Sacrificing Children On The Altar Of Literature

The two questions any author gets asked the most, are ‘where do your ideas come from?’ and ‘do you use real life people for your characters?’. If the answer to the latter is yes, the follow up question, is ‘do they know?’

The child psychologist Jean Piaget drew up his theories partly through observation of his own children. Sigmund Freud psychoanalysed his daughter Anna and though anonymised, she was the case study for “A Child Is Being Beaten” published in 1919. Neither author was challenged at the time over any questionable ethics, though some of Freud’s modern critics have since rounded on him, not just for the ultimate in Oedipal/Electra Complexes concerning his own daughter, but accusations of virtual incest through opening up her deepest intimacies on the analysand’s couch. 

Both authors would have likely offered up scientific method in any putative defence. However, fiction authors have no such recourse when frequently asked whether we base our characters on real life people. And while our attempts at anonymising (through fictionalising), may just about get us through condemnation for identity theft and lack of consent, when children are used for material that is feasibly an invasion of privacy too far.

I knew I wanted to become a parent, through observing my own childhood as a singleton with a certain dissatisfaction and some resolutions on how I might do it differently.  I was an observer by nature and writing seemed well suited to such a temperament. I started writing stage plays, but when my twin boys arrived. I switched to late night novel-writing since I could no longer devote the time hanging out at theatre bars networking. My early novels barely mentioned children, but now that my sons have attained the age of majority and fledged from home by attending university, I've turned my literary observations to writing about parenting and children. In doing so, have I betrayed their privacy?

The comedian Stewart Lee had a routine about now that he was a parent, his entire life was in service to his children, driving them around to play dates or watching kids’ movies with them, so that he had no real life material to draw on to create a new comedy routine (which of course he adroitly subverts by offering up plenty of comic evidence, eliding Scooby Doo with the political woes of our nation). When you become a parent, one of the things it does is prompt memories of your own childhood in offering perhaps a ready reference to apply to that of rearing your own children. But I had already covered this happenstance through my own reflections that had fed into my desire to become a father in the first place. I may not have always prefigured my parenting actions correctly, but I wasn’t taken by surprise. So the first childhood experiences I offered up to the altar of literature were actually my own. Not quite the scientific method of Piaget and Freud, but I do probably hold the intellectual and emotional rights over my own experiences.

But such content was not enlisted in isolation. There was an echo with the more recent layerings provided by having my own children. But a good deal of what I put into the novel were certain universals about children and in particular child development, rather than details that would identify and out my children as the raw material of the book. Piaget outlined developmental stages which all children go through as their brains mature and although his timeline for such phases has been challenged, the principle remains generally accepted. The same in my book, that language really only enters the picture once the child is able to take on solids through the resultant change in the anatomy of the throat. How we then gain words through imitation long before we know how they are spelled, before we acquire knowledge of the alphabet and the school-borne struggles of mastering the stroke of our pencil to write our letters. From these universals I could proceed to consider how we all acquire our personal forms of self-expression, how much it stems from our parents and how much it deviates as we are able to individuate ourselves. I don’t credit I am betraying any confidences in sharing some observations on these developments. Indeed, one of the arts of novel writing is to make its themes universal enough to speak to a wide diversity of readers. A novel that remains subjective to the experiences of the author is far more likely to fail to communicate. 

In real life I have twin boys. In my novel the protagonist mother has two girls. So my experiences standing on the touchline managing my twin’s Under-9s football team to an FA Fair Play Award couldn’t feed into the novel. However, the overweening ambition of some of the other parents stood there on the touchline screaming at their scions, did inform the novel’s contemplation of the hazy line between a child’s individuation and the parent’s overlaying of it with their own projections for the child, rooted in the parent’s own neediness or unfulfilled dreams.

I also have scenes set in the nursery school playground, but again the mother of girls demands a different depiction than my actual experiences of a father waiting to collect his boys at going home time. Though the playground politics of who talks to who and who shuns who, is likely a universal scenario, standing as a man huddling close to the smattering of other fathers among the preponderant women does ineffably change the dynamics. So while the portrayal of the fictional mother’s isolation reflected my own, I’m happy to report that the by extension isolation of her child, did not reflect the true status of my own twins who were perfectly blended into the social scene of the kids at their school. My fictional mother doesn’t even have the consolation I managed to utilise, of quietly imagining that I would assuredly be in possession of the best record collection of any parent stood in the playground, seeing as I worked in an independent record shop at the time. See, one doesn’t require the direct experiences of one’s own children to get into an infantile mind, one just probe’s one’s own stock of such behaviours.

Further novelistic reflections of pester power in the supermarket, or of the end of service for a teaching toy as all its peripherals are finally and unutterably lost, each represent my reflections looking back on similar incidents; they happened while bringing up my twins, but again there are dual refracting lenses, me as a father casting back to when I was a child so that the outcomes written about is a new synthesis, neither truly representing my childhood nor that of my twins. The choking on a raisin never to the best of my knowledge afflicted either of my boys, while the panic over the body dysmorphia engendered by dolls, was never any direct translation over from “Action Man”^TM, seeing as I wouldn’t provide my boys with anything military in the toy department. So a good deal of the work just comes from the imagination, rather than transliteration of actual events, that in another register might appear in a memoir or biography. 

And this is the rub and which returns us to the questions readers ask of authors. Novels do many things, but one of the most significant is that the author takes you inside the mind of his characters, someone likely to have different experiences and thoughts to that of the reader. But where do these characters come from? They come from the mind of the author of course, but ultimately authors are writing about themselves. They may pick characters seemingly diametrically opposed to themselves, but in doing so they are likely tapping into lesser seen parts of their own personality, exploring or imagining themselves in these guises. For a writer cannot write wholly outside of their own experience. Even if a writer employs an anecdote someone else told them, or something they read in a newspaper or saw in a film, it becomes part of them if it enters their stock of memory enough to be recalled when the writer decides to use it in a book. Second hand experience rather than first for sure, but still from within them. So I don’t believe I have pillaged the lives of my children for my novel, only myself. If I'm wrong in believing this, then I guess they will call me out on it. I'll let you know if that's the case.

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Meditation Ex-Cathedra : Flash Fiction

When the levee of my mother’s natal waters broke; when the champagne bottle was dashed against her cervix and started my baby hull moving down the rollers of the birth canal; when HMS neonate me was launched into the world, it had no concept of its future obsolescence and scrappage. Of its down the line replacement by another in the lineage fleet, bearing the same name but managing only to serve in effacing the uniqueness of its memory.

It spent its early days all at sea trying to cohere the view through the telescope provided by the visual cortex and processing chip of a brain. These cozening forces of ordinate and abscissa, plotting the flat earth co-ordinates of reality as fixed and immutable. Freud of course would have it that one is also unwittingly consumed by the perspective rendered extant by the sextant; your personal parental poles of latitude and longingtude. From the antipodes of father and mother, when there is a whole host of the rest of the world to explore and chart. Further palimpsested by majusculed school and prescriptive religion. Establishing a moral foundation erected like a hollow Gaudi edifice, with the dislocating wind blowing up a maelstrom through the upright interstices. 

Of the heritable venerable three questions for man, ‘Who am I?’, ‘Why am I here?’ and ‘What have I done?’, most who bother to interrogate themselves only get as far as grappling with the first one. The last is a matter for consideration solely on death beds and the second is forsaken because they fail to supply the context of their inevitable death through which all explorations would necessarily be refracted. They remain steadfastly progressively forward looking, rather than applying the singular teleological certitude to their thought processes. So inevitably they come to focus on their identities. The person they are during their brief sojourn on earth. Yet what is the point fixating on something that is ultimately perishable? They also reify love’s existence in order that they will not spend their sojourn alone, but again why would I devote contemplation on something equally fugacious? 

Author I took the antipodal approach. Placed myself in the full-length mirror. Over time studied the maculations of the skin, burst blood vessels, the ossific curvature, the protuberances and the loss of sinewy definition. No looking glass could reflect the loss of suppleness, the fitful sleep, the arthritic joints. The physicians had diagnosed my corporeal failings, I was now trying to diagnose myself for my readers. To offer them a speculum into their own being. But stood there in the mirror, pressing and pinching the flesh to see if the nevus had regular contours or not, scrotal bobbins cupped in my hand feeling the spindle for noduled swelling, I have no idea of whether I am of any assistance to my readers. As my words are released, I scrutinise them for their effect, but the letters are reversed in the mirror and illegible to me. The audience remains invisible, occluded by my eidolon therein the glass. The author dies twice over; once at the end of his life, the other every day in isolation. 

A Literation - Flash Story

Children carbon copied their creators. While the physical outcomes of the genetic wheel of fortune retained a whisper of protean unpredictability, speech and acculturation remained utterly undifferentiated from that of their parents. Glossal guardians, stagnant syntactical statuary. Consummate chips off the old blocks, kids were cultivated colloquial clones.

Initially imbibing milky morphology mutely with teat-stuffed mouths at the mammary, while mum suckles safe words for them. Sat at her knee, bottled blather iterated, infused and introjected. Mounted in the high-chair of babble, being spoon-fed more solid sonant syllables minced and mashed into building brick morphemes. Until the child evidenced an incipient ability to word string sentences for himself. From there on in, the parlance predisposed, perpetually prefigured and impervious to independent importation.

Scions were unable to shuck themselves from their die cast speech stamp. They artlessly echoed the same means of articulation as their extraction. Whatever their emotional bent, which like their physical features could lie anywhere on the continuum provided by the DNA chemical crap shoot, they were devoid of the vocal means for varying its expressive pitch.

The theories of Sigmund Freud darted back for favoured diagnosis, as Oedipal dissonances were played out in the most derisory fashion, since none had the diction to defy the discourse. Juvenile abstractions might fleetingly seem unregimented, but they were soon shunted along tramlines once terminology was brought to bear to transliterate them into tangible thought. 

Bilinguals were to some extent immune. For they could slip in and out of their twin vocabularies in any manner of their choosing. Thus was their language uniquely minted beyond predictability. So radical educationalists swept aside the Sciences and even English, in order to place primacy on second languages. But the rote inculcation by lifeless textbooks proffering limp assimilations of Jean-Paul’s first day at school, or Otto writing to his pen-pal, were no less arid than the way adolescents had acceded to their own mother tongues. Fluctuating between two stuttering fluencies furnished them neither felicity nor facility. 

Yet a few whippersnappers managed to strike out on discoveries of their own that enabled them to snap their linguistic shackles. They didn’t enter such a course knowingly in a spirit of seeking to expand their verbal palettes, but merely ventured into the neglected libraries- (there were no bookshops anymore) and picked up novels to read. They were swept along the unadulterated imaginations of authors and buoyed by exposure to the words therein which cast them free of their own constricted palates. They envisioned new horizons, disinterred wonderment and evolved the means to encapsulate it in voiced reactions of their own. Then they set to work writing books to liberate the next generations that would come after them. 

Iago Imago Magoo - Second Campaigner Challenge

The Challenge is:
Write a blog post in 200 words or less, excluding the title. It can be in any format, whether flash fiction, non-fiction, humorous blog musings, poem, etc. The blog post should:
include the word "imago" in the title
include the following 4 random words: "miasma," "lacuna," "oscitate," "synchronicity,"
If you want to give yourself an added challenge (optional and included in the word count), make reference to a mirror in your post.
For those who want an even greater challenge (optional), make your post 200 words EXACTLY!

*


Mirror mirror on the wall, who's fairest of them all?

Compared to you, I would opine the imago of the miasma-loving fly that emerges from the maggot boring through rancid carrion

Whose vanity table did you adorn originally, Tamerlaine's or Stalin's?

A dreary synchronicity of cruelty, but none that can rival my own waspish tongue

A lacuna in your logic that oscitates so achingly

How so?

A mirror faithfully reflects what it's confronted with does it not? Light and optics and what noptics...

Indeed

Your glass can tarnish. Your silvered back degrades. Your focal plane slowly unhinged, your vision is not so true after all

A tad less sharply focused, but then I redeem that with the tartness of my verbal judgements

Only, you are limited by the lacuna in your vocabulary

I credit I express myself adequately. Sufficient to cut to humanity's quick

Then a maven such as yourself would know that 'imago' has a further, more modern rendering?

You're aware Freud sniffed cocaine off my vitreous body 'for medical purposes', or so he claimed

I'm more Lacanian. His positing of the 'mirror stage'. So with this big, slobbery osculation, I'm agoin' to attain the ideal form of me

"C" by Tom McCarthy

Tom McCarthy's Booker Prize shortlisted novel "C" has been described as "experimental", "modernist" and even an "anti-novel" (by Christopher Tayler in "The Guardian"). I don't believe it is any of these at all, though it is still ambitious and daring enough to deserve carrying off the prize.

It is actually rather conventional in structure, portraying a fictional but highly credible character, moving through a recognisable historical period. Both narrative and subjectivity are absolutely linear, in that it traces the 24 year life of Serge Carrefax, in chronological order, through four main stages of his life. The period he lives through, from 1898 to 1922, sees huge technological advances culminating in the First World War, Einstein's theories of relativity, Freud's psychoanalytical theories, Eliot's "The Wasteland" and Joyce's "Ulysses". Thus accordingly the novel is suffused with modernism, but as a study of it and its legacies, rather than a modernist work in itself. The writing is limpid and tight, and though there are allusions and references aplenty, with some modest plays on language, the ambition is in the book's scope rather than any gamut of intertextuality.

However I believe one has to acknowledge an earlier defining epistemological moment just prior to the novel's opening, when Nietzsche and others in the face of science and rationality pronounced God to be dead. With the divine Clockmaker removed, now comes the search for the hidden codes and logic underpinning the world and gluing our human existence together. Through Serge, McCarthy resolutely shows up man's flawed search to answer these questions and thereby depth charges any possibility of a humanist philosophy successfully replacing the theological. For as voiced by an archeologist, "The mistake most of my contemporaries make is to assume that they're the first... that their moment of looking is somehow definitive, standing outside the long history of which it merely forms another chapter".

This is a conflict between the old and the new forces of modernity. A play staged alfresco at his father's school for the deaf, hints at the silver screen's imminent eclipse of the theatre by an insertion of a white sheet for projecting scenery upon. A war artist complains that the battlefield won't stand still long enough for his depictions, or that it is obscured by gas and cordite smoke, "how can you paint something when you can't even see what it is?" He is advised to photograph the scenes instead. On the one hand Serge takes the spa waters to clear up his intestinal problems, yet it is only a good seeing to by his earthy hunchback masseuse in a manner which Freud would heartily approve, which clears up both this symptom (probably provoked by the death of his older sister) and his viewing of the world as if through a membrane. To such an extent that he can join up with the nascent RAF as an aerial spotter in the Great War.

It is this second section of the novel during the War which is perhaps its strongest, both in terms of the interweave of motifs McCarthy deals in and in the reader getting inside Serge's character. He tries to replace the heavenly god with the distortions and shaping of space afforded to him by dog rolls and dives in the plane. By the flattening of the ground from his eerie, where armies of men look like ants and the trenches look like a labyrinth. But most significantly, by his desire to merge with the humming machinery and wires of his plane. The high death toll for airmen is something he welcomes, in his quest to embrace what he calls a "quickening". An unwitting Futurist man, indelibly tied to motorised machinery. But Serge cannot resonate with the periodicity of the machines, cannot match their frequency.

In addition to the new rhythms of machine-led pulsation, the novel considers the new architectural space, of pylons and subterranean cabling, man reaching for the sky and tunneling underground. Everything becomes a transmission, prefiguring the data overload of our current virtual world. The ancient Egyptian scarab amulet on which secrets were inscribed in order to disarm their gravity, "the scarab withholds the vital information even as it inscribes it?" underlies the book's drive. It's further concerned with encryption, trying to tease the meaning from seemingly chaotic signals, yet yielding only static interference, white noise, and a Babel of conflicting disembodied voices. In the post Great War world, French, British and Bolshevik agents and spies are trying to spin webs of deceit and intrigue to misdirect their rivals. Even Serge is unsure whether the mission he is charged with is genuine, or just some dummy activity. All information is to be monitored, just as every detail is logged and annotated on the archeological digs. But no one can differentiate the vital and the legitimate, from the false and the peripheral.

Insect imagery accompanies virtually every scene, be they flyers, burrowers or crawlers. And of course they too have antennae and buzz and drone like machinery. Their constant presence is both a litmus test for mankind's progress and a reminder of no matter how much we use technology to harness our environment, the creepy crawlies maintain their own humble adaptive pertinacity to also colonise the globe. When Serge overturns his car and is pinned underneath, he begs his rescuers not to remove his "carapace". This is akin to Kafka's cockroach in"Metamorphosis", only Serge has no layers of guilt or shame armouring him. Serge is trying to evolve into a future human, yet this early nod to cybernetics, like his earlier yen to fuse with the plane's fuselage, come to naught.

The book is undoubtedly a tour de force, but one that shows a real deftness of touch. It only stretches to 310 pages, where in other hands it would likely meander on towards 500+. It encapsulates a historical period economically, while inviting the reader to populate it with his own imagination, rather than leading us by the nose. It wears its erudition lightly as well. The strength of the novel is in its layering of symbols and motifs. Spun as finely as the silk Serge's mother has a cottage industry producing. The breadth of ideas displayed here are always handled by McCarthy in literary fashion, which is no mean feat, as in the hands of lesser authors, discursions would be made in order to handle bed them in. If the Man Booker Prize is for the 'best' novel, I really believe of the six shortlisted, this ought to be it.