by Paul Morley
If, and this is only one way of thinking about what the Internet is, history has led to the first signs of what will become an I, a single consciousness to where everything that has ever happened is heading, a distillation of human endeavour and thoughts into a post-human near god-like vessel, then it is best that what ends up as I contains all the best that we ever were. This will need a large amount of the north of England for it to be close to complete. In this future ideas as distinctive and dynamic as the north will not disappear, even if the land, the planet, itself disappears.
This I, if it speaks English, or whatever it speaks, will be most complete if it speaks with a northern accent, which is of course the best way of reflecting how it has emerged as a combination of different elements with different appetites fighting to survive in the most unlikely of circumstances constantly under pressure for it to disappear, or conform, or lose its fighting, competitive, disobedient qualities. God should speak with a northern accent. The accent, perhaps, of Laurence Sterne.
In Tristram Shandy there is no real narrative, and what narrative there is does not proceed in a single direction. The so-called narrative intrusions and comments actually form a linear narrative whose subject is the composing of a narrative. Sterne distrusts language as a means of communication while being fascinated by its elemental magic powers. One critic noted how Sterne loved to litter his pages with esoteric encyclopedic graffiti. It makes the long sentences, like the very first one in the book, for instance, which might seem intellectually indigestible to an unaided eye, immediately available, not as structures but as developments, and reveals, where it occurs, the opening to an interpretation that the mere sweep of an eye might either neglect or refuse. Another difficulty is the babble of competing voices and tones that make up the curious texture of the prose – perhaps he was drawn to quoting and appropriating because of how they generate alien texture.
He intended to explain how our minds work by allowing us to understand how his mind worked, and part of how he did this is how he brings us in and out of the text. Tristram’s system demands a reliance on Sterne’s leadership, a trust in his choices, that can seem overweening, irritating, demeaning, even perilous or simply not worth the effort. But after some time readers may begin to understand why Tristram has turned in each new direction, led the way forward (or backwards) into yet another strange terrain, but they will never predict beforehand where they will next be led. Sterne took pleasure in destroying the normal order of things and in creating an exaggerated appearance of disorder, but only to link the pieces in another and more interesting way. By dramatically scrambling chronological and psychological durations, he emphasised the dual nature of time, something to which an individual responds both by reason and by emotion.
Sterne didn’t want unity or coherence or defined direction, at least not in any conventional sense; he wanted multiplicity; he wanted free association of ideas, not subordination of them; he wanted to go backwards or forward or sideways, not in straight linear paths. Virginia Woolf, an ardent admirer, remarked, ‘and though the flight of the erratic mind is zigzag, like a dragonfly’s, one cannot deny that this dragonfly has some methods in its flight . . . what fascinates him is his own mind with its whims and fascinations. We go backwards instead of going forward . . . we circle round and round . . .’
The sense of randomness and accident, the role of chance, the principles of absurdity, the confusions in communication, the authorial tone and direction: all these follow naturally from the description of a novel whose intention is to create a fictional world that parallels the realities of experience. It represents how the brain starts several different journeys at once. A single word can make you recollect, or anticipate, several different events. Its realism lies in representing not a completed world (natura naturata), but rather a process (natura naturans) – the process of creation, of growth, of the author’s imagination of his own world, with all its emergent contingencies, idiosyncratic perspectives and alternations of cosmic and local scale. The action is nothing less than creation itself making a child, a microscopic model, an individual, an autobiography, so that its completion must always recede before fresh interruptions. In Tristram Shandy, the earliest example of experimentation with time in the novel, or at the time the latest, we find that a superficially haphazard form becomes upon closer examination very conscious, even precise. Because there is no definitive reality, the novel, in what would become a classic postmodern style, playfully shifts between surfaces. The idea of the fragment becomes more trustworthy than the whole. Rather than bow down to the limitations imposed by indeterminacy, the texts embrace fragmentation through plurality. By adopting collage, montage, bricolage and pastiche, it succeeds in sketching a more believable simulation of a coherent reality. The disjointed, schizophrenic nature of the discourse not only draws attention to the limitations of perception, but to the possibility of a multiplicity of realities. It becomes impossible ever to truly know anything. Everything is incomplete until read, and even then the reader only gets a semblance of order brought about by the act of filling in the blanks. Because many realities exist, nothing can be certain. How can anyone ever come to know anything?
Tristram himself, the hero whose story is never completed, stumbles through days and nights in an unpatterned movement of ‘transverse zigzaggery’. He is vulnerable to countless accidents, interruptions and digressions. Existence, never quite in focus, appears to be made up of uncontrolled events and meetings within a nonconsequential time frame. The span from birth to death creates an illusion of disorientation as the prevailing reality.
The book includes so much that it hardly has space for the hero of its title. The birth of young Tristram only occurs after 200 pages have passed. Meanwhile, the magnitudes of life’s complexities have been exposed to view. Sterne points out how we can read to forget about everything else, losing ourselves in another world made up of fragments of other worlds, at the same time as facing up to everything. Tristram Shandy and Sterne, as precursors of the postmodern, the Internet, display research for something else, the form of which isn’t yet clear.
Belle Vue Pleasure Gardens
Part Seven
The rest of the world rubbing off
Poetry is nobody’s business except the poet’s, and everybody else can fuck off.
Philip Larkin
85.1
At the other end of the Mersey from Stockport, looking out rather than in, the living, seething Liverpool, constantly digressing from the ordinary, the obvious, defying time and the likely. The city as surreal act of self-belief, the city as fluid integrated object, composed, constructed, imagined, created over centuries, by individuals and communities, by exceedingly practical people and unholy fantasists, by solo and connected corrective acts of genius, by coordinated determined blasts of surrealist survival spirit. The city starring in its own far-fetched story, making stars and making people. Liverpool, built on the show-off genius and transformative memories of those who thought of it and those who live in it, adapt to it, leave it, taking it all with them and spreading it throughout the world, with unique timing and barbed melancholy emotional force, so that it feeds back again. A city not built only by bosses, trade, ambition, chiefs, leaders, managers, officers, academics, envoys, entrepreneurs, planners, literati, but by the adaptability, energy and subversive mutating flair of the serf, slave, worker, underling, hired hand, vagabond, outlaw, deputy, steward, pen-pusher, artisan, shopkeeper, apprentice, assistant, aide and gang. Hard-working, blunt and self-assured Lancashire, softer, sweeter Cheshire, steamed, baked and boiled in the spices of the world and soaked in the residual spirit of the poetic, sensitive Celts – the wild, wily, spiritual side of Britishness, pushed away to the edge, the edges, into the margins, against the more prosaic and regulated Anglo-Saxon in the solid indifferent middle. A succession of generations and increasing populations responding to the challenges and pressures that economics thrusts at them by constantly restructuring the society around them, a
nd finding different highly articulate and provocative artistic, dramatic and comic ways to explain, exploit and explore those changes.
A city representing the bleak, brilliant, narrow, open north of England, but out on its own, a compression, distortion and extension of the stubborn energy of pioneers, immigrants, outlaws, artists, entrepreneurs, labourers, dockers, sailors, teachers, drinkers, travellers, politicians, thieves, poets, celebrities, comedians; in this history of the north, this discriminating impartial selection of moments and moods that reflect the making of a whole different world, it could be Manchester – its fierce, ironic, sporting, cultural, commercial, friendly rival – Leeds, Sheffield, Newcastle, Preston, but it is Liverpool, at the other end of the Mersey from Stockport, where I sat on the bus, on my way to school, a million miles away, a few miles away, crossing the start of the Mersey hundreds of times a year, as the water rushed through Stockport, eager to reach Liverpool, which was something else, and undefeated, undeterred, by war, indifference, all forms of hostility, intolerance and condescension.
85.2
1154
Facing what became Liverpool, on the opposite bank, a Benedictine priory was founded between 1154 and 1199, and was the beginning of Birkenhead. The name is thought to derive from Birchen Head (a birch-covered headland) or else refers to the mouth of the River Birket. The monks started the first ferry service across the Mersey from the priory to Liverpool. The Priory was closed in 1536 on the orders of Henry VIII.
1207
Liverpool, a tiny watery eye blinking bravely in the dense dark cold. Liverpool, Lle’rpwll, Lerpwl, Lyrpul, Leverpul, Laverpul, Lyfrpwll, Leverpole, Liverpul, Lytherpwll, Lieverpull.
King John founded the borough and port of Liverpool to the south of Blackburn on the north shore of the estuary of the River Mersey where it flows into the Irish Sea. John wanted a port independent of nearby Chester, which was too much under the control of its powerful and independent-minded earl, from which to send troops to Ireland. On 23 August 1207 he issued letters patent which resulted in the little hamlet becoming a borough. John invited people to settle in his new township and offered them tax concessions and land to do so, his agents laying out seven streets.
1379
The poll tax returns for Leverpull reveal 86 householders: 26 engaged in agriculture, 18 brewers, 9 servants, 9 cobblers and shoemakers, 5 fishmongers and herringmongers, 4 drapers, 3 tailors, 2 smiths, the mayor, William de Leverpull, a franklin, a tanner, a dyer, a butcher, a carpenter, a chaloner, a weaver and a baker. The list is incomplete.
1565
Liverpool is described as a poor and obscure village. Apparently only the original seven streets in the town were settled, containing 138 cottages and 690 inhabitants: Chapel Street, Castle Street, Dale Street, Bancke Street, Moor Street, Juggler Street and Peppard Street.
1635
A bridge is built over the Pool and a quay and harbour constructed ‘for the succour of shipping’, and in 1647 Liverpool is made a free and independent port, no longer subject to Chester, where the Dee has silted up. (The Romans had ignored the Mersey in favour of the Dee to the south, which got them further inland to Chester, and the Ribble to the north. Perhaps they avoided the Mersey because the tides and gales during winter were too harsh: Liverpool’s name could be an Anglo-Norman translation from Latin of a phrase meaning ‘spring time anchorage’, because the location was only used during the warmer months. There is no Roman mention of the Mersey, and it was suggested by George Stephenson and Thomas Telford that the Mersey estuary was created by an earthquake in about ad 400 or some time between the fifth-century departure of the Romans and the eleventh-century arrival of the Normans. This would account for the total obscurity of the area around Liverpool until then. It seems to have appeared like the beginning of a work of art, a brave stab in the dark, out of nowhere, but everything has to begin somewhere.)
1667
Sir Edward Moore, a member of the leading family of the town at the time, warns: ‘Have a care of them, the men of Liverpool are the most perfidious in all England, worse than my pen can describe.’
1705
Daniel Defoe describes Liverpool as ‘one of the wonders of Britain; what it may grow into in time I know not’.
1717
The first dock in Liverpool is built. Previously ships were simply tied up by the shore, but as the port grows busier this is no longer adequate.
85.3
Liverpool is not part of England in the way that New York is not part of America. It is more Welsh, more Irish, more Scottish, more exotically international and defiantly local, a shifty, shifting outpost of defiance, determination and scouring kindness reluctantly connected to the English mainland, more an island set in a sea of dreams and nightmares that’s forever taking shape in the imagination, more a mysterious place jutting out into time between the practical stabilising pull of history and the sweeping sharpening force of myth.
It’s where it says it is on the map, in position, up there, and along there, down under what’s above, above what’s below, and rivers and roads and railway lines draw it towards England, and a little bit further out, and you can easily find ways in and out without losing track of time or leaving behind English weather, English telly or English moods. Liverpool, though, fancies that it can just keep going, leave mean and limiting England far behind. It can climb mountains, crack open new territory, even conquer space; the implacable water keeps it connected to the rest of the world, all of history, and grinding reality doesn’t wreck its role as a kind of gutsy cosmic link between the tough everyday and the frailly fantastic.
Liverpool has always forced itself forward through the grimy thick and thin of rise and fall, success and failure, hope and hopelessness, despite what is said about it, however hostile the assault on its bitter-sweet rhyme and reason. Liverpool is always on guard. They know that the English elsewhere look up and over with suspicion and doubt, stumped by the language, needled by the snappy, mongrel confidence, outmanoeuvred by the logic-shredding wit. The city is also always wary of what might appear over the horizon, from the endless heavy sea, of what unknown force, for good or evil, might wash up on its vulnerable shore. The city has had more money than some, and been poorer than most. It’s seen better days; it’s always on the up; it believes in itself; it’s all on its own. It’s been associated with grotesque episodes in history. It’s had ideas that have contributed to the progress of the whole world. Its hands are dirty, but its mind is open.
You can hear it in the way Liverpool talks, finding meaning in the very heart of words. You can hear all its grievous, glorious past in a single sentence spoken about nothing much in particular. Local history, and its well-reported agitated impact on the planet, fizzes one way or another on the whetted tongue of a Liverpudlian. You can hear the enterprise and belligerence, the flippancy and the rage, the ambition and the stubbornness, the influx of this, the passing-through of that, the constant rumour of the amazing and the bog standard. You can hear the guilt, the defensiveness, the aggression, the pride, the victimised flush, the determination not to be taken for a ride, not to be taken for granted, the hunger to be in the know, first in line, ready for anything, dead on the money.
In a single sentence spoken about nothing much in particular you can hear that this is a city that has fought off all manner of danger, derision and repression, from inside and outside, and has lived to tell the tale, and tell it with a kind of spectacular, cunning relish. You can hear arrogance and music, love and anger, a turbulent, tragic city folded into speech, centuries of movement and achievement propelling words that urge the future to happen, now, again, now and again, friendly, violent vowels that connect friends and family and streets and memories and strangers with everything that’s happened, that’s come and gone, that’s lived and died, across 800 years. It’s the cranky, nimble sound of a people who have been loved and hated, ignored and exiled, the sound of an inspired but persecuted collection of voices, religions, myths, schools, rhymes
and traditions that have fused together in one impoverished, prosperous place where, against all odds, they found refuge, a home and a future. The Liverpool playwright Alun Owen suggested that the multiracial population of the city ‘evolved an accent for themselves’, borrowed from their Irish and Welsh grandfathers in response to the ‘problem of identity’.
One Liverpudlian wit described Scouse as ‘one third Irish, one third Welsh and one third catarrh’, which is not far off the mark, according to Andrew Hamer, a regional accents expert at Liverpool University. ‘During the potato famines in the mid-nineteenth century Irish immigrants moved to Liverpool, some of whom spoke Gaelic. It was their children who first spoke with a distinctive accent that was a mix of Irish accents and the accent from neighbouring Manchester.’ Liverpool grew to be the ‘second city of the empire’ (an accolade also given to Glasgow and Calcutta) through trade with the colonies and serving the Lancashire factories inland. The distinctiveness of the Scouse accent is largely the result of immigration, particularly from the Celtic lands surrounding Liverpool, but also from elsewhere, far away, bitten and nibbled at from all over the world, biting and nibbling back.
The peculiarities of Scouse are almost entirely phonological; thanks to prolonged and regular contact with London, its grammar and vocabulary remain close to British standard English. It has been suggested that its adenoidal quality is derived from poor nineteenth-century public health – the prevalence of colds and chills. Impairment of nasal resonance in many people over a long time resulted in it becoming regarded as ‘the group norm’ and it was copied by immigrants. Liverpool, its language becoming itself when the city made the most of what it had and didn’t have, in the nineteenth century, when people poured in and poured out, leaving behind sounds and attitudes, and changing a nervy town on the obscure edge of Lancashire into a self-glorifying city on the exhilarating edge of the world. The most important port in the British empire had by the end of the nineteenth century a morphing charged sound all of its own. It’s one of the city’s greatest achievements – the mixing together out of the air, the sea, the world, the hunger, the place where it is, the people, whether down and out and up against it, or prospering, or on the prowl, or on the verge of discovery – its very own dialect.
