Too Poor for Proust

I don't know what it is with me and questionnaires but just lately they've been coming my way in droves. Well, not so much droves as more than one. Enough anyway to make me wonder if I really enjoy reading novels or poetry or watching drama or doing anything really quite as much as I enjoy the apparently straight forward, to the point nature of questionnaires, their attempt to sketch out a whole individual via the asking of a dozen or so questions and the wonderful enigma that each questionnaire actually produces, as every answer only creates more questions, at least for me.

Here is a poor man's Proust questionnaire with replies allegedly given by the film maker Tarkovsky in 1970. I'm not totally convinced by his idea of a woman's driving force, but I admit I've never made strange and extraordinary films relying on long, long single shots, so I will bow to him for now:

Proust Again

I haven't tackled Proust again (for earlier efforts see here and here and here and for my liberation see here). 

In all honesty, I probably never will tackle Proust again. I think I understand now that some authors suit some people and some authors suit other people and there is little explanation for this, beyond the differences in human temperament. 

Proust is extraordinary, but not the kind of extraordinary that interests me. I could enlarge and start to speculate about the rise of narcissism - or at least an unbalanced interest in the self - and his influence, but, since I haven't finished reading him, I could be way off the mark.

The only thing I am certain of is that I am temperamentally unsuited to a man who chose to bang on quite so nauseatingly about hawthorn. 

Nevertheless when I came across a reference to Bernard Pivot and his use of the Proust questionnaire I was intrigued. I can't remember where I first read about it but a quick search of the internet revealed this slavishly adoring article about Proust's own responses to the questionnaire, which was a kind of parlour game in his time (his answer to Question 1. convinces me I will never be able to look at his work without a faint touch of nausea, and his answer to Question 7. reinforces that new conviction) and this.

I think the questionnaire falls under the category of "Quite Fun", which, for me, is more than "A la Recherche du Temps Perdu" will ever do. 

Times Past, Times Future

I loved reading Simon Hoggart. He used to make me laugh. I think this piece by him, published on 15 May 1997 may be educative reading for MPs in the current government, to help them prepare for what is to come at the start of the next parliament.

Hoggart's line about survivors of the Titanic is brilliant:

"Ten minutes before the start, half a dozen Tories were facing the massed, crammed, stuffed and stifled ranks of the government benches. It was as if we'd gatecrashed the annual reunion of Titanic survivors, and they'd invited the iceberg to show there were no hard feelings."

Ingrained Conservatism

In Britain recently there has been a confected show of outrage at the fact that an old club called the Garrick has for many years refused to admit women. When a woman pointed this out in the press, all sorts of portly men in the public eye who have belonged to the club for decades decried the discrimination in unison. In doing so, they demonstrated they were either utter hypocrites or total fools who had never realised the absence of women about the place was due to the club's strict rules. 

Personally I'd be far happier to know my husband was having fun in a club that was entirely male. I wouldn't have to worry that some ambitious high-flying female, realising suddenly that she is 41 and needs a husband fast if she is to achieve the item on her bucket list called having a baby, may be doing her best to prise him from our marriage. 

But I am just irredeemably conservative on all subjects. I realised this once and for all when I saw this item about Morris dancing becoming dominated by women and felt extremely sad. I am a woman - I ought to be pleased my own sex can participate in things previously closed to us, but I'm not. I hate it. 

To show that even I can, if I really try, go against the grain of my hatred of novelty, I will use a newly minted phrase that I loathe so much it almost makes me sick:

"My bad."

Reading 2024 - Fantastic Invasion by Patrick Marnham

I chose Fantastic Invasion (the title comes from Conrad's Heart of Darkness) because it cost 20p and because it is about Africa and I am very interested in Africa but never want to go there. Patrick Marnham's reason for writing the book is to set out the thesis that Africa's problems all arise from the interference of "the North" in its affairs. The North is us. Marnham is convinced that trying to force our ways on Africans is a big mistake. 

To construct his interesting argument, Marnham tells all sorts of great stories, presents a both dispiriting and hilarious picture of what is really going on when game parks are set up and highlights many absurdities caused by outsiders thinking they know better than indigenous locals. He convincingly argues that the repeated Sehel disasters are the result of Westerners imposing their agricultural demands on lands that they don't understand - lands that had, until our arrival, been tended successfully by those who had lived on them for centuries. He conjures up the life of expatriates in the development industry, displaying considerable scepticism and scorn, with good reason I suspect. 

The book is now probably largely out of date in its details - although if you look up Sehel you will see that a lot of UN employment is being generated in trying to address the problems that Marnham argues were created by outsiders and can only be solved by leaving things in the hands of those who understand the area's environment because they are of the place. All the same there are things that leap out and make sense even today. 

Here, for example, are his remarks on refugees:

"African refugees have been presented as many things in [an] effort to avoid describing them as what they are. There is the refugee as 'a problem', an inexplicable abstract demanding general compassion. This is only briefly satisfactory, and the refugee is a persistent presence, so next we have the refugee as an idealist. In the words of the All-Africa Conference of Churches, refugees are 'people who somewhere, somehow, sometime had the courage to give up the feeling of belonging, which they possessed, rather than abandon the human freedom which they valued more highly'. This kind of analysis, 'somewhere, somehow, sometime', has a purpose: to prevent the exact consideration of particular refugees, here and now, and to forestall awkward questions as to 'how'.

Refugees are not just idealist; there is also the refugee as a sign of progress. 'The refugee is a by-product of the development of Africa. Refugees are therefore one aspect of the growing pains that Africa has to suffer before she attains the maturity that is essential to ensure freedom and equality of all races, tribes, creeds and the expression of controversial political opinions.' [Canon Burgess Carr, general secretary of the All-Africa Conference of Churches] This leads to the refugee as pioneer, not someone 'to be pitied, far more people to be admired'. And so, naturally, to the refugee as an opportunity, 'assets of the economic and social balance of the countries' development'. [UN High Commissioner for Refugees]. In fact, as elsewhere in the world, the refugee is nothing to do with pioneering or continental maturity or national development. If he is a sign of anything, he is a sign of national sickness. The refugee is the awkward evidence of Africa's inability and unwillingness to be reorganised into countries that have nothing to do with the real organisation of the people who live there.'

Everyone I have ever met who has had anything to do with Africa talks about tribalism, and Marnham is no exception:

"The obligations of African tribalism are honourable, and they are constantly honoured. They are an extension of the obligations of the family, and they are supported by customs and language to an extent that simply does not exist on a national scale. They have survived colonialism and independence and all the high hopes of an Africa of sovereign states. For Africans to deny tribal feeling or to indulge it covertly is for them to compromise their fundamental identity, that which they know intuitively, which governs much of their daily behaviour, and which unites people across the continent.

Marnham's arguments might sometimes be construed as racist, if suggesting that Africans and Europeans are profoundly and irrevocably different is racist (although to infer racism you would have to assume that in calling them different you thought one superior to the other as well). He says:

"For those members of the administrative class who are responsible for making things work ... there are certain refuges. One refuge is the theory of backwardness, the commonly held opinion that Africa is a 'backward' area which is 'progressing' (as opposed to a different society which is being forced to conform' ) and that African society is accomplishing in half a century - as it moves from tribalism to nationalism - what it took Europe a thousand years to achieve." 

adding: 

"Thanks to the system of nation-states, we see Africa more and more in our own likeness, as a primitive version of Europe which just needs time to catch up."

However, his central assertion is that all this is wrongheaded and in fact:

"Until Africa has achieved self-determination and stepped out of the colonial shadow which was cast at the time of independence, the real nations of Africa will never have a chance to develop. Until they do, the pseudo-nations that exist today will remain under the control of the powers that set them up and of the native rulers who act as their proxies. And the strain this causes to African society will continue to be felt by the citizens of these states, the mortal men of Africa."

I found this book really, really interesting, full of vivid anecdote and surprising perceptions. I would very much like to read an update that includes Marnham's thoughts on China's growing involvement in Africa and his predictions for how that new development might turn out.

A Question of Importance

Reading this very interesting article about WS Gilbert in Issue 33 of The Critic, I came across a list of ‘great British duos’. The writer argues that in all three examples - fish and chips; Morecambe and Wise; and Peter Cook and Dudley Moore - one half of the duo is 'vastly more important than the other'. 

I can see that Peter Cook was the genius in Cook and Moore, and the one with the glasses was funnier than the short one in Morecambe and Wise (although I never quite got the point of either of them, to be truthful - or possibly, in some circles, sacrilegious). 

The one pair in the list that I am not sure about is fish and chips - which is the most important element in that combination? Which part of the duo is the dominant one? I suppose it's chips, except that chips exist on their own. So is it actually battered fish? Do some people see the fish bit - or should that be 'the bit of fish'? - as the ascendant part of fish and chips, with chips a mere accompaniment? 

Actually I think the problem may be that this duo simply doesn't fit the thesis. I suspect for most people the two components of fish and chips stand together in importance. I wonder whether others agree.

I am also going to spend the rest of the day trying to think of other inseparable duos and working out whether any of them have a dominant and a recessive element. Antony and Cleopatra immediately spring to mind.

Reading 2024 - Stalled and Stubbed Out

 I went into a reading hiatus after: (a) getting becalmed in the middle of An Awkward Age by Henry James (I will go back to it, but I don't really read James for dialogue and quite frankly if anyone thinks Ivy Compton Burnett was an innovator in her dialogue-heavy approach to novel writing, An Awkward Age suggests to me that in fact she pinched the idea, lock, stock and barrel from Henry James); (b) beginning A Burnt Out Case by Graham Greene and then taking it out of the house to read in a train or a cafe and losing it and feeling cheated and bereft and unable to start any of the many other books around the house. 

Except for those that come under the heading 'detective fiction', of course. I could begin them with no trouble but for some reason I don't count reading detective fiction as real reading, even though I love reading detective fiction - or perhaps because I love reading detective fiction and therefore think it can't be worthwhile? 

Anyway, while I pined for A Burnt Out Case, I read detective fiction. Since about the age of 10, this is what I have done when discouraged. I started with Conan Doyle. Years later I discovered Margery Allingham. Dorothy L Sayers became another favourite. I don't read modern detective novels in which perversions are graphically described. I am reading for comfort and escape and horrible tales of flailing and other horrors just leave me disgusted. 

One author I love very much is Simenon, in his Maigret guise. The world he writes about - mostly Paris streets and bars and unglamorous dwellings - is so carefully observed and vivid and yet there is no showiness to his writing. In fact I realise as I write that what I especially like about the Maigret books is that I get a sense of quietness from them. While waiting for A Burnt Out Case to turn up again, I read La Première Enquête de Maigret and Maigret et le Corps sans Tête. In the course of reading them, I was baffled by a conversation with a friend I studied French with who said it was pretentious to read the books in French, whereas I thought it was fun to get the added bonus of new vocabulary - plus the copies I found in a secondhand bookshop were in French, so I had little choice. One day I might be brave enough to read Simenon's non-Maigret novels, but I gather they will not be as reassuring as time spent with the slightly melancholy detective.

In between the Maigrets, I read two Agatha Christies, The Clocks and Five Little Pigs. Christie's style is absolutely nothing to write home about, her characterisation is paper thin, and yet I am totally in awe of her. Despite the limitations of her writing, it is impossible not to recognise her wisdom. Here are two or three insightful lines from the two books I read:

"Extraordinarily tatty hotels always have grand names."

"When discouragement sets in, it's like dry rot."

"She had the enormous mental and moral advantage of a strict Victorian upbringing, denied to us in these days. She had done her duty in that station of life to which it had pleased God to call her, and that assurance encased her in an armour impregnable to the slings and darts of envy, discontent and regret. She had her memories and her small pleasures, made possible by stringent economies, and sufficient health and vigour to make it possible for her still to be interested in life."

I also read some books about a bird watcher and his wife who become semi-amateur detectives. I thought the premise ridiculous but they were written by Ann Cleeves, who is the creator of Vera and of Shetland, and she is another extraordinary writer, capable of making up good stories, untroubled by worrying whether she is creating "literature". 

All these books were concerned with the murder of innocent human beings so I've no idea why they cheered me up. I suppose there may be something in the theory that murder/mysteries give pleasure because the reader experiences an ordered world being disturbed and then order being restored.

Sadly as yet order has not been restored enough for me to find my lost copy of A Burnt Out Case.