Michael Moorcock, 2006
Author’s Introduction
I am known in my circle as notoriously foul-mouthed. It’s a familiar paradox – the soft-spoken, middle-aged English gentlewoman who swears like a trooper when roused. I blame my father, who was neither English nor a gentleman but Scottish and a journalist, who bequeathed me bad language and a taste for the print, so that his daughter, for the last fifteen-odd years, has been writing book reviews and then conscientiously blue-pencilling out her first gut reactions – ‘bloody awful’, ‘fucking dire’ – in order to give a more balanced and objective overview.
My father kept a shelf of Penguin classics in translation by his bed. Homer, Thucydides, Apuleius. My mother preferred Boswell, Pepys – she adored gossip, especially antique gossip, but she mistrusted fiction because she believed fiction gave one an unrealistic view of the world. Once she caught me reading a novel and chastised me: ‘Never let me catch you doing that again, remember what happened to Emma Bovary.’ Both my parents had left school at fifteen, they were among the last generation of men and women whose minds were furnished out of curiosity about the printed word.
In the medieval morality play of Everyman, Knowledge says: ‘Everyman, I will go with thee and be thy guide, In thy most need to go by thy side.’ The old Everyman editions used to print this on the inner covers, it was their motto. (The revived Everyman editions happily use the same motto.) I remember another slogan: ‘A good book is the precious life blood of a great master’, or words to that effect. We sat at meals with our open books. My mother liked to read cookery books between meals, especially during the period of food rationing. We were the only family in my class at school who didn’t have a television set. They got one at last, when my father retired, ostensibly so that he could watch the news; things went downhill, after that.
Although I grew up with books and have spent a good deal of my adult life among them, make my living out of writing them and very much enjoy writing about them, I can contemplate with equanimity the science-fiction future world that every day approaches more closely, in which information and narrative pleasure are transmitted electronically and books are a quaint, antiquarian, minority taste. Not in my time, anyway, I say to myself. And, anyway, a book is simply the container of an idea – like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters. Even so, I admit to having a fetishistic attitude to books, to their touch, their smell. All the same, human beings told each other stories, instructed one another in the names of things, speculated about the meaning of it all (and came to few if any conclusions), discussed the habits of animals, composed recipes, before there was such a thing even as writing and will doubtless continue to do so because the really important thing is narrative.
All books, even cookery books and car-maintenance manuals, consist of narratives. Narrative is written in language but it is composed, if you follow me, in time. All writers are inventing a kind of imitation time when they invent the time in which a story unfolds, and they are playing a complicated game with our time, the reader’s time, the time it takes to read a story. A good writer can make you believe time stands still.
Yet the end of all stories, even if the writer forebears to mention it, is death, which is where our time stops short. Sheherezade knew this, which is why she kept on spinning another story out of the bowels of the last one, never coming to a point where she could say: ‘This is the end.’ Because it would have been. We travel along the thread of narrative like high-wire artistes. That is our life.
But there is more to it than that. The Balinese embark on a marathon session of reading aloud after they have prepared a corpse for burial. They read stories from collections of popular tales without stopping, twenty-four hours a day, for days at a time, in order to keep out the demons:
Demons possess souls during the vulnerable period immediately after a death, but stories keep them out. Like Chinese boxes or English hedges, the stories contain tales within tales, so that as you enter one you run into another, passing from plot to plot every time you turn a corner, until at last you reach the core of the narrative space, which corresponds to the place occupied by the corpse within the inner courtyard of the household. Demons cannot penetrate this space because they cannot turn corners. They beat their heads helplessly against the narrative maze that the readers have built, and so reading provides a kind of defence fortification . . . It creates a wall of words, which operates like the jamming of radio broadcast. It does not amuse, instruct, improve or help to while away the time: by the imbrication of narrative and the cacophony of sound, it protects souls.1
And that is quite enough about the importance of narrative and ought to explain why the largest section of this book is devoted to pieces of writing about storytelling in its purest form, that is, to invented stories, and the strategies writers have devised to cheat the inevitability of closure, to chase away the demons, to keep them away for good.
Don’t think I don’t like real novels, though, the kind of novel in which people drink tea and commit adultery – I do like novels! I do! In spite of my mother’s warning. Although, if a comic charlady obtrudes upon the action of a real novel, I will fling the novel against the wall amidst a flood of obscenities because the presence of such a character as a comic charlady tells me more than I wish to know about the way her creator sees the world.
Because all fiction, all writing of any kind, in fact, exists on a number of different levels. ‘Never trust the teller, trust the tale,’ said D. H. Lawrence, and he was right, even if he did not want this to happen to his tales. If you read the tale carefully, the tale tells you more than the writer knows, often much more than they wanted to give away. The tale tells you, in all innocence, what its writer thinks is important, who she or he thinks is important and, above all, why. Call it the sub-text.
I don’t really think that writers, even great writers, are prophets, or sages, or Messiah-like figures; writing is a lonely, sedentary occupation and a touch of megalomania can be comforting around five on a November afternoon when you haven’t seen anybody all day. But one or two of the people I’m writing about, here, have aspirations in the Messianic direction and I’m all for pretension; besides, I’m glad that Iain Sinclair did his bit to bring about the resignation of Margaret Thatcher. But, rather than the gift of prophecy, it seems to me that the times shine through certain writers, so that we think they see more clearly than we do, whereas in reality they are making us see more clearly. Calling such writers seers, or prophets, is a form of shorthand. I suppose I’d include John Berger and William Burroughs in this category, probably J. G. Ballard, certainly Christina Stead.
Otherwise, I like to write about writers who give me pleasure. Pleasure has always had a bad press in Britain. I’m all for pleasure, too. I wish there was more of it around. I also like to argue. There is also a strong irascibility factor in some of these pieces. A day without an argument is like an egg without salt.
I’ve divided up this mass of evidence of fifteen years writing about books into sections according to various enthusiasms. Storytelling, yes. Food and the semiotics of food. My country, this messy, post-imperialist Britain, which is not the country of my childhood in Atlee’s austere, dignified egalitarian Forties, nor yet of my young womanhood in the ecstatic Sixties but something much more raucous and sinister. And there is also Amerika. Note I have adopted Kafka’s spelling for the title of this section.
Like most Europeans of my generation, I have North America in my bloodstream. It started with the food parcels we used to receive just after the war, with the sticky American candies all over nuts and the cans of peaches, each half-peach as round, firm, golden, and ersatz as (had I but known it then) a silicone breast. I remember, possibly a trick of memory but even so, copies of Glamour and Mademoiselle and Seventeen thrown in as makeweights that showed me a world, as pastel-coloured and two-dimensional as a Loony Tunes cartoon, where people with good teeth on permanent exhibition in wide smiles ate inexplicable food, hamburgers, h
ot-dogs, French fries, and there were teenagers, bobby-sox, saddle Oxfords.
It was the bright, simple world of the post-War Eisenhower Utopia and I didn’t encounter it again until Pop Art, when I realised it had been a vicious fake all the time.
But it was the movies that administered America to me intravenously, as they did to the entire generation that remembers 1968 with such love. It seemed to me, when I first started going to the cinema intensively in the late Fifties, that Hollywood had colonised the imagination of the entire world and was turning us all into Americans. I resented it, it fascinated me.
It still does – that giant, tragic drama of American history, the superspectacle of the twentieth century, the nation that invented itself and continually reinvents itself through its art. I’ve lived in the Mid-West, with its pastoral simplicity and the endless promise of the land, and in upstate New York, on the upper reaches of the most beautiful river in the world, the Hudson, and other places, too, though less passionately, and I think of the United States with awe and sadness, that the country has never, ever quite reneged on the beautiful promise inscribed on the Statue of Liberty . . . and yet has fucked so much up.
So there is an American section. And since my life has been most significantly shaped by my gender, there is a section titled ‘La Petite Différence’. I spent a good many years being told what I ought to think, and how I ought to behave, and how I ought to write, even, because I was a woman and men thought they had the right to tell me how to feel, but then I stopped listening to them and tried to figure it out for myself but they didn’t stop talking, oh, dear no. So I started answering back. How simple, not to say simplistic, this all sounds; and yet it is true.
I’ve ended the book with a little piece about James Joyce, in Dublin, because for any writer in the English language, the twentieth century starts on 16 June 1904, Bloomsday, and shows no sign of ending yet.
The pieces aren’t arranged chronologically because I didn’t start reviewing seriously until I was thirty-five years old and fully grown up; my tastes were pretty much formed, I knew what I liked although every now and then something new would astonish me and still does. But there is a consistency of taste, if not chronology. I haven’t changed much, over the years. I use less adjectives, now, and have a kinder heart, perhaps.
My thanks to the literary editors who commissioned these reviews or, in some cases, acceded to my requests for commissions to review books they themselves might not have thought of: Karl Miller, Tony Gould, Blake Morrison, Waldemar Januscek, Tim Radford, above all Bill Webb. Thanks to Susannah Clapp. My dear friend, Carmen Callil, thought this collection was a good idea, and found me Mark Bell, my amanuensis, without whom this book could not have been assembled. My thanks, above all, to the staff of the Foulis Gallery, the Brompton Hospital, London, also without whom . . .
For more than three years, Salman Rushdie, Britain’s most remarkable writer, has suffered the archaic and cruel penalty of a death sentence, passed on him for writing and publishing a book. All those who work in the same profession are affected by his dreadful predicament, whether they know it or not. Its reverberations upon the freedoms and responsibilities of writers are endless. Perhaps writing is a matter of life and death. All good fortune, Salman.
TELL ME A STORY
Death is the sanction of everything the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
Walter Benjamin
• 1 •
Milorad Pavic: Dictionary of the Khazars
According to Apuleius, Pleasure is the daughter of Cupid and Psyche – of Love and the Soul, that is, a sufficiently elevated pedigree, one would have thought. Yet the British still put up a strong resistance to the idea that pleasurability might be a valid criterion in the response to literature, just as we remain dubious about the value of the ‘decorative’ in the visual arts. When Graham Greene made ‘entertainment’ a separate category from the hard stuff in his production, he rammed home the point: the difference was a moral one, a difference between reading to pass the time pleasurably – that is, trivially – and reading to some purpose.
The ‘great tradition’ does not brook even the possibility of libidinal gratification between the pages as an end in itself, and F. R. Leavis’s ‘eat up your broccoli’ approach to fiction emphasises this junkfood/wholefood dichotomy. If reading a novel – for the eighteenth-century reader, the most frivolous of diversions – did not, by the middle of the twentieth century, make you a better person in some way, then you might as well flush the offending volume down the toilet, which was by far the best place for the undigested excreta of dubious nourishment.
The Yugoslav writer Milorad Pavic’s Dictionary of the Khazars is an exercise in a certain kind of erudite frivolity that does not do you good as such, but offers the cerebral pleasure of the recognition of patterning afforded by formalism, a profusion of language games, some rude mirth. In culinary terms, the book is neither tofuburger nor Big Mac, but a Chinese banquet, a multiplicity of short narratives and prose fragments at which we are invited, not to take our fill, but to snack as freely or as meagrely as we please on a wide variety of small portions of sharply flavoured delicacies, mixing and matching many different taste sensations. In other words, it is not like a novel by Penelope Lively. It will not set you up; nor will it tell you how to live. That is not what it is for.
The mother-type of these feast-like compilations is The Arabian Nights Entertainment – note the word ‘entertainment’. That shambolic anthology of literary fairytales linked by an exiguous narrative was originally, and still is, related to the folktale of peasant communities and its particular improvisatory yet regulated systems of narrative. The whole of Dictionary of the Khazars is a kind of legendary history, and some of the individual entries have considerable affinities to the folktale (‘The Tale of Petkutin and Kalina’ in the section called ‘The Red Book’, for example): but, I suspect, not so much the influence of an oral tradition – though that’s still possible in Yugoslavia – as the influence of an aesthetic owing a good deal to Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folk-Tale, first published in Russia in 1928.
Propp’s thesis is that the traditional fairytale is not composed, but built up out of discrete narrative blocks that can be pulled down again and reassembled in different ways to make any number of other stories, or can be used for any number of other stories in combination with other narrative blocks. That is partly why there is no place for, nor possibility of, inwardness in the traditional tale, nor of characterisation in any three-dimensional way. If the European novel of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is closely related to gossip, to narrative arising out of conflicted character, then the folktale survives, in our advanced, industrialised, society, in the anecdote. Gossip would say: ‘You know the daughter of that bloke at the “Dog and Duck”? Well . . .’ An anecdote might begin: ‘There was this publican’s daughter, see . . .’ In our culture, the folktale survives in the saloon bar.
A traditional storyteller does not make things up afresh, except now and then, if the need arises. Instead, he or she selects, according to mood, whim and cultural background, the narrative segments that feel right at the time from a store acquired from a career of listening, and reassembles them in attractive, and sometimes new, ways. And that’s how formalism was born. (Italo Calvino, the most exquisite of contemporary formalists, is also, it should be remembered, editor of the classic collection of Italian fairytales.)
Pavic advises the reader to behave exactly like a traditional storyteller and construct his or her own story out of the ample material he has made available. The main difference is, Pavic has made all this material up by himself. ‘No chronology is observed here, nor is one necessary. Hence, each reader will put together the book for himself, as in a game of dominoes or cards.’ The book is an exercise, not in creative writing, but in creative reading. The reader can, says Pavic, rearrange the book ‘in an infinite number of ways, like a Rubic cube’.
Pavic
positively invites you to join in, as if opening his imagination to the public. ‘It is an open book,’ he says in the preliminary notes, ‘and when it is shut it can be added to: just as it has its own former and present lexicographer, so it can acquire new writers, compilers, continuers.’
In a US review, Robert Coover suggested that computer hackers might make Dictionary of the Khazars their own as a prototype hypertext, unpaginated, non-sequential, that can be entered anywhere by anybody. This looks forward to a Utopian, high-tech version of the oral tradition where machines do all the work whilst men and women unite in joyous and creative human pastimes. It is a prospect to make William Morris’s mind reel, publishers quail.
But who are, or were, the Khazars? ‘An autonomous and powerful tribe, a warlike and nomadic people who appeared from the East at an unknown date, driven by a scorching silence, and who, from the seventh to the tenth century, settled in the land between two seas, the Caspian and the Black.’ As a nation, the Khazars no longer exist, and ceased to do so during the tenth century after ‘their conversion from their original faith, unknown to us today, to one (again, it is not known which) of three known religions of the past and present – Judaism, Islam or Christianity.’
The Dictionary purports to be, with some additions, the reprint of an edition of a book published by the Pole, Joannes Daubmannus, in 1691, which was ‘divided into three dictionaries: a separate glossary of Moslem sources on the Khazar question, an alphabetised list of materials drawn from Hebrew writings and tales, and a third dictionary compiled on the basis of Christian accounts of the Khazar question’. So the same characters and events are usually seen three times, each from the perspective of a different history and set of cultural traditions, and may be followed through the three books cross-wise, if you wish. The ‘ancient’ texts are organised according to the antiquarian interests of the seventeenth century. As in The Arabian Nights, an exiguous narrative set in the present day is interwoven throughout the three volumes of the dictionary and provides some sort of climax.
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