Patience
Posted by cathannabel in Literature, W G Sebald on February 27, 2012
A few seconds after the title of Grant Gee’s film fades, a subtitle appears that tells us what the next 84 minutes are going to be about: “A Walk Through The Rings of Saturn.” Patience (After Sebald) is a tour through a book rather than a visit to a place or the story of a life. Gee does, at times, show us locations referred to by the words of the book, but, as several interviewees say, it’s foolish, really, to follow in Sebald’s footsteps. So, like a good reader, Gee follows Sebald’s words.
Patience is a layered, often leisurely film, content to linger on images or, in one instance, plunge the screen into blackness for a few moments. The film begins and ends with the opening and closing words of The Rings of Saturn, wonderfully read by the actor Jonathan Pryce, whose uninflected, almost monotonous voice has the…
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W G Sebald’s Bleston
Posted by cathannabel in Literature, Michel Butor, W G Sebald on February 26, 2012
I discovered Sebald and Butor at around the same time, and noted the biographical coincidence that both had spent time at the University of Manchester, but it’s only with the publication of Across the Land and the Water that I’ve discovered quite how strong the links between the writers are. Reading The Emigrants, I had been struck by the echoes of Butor’s descriptions of Manchester, but had attributed them mainly to the common subject – after all, there are common features in descriptions of the city, particularly of the first encounters with the city, across a couple of centuries, upon which both authors draw. In the light of the ‘Mancunian Cantical’ however, it’s very clear that Butor’s novel was a direct influence, and of real significance to Sebald. I’ve gone back since both to the Max Ferber segment of The Emigrants, and to the final part of After Nature, part of which also relates to Sebald’s Manchester days. (There are interesting connections between all four texts – to take just a couple of examples, the fascination with the star-shaped Strangeways prison, and the Guy Fawkes anecdote – which deserve more attention, and may well get it at some future point.)
I’ve been much taken with the notion that Sebald might have chanced upon Passing Time in a Manchester bookshop, just as Butor’s hero Revel finds the book that’s going to shape his experience of the city, Le Meurtre de Bleston, nestling between Torture through the Ages, and a Handbook of Cricket. I now know that he owned the French text (the 1966 edition – thanks go to Terry Pitts, of the Vertigo blog, for that information), and the poem itself provides internal evidence of this – but the idea is too delightful to let go. Of course, the English edition may have prompted him to track down the French, having recognised that this extraordinary text was going to be profoundly important to him. Either way, as this poem was finished on or shortly before 26 January 1967, his response to the book must have been pretty immediate.
The poem contains a number of direct quotations in French from L’Emploi du temps, which are noted by Iain Galbraith The title of the final section is ‘Perdu dans ces filaments’, which refers to Revel’s sense that he was a virus, caught in Bleston’s threads. ‘Filaments’ also echoes ‘fil d’Ariane’, a reference to the story of Theseus who found his way through the labyrinth to kill the minotaur with the help of Ariadne’s thread – a legend that is central to L’Emploi du temps.
There are also a number of phrases that aren’t presented as quotations from L’Emploi du Temps:
| Sebald | L’Emploi | Passing time |
| The mere shadow of a feast-day phantom/Of a defunct feast-day Bleston | L’ombre d’une fête, le fantôme d’une fête morte (24 July, p. 237) | The shadow of a festival, the ghost of a dead festival (p. 176) |
| Bleston my ashes in the wind of your dreams | Toi … qui éparpillais mes cendres au vent de tes rêves (20 Aug, p. 306) | You who in your dreams scattered my ashes to the winds (p. 225) |
| From time to time the howls of animals in the zoological/Department reach my ears | On entendait de temps en temps les hurlements des animaux dans la section zoologique (30 July, p.250) | From time to time you could hear the animals howling in their nearby cages (p. 185) |
I’ve shown these against the French text and the English translation because I think this makes it clear that Sebald’s source was the French text, which he translated into German, and which Iain Galbraith has now rendered into English.
Of course, what’s interesting isn’t just that Sebald has chosen to quote (albeit via translation) Butor’s novel, but which aspects of it appear to have made the most powerful impact on him. There are key words in L’Emploi du temps, motifs which are repeated and which gain cumulative weight as the narrative develops, and a number of these recur in the ‘Cantical’ too. I’ve picked out a few, to set out some markers for a future study, or for real Sebaldians to take further than I can.
- A shuttered world – the image of a closed shutter (grille de fer, literally Iron Curtain) is found throughout L’Emploi, reinforcing the idea of a city that is closed, but also the sense that the protagonist’s efforts to find his way, to make connections, are constantly thwarted by ‘une grille de fer fermee’.
- Mute – silence is a theme here, repeated in ‘the silence of revelation’ in part III, ‘reclining in silence’ , ‘The valleys of Bleston do not echo’, in part IV . In The Emigrants, Max Ferber speaks of the loss of his mother tongue, German, which he hasn’t spoken since parting from his parents in 1939, ‘and which survives in me as no more than an echo, a muted and incomprehensible murmur’ (p.182). Music and silence are key themes for Butor – Revel ponders the absence of music in Bleston, a symptom of its malaise. There is actually a strong musical theme in L’Emploi, and throughout Butor’s work, which will be the subject of a later blog post.
- ‘The starlings … sleepless on the sills of Lewis’s Big Warehouse’ – this passage is reworked in The Emigrants (p. 157)
- Shadows – one of the most often repeated motifs in L’Emploi. Bleston is full of shadows, both literal and metaphorical, obscuring both the way ahead and the motives and intentions of the people.
- Mamucium – Sebald’s reference to the origins of Manchester’s name recalls Butor’s offering of alternative etymologies for Bleston, from the popular ‘Bells Town’ to the improbable ‘Bella Civitas’ but focusing on Bellista, city of war. (Manchester itself was the site of a temple of Mithras.)
- ‘torture a travers les ages’ – this phrase is translated by Galbraith but he doesn’t note that it’s a quotation from L’Emploi. This is the title of one of the books that Revel sees when he’s looking for the detective novel, Le Meurtre de Bleston, which plays a key role in the narrative.
- feast-day phantom – see also Fete nocturne, more shadows, and the phantom. Bleston reduces, or tries to reduce, its inhabitants to ghosts, or shades. But there’s also a ghost in The Emigrants, the ‘grey lady’ who visits Ferber daily (pp.181-2).
- ‘the howls Of animals in the zoological Department’ – in context in L’Emploi, the animals echo Revel’s despair, and his sense of imprisonment
- Sharon’s Full Gospel – referred to also in After Nature: ‘row after rock of the sick, amid the congregation’s shrieking, were healed and even the blind had their sight restored’ (p. 98)
- The offshore ships waiting in the fog recur in The Emigrants (p. 166)
- opgekilte schottns – translated as ‘frozen shadows’ (see earlier references to shadows). Galbraith also relates this to the story of Theseus who causes the death of his father, a legend that is represented in the tapestries in Bleston’s museum
- wasteland – Bleston’s centre is ringed by areas of ‘terrain vague’. These are the locations for the travelling fair as it moves around the city, and for many of the fires which punctuate the narrative.
- ‘my ashes In the wind of your dreams’ – Sebald retains the construction ‘in the wind of your dreams’ which is lost or weakened in the English. However, whereas his wording suggests that it is Bleston that is being addressed, in the context of the novel, it is the city which is addressing Revel, who has burned his map in an attempt to revenge himself on the city.
- On ne doit plus dormir – Pascal via Adorno, the abundance of suffering permits no forgetting. Both Sebald and Butor wrote ‘contre l’oubli’.
As Galbraith says, ‘The poem presents a labyrinth of allusions, and the reader who attempts to follow them risks becoming ‘perdu dans ces filaments’ . To which I’d have to say, ‘Challenge accepted’!
Michel Butor, L’Emploi du temps (Paris: Minuit, 1956)
Michel Butor, Passing Time, translated by Jean Stewart (London : John Calder, 1965)
W G Sebald, ‘Dark Night Sallies Forth’, in After Nature, translated by Michael Hamburger (London, Hamish Hamilton, 1988)
W G Sebald, ‘Max Ferber’, in The Emigrants, translated by Michael Hulse (London: Vintage, 2002)
W G Sebald, ‘Bleston: A Mancunian Cantical’, in Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems, 1964-2001, translated by Iain Galbraith (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2011)
The Impossibility of Maps
Posted by cathannabel in Michel Butor, The City on February 19, 2012
Michel de Certeau‘s famous description of looking down from the World Trade Centre illustrates the opposition which he explores through ‘Walking in the City’ between the ‘ville-concept’ and the real, organic city as experienced at ground level, by those who live and walk in it. From such a vantage point, the cartographer can map on to the constant motion, the indistinct sea and fog of the city, a ‘terra cognita’ of recognisable taxonomies (see White, on Zola’s Paris). Even the most complex maze or labyrinth seems straightforward when one can see the whole. But once we’re walking in the city, rather than gazing at it from on high, all of the means we have to make sense of it rapidly reveal their limitations. Maps sooner or later are ‘interrupted by an encounter with the unmappable’ (Hillis Miller).
An early review of Michel Butor’s L’Emploi du temps claims that ‘if [its] explicit geography … does not make that story an excellent guide to the back as well as main streets of Manchester I should be very much surprised’ (Frohock). One hopes he did not make the attempt to navigate the Manchester streets armed only with the book, and a map which marks those streets and landmarks encountered by the novel’s hero (and not all of those). The frontispiece map was prepared by Butor to guide him through the cityscape he was creating. It indicates the relative positions of the key locations as anchorage points – the stations, the homes of the various characters, the cathedrals, restaurants etc, but there are gaps where streets and buildings must be but are not recorded. Resemblances to the layout of Manchester’s city centre seem pretty much random and coincidental – for example, as noted elsewhere, the star shape of the prison is replicated on the map, but it does not sit in relation to the river, the University or any other features of the city as it does in reality. So we can dispose of the frontispiece map as a lightly disguised map of Manchester.
The other thing the frontispiece is not, is the map that Revel buys and uses to get his bearings in the city. It is like a map drawn from memory, where some configurations of streets are recalled in detail and others only vaguely. Thus it mirrors the text which is an act of resistance against the forgetfulness that Bleston’s fogs engender. Just as the text does not and cannot record everything that happened even to Revel, let alone the things that he did not witness, the map only records his experience and first-hand knowledge, and as such we are aware that it may be partial both in the sense of being incomplete, and in the sense of reflecting subjective perceptions and priorities. It recalls the famous surrealist map of the world, whose proportions relate to the cartographers’ cultural ideals rather than to geographical reality, as well as the first medieval maps, which were records of journeys taken, rather than attempts to objectively encapsulate space.
Revel’s experience of Bleston begins with him losing his way, and his failure to grasp its geography leads him to see it anthropomorphically as trying to evade him, hiding from examination as if the light burned it, or camouflaging itself as if in the folds of a cloak. Purchasing a map is the first of his tactics. However, it is apparent from the beginning that any one source of information will be insufficient. The map gives him the aviator’s or bird’s eye view but does not tell him how to make his way around the city. For that he needs the bus timetable. Taken together, these tools do not help him to find lodgings – for that he needs the intervention of a fellow exile, using informal local knowledge. To make sense of the city he needs to engage with its inhabitants, indigenous or otherwise. (See Annie Lovejoy & Harriet Hawkins‘ project Insites on ‘deep mapping’). The journal, as it logs street names and bus numbers, weaves together his sources, unreliable or partial as they are, in an attempt to encompass the reality of the city. Revel’s fight back against the city culminates in his burning of the map (one of many fires which punctuate the narrative). But that ‘profoundly irrational act’ is both negated and emphasised when he has to buy another to replace it. The map is inadequate and misleading, but essential nonetheless.
Maps imply a knowledge which denies their selectivity. They make the city readable, or purport to, and so slough off the city’s complexity and freeze its opaque mobility in a falsely transparent text. But the phantasmagoric city, in constant flux, is the antithesis of the guidebook/map representation of the city which fixes locations, connections, distances. It is this city that the text invites us to see, recognising the inadequacy of the map, showing us an inferno, a necropolis, a temple of war, a prison. It is its own past, and its own potential futures, which we explore as physiognomy, as mythology, as history, as politics, as text – a secret text, which we need to decipher, from signs and symbols, a palimpsest where what has been erased can still be traced.
See my only published paper on line here!
Robert Alter, Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2005)
Jeremy Black, Maps & Politics ( London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 1997)
Gary Bridge, Reason in the City of Difference: Pragmatism, Communicative Action and Contemporary Urbanism (London: Routledge, 2005)
Mary Ann Caws (ed), City Images: Perspectives from Literature, Philosophy and Film (NY: Gordon & Breach, 1991)
Michel de Certeau, L’Invention du quotidien, I (Paris: Gallimard, 1990)
Mike Crang & Nigel Thrift (eds), Thinking Space (London: Routledge, 2000)
Christian Emden, Catherine Keen & David Midgley (eds), Imagining the City, Vol. I (Bern; Oxford: Peter Lang, 2006)
W M Frohock, ‘Introduction to Butor’, Yale French Studies, 24 (1959), 54-61
Graeme Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City (Cambridge: Polity, 1996)
Ben Highmore, Michel de Certeau: Analysing Culture (London : Continuum, 2006)
David Frisby, ‘The Metropolis as Text’, in Neil Leach (ed.), The Hieroglyphics of Space: Reading and Experiencing the Modern Metropolis (London; NY: Routledge, 2002)
J. Hillis Miller, Topographies (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1995)
Nicholas White, ‘Reconstructing the City in Zola’s Paris’, Neophilologus, 8 (1997), 201-14
Why Who?
Posted by cathannabel in Television on February 18, 2012
In future my blogging energies will be shared between this site and Doctor Her, a new blog about all things Doctor Who, from a feminist perspective. Given my previous post in defence of fantasy, this might not be too much of a surprise. But I’m very well aware that to declare one’s love for Doctor Who, or Buffy, is to be dismissed with a contemptuous curl of the lip by some. Their loss, clearly. I have strong views about what’s worth reading, watching or listening to, increasingly so as I grow older and realise that I really may not have time to read/watch/listen to all the great stuff that’s out there, so I really don’t want to waste time on the merely OK, let alone the poor. But my criteria don’t include genre categories – I may have a preference in televisual terms for fantasy rather than costume drama but I’ll only watch something if it’s written intelligently, if it has some emotional truth and weight to it, whatever category it’s in. And that, most decidedly, includes Doctor Who.
We go back a long way, the Doctor and me. Back to the mid-sixties, when he was a cosmic recorder-playing hobo. I followed him as he regenerated, and whilst I did love some Doctors more than others, I never gave up on him altogether. The BBC pretty much did though, and I wasn’t expecting the reboot at all, let alone expecting it to be – the odd clunky episode notwithstanding – a return to the quality of the very best era (Four, need you ask?).
As a kid, of course, I hid behind the sofa (metaphorically, I don’t recall literally doing so) and the limited budgets (the quarry which doubled for every alien planet ever visited, the visible zips on the monster costumes) didn’t make it less scary. But it was always about more than scaring the kids, it was about ideas. The first series had an overt educational mission, both historical and scientific, which has become less evident over the years. But what has been constant is the real heart of speculative fiction, exploring what it is, what it could be to be human.
The reboot of Who, for me, has succeeded marvellously in that arena. It’s explored love, loyalty, loss and longing. It’s made me laugh, and its made me cry. A lot. It’s made me think, it’s prompted vigorous debates, on and off line, wild divergences of opinion amongst fans. And I’m really excited about a forum where I can share and explore these things in the context of what it is, what it could be, to be a woman.
Labyrinths and Mazes – finding and losing the thread
Posted by cathannabel in Literature, Michel Butor, The City on February 12, 2012
The more I attempt to define the labyrinth, the more I lose my way, appropriately enough (or not, depending on one’s understanding of the purpose they serve). The maze is more straightforward in purpose, if not in navigation. It’s a puzzle, where the objective is to reach the centre (and then find one’s way out again) but which requires choices to be made, some of which will lead to dead ends, or will take (or appear to take) the walker away from rather than towards the centre. But the most striking thing about the classical labyrinths is that there are no dead ends, no tricks at all. There is one route through, no choices to be made, no cause for confusion.
And yet Daedalus, at least according to Ovid, constructed his labyrinth so cunningly that he barely managed to escape it himself after completion. Indeed, its purpose was to imprison the minotaur, and to make its slaying a feat of legendary heroism. So, with only one path through, how could Daedalus have risked losing his way, why did Theseus need Ariadne’s thread to guide him out, and how did it keep the minotaur in?
Looking at the classical designs, whilst all one has to do to reach the centre is to keep going, the effect of the complex looping of the path is to take the walker closer to and then further from the goal, such that they start to doubt, to feel as if they must have made a wrong choice even though no choice was in fact possible, and to turn back, so ending up back at the beginning. So, if Daedalus’s labyrinth was indeed the unicursal classical design, Ariadne’s thread did not so much lead Theseus out of the labyrinth as reassure him that he was on the right route, whatever his instincts told him. It is this aspect that has encouraged the use of labyrinths for meditative purposes – one has to put aside doubt and go where the path leads. Guillermo del Toro has said that ‘unlike a maze, a labyrinth is actually a constant transit of finding, not getting lost. It’s about finding, not losing, your way…I can ascribe two concrete meanings of the labyrinth in the movie. One is the transit of the girl towards her own center, and towards her own, inside reality, which is real’.
The association between labyrinth and city is of long standing (Roman mosaic labyrinths represent fortified cities), but contributes to the confusion about terminology. The damp dark labyrinth of streets to which de Tocqueville refers was a product not of design but of its absence, and thus the disorienting effect was accidental rather than deliberate. But the personification of these great cities attributes to them the intent that the builders lacked – the distinction between the physical qualities of the cities and the texts and thoughts they engender is blurred (Faris, 1991). It’s also clear that urban labyrinths involve choices, which potentially can result in losing one’s way, finding dead ends, returning inadvertently to where one started. Being in the metropolis feels like losing control, composure, the sense of self. Lynch says that ‘there is some value in mystification, labyrinth or surprise in the environment’ but that there must be no danger of the form of the city being lost, or that one might never get out of it. There must be the possibility that the mystery can be comprehended, the form explored and in time grasped. Otherwise, the labyrinthine city becomes a trap, closing on the newcomer, the isolated wanderer.
The labyrinth is one of the key motifs of L’Emploi du temps (see Pierre Brunel for the definitive treatment of the theme), fittingly for a writer of whom it has been said that the fundamental question in his work is always ‘where am I?’. It’s a labyrinth in space, but also in time and memory. The narrative starts simply enough, with two time frames, the time of writing and the time that is written about. But as the diary continues, one memory triggers another, events in the ‘present’ require a reference back to the past outside of the linear chronology of the journal. The writing which explores the labyrinth becomes labyrinthine as memory endlessly circles. ‘The rope of words that uncoils down through the sheaf of papers and connects me directly with that moment on the first of May when I began to plait it, that rope of words is like Ariadne’s thread, because I am in a labyrinth, because I am writing in order to find my way about in it, all these lines being the marks with which I blaze the trail: the labyrinth of my days in Bleston, incomparably more bewildering than that of the Cretan palace, since it grows and alters even while I explore it’ (p. 183).
But what’s at the centre of the labyrinth? Perhaps Revel never reached it. Butor’s work is characterised by openness and mobility, and the narrative cannot be self-contained. So the book ends as Revel tells us of the pages he didn’t write, the places he didn’t visit, and of ‘something that happened on the evening of February 29th, something that seemed very important and that I shall forget as I move farther away from you, Bleston’.
Pierre Brunel, Butor: ‘L’Emploi du temps’: le texte et le labyrinthe (Paris: PUF, 1995)
Mark Crinson (ed), Urban Memory: History and Amnesia in the Modern City (London: NY: Routledge, 2005)
Wendy B Faris, Labyrinths of Language: Symbolic Landscape and Narrative Design in Modern Fiction (Baltimore; London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988)
Wendy Faris, ‘Cognitive Mapping: Labyrinths, Libraries and Crossroads’, City Images: Perspectives from Literature, Philosophy, and Film (NY: Gordon & Breach, 1991)
Marilyn Thomas Faulkenburg, Church, City and Labyrinth in Bronte, Dickens, Hardy, and Butor (NY; San Francisco; Bern; Baltimore; Frankfurt am Main; Berlin; Wien; Paris: Peter Lang, 1993)
Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, Mass.; London: MIT Press, 1960)
Guillermo del Toro, Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)
In defence of the undead
Posted by cathannabel in Film, Television on February 5, 2012
In response to Stuart Heritage’s article in this week’s Guardian Guide, I have no intention of defending the indefensible (i.e. Twilight). And I haven’t yet seen the first episodes of the new series of True Blood, The Walking Dead, or Being Human – Heritage may, for all I know, be right that all of these have exhausted whatever value they had. However … I do rather mind being stereotyped by my love of these shows. For the record, I do occasionally wear a black t-shirt, but I do not practice witchcraft, do not have either a cat or a Tumblr site (que?) and if I did I would neither dress one as a butler nor call the other Elysian Moonquaver. And I do not accept that I have to choose between dressed up cats and Robert Pattinson or forswearing the whole genre.
I fully intend to continue to despise the wretched Twilight and to regard Buffy the Vampire Slayer as one of the absolute high points of television drama, and to love True Blood (madly over the top, and, yes, featuring some rather fetching topless men), and the Brit equivalents, Being Human (can it survive the departures of Mitchell, George and Nina?), Misfits (can it continue, after that frankly rather gobsmacking final episode?), The Fades (will there be another series?).
It all goes back to Buffy. Not, for me, to Dracula, or the George Romero zombie films, or Hammer Horror. Joss Whedon‘s show overwhelmed all of the assumptions I’d made on the basis of a silly title (Sabrina the Teenage Witch, anyone?) – just as The Stand disposed of my prejudices against Stephen King. Buffy had some seriously naff special effects, but it was never about that. The scripts were so sharp, so funny, so packed with layers of references that throwaway lines are often key to a more weighty subtext and the characters never lose their plausibility however bonkers the storyline. Through the medium of this fantasy with vampires, demons and all kinds of inhuman creatures, we’re exploring human relationships – teenagers and parents, sibling rivalries, sexual discovery and betrayal, bereavement and loss – in a fantastic context that allows these things to be explored in fresh and unexpected ways, that jolt us with their familiarity whilst we accept a narrative involving an ensouled vampire or a mayor turning into a giant snake. For all the scary stuff (and there are some real shiver down the spine moments) the things that stay with you are the human elements – what Heritage calls ‘the fat streak of humanity’.
I am, in general, less fond of zombies. Vamps – in the worlds created by or inspired by Whedon – are conflicted, capable of both savagery and love, and so can be interesting. Zombies per se are not. As Heritage points out, they basically just shuffle around, slurp brains and shed body parts. However, zombie drama is not fundamentally about zombies, it’s about surviving in an apocalyptic landscape, with a mindless and relentless threat always out there, and about how human beings act together and apart in the face of that. It’s about the fragility of civilisation – it’s no accident that The Walking Dead and 28 Days Later use the same opening dramatic device as Day of the Triffids, as our hero, waking in a hospital bed, is thrown into the midst of the post-apocalyptic chaos without any warning or preparation, and has to try to find allies, and figure out what it takes to survive. The Walking Dead gets its scares from the zombies, but its drama from the beleaguered human protagonists. Buffy required us to learn the plural of apocalypse – she saved the world, a lot – but the zombie drama requires us to face the terror of a world where no one saved us.
Fundamentally, all of these dramas, like Stephen King’s novels, deal with the sense that there is something bigger than the stuff of our everyday lives, and that people are making moral choices in the face of those bigger questions, about which side they’re on. In other words, what it means to be human. To quote the eleventh doctor, ‘Letting it get to you. You know what that’s called? Being alive. Best thing there is’.
Buffy – the best bits: Harvest, Innocence, The Wish, Doppelgangland, Hush, The Body, The Gift, Tabula Rasa, Once More with Feeling, Chosen. See http://slayageonline.com/ for academic takes on the Buffy/Whedonverse.
A very incomplete list of some of my favourite apocalypses not mentioned above: Stephen King – The Mist, Cormac McCarthy – The Road, John Wyndham – The Chrysalids, Chris Marker – La Jetee, Barry Hines – Threads, P D James – Children of Men (and the rather different but also excellent film thereof), Liz Jensen – The Rapture
Manchester, so much to answer for
Posted by cathannabel in Literature, Michel Butor, W G Sebald on February 5, 2012
As a Sheffielder, albeit having blown in a mere 37 years ago, I’d be expected to take a dim view of Manchester. It’s the wrong side of the Pennines, for a start. It feels like a huge sprawling metropolis, whilst Sheffield, big city that it is, feels still like a city centre surrounded by villages. Here, one can look out over fields and moors, but be 20 minutes from not only shops but wonderful cultural opportunities – the Crucible theatre, the Showroom cinema, Music in the Round. And it really does rain a lot over there. I commuted to Manchester in the early 1980s, and going through the Chinley tunnel always felt like leaving one country and emerging in another, emerging in a different climate, a different season.
There’s a view that northern cities are much of a muchness, a view that those of us who live in them would dispute vigorously. When the narrator of Passing Time, Jacques Revel, says that ‘Bleston is not unique of its kind, that Manchester or Leeds, Newcastle or Sheffield, or Liverpool… would have had a similar effect on me’, I’ve always felt inclined to argue that had the author come to OUR University instead of Manchester’s, he would have found digs in Crookes, where the air would not have choked him, from where escape would have been easy, out on Manchester Road, or up towards Redmires, or down to Rivelin, and from where he would have been able to see the lights of the city, the kind of bird’s eye view that Revel could only approximate when he spread his map of the city out and ‘surveyed its whole extent at a glance, like some hovering bird about to pounce’ (p. 41).
Bleston is undoubtedly inspired by Manchester (Butor said as much), and draws on Manchester’s iconic status as the archetypal city of industry and of the worst aspects of industrial life. His descriptions echo those of Alexis de Tocqueville, 200 years earlier, who described the ‘damp, dark labyrinth’, the ‘half-daylight’, and the sun seen through the pall of black smoke as a disc without rays. Part of the reason for Manchester’s status as ‘shock city’ of the Victorian era is that its growth was unplanned, ‘an incoherent environment shaped hastily to exceed earthly standards … it inspired wonder and dread in equal measure’ (Crinson, Fabrications) – see this upcoming conference, noted on the Occursus blog. Eric Hazan has described three models for the growth of cities: an onion adding outer layers as it expands (Paris), mathematical grids (New York), and bacteria in a petri dish. Butor uses an even less appealing metaphor when Revel, armed with his map, sees himself as a scientist studying ‘this huge cancerous growth’ (p. 42).
W G Sebald, arriving ten years after Butor, was struck by many of the same features that Butor, Engels, de Tocqueville, and so many others, have described. In The Emigrants, he describes how Max Ferber, approaching Manchester from the moors in 1945, ‘had a bird’s eye view of the city spread out before him’ (Emigrants, p. 168), of the ‘solid mass of utter blackness’ of the city centre, the chimneys towering above the flat maze of housing. Sebald’s narrative charts the decline of industrial Manchester, from the constantly belching chimneys of 1945 to the decay and neglect of 1990/91.
The geography of Sebald’s Manchester is that of the real city, whereas Butor’s Bleston is a transformed Manchester, a composite , as Dickens’ Coketown, ‘where Nature was as strongly bricked out as killing airs and gases were bricked in’, was an amalgam of Manchester, Oldham and Preston. Thus the frontispiece map would not serve a visitor as a guide, despite the claims of some commentators, though it borrows features from the real city. Both Butor and Sebald draw attention to the distinctive star shape of Strangeways Prison – a design common to many late 19th century prisons, including Paris’s la Petite Roquette – and Butor’s city is very much a carceral space. Revel tries to get out into countryside, fails, and never tries again – when he asks a pub landlord how he might get there, he’s referred to ‘some nice parks’, and to the wastelands between the towns; his colleague Jenkins has never left at all.
As Revel finally leaves, in the moment of his deliverance, he addresses the city for the last time: ‘as you lie dying, Bleston, whose dying embers I have fanned’ (p. 288), and Sebald’s ‘Mancunian Cantical’ ends with ‘Flutes of death for Bleston’. Both Butor and Sebald found that Manchester triggered associations and memories which inspired their writing. If one considers some of the repeated motifs that both writers use – ash, fog, darkness, shadows, silence, fires and wasteland – it’s hard to escape the notion that for both those associations and memories were rooted in wartime Europe, the Europe that Max Ferber had escaped with his life.
Notes:
For all matters Sebaldian, Terry Pitts’ Vertigo blog is essential
Unplanned Wildernesses: Narrating the British Slum 1844 – 1951
http://www.thenewsignificance.com/2011/05/10/eric-hazan-the-invention-of-paris/
Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990)
Michel Butor, Passing Time, translated by Jean Stewart (London : John Calder, 1965)
Mark Crinson, ‘Towards the Beautiful City’, Fabrications: New Art and Urban Memory in Manchester (Manchester: UMiM Publishing, 2002)
Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854)
Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)
Eric Hazan, L’Invention de Paris: il n’y a pas de pas perdus (Paris: Seuil, 2002)
J B Howitt, ‘Michel Butor and Manchester’, Nottingham French Studies, 12 (1973), 74-85
Musée Carnavalet, L’impossible photographie: prisons parisiennes 1851-2010 (Paris: Paris Musées, 2010)
W G Sebald, The Emigrants (London: Vintage, 2002)
W G Sebald, ‘Bleston. A Mancunian Cantical’, Across the Land and the Water : Selected Poems, 1964-2001 (London : Hamish Hamilton, 2011)
Alexis de Tocqueville, Voyages en Angleterre, Irlande, Suisse et Algérie (Paris: Gallimard, 1958)
Holocaust Memorial Day 2012
Posted by cathannabel in Genocide on January 26, 2012
When I was 9 years old, my family lived in Zaria, in Northern Nigeria. It was 1966, and a series of coups d’etat were hiking up tensions between the north and south, tensions which in May and September of that year resulted in mobs seeking out and killing on the streets, in the schools and hospitals and churches, anyone recognised as being of Igbo origin. I don’t know how many died. Probably no one does. Because of the civil war that followed, the pogroms in the north have received little attention – though Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her stunning novel Half of a Yellow Sun portrayed these events incredibly powerfully. I was a child, and my parents protected me and my younger siblings from the horror of what was happening. But even as a child I heard and saw enough – even when the adult conversations stopped abruptly in my presence – to be haunted by what I’d half overheard, seen out of the corner of my eye. I’ve needed to try to understand what happened, not just in Northern Nigeria in 1966, but whenever an attempt is made to wipe a group of people from the face of the earth.
We’re told that we must remember the past in order not to relive it. It’s a lot more complicated than that of course. In order not to relive it we’d have to understand it. Memories aren’t necessarily trustworthy – after the Liberation, Michel Butor has spoken of how his parent’s generation said of the years of occupation, 1939-1945 was a nightmare, but it’s over, so we’ll forget all of that and pick up where we left off. His generation of writers has been preoccupied with memory, and how we revisit, rework and reshape as we try to master the past. The simple imperative to remember would seem to have done us little good in the generations since Auschwitz. It didn’t stop, or even slow down, the slaughter in Rwanda, the massacres in Srebenica, decades of pogroms in Nigeria, the devastation in Darfur, the killings in Cambodia. But remember we must. The important thing is that we remember right, and we remember well.
I’m reminded, oddly perhaps in this context, of a song from South Pacific: ‘You’ve got to be taught To hate and fear. You’ve got to be taught from year to year. It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear. You’ve got to be carefully taught.’ Frances McDormand’s character in Mississippi Burning echoes these words very closely: ‘Hatred isn’t something you’re born with. It gets taught. At school, they said segregation is what’s said in the Bible… At 7 years of age, you get told it enough times, you believe it. You believe the hatred. You live it… you breathe it. You marry it.’ And so we need to teach the opposite, for the sake of the future.
And for the sake of the past. The perpetrators of genocide don’t start by taking lives. First they take everything else – name, livelihood, home, dignity, humanity. For it to be possible for society to collude in this, the victims have to become less than human – cockroaches, perhaps, or lice. Or less, even, than that – one of the most powerful Holocaust documents is a memo, addressing technical problems with vehicle stability. As one reads it, it takes a while before the nature of the destabilising ‘load’ becomes apparent: this load has a tendency to rush towards the light, which causes problems in getting the doors closed. This load may also scream.
And so, for the sake of the past, we need to give back to the victims of genocide what we can – their names, their stories, their voices. Serge Klarsfeld reconstructed the convoy lists from the French internment camps and gave the people once herded onto cattle trucks a name, an address, sometimes a photograph, a letter. The photographs of the children – see them if you can bear it, and I think one has to bear it – in their best clothes or on summer holidays, looking solemn or smiling for the camera, tell you everything, in a way, about genocide. Sheffield’s wonderful Ensemble 360 performed music last spring by composers who were imprisoned at Terezin – music created in the midst of a nightmare, by composers who had barely begun to achieve their potential before they were silenced.
Hélène Berr is one of the people I will be thinking of on Holocaust Memorial Day. She was 20 when Paris was occupied, from a thoroughly assimilated French Jewish family, a student at the Sorbonne. She was 21 when she started the journal in which, at first, the war and the Nazi persecution are almost background noise. She was almost 23 when she was arrested, a few months before Paris was liberated, and then deported to Auschwitz on one of the convoys from Drancy. It was her 23rd birthday when she was moved from Auschwitz to Bergen Belsen. She was 24 when she died, in Bergen Belsen, 5 days before the camp was liberated. Her journal, kept by surviving members of her family after the war, was finally published in 2008 and when I read it I loved her, and I grieved for the fate I already knew would be hers. Another voice that wasn’t quite silenced, after all.
http://www.memorialdelashoah.org/upload/minisites/helene_berr/index.html
Hélène Berr, Journal, 1942-1944 (Paris: Éditions Tallandier, 2008)
http://gideonklein.cz/fruvod.htm
Les 11400 enfants Juifs deportés de france (Mairie de Paris, 2007)
http://www.holocaust-history.org/klarsfeld/French%20Children/html&graphics/T0423.shtml
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun (Harper, 2007)
Turning the pages – Stephen King and Marcel Proust (and Michel Butor)
Posted by cathannabel in Literature, Michel Butor on January 24, 2012
I find myself – as someone who always has at least two books on the go – currently reading both the second volume of Proust’s A la recherche… and Stephen King’s latest blockbuster, 11.22.63. If I say that these present two very different reading experiences, an ironic ‘who knew?’ would be a reasonable response. However, I invariably find that the things I’m reading in parallel, however different they may be in genre, register, subject matter or anything else, create intriguing connections and trigger, at the very least, random ruminations on the various topics that preoccupy me.
Proust is actually immensely readable, if you let yourself go, let yourself float along on his endless sentences, absorbing it all rather than worrying about what is happening (not a huge amount, in general, it’s not about external events as much as internal processes – the process by which the narrator becomes indifferent to Gilberte with whom he has been in love, for example). One doesn’t pick the book up with the sense of urgency that Stephen King can generate, and one is unlikely to be tempted to skip mealtimes or be late for appointments, or to miss out on sleep in order to read just one more chapter. But you can lose yourself in it, immersed in his world – and it’s also funnier than one might have expected. Obviously Proust is hugely influential on 20th century fiction, not just in France. Butor certainly shows the influence of his style in his labyrinthine sentences – bizarrely, he was criticised for this by the literary establishment, on the basis that the French language demands short sentences. Understandably he referred them to Proust, only to be told, well, Proust is Proust. Taking the view that Butor is Butor, he dumped the draft with the short, pithy sentences for the one that draws you in and takes you on a hypnotic journey where the phrases loop around and around so that the key words and images accumulate more and more power as they resonate with each other.
If everyone agrees that Proust is a great writer, not many have actually read any, let alone all, of his great oeuvre. Stephen King is read by millions, but disparaged by many, even if his critical standing is better than it used to be. He now gets reviews in the quality press, even if most still start with a defence of the coverage being given to this kind of book. It wasn’t always so, and the change is reflected in the book covers – early editions looked tacky, whilst more recent reissues and new titles, have a generally classier look. The schlock-horror image put me off for a long time, and I only read King because a friend told me I must, and lent me The Stand. I didn’t expect to like it. But within a page, I was hooked, and read it straight through, twice. That’s one of his great gifts; right from the start he makes you want – need – to know what happens and, very importantly, makes you care about the people he introduces, so that the compulsion to read on is not just curiosity but an emotional connection.
He’s a hugely talented writer, who can transcend genre, but who for the most part is happy to work within it; a horror writer who can go for the gross-out but whose power resides in his ability to make you connect with his characters, and in his ability to make goodness as compelling as evil. Not all of King’s books are great, but none are less than readable, and many will repay re-reading. He uses the classic horror writer’s trick, of starting with the everyday, the familiar, and introducing something that’s just that bit off key, unsettling. Often this is done by the narrator forewarning us that this apparently mundane event is far from it – in 11.22.63 the trigger is a teacher reading the work of a pupil in his adult learners’ creative writing class. We don’t know how or why this will change everything, but we know that it will do so, and everything thereafter is imbued with this disquiet – a sense of the uncanny, das unheimliche, to use Freud’s term. It’s a cognitive dissonance – something is both familiar and foreign, and so one is at the same time attracted and repelled.
One thing King does very powerfully is to create a bad place. Derry, Maine, is one such – a town that just isn’t quite right, where this disquiet is manifested in the mutual mistrust of the locals, the desire of visitors to get the hell out as soon as they can, and a feeling that bad things have happened, may be still happening, and are probably just around the next corner. It’s part of King’s fictional geography of Maine, his home state, a trinity to match Lovecraft‘s Massachusetts trinity (Derry, Castle Rock and Salem’s Lot on the one hand, Innsmouth, Arkham and Dunwich on the other) and we visit it in many of his novels – he references the plots and characters of those earlier novels often too, so the reader who’s familiar with the opus has an added weight of unease. Interesting in this context to see the new Topophobia exhibition and publication, on fear of place in contemporary art.
I thought of that aspect of King quite often when reading L’Emploi du temps. Butor’s narrator arrives in a northern industrial city, his train is late, and he’s lost his letter of introduction with details of the firm he’ll be working for or his hotel, so on his first evening in the city he gets lost, and ends up sleeping on a bench in the 3rd class waiting room. Obviously this is an inauspicious start, but right from these first pages, there’s the sense that it’s more than that. Jacques Revel is afraid. He’s ‘seized with sudden panic…. for one endless second… overwhelmed by an absurd wish to draw back, to give it all up, to escape’ (Passing Time, p. 8). Later, a colleague, who’s never left the city, tells him ‘there’s something peculiar about this place, something which I’ve never seen satisfactorily described in any story set elsewhere, a sort of permanent dread’ (p. 89). Just like Derry, Bleston is a place where we are in suspense, waiting for the bad things to which everything is leading, and which everything is attempting to conceal, and where ‘even at midday the few passers-by hurry, hugging the walls, humming to themselves with lowered heads as if it were black night’ (p. 90). Something is wrong with Bleston, but unlike King, Butor does not require us to accept a supernatural explanation for this. We’re potentially in the realm of Todorov’s ‘fantastic uncanny’, where the apparently supernatural is subsequently explained as illusion (through dreams, drugs, madness), but we are ultimately left with uncertainty, as the book ends with the narrator’s departure, and his acknowledgement of the lacunae in his narrative. The Turn of the Screw is perhaps the classic example of this – the reader is left to ponder whether the governess is delusional, and nothing supernatural has actually happened, or whether the laws of reality have changed as she believes. The French have a higher regard for fantastic literature than we have. Poe and Lovecraft are held in much higher esteem there, and both are present in Butor’s Bleston – Poe’s short story ‘The Man of the Crowd‘ has intriguing echoes in not only the supernatural but the detective story aspects of the book, and we also find the Lovecraftian motif of a place where every route out leads back to the place one is attempting to escape – see Ramsay Campbell‘s story ‘The Church in High Street’ for a more recent hommage to Lovecraft in this respect. To quote Revel’s colleague again: ‘Perhaps you’ve already tried to escape, but in that case you’ve only just made a beginning, M. Revel … you’ll be losing more than your way’ (p. 89-90).
Michel Butor, Passing Time, translated by Jean Stewart (London: John Calder, 1965)
Ramsay Campbell, ‘The Church in High Street’, Cold Print (London: Grafton Books, 1985)
Helene Cixous, ‘Fiction and its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s “Das Unheimliche (The “Uncanny”)”’, New Literary History, 7, 3 (1976), 525-48
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw, 1898 (London: Penguin, 1986)
Stephen King, 11.22.63 (Hodder & Stoughton, 2011)
H P Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature, 1927 (NY: Dover, 1973)
H P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories (London: Penguin, 1999)
Edgar Allan Poe, Selected Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)
Marcel Proust, A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, 1918(Paris: Gallimard, 1988)
Tzvetan Todorov, Introduction à la littérature fantastique (Paris: Seuil, 1976)
L’Emploi du temps (Passing Time) – the mystery of Bleston
Posted by cathannabel in Literature, Michel Butor on January 22, 2012
My present preoccupation is with Butor’s second novel, L’Emploi du temps[1], published in 1956, whose English translation is currently out of print, but which holds a particular fascination, amongst Butor’s many and diverse works. It’s inspired a remarkable number of other literary and artistic works – Allen Fisher’s poem ‘Butor – Passing Time Again’[2], Richard Wollheim’s novel A Family Romance[3], Steve Hawley’s DVD ‘Yarn’[4], and, as we discovered very recently, W G Sebald’s ‘Bleston: A Mancunian Cantical’[5]. This last is not only a direct response to Passing Time, but confirms a gut feeling that the Max Ferber section of The Emigrants[6] is inspired by Butor’s depiction of the city they both came to as strangers, just over a decade apart. A lot more about that to come…
The description of a northern industrial English town is recognisable even 50 years after the time – pollution, fog, and frightful food – and has struck a chord with English readers in particular. However, its interest is wider than that because as you follow the narrator as he tries to find his way around the city, the initially familiar becomes increasingly disquieting and you start to wonder exactly where you are.
One of the intriguing things about the novel is the gap between the prosaic realism of many passages, and the fantastic/supernatural elements which pervade the text. These elements, and the passionate hatred between the narrator and the city, are difficult to reconcile with the actual events depicted – nothing happens that isn’t entirely explicable in rational terms. But from the first page, there is an atmosphere of terror, which intensifies as the narrator finds himself more and more beleaguered. The language is intense and dramatic – Butor talks of fear, of murder and blood, betrayals and lies, secrets and vengeance. These prosaic events take on supernatural overtones – the difficulties and disappointments he encounters are blamed on the opposition of the city, a traffic accident is attempted murder, the many fires are the manifestations of the spirit which possesses and consumes the city, and the fog and polluted atmosphere are enchantments that sedate the inhabitants.
Clearly, Bleston is Manchester, where Butor spent a couple of miserable years, and the descriptions are both recognisable and drawing on the archetypes of Manchester as the iconic industrial city. It’s at once a real, grimy, foggy place, and the infernal city of de Tocqueville and Engels, Dickens and Mrs Gaskell. It’s also, though, the city of Cain, Babylon, and the labyrinth of Daedalus. It’s a city of war, and a city at war with itself. I’ll return to that in a future entry, because I think that is the key to the transformation of the grubby ordinariness of a modern industrial city into a monster.
[1] L’Emploi du temps (Paris: Minuit, 1956)
[2] Allen Fisher, ‘Butor, Passing Time Again’, Gravity (Cambridge: Salt, 2004)
[3] Richard Wollheim, A Family Romance (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969)
[5] W G Sebald, ‘Bleston. A Mancunian Cantical’, Across the Land and the Water : Selected Poems, 1964-2001 (London : Hamish Hamilton, 2011)
[6] W G Sebald, The Emigrants (London: Vintage, 2002)
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Passing Time 