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.
A couple of years ago I bought a cheap copy of Emile Zola’s The Masterpiece (L’Oeuvre), prompted by a Cezanne exhibition at Tate Modern. (Zola and Cezanne’s friendship ended because of what the latter perceived to be his negative depiction in the novel.) And, inevitably, it slipped under a pile of other books and I’ve only just read it.
A few thoughts from the first couple of chapters:
1. Back in the days when Dan Brown was A Thing, I was far from the only one to point and laugh at his gauche telling-not-showing schtick, displayed most notoriously in the first bloody line of The Da Vinci Code when he told you that a character was a renowned curator by introducing him as “Renowned curator Jacques Saunière” (and then killing him). Does Zola do any better? Well, of course he does. After the first sentence introduces the central character, Claude, we get:
He was an artist and liked to ramble around Paris till the small hours, but wandering about the Halles on that hot July evening he had lost all sense of time.
(Il s'était oublié à rôder dans les Halles, par cette nuit brûlante de juillet, en artiste flâneur, amoureux du Paris nocturne...)
So you get the information, but there’s a reason, a context for your getting the information. Even if it relies on the stereotype of the artist wandering around the city at night, up to no good. Which may, in Claude’s case, be accurate...
2. Claude meets a distressed young woman and lets her stay the night in his studio. She is nervous about the situation, and he is annoyed by her nervousness, the fact that she thinks he might want to take advantage of her, but then:
In the hothouse heat of the sunlit room, the girl had thrown back the sheet and, exhausted after a night without sleep, was now slumbering peacefully, bathed in sunlight, and so lost to consciousness that not a sign of a tremor disturbed her naked innocence. During her sleepless tossing the shoulder-straps of her chemise had come unfastened and the one on her left shoulder had slipped off completely, leaving her bosom bare. Her flesh was faintly golden and silk-like in its texture, her firm little breasts, tipped with palest rose-colour, thrust upwards with all the freshness of spring. Her sleepy head lay back upon the pillow, her right arm folded under it, thus displaying her bosom in a line of trusting, delicious abandon, clothed only in the dark mantle of her loose black hair.
Good heavens, that’s pretty racy stuff for the 1880s. But what does Claude do? He begins to draw her still-sleeping form, and carries on after she wakes, gruffly overriding her objections. All sorts of modern concerns about consent and agency and surreptitious image-making come into play. But he doesn’t touch her little breasts, only draws them, so that’s OK (or at least Claude himself thinks that’s OK, but Zola stays out of it).
3. Claude and his chums are at the vanguard of something that may turn out to be Impressionism, but with the names changed, and he wants to present a sense of authenticity, as distinct from “the run-of-the-mill, made-to-measure École des Beaux-Arts stuff”. But, in his mind at least, the logical end of this is the triumph of the mundane, familiar image that Warhol might have envisaged:
The day was not far off when one solitary, original carrot might be pregnant with revolution!
And later, he comes close to precognition of Duchamp:
...a naked woman’s body with neither head nor shoulders, a mutilated trunk, a vague, corpselike shape, the dead flesh of the beauty of his dreams.
Tell you what, it’s better than Dan Brown, isn’t it?
I keep returning to the matter of Radio 4, pretty much the last remnant of Reithian values, and how in its desperation to remain relevant to Gens Y and Z, its presenters apparently feel the need to explain cultural references that their parents and grandparents would have taken in their stride.
And then this happens. In the lexicography-cum-comedy show Unspeakable, the comedian Russell Kane explains how he and his wife, when in the presence of their children, use the name “Immanuel” to describe someone who might in adult company attract a rather more robust epithet. What’s interesting is that the audience gets the gag with the barest of clues; all Kane tells us is that Immanuel is a philosopher who wrote the Critique of Pure Reason and the ribald chortles begin. I’m not suggesting that everybody who rocks up to a BBC comedy recording is totally conversant with what Kant has to say about metaphysics (I’m certainly not) but they have enough basic, possibly superficial understanding – what ED Hirsch would call cultural literacy – to ensure they laugh in the right place.
I wonder what it would take for producers and controllers to understand that listeners at home can cope with the same sort of thing.
PS: Vaguely related: investigating the war on so-called performative reading; and when AI destroys one’s ability to flirt, let alone write a college essay.
PPS: From the vaults: when I defended Paul Morley from the Philistines.
PPPS: An argument that men don’t read books any more; and an article on beach reads (Kinsella beats Tolstoy) that seems to take that contention for granted.
