Monday 6 May 2019

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath


The Bell Jar is, along with Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping and Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding, my favourite novel. These three novels have forced me to think about literature and about life in a different way and they have transformed my own writing.

The Bell Jar is a novel that quietly and beautifully portrays a woman’s emotional descent into darkness. That may sound grim, but the way Sylvia Plath melds humour and pain is remarkable: the unfolding of Esther Greenwood’s emotional crisis is perfectly handled, and the balance of laughter and tears is superbly controlled, the former sliding inexorably into the latter, but with faint echoes remaining throughout, the tracks of hope in a landscape growing increasingly darker. I suspect it is impossible, now, to extricate the novel from the history and Esther Greenwood from Sylvia Plath. After all, it is so autobiographical that Plath originally felt the need to publish it under a pseudonym and it didn’t appear under her own name until three years after her suicide. But it is unfortunate, really, if the novel is submerged beneath the myth of its author, because it needs no external pathos to give it power.


When we first meet Esther Greenwood, an ingenue from Boston, she is working as an intern in New York, working on a successful magazine. This is not her milieu, and while she is not exactly gauche, she is far from assimilated into New York life. We first get a hint of her dissociation from the activity around her in the novel’s famous opening line: “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.” That the Rosenbergs’ electrocution is barely mentioned again in the novel further establishes her disconnection from reality (although, of course, this high-tech execution acts as an ominous foreshadow of Esther’s subsequent, highly traumatic electroconvulsive therapy).

Initially, though, one has little inkling of what will follow. The early passages, even the darker ones, are shot through with humour. There is a deftness and lightness to them that is, in retrospect, extraordinarily skillful. One often hears people say of those around them who attempt suicide that they had no idea, and this is the case with Esther. She appears a complicated young woman, certainly, not entirely comfortable in her skin or her surroundings, but her breakdown, which is precipitated when she returns home to provincial Massachussetts and is overlooked for a writing course on which she had set her heart, nonetheless comes as something of a surprise. And just as people will do in similar circumstances in real life, one retrospectively picks over the evidence of the past for clues of her distress and indeed they are there, submerged in the minutiae of daily life.

Image result for the bell jar 

Esther’s decent into depression and suicidal tendencies progresses through the summer. Even now, though, there is a lightness to it that beguiles the readers, lulls them into a false sense of hope. It seems at first like depression-lite, the manufactured sort of emotions you might get in a soap opera when a major character’s flirting with the blues is scheduled to last for so many episodes, after which she will snap out of it and return to normal. Or perhaps we see Esther as a female McMurphy, the sane one in the asylum ward, and hope, like we do with McMurphy, that she will prevail against the system. But we know that McMurphy doesn’t prevail and, in The Bell Jar, we come to realise that Plath’s lightness of tone masks the growing distress in Esther’s mind, and her depression is far from superficial. She is a deeply troubled woman and, finally, we begin to seriously fear for her.

She comes to feel as though she is trapped beneath a bell jar. This is a horrifying image: trapped, suffocating, no prospect of release, everything outside, visible but not touchable, out of reach, beyond your world of confinement and gloom, a distorted vision of normality in which you cannot share. Her suicide attempts grow more serious. Her first experience of ECT is horrific. Her second, for entirely different reasons, is more so. The woman she trusts, her therapist, Dr Nolan, promises her that she will not subject her to further ECT without warning her. Dr Nolan is true to her word, but it doesn’t feel like it to the distraught Esther. This scene has a terrible emotional power: if you want to know how to write, this is a good starting point; and if you want to understand other human beings, in their distress and fear and hope and need, likewise this is a piece of emotional treasure trove. Be warned, though: Esther’s terror is contagious.

The novel grows darker yet, and then lighter. It ends on a note of hope. All the same, it ends without resolution, as befits the life of a woman in torment. After all, as we know from the life of the author of this novel, the only feasible resolution is likely to be the wrong one. But in The Bell Jar, at least, the reader can imagine, believe, hope that Esther Greenwood lives on and finds happiness.

Wednesday 1 May 2019

The Spire by William Golding


 Image result for william golding the spire


William Golding’s The Spire begins dramatically: “He was laughing, chin up, and shaking his head. God the Father was exploding in his face with a glory of sunlight through painted glass...” This explosion is not literal, then, but effected by a burst of light shining through the cathedral window. All the same, the idea of a godly explosion portends what is to come, and what unfolds in the novel is the inevitable destruction of a mind consumed by God and all his certainties without any concomitant mechanism for exploring God and his mysteries.

There is, in Christian theology, and in particular in Roman Catholic theology, an essential binary of faith and reason. However, this is not a binary opposition: rather, both are essential to a true religious sensibility and it can never be an either/or principle. Faith is about maintaining belief, reason about questioning the suppositions behind that belief. St Augustine referred to credo ut intelligam – I believe that I may understand – while Peter Abelard, a rationalist before his time, suggested instead intelligo ut credam – I understand that I may believe. Abelard also used a form of the Socratic dialogue to pursue arguments, with his sic et non – yes and no. For Abelard, reason took precedence, but faith was nonetheless essential. Augustine, too, saw the power of reason. Indeed, the quote I just mentioned more rightly continues thus (although one seldom sees it in this form): "I believe that I may understand; and I understand, the better to believe". With this, Augustine is establishing a clear relationship between these two poles of understanding. Nonetheless, he cannot accept that reason, alone, can bring harmony with God. “If you comprehend it, it is not God,” he says. Thus, faith and reason must co-exist. Pope John-Paul II explained this when he noted:

Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth - in a word, to know Himself - so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.

His successor, Pope Benedict, also considered the duality of faith and reason to be central to the human experience, suggesting their relationship was “a subject not only for believers but for every person who seeks the truth, a central theme for the balance and destiny of all men."

Although I'm a non-believer, I can nonetheless accept Benedict’s contention here. Faith, however, undoubtedly was also a key component of William Golding’s make up and the duality of faith and reason runs unmistakably through this, his sixth novel. The Spire takes a real building – the 404-foot spire of Salisbury Cathedral – but invents the man who created it – the fictional Dean Jocelin and the course of events that comprised its troubled construction. Thus, it is both true and not true, and we can both believe and disbelieve it. As we shall see, this duality is central to the novel.

Jocelin believes absolutely. The spire is being added to a cathedral which is built on insufficient – even, perhaps, almost non-existent – foundations, and Jocelin’s principal builder, Roger Mason, repeatedly warns him it is unsustainable. Indeed, Mason is so concerned he asks to be released from his agreement to build the spire but Jocelin refuses. It is a matter of faith. Jocelin believes he has been chosen by God and this is the act he has been chosen to complete. His belief is total, unswerving. It cannot be questioned, it cannot be tested. Ultimately, it overtakes all reason and he loses his sanity. As a result everything collapses around him – as, of course, symbolically we expect the spire must at the end. Obsessed by his mission, Jocelin neglects his duties. The cathedral falls into disrepair, even disuse, as services are removed elsewhere because of the noise and disruption. Around him, his relationships wither. Ultimately, a Church commission arrives to quiz him on his actions and he is found wanting and is stripped of his office. By now, too, he has succumbed to “consumption of the back and spine”, or tuberculosis, and by the novel’s end he is a much diminished man. Still, it seems, his obsession remains. His faith is total. Reason is not privileged. But by any measure – whether Roman Catholic or secular – his life ends in failure.

Roger Mason, meanwhile, is a man of reason who lacks faith. Early in their project, Jocelin would call out to his master builder, “What! Still no faith my son?” to which Mason would offer no reply. And so we can see that this duality between the two men truly is a binary opposition, as forces in conflict, and not, as the Catholic faith would contend, in harmony. The result is tragedy.

 Is The Spire theerefore simply a debate about the nature – and need – for both faith and reason? It is undoubtedly that, and it debates those questions superbly. But it is more than that. Golding, of course, although he was much concerned with theological questions, resided among humanity, and he knew humanity, knew its strengths and great weaknesses. Thus, while the theological aspect of  The Spire is undoubtedly central, profane themes run through the novel, too. There is adultery, perhaps even murder. There is a strong – and dangerous – strand of paganism running alongside the pious engineering for God. There are the manifold foibles of humanity.

And, for all his blind faith in his project, Jocelin is as flawed a human being as any of us. In particular, he is beset by sexual desire, most notably for Goody Pangall, the wife of the crippled and much maligned cathedral worker, Pangall. Jocelin is greatly distraught when he discovers Goody, whom he has idolised as a child of God, is having an affair with Roger Mason. Mason, meanwhile, overcome by his own problems, not least the impossibility of building the spire, succumbs to alcohol and ends the novel a drunken, suicidal wretch. The novel, then, is a combination of sacred and profane, known and unknown, true and untrue, good and bad. And all of this is premised on the twin facts of faith and reason.

There is and there must always be a mystery in human existence. This is not merely a matter of theology, although it is undoubtedly that. It is also an inescapable truth that we do not and cannot know what happens in Hamlet’s “undiscovered country”, the realm of the beyond, what is the true nature of death. Those who have only faith and who never seek to question that faith miss something essential in their lives. It is, after all, the nature of human beings to question things; it is how we progress as a species. And equally, people of a religious temperament would suggest, those who live by rationality alone miss something of the numinous beauty of existence. I would certainly agree that there is a mystery, but I do not privilege it in the way Roman Catholics, in particular, seem to do. In The Spire, there is no mystery for Jocelin, only the certainty of his endeavour. For the reader, however, there is mystery and ambiguity aplenty, as Golding seeks to confront us with the uncertainty of existence. His characteristic stream-of-consciousness style renders meaning opaque: thus, is Jocelin’s angel a real manifestation of his piety or a symptom of his tubercolosis? We do not definitively find out. Does the spire fall? We do not find out. Mystery. Mystery surrounds us because we cannot know everything. This is a useful corrective, perhaps, for hubristic notions of man’s superiority, although such notions are greatly overplayed in my estimation. And it may be that Golding, sceptic though he was, agrees. The greatest mystery, in the end, may not be the sacred one, but the profane.

I suggest this may be the case because, ultimately, the greatest mystery in The Spire is revealed to be Joceln’s own motivations. Throughout the novel we have been assured the building of the spire is a tribute to his faith and to the glory of God. In his final delirium, though, we understand that his motivations were more secular, a response to the sexual urges he has tried, with decreasing levels of success, to repress. Or do we? Or is this, too, a mis-speaking? We do not know. Mystery remains, as it must.

Golding himself accepts that point. Speaking of this novel, he suggests: “The writer is aware of that whole spectrum [of possible meanings or interpretations], but he doesn’t choose between them. What does the right choice matter, so long as the spectrum is there?”

The Spire is an astonishing novel. This review comes nowhere close to mining the seam of symbolism which it contains. It is a novel that needs to be read and re-read and possibly re-re-read in quick succession in order to begin to comprehend the nuances of meaning it contains. It is a work of utter genius.

Myth Becomes Fact

CS Lewis observed that the myths of all primitive religions are expressions of an innate desire for the transcendent God to make contact with mankind in order to assauge our sins and guilts. From this position, it is easy to view Christianity as just another religion, and its central tenets, such as the Virgin birth, the resurrection and Jesus’s divinity, as further examples of myth. In particular, they could be seen as emblematic of myth surrounding the dying god, which appears in a great number of ancient mythologies. The Virgin birth and the resurrection could thus be understood as symbols of the peristaltic flow of life, birth and rebirth, regeneration, renewal across generations. This view came to prominence, of course, with J.G. Frazer’s anthropological research at the turn of the nineteenth century, and has been developed further in more recent times by Joseph Campbell et al.

Lewis, however, argues that, “as myth transcends thought, incarnation transcends myth. The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact”. Thus, the old myth of the dying god is given historical provenance when we move from “Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where” to the historically verifiable crucifixion of Christ. He goes on: “By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle”. It is “the marriage of heaven and earth: perfect myth and perfect fact”. Thus, for Lewis, Christianity appears to be the “true” religion, standing at the pinnacle of human development.

This was a view that Eric Voegelin understandably grew uncomfortable with in his later career, causing a profound change in his thinking in Volume 5 of his magnum opus, Order and History. For novelist Cormac McCarthy, too, there appears to be a consistent wrestling with myth and the notion of “myth become fact”.

In McCarthy, we certainly see a reflection of the straining for contact with the transcendent God. The litany of characters who debate God’s existence in McCarthy’s oeuvre clearly reveals this, as do the heretic in The Crossing and the range of eschatologically-minded prophets who people McCarthy’s universe. God, of course, never appears, and this creates the tension which drives McCarthy’s fiction. Far from accepting Lewis’s conception of “myth become fact”, McCarthy continues to wrestle with the notion that there is no Christian certainty and the notion of contact with the transcendent God is no more than a chimera. The catharsis that comes with acceptance of the myth and surrender to the fact becomes impossible; the resulting existential tension is all the greater because of the sense of despair, or disappointment, or failure that ensues.

Thus, McCarthy appears to be caught between regarding with awe the mystery of religion and remaining sceptical about the very possibility of that mystery. He wants to believe the myth that Lewis believes. He is on record as saying so: Garry Wallace paraphrases him thus: “He went on to say that he thinks the mystical experience is a direct apprehension of reality, unmediated by symbol, and he ended with the thought that our inability to see spiritual truth is the greater mystery.”

But his fiction consistently shows that he comes across a barrier which appears insurmountable. Thus, he appears to be trying to write his own myth, in order to make it work.

To be honest, the idea that God deliberately used existing primitive myths to seed the minds of humanity in order to make them accept the “truth” of the incarnation is wholly unconvincing. Jesus may genuinely have existed – the evidence is persuasive – but to assume that the myths surrounding him must also therefore be true is a logical non-seqiteur. To look at the myths as articulated by, say, Joseph Campbell, creation myths and stories of sin and redemption and so on, and to acknowledge the mythical nature of these stories, and then to look at precisely the same myths in a Christian context and claim that these myths must be “true” because Jesus was real seems naïve.

It is almost impossible, now, to separate myth from reality in the American West of the 1850s, only 170 years ago, far less what occurred two millennia distant. The texts consistently tell us the stories are “true”, but one must not forget the role of propaganda in propagating myths.

Monday 1 April 2019

Writing the Grotesque

Sarah Gleeson-White, in a study on the southern grotesque, argues against the common interpretation of it as presenting a "gloomy vision of modernity" which acts as an allegory of the human condition as "existential alienation and angst." Her focus is specifically on Carson McCullers, highlighting a quote from her The Vision Shared, which sought to justify the grotesque school by claiming, of its authors, "I seem strange to you, but anyway I am alive." This demonstrates, Gleeson-White suggests, rather than an alienated modernity, an affirmative and transformative quality, and it is this we should be celebrating when reading the southern grotesque.

In developing her argument, Gleeson-White adopts and adapts Mikhail Bakhtin’s conceptualisation of the grotesque which, she feels, comes closest to articulating the celebratory nature of McCullers’ cry of "I am alive". In doing so, she rejects as incomplete those traditional interpretations, as expounded by the likes of William Van O’Connor and Millichap and Fiedler, with their allusions to "dark modernism" and "alienation, loneliness, a lack of human communication, and the failure of love." She presents instead, McCullers’ explanation of the grotesque: "The technique is briefly this: a bold and outwardly callous juxtaposition of the tragic with the humorous, the immense with the trivial, the sacred with the bawdy, the whole soul of a man with a materialistic detail."

A key focus for Bakhtin and McCullers is the body, in particular deformity and difference from conventional perceptions of beauty, even normality. Physical freaks are, of course, a signature of the grotesque, from William Faulkner’s Benjy to Flannery O’Connor’s Hulga and onwards. McCullers’ novels and stories, too, are peopled by freaks – giants or dwarves, mutes, hunchbacks and cripples, self-mutilators, androgynous men-women, and so on – but, Gleeson-White argues, and I would agree, McCullers ultimately uses these characters as a reaction against convention and as an exploration of humanity. She suggests that: "Her novels of resistance present us with unsettled identities and so push the very boundaries of how we understand human being."

This idea of the transformative nature of grotesque freakery is interesting. For all her brilliance as a writer, for example, I cannot see it in Flannery O’Connor. Transformation, for her, is bound to redemption, and her perspective on redemption is that of a subject reconciling him or herself to the will of the master; her works are flavoured by subjugation to the supernatural and not celebration or understanding of the human.

Likewise, I look at the works of Cormac McCarthy and try to discern how they might be described as affirmative or transformative. Only his early works, of course, are considered to be truly southern but I believe that typical southern transgressiveness suffuses his later works, too. And, in his collection of freaks, from Lester Ballard and Rinthy and Culla onwards through the seven feet albino judge to the morally autistic Chigurh, he presents a set of characters who are outwith anything that could be considered normal. But is he, in Bakhtinian terms, "[disclosing] the potentiality of an entirely different world, of another order, another way of life"? And, moreover, is he using his grotesquery to unnerve in order to enlighten?

The answers to those questions would appear to me to be yes and possibly no, and therein lies a difficulty. Yes, McCarthy shows us a different world, most significantly in Blood Meridian and The Road. This is what mankind is capable of, he is telling us in the former, and because of that in the latter he presents the road we may be leading ourselves down. It is, then, a negative view, and what positives one may take from his novels must generally be taken by this process of inversion: don’t do that, or this may be the result. Such is the approach of organised religion through the ages: behave, or else; believe, or de’il tak ye; belong, or be cast adrift. In this, then, we see echoes of Hazel Motes and Tarwater in Flannery O'Connor's novel, even of Captain Ahab; we see the human relegated beneath the supernatural, and the result is obeisance to the godhead, whoever or whatever that might be.

Rather than transformative, then, it is reactionary: it is promulgated on the maintenance of a primordial order rather than the advancement of humanity. Hence the answer to the second question may be no: McCarthy’s grotesquery does not wholly enlighten, but rather it can seem to cast us backwards, to limit our freedom. McCarthy so constructs his characters – indeed, they are often more archetypes than characters, with no psycho-social histories or motivations – that they are unable to project forward. It is all very well for McCarthy to warn of the dangers to human society of our inwardness, our selfishness, our self-destructive disregard for nature, because those are warnings we would do well to heed, but in presenting only the binary oppositions of annihilation and acceptance of a putative god, he is artificially defining the boundaries of the debate. His grotesques are so designed, those characterless characters, that they miss the true alternative, the human. They endure so much and experience so little. And his words, all that rhetorical portentousness, serve only to wrap a mystery around them that, in the end, overwhelms.

It is a grotesquery which doesn’t so much say "I am alive" as "I can only die".

Saturday 9 March 2019

Rewind

When I first started this new blog, I transferred all my old reviews from my old blog, which was written under a pseudonym I no longer use. I've deleted all of those posts and intend to restart.

What I've found in the past three years or so that I have seriously taken up writing again is that I have changed. My writing has changed, my reading has changed, my outlook has changed.

All my reading life, I would have argued that my favourite novels are Gunther Grass's The Tin Drum, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Haruki Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase. I still love little Oscar (to the extent that he is tattooed on my arm) and the Buendias, but I re-read the Murakami a couple of years back and thought it was awful.

But are they favourites? No way. My favourite books now, the ones that inform my writing and my world view, are:

  • The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
  • Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
  • The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers

I could not write what I'm currently writing without these three works of genius. So as well as recording my own writing journey, I am going to use this blog to revisit some of my favourite novels and revise my original reviews. It'll be fun...

Join me...

Saturday 16 February 2019

Northern Noir Crime Novel Competition

This competition, run by the Bradford Literature Festival, gave ten winners the opportunity to attend a residential writing course at the Arvon Foundation's wonderful Lumb Bank. It was, of course, Ted Hughes's former house, and Sylvia Plath is buried in the graveyard in Heptonstall a mile or so away.

the view from my room

I was fortunate enough to be one of the winners and this week I attended the course, led by Cathi Unsworth and AA Dhand. It was excellent, truly thought-provoking and providing a fantastic insight into the writing process.
Sylvia's grave, looking a bit unkempt

The story I won with is a novel based on a true crime in 1930s Perth. It's a story that fascinates me, as much for the aftermath and trial as for the investigation, although that is extraordinary enough. I have finished two drafts so far and I have been deliberately ignoring it for some time to allow me to come back to it for the third draft with a more objective view. I'm very glad I did because the information I gleaned from the course will have a dramatic influence on the novel's direction. In the very first session, on the first afternoon, I realised I'd made a mistake with my main character and I wasn't making anything like enough use of him. So I will be focusing on that in the next few months.
three quarters of a mile, steep uphill, an absolute killer...

I would like to thank Cathi and Amit and all the other attendees for the participative and supportive time we spent. For all of us aspiring writers, juggling writing with real life irritations like working for a living, the chance to devote so much time to our fiction is very welcome.
the group, photo borrowed from BLF Facebook page

And, of course, I came home to three rejections. The life of a writer is never smooth...

Monday 28 January 2019

Bedford International Writing Competition

I had a wonderful evening on Friday when I attended the prize giving for the Bedford Interational Writing Competition, for which I had two stories shortlisted.

The competition was judged by Sue Moorcroft, I'm delighted that I won it with my story Joss'n'Jules Forever, which is adapted from my first novel Cloudland.

Many thanks to all the judges, readers, committee and fellow entrants. This is a brilliantly run competition and the awards ceremony was a terrific event.

(Pictures borrowed from the BIWC Facebook page)


Wednesday 19 December 2018

Bradford Literary Festivel Northern Noir Crime Writing Competition

I'm delighted to have been chosen as one of ten winners of a week-long crime writing residential course in the Bradford Literary Festival Northern Noir Crime Writing Competition. This is for my second novel, Cuddies Strip, a crime novel set in 1930s Perth, Scotland.

The residential course in at the Ted Hughes Writers' Centre, Lumb Bank, Yorkshire, so that will be fascinating anyway. And leading the course are AA Dhand and literary agent Simon Trewin, so it's bound to be an experience to treasure.