On Literature and Teaching

  In 1881, a Brazilian writer named Machado de Assis published in book form what had been serialized in a Brazilian newspaper: The posthumous memoirs of Bras Cubas ( originally published in Portuguese as Memorias posthumas de Braz Cubas) . It was published in French in 1911 (the first translation of that novel), and only reached the English-reading world in 1953 (even today, the English-reading world is notoriously reluctant to publish translation of foreign works). In English it first appeared in an American translation under the name ‘ Epitaph of a small winner ’, a terrible title in many ways and a great one in others, but it seems that this first English translation was not up to scratch and so a new one appeared in 1997, and then two more in 2020, all under the new title ‘ The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas ’. Translating it was obviously difficult since so far there have been three different French translations, two Germans etc. – but the title The Posthumous Memoirs of ...

  Understated perfection:  a loving appreciation of Penelope Fitzgerald When Penelope Fitzgerald sat down to write her first novel, she was already into her 50s. Born in 1915, educated – among other places – at Oxford, having worked at the BBC, a theatre school and a crammer school, having had children and led a somewhat peripatetic life with her husband, she first published non-fiction and then a first novel in 1977, at the age of 52. After that came a remarkable series of nine novels, most of them short, some of them historical, several of them (partly) autobiographical. What happened? And more importantly: what makes her an exceptional writer? It's certainly not unusual for writers to, as the phrase goes in Writing Workshops, ‘use what you know’ to get started: use your own life, your own memories, the people you know or knew, situations you went through – then novelise it all, put it through the fictional grinder and there you go. Silly advice? Perhaps, but not in her ...

  Oscar Wilde: ‘It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors’ I was having a discussion with a student not long ago, about a novel and its main character, and how that character – a boy –   changes throughout the narrative. At some point, she exclaimed: ‘Ah, I see, this character has grown – he has developed!’. No, I said, it doesn’t pay to think that way. Instead, you should think: ‘That person has changed, that person has developed’- he’s not a character, he’s not made of cardboard or balsa wood, he’s not a Platonic shadow: he’s real, he lives and breathes like you and me. He’s alive . This idea that a made-up character, in a made-up situation, with made-up parents and friends and occupations, could be real, seems at first illogical. ‘No’ you say, he’s not real: he’s an invention, he’s got no blood in his made-up veins, no feelings in his made-up body and mind – he’s a character in a book of fiction, and as such he cannot exist for himself. His wo...

 There's a science-fiction short-story (by Asimov I think, but I'm not too sure - it could be David Brin) in which an Artificial Intelligence has been put in charge of the world. One of the things it does (among many, i.e. everything) is answer any question anyone may have: about the weather outside, the size of Mars, how much cake is eaten per day or what a word means. In short, the AI takes care of everything, including providing knowledge and information. In a time of Chatgpt, connected coffee-machines and self-replenishing fridges, I guess that story sounds old-hat. The point of it, though, is that one day the AI stops working - I cannot remember why, but it does. Forget about the food supply, machine-led agriculture, weather control and such considerations: the story focuses on what happens to people when their questions cannot be answered immediately. As you can imagine, those people are lost - they just don't know what to do, how to react, they have none of the knowl...