06 November 2005
The possibility of a good review
Upon reflection, it was possibly a bad idea to plough my way through Michel Houellebecq's latest novel (The Possibility of an Island) on the way to my Grandmother's 80th birthday party.
For the first half-an-hour all I could think about were shriveled-up old people's genitalia, and the irreversible sadness of bodily dessication ('old age; there was not a new blossoming at the end of the road, but a bundle of frustrations and sufferings, at first insignificant, then very quickly unbearable...').
I was hoping to make it through the day without having to listen to ill-informed West Country racist cant - just as they were leaving, though, one of the more sour-faced (great aunt? second cousin? I can never bring myself to ask someone. They also seem to share the same names; Val, Dot, Brenda, Mo. I'd never remember), suddenly recalling that I'd earlier told her that I'd taught religious studies, launched, apropos of nothing (like, er, most racism), into an obscure rant about "mercy killings" amongst Muslims. "Honour killings, you mean?" I said. She blathered witlessly on. "You don't teach that sort of thing do you?". When I assured her I didn't, that I actually taught philosophy of religion rather than features or central tenets of particular religions, and that, in any case, incidences of murder were unlikely to feature positively on any A' level syllabus, she shrugged and said: 'well, it doesn't make sense does it? Killing your own family?'. I simply can't imagine it ever crossing anyone's mind...
One of the best lines for a while in the Houellebecq. The narrator, Daniel, is sitting with a friend of his at a Thomson Holidays club "Miss Bikini" contest in Lanzarote: "I threw a despairing look at Vincent: he was as much at home in this seaside spectacle as Samuel Beckett in a rap video".
You know - the critics say the most boring things about Houellebecq; that all his narrators are thinly-veiled versions of his own misanthropic, sardonic, hermit-like self. But this is deliberately point-missing and of course utterly banal, though not particularly surprising coming from these guard-dogs of unreason (actually there's a good blog piece on precisely this point at Splinters). The general reaction to Houellebecq reminds me of seeing Ballard being interviewed by someone who did literary reviews for the Times. "Ooo, your novels are awfully dark, aren't they?"; "so, do you not like women, then?". Twat. In fact, there was almost a middle-class revolt on the part of the audience against the extent of this woman's stupidity. Any one of us could have asked him better questions! Had she even read the books?, etc. Perhaps Ballard had engineered the whole event after all...heh.
There is a basic sense in which biographical questions and concerns about social niceties being demanded of literature are just a basic misunderstanding of what literature is (or can be). A insipid mask for the author's own pathology? Hardly explains the endurance and (admittedly rare, but real) force of novels. Quoting characters as if they were direct reflections of the author's POV (as everyone and his dog has done for the narrator-comedian's line in the Houellebecq: "'Do you know what they call the fat stuff around the vagina?' 'No.' 'The woman.'") is similarly idiotic - as if the reviewer can see something 'true' about the author that somehow escapes his or her own grasp (even though it is the reviewer who ironically says exactly what is expected of him or her).
The idea that one has a kind of "privileged insight" is a constitutive element of the columnist mind-set, of course - witness the "interviews" of the truly slapable Emma Brockes, the painfully poor Harry's Place in-joke parody "Norman Johnson" (which does at least reveal how shit-scared newspapers are of blogs and their increasing incursion into their market), Bruce "bloated outrage" Anderson, well...you know the rest.
Hari I'm occasionally revising my opinion of (despite his unforgivable Negri article a while back) - his recent piece against heartless middle-class manipulation of the education system (completing coursework for one's offspring, moving catchment area to get to a better school, being pushy with teachers) was obviously OTM. And he does write rather twee little things such as: 'Once, I found an old, cold Chicken McNugget in my bed and, reader, I ate it.' And is he is yet young, and did pull out of Harry's Place when it got really horrendous.
Current hatred for the public-school 'n' oxbridge-"educated" columnists (not all of them, certainly, but rather more than there should be by any decent measure) is daily increasing. Those who hated their time in such places I have time for, but those who believed the hype their parents paid for them to receive ("the future captains of industry", "you're the cream of the cream" - well, fat, thick and bad for you, certainly), and who think that their education stopped at their rictus-grin acceptance of their double-first. Newsflash! Any old twat can get a first. It doesn't make you special. And it certainly shouldn't make you complacent - as if you'd reached the apex of reason by the age of 21 by virtue of being a bit cocky and writing a couple of essays.
I'm convinced that broadsheet (technically I suppose they are less-broad now) columnists spend all their time talking only to each other as a way of shoring up the fact that they are really ignorant, clueless hacks (in the strict sense of the word) who could no more apply themselves to serious study/insightful analysis than they could rid themselves of the deeply misplaced feeling that they somehow deserve to be more successful, better-paid and more widely-read than other people.
Cease this tyranny of the self-appointed word-smugorati!
For the first half-an-hour all I could think about were shriveled-up old people's genitalia, and the irreversible sadness of bodily dessication ('old age; there was not a new blossoming at the end of the road, but a bundle of frustrations and sufferings, at first insignificant, then very quickly unbearable...').
I was hoping to make it through the day without having to listen to ill-informed West Country racist cant - just as they were leaving, though, one of the more sour-faced (great aunt? second cousin? I can never bring myself to ask someone. They also seem to share the same names; Val, Dot, Brenda, Mo. I'd never remember), suddenly recalling that I'd earlier told her that I'd taught religious studies, launched, apropos of nothing (like, er, most racism), into an obscure rant about "mercy killings" amongst Muslims. "Honour killings, you mean?" I said. She blathered witlessly on. "You don't teach that sort of thing do you?". When I assured her I didn't, that I actually taught philosophy of religion rather than features or central tenets of particular religions, and that, in any case, incidences of murder were unlikely to feature positively on any A' level syllabus, she shrugged and said: 'well, it doesn't make sense does it? Killing your own family?'. I simply can't imagine it ever crossing anyone's mind...
One of the best lines for a while in the Houellebecq. The narrator, Daniel, is sitting with a friend of his at a Thomson Holidays club "Miss Bikini" contest in Lanzarote: "I threw a despairing look at Vincent: he was as much at home in this seaside spectacle as Samuel Beckett in a rap video".
You know - the critics say the most boring things about Houellebecq; that all his narrators are thinly-veiled versions of his own misanthropic, sardonic, hermit-like self. But this is deliberately point-missing and of course utterly banal, though not particularly surprising coming from these guard-dogs of unreason (actually there's a good blog piece on precisely this point at Splinters). The general reaction to Houellebecq reminds me of seeing Ballard being interviewed by someone who did literary reviews for the Times. "Ooo, your novels are awfully dark, aren't they?"; "so, do you not like women, then?". Twat. In fact, there was almost a middle-class revolt on the part of the audience against the extent of this woman's stupidity. Any one of us could have asked him better questions! Had she even read the books?, etc. Perhaps Ballard had engineered the whole event after all...heh.
There is a basic sense in which biographical questions and concerns about social niceties being demanded of literature are just a basic misunderstanding of what literature is (or can be). A insipid mask for the author's own pathology? Hardly explains the endurance and (admittedly rare, but real) force of novels. Quoting characters as if they were direct reflections of the author's POV (as everyone and his dog has done for the narrator-comedian's line in the Houellebecq: "'Do you know what they call the fat stuff around the vagina?' 'No.' 'The woman.'") is similarly idiotic - as if the reviewer can see something 'true' about the author that somehow escapes his or her own grasp (even though it is the reviewer who ironically says exactly what is expected of him or her).
The idea that one has a kind of "privileged insight" is a constitutive element of the columnist mind-set, of course - witness the "interviews" of the truly slapable Emma Brockes, the painfully poor Harry's Place in-joke parody "Norman Johnson" (which does at least reveal how shit-scared newspapers are of blogs and their increasing incursion into their market), Bruce "bloated outrage" Anderson, well...you know the rest.
Hari I'm occasionally revising my opinion of (despite his unforgivable Negri article a while back) - his recent piece against heartless middle-class manipulation of the education system (completing coursework for one's offspring, moving catchment area to get to a better school, being pushy with teachers) was obviously OTM. And he does write rather twee little things such as: 'Once, I found an old, cold Chicken McNugget in my bed and, reader, I ate it.' And is he is yet young, and did pull out of Harry's Place when it got really horrendous.
Current hatred for the public-school 'n' oxbridge-"educated" columnists (not all of them, certainly, but rather more than there should be by any decent measure) is daily increasing. Those who hated their time in such places I have time for, but those who believed the hype their parents paid for them to receive ("the future captains of industry", "you're the cream of the cream" - well, fat, thick and bad for you, certainly), and who think that their education stopped at their rictus-grin acceptance of their double-first. Newsflash! Any old twat can get a first. It doesn't make you special. And it certainly shouldn't make you complacent - as if you'd reached the apex of reason by the age of 21 by virtue of being a bit cocky and writing a couple of essays.
I'm convinced that broadsheet (technically I suppose they are less-broad now) columnists spend all their time talking only to each other as a way of shoring up the fact that they are really ignorant, clueless hacks (in the strict sense of the word) who could no more apply themselves to serious study/insightful analysis than they could rid themselves of the deeply misplaced feeling that they somehow deserve to be more successful, better-paid and more widely-read than other people.
Cease this tyranny of the self-appointed word-smugorati!
