Literature Town (part 2): Connections, baby - connections!

 (Part 2)

Of course, an easy way to partition the town is to view it in terms of nationalities: French Literature, Japanese Literature, English Literature. But as the landscape of the town makes clear, blood relations supersede geography: Murakami claims Raymond Carver as a major influence on his own work, and Joyce admired Ibsen so much he wrote him a fan letter when he was 18 (where he doesn't shy away from telling Ibsen that, being old, he'll soon die and that he, Joyce, is ready to move in that space :)). That is probably why it is so difficult to determine what the literary character of a nation is; after all, there are neither stylistic, aesthetic, narrative or structural resemblances between Fielding, Blake, Dickens, Eliot, Sassoon and Kingsley Amis than there are between Martin Amis, Ishiguro, Magnus Mills or David Mitchell. And in fact, Mills and French author Toussaint are much closer to one another than Mills and Ishiguro, or Toussaint and Claudel. Eliot has more in common with the French poet St John Perse than with Wilfried Owen, and Pascal Quiriny owes a lot more to Borges (and Kafka) than to Zola.

Rather than trying to cram all those authors and their texts under one heading (English Literature, French Literature), one should link them to their blood relations, their literature family. In that way, not only does a text become illuminated from many new perspectives, but the idea of literature (its workings, its meaning, its role and function) can be brought to life and made tangible.

The same is true for e.g. Poetry: what is common to Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot and Philip Larkin beyond the fact they are called ‘Poets’? It cannot be the style, the concerns, the prosody, the rhyming scheme, so…what is it if not an idea of relationships? There were reasons for Larkin to despise the Modernists, and those reasons were artistic and literary. Eliot had reasons to want to move away from the tradition (or most of the tradition), and those reasons were literary and artistic.

So something else that links apparently distant authors and movements is their theoretical concerns and the way they found to answer those– just as you find in music (Dodecaphonists, Minimalists, Wagnerians), Theatre (Goldoni, G.S. Shaw, Brecht, Beckett) and of course painting (Titian, Michelangelo, Turner, Duchamp, Pollock). It is only by asking yourself, for example, why a painting should be square, why an image should fit a frame, or, more simply, why a painting should figuratively represent what it represents, that you can start using your Art to answer those questions. That is how it is easier – in some ways – to see a link between Virginia Woolf and John Updike than between them and most of their contemporaries and co-nationals.

This point may sound abstruse, but it is important; after all, even if we had time to talk to all the inhabitants of the town, interview them, review them, grill them, would we in fact know them completely? That is, who they are in relation to who’s around them, who raised them, who loved them and who hated them? In a word, would it be possible to know each individual while ignoring their relationship with those around them? 

For example, is it possible to understand the Modernists if you don’t know what they felt had to change and why? Is it possible to make full sense of Brecht without any knowledge of the theatre he rejected, and why? Can reading the Realists make sense without knowing about the Romantics and their relationship with nature? Does one really know Tristram Shandy if one has no idea of the state of the novel then? Can Flaubert’s importance be understood without reference to Stendhal, Chateaubriand or Hugo and what they valued? Of course, reading the whole of Brecht will tell you about his work, but will it tell you about the place of his work in Literature? Yet that place determines the way his work turned out, since that work is the result of a rejection of other works by other authors.

Ultimately then, the work as work cannot be easily dissociated from the web of relationships it emerged from - and if it is, we should be concerned that it decontextualises the reading and creates an artificial approach. As Jean-Claude Carrière once put it in a book he co-wrote with Umberto Eco (2009): ‘We can of course explain the great influence that Cervantes had on Kafka. But we can also say that Kafka has had an influence on Cervantes. If I read Kafka before Cervantes, then through me and without my knowing it, Kafka will impact on my reading of Quixote’. Relationships; connections: that’s the ticket.

 Such a metaphor as the Literature town has at least two immediate uses:

First, it visualises the world of books as a place which, when viewed from the outside by a foreigner, may look united and forbidding, but which is in fact multi-faceted, very diverse and affording the visitor many points of entrance. Further, those inside do not always know where they stand in relation to the whole, and the unity shown to the outside world is only a façade: competition, jealousy, detestation, incomprehension and complete disagreement are the norm rather than the exception in that town.

 Second, it visualises the world of books and authors as one three-dimensional space instead of a linear, chronological process. It therefore highlights the interdependence of books and authors, and shows that this interdependence transcends historical moments and strict geographical location. Except for a very few hermits, that is, authors apparently unrelated to anyone else, each author, each book is related to another in one way or another.: Ezra Pound owes more to the past (the Greek world, say) than to his contemporaries; James Joyce is closer to Tolstoy and Flaubert than to G.B. Shaw; John Updike is closer to Vladimir Nabokov than to Norman Mailer; and Lord Byron had more in common with Lamartine and Goethe than with Jane Austen. 

This idea is obviously not new, and was beautifully articulated by J-L. Borges: every text is a continuation, in one form or another, of a previous text. no text ever really ends as it is continued elsewhere, somehow.

 Similarly, the porosity between neighbourhoods means that the same applies to sub-genres: Margaret Atwood or Italo Calvino (like Jorge Luis Borges) belong to more than one neighbourhood, and they come and go between them as they please. Philip Roth can be the Grand Old Man of American Literature and win prizes with a Science-fiction plot, as did Cormac McCarthy. A working-class denizen may be feted in the high society (James Kelman), a high-brow thinker can find its way into a whole range of neighbourhoods (Kazuo Ishiguro). Of course, there are numerous neighbourhoods where we wouldn’t dream of going (for some that will be science fiction, for some romance, for some detectives, for some mainstream Literature, for some poetry), or we may wait a long time before visiting, but still: we need to know they are there as their very existence helps define the rest of it. The whole cannot be understood without its parts.

Remember: in Literature Town, everyone owes a debt to someone else, somewhere else, even if that debt is one of rejection, of defining oneself against, and not just 'as part of'. Don't cut up the village in neat but ultimately meaningless little squares: see it in its globality, and find the links between the parts. See the whole of what’s been written as connected in some way, through little paths and grand avenues, sometimes well-lit and sometimes obscure: those paths can be as informative as the texts themselves.

Oh yeah - and read, too: that always helps :)