a gallimaufry

A Question of Upbringing, by Anthony Powell

(Nicolas Poussin, The Dance to the Music of Time, c.1634–36, oil on canvas, in the wonderful Wallace Collection, London; image found here)

This is the first of the twelve-book series A Dance to the Music of Time, of which I’m reading a book a month along with heavenali and others… I have just squeaked in before the end of January, the first month...

I started A Question of Upbringing directly after Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love, and was struck by the different approaches of the two works to the question of memory and our attitudes towards the classical past.

Stoppard’s play is peopled by classical scholars, who trawl texts to learn about the Golden Age of the classical Greeks and Romans. Although so much classical literature has been lost in the maw of Time, and although what remains may be fragmentary or corrupted by inattentive copyists; although their interpretations are tinged by their romanticising of the past, and although they project anachronistic ideas onto those ancient cultures, these Oxford professors cling to the belief that with sufficient knowledge, care and intelligence they can reconstruct and understand the books and the lives of the past. Or at least they say they do: in practice they acknowledge the impossibility of doing so and turn the exercise into a sort of game. Stoppard also shows that every age is at once one person’s Golden Age and another person’s Time When the World is Going to Hell in a Handcart and Things were Much Better when I was a Boy. So any idea of a Golden Age is subjective, a fantasy.

A Question of Upbringing opens with the narrator, Jenkins (I don’t think we learn his first name in this book, do we? But it’s Nicholas, like Poussin) contemplating a very ordinary scene – some workmen pausing in their task of working on drainpipes to warm themselves round a bucket of coke:

For some reason, the sight of snow descending on fire always makes me think of the ancient world – legionaries in sheepskin warming themselves at a brazier; mountain altars where offerings glow between wintry pillars; centaurs with torches cantering beside a frozen sea – scattered, unco-ordinated shapes from a fabulous past, infinitely removed from life; and yet bringing with them memories of things real and imagined. These classical projections, and something in the physical attitudes of the men themselves as they turned from the fire, suddenly suggested Poussin’s scene in which the Seasons, hand in hand and facing outward, tread in rhythm to the notes of the lyre that the winged and naked greybeard plays.

Here Jenkins imagines the sort of romanticised Golden Age which some of Stoppard’s scholars seek, and having pictured it, gives his source: Poussin and the artists of the classical Baroque. His nostalgia for a past which never existed is steeped in theirs, and acknowledged as such. Jenkins is very much a creature whose idea of the present is permeated by the past, specifically its art. During the course of the novel it becomes clear that he is knowledgeable about art, comparing Stringham to a ‘stiff, sad young man’ from a sixteenth-century portrait or to Paolo Veronese’s Alexander, and Jean Templar to a ‘young and virginal saint’ from a Flemish or German Old Master drawing – with what accuracy we may draw our own conclusions. He is also acutely visually aware, describing the outward appearance of every character he meets in meticulous detail. How people look is an important clue as to who they are – at least, this seems to be his philosophy.

(Paolo Veronese, The Family of Darius before Alexander, 1565–67, oil on canvas, National Gallery, London; found here; that’s Stringham in the red)

The paragraph continues:

The image of Time brought thoughts of mortality: of human beings, facing outward like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure: stepping slowly, methodically, sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognisable shape: or breaking into seemingly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance.

It is telling us how to read this novel, and the eleven which follow: to look for patterns, for visual clues and for archetypes or echoes of a greater culture; to expect repetitions and reappearances and circles. (And to trust the author!) The structure of A Question of Upbringing itself describes a sort of circle, starting in an educational establishment and an encounter with Jenkins’ Uncle Giles, moving outwards to London, Templar’s villa – which reminds Jenkins unexpectedly of paintings by Claude Lorrain – France, and then back to another educational establishment and ending with Uncle Giles again.

Both Stoppard and Powell concern themselves with the past and our idealisation of it, Stoppard by deconstructing the myth of a Golden Age and the knowability of the past, Powell by showing how the past shapes our perceptions and interpretations of the present. They also address memory. In The Invention of Love memory is fragile and fluid, coloured by experience and desire; there is no ‘truthful’ memory but each subtly – or not-so-subtly – re-imagined moment has its own integrity and utility for the person who is recalling and in doing so inevitably re-making it. Stoppard’s protagonist, the poet and scholar A.E. Housman, pauses on the banks of the Styx to think about his undergraduate years in Oxford, but he cannot bring that time to mind with any certainty. Stoppard dramatises this unreliability of memory by having many of the lines or fragments of dialogues or scenes repeated, sometimes by the same characters who originally uttered or enacted them, sometimes by others, or in an altered form, as if mimicking the way that the mind replays and reworks memories.

Powell’s approach to memory is more straightforward. Jenkins moves from considering Poussin and the dancing figures to his schooldays:

Classical allusions made me think, too, of days at school, where so many forces, hitherto unfamiliar, had become in due course uncompromisingly clear.

Ta-dum: cue beginning of reminiscences. Jenkins doesn’t express any doubt here about the accuracy of his memory, which is astonishingly clear regarding even the tiniest minutiae. This requires a certain suspension of disbelief in the reader, for who can really quote word-for-word the conversations and gestures of thirty years ago? But Powell is less concerned with the mind’s vagaries than with, as I mentioned above, showing how people are shaped by the past. He chooses to tell Jenkins’ story retrospectively despite the implausibility of the method, so that he can frame events with a commentary supplied by the man who experienced and was made by those events, who can use the understanding he acquired subsequently to interpret actions and words which may seem insignificant but in fact are telling. It gives the novel a sense of being very consciously and carefully ordered even if a sense of the whole has not yet been provided us.

heavenali’s review of A Question of Upbringing is here.

(Claude Lorrain, Port Scene with the Embarkation of St Ursula, 1641, oil on canvase, National Gallery, London; found here)

Un autre monde, by J.J. Grandville

Last weekend, and the previous one, I visited a fascinating exhibition here in Belgium called Middle Gate, which brought together work by professional and outsider artists, and showed them in a conventional gallery, a church, a museum and the art department of a psychiatric treatment centre, to consider art-as-art, myth and psychiatry. It was beautiful, perplexing and disturbing, and I wish I could return this weekend as there was so much to look at and think about and so little time. I’m not going to write a review of it here because it’s closed, but if you are interested you can read more about it in English here.

(‘Apocalypse du ballet’, from here)

The exhibition included work by Cindy Sherman, Paul Klee, René Magritte, Odilon Redon and a lot of contemporary artists from Belgium and abroad whose names I didn’t know. But the greatest pleasure for me was my discovery of J.J. Grandville, a nineteenth-century French artist.  Born in Nancy in 1803, Grandville moved to Paris at the age of twenty-one and began work as a lithographer. His private life was appallingly sad. None of his four sons lived longer than a few years, and his first wife died of peritonitis. He died at the age of forty-four, a couple of months after his last child. Grandville’s caricatures, often featuring animal-headed people, were enormously popular until 1835, when the government cracked down on caricatures and re-introduced prior censorship. Grandville then turned to book illustration. He supplied work for editions of Gulliver’s Travels, Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe, as well as issuing books of lithographs. It was the exquisite, delicate drawings from one of these books, Un autre monde (1844), which caught my eye at the exhibition and which I’ve used to decorate this post.

(‘Le Louvre des marionnettes’, pen-and-ink drawing, Collection Ronny et Jessy Van de Velde, from here)

Talking flowers, angry vegetables, tightrope-walking fleas, hybrid animals, eccentric viewpoints... Grandville has been called a proto-Surrealist, and I think you can see why. Max Ernst, André Breton and Georges Bataille were inspired by Un Autre Monde, it’s impossible not to feel that Lewis Carroll and perhaps John Tenniel too had either seen the book or drunk the same water as Grandville.His pictures are fanciful, witty, grotesque, fevered. You can see all the illustrations from Un autre monde here. Go and look!

(‘Mlle Tender et M. Tunnel, concert of steam cornet and soprano’, from here)

(‘The wheel of fashion’, from here)

(‘A young ewe leads the dancing with an ageing panther’, from here)

The Bastard of Istanbul, by Elif Shafak

After Christmas the gallimaufry entourage nipped over to England for a few days, to foist themselves on my unfortunate family. Now I am not a fan of shopping – I find it boring, fatiguing and requiring too many decisions – but I do miss bookshops, and I was looking forward to paying a visit to my local Waterstone’s, the last bookshop left in a town which once boasted three (plus several second-hand bookshops).

(Ahem, this is not really me in Waterstone’s but my near-doppelgänger, Dovima from Funny Face; from here)

As it happened, I had precisely seven minutes to devote to this visit so was unable to savour the great pleasure of bookshops: examining the books. However, I did have time to look at its selection of the work of Elif Shafak, whose Black Milk I read last year, as I wanted to weigh up which of her novels to buy. Only two of her novels were in stock, The Bastard of Istanbul  (for which she was prosecuted by conservatives in Turkey; the case was thrown out of court by the judge) and The Forty Rules of Love. With no time to ponder, I seized The Bastard for the very simple reason that I could not bring myself to buy a book with a cover so soppy as The Forty Rules, and rushed to the till, oops a copy of Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child fell into my hand as I ran, well it was half price which as we all know is practically the same as free.

In that same moment they both slowed down. There, half a mile away from them out on the sea, was a man standing up in a small motorboat with several other passengers, holding a newly lit cigarette in one hand and in the other a fantastic tree of balloons in glowing yellows, oranges, and purples. Perhaps e was a fatigued balloon vendor, the father of many children, taking a shortcut from one coast to another on his way back from work, without knowing how breathtaking a pose he struck, as he dragged along a rain of colors and a plume of smoke over the blue waves.

Caught utterly unprepared by the exquisiteness of the scene, Armanoush and Asya stood silently watching the motorboat until it disappeared into the horizon.

Elif Shafak chose the Armenian genocide by the Ottomans in 1915–17 and its consequences for both Armenians and Turks as the focus of The Bastard of Istanbul . Asya Kazancı is the daughter of a single mother, brought up by three generations of Turkish women in Istanbul, nihilistic and besotted by the music of Johnny Cash. Her four ‘aunties’ are all formidable characters: mad Feride, disappointed Cevriye, Zeliha the tattooist – who is also Asya’s mother – and Banu, the clairvoyant with two dijinni on her shoulders. Armanoush lives part-time with her Armenian father’s family in San Francisco and part-time with her American mother Rose, who is estranged from Armanoush’s family and remarried to a Turk. Feeling suffocated by both sides of her family, Armanoush confides to other Armenian-Americans in a cybercafé and they are the only people she tells of her bold plan to lie to everyone and travel to Istanbul, where she feels certain she can learn more about her Armenian identity. Her intention is to stay with the family of her Turkish stepfather, who just happen to be the Kazancıs.

While the novel’s discussion of the genocide is in itself extremely important, it is also the means for exploring what the point of history is, and whether knowledge always better than ignorance, remembrance than forgetting. On the one hand, Armanoush and her fellow Armenians in diaspora are steeped in the past, the terrible events of 1915–17 are still very real to them all and a fundamental part of their identity. This cannot be otherwise, it has shaped all their lives and psyches, and yet Shafak seems to suggest that their constant dwelling on the past can be constricting too. While staying with the Kazancıs, Armanoush introduces Asya to her friends at the cybercafé. The Armenians are quite hostile. Asya asks: ‘Tell me, what can I as an ordinary Turk in this age do to ease your pain?’ and they are baffled. Ultimately, even the apology they crave cannot wipe away the tragedy. In the end one of them writes:

Just like the Turks have been in the habit of denying their wrongdoing, the Armenians have been in the habit of savoring the cocoon of victimhood. Apparently, there are some old habits that need to be changed on both sides.

In contrast, for most of the Turkish characters in Istanbul, the genocide is sad, terrible, but not important to their lives. Is this indifference better, or worse?

Asya, on the other hand, takes up an extreme position in the opposite direction. She does not know who her father is, hates the past and even claims she’d like to have Alzheimer’s, like her great-grandmother:

The past is nothing but a shackle we need to get rid of. Such an excruciating burden. If only I could have no past – you know, if only I could be a nobody, start from point zero and remain there forever. As light as a feather. No family, no memories and all that shit …

At the end of the novel Asya has learned the truth of her parentage, but to what advantage? And the person who committed a crime against a member of the Kazancı family (I don’t want to spoil the plot!) is punished, but whether this has brought peace to the victims or nothing more than sorrow to everyone else is not yet clear. It is also perhaps, not the point: I think Shafak is arguing that it’s  what we do with history now which is important, and acknowledgement of it (but not domination by it) is a step towards this. But there are no easy answers. Banu’s clairvoyance reveals truths to her, but if she cannot act on those truths they just become a terrible burden to her. Knowledge can be a curse.

If there is an ideal position with regards to a terrible past, it is surely that of Aman, the Armenian who has remained in Istanbul and chosen to accept the genocide’s place in history and to distinguish his neighbours from his family’s oppressors.

This city is my city. I was born and raised in Istanbul. My family’s history in this city goes back at least five hundred years. Armenian Istanbulites belong to Istanbul, just like the Turkish, Kurdish, Greek, and Jewish Istanbulites do. We have first managed and then badly failed to live together. We cannot fail again. […] I love strolling these streets in the mornings, in the evenings, and then at night when I am merry and tipsy. I love to have breakfasts with my friends along the Bosphorus on Sundays, I love to walk alone amid the crowds. I am in love with the chaotic beauty of this city, the ferries, the music, the tales, the sadness, the colors, and the black humor …

Does all this make The Bastard of Istanbul seem heavy and depressing? It is not, although there is certainly a lot of working-out of ideas going on. Shafak touches upon great sadness, but lightly. She has an eye for the absurdities of situation and personality, a great sympathy for all her characters but a love of mocking them. The supporting cast is generally eccentric and rather two-dimensional, a fact to which she seems to nod with a smile in her naming of Asya’s intellectual friends: the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist, the Exceptionally Untalented Poet. The writing is energetic, sometimes a bit awkward – no surprise since, impressively, Shafak wrote this in English, her second language. She enjoys including back story and explaining everything in a way which is not currently fashionable in Anglo-American novels, it brings Isabel Allende’s style to mind. If it’s possible to write a ‘beach read’ about genocide, death, rape and illegitimacy, then Shafak has done it, and that is both its strength and its weakness.

The book consists of seventeen chapters, sixteen of which are named after the different ingredients mixed together to make ashure, a traditional dessert also known as Noah’s Pudding because of the story associated with it (that it was first made on the Ark with everyone and every animal bringing something to put in it). The seventeenth ingredient is not normally included in ashure. Shafak explains that ashure is a communal dish; it is made in large batches, ladled into bowls and shared out between your neighbours, colleagues, classmates and friends as a gesture of peace and love. It is also vegan, so no violence, bloodshed or exploitation of another creature goes into its making. As such, ashure is a symbol of peaceful multiculturalism and unity in diversity, both in the mixing together of so many ingredients and in the sharing of the finished pudding. Ashure is the way Shafak is asking us to try to live, and her novel itself is a bowl of ashure, a gift intended to bring people, Turks and Armenians included, together.

(Photograph of ashure from here)

twelfth night

Happy New Year to you all! Belated, I’m afraid. But it’s only now, Twelfth Night and the end of Christmas, that the new year begins properly for me, only now that I can crawl out from under the pine boughs and look out at the year ahead.

(Happy Misrule!)

(Jan Steen, Twelfth-Night Feast, oil, 1662; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

I always enjoy reading everyone’s end-of-year round-ups and plans for the next twelve months’ reading. For me, 2013 was a bit patchy: I read plenty of good books but drifted about a lot in between, unable to find something which suited me. It was a year of unfinished books and I hate failing to finish a book (unless it’s crap). So, 2014 can only be better!

I’m not much of a planner, and mainly intend to follow Stefanie’s excellent maxim: read good books. But I have tentatively elected to dance to the music of time with Ali, and I intend also to read a chapter of The Morville Hours every month. In addition, I’ll be more scrupulous in writing about the Grimms’ tales and I’ll get back into the saddle with my Modernist reading, which fell by the wayside after a disagreement with Gertrude Stein (I was entirely to blame).

Alternatively, I’ll continue with my usual modus operandi of alighting on whatever takes my fancy at any given moment.

Do you have reading plans for 2014?