Being one of the masochistic types drawn to marathon running, much of my reading in the Spring, in the lead up to the Belfast marathon, was about running form, fartlek training, tempo runs and tribes of Mexican Indians (more of all this, perhaps, in later posts). A suggestion I came across somewhere,  is for the runner to state their ambitions in advance for the marathon they are about to undertake, the theory being that if you have told a lot of people that you plan to finish your marathon in a particular time, and on the day find yourself faltering and succumbing to the temptation of taking it a little easier, then the embarrassment of having to tell all these people that you didn’t make your stated time but instead ambled over the line 45 minutes later, will prove more urgent than the fatigue and stimulate you to renew or maintain your effort. And so, applying this to posting a Secular Sundays on a regular basis, I am planning to write a series of posts on the ordinary in literature. 

 
It is not unusual, in June, in Dublin, that one’s thoughts turn to the ordinary. Wednesday, Bloomsday, sees what is, essentially, the celebration of the ordinary – Ulysses being  the epic attempt to represent the modern consciousness immersed in and bombarded by the utterly ordinary. By doing this, and by doing this in the way he does it, Joyce of courses, creates something utterly extraordinary. This as I think I’ve probably conveyed in my previous posts, is something of a preoccupation of mine, it is what I am drawn to in literature – the creation of art from the ordinary stuff of the day.
In the posts to come, I will reflect on and quote from work that is concerned with Kavanagh’s now overly-familiar phrase, the habitual banal. Rereading permitting, I will show how the likes of Updike, Nicholson Baker and William Carlos Williams, among others, understand how the ordinary, ordinary things, interact constantly with ones consciousness, how the fact of being in the world is dependent upon and conditioned by our relationships to the things around us, not just the extraordinary things, or the beautiful things or the huge things, but the trivial things, the small things, the bloody, messy things. Things have a different impact upon us, depending on our humour, or moods, our circumstances at the instant we encounter them – our memory of events are often triggered, Proustian-like, by a thing: the taste of peanuts, a song, a car, a tree, an advertisement, a shoelace, and on, and on. 

 
Of course, the ordinary can be trivial and inconsequential and dull. I had the misfortune recently to read Richard Russo’s Empire Falls a book about ordinary small-town life (that somehow won the Pulitzer prize)but one so formulaic and predictable and flat that returning to it each day required an act of will and discipline far greater than that needed to get out the door for that hard tempo run on a rainy Tuesday, after a hard day’s work. The book is a good example of the negative implication of the word ordinary, ordinary as in mediocre, uninspired, cliché. What distinguishes the authors I have mentioned above, is how their depictions of the ordinary, astonish, educate, elucidate while also reflecting their own fascination with and wonder in the face of the ordinary. This is beautifully articulated by one of our greatest chroniclers of the ordinary, John McGahern, describing the origins of his short stories in the preface to Creatures of the Earth: 

 
These stories grew in the mind and in the many workings of the material, but often began from as little as the sound of a chainsaw working in the evening, an overheard conversation about the price of cattle, thistledown floating by the open doors of bars on Grafton Street on a warm Autumn day, an old gold watch spilling out of a sheet where it had been hidden and forgotten about for years. (vii, Faber & Faber) 

 
To use William Carlos William’s theory about the creation of a poem – McGahern’s stories come from a fusion of the poetic sensibility, with imagination, and, importantly the ‘thing’. 

 
Finally, two things, one: to proffer an excuse in advance of any delay between postings for the next month, or rather, three excuses, three excuses per day, in fact, coming as they do at about twelve, three and seven. Two: a quote to get the thing underway, from Nabokov: 
 His thoughts were characterized by the same monotony as his actions, and their order corresponded to the order of his day. Why has he stopped the coffee? Can’t flush if the chain comes off every time. Dull blade. Piffke shaves with his collar on in the public washroom. These white shorts are not practical. Today is the ninth – no, the tenth – no, the eleventh of June. She’s again on the balcony. Bare arms, parched geraniums. Train more crowded every morning. Clean your teeth with Dentophile, every minute you will smile. They are fools who offer their seats to big strong women. Clean your teeth with Dentophile, clean your minute with your smile. Out we file. (King, Queen, Knave, Penguin Classics, p.201)

As William Carlos Williams writes: “There is no end of detail that is without significance”. (‘Spring and All’, Imaginations, New Directions, p.139) Updike is a particular example of a writer who understands this, his follower Nicholson Baker indeed never gets to the set pieces, the logistics of getting from A to B are never overcome: 

 
I had my coat on when I remembered that I had forgotten to put on antiperspirant. This was a setback. I weighed undoing the belt, untucking the shirt, untucking the T-shirt from the underpants: was it worth it? I was running late. (The Mezzanine, Vintage  p 51) 

   
Getting from A to B is the substance of the work, the ideas are the details, the mundane details that lie between a to b are so varied, so multifarious and such a cause of awe and delight that, for Baker, they contain anything you could wish to write about. 
As the oft-quoted William Carlos Williams maxim goes – …no ideas but in things. (Paterson, New Directions,p.6) 
The thoughts or impressions then, born of the interaction of the poet and the poetic imagination with things, and the expression of this impression – that unique moment when the poet with all his ideas and his imagination, meet, say, a soda sign, or a fire engine, or in the case of Nicholson Baker, three generations of vending machines at the top of an escalator (the journey up which has taken up much of the novel), or a shoelace.  The ideas should inform the writer, but should not replace the ‘things’ in the foreground. 

 
Anyhow, these musings were prompted by an essay in a recent Guardian Review by pianist Susan Tomes, who discussed those troublesome ideas: 

 
Having ideas about the music was a process we had relished in our rehearsals. But gradually, through experience of performing, I had to learn how to let my ideas sink down into the music and disappear.
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2010/mar/20/susan-tomes-playing-piano-concerts) 

 
And all of this, in turn, brings me to Richard Powers, a writer who also has trouble with ideas, having too many, to the point that they, according to some critics, choke his prose. I enjoy Powers’s work but acknowledge the accuracy of this criticism. The mundane details, dialogue, human interaction, are often perfunctory, cliché-ridden and awkwardly rendered.  The ‘things’ are forgotten in the excitement caused by the ideas, and the desire to impart the ideas. I quote both here and below from pages 370 and 371 of Plowing in the Dark (certainly the worst of his books that I have read) but pick your page, really: 

 
Adie took charge of the mosaic saints. Spiegel delighted daily in watching her assemble the stones. As she turned high-resolution photographic reproductions back into low-res squares of coloured tile, the staircased edges of her own soul smeared and softened. (Picador, p.370) 

 
What?… I’ve no problem with the techie stuff but when he tries to apply it to the human, the incidental, we get the ‘staircased edges of her own soul smeared and softened’. Suggestions to what this actually means are welcome, and if anyone confesses to actually thinking like this please leave a comment, I am interested in knowing how one comes to realize the edges of their soul (leaving aside the whole ‘soul’ thing) is staircased etc, etc. 

   
To digress momentarily, I do not mean necessarily realism, I’m not arguing for realism over ideas, I am arguing for a convincing novelization of ideas. Thomas Bernhard, for example, does not, ostensibly anyhow, practice realism, nor, however, are his novels choked by ideas. Rather, the ideas constitute the impulse for his work, in his case, the impulse for every aspect of his work – the form, style, tone and subject matter – they are subsumed into the fabric of arresting, funny, vicious, ironic and compelling novels, novels that despite initial impressions are very much concerned with the getting from A to B, even if, like Baker, but in a very different way, the thoughts and details of getting from A to B can constitute the entire novel.   Once again to invoke Dr Williams, who articulates with greater efficiency and beauty indeed what I have been trying to say – they must be real, not “realism” but reality itself. (Imaginations p.117) 

 
So back to Powers, Powers chooses to write in the medium or genre of the contemporary American (realist-ish) novel.  So he puts people in situations whereby they engage in dialogue. This dialogue, however, is either stilted or ridiculous, or is essentially a series of lengthy theoretical digressions staged to deliver a message or idea, and are comprised of the kinds of things no one would ever say to each other (unless they do talk like that to each other In America, in which case this whole piece is invalid and I apologise): 

    
Destined to do? he asked. But the old irony hid itself under a bushel. She shrugged. Every person has something she’s supposed to do. I knew this when I was little, but I forgot. It comes back to you, though. That’s the beauty: you think you’re lost. You stumble around forever with-out knowing which way is forward. But you turn a corner one day and your work is right there, smack in front of you. Tracking you like the moon. (p.371) 

 
Seriously… 

 
This is the kind of thing that, in Elizabeth Costello, Coetzee draws attention to. Part of Powers’s problem is, I think, that he knows a lot about a lot of stuff – music, physics, technology and literature, and he tries to squeeze all of this theoretical knowledge into each novel, often at the expense of the novel . I am reminded of Hemingway’s comments on writing in Death in the Afternoon. He says that a writer should only write about what he knows, and that a good writer should know a little of everything. The little is important – Powers, I think, knows too much of everything.

It is another new release, however, that concerns me this Sunday – The Unnamed, by Joshua Ferris. Veteran readers of these virtual pages will recall that I talked about Ferris’s excellent debut, And Then We Came To The End, in my very first posts about work and literature. It is a book narrated in the first person plural, a device that initially seemed a little like a gimmick but proved to be essential to the fabric of the novel. The second novel, treacherous waters responsible for the sinking of many a literary career, also features what at first seems like a gimmick. The central character, a successful lawyer, is periodically wrenched away from his work and his family, from his carefully constructed life, by corporeal demands – he suffers from a mysterious condition that demands constant walking to exhaustion, followed by sleep. The man, Tim Farnsworth, will suddenly leave a room and walk, without stopping (even for a cold drink or some food), until, exhausted, his body stops and he sleeps where he falls. The first part of the novel describes the carefully constructed life and the gimmick seems designed to counterpoint this, to offer some trite message along the lines of taking things for granted and to offer up opportunities for comedy. As with the first novel, though, the gimmick becomes central, the gimmick is the novel – the condition gets progressively worse, the walks longer, until the walking dominates the man and he deconstructs his previous life, constructing a new one around the demands of his condition. Anyone who has experienced serious illness, either directly or indirectly, will recognize the ability of infirmity, the ability of the body, to upend a life and suddenly begin determining every aspect of one’s existence.
It should be clear, then, that we are into some interesting theoretical stuff, about body and mind, about the existence or otherwise of self and soul:

“He” or “It” or whatever you wanted to call it – but certainly not “I” he thought – still bellyached for food, needed water, complained of soreness in the joints and muscles. He tended to its needs while trying not to spoil it. He made every effort to remember a time when he was not just the sum of his urges. (The Unnamed, p252)

This, in a way, is frontier writing, internalized. The frontier is no longer a physical space, man has colonized more or less all of the physical space – the frontier has been pushed back from the physical and become internalized, the frontier is now between the known and unknown self, the space between mind and body, an individual self or mere highly evolved animal
In a review of this book in the New Statesman, the reviewer alluded to John Gray’s Straw Dogs and in particular the following passage:

In Benjamin Libet’s work on the ‘half-second delay’, it has been shown that the electrical impulse that initiates action occurs half a second before we take the conscious decision to act. (p.66)

I always understood this as meaning we were mere animals and the attempts to elevate the human beyond this, were deluded. The reviewer (I’ve forgotten the chap’s name and an admittedly brief search on the New Statesman’s website was unsuccessful) argues that the impulse governing our actions in this half-second is God and claims Ferris is arguing that God is making Tim’s body work. This while I suppose (grudgingly) is arguable it doesn’t cut it. It is our animal instinct – to presume a God would bother or have the time to move my hand from the keyboard here to the cold beer beside me is as arrogant as assuming we are somehow more than animal. Farnsworth, true does flirt with God (I believe in God now. Isn’t that something? P.228) but seems then to reject it. The ending though is ambiguous about the whole God question. On my reading, Ferris comes down on the side of the mind and body, the ‘self’ and our corporeal urges all being one and the same thing:

The soul is the mind is the brain is the body. I am you and you are it and it will always win. (p.233)

It is not just by following Farnsworth’s struggle with his body and the construction of a life determined by his corporeal needs that Ferris introduces and examines his theoretical stuff. The thing is that Farnsworth’s fate is ours, our daily fate, whether we work or walk or run marathons. The other characters in the novel, much as they think they have a controlled, constructed existence, are subject to urgent physical needs, needs which tend to exert a degree of control, almost surreptitiously, on a character’s so called real, or external life. His daughter’s overeating, his wife’s sudden and unexpected alcoholism, and a colleague’s overwhelming need to have a snake (the more deadly the snake the better, it seems) in the room when he has sex. Ignoring all the religious symbolism here, this urge goes on to have a profound effect on the course of his life. Man’s lot, it seems, is to be at the mercy of his animal urges, for all of his urges are animal. As John Gray says:

The I is a thing of the moment, and yet our lives are ruled by it. We cannot rid ourselves of this inexistent thing. In our normal awareness of the present moment, the sensation of selfhood is unshakeable. This is the primordial human error, in virtue of which we pass our lives as in a dream. (Straw Dogs, p.78)

A review in the Guardian likened the latter part of the novel to early Auster, and the name Farnsworth echoes, in its arrangement of vowels and consonants, Fanshawe, another who abruptly upped and left a life. The struggle with mind and body similarly, is a struggle that informs Auster’s work, from his early non-ficiton writing, notably ‘The Art of Hunger’ right through to Invisible. This novel is superior to Auster’s most recent offering, and though it is a flawed novel (as noted in both reviews I mention), Ferris manages to combine a substantial idea with a compelling narrative - rarely  a successful marriage(some of his critics -not including this writer- might offer Richard Powers here as an example). 

Speaking of resonances, there are also echoes of another writer’s work in this book, evoked by the title, a writer whose work depicts men, animals, entities, trapped between states of non-being walking relentlessly, compulsively, sometimes even in circles with no end, no goal, other than eventual expiration:

…I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on. (Samuel Beckett, ‘The Unnamable’ Trilogy, Calder p.418)

McGahern, in the essay ‘The Solitary Reader’, writes about how the nature of one’s reading changes, if one sticks with it, at a certain point. When young, we read for the escape, rather than the use of language or the ideas conveyed (even if it is the quality of these that allow, or facilitate the escape). All of us will identify with his description of ‘waking’ from being immersed in a book. One of the things that cause this immersion in a text is the evocation of place. Place is probably a little restrictive, by place I mean a place in time, as experienced or imagined by an author. This evocation of place is something that I certainly read for as a child – whether it was the rooms in 221b Baker Street (I’m terrified to see what Guy Ritchie has done to them) or Castle Rock or any of the other small Maine towns Stephen King depicted and then terrorised. While, as McGahern says, our reading experience changes as we develop intellectually, this evocation of place never ceases to be important – capturing the experience of poet and his environment in a fusion of time and place was William Carlos Williams’s poetic project. He believed the poem was a unique ‘thing’ birthed by the male and female elements of the poet interacting with the world, both natural and man –made.

McGahern’s great gift is certainly this evocation of place, evident obviously in his fiction and now, in his essays. The previously unpublished essay ‘Blake’s of the Hollow’ written about his favourite pub, is an absolute gem. Blake’s of the Hollow will undoubtedly experience a wave of strange, pale, socially awkward visitors (readers, that is) poking around, ordering a pint and mentally ticking off, from the remembered inventory, the lamps, “the ceiling and panelling” that are of “pitched pinewood” or the office that overlooks the bar and “could belong in a theatre or ship,” the snugs in the landing or the “patterned tilework of the floor,” not to mention the pint of Guinness or the “delicious sandwiches neatly cut into squares with generous measures of tea in the old aluminium tea pots”. The essay describes a pub but captures an atmosphere, a way of life, a moment in time, a time, for example, when one could arrange to collect one’s mail in the local pub. The essay is brief, but it may as well be a substantial short story, such is the cast of personalities and characters it conjures up (especially the man who comes, Thursday afternoons, to drink champagne and read the Financial Times, a short story all by himself), and the lives it suggests. Indeed, it is an essay, but if we were to visit Blake’s of the Hollow after reading this we would, no doubt, come away feeling slightly disappointed, or empty, no matter how little the pub has changed aesthetically (the kind of experience and slight disappointment McGahern actually describes in the next, also excellent essay ‘Dreaming at Julien’s’). It will not be as McGahern experienced and described, for that image was his and is now gone. Better, I think, not to go but to read the essay and reread it and enjoy the imaginative Blake’s and the lost world it suggests.

I am too full of turkey, and there are too many unopened bottles of Tyskie in the fridge, (not to mention the fact of a new baby demanding attention) for me to spend too much time typing this week. In fact, I just want to alert readers to some Christmas TV – the excellent Orson Welles season on BBC 4 continues this evening and ‘The Dead’, John Huston’s fabulous rendering of, arguably, the complete (perfect?) short story is on RTÉ tomorrow evening. As Fintan O’Toole wrote last week in the Irish Times, it is impossible now to read ‘The Dead’ and imagine Gabriel as anyone other than the magnificent Donal McCann.

Finally, some words from James Joyce to end 2009 – chosen, from ‘The Dead’, for absolutely no reason other than their simplicity and beauty:

The patting at once grew louder in encouragement and then ceased altogether. Gabriel leaned his ten trembling fingers on the tablecloth and smiled nervously at the company. Meeting a row of upturned faces he raised his eyes to the chandelier. The piano was playing a waltz tune and he could hear the skirts sweeping against the drawing-room door. People, perhaps, were standing in the snow on the quay outside, gazing up at the lighted windows and listening to the waltz music. The air was pure there. In the distance lay the park where the trees were weighted with snow. The Wellington Monument wore a gleaming cap of snow that flashed westward over the white field of Fifteen Acres. (Dubliners, Triad/Grafton p230)

This is what I wanted to do with my own stories: line up the right words, the precise images as well as the exact and correct punctuation so that the reader got pulled in and involved in the story and wouldn’t be able to turn his eyes away from the text unless the house caught fire. (Harvill, pxii)

And this from the essay ‘On Writing’:

…And this is done through the use of clear and specific language, language used so as to bring to life the details that will light up the story for the reader. For the details to be concrete and convey meaning, the language must be accurate and precisely given. The words can be so precise they may even sound flat, but they can still carry; if used right, they can hit all the right notes. (Call If You Need Me, Harvill, p92)

Rather than minimalism or brevity, Carver’s emphasis is on precision and on accuracy and it is this that makes, for me (and not always, but for the most part) Beginners the superior version, because the stories are more accurately rendered. The extra scenes, the extra images and the extra detail are essential to the story Carver is trying to tell, the scene, for example, in ‘A Small, Good Thing,’ in the bakery, with the soft warm rolls that I can taste and smell when I think of this story, makes this version an entirely different story than ‘The Bath,’ which doesn’t contain the scene, and therefore a more faithful, more accurate one – that is, more faithful to the impulse behind the story, the impulse that led Carver to write the story.
I will return to this point and to this impulse in later posts, but I want to dwell for a moment on the exceptions here, on the reason I say that for the most part Beginners is superior to What We Talk About…. Carver, as many have pointed out (in answer to the question of whether or not the author would have welcomed this collection) had published the restored version of some of these stories already, in Where I’m Calling From,, most famously perhaps ‘A Small Good Thing’ and ‘So Much Water Close to Home’ (twice filmed, incidentally, by Robert Altman in Short Cuts and less successfully by Ray Lawrence in Jindabyne) which become dramatically different stories. Some of the stories, however, he collected in Where I’m Calling From, without revising, or restoring them, implying that he preferred the versions that Lish had suggested. An example is the final story , ‘One More Thing’ in What We Talk About… which is far tighter and more effective and more accurate, than the version in Beginners. ‘One More Thing’ ends thus:

“I just want to say one more thing.”
But then he could not think what it could possibly be. (Vintage Classics, p. 134)

This ending accurately conveys the desperation of the situation presented in the story and the nature of its development, how things began to go badly, to slip out of control, not due to the charcaters deliberate, willed actions, but almost in spite of them. There is a sense of unreality and impotence about L.D. and the situation he finds himself in, and this is nicely symbolised by his desire to say something and his inability to identify and articulate this something. In the version in Beginners, L.D. does say one more thing, taking about love, however, it lacks the power and accuracy of the seemingly more ambiguous ending above.
It is not, therefore, a case, as it has been portrayed, of one version, the version Carver liked (Beginners) versus the bad version, the version nasty Gordon Lish imposed upon the young author. A good example of this is the story ‘Distance,’ in Beginners, or ‘Everything Stuck To Him,’ in What We Talk About…This story is also published in Where I’m Calling From, as ‘Distance’ but this version combines elements from both the original longer story and from ‘Everything Stuck to Him.’ I read both books concurrently, reading a story first from What We Talk About… and immediately afterwards in Beginners. Reading this story I was struck, again, by the more effective ending of the Lish influenced cut, however the extra detail in the main body of ‘Distance’, when the boy drives over to Carl’s to tell him he won’t be going hunting, was essential to the story. Carver, it seems, felt similarly and the version published in the collection Where I’m Calling From combines the extra detail in ‘Distance,’ with the shorter, superior ending of ‘Everything Stuck to Him’.
This ending, or the difference in both endings is a good example of the accuracy and precision that Carver strives for and indeed the positive role of an editor. Lish’s role has been maligned in some of the commentary that I have read, and many have expressed dismay at the extent of the influence an editor has over a completed text. I will go into this in more detail in my next posts, however, surely one of the roles of an editor, an essential role, is to provide some clarity to an author, to understand the author’s impulse and intention and help him achieve this. The ending of ‘Everything Stuck to Him’ is an example of the editor recognising what the author is trying to say and helping him get there with greater accuracy, an accuracy this author is always striving for. In this instance, certainly, Lish’s influence is what you would expect of an editor. This is the ending from ‘Distance,’ in Beginners:

Absolutely, he says. Put your boots on and let’s get under way.
But he continues to stand at the window, remembering that gone life. After that morning there would be those hard times ahead, other women for him and another man for her, but that morning, that particular morning, they had danced. They danced, and then they held to each other as if there would always be that morning, and later they laughed about the waffle. They leaned on each other and laughed about it until tears came, while everything outside froze, for a while anyway. (Jonathan Cape P176)

This is the ending, then, from ‘Everything Stuck To Him’ in What We Talk About…, the ending that Carver retained for the version of ‘Distance’ that he published in Where I’m Calling From:

He says, Put your boots on and let’s go.
But he stays by the window, remembering. They had laughed. They had leaned on each other and laughed until the tears had come, while everything else – the cold, and where he’d go in it – was outside, for a while anyway. (Vintage Classics P112)

We know, from the way the story is set up, that there were hard times ahead, and other women and other men, we know from reading the preceeding stories in the collection that this is what happens, almost always, invariably. It doesn’t need spelling out at the end, the story up to now, though not ostensibly sad, has been infused with the sadness of the unstated, subsequent hard times and other women and other men.

It often seemed to me, sitting quietly at the back of the lecture hall, as it did reading yesterday, that Professor Kiberd is assuming a position reminiscent of Ralph Waldo Emerson – calling for the emergence of an epic poet to describe ourselves to ourselves in a uniquely Irish way, requiring more than the superficial treatment of new Ireland in genre fiction (crime or chick-lit, which have prospered here of late, as Kiberd identifies). As Emerson urged, and celebrated with Whitman, Kiberd suggests that the new Irish epic poet (for poet read also novelist, dramatist etc) express contemporary ‘Irishness’ in a new or at least appropriate form, and that the new should be informed and perhaps inspired by the past, by history. This from Emerson’s Divinity School Address:
The new statement will comprise the skepticisms, as well as the faiths of society, and out of unbeliefs a creed shall be formed. For, skepticisms are not gratuitous or lawless, but are limitations of the affirmative statement, and the new philosophy must take them in, and make affirmations outside of them, just as much as it must include the oldest beliefs. (Page 96 of the Dover Thrift Edition of Self-Reliance and Other Essays)

Kiberd too urges the epic poet to bring scepticism to the mix, in the face of the new affluence and the ascendance to the position of ‘religion-of-the-week,’ or ‘ism-of-the-week’ of ‘the market.’
An essential part of contemporary Ireland is, of course, a large immigrant community and this is identified as a potential source for this new poet, or new voice. The old beliefs Emerson mentions, for Kiberd are the old Irish myths – of Cúchulainn etc, with whom, he suggests, our recent arrivals might engage and identify with – certainly a fascinating and exciting prospect.

Joyce and Beckett are identified, in the essay, as epic poets of their time, as they undoubtedly were. Both found Ireland too claustraphobic, however, and became the epic poets, the describers of their people, from exile. Kiberd neglects to mention this, and it is an important point – perhaps our contemporary epic poets are busy scribbling away in Australia, or South America – inspiration and clarity available having been freed from the bounds of proximity.

While Kiberd recognises that we have excellent writers, he correctly asserts that many of them write about the past. He would rather the writer look to the past, to an Irishness found in our myths (as Yeats did with Cúchulainn) and apply this or meld this somehow to the present. In the Banville interview in the same section of the IT, Banville, one of those writers Kiberd surely had in mind, is concerned with the past. He acknowledges this and explains why – it is because we don’t change. I am inclined to agree, and this viewpoint is no doubt inforned by his reading of John Gray. We don’t change, the surfaces change but, by and large, what we do stays the same.
Perhaps we don’t have any striking new forms of expression because the old forms still speak to us about oursleves. It is interesting to note that some of the things Yeats, Joyce and Beckett expose about us – racism (anti-semitism), hyper-materialism, hypocrisy and small-mindedness – are defining characteristics of ‘Tiger Ireland.’

Yes, I have been at the Ballard again, however, although it could well be, the lines above are not from a J.G. Ballard story. This is not a sales pitch from a store in Vermillion Sands. This is a quote from Ikea’s Irish website.

I received an email a while ago from fellow New Voice blogger Tony Lane, to let me know he had done what we all must do eventually, inevitably. He went to Ikea. He went in search of the transcendent experience that, he gathered from the general hysteria, awaits us all in Ballymun. He returned confused and somewhat deflated, all he found were aisles of reasonably-priced, flat-packed furniture.

The centre of J.G. Ballard’s Kingdom Come is just that, a centre. A shoppping centre to be precise and the dominant role it plays in the lives of the suburbanites in the novel is an accurate description of our reality – one only needs to walk through the Blanchardstown Shopping Centre, or Liffey Valley, or I imagine, Dundrum. While I admired how accurately Ballard captured this, I put the devotion of the Metro-Centre’s patrons and the role of the shopping centre as a vacuous, centre-less religion to be an exaggeration, necessary to drive the story. Foolish of me – Ballard’s work shows that he possesses a seemingly at least, slightly mystical, prophetic quality. He is, though, truly, a seer – he sees more clearly through the absurd layers and constructions we erect and call normality. I realised my foolishness when I read this, from the Irish Times (July 28, 2009):
“Linda Owens from Co. Kildare described herself as a ‘fanatic’, having shopped in Ikea in the UK, Italy, Austria and America.”
This is not a shop selling religious awakening, salvation or an elixir of youth or wisdom – it sells flat-pack furniture.
Ballard signals the danger in this:

“Half the goods we buy these days are not much more than adult toys. The danger is that consumerism will need something close to fascism in order to keep growing. Take the Metro-Centre and its flat sales. Close your eyes a little and it already looks like a Nuremberg rally. The ranks of sales counters, the long straight aisle, the signs and banners the whole theatrical aspect.” (105)

This again from the IT, describing the rally-like opening of the Ikea store:

“Smiling employees lined up to welcome excited shoppers, and distribute store maps and tape measures, as Irish Eurovision 1986 entrants Luv Bug belted out Abba’s Dancing Queen.”

The atmosphere is that of a rally and the evocation of fascism is not too far fetched either. Ikea use their Swedish nationality in their branding, giving them a flag, a uniform, an identity, Swedish fare in the food hall. But make no mistake, the branding may be Swedish but Ikea presents itself as an alternative to a state – visit the website and read about their ‘Family Ambassadors’ and their ‘Social Initiative.’ Yes, they sell flat-pack furniture.

Again, from Kingdom Come:

“Consumerism is the greatest device anyone has invented for controlling people. New fantasies, new dreams and dislikes, new souls to heal. For some peculiar reason they call it shopping. But it’s really the purest kind of politics.” (145)

Politics or religion. People don’t just purchase furniture, they make an emotional investment, they become evangelical, urging the people they meet to go, to buy furniture, to experience the food hall. The staff too become as proud and evangelical and in a sense, nationalistic:

“However another Ikea worker, Hayley McHugh from Australia, was in tears as the first customers came up the escalators at 11 am: ‘It’s just emotional. ‘It’s all too much,’ she said.”

Too much indeed, now, where’s that allan key?

In a predictable irony, the US may become a casualty of its own earlier policies. In the neo-liberal period, it was the chief architect of global laissez faire. Now that the era of global laissez fair is nearly over, the US could well prove more vulnerable than other countries to the shocks inflicted by de regulated financial markets. (xxi)

Reading this in 2002, we may have been tempted to write Gray off as a disgruntled lefty, after all, were we to think of ‘de-regulated financial markets’, and we didn’t think with that kind of vocabulary then, we would have expained to Mr Gray that because of this free market, we were buying up second and third homes like sweets in a pick-n-mix, apartments in Florida and BMWs. Now, of course, our coffee break conversations frequently refer to de-regulated financial markets and toxic assets and triple A ratings, and no one can sell their Beamers.
Which brings us to the inevitable question – so what’s the solution. Well, the ideal solution is no longer available – basically, it was not to have come this far in the first place, as Gray argues in Black Mass or Straw Dogs, we were happier as hunter-gatherers. His theory is that all our utopian impulses – that the world will be perfect if unity is realised – are incompatible with reality. We are human, a particular species (albeit highly evolved, but also incredibly violent) that behaves in the same way, that is, differently. What works for some of us, won’t work for others, a law to unite us all is impossible, one religion, one political system, one economic system, one social structure – we can’t escape boom and bust economics because we can’t escape being human, and economics relies utterly on human decision making, on confidence and sentiment. Humans are by no means rational, you can’t take the emotional human motivations out of our decision making.
My colleague Keith, in his fascinating post on this site, delineates the narrative of GUT, a utopian project based on the notion that we are moving on an upward, teleological narrative towards some promised land of absolute knolwedge. Even if we did achieve one unified theory that explained all, we would still continue to be human. Keith argues that religion would have to be reviewed, and indeed you would think so, but of course it wouldn’t make the slightest difference to religion because religion is based upon a leap of faith – there will always be people leaping all over the place, in all kinds of directions. Darwin should have done for religion, but religion, by and large, ignored or footnoted him. As Gray argues, we would be better off abandoning this search and concentrating on enjoying the ride, on enjoying being human, on enjoying what our endeavours have realised, and maybe point our scientific endeavour, not upwards, but sideways. Our march towards scientific progress has seen not increased happiness and peace, but unprecedented violence and war and mass death. The move towards unity always, as was proved in the modern era, involves discarding or ignoring the awkward, the ugly or the clumsy – whether we are talking about equations, theories or people. The move towards unity leads to fascism, we need only think of Ezra, in Rapello, spitting invective out into the world.
Which leads me back to Kerry, in a way. The message I take from Gray is that life needs to be looked at from a different perspective, with different goals in mind, goals which might seem negative – there’s no point in progressing, or the “no-growth economy” he suggests as a potential model in False Dawn – but is actually a call to enjoy the life around you, it’s a call to simplify. This too seems to be the message of the book I came across in the lovely Killarney Bookshop – a tiny shop with a great range of books. I was attracted to Yoko Ogawa’s The HouseKeeper + the Professer (the plus is important) by the title – all I could see was the book’s spine on the ‘new titles’ shelf. The front cover carried an endorsement by Paul Auster, rare enough and usually a good indication that the book will be interesting. The style and, at times, perspective of the novel are reminiscent in a way (and in no means a derivative way) of Auster himself, a point made by Eileen Battersby in her review of the book, something I subsequently came across. The book is interesting, and beautiful and fantastic – buy it and read it.
Ogawa too suggests looking again at life. We are all in some way or another irrevocably marked by a trauma in the past, or the trauma of the past. We are moulded and determined by it – as are our lives. This, though, does not have to be negative, we merely need to reevaluate each day, to seek out the new opportunities to interact with our environment and in our relationships within the manifold constraints imposed upon is, and new dimensions in each day – we need to play with the notion of time and space, to exploit it and explore it. Ogawa uses two wonderful devices – involving mathematics and memory – to achieve this in her tale. By examining the potential for new dimensions within the time we are given, whether it be a day or eighty minutes, by reevealuating our expectations, and much like Auster at his best, or Murakami indeed, by an attention to the simple tasks and the simple joys afforded by the unlikeliest of mundane tasks, we can affect our identities.
This is a simple narrative, written simply, shot through with an arresting, challenging complexity of thought, a rare thing indeed, and a lucky find.

In my last post I also touched on the curious idea of realism, and quoted a line from Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, that mentioned the uneasy relationship between ideas and realism. I have been reading Saul Bellow’s short (ish) stories of late and, as James Woods argues in the introduction, Bellow in fact is a writer who managed very well to combine both ideas and realism. In fact Bellow’s writing is essentially about fusion – America and Europe, Ideas and Realism, High and Low and so on. Bellow’s stories, so rich in detail, and especially physical detail generally eschew what Amis has someone describe somewhere in The Information (I did try to find this line, but it’s a big book and the golf is on) as the necessary getting from A to B. A concession to realism that Richard Tull is unwilling to make in his ’difficult’ novel.
Woods argues: “His prose is densely “realistic,” yet it is hard to find in it any of the usual conventions of realism or even storytelling. His people do not walk out of the house and into other houses – they are, as it were, tipped from one recalled scene to another – and his characters do not have obviously “dramatic” conversations. It is almost impossible to find in these stories sentences along the lines of “He put down his drink and left the room.” These are at once traditional and very untraditional stories, both “archaic” and “radical”.” (Collected Stories, xvii)

It could be argued that this represents the position that Bellow finds himself in – an urban Canadian-American, (maybe not, like Augie March, “Chicago born” but a Chicagoan certainly), but rooted in an archaic European tradition, an intellectual concerned with the rythms and cadences of the American street.
But that’s enough undergraduate waffling for one week, I’m off to watch the golf.