“ – the dangerous words, the padlocked words, the words that do not belong to the dictionary,
for if they were written there, written out and not maintained by ellipses,
they would utter too fast the suffocating misery of a solitude …”
Jean Genet
Introduction to “Soledad Brother – The Prison Letters of George Jackson”
As a fiction author, I have to nail my colours to the mast of metaphor. For who would want to read a novel which read something like "He did this. Then he did that"? without any metaphors and similes and images to bring the action alive? Even speechmakers resort to metaphors rather than just providing a literal presentation of the message it is they want to transmit. Hell, some scientists indulge in metaphor to communicate their abstruse mathematical equations when translating them to effects in our reality.
And yet, we have to acknowledge a fundamental paradox at the heart of our reliance on metaphors in what it says about language itself. Metaphors and similes express things in terms of something else. These two things cannot be the same, can't be mere homonyms for one another, otherwise what would be the point (other than a very short list of two). Now we have form for this, seeing as our dictionaries which provide and define our vocabularies for us, also define words in terms of other words, which themselves can be looked up and, well defined in terms of other words in the dictionary. (You can look up words to find their etymological roots, usually Anglo-Saxon/ Norman-French, Greek or Latin, but sometimes words have shifted away from these original root meanings, like a decaying half-life, so you are non the wiser: 'screen' means both to hide something behind it, as well as to project something upon it, fundamentally contradictory).
The dictionary definition of our words forms a perfect closed circle, except for the constant change of word usage which means it's still closed, but considerably less than perfect. There is no basecamp of primordial words from which all other words derive. There is supposedly an Ur language, the first ancestor of human language, but we don't know what it was. So there is no rooting magnetic core at the heart of language against which all words can be defined. And when we employ metaphors, we face a similar lack of solidity. Take the humble simile, describing something as 'like' or 'as' something else: his aspirations were as vaporous as a plane's contrail. Aspirations are an abstract concept, therefore in a physical or material sense they can't be like anything else. But that's okay, we're saying they're vaporous anyway, like the short-lived exhaust trail of a passing airplane. And there's the nice bonus of aspirations being aimed skywards to raise us from our current state, matching something skywritten by the plane. But both aspiration and contrail have other associations; the pollution of the burned plane fuel; the hanging contrail evidencing a plane that is no longer in sight; the possibly political, social or advertising fostering of one's aspiration. Is aspiration a noble mental construction, or does it share the more bodily drives of ambition or appetite? So in fact the humble simile more approaches a Venn Diagram - what they share where they overlap, still leaves great chunks of their structure that have nothing to do with each other.
A Venn Diagram yesterday
Because the overlap of shared meaning is a fraction of the two wholes, this makes metaphors rather hard to land perfectly. In focusing on the shared meaning between the two words, it calls for an obliteration of the other shades of meaning and association of the two words. Many metaphors don't stack up to an even cursory reading. I have just read and reviewed two novels in which most of the metaphors were nonsensical yoking of images together - one of the authors was, I think, doing this deliberately, although I couldn't see to what end.
So is the conclusion that language is eternally and internally referential without ever being able to settle on a single definitive interpretation of a sentence's meaning? Well in one sense yes, but while this is useful in fiction where we are appealing to the imagination of forms that don't necessarily accord to the evidence of our eyes and our understanding of reality, it's not terribly useful in spoken communication (or increasingly in communication online) when we are trying to transmit ideas or an argument unambiguously.
In his book "You Are Not Human", Simon Lanchester asserts that the origins of our alphabet used important notions of man's reliance on hunting, on different animals and tools for the kill, to give shape and name to the earliest letters. This makes sense when you think of the earliest cave paintings being chockfull of images of animals and their hunters who looked to imitate their habits in order to get up close to them (imitating their calls, dressing up in same animal skins etc). Therefore there was a close relationship between letters, the sounds those letters made when combined into words and what those words were actually expressing: letters about animals and hunting, forming words aggregated into sentences that were talking about hunting. However, when those alphabets were taken on and transformed by seafaring nations like Phoenicia and the Ancient Greeks, they became stripped from this meaning. The earliest surviving records of these alphabets are found mainly listing mercantile inventories. The magical imaginations behind the hunting/animal alphabet are replaced by a far more prosaic numbering and categorising based alphabet. The sound of our words no longer bear any relationship to the meaning of those words. And this is why we are yoked to the notion of metaphor. We don't have the word to express directly in order to convey the precise meaning, so we have to try and illustrate its meaning in terms of something else is shares a partial quality with.
Animals still have a formative role in our language, just consider children's alphabet primers, how many of those 26 letters are illustrated with an animal - 'Z' is for zebra etc. But we have severed the animals from our former reverence for them as expressed in our very language. Now we have a mercantile and categorising relationship to animals, as food, pets, predatory threats to our farms or huntable just for pleasure, so that our very language both provides a threat to animal survival and, as Lancaster argues, to our fellow man as we dehumanise groups through animal metaphors, 'Rats', 'Dogs', 'Pigs', 'Vermin', 'Snakes', 'Worms' etc.
I was delighted when Anna Burns' novel "Milkman" won the Booker Prize for 2018. From my review video below you can see I was rooting for it to triumph.
However, I was surprised to see it so often described as an experimental book. It's a novel that works entirely through its language, an everyday speech (albeit lyrical in parts) that is restricted whereby certain words and concepts are not permitted for political reasons. This is what i admire so much about the book, that everything emerges from its language. Anthony Burgess did a similar thing in his book "A Clockwork Orange", creating a whole new slang language for his youth gangs to speak in. But like "Milkman", the language remains consistent and it's a question of the reader getting used to the vocabulary of these languages and then passage through the novel becomes easier. Therefore I'm dubious that this makes either novel experimental. What they are is unconventional. What do we mean by experimental novels? I'm not sure it's a term that has much use to us in terms of better understanding the literature we read. Often it is used as a term of abuse; that somehow the author didn't have a clear idea in her head where she was going with the concept, or where it was going to end up, or that it's somehow unfinished or just a doodle, rather than a fully realised work. I reject these for the following reasons; If author, editor and publisher deem the book fir to be published, then it is finished; while there are plenty of authors writing mainstream fiction who start their new work without having a clear plan from beginning to end of the plot, because they like to see where their dialogue with their characters takes them and the book. It's what we call 'Pantsers' as in seat of the pants writers. Yet the concept of experimental is fraught with problems. How many formalistic conceits (or devices) does it take to make a book experimental? I loved Tony White's novel "The Fountain In The Forest", which uses mandated language it has to get into each chapter, in this case taken from the solutions to the Guardian Quick Crossword from a specific month during the 1980s. It also has chapter headings from the French Revolutionary calendar that briefly swept away the Julian one we use. But other than those two elements, it is a police procedural on the theme of policing dissent and political protest. Are those two elements enough to make it experimental? Another thing about experimental books is that the formalist conceit can only be used once to be considered genuinely experimental. If those that follow use the same device, it is no longer truly pathbreaking. So BS Johnson's 1969 book "The Unfortunates", in which the pages are in a box and the reader can choose their own way through by choosing which chapter to read next, is I think 'experimental', though I have no idea if anyone beat him to the punch previously. Those digital novels where you can choose the your path through the book are the same, only they operate with digital rather than analogue technology. BS Johnson himself is an interesting study in the concept of experimentalism. He called himself an avant garde writer rather than an experimentalist, but across his oeuvre, his books perhaps not unnaturally, varied in the amount of experimental conceits they employed. "House Mother Normal" for example is of similar form to Rashomon, many different perspectives describing the same event they all share as witnesses, but Johnson was beaten to the punch by Ryunosuke Akutagawa by 54 years. I made a video discussing the variable levels of experimentalism by Johnson across his oeuvre here. Finally I would offer you the example of Mark Danielewski's novel "House Of Leaves" which I read as a highly experimental novel that used words and sentences as architecture on the page to give clues or echo the architecture of the house at the centre of its story. I wanted to see what other readers were saying and was surprised at how many lauded it as a great work in the Horror genre, a notion that never even crossed my mind. What could be better than a book that works both as a high literary formalist work AND a genre piece? And yet, I got to musing as to whether it does work for most across both; if it never entered my head that it was a genre work, just as it seems not to have entered the heads of many of its fans that it's a work of high literariness, then can it be said to have been successful as either, at least for each reader who had a blindspot as to its other literary face? So while experimental work is never just tossed out in half-arsed fashion, the uniqueness of each experimental conceit disappears the moment it is realised, while there is no metric for when formal conceits weigh enough to render a book 'experimental'. I'm just not sure it's a useful term at all. And I speak as someone who has been called an experimental writer and whose current book "Three Dreams In The Key of G" has several formal innovations, but I have no idea if that classifies it as 'experimental' because there is no measuring gauge. I think we all confuse experimental for 'non-conventional' and it is perhaps an indictment that all us wordsmiths can't come up with a better word for just what it is we do than 'experimental'
In my new novel, one of the main metaphors is that of writing. But it is not a book about an author or the act of writing itself, I always feel that is rather self-indulgent. It is more about the role that language plays and how it works (and more significantly how it transmutes) when written down.
In the late 1990s, all over the globe there was the race to decode the human genome. To set down the language of every one of the 20,000 genes (out of the 3 billion we possess) that constructs and formulates us. Despite the complexity of the DNA molecule, there are only four chemical bases that bond with one another to form genes. This being chemistry, these four bases have conferred a letter abbreviation to stand for them, so the DNA ‘alphabet’ contains just four letters, ‘A,G,C &T’.
Yet from such a small palette, a myriad of chains of these four letters spells out the complexity of DNA, genes and ultimately us. Our bodies and our consciousness. The human genome is one of the 3 voices of my novel. Being inanimate (at least in the pre-protein expression state), the genome cannot speak for itself, but in the novel it uses our computers it is hooked up to, in order to berate, challenge and bait us; we may have a 26 letter alphabet with which to express every complex idea and invention we’ve ever had as a species, but we get nowhere near approaching the intricate complexity of the DNA molecule and its mere quartet of characters. To the genome, it is as if the alphabets are reversed, we humans only have 4 letters to work with, while it leaves us in its wake with a full complement of 26 characters to permutate meaning from.
The genome wryly comments that its mechanism is the polar opposite from Medieval Monks and Jewish scribes transliterating perfect copies of liturgical texts; one error in transcription and the whole volume is junked, whereas the genome relies on misprints in order to foster variance and mutation to drive evolution. The modern age has come upon the genome with the human desire to ensure there are no errata in its transcribed language and if there are, they can be corrected through science. It is no longer sufficient to operate at the level of the word and the sentence. Now there is a need to drill down to the letters that form the words, as the very DNA of the words themselves.
Online in the virtual world, you are also dealing with code. With hyper-text and binary computer code that also combine to project personas and people and ideas and well, everything. Just like with genes, hypertext can code non-sequentially, unlike our plodding written syntax of predicate, verb, object noun. The second voice of the novel ‘exists’ incontestably online, but it is entirely unclear whether that equates to a real person in actual life. It is a persona that only announces itself through the electronic written word, yet it appears to present feelings, opinions and have dreams. But can this language be trusted? And it seems to fail to obey the laws of time as it evanesces and disappears from view, only to reappear elsewhere, like the Cheshire Cat.
The third voice is a mother who confides into her journal in order to retain some vestige of adult conversation, having been surrounded all day by two young daughters. But the pages of her journal are out of chronological order. The development of her daughters which proceeds in a fairly fixed sequence controlled by their genes, is fractured in the non-linear reportage of her writing. Where she lives in sectarian Northern Ireland, murals, colours and the visual image out-trumps the written word. In trying to shield her daughters from the violence, she is trying to assert the primacy of the written over the visual.
But all three are unconsciously writing part of one of the others. The online voice is threatening to use the open source data about the human genome, to undertake some radical genetic engineering of her own. Which is possibly why her compound is currently under siege from the authorities, an event followed online by the mother far away in Ulster. And she herself is battling with the stages of maturation pre-programmed in her daughters by their genomic programme, trying to support their development, including helping them to learn to write.
So this is a book about language and writing, but it is not about writers. It is about a pre-coded language, working away at the unconscious level. And it is when this writing goes wrong, when there are errata, it can produce dire consequences. A mutation changes the replicated code within a gene and can lead to a debilitating genetic condition. The mother is stymied in trying to trace the development of her second child, when the journal reporting that of her first child is shuffled out of order. While the online written broadcasts to help save fellow souls, has attracted the wrong sort of attention and has lead to a siege that is likely to end catastrophically, pursued by men with three-lettered acronyms stencilled on the back of their flak jackets. Men whose lives are entirely ordered and prescribed by their three-lettered alphabets such as FBI, ATF, DEA. Her online posts are attacked by viruses and digital interdiction that unravels the very letters of her typed words.
We are all written, yet none of us are characters in a work of fiction.
So my novel "Three Dreams In The Key Of G" was officially launched at Burley Fisher Books in Hackney with a reading and then hour long discussion between me and fellow author Lee Rourke about the book's themes; reality and fiction, feminism and the patriarchy, biological determinism and culture, consciousness and imagination and the role of language.
In conversation with Lee Rourke
Extract
Watch out for some big news about the book to be revealed next week!
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 webase 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.
Absolutely nothing. Fiction can only tell us about fiction. But that can offer us rewards too, in addition to the entertainment and pleasure value of reading a novel.
No fictional character ever existed in real life. Not even in Historical Fiction which takes real people from history for their characters. The Historical Fiction novel creates a version of the real person to suit its narrative needs. Even memoir, which purports to be a true record, is fictive, in that any human life, while unfurling chronologically, is not experienced as such and any written narrative imposes retrospective order and pattern on a life that is likely to have been lived oblivious of them. The subjects of memoirs, only head towards a destiny, an outcome elicited by the end of the book, through the narrative’s arrangement, no less than with fictional characters.
So we follow a novel’s characters through their lives and events which never actually happened, or versions of actual events. To what advantage? Well in our so-called ‘real world’, fictions abound. Firstly you have phenomena such as the spin of politicians, the dark arts of advertisers, the myths and fables of religious preachers, which an appreciation of fiction might possibly provide some ability to detect and parse. Fake News anyone? We’ve been reading it for years, only in an already avowedly admitted fiction.
But deeper than that, you have the notion of ‘hyper-reality’ which affects us all. Our very own memories, experiences, elements of our own identities and how we see ourselves, may have originated externally rather than from within, though we have absorbed them and unwittingly ascribed them to all our own mental work and personal experience. If you hear a point of view of an argument that speaks to you, you may well remember it and roll it out in future discussions without attributing it to the original citer, not out of wilful plagiarism, but more likely because that argument has settled down so comfortably in your psyche, you come to believe you thought of it yourself, or at least that it is very much seared into your marrow. If someone tells you an anecdote and you trip it out in future company, are you careful to frame it as a story told to you by someone else? Even if you are, how do you know it really happened to them exactly as they told it, or even that they too haven’t borrowed it from the person who first told them? None of this really matters in terms of consequence, but it reveals the mechanisms by which we partly acquire and retain information. On one level that anecdote becomes part of my experience because it resonated enough for me to remember it; on another level it was never part of my experience because I never lived its story. Just as with fiction and its imaginary characters.
So fiction could help us unravel the more direct experiences for ourselves, from those imported ones. This could be particularly acute for things we absorb more passively than a friend telling us a story, but from films, or reading a news story, or the dread advertising and politics implanting ideas we later imagine we originated. Think about how we may acquire our identity for example, when we explore commonalties with others in our ‘tribe’. Some of those perceived shared values will undoubtedly originate from inside you, but when the historical and political dimensions are added, such as how your group is excluded or oppressed, or viewed in a certain light by other tribes, have you come up with all those connections yourself, or have they been supplied by the commonality that unites you all together? The historical and analytical context is held by the collective and passed on to you so that it informs who you are and where you derive from. Then you plot your own experiences against its matrix.
Since narrative provides pattern and order on the events it portrays, this can mirror the same techniques we use to make sense of our actual world. Human nature craves pattern and order in order to render a familiar and negotiable landscape in which we move through. Imagine the menacing chaos if the everyday was not recurring and cohesive, our flight or fight reflex would be constantly triggered every minute, with every step we took. It would be exhausting. Our evolution has raised us from the minute to minute awareness of threat, experienced by all animals except possibly those at the top of the food chain. But in order for it to have done this, we have constructed hugely elaborate fictions to regulate our environment, to make it predictable and readily readable.
Our perception system is not the one way directional of what the eye sees, the brain interprets. Rather it is largely the other way around, the brain has preset templates of what the eye should be seeing, so that the eye is really only scanning for variation from that normative vision. Pattern and familiarity are thus fundamental to our perceptive functions. And this is fine, but there also exists both the opportunity to look beneath the pattern and arrangement of both our actual environment and also to somehow elucidate its reciprocal relationship with those templates in our brains. To probe the fictional elements inbuilt into the structure of our ‘reality’. Fiction can echo the analytical wavelengths to reach some of these realisations, for narrative too is predicated on order and pattern. It can show up the processes by which we manage to obfuscate our own fictional creations, which we have managed to install as a hard and fast reality over and above ourselves. Challenging that self-reinforcing feedback loop. That way lies madness? Bring it on I say, who knows what illuminations it may yield us.
The other thing fiction can explore is a language. For words are all a novelist has, their only tool. Yet language itself is a pretty blunt tool, especially when it comes to its primary function, that of communication. JK Rowling, Jonathan Franzen and Martin Amis all speak the same language, yet produce wildly divergent types of books from each other (even taking Rowling’s adult novels, not her writing for children). Readers speak the same language as the writers whose work they’re reading, unless reading in translation, but the range of possible response is myriad; if different writers can’t agree on a single method of communication within the novel, what chance the poor readers? We all speak the same language, but how we interpret it is almost infinite.
In ordinary conversation, speakers need the cues of facial expression, gesture and inflection to interpret each other’s words. For example if someone says “that man looks nice” while pulling a face, the listener realises that the speaker means the man doesn’t look nice at all. Then you need context as well. If a speaker says ‘he did this, then he did that’, is she speaking about her father, her boyfriend, a mugger or her pet dog? You need something establishing who the subject was, or failing that, a reference to digging up a bone might place it as the dog, unless she happened to be speaking about a scene of crime technician or an archeologist. Well you do at least always get context in a novel. When someone says they are hungry and need to get some food, they are communicating a pretty literal state of affairs as they are experiencing it. They may additionally employ a metaphor for emphasis, such as saying they’re so hungry they could eat a horse. So everyday speech can be either literal or metaphorical, whereas writing in a novel is always metaphorical, because the people & the situations are always imaginary. And here we face the problem of language in the novel. Even though a novel can provoke an emotional response in the reader, (tears, laughter, irritation, rage etc), authors cannot write actual emotions. They can only set down words that approach emotions, that represent emotions, not the actual emotions themselves.
The artist René Magritte produced a painting called “The Treachery Of Images”, consisting of a pipe and the caption “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (This is not a pipe). His point was you couldn’t smoke his pipe, since it was an image of a pipe not a real object. Additionally it wasn’t just an image of a pipe, it was a painting of the image of a pipe, so the object if anything is a painting, not a pipe. But consider this, without his helpful caption smeared on the canvas, would the layers of meaning and reflection upon images and objects still exist for the viewer, or is it really only cued up by the linguistic element of the painting? In which case the material object is as much a piece of literature (commentary/question/philosophical axiom), that is a text, as it is a painting? Yet the text is only commenting on the image/symbol of a pipe. The metaphorical nature of the painting rather relies on the caption and the title existing in words. You can’t paint or write pipes, only their symbol, their referents. Now consider this for something that doesn’t even have a material existence such as emotions. (for more on this)
What is fiction for? It exists to entertain us. With the happy boon of potentially enabling us to question the real life in which we exist.
Marc Nash/Google Images "The Treachery Of Language" 2018
Magritte's painting has the caption "this is not a pipe". In doing so he is admonishing/advising the viewer that it is not an actual pipe, merely the representation of one in painting. Yet there is a further distancing layer than that even, in that it is a painting of the image or the symbol of what we mean by the word 'pipe'.
Marc Nash's version is that whatever the treachery held by imagery, there is further treachery upon treachery, when you introduce language into the picture.
Firstly let's not overlook that without Magritte's caption painted on the canvas, the painting would have far less meaning to transmit. This painting without its words, would be a fairly contextless painting of a pipe. It is only the injection of language through its caption that transmits Magritte's meaning, as it sets up the resonance through the paradox it presents.
But Nash points out language is equally treacherous. The word 'pipe' does not conjure up a singular, universal image. Magritte's pipe burns the solid state of tobacco and produces gas in the form of smoke. Nash points to a whole host of pipes who don't deal in solid states at all, but channel the passage of fluids and in some cases, like a car exhaust pipe, gases too.
Apart from a sprinkling of onomatopoeic words, few of which are employed as object nouns (most are sonorous verbs or objectless exclamation nouns such as 'boom'), the sound of a word bears no relationship to its meaning. It is this disjunction that makes language treacherous. Without the visual image Magritte provides, we would have no idea if 'this is not a pipe' refers to something not being a smoker's pipe, or a hosepipe, some duct piping, a drainpipe, an oil pipeline, a sewer, the outside of the Pompidou Centre, or a pipe bomb.
Magritte relies on language to contextualise his painting, but in doing so undermines it at a stroke. It is language whose treachery far outstrips that of images. Images and their referent symbols are nothing without the labelling of words grouping them together as 'universals'. Yet it is that very universalising that reduces much of the essence of things, grouping together broad categories of objects which have significant differences one from another. Can you smoke a sewer pipe? You can light it and it would likely explode from the gases passing through. A literal approach to the word sewer pipe would be fatal in such a case. Can you pass water through a smoker's pipe? Well only if it was one of those comedy bubble-blowing pipes perhaps. And the ingenuity of the crack smoker, who forges a crack pipe out of anything that resembles a piece of tubing, merges the two 'universal' meanings of the word 'pipe' into a single function.
Now Magritte's work has led to self-reflection on the image within the art world, but there has been far less investigation in fiction of the treachery of language; of the dissociation between the sound of a word and its meaning. Consider how we acquire language - as a child language is modelled for us by adults and the child imitates those sounds. Over time the child starts cohering those sounds to associate them with specific words which further will be constructed together into sentences. By age 2 they will have a grasp of pronouns, by 3 they are able to construct sentences and by four understand directions for them to respond to. It is only when they start nursery school that they begin to be taught how to read write and spell these words they have already mastered vocally. They learn to spell by wrote or by reading and picking up spellings, because there is no logical relationship between sound and meaning.
This is one of the themes I explore in my novel released in 10 days.
With publication of Adam Steiner's debut novel "Politics Of The Asylum" (my review here), I was very struck by his stylistic and linguistic approach as well as the fact that the novel is that most rare beast in UK fiction, a political novel. So we got together to talk all things writerly and compare and contrast our approaches to language and politics in fiction.
MN:The novel is called “Politics Of The Asylum”- How political do you regard your novel?
AS: Good question – it's hard to say how political any novel is under the skin. We can all make declarations of intent, expose horrors and strike out a short sharp j'accuse but it doesn't mean we're actually saying something [new] about a given state of affairs that hasn't already been expressed – although, the flip side of this would be Orwell's 1984 and Margaret Atwood with The Handmaid's Tale. For me, I don't think I've said anything particularly controversial, but I certainly took the extremities of the current situation and drew them into wild and sometimes illogical conclusions [as I say, it's fiction] but what is odd, as opposed to it being purely prescient which is what most people say about the above titles, the book exists in something of timequake – I started writing it in 2011/12 – so it has kind of stretched and warped according to contemporary context. What gets me is that the book expresses so much paranoia, alienation and self-loathing [personal, public and political] that it is slightly smothered under a fair swathe of negativity, hate you could call it, such that the saving of lives is undermined and undervalued – as I keep saying – Ballard's Death of Affect – what else can you feel when people are living through bludgeoned times of near-PTSD. I think you nailed this in your review, I don't think the book is miserable or depressing per se, but it is a challenge and a confrontation, hopefully that sparks meaningful arguments.
MN: Is there a danger with political or even contemporary writing that it gets out of date and becomes a historical snapshot?
AS: Yes – absolutely – there is the absolute danger that people can have well-meaning terms applied to them, which for some spark a death-knell, of being "relevant/timely/urgent" – I appreciate that angle, but lots of my kindest reviewers have said those kinds of things because they are very true. It is utterly bizarre that PoTA makes more sense now than when it was first written years ago, and in the intervening period the events and themes of the book have become more real, or if you like, calcified.
I guess the risk is that in writing a book [novel] which is too much about current events or trying too hard to fix/save the world you risk your own obsolescence and it does betray some lack of imagination. Equally, people don't seem to change too much, within the lessons of Greek tragedy especially [hubris – trump] so much of which holds and we are still re-making these scenarios. But even then, the historical snapshot has value, because looking back we can see that people did care, did speak out in their own small way, ideally these books would evoke that time. People still refer to Dickens or less sensationally George Eliot and Thomas Hardy [none of whom I really like] as being of their time, and I do admire that striving to be contemporaneous not escapist. What gives their work credence in that sense is that they provided analysis, they had an angle, they evoke and draw upon their times to make something new, this is why pure soc-realism falls flat on the heart and the ears.
By way of a positive example, I saw that Nikesh Shula who has been pushing greater diversity of stories and publishing pros for ages, before most big publishers bothered to notice, has written a real-time novel in relation to riots. The England riots happened in 2011, ages ago in modern terms, but, I get the sense that he saw there was something socially significant in this which had not been fully explored beyond the media – so I think it's great he has stepped-up and used the riots to how us something about our society which we are still experiencing the repercussions of, without fully-knowing why.
MN: Just what political impact can fiction have?
AS: I think as above, we all have feelings, inclinations and leanings about how things should be in the world, but because we are ultimately human, feeling beings [most of us] these exist quite outside of and in incompatibility to political systems, much of which is essentially a game, for and by politicians, quite rarely are they real people, they tend not be particularly qualified in anything that counts in real life – I think that makes us all pawns, de facto, just look at the royal family – you wave a flag for them and kiss their feet – they are strangers – they do not know you or care what happens to you - they just want your money [and to be adored] – books are great to spark ideas – but it only takes a few pitchforks, a few matches...
MN: What do you see as the current landscape in the UK for political fiction writing?
AS: Hard one to answer. I'm not one for Pikkety's examinations of capitalism - over my head – but in terms of fiction, I do think that creative non-fiction can play a stronger hand. People build a human narrative into real events [twist and tweak the events slightly] and this gives insight, drives empathy and helps people to see how and why things matter. This is perhaps a better "in" for letting people appreciate the human impact of politics, when democracy in action is often third-hand to most of us. It is so hard in the UK, a country riven and driven by class to attempt to put yourself in someone else's shoes, to feel their own struggle. It's all very well checking your privilege, but it doesn't bring us together; the prince and the pauper were both alien to the other, and think that's important, because you either strike off a whole swathe of people, who will then never vote for you or seek to align their views, or you try and force them into a homogeneity, we are anarchic beings, political divides should not be able to constrain us. MN: ”people build a human narrative" - is not the problem that every narrative can be neutralised by a counter-narrative and that all government has to do is react to narratives that cause them problems and counter them, often by blowing enough smoke in our eyes? The Big Society idea of David Cameron to restructure the nature of charitable giving in this country was abandoned very quickly (and quietly), yet Charities rely absolutely on the human narrative of the the people they seek to help, save a child's life/sight/give her clean water in order to get us to put our hand in our pocket, set against the political narrative of constantly wanting to cut the foreign aid budget. And then charities are blighted by compassion fatigue?
AS: Indeed! That' a comprehensive overview! Ironically, narrative display our personal drives; our paths betray us. Saying is no replacement for doing, and on that note, giving money is rarely doing, clicking as an action – it just doesn't translate. The right wing view off charities is that they self-perpetuate, thrive on myth-making – they kind of have a point. By being perpetually under-funded, always needing more, it is continual war, a la the NHS, as in Orwell's 1984. So then what? I do think that humans have a disposition towards the right/left and within that selfishness abides, so we have to struggle with the better angles of our nature. I would like to go Buddhist on this and say be better, everyday, where you can. Change is life and little things make a big difference. charity begins at home, meaning helping yourself enough to be able to help others; to do small acts of kindness, without reward or virtue signalling. there doesn't have to be a metaphysic to this; it is the form of work that is engendered by hospital staff, anyone can wrap a bandage, take blood, try to break the worst kind of news – it is the way in which these repetitive acts are performed that define your disposition, as a thinking, feeling [human] being.
And yes, the foreign aid budget is vital. We already pay our taxes but we are rarely given the option or transparency to know and decide where they are dispersed – potholes, street lighting and bin collections are not the same thing as creating wells for water, sexual health programs and creating sustainable micro-economies. We have a collective colonial responsibility, still – so may of us choose to ignore. There are no borders, no citizens of the world, only human beings.
MN: With novels that have challenging language, is there is a risk of being too exclusive for a general readership and therefore undermine any political designs for the fiction?
AS: Definitely. But I go back to me earlier mutterings and attest that it is really important to use the voices at your disposal, and to remark upon your prejudices and misunderstandings; to show yourself tripping. I wanted to write as an orator, not a speech-writer or a marketing consultant – see Jonathan Meades on Jargon [BBC doc]. I always loved the line in Alan Bennett's The History Boys: "etcetera is what the Nazis would have said." I think he has historical accuracy slightly off, but it speaks of a tyranny of reductionism, crushing depth and expression. Libraries gave us [GIVE US] power – I see so many writers at the moment, especially the financially struggling of London [who don't have a spare room/desk/office space] using libraries as a stronghold to write/read/learn/resist – in the days of internet access [information overkill/spin/troll anger/alternative facts/post-truth] books offer you an escape from noise and bullshit – its an impressive show of solidarity that they fight the government from a desk in books that will sold and read by the underground and in indie bookshops across the world. MN: Could you elaborate more on writer as orator? I've not conceived of it in those terms before (and yes the Meades' programme was wonderful, how jargon is used to shut down conversation and communication).
AS: I guess the writer has an obligation to do the police in as many ways as they can find or create. You establish voices for your characters, and your narrative and style, and you throw them as best you can. Let the blind man see and the ignorant show their vulnerability. One problem of the UKIP crowd and the Britain first lads is they feel disenfranchised and neglected, ignore the ignorant – I agree – but it'll only get you so far. This iwhere all but the most exploitative and populist politicians fail, if you cannot bring people on side, instead of existing in an echo chamber, what is your use, what are you for?
I didn't want to establish a platform for particular views necessarily, but I did want to show how good people can easily become "bad" and how bad people are not rotten to the core, there is capacity for change, quit on that and you quit on hope.
I think the one thing I can say for myself and the book, is that it is honest, within its own confines.
MN: Also, speaking of a tyranny of reduction, how do you view social media, in how its algorithms channel users into echo chambers of people with the same views, plus the shouting down and hectoring of those with different views?
As to artistic resistance, I think this is a myth. If resistance art sells, it will be absorbed by the authorities and corporates and defanged as with punk. After the Grenfell fire, lots of writers put up their wares for an auction to raise funds for the victims which was laudable, but none of those authors were what you would call activists or political, being writers of romance or fantasy, so there will be no sustained outcome of their campaign beyond the money raised? For me this is little different to the equivalent of performers snorting cocaine backstage at Live Aid, a well-meaning giving of their time but of limited duration as they then slide back to their normal writing lives with no more interaction with the political.
AS: Interesting. Social media is damn tricky. So many voices, so many flare-ups, policing the internet begets trolling and the marshalling of arguments - minefield. for me, it's a great way to share knowledge and connect with other people, who I can then have a proper human conversation with, ideally. I mean, look at trump, he just rants and accuses, he states opinions as fact and the rest is just follow mein leader. Into the abyss...
I think people might find cause to change from getting involved in activist causes. And I think people can write out their own truth, similar to what I was talking about earlier, people can find and offer solidarity, and so many amazing things are sparked or started by revolutions in the head, people arm themselves with the knowledge or passion gleaned from books – that's encouraging.
and - surely the artist has a right to cocaine - give the anarchist a cigarette..
What this means is that an angry generation are making a stand [by] writing their works, and the offer of the library, or just reading and expanding your mind is to empower yourself. My point here is, like Russell Brand who has a silly authentic-ish accent but is very articulate, we should allow for difficult writing, challenge, extremity. I wanted to write in my own way, not just to sell books, not within the pre-conceived notion of the novel as entertainment, music and films can give you exactly the same level of brute sophistication, it's too easy to tune out, drop out, browse with no appetite or hunger, just to be entertained.
A book like mine might exclude some people and that's ok. Not because it is so high minded or too brilliant for them, more likely they choose not to put the effort in, or they want twists and turns and a knowing surprise at the end – fuck off – go to McDonalds, put your head in the trough, ignore the storm – get thee to a library, learn your language[s] as a tool, learn how to spell, get inspired, go read a fucking book instead of just consuming.
I'm starting to sound like my character now...
MN: The language is very lyrical/poetic, what are your thoughts on the poetic novel?
AS: It can go either way. I was keen to experiment, this was the first book I ever wrote [finished writing] so let's have fun, play and learn. I read up on purple prose and meddled with bathos, so easy to slip into this, trying to make someone feel X or Y rather than feeling it yourself in the work of your writing [ this is very difficult, not sure if I achieved it 100%]. I think prose-poems are specific and valuable thing, like poetry, a bit precious, it can spark the fire against the everyday. There's value in reading widely, stretching your brain.
MN: Is language the highest value for you in a novel?
AS: I wonder...it was definitely playtime for me, but I put effort into making archetypal characters, almost cut-outs that suited the pop-art scenes that jump out at you throughout the book. I worked towards a plot, but I'm happy to have some failure, a healthy dose of crash and burn. The language is perfect, but I think I spent the most time on it, I wanted to make every sentence ring [impossible] and not have to say ordinary things, I wanted it all to be pointed, I think like PiL it perhaps came out too spiky – but I'm cool with that. As much as I tried to take the brilliant in the banal dull and mundane, I wanted to luxuriate in language a bit, rather than just drag the reader from character A to B, through door C and then have them talk about an affair, death in the family - I wanted those things to bleed off the page.
MN: The language IS perfect and the sentences do ring - just a comment, not an actual question. There is a lot of both word play and visual manipulation of the type such as words stretched out by the spacing. What effect do you see these as having for the reader? How do you decide when and where to employ them?
AS: I think [know] I was slightly crazy at the time [ another luxury ] and as such I could push the form, the artwork in the book is not pictures of the characters, like in Sherlock Holmes, it wasn't an illustrated guide; equally the physical madness of the text was stretching new muscles within the form, if yes, then why not? I love beautifully weighted prose, but I also want rough edges, hard angles, thwarted landscapes; you can do all of this with words and the breakdown of their structures – equally – you can't just take the piss.
I think it served to alienate the reader, bore them a little, keep a safer distance – all the headfuck that was Nathan [Finewax, the protaganist] I thought the book could be filmic, the way impressionistic shots will blur a murder through a doorway, you get the sense of what's happening, even though your sense are impaired, you're living their dream-nightmare along with the character. To be taken out of the ego of our own headspace is the most liberating things about art – like getting drunk.
MN: I think that's a really interesting thing to aim for, but it does risk alienating the reader, or perhaps demand that the reader be guided how to read this book, not in the sense of its meaning, but in its language, typography and how its sentences work (which is also a high risk writing strategy). Did you have that in the back of your mind as you were writing it?
AS: I don't feel I respect my reader. That's about it. I don't necessarily value them like I should. But, I had the armour of newness, striving, trying, enge-nuity - fresh genius. If everything was for and of the reader, then I would be Lee Child – brilliantly done, but I'm not sure why I would be writing then, apart from money...
The reader deserves to be pushed and pulled, come along for the ride, this is the way step inside. I broke no boundaries, but if I'm bored then the reader must be also. On that note - boredom is sometimes underrated. Nathan's boredom is a pain we can all share, it is the gripe and grit of work, and we are increasingly deadened by administration, what could be more relatable than that?
MN: It’s clear what the role of sound is in poetry, but does it have a role across the length of a novel?
AS: I was conscious to show zings and zips, and the sharpness of too many sips. Sounds that seem to evade the listener but exist as non-music, non-functional performances of crashes and fractures, all very real. Hospital is a great example of this, noisy, then extremely quiet – it comes back to the war analogy, all quiet until it kicks off - which can be any time, its an unhealthy headspace, sounds, like an illness, can creep up on you like a darkness. I also went quite lyrical at times, I wanted to chain together a run of ideas, what might seem like a dirge for some was a sprint for me. Over the course of the novel, the voices recede, become muted noises, incidental. I think more like a breath, you get the sense of withdrawal, closing in and closing down.
MN: Oh to have scratch and sniff versions of novels! It’s not surprising that a book about a hospital devotes so much writing to the human body and its failings. But does all your work start from the body?
AS: I’m really drawn to the influx/reflex of the body; how sense impressions can be an overload where and when you indulge them. This can be internal stimulus, brooding, overthinking things, but also external influence and alterations to a settled state. Within the the novel, I allowed myself to get lost in every inflection, the creep of skin that is always shedding but attached to you, it is and is not your own. You can easily go too far in this; they said Eliot's main failing was that he was the kind of fella who could hear the grass grow – that is nice to indulge but it can be overwhelming. I guess bodies just have so much to teach us, but listening can be deafening, like we lack capacity as beings to hear ourselves, easier to deny.
MN: There’s so much more to say on that last point, perhaps the starting point for a future novel?
AS: Who can say? It might be that the body-reflex is a perpetual concern for me, and I never knew it except in writing. Willing to take that most domestic of chances! I just think that in showing so much ugliness you can sharpen the appetite for something better, to that nature cannot be all bad, and to recognise those worse off [as we might see it] than ourselves.
