essay

our lecturer at Cambridge University ICE (Adrian, you know I am madly in love with you, at an academic level, that is) was explaining the relevance of linking Auden's poems 'Roman Wall Blues' and 'Refugee Blues' to Jazz music and he said that it 'strikes a chord' to analyse it in those terms.....
yes, Adrian, that rings a bell indeed,
anyhow, here I want to share one of the many essays we had to write:


Writers, readers and the community of literature

Marina Velez, London in Literature, Cambridge, 2007. All rights reserved.

A writer is first of all a reader

‘To perceive the distance between the divine and the human, it is enough to compare these crude wavering symbols which my fallible hand scrawls on the cover of a book, with the organic letters inside: punctual, delicate, perfectly black, inimitably symmetrical.’
‘Labyrinths’, Jorge Luis Borges

Writers write about readers. Don Quijote is the epitome of the excessive reader, the reader who cannot (or wishes not to?) distinguish fiction from reality. Driven to insanity by books, he seeks in madness the truth and heroism he no longer finds in the real world. The power of the word is such that it elevates gallantry beyond the reach of common mortals. Words will fuel Quijote’s aspirations and words will haul him down into perdition.
Another famous reader worth mentioning is the shallow and syrupy character Madame Bovary who, as Quijote, suffers from corrupted imagination. Words must be handled carefully otherwise impressionable creatures can fall under their influence.

So why do we read. Or, equally enigmatic, why do writers write. The literary community is made of and perpetuated by readers and writers in constant interchange, establishing cultural, political, aesthetic and philosophical connections in which reality is represented in the form of language.

The inner world of the writer has to travel the insurmountable distance that separates him from his reader, and he can only begin to grasp such a spiritual and intellectual pirouette by becoming a reader himself.
So, how can we approach the paradox of the writer’s necessary inwardness and his equally necessary need to reach out for the reader? Or, as Sontang describes it, can ‘the fragile delirium which is authorship’ be also a call to literature?
Perhaps the apparently unidirectional dialogue between writers and their readers can be transformed if we admit that a writer is first of all a reader.



Between language, meaning and words

‘We perceive ourselves as subjects through inner experiences, especially through the experience of thinking. Like the experience of our ability to speak, these inner experiences are super-conscious. They are coloured and influenced by the way we experience our body. The processes of thought, however, are also shaped by the pattern of our language, which determines both the separation of the subject and object and the consequent integration of the subject into the world in the act of cognition.’
Georg Kuhlewind

Words have become symbols, we think in words. Words codify the poetics of thinking, identifying the meaning of subjects with the very dynamics of meaning itself.
The uncertainty of writing is nothing compared with the pitfalls of understanding, and yet, in various degrees of sophistication, understand we do. We understand the fog in Bleak House, the recurrent rhythm of city life in William Wordsworth’s ‘On Westminster Bridge’, the infinite desolation of Lamb’s poem ‘The Old Familiar Faces’. Like precious cargo, the meaning of what the writer had thought is all transported in words.
What was once written was alive, the writer has to carefully select the words that will best preserve this delicate life through time, until a reader reads them, warming them up once more into life. There lies both the power and the vulnerability of literature.

Sontang explores writing itself by analysing Roland Barthes’ prose: ‘That most inclusive category is language, the widest sense of language-meaning form itself………To stipulate that there is no understanding outside of language is to assert that there is meaning everywhere.’

A word can be considered as manifestation and meaning. Meaning is the inner aspect of a word. Words have continuously changed their meaning, and by this change the understanding of human communities changes in a similar way. Spenser’s experimental poem ‘Prothalamion’ speaks to us in riddles, where a ‘bower’ is a place where lovers meet, a ‘flasket’ is a long thin basket and ‘eftsoones’ means ‘very soon’. Such words, like distant quasars pulsating their message through centuries with decreasing intensity, will have to wait in that place where time never reaches, until an obliging midwife delivers us their meaning again and as they resurface into today’s world they unlock their imagery for us once more, revealing landscapes long gone, objects no longer made, people no longer alive, customs no longer practiced. Words embody relicts of ancient wisdom. Language has a physical history and etymology can show us how words have developed.
Words can also become overwhelming, and in the case of ‘Austerlitz’, words are so evocative that they materialise into pictures.




The dialogue is still alive

Never has the conversation and interaction between writer and readers been more spontaneous and immediate than in the case of Charles Dickens. Unlike ‘Jane Eyre’ and other contemporary titles which were published in three volumes and could only be afforded by the wealthy, Dickens’ novels were published in monthly instalments, serialised in monthly magazines and could be shared and read by nearly everybody. This microcosm of picturesque characters and their cycles of incidents with London at its centre could be adapted to the way readers reacted as they were written in a ‘write as you go’ fashion.

A conversation between writers, even when it is a posthumous affair, opens up to the absurdity of being a dialogue that has to be simultaneously intimate and public. Charles Lamb addressed Coleridge in his fervent poem ‘The Old Familiar Faces’: ‘friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother’. He also in ‘The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple’ conjures up the past, which he thinks should be valued, by imagining first impressions of a countryman visiting London for the first time, by naturally quoting Spenser.
Perhaps the dialogue indeed needs time in order to find its rightful melody.



The geography of time

Writers write about people. Dickens’ characters, albeit through the milky transfiguring effect of the fog, distil the best picture of the Victorian London we could possible imagine. He succeeded in getting across the condition of England in those days. He even wanted to change people’s minds bringing to people’s attention the issues of those days. How we lived then.
Ian McEwan describes with sharp eyes what life in London is for the contemporary white middle class. How we live now.

Writers write about cities. Relocating places and people, adding and subtracting, modifying city geography. They walk and walk, as if by walking they would spin a thread that could bind city and literature together.
We experience London as outsiders seeing it through the eyes of Nazneen in ‘Brick Lane’ or Austerlitz in ‘Austerliz’. We see it through the eyes of locals, as in ‘The Old Benches of the Inner Temple’ by Lamb or Pepys’ Diaries.

In ‘Brick Lane’, the topography of one single street is turned into an inner description of an innocent anthropologist, by making the familiar unfamiliar, for it is seen through the eyes of an immigrant. Just as the realistic account of the isles that Odysseus visited makes him one of the poorest sailors in the history of navigation, tracing out the streets described by Monica Ali in her novel covers no more than a few blocks. Rather like Xavier de Maistre’s ‘Journey around My Room’, it expands the geography beyond physical limits.
The elegance of travelling by water is set forth most beautifully in Pepys’ diaries, celebrating London before the embankment by simply describing the grace of the boats coming and going up and down the River Thames.

London’s gardens can be a shelter, a place to get lost, or a square one has to cross ‘ high heels ticking in awkward counterpoint’. A tower can be an obstacle blocking the spectacular view of an imaginary comet at night. Houses can still be asleep in the early hours of the morning. Bridges can be a platform from which to bear testimony of the beauty of the city, and where its people can be described with poetic justice. Rivers can be carriers of disease, as well as agents of good tidings. The same street can be safe by day and perilous by night.

Writers delineate a geography of the city whose form is malleable by nature and that is more an individual experience than a real place. Writers do not invent the city, they just put in words what we already perceive.

There are as many Londons as we dare imagine.








Bibliography

‘Where the Stress Falls’, Susan Sontang, Picador, 2001

‘El Ingenioso Idalgo de Don Quijote de la Mancha’, Miguel de Cervantes

‘Brick Lane, Monica Ali, Black Swan, 2004

‘Labyrinths’, Jorge Luis Borges, New Directions, 1964

‘Die Logosstruktur der Welt’, Georg Kuhlewind, Lindisfarne Press, 1986

‘The Origin and Development of Language’, Roy Wilkinson, Hawthorn Press, 1992
"Composed upon Westminster Bridge, Sept. 3, 1802", William Wordsworth
‘Austerlittz’, W.G. Sebald, Penguin Books, 2001
‘Bleak House’, Charles Dickens, Penguin Classics, 2003