From Then We Came To The End, by Joshua Ferris. How many of us can identify, however uncomfortably, with this?
He had another screenplay about a disaffected and cynical copywriter suffering ennui in the office setting while dreaming of becoming a famous screenwriter, which he claimed was not autobiographical.
Alwyn Turner argues that we are in a “post-fiction world” in which the death of any form of common culture means that any remaining common points of reference (Sherlock Holmes, Daleks and so on) are from the past. Nothing new is coming along that we can assume everybody, or even a healthy majority, will know and understand. (Turner also reminds us that you don’t need to have read a line of Doyle, or even seen a film or TV adaptation, to know who Sherlock Holmes is.) And what stands in their place is the mundanity of fact:
The need for a shared culture remains, but in the absence of fiction we have the dominance of ‘reality’, a social agenda dominated by news stories and sport, not by Morecambe and Wise or who was on Top of the Pops last night. Strip away major events – the Royal Family, Brexit, Covid – and what have been the shared moments of the last ten years? The fortunes of the various national football teams, dissatisfaction with politicians and politics, and a handful of hashtags (#MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter) that emerged from the internet to dominate conversation around the dinner-tables and water-coolers of the nation. It’s all factual.
Coincidentally, I’ve been reading Félix Fénéon’s Novels in Three Lines, which collects short news items from French publications in the early 20th century, any one of which might be the starting point for some convoluted epic by Flaubert or Hugo. Or, indeed, to monopolise a water-cooler for a few minutes.
“To die like Joan of Arc!” cried Terbaud from the top of a pyre made of his furniture. The fireman of Saint-Open stifled his ambition.
At Troyes, M.M.C., a hide merchant, was run over by a train. One of his legs rolled into a ditch.
Accountant Auguste Bailly, from Boulogne, fractured his skull when he fell from a flying trapeze.
The gendarmes of Morlaix were sent to Plougar to substitute lay teachers for the nuns who had barricaded themselves in the school.
Frogs, sucked up from Belgian ponds by the storm, rained down upon the streets of the red-light district of Dunkirk.
Nurse Elise Bachmann, whose day off was yesterday, put on a public display of insanity.
And a few lines later...
A certain madwoman arrested downtown falsely claimed to be nurse Elise Bachmann. The latter is perfectly sane.
A tiny snippet in my ongoing effort to determine that which we are expected to know. On ITV’s The Chase this afternoon, a contestant was asked, “Who is the patron saint of surfers?” Now, I didn’t know the answer. Given the options (Valentine, Peter, Christopher), I would have guessed Christopher, because of the myth of him carrying Jesus across the water, but it would have been a guess.
The contestant didn’t know either, which is fair enough. But more than that, she didn’t understand the question. I’m not inferring that from her look of bafflement: she actually said as much. She didn’t understand what a patron saint was. Maybe she didn’t understand what a saint was. In the end she picked Valentine, because maybe he surfed.
Any author or editor will understand the tension that exists between telling the reader what needs to be told, and insulting said reader’s intelligence. And it’s a tension that will likely never be resolved. When my Leonard Cohen books was published, a reviewer on Amazon complained that I blithely chucked around words like “solipsistic” while feeling the need to explain that sake is Japanese rice wine. Which is, amusingly enough, a rather solipsistic argument, because it’s only valid when the critic shares the same grab bag of knowns and unknowns.
In the same vein, while reading the Wordsworth Classics edition of Dracula, I’m quite grateful that the editor, David Rogers, is helpful enough to gloss archaic Whitby dialect (“crammle aboon the grees”) and the minutiae of central European history (Honofoglalas) and at the same time wonder why I’m being told about Thor and Medusa, the Danube, the British Museum and the Battle of Waterloo. I mean, we all know what they are. Don’t we?
Yet another thing that really should have gone into my dissertation, I suppose.
PS: Two fragments from the text:
It was not alone that it was composed of all the ills of mortality and with the pungent, acrid smell of blood, but it seemed as though corruption had become itself corrupt.
And a line from Van Helsing, who regularly drifts into comedy-foreigner-speak:
It is a new experience to me to find a lunatic who talk philosophy, and reason so sound.
In time... it may become possible to be accepted as a cultivated person (whatever that archaic term will by then have come to represent) without having an acquaintance with any literature written before one’s own era, or perhaps with any literature at all.
I am grateful to my former teacher Professor Martin Eve for drawing attention to an extraordinary document from the University of Warwick, which endeavours to ensure all communications from said institution are at once Provocative, Curious and Optimistic.
Nah, me neither. But, as an example, we are entreated not to say something as anodyne as “Scientists make breakthrough in development of fridge-free storage for vital medications”. Now, I would have thought that was rather a good thing for a university to announce, for any number of reasons. No, instead the headline should be: “Medication proteins so stable, you can pop them in the post.” You know, like sweeties. And, at all times we should operate under the banner of Beyond; indeed, “Using ‘Beyond’ as a subject noun makes ‘Beyond’ an entity that is actively driving change.”
So, not only childish and inane, but consciously anti-literate as well. Warwick is the 74th-best university in the world, you know. God help the rubbish ones.
Clickbait, or the principle of clickbait at least, predates the internet by a long while. I remember those hoardings at the pitch of the Evening Standard sellers, declaring “FAMOUS ACTOR DIES” and if you were tempted to buy the paper you’d discover it was someone who was in Emmerdale in 1974.
What the web has done is to refine this technique, luring you in with something more specific, but often irrelevant, reductive and often plain insulting. An obvious example was when the double-Oscar winner Maggie Smith died and all the headlines mentioned was Harry Potter and Downton Abbey – the last-named being a show so banal that even Dame Maggie herself couldn’t be arsed to watch it.
But yesterday they were outdone by The Independent, which marked the death of Connie Francis, a performer who sold over 100 millions in a turbulent, incident-packed career, with this headline:
SINGER BEHIND VIRAL TIKTOK HIT DIES AT 87
Mad-eyed, foam-flecked rumours on social media that Saturday will see a mass invasion of Dover Beach. Not one led by migrants, though. This time it’ll be stout-limbed, pink-hued defenders of the British way of life on the sands, doubtless screaming bleeding chunks of Matthew Arnold at the baffled boat people until they skedaddle back home.
...and we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
