck machinery and fix satellite communications. Hence it is poorly edited.

I was a bit upset that my main point about Abraham's sister Mercy being an archetype in western literature was misunderstood. The tutor thought I was talking about the quality of compassion ! But my argument could have been put better.

I had to have yet another dig at the awful pretentious Spivak, which I managed.

I admire Jayaretnam for the courage in publishing Abraham's Promise. It must have ruffled feathers in the Singapore Government, but kudos to them for allowing it to go out in print.

I loved the character of old Abraham - the noble failure, totally alien to the modern drive towards material comfort and instant gratification

+++++

In this essay I will try to show how Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia is used in P. Jayaretnam’s Abraham’s Promise and Lee Kok Liang’s Return to Malaya, and how this usage illustrates certain facets of postcolonial theory. In particular I will attempt to apply some the approaches set out by Said and Hall, and will include Sivak where the issue of female subalternity is touched on in the two works. Much of the essay will concentrate on Abraham’s Promise, which is a full length novel, whereas the piece by Lee is a fragment of a larger work.

Abraham’s Promise is a work of great depth and maturity, albeit flawed in some respects. Written in the first person singular, the reader is immediately immersed in Abraham’s world. As a young teacher he seems steeped in colonial discourse, even upholding that English, and it’s precedent, Latin, was given by God as a medium to civilize the world – “Latin is a wonderful language. Like English, it is the language of conquerors” He values western classicism highly, comparing it with the rampant materialism which has infected Singaporean society – “ Why should it surprise us that the wicked and unjust succeed where the pure of heart fail”. This sets the tone of the novel ; a struggle between an essentially utopian world view and the reality of post-independence Singapore. Abraham is an idealist, and it is idealism which eventually destroys him. In heteroglossic terms, it is a conflict between two monolithic ideologies, two discouses of power; that of colonial discourse, and that of nationalism without regard for the individual, political expediency. In Krishna’s words ; “It’s not a question of who’s right and wrong… we have to show who’s boss”.

Abraham seems to represent a hybrid between colonial continuity and a desire for nationhood which is both free from the past, but at the same time draws on what he sees as the finest classical ideals of humanity. Interlinked with these tensions are his personal relationships. I would argue that his desire for Rani to continue her career after they are married, and his willingness to do his fair share of housework, show that he is breaking free from the paternalistic hegemony inherited from his Tamil father. Her adultery is therefore unforgivable, as is the treachery of his friend Krishna. So too is the treatment dealt him by his colleagues. Abraham has in fact done all the right things for the right reasons, but has been betrayed.

The account of Mercy’s suicide, and the factors which led to it, is conspicuous by the absence of a “voice”. It is curious that in literature written in the post colonial world, the female subaltern is a recurrent character, becoming almost an archetype. Mercy is the same woman who Spivak wrote of in Can the Subaltern Speak?”. She reappears in the works of Catherine Lim and Lee Kok Liang. In Jayaretnam, it is unclear whether this muting of female voices is deliberate or unconscious. Similarly, in Return to Malaya where Lee comments lightly on the old woman’s predicament without attempting to explore it. I would argue that Mercy first surfaced in western canonical literature, for example the “mad woman in the attic”, Miss Havisham, in Dickens’s Great Expectations, and in Bronte’s Jane Eyre , the insane Bertha locked away unseen but always present. I would go further to question the premise that subalternity is somehow the result of western colonialism, as Spivak sometimes seems to suggest. It is transcultural and has existed throughout all of history. What is encouraging in postcolonial dicourse is that the essence of subalternity is firmly recognized and is now discussed not only by postcolonial theorists but by serious writers in the post colonial literary world.

This line of thought is followed by Hall where he asks the question “When was The Post-colonial?”. For Hall there are no “clear-cut politics of binary oppositions” because this leads to homogenization and simplification. He goes on “What post-colonial certainly is not is one of those periodisations based on epochal stages, where everything is reversed at the same moment, all the old relations disappear forever and entirely new ones come to replace them”. What Hall seems to argue is that not only are there no clearly defined temporal landmarks separating the colonial from the post-colonial, but also that there are no clear ideological borders between each of the two discourses. In Abraham’s Promise, Abraham attends a cocktail party as a guest of the political elite, refuting the claims of a politician that a clear break must be made with the past, and with America in particular. In this aspect at least, Abraham is a pragmatist. Hall argues that “a world of separate identities, of isolated or separable and self-sufficient cultures and economies, has been obliged to yield to a variety of paradigms designed to capture these different but related forms of relationship, interconnection and discontinuity”. Both Jayaretnam and Lee recognize that post-colonialism does not equal post-independence, and that many voices influence the postmodern, postcolonial state. This recognition is reflected in their use of heteroglossia, giving voice not only to characters, but to the events that shape them.

It could be argued that Jayaretnam’s novel is flawed in some respects. The non-relationship with Rose is overdone, and the repeated use of the epistolary form is laboured at times, and seems to serve no purpose. Rani, Victor and Mercy are not developed or “represented” enough as dynamic characters ( again, the absence of voice). But the use of memory, and the manner in which the author alternates between memory and the present, is very effective. Abraham’s character is fully realized. Lee’s short piece is evocative, centrifugally multi-voiced, using essentialist imagery as well as lyric themes. There is a sense of detachment, and we feel that the writer has become distanced, almost alienated, as a result of his time spent in the Diaspora. Said’s notion of representation leads to a political conclusion – “representation becomes significant, not just as an academic or theoretical quandary but as a political choice”. Jayaretnam’s representation of Abraham is indeed political, but Lee’s multiple representations lean more towards a pastoral view of culture and identity – the reader is not persuaded politically. But Said continues – “exile, immigration, and the crossing of boundaries are experiences that can therefore provide us with new narrative forms, or, in John Berger’s phrase, with other ways of telling”. Lee’s work seems to embody this idea. Thus the two works exemplify the differences between Singaporean and Malaysian writing. The former tends towards a simpler mix of heteroglossia, often using only a few voices in opposition, leading to clear tensions which in turn encourage political consciousness and concepts of nationhood. The latter employs multiple voices, many of them rural and often from different ethnic groups, provoking questions of cultural identity and solidarity.

To conclude I would argue that in general both works are examples of the freedoms open to all writers in post-colonial space. Cesaire, quoted by Said, suggests that “man still must overcome all the interdictions wedged in the recesses of his fervor and no race has a monopoly on beauty, on intelligence, on strength/ and there is room for everyone at the convocation of conquest”. In particular, Abraham has struggled not only to free himself from the hegemony of colonial and patriarchal discourse by embracing his son, but is also the embodiment of the honest and good man crushed by the political compromises of an emerging nation. In his own words “ Perhaps the true value of a good life lies in its aim, not its trajectory”.

(1265 words)

References

Hall, T. “When was ‘The Post-Colonial’? Thinking to the Limit” Reprinted in “Post Colonial Writings from Singapore and Malaysia” (Offprints Collection), 2001. SIM University

Jayaretnam, P. “Abraham’s Promise”, 2004, Times Editions, Singapore.

Lee, Kok Liang, “Return to Malaya” Reprinted in “Anthology - Post Colonial Writings from Singapore and Malaysia”, 2001. SIM University

Said, E.W. “Presenting the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors” Reprinted in “Post Colonial Writings from Singapore and Malaysia”, (Offprints Collection,) 2001. SIM University.

Petition to save a Madras beach

2009-10-19T08:48:00.004+08:00

To all Theosophists, (active or lapsed), old hippies, dreamers and idealists, please sign this petition to stop a raised highway being built over the stretch of beach that adjoins Adyar.

- Ancient Mariner

Dear Friends,

The Tamil Nadu State Government is planning to build a 47 km elevated express way which will include parts of the Chennai coastline. The first studies show that around 14 fishing communities (kuppams) and over 560 families will be affected by the project. The proposed route includes the Adyar beach near the Theosophical Society's compound. The entire unique ecosystem in that area will be severely disturbed.

The Adyar beach is one of the last undisturbed beaches in Chennai. Many residents from Chennai go there every day, through the TS compound, to enjoy the beach and the vastness of sea and sky. The beach is also a landmark in contemporary India as it was the place where renowned philosopher J. Krishnamurti was discovered a hundred years ago.

The Save Chennai Beaches movement has organized a petition addressed to the Environment Minister of the Central Governement in New Delhi, asking for the project to be abandoned. The link to the petition webpage is given below:

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/abandon-the-elevated-highway-and-save-chennai-beaches

As a resident of Adyar I would like to ask you all to consider signing the petition and support this important initiative to save the Adyar beach from unwanted development. Kindly also consider sending the petition to concerned persons in your contact list. Thank you.

With best wishes to all from Varanasi,

Pedro Oliveira

Catherine Lim & Lee Kok Liang ( Post Colonial Prose)

2009-10-11T13:39:00.002+08:00

This short essay compares Catherine Lim’s Adeline with Lee Kok Liang’s Return to Malaya, and tries to highlight the use of heteroglossia in both pieces, and how this technique foregrounds certain post colonial aspects of the writing.

Lim’s Adeline is stylistically simpler than Lee’s and uses four separate, distinct narratives. There is no writer’s persona except an omnipotent, neutral one. The first voice, that of the newspaper report, is centripetal, non-dialogic. The letter by the teacher is authoritative, what Bakhtin would call monolithic. It seeks no response. The third is a mix of voices as teachers discuss and interact dynamically, and it is therefore centrifugal in that ideas are thrown outward to collide and react with others. The final voice, that of Adeline herself, is again monologic, but perhaps addresses an unseen other, or alter-ego, as diaries often do. Adeline’s suicide reminds us of Spivak’s menstruating girl, who finds no voice in response to paternalistic oppression.

By comparison Lee’s piece is more multilayered, dynamic and heteroglossic. Many voices are heard, each themselves unique utterances arising from an infinity of influences. The story includes elements of essentialism in the description of the Englishman and the Malay boys. The persona appears to drift through the town, detached, as if alienated from friends and family after a long sojourn abroad. There is a sense of ambivalence concerning his identity as he meets people from his past. Returning from the diaspora has distanced him from them. Lee’s story emphasizes problems of ethnic and cultural identity, a characteristic of Malaysian literature.

John

John,

I will not comment on your application of theory as I would like the class to add their comments to your interesting reading. You may want to re-think the role of author/writer in heteroglossia though--can objectivity really truly exist? Also, I do want to draw attention to the structure of your work as a way of example of how to write a well structured piece.Your work begins with an introduction and provides a thesis and a preview statement of what the reader is to expect. The body examines the two pieces of fiction in a logical manner and you include the comparative element. A breif conclusion would have made it complete and yet the work appears compact.
Such an example can help others to see how to present ideas of such complicated nature.
thanks,

priti

Priti,

I beg to venture that your question, “can objectivity really truly exist?” is wryly rhetorical. I think Bakhtin would say that all utterances, and indeed all individual words, are loaded with what he calls “taste”. His theory of heteroglossia seems not confined merely within the text, but extends to the reader, who reacts and interacts dynamically with the texts. Thus each reader forms his own unique impression, dependent upon an infinite number of influences. I think it could be argued that Lim has used this dynamism very consciously, splitting her story into narrow segments of separate narratives. Although the persona is absent in terms of style, in heteroglossic terms she compels readers to confront uncomfortable truths. Lim’s piece is not a political statement per se, but it foments political consciousness.

John

Hi John,

I agree with your theory of voices, especially that of the diary. I would also like to suggest that there is a difference between Adeline and Bhaduri's suicide. Bhaduri has left behind no written explanation except the deliberate wait till she menustrating, thus subjecting her suicide to be read as any but the 'outcome of illegitimate passion' (Offprints Collection, p.48) and denying herself a voice. Adeline however, has left behind her 'alter-ego', the diary which is perfectly capable to speak for her but however, because of her inability to connect with the people around her who speaks the colonial language and which ultimately results in her father's perception that there is no need to read the diary in order to understand her attempt, has thus denied her that speaking voice.

Siew Hoon

Siew Hoon,

I agree with your view that the circumstances of Adeline’s suicide are different from Bhaduri’s. Adeline left no significant message other than her monologic diary, whereas the manner of Bhaduri’s demise was itself significant. Reading beyond the text it could be argued that Lim has provided Adeline with a true voice. In this way, the dynamics of heteroglossia, and especially that which exists between the reader and the text, has enabled Adeline to speak. Heteroglossia, it could be argued, is a by-product of globalization. Whereas the economic effects of globalization can be regarded as a new form of imperialist hegemony, heteroglossia is a positive phenomenon. Lim and many other post-colonial writers use it very skillfully in order to obliquely allude to, rather than to directly expose, societal injustices.

John

Shirley Lim - My Father's Sadness (Malaysian Post Colonial Poetry)

2009-10-11T13:25:00.003+08:00

(Question 2)

The poet’s tone in ‘My Father’s Sadness’ is one of melancholy and loss. Lim’s father is represented as a victim of circumstances beyond his control; an idealistic young man, incapacitated by the multiple hegemonies of British colonialism, the Japanese occupation, and the ensuing Malayan Emergency. His dreams of continuing a patriarchal family tradition within the Malaccan Peranakan community are shattered, as are the innocent dreams of ‘a young man with a full moon / and no woman in sight’. The poem is a powerful indictment of colonial imperialism which ruthlessly subjugates and alienates Malayan indigenous communities.

John

I see Fanon has been introduced here--wonderful. What more can we say about Fanon when reading the poem.
As for Lim breaking free and starting afresh--I am not sure if I see this. At best I would say the poem uses strategic essentialism to get various representations across. But if so, then yes, there is an element of understanding of the "idea" of wanting to break free...but does it happen? THere are too many layers of representation here that drown the voice of the persona, who although the speaker, is lost in the discourse of patriarchy--the very discourse she represents--how ironic.
But this is my view. I really want to hear what you wish to add about Fanon, John.

Priti

Priti, I do think the poem is autobiographical because Lim seems to write poetry as part of a lifelong confession. The persona in this particular poem, however, seems absent, a subject in a diasporic vacuum. Perhaps breaking free is going too far, as you point out. In Lim’s short essay on her early life, she describes her father as a romantic who once serenaded his fiancé under a fulll moon, hence the opposing image of a man whose dreams were shattered by colonial wars; “a young man with a full moon / and no woman in sight”. Fanon appears to recognise this process of alienation within colonized communities, bringing together “psychoanalytic notions of the alienation of the colonized, with Marxist notions of the economic and social forces that have brought about that alienation” ( Fanon, 1968). Although he was referring to the Algerian Arabs, the same project applies to the Malayan Peranakans.

John

Fanon F. (1969) Black Skin : White Masks trans. Markmann, C.L. London, 1968. in Study Guide, p9, SIM University, 2001.

Lim, S.G., War and Marriage reprinted in Offprints Collection, SIM University, 2001.

Hi Priti,

As you ask me to elaborate, I try but can't keep it within the word count of 80 words. Anyway this is my 4th response. Hope this is OK.
The voice is unmistakably a woman but she is still the object; the father is the subject - his sufferings are glorified.This first sentence sets the poem in a surreal setting: a dream. It seems the female persona is not able to articulate her emotions in a ‘real’ day-to-day setting except in her dream. Dreams emerge from our subconscious mind, in that sense, she is actually speaking to her inner self and in reality she is still not heard. And even within her dream, she is still not able to be heard in the family of males. The female essentialist image and voice is that of passivity, she lives behind the shadows of the males in the family. The tone is that of a discerning voice that is still ‘hissing beneath the surface’, never ever to emerge.

cheryl

Cheryl, I respectfully disagree. It seems quite possible that the persona is the author, writing of her father’s experiences during the 1940’s. There are close similarities in the poem with Lim’s own account of her early life. As such, the object is her father, and the subject is the persona, the author, the “I”. But although Lim’s tone is sorrowful, she has escaped the multiple hegemonies I mentioned in my earlier response, which reduced her father to a mute subaltern. To paraphrase Fanon, (Fanon 1952, p231) she has “become her own foundation. And it is by going beyond the historical, instrumental hypothesis that she will initiate the cycle of her freedom.”

John

Fanon F. (1952) Black Skin : White Masks trans. Markmann, C.L. London 1968 Reprinted in Ascroft, Griffiths and Tiffin Post Colonial Studies - The Key Concepts (p207) Routledge 2007

Lim, S.G., War and Marriage reprinted in Offprints Collection, SIM University, 2001.

David Williamson - "Heretic"

2009-09-10T10:47:00.002+08:00

My essay on Williamson's play, Heretic.

As the tutor pointed out, the arguments sometimes contradict each other and there is a lack of focus. My dig at elitist postcolonial theorists, comparing their Marxist dogma with the literary sensors of the Soviet Union, was not well received. But I simply could not resist, even though it probably cost me some marks. I find Spivak, in particular, to be a poseur of the first rank - she simply spouts dense theory whilst in no way improving the lot of the sabalterns which are the subjects her study. I am not an academic and speak from the heart, which is a fundamental weakness where theory is concerned.

++++

In this paper I would argue that Williamson’s “Heretic” does not attempt to subvert the canon by ‘celebrating the neglected or marginalized Other’, and that the imperialist’s construction of the Other is in many ways upheld and reinforced by the play. The identity of the Other is indeed compromised and undermined, but quite intentionally, as I will attempt to show. Australian postcolonial literature has often been criticized for denying the indigene, in this case the Australian Aboriginal, a true voice or persona. It has been left to the Aboriginals themselves to attempt to speak from a disadvantaged position, one in which they are handed the tools of expression by the settler-colonizer, the most practical tool being the English language, without sufficient encouragement or instruction. As Sneja Gunew notes, “The land… speaks most authentically through the oral literature of the indigenous nomads: in translation” The subaltern cannot speak with his own voice.

Williamson’s play is a multilayered. It touches on gender issues, the Oedipus complex, and questions of professional probity, but the crux of the play concerns the conflict between two opposing anthropological viewpoints. On the one hand, that social behaviour is shaped by the inexorable forces of genetic inheritance, a view upheld by Freeman, and on the other, that is culturally determined, a view supported by Mead. The historical facts of the dispute are well known, and lead ultimately to the conclusion that elements of truth can be found in both theories. However, throughout the play, and to some extent throughout the historical record, the voice of the Samoans is conspicuous by its absence. (We could allow that Fa’apua’a does indeed speak at the play’s denouement, casting doubt on Meads assertions, but her speech is used solely as a ploy to win a point in an anthropological argument, which could appear as coldly academic.). As Said has noted, “…anthropologists should spend more time thinking of textuality and less of matrilineal descent” and further ; “issues relating to cultural poetics (should) take a more central role in their research”. Said goes on to suggest that interlocutors (i.e. anthropologists) are “driven increasingly to more and more desperate remedies as they try first to fit the categories formulated by the colonial authority”. Mead and Freeman could both be regarded as being ‘driven’ in this regard. Said’s seminal theory is that of Orientalism, which, in his view, is “a structure erected in the thick of an imperial contest whose dominant wing it represented and elaborated not only as scholarship but as a partisan ideology”. Hence Mead and Freeman’s debate tends towards a distancing of the indigene, not towards an engagement, which leads to the representation of the Samoans as something Other, without tangible form or identity.

“Heretic” neither endorses nor refutes this position. Williamson seems content to show rather than tell, and leaves the audience to construct their own meanings and interpretations. The play cannot be regarded as didactic, and in this regard it encourages speculation and engagement with the ideas played out on the stage. Williamson does hint, however, that the Other is an unseen member of the dramatis personae, in his use of a continuous dream sequence. Not only does this device allow for dramatic temporal discontinuity, but it also introduces a subtle representation of the aboriginal dreamtime where shared cultural memories, described by Jung as the collective unconscious, are awakened and vocalized. However, dreamtime is the domain of the Australian Aborigine, foreign to Samoan culture, and so ironically, Williamson could be criticized here for homogenizing or subverting the Other to fit his own purposes.

Williamson’s main concerns are not directed towards a representation of the Other, although he has obviously allowed for this interpretation. Rather, he seems to be inviting inquiry and speculation, leaning heavily towards Freeman’s side of the argument. As Freeman exposes Mead ‘s flawed hypothesis by using the testimony of the aging Fa’apua’a, it is presented as the final coup de grace. The parallel drawn between Mead’s utopian vision of a society without greed or jealousy, and the halcyon days of the 1960s, is another indication that Williamson regarded Mead’s premise as misguided. The experiment of the 1960s was doomed to failure as the alternative society disintegrated from the inside out, torn apart by materialism and commercialism, thus proving Freeman’s point. The Other is appropriated in order to illustrate these truisms, but plays no real part. Williamson may be engaging in cultural imperialism, albeit unknowingly, when viewed from this standpoint. But perhaps the following questions should be asked; is it the duty of the writer in the postcolonial world to introduce a considered representation of the Other into his or her works? Are the postcolonial literary elite imposing their own standards on writers? And by extension, is this not reminiscent of the Soviet era, when authors were sanctioned only to write within the genre of social realism? The answers are self apparent.

The paradox that Williamson illustrates in “Heretic” is that “the indigene is a semiotic pawn on a chess board under the control of the white sign maker” as Goldie puts it. By not allowing the subaltern to speak, Williamson portrays himself as the white sign maker, perhaps intentionally, in order to expose the conundrum in which the white colonial settler finds himself; that of being a member of a white literary elite whilst being incapable of representing the voice or culture of a colonized people. Williamson shows awareness of the paradox in his play, and probably avoids any attempt at representing the Samoans directly in order to avoid falling into the trap of misrepresentation. He leaves the Samoans out of his main view, preferring the audience to build on his bare framework, a technique employed by many playwrights. As Goldie goes on to state; “imperialist discourse valorizes the colonized according to its own needs and reflections.” Hence, Williamson avoids the trap but shows that both Mead and Freeman have fallen in to it.

To conclude, “Heretic” does indeed ‘compromise and undermine the identity of the Other’.
But in my view Williamson has done so intentionally, in order to show how the Samoans have been unfairly represented by Mead , and to a lesser extent by Freeman. The Other is nowhere to be seen, highly inconspicuous, silent, but nevertheless present in the form of a pawn in a chess game, to use Goldie’s analogy. The play highlights the dangers inherent in attempting a representation of the indigene by colonizers, and Williamson rightly avoids the attempt. Instead, he shows his two central characters waging a war of ideas on stage, both guilty of denying the Samoans a true voice. Williamson’s depiction of this denial foregrounds the colonizers’ tendency to subvert the Other in order to suit their own purposes. It does not appear to be the playwright’s intent to comment on the indigene’s identity himself, or on the characters’ manipulation of their identity. Williamson positions himself as a neutral observer, for the most part. That Mead has appropriated the identity of the Samoans for her own ends is self-evident. As Goldie notes; “…cultures without writing operate within a different dimension of consciousness. This different dimension…suggests mysticism, in which the indigene becomes a sign of oracular power, either malevolent, in nineteenth century texts, or beneficent, in most contemporary ones”. Mead chooses the latter sign, and consequently her observations of Samoan society, far from being empirical, are biased towards this view. She sees what she wants to see. Although Freeman does not wholly embrace the former view, he views Samoan society as imperfect, much as western society. However, Goldie reminds us, that both these views are constructions, created in part by an imperialist project which is designed to fix the Other as an homogenized entity, a reflection of western power and hegemony. What Williamson has achieved in “Heretic” does not concern the empowerment of the Other by giving him a voice. Rather, he has enabled his characters, by their very subversion of the Other’s identity, to show how in a post-colonial world, consciousness is still encumbered by imperialist colonialist discourse. As such, “Heretic” cannot be said to subvert the canon, on the contrary, it could be said to have now entered the modern Australian literary canon.

(1366 words, not including references)
References

GOLDIE, T. “The Representation of the Indigene” Reprinted in “Post Colonial Writings from India and Australia”, 2001. SIM University.

GUNEW, S, “Denaturalizing Cultural Nationalisms: Multicultural Readings of ‘Australia’”
Reprinted in “Post Colonial Writings from India and Australia”, 2001. SIM University.

SAID, E.W. “Presenting the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors” Reprinted in “Post Colonial Writings from India and Australia”, 2001. SIM University.

WILLIAMSON, D. “Heretic”, 1996. Penguin Books, Melbourne.

2nd brood

2009-09-06T11:09:00.002+08:00

The adult pair returned to the nest about one month after the first fledglings had flown, and produced another two or three eggs. These birds left the nest and flew about a month ago. So it seems a pair will produce two sets of offspring in a season. The nest lasted until today, finally dropping off the twig. This miraculous structure lasted four months. Incredible endurance for such a seemingly fragile nest.

Imtiaz Dharker - The Word

2009-08-21T11:42:00.003+08:00

This poem was the subject of my first essay on postcolonial poets from India.

The Word

It is pure power,
not in the throat or on the page
but sliding, coiling and uncoiling
in the minds of men
and women, lifting itself to creep
out of their eyes. It slithers
everywhere, over the shoulder, right or left
prepared to heal or wound,
give birth to a whole nest
of hungry thoughts. This way madness,
this may change the world, this
tame a thousand beasts, or make monsters
of a million sheep.

And I the keeper, with my
small signs and codes. How long
will it obey my commands? I,
wary of this thing
hissing in its box. A quivering of hands,
It is waiting to be fed,
let loose, one day,
when its moment comes,
upon a world unready
to be stung from sleep.

(Imtiaz Dharker)

The qustion asked students to apply Spivak's theories as propounded in "Can the Subaltern Speak", which I found very difficult to do. The poem struck me as being one of Dharker's less typical ones in that there were no direct or implied references to women or the subaltern.

My essay is flawed by a lack of sustained postcolonial analysis. The tutor was very generous with her marking.

Essay :

Imtiaz Dharker’s “The Word” is written in a sparse, condensed style which could almost be described as blank verse, apart from the three salient assonances spread over the two stanzas, in “creep’, “sheep” and “sleep”. The form of the poem omits any attempt at introduction and launches itself directly at the reader, demanding reaction. There appear to be two archetypal images work, both religious in origin, which intermingle to produce a powerful metaphor of defiance, almost of menace. If we accept Bakhtin’s premise that texts are dialogic and heteroglossic, there is a dynamic relationship between texts and their receivers. Poststructuralists would argue that the reader brings experience and unique interpretation to static texts, and that readers will respond in an infinite number of ways..

The first image arises from the title, and for the Judeo-Christian reader it will evoke John 1:1 – “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was with God”
( New Testament, King James Version). John’s introduction to his gospel is in turn a paraphrase of the much earlier passage from Genesis, describing the origins of existence. The second image which binds the poem together throughout its full length is the evocation of kundalini, a branch of Hatha yoga which seeks to awaken the dormant serpent of knowledge, where “kundalini” has the dual meanings of serpent and an awakening of unlimited potential which resides in every human being. Kundalini lies curled within the human form, from the lower end of the spinal column upwards to the top of the head. In Dharker’s words, “…sliding, coiling and uncoiling / in the minds of men and women” to be “let loose, one day”.

Dharker uses these two powerful images as metaphors for the condition in which all humans find themselves, that is, ultimately silenced and unconscious of their inner wisdom and power to change. Her poems are noted for their illumination of the crisis of identity experienced by Indian expatriates in the diaspora, and by subalterns in the Indian subcontinent, and especially female subalterns. But “The Word” seems to address a more universal theme of alienation within society which can apply to all people. Dharker takes pains to emphasis this wider sphere, as in “the minds of men or women”, and by the absence of any local or cultural landmarks in the poem.

A postcolonial reading of the poem would identify the concept of the Other, (Lacan, 1968, cited by Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, 2007, p155) where the writer conjures the image of kundalini as the unconscious “Other” which resides within. Conversely, the “other” is anyone who is apart from oneself, and so the persona represented in the poem is apart from the self of the reader. Thus the poem operates in both senses of the word. But Dharker’s main concerns would seem to be the power of silence and the concept of being aware of this power, and of being able to control potentially unpredictable consequences which could follow the unleashing of this power. She asks the question “How long / will it obey my trivial commands?”, and she has become aware of the forces at work within, which can be “let loose” to bring forth madness, totalitarianism or utopia.

The “otherness” of the inner serpent could also function as a metaphor to describe the latent powers which have been silenced in countless colonized men and women over the centuries, although there is no direct allusion to the underprivileged masses. Dharker is an educated, eloquent writer, an expatriate Indian far removed from the daily realities of the colonized subaltern. That she may include them in the universality of “The Word” could be seen as ironic, for the postcolonial writer is possessed of the tools of self-expression which are denied to the colonized masses she hopes to give voice to. Similarly, Spivak is a self confessed “postcolonial intellectual” (Spivak, IV,1988.) who argues against the subaltern studies groups’ claim to speak for the subaltern masses. She argues that the attempt to speak for the subaltern recreates imperialistic, patriarchal control over the masses and defeats the object. She uses the Sati as a case in point, arguing forcefully that western aversion to the practice of the widow’s self-immolation has superimposed imperialistic values over the issue. According to Spivak, the banning of the practice was a colonial conceit, and utilized the colonizer’s understanding of local customs as primitive and barbaric, without any attempt to grasp the religious or cultural sensibilities involved. It could be argued that Spivak’s test case is an extreme one, but it does nevertheless expose the dichotomy faced by post colonialists; on the one hand the post colonialist writer gives voice to the subaltern, but on the other, the voice is silenced in a fog of patriarchal condescension with which the writer clouds his subject.

In conclusion, I would suggest that to apply Spivak’s argument to “The Word” is not a straightforward exercise. The poem does not appear to be an example of the typically postmodern utterance; that which seeks to give voice to underprivileged subaltern, and which often centres around issues of alienation and subjugation, and in the case of many of Dharker’;s poems, the double colonialization of women. “The Word” touches on more universal themes of human identity and inner potential that apply to all of us.

(876 words)
References

ASHCROFT, B., GRIFFITHS, G., TIFFIN, H. “Post-Colonial Studies, The Key Concepts” Routledge, 2007.

BAKHTIN, M (1981) adapted from “Discourse in the novel” in The Dialogic Imagination, University of Texas Press, 1981.

DHARKER, I. “The Word”, reprinted in “Offprints Collection”, SIM University, 2001.

SPIVAK, G “Can The Subaltern Speak?” reprinted in “Offprints Collection” SIM University,2001.

From "Jejuri"

2009-08-13T18:11:00.003+08:00

More from Kolatkar.

I am wrapped up in the poems from his collection Jejuri.

Spending hours waiting on isolated Indian train platforms, squatting with the crowds, awaiting my 3rd class berth on the next train to Bangalore, Delhi, Madurai, I can sympathise with these sentiments entirely. It took me thirty years to find this poem, and finally I have found someone to put the frustration into words.

Slaughter a goat before the clock
Smash a coconut on the railway track
Smear the indicator with the blood of a cock
Bathe the station master in milk
And promise you will give
A solid gold toy train to the booking clerk
If only someone would tell you
When the next train is due

Scarlet-Backed Flowerpecker

2009-08-04T15:52:00.004+08:00

During one of my habitual walks up to Kent Ridge Park this morning, as my mind was full of the usual inane chatterings (the essay I had to upload this afternoon, my radio project to build a balanced tuner) - I was lucky enough to catch a male Dicaeum Cruentatum up close, feeding on small flowers in the roadside hedges. It was a delight to see - the scarlet is really quite dazzling against the pale blue sky.

Deception

2009-06-17T15:41:00.003+08:00

I picked up some of the course books I need for my forthcoming SIM course today. Upon opening the first one, Twelve Modern Indian Poets at a random page I found the following pearl;

Manohar

The door was open.
Manohar thought
It was one more temple.

He looked inside
Wondering
Which god he was going to find.

He quickly turned away
When a wide eyed calf
Looked back at him.

It isn’t another temple,
He said,
It’s just a cowshed.

(by Arun Kolatkar)

This is a simple metaphor for all of the myriad illusions and fakes claiming to be real paths to enlightenment. Or is it self-deception? The cow is innocent after all. The illusion arises in the mind of the observer.

Whatever. This course will be interesting.

Grimm's Ditch

2009-05-02T20:02:00.003+08:00

Dad sent me this lovely photo of the path down Grimm's Ditch in Wiltshire. It has always been a favourite walk of mine. The photo captures a delicate balance between the ephemeral beauty of bluebells ( I can almost smell their heady perfume), and the unchanging nature of the ancient earthworks.

It is great that Dad is still walking at the age of 88, and Mum too, even with her fragile hip. They would both like to take the long three-hour walks we all enjoyed years ago, I am sure.

Birds Have Flown

2009-05-02T20:01:00.003+08:00

Our first fledgling made the flight and has disappeared, and we can't hear the others chirping inside the nest so we think they have all now flown, and the nest abandoned. What a small miracle.

Fledgling on a limb

2009-04-27T19:00:00.003+08:00

Today I was coming home from another exhausting day at the shipyard and saw a chick perched just outside the nest. I rushed inside to grab my camera..... but there was no need. The chick seems to be at home there awaiting food from its parents and getting ready for the first flight...

I estimate that it has been five weeks from the eggs being laid to the chick leaving the nest. They must have hatched about two weeks ago.

There's a lovely tabby cat down stairs watching eagerly....

2009-04-18T20:27:00.001+08:00

Sunbirds have chicks

2009-04-17T14:24:00.005+08:00

Yesterday as I left the lift lobby to return home, I noticed the quick flash of an adult sunbird leaving the nest. It has been more than six weeks since they started building this tiny miraculous hanging bulbous nest, and I had often wondered if they had already left and the fledglings had flown.

I managed to lean right out, risking life and limb, and heard the chicks inside chirping away. The book says they only lay two or three eggs so there may be up to three chicks inside but it is impossible to see without a mirror on a stick, which I will try to arrange. The opening faces away from the building.

I am wondering when the chicks will venture out on their maiden flights.

Rockwater 2 - a new lease of life.

2009-04-13T20:37:00.004+08:00

My blogging has been rather intermittent this month due to my work schedule on the Rockwater 2 this past month or so.

She is in drydock in Singapore for the past few weeks and re-floated today.

I managed to get some shots in the dock bottom before the flood gates opened.

She has a nice paint job and fresh new thruster blades.

Most of the work is on top. New engineroom alarm systems ( 1000 discrete alarms, all of which must be testes and proved). New PLC controls for the Liaanen thrusters, designed by Rolls Royce.

A total of 16KM of cable has been run around the vessel in the past two weeks.

New communications and fire alarms systems, plus accommodation upgrades and a 25-year steel survey by Lloyds.

Its is a kind of dharma in action. The Old Girl will certainly perform better than before, due to all the hard work (and money) invested in her.

The Old Girl freshly painted, just before re-floating

2009-04-13T20:36:00.000+08:00

Liaanen Azimuth Thrusters

2009-04-13T20:34:00.000+08:00

Brunvoll Bow Thrusters out of the water, freshly overhauled

2009-04-13T20:32:00.000+08:00

One

2009-03-06T12:52:00.008+08:00

Like the 2nd TMA, I had to finish this one early, in this case more than one month early. This one was easier. I am fascinated by the work of Bakhtin, who approaches lingusitic theory in a revolutionary way.

According to Wilson, creativity in language is “influenced and situated within a variety of salient contexts such as time, environment, culture and space” (cited in Maybin and Swann, 2006, p.349).
Demonstrate the validity of this view of creativity and discuss its significance.

Wilson’s view of language creativity is an expansive one which includes the influences of the dynamics of time, environment, culture and space. He broadens the narrow analytical focus of the inherency models put forward by Cook’s theories of schema refreshment, which in turn spring from Jakobson’s formalist approach which analyses the purely poetic functions of creativity. Wilson’s argument infers that artful language is the result of a myriad of external forces, which in turn are shaped by the affordances and apparent restrictions of contemporary literary genres. It is often the tension arising from the constraints within literary genres that actually gives rise to creativity, rather than diminishing its possibilities. Wilson apparently draws on the theories of the Russian socioculturalist Bakhtin, whose work has been very influential in modern linguistic analysis. Cameron (2006, cited in Maybin and Swann 2006) and Lakoff (1980, ibid) also use Bakhtinian theory as a basis for their extended research into conceptual metaphor and its influence in language on the fundamental level of the psyche. Bakhtin has given a general view of the dynamic nature of language creativity, whereas later researchers have expanded his argument to include the specifics of time and space, culture and environment and their influence in creativity. In this essay I will attempt to show examples of how these influences effect our understanding of creativity, and discuss their significance in modern linguistic theory. I will also suggest that if one accepts their validity, it inevitably leads to the concept of creativity as being in a state of continual flux which is difficult to categorize or define conclusively using the conventional tools of inherency. Further, I would argue that Carter’s cline of literariness and Grice’s maxims are almost impossible to apply when one accepts Bakhtin’s premise that language is continually evolving and changing.

Cameron (2006, Maybin and Swann p. 46) expands the Bakhtinian theory by concentrating on the ubiquitous use of metaphor in everyday language. Such expressions as “a crossroads in our relationship” and “high prices” have become deeply embedded in discourse, and evoke concepts of space and dimension which attach themselves to simple lexis, in this case “relationship” and “prices”. She points out that these words are inextricably linked with the modifiers “crossroads and “high”, and that the concepts they convey could not be easily expressed without metaphorical allusions. In this sense, many of our most basic thought processes rely on metaphor to make sense. As such, our everyday speech and writing, as well as our internal thought processes, are shaped by metaphors of time and space. She cites the work of Lakoff and Johnson (Metaphors We Live By, 1980) who point out that many concepts could not exist without the use of metaphor as a vehicle for their transference. Thus the term “dead metaphor” is actually a misnomer because far from being inert or irrelevant, these metaphors reside embedded within the collective and personal consciousness.

Within the affordances offered by new technologies, as well as the older genre of letter-writing, the context of time and its impact on the creative impulse is immediately apparent. Maybin (2006, p.283) cites a letter written by an English airman to his mother during the 2nd World war, just before he was killed in action. The letter captures a moment in history which is crystallized and preserved for posterity. The poignancy of the utterance is highlighted by the impression of a living testimony by a dead man, as if the words themselves are alive but the writer is gone.

The epistolary genre would probably have been categorized by Bakhtin as centripetal, in that the forces at work tend towards an inward focus. The writer uses all his powers to sum up a pivotal moment in his life, making use of conceptual metaphor ( “events are moving rapidly”) unconsciously , as well as a conscious reference to the future ( “faith in the future”). The letter is, however, fixed in time, and became a famous instance of propaganda when it was published in the press. It shows how time can be bracketed and positioned in everyday literary creativity, whereas in many other genres, time is distanced and made more fluid. This fluidity can be seen in the new affordances offered by the internet, where utterances can be continually revised and updated. Similarly in online chat, authors are engaged in a virtual stream of consciousness, where time is of the essence and discourse is immediately dialogic, conforming more to modality of verbal conversation. In this sense online discourse is what Bakhtin would have termed centrifugal, throwing out words and brief utterances radially so that they fall widely dispersed. This creates cognition in potentially thousands of readers, who interpret and respond in unique ways as a result of the almost infinite variety of experiences which have shaped them as “selves” and identities.

The terms “culture” and “environment” are closely linked. Creativity is shaped in large degree by the culture of the society in which we live. Withing an identifiable culture there exist diverse environments. An example would be the prison inmates cited by Wilson (2006, in Maybin and Swann p. 340-349) who inhabit an environment set within (or apart from) mainstream society. Prisoners often create a third space for themselves, neither “inside” or “outside”, but situated within the mind. This constructed environment, which is psychological rather than physical, gives rise to verbal and literary creativity and a sense of freedom, a place where the physical realities of confinement cannot impinge on the creative processes. Hence the poem “Remember If” by T.C. Campbell ( cited in Maybin and Swann p. 348) which includes the line “For though I’m chained in solitary/My mind is free to wander..” demonstrates that confinement is not an impediment to creativity, and that a spatial environment that one would assume as restrictive, can actually produce literary creativity of a high standard, according even to the norms of Carter’s literary cline. This is an extreme example of the influence of culture and the environment on language creativity, but is serves to illustrate the principle that tensions arising from constraints are often the catalyst for creativity.

The same could be said of the online environment, where nuance, tone, stress and body language are absent but are compensated by the novel use of emoticons, colour and sound. As McCullogh noted (1996, cited in Maybin and Swann, 2006, p199) “..Constraint is a source of strength…Only through the possibilities and limitations of structured substance does expression come into being – otherwise it remains only an inspiration.” Culture and environment may be constrained, but it is the tension inherent in these constraints itself which leads to creativity.

Bakhtin would argue that language always includes the unconscious use of heteroglossia, where each voice is in fact influenced by the voices of all those that have gone before. Hence all utterances are “double voiced”, in that they carry nuances of earlier ones. It could be argued further that if we accept the influence of heteroglossia and intertextuality , we are therefore incapable of a truly original utterance, only a modification or amalgamation of the work of others. Bakhtin goes further to state that nearly all words are flavoured with a “taste” of previous contexts (Maybin and Swann p.248), and that there are no “neutral words or forms”. The work done by Lakoff and Johnson on cognitive metaphor would substantiate this view.

The sociocultural view of language creativity draws heavily on the concept of intertextuality, Even on the basic lexical level, locative prepositions such as “in” and out” or “here” and “there” are connotive of time and space. (Goddard, cited Maybin and Swann, p 253). In online communications, Goddard argues that the writer is somehow disembodied in virtual space and that the usual associations of these words are clouded and less fixed in meaning. “With no more than verbal language as their building blocks, these users create spaces where there are none in reality” (ibid, p 254). Thus is can be argued that the new affordances offered by the internet lead to more nebulous associations of time, place, environment and culture, and that these associations are therefore more widely dispersed in the universe of a writer’s psyche. The reader, or “receiver”, similarly needs to search unconsciously for more distant cognitive allusions and intertextual relationships when making sense of the texts on the computer screen. Goddard is another socioculturalist who draws on the work of Bakhtin in order to try to identify the forces at work in diagolicality and intertextuality.

Bakhtin raises some difficulties when trying to identify or quantify the relationships between what he terms as “the word” and the object or idea, that is ultimately conveyed to the reader.
(Bahktin 1981, cuted in Maybin and Swann 2006, p 439). “The way in which a word conceptualizes its object is a complex act.” He goes on to suggest that the interpretation of every word, with its apparent “taste” of time, space and culture, is “open to dispute and overlain…with qualifications”. His point is that everyday language is never unitary or fixed in meaning, although one could argue that certain genres such as technical manuals or the minutes of a meeting are exceptions to this rule. Nevertheless, even reported speech, according to Bakhtin, is also prone to nuance and embellishment on the part of the reporter, and we can never know for sure the “taste” of what the original speaker intended to convey. Hence is this regard, time, place, environment and culture is open to subtle shifts of meaning and interpretation when original utterances are passed down through the voices of others.

In conclusion, I have tried to show that creativity in language is a function of an almost infinite number of influences, which can broadly be identified as temporal, spatial and situational. These dimensions are cited by Wilson and others as being those that inexorably shape our everyday utterances. From the nineteenth century, when literacy became widespread in all classes of society, and the affordances offered by letter-writing and the “penny dreadful” became highly developed, it can be seen that these influences worked together in a creative process which was unique to each writer or speaker. Many of these instances could be said to have been fixed in time and space and have passed down to us in the form of historical record. But they were in fact the product of a myriad of influences on the writers, which can be described as emerging from the time and space in which they were conceived, and the culture and environment that the writer inhabited. In this sense, we have moved beyond the narrow avenue of linguistic analysis based on poetics and inherency, into a broader arena which includes not only spatial, temporal and cultural influences, but also the influences of all previous utterances encountered by the writer. The view held by Wilson, Bakhtin, Goddard et al is entirely valid if we accept the hypothesis that all that we are is the result of all we have experienced.

The significance of the hypothesis leads to the almost inevitable conclusion that the study of creativity in language must necessarily embrace far more than the formal properties of poetry, lexical invention and the foregrounding of language. As Koestler states (cited in Maybin and Swann, p 252);

“The creative act does not create something out of nothing, like the God of the Old Testament: it combines, reshuffles and relates already existing but hitherto separate ideas, facts, frames of perception, associative contexts. This act of cross-fertilization…seems to be the essence of creativity.”

This concept does however present socioculturalists with a dilemma; it now becomes a monumental task to analyze creativity when the influences which shape it can be regarded as infinite in number and effect. Further, the act of analysis necessarily carries with it preconception, and is itself an instance of “double voicing” where the linguistic analyst will inevitably alter the spirit of the original meaning with his own interpretations, born of his own experience.

1991 words, not including title and bibliography

References

Maybin, J. & Swann, J. (2006) The Art of English: Everyday Creativity. Palgrave and Macmillon

TMA 02

2009-03-06T12:48:00.007+08:00

I had a bit of a struggle with this one. It was difficult to analyse such short extracts in an essay stretching to 2000 words, but feedback from Ms Nora (my tutor) rightly says that I should have defined such terms as intertextuality more expansively.

I have also been advised not to publish my TMA's online until the final marks have been awarded. I had a phone call from the head of department to this effect, as well as a remark from Nora on my TMA submission. I must admit that I was unaware anyone was reading my blog, which is more or less a personal diary for myself and my family.

TMA 02. EZS3011.

In this paper I will analyze text A (the graffiti example) and text C (the rebus example) and discuss the degree to which they exhibit both creativity and dialogicality. The extracts use differing affordances and genres to achieve their aims. The graffiti exploits the illicit and potentially subversive act of defacing a public arena. Part of the authors’ satisfaction is derived from breaking a cultural taboo. The rebus started life as published word games in pamphlet form, but now exploits the affordances offered by the internet.

The example of graffiti given is not typical of many of the graffiti on display in public places, which often show an element of social rebellion or a propensity to insult either a particular social community or an individual known to the author, or are statements relating to famous persons or events. Most graffiti are oppositional or involve confrontation, but the given example works at a more subtle level. Graffiti has been known to exist since the 3rd century BC, with examples carved into walls of Roman amphitheatres in Pompeii and the Coliseum at Rome. They often extolled the prowess of popular gladiators or were more personal love declarations intended to be read and recognized by only one person. In all these instances, there is a dialogic interactions in that utterances are made public and provoke a response in the reader. Modern graffiti achieves the same end, and involves anonymity in most cases, where the author hides his identity, except of course in the lover’s scribbling to his muse. Much graffiti could be viewed as an attempt to leave part of the individual self inscribed for all to see for posterity. It is a form of rhetoric designed to engage the passer-by and to perhaps invite further comment.

The given example of graffiti is more sophisticated than most in that it is not intended to insult or engage in social commentary. It contains none of the oppositional elements found in most graffiti. It is a skillful example of word play shown by the use of punning, and it includes elements of semiotics including connotation. There is also iconicity in the layout of the text, as I will attempt to show. This graffiti seems designed to amuse and engage the reader, rather than to make a statement.

Semiotics, or the use of embedded signs, is demonstrated on two levels. We assume that the example is a photograph of the original text in situ written probably by a marker pen on a wall or poster in a public place. Hence the statement that it is the “centre of graffiti” immediately positions the text spatially and invites the idea that further graffiti could be added around it by future contributors. Secondly we have the word “is” underlined and positioned near the centre of the block of text. Therefore not only is the text being positioned as the centre of future graffiti, but within the text itself we have a central point within a larger whole. Saussure (cited by Goodman in Goodman and O’Halloran, 2006) would probably refer to these spatial elements as iconic, that is, as signs where a resemblance to another, related concept can be immediately recognized. There is also a level of denotation here, a central principle of semiotics, where the “arrangement of the written text denotes another concept,” in this case spatial relationships. ( Goodman, ibid, p. 249) The semiotic relationships in the text rely on dialogicality for them to be effective, and as the reader recognizes the spatial relationships within the text so the author has achieved his aims. It is the skillful use of signposting which amuses and entertains the reader as he makes the spatial connections.

There is some intertextuality shown in the connotation raised by the name Isaac Newton. The reader draws on his inherent knowledge of scientific concepts to decode the pun on “graffiti” as “gravity” and thus there is the intertextual link to Newton’s theory of gravity. The graffiti could have been abbreviated simply as “this is the centre of graffiti” but the intertextual relationships would not perhaps have been so apparent. By invoking the name of the great English scientist, the author ensures that the links are in place and recognized.

Most graffiti, apart from personal declarations of love or insults, is anonymous. However, the reader of this example gets the impression that the writer, whoever he or she may be, is a literate person whose aim is merely to engage the reader. Creativity is the text is evident from the various layerings of intertextuality, connotation and semiotics discussed above.

The second extract is an example of a rebus which is a visual word game popular since the 18th century, and is nowadays encountered in books of word games or puzzles on websites. As Goodman states ( Goodman, ibid, p. 251) “The visuals have to be read literally and the result transposed into words for the reader to make any sense of it”. The rebus, although popular with children, is an example of language play which appeals to adults as well. Crystal (1998) defines language play as “rooted in a human enjoyment of texture, an enjoyment which is built on deviating from the rules and structures”. In the rebus example, we can see that the rules of conventional writing are broken by the inclusion of symbols and icons.

The rebus in the example given is laid out on the page in a conventional textual manner, reading from top to bottom with a conventional title, “We Can Fly” as a heading. The whole piece of text is however framed by a strong grey line which suggests a painting or poster rather than a piece of prose. We are thus introduced to the inherent intertextuality of a rebus even before we have read it in its entirety. Below the written title is another title in purely iconic form which shows a girl flying in an aeroplane in the clouds accompanied by a bird. Hence we have a summary of the contents both in written form and symbolically which introduces the main body of the text. The symbolic title and main body rely on semiotics in that they use signs which are socially and culturally meaningful. In particular, the rebus uses iconic signs where a resemblance can be perceived, in this case the image of a girl, an aeroplane, clouds and a bird. It could be said that the rebus uses semiotics more overtly than the example of the graffiti, because connections and connotations are made more obvious through the use of visual imagery and symbolism.

The creativity of the rebus is demonstrated by its use of visual iconicity. The girl and the bird are iconic because they represent directly the entity they are describing. Iconicity often simplifies visual representations to avoid ambiguity, and this is the case here. The visual art is embedded in a narrative plot which has a beginning, a middle and an ending, or conclusion.
There is however a more subtle level of creativity suggested by the transposition of nouns with verbs. At the visual level we have the icon of a tin can (noun) representing the auxiliary verb “can”. Similarly the fly (noun) is transposed grammatically by the reader as the verb “to fly”. There is visual punning too in the use of the numeral “2” transposed by the reader as “too”.
These connections are made by the reader, and as such they rely on dialogicality to succeed. Without cognitive effort on the part of the reader, the rebus is ineffective and static. It is the dynamic of the dialogic process which gives rise to the pleasure and humour experienced by the reader.

The two extracts which have been considered are taken from different genres. As Maybin notes (Maybin and Swann, p.261) these genres offer opportunities for creativity at the level of the text and exhibit interactional functions which are embedded in social practices. She goes on to point out that these acts of writing are addressed to specific audiences, and “shared generic conventions”. In both extracts, the effectiveness of the impressions left on the reader rely on a sense of shared identity and of being members of a similar cultural and social group. In parallel with the appreciation of the reader, skillful use of language involves a process of self-construction on the part of the authors, in that they respond to the reactions of their readers and continually remake themselves in further utterances, which are again responded to. In the case of the graffiti, the author is inviting further contributions by claiming that his offering is the centre around which more additions could be written by others. In the rebus example, new possibilities are revealed in the transposition of nouns and verbs, which thereby invites further inventiveness, and so on. Hence the principle of dialogicality can be taken further than the single act of creativity and response, to include future possibilities of enhanced and expanded creativity.

In conclusion I would argue that not only do the two extracts show creativity and dialogicality, but that they are part of a dynamic cultural process which is continually evolving, drawing on past utterances to add to the store of embedded literary and social practices. This is implicit in the way in which the authors invite further invention and creativity in an essentially dialogic manner.

1558 words, not including title and bibliography

References

Maybin, J. & Swann, J. (2006) The Art of English: Everyday Creativity. Palgrave and Macmillon

Goodman, S & O’Halloran ,K (2006) The Art of English; literary creativity. Palgrave and Macmillon

The Theosophical Society Headquarters, Adyar, Madras.

2009-02-21T16:16:00.003+08:00

In February 2005 I spent ten days at Adyar - a dream I had had since childhood. Faded sepia prints of the headquarters were included in old Theosophical tracts on my parents' bookshelves, and they had imprinted themselves on my mind.

To be continued.

The Masonic Temple

2009-02-21T16:15:00.009+08:00

Helen Jameson took me on a guided tour of the grounds one early morning. Helen is a New Zealander of indeterminate age, one of Adyar's permanent residents. Although she would neither confirm nor deny it, I believe she is a senior member of the Star of the East co-masonic fraternity. I did not get a chance to see inside the temple; she was unaware who held the keys .

The Liberal Catholic Church

2009-02-21T16:15:00.008+08:00

The pastoral chapel of the LCC, where I attended a Sunday morning service. The priest for the day was my friend Brian Harding who was on a prolonged stay with his wife Janet. At the time, the chapel had no resident ordained clergy so it was fortunate to be able to witness such a beautiful ceremony. Much of the liturgy was written by Bishop C.W. Leadbeater, and borrows much from the ancient Gnostic tradition.

The service was attended by four other sentitient beings, including one dog.

Irrigating the parched orchards

2009-02-21T16:13:00.002+08:00

The orchards at Adyar are in a sorry state. Years of drought have meant the fresh water table is sinking, being replaced by brackish water from the sea. Adyar was in need of a full-time arborealist to care for the trees, and I thought of Paul Henry, my old friend in Scotland, but he has family commitments back home.

Leadbeater Chambers on a soporific afternoon

2009-02-21T16:12:00.002+08:00

Everyone who stayed at Leadbeater Chambers took an afternoon siesta. We usually rose before dawn for meditation or prayers followed by breakfast, so by early afternoon we were pretty tired. The heat added to our weariness. Although February is pleasantly cool in the mornings and during the night, it could get very hot after lunch.

A visit by a schoolclass with teachers in tow

2009-02-21T16:11:00.002+08:00

Happy, laughing school kids and their teachers on a day's outing.

The Famous Bhodi Tree

2009-02-21T16:10:00.002+08:00

Administration Building

2009-02-21T16:09:00.003+08:00

It is almost impossible to take a clear picture of this old colonial building because it is enveloped in bougainvillea .

The tranquil Buddhist meditation centre.

2009-02-21T16:07:00.003+08:00

Nomatter how early I rose, I would always find fresh gold leaf adorning the stupa. Whoever got there before me must have risen around 4 a.m.

Annie Besant's Memorial In Madras City

2009-02-21T16:06:00.002+08:00

Near the heart of bustling Chennai, on the waterfront, you can find traces of Annie Besant. Not only at this memorial, but in some of the street names.

One of the many residences in the grounds.

2009-02-21T16:04:00.004+08:00

I think this is the house where John and Helen Jameson stayed. They invited me round for afternoon tea one day. It was quite surreal; sipping Earl Grey in an English country house parlour in the environs of modern Chennai.

On my last day at Adyar, John came to say goodbye and his parting words to me were "Remember. There is no death".

How refreshing to find such focussed, spiritual people of such a venerable age and in such a tranquil place.

Adyar Headquarters

2009-02-21T16:03:00.002+08:00

Adyar Headquarters - Main Entrance

2009-02-21T16:02:00.002+08:00

Dining Room and Meeting Place

2009-02-21T16:01:00.001+08:00

Colonel Olcott's Memorial

2009-02-21T15:59:00.001+08:00