Analogy, Metaphor, Literature and the Brain

This morning I've been listening to A.S. Byatt being interviewed by the Australian Radio National 'All in the Mind' for National Science Week. It was a great pleasure to hear a favorite author talk about her love of science, her horror at the idea that the English Department would be the centre of the University, snail neurons, mirror neurons, her mind maps (though she doesn't use that term) and the colours of her novels (in an almost synesthesian* sense).

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I am fascinated by the intersection of art and science, and this is one of the reasons I am so fond of her novels. She quite clearly articulates that she understands what some of her more disdainful peers in literature did not; that science is very much a creative field of endeavour. Further, she explains how she develops some of the key concepts underlying her novels (specifically Babel Tower) through the process of analogy, which she links to metaphor. Byatt is quite obsessed with metaphor, as well as being very interested in neurology. As such, I always think she should read one of my other favorite authors, Douglas Hofstadter. I am always telling people they should read Gödel, Escher, Bach, and then refusing to lend it to them, because I need to have it on my bookshelf at all time.**

Hofstadter works in artificial intelligence, so he thinks very deeply about how it is we think. He feels that analogy is the core of cognition, as he explains in the amusing and unpretentious lecture included below (the unpretentious part his lecture itself begins at 13.5 minutes in). When I was in grad school and he came to give a physics colloquium. He was trained as a physicist (and in fact, his father was a Nobel laureate in physics). He created a wonderful lecture on how Einstein, in his miraculous year (1905 - wherein he discovered the core of special relativity and much of the core of quantum mechanics), came up with his ideas through the process of ANALOGY. Einstein was also a great and honest observer of his own mind. The talk as I recall it, in fact, went through the entire history of physics and explained it all as a process of analogy. I'll give you but a hint: Rutherford proposed his model of the atom (which of course is both wrong, and a revolutionary step forward) with electrons circling the positively-charged nucleus by analogy to our model of the solar system, with planets orbiting the sun.



I think it is quite wonderful that Byatt can look to science as a means of enriching her literature - not simply with pretty metaphors, but in a deep structural sense, and Hofstadter can look at the tiniest linguistic errors we make***, and see them as data on how it is we actually think. In the interview Byatt speaks about mirror neurons - neurons which light up both when we perform an act and when we see an act performed. This is explained as a possible source of empathy. I wonder if this mirroring (which I've seen also postulated as an explanation for how we understand facial expression) does in fact indicate that on a fundamental level we understand actions we observe directly from analogy - not just in a higher level 'software' sense, as Hofstadter tends to discuss, but in a neuron-level 'hardware' sense as well.

*Is this a word? I think it should be. I created it by analogy.
**I made an exception for the time, years ago, I convinced my friend JM to go get it signed by Hofstadter, since I had to teach when he was speaking with the grad students in our department. JM was a good sport. I confess I was actually unsure I wanted to meet Hofstadter - because I was uncertain he would match the mental construct I had formed of him in my head. This is ironic since I formed my ideas about mental constructs of people partly by reading Hofstadter's Le Ton Beau de Marot (which of course, is in English).
***He collects linguistic slips. My favorite, of the spoken errors in English by native speakers, which I have observed is one made by my friend Jill. Jill once said, "I'm turd, even though I have a chordle-neck on." I love that 'turd' came from 'turtle' and 'cold' not only swapped places with the first syllable of 'turtle', it also morphed into 'chord', because, presumably, she couldn't drop the 'r' sound. (Also, it's quite interesting that I typed 'turdle' before correcting myself with 'turtle'). But, most of all, I love that she said, "I'm turd" and persisted with her sentence despite the fact that I was laughing uncontrollably. Incidentally, Jill also faces a prospect discussed late in this lecture. That was a teaser, to try to intice you to listen to it.

Reading is sexy XXX

(image Courtesan reading a love letter (Edo) via this site) It occurs to me that this is not a well-advised post title, but, c'est la vie.
1. A Whistling Woman by A.S. Byatt. This is the fourth and final (?) book in a cycle by Byatt, completing the quartet which began with The Virgin in the Garde, Still Life, and Babel Tower. This is a rich world Byatt has created, around the life of the North Yorkshire Potter family, and red-headed, independent, intellectual Frederica Potter in particular, during the 50s and 60s. The first novel is intertwined with a play about Queen Elizabeth I being performed for Elizabeth II's coronation. The second is intertwined with the story of Van Gogh. The third is intertwined with a battle over censorship, freedom and pornography with a character's novel Babeltower. The fourth is rich in symbolism, but does not have as much of a dualistic structure. The character Agatha's fairytale story Flight North begins the novel, and the story of its publication is a thread in the novel, but plays a far more subtle role than say, Babeltower in Babel Tower. Ironically, now that I've claimed the final novel is less dualistic, one of the major themes is the syzygy in the Gnostic sense (a male-female pair of aeons), in the Jungian sense of archetypal pairings, and in the zoological sense (and the discussion of sexual versus asexual reproduction) - not to omit, the on-going story of the twins John Ottokar and Paul/Zag (and his rock band Zag and th Syzygy Zy-goats) and the discussion of whether monozygotic twins are an example of asexual reproduction with the one twin as both mother and genetic pair of the other. Other major themes include blood, birds, mind & body, reproduction, mirrors and light, Manichaeism and the Biblical stories of Abraham and Issaac, and that of Joshua. The novel, as you may have gathered, takes on a lot: mental illness, religion and cults, psycotherapy, changing role of women in society and evolution of the actual family unit, duty, media and television in particular, love of knowledge, love, domestic violence and counter culture. Frederica and her son Leo are still living in South London with Agatha and her daughter Saskia. Byatt makes various allusions to The Golden Notebook and the concept of free women, or unmarried women with children sharing a home to share child-rearing duties. Frederica is still seeing computer scientist and Quaker John O., but soon he accepts a job at the University of North Yorkshire (where several characters from previous novels work including Marcus, Frederica's brother). Frederica is convinced by Edmund Wilkie to host a television show about ideas called Through the Looking glass. This is a way for Byatt to weave in all sorts of knowledge, whether it be neurology, sociology, art history to even things not found in universities, like astrology, along with the imagery of Lewis Caroll (not without its own binary pairs). Meanwhile, the Quaker Spirit's Tigers (including psychologist Elvet Gander from Babel Tower) merge with Gideon Farrar (Still Life)'s Children of Joy, and we watch in increasing dred as the budding cult falls under the sway of Manichaen Joshua Lamb (or Ramsden), a charismatic man whose mental health was shattered when his father acts on the belief he was commanded by God to sacrifice his family. Joshua survives, his family does not. The group contains other religious characters and one ethologist from the previous novels and centres around Lucy Nighby, a woman battered by her husband, who may, or may not have attacked both he and their children - again the bloody image of sacrifice of children. At UNY, biologist Luk Lysgaard-Peacock is in love with Jacqueline Winwar (who in turn loves Marcus, who may love Ruth, who is embedded in the Children of Joy). Gerard Wijnnobel is organizing a conference on Mind and Body (another means of Byatt to express her love of knowledge) while a growing encampment called the Anti-University of counter-culture student protesters, plans their response. Byatt deftly weaves all her strands together, making a strong argument for interdisciplinary, unfettered celebration of knowledge, for real people living true, if messy lives, and for independence.

One could easily write a doctorate on these books. Consider the symbolism of names alone (Marcus and his mystical, instinctive approach to mathematics, compassionate Ruth, Lady Wijnnobel is née Eva Selkett, Joshua Lamb, Elvet Gander, Daniel with his foresight and tests of faith, Lucy Nighby who makes a religion of light, Lyssgard-Peacock, and even Avram Snitkin). I'll refrain from attempting to summarize such a richly-woven a web with a few lines. The cycle as a whole is both long and heavy, but very rewarding, and I highly recommend them.

2. Noh - The Classical Theater. Performing Arts of Japan IV by Yasuo Nakamura, introduction by Earle Ernst. No one is going to read this post and then read this book, if for no other reason than its obscurity. I found it in a used bookstore, years ago. I would have prefered Bunraku: The Puppet Theater, but this is what I found, and I do have a thing about masks. The author varies between claims that the ancient theatre is in fact avant guarde or whether it is so slow and stylized to be undoubtedly boring. The history of Noh, in excruciating detail, is likewise a mix of the undoubtedly boring with some real gems of ideas and stories. The introduction vivdly presents Tokyo, immediately after WWII, where Prof. Ernst was ironically tasked with censorship in name of the democracy, to prevent the feudalistic from re-appearing. He recognizes art, rather than nostalgia for neofeudalism. The author, mathematician-Noh expert Nakamura, relates the history of Noh from 200 BC to (his) modern day, the training of actors, the masks, music, sets and costumes (down to the socks). Just when it might get boring, he explains the difference between dramatic and supernatural parts as akin to the difference between living in three and four dimensions (with a metaphor that could have be straight out of Flatland), or a juicy story about an emperor's advisor who became addicted to Noh, or a love affair between a shogun and young Noh apprentice.

3. From the Notebooks - The Unwritten Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald by Stephany Aulenback, John Beckman, Marc Bojanowski, Judy Budnitz, Ian Caldwell, Rachel Ingalls, Sam Lipsyte, Tom Lombardi, Carey Mercer, Lydia Miller, Sigrid Nunez, Michelle Orange, Salvador Plascencia, Matthew Sharpe, Miriam Toews, Jincy Willett, Diane Williams This is of course a McSweeney's project (issue 22). F. Scott Fitzgerald kept a notebook. It contained, amongst other things, 32 more-or-less wild story ideas. McSweeney's gathered authors together and asked them to select one. Everyone wanted "girl and giraffe" so they include two stories on that theme, and many others (i.e. "the man who killed the idea of tanks in England - his after life" or "Fairy who fell for a wax dummy"). I enjoyed these various stories very much, though some more than others. Stand-outs include Plascencia's "Returned" wherein the ocean follows a girl, Lombardi's "The Bear" ("Lois and the bear hiding in the Yellowstone") and Sharpe's "Bert as a Boy".

McSweeney's say they leave the unselected ideas as an exercise to the reader. So, I assign you the task of writing a story of what I deem the most promising, unselected Fitzgeraldian idea:
A tree, finding water, pierces a roof and solves a mystery

{Series so far: books read, more books read, books read, books read continues, more books read, I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII,XIX, XX, XXI, XXII, XXIII XXIV, XXV, XXVI, XXVII, XXVIII, XXIX}

Reading is sexy XXVII

(Image: Young Girl Reading by a Window by Delphin Enjolras) 34. Little Black Book of Stories by A.S. Byatt. Little Black Book indeed. A.S. Byatt writes fairytales for adults wherein sometimes the monster wins, and it may not be the one expected. The Thing in the Forest is a war-time story within a contemporary frame which revisits the British-style dragon, the worm, which appeared in The Djinn in the Nightengale's Eye. It is about alienation and guilt. Body Art is an amazingly visual story, combining some of my favorite things (art, art history, history of science and cabinets of curiosity) with rounded characters and ethical dilemma. The Stone Woman is a wonderful story of geology and the modern-day, accidental, Nordic troll. Raw Material is a very dark story about writer's block - the violence is just beneath the surface. I am certain that no author before or since has ever made the Teletubbies quite so creepy, or combined them with Greek mythology, as in The Pink Ribbon. These stories appeal to our primordial pleasure in being scared just enough. Byatt has a lot of control and the confidence and insight to take the reader to the edge. Read this book. 35. The Man Game by Lee Henderson. The violence below the surface in the Black Book is let loose in the astonishing Man Game. This book won the BC Book Prize. Despite a contemporary narrator, it is mostly set in 1886 - 1887 in Vancouver, but this is no reverential historical fiction. It is more like Fight Club meets the wild west, but it is a true novel of the Canadian west, with more lumberjacks, Chinese immigrants, drug abuse, labour unrest and fewer cowboys. Beautiful newly-wed Molly Erwagen arrives in town with her recently paralyzed husband Samuel and native ward Toronto (honestly), just in time to witness a great fire which destroys most of the city. Two lumberjacks Litz and Pisk are blamed for the fire. It doesn't take Molly long to invent a profit-making diversion in the male-dominated Vancouver, combining dance, acrobatics, vaudeville and martial arts - the Man Game is a game of skill, fought in the nude (to avoid dirty tricks), illustrated in the book by a series of line drawing for the various moves. The cast of characters includes entrepreneurial opium-adicts, bookies, Chinese bakers, lumberjacks, the po-lice, snakeheads from San Francisco, a Mexican barman with a portable bar, a Bermudan barman, a cowboy "shit-disturber" (pro-labour xenophobe), the madam and the Whore Without a Face. The language is rough and tumble and full of Chinook, a dialect which allowed the major ethnic groups (miscellaneous Europeans, Chinese, Chinookan, Nootka, Salish, Haida, Siwash, Snauq, Sto:lo, Tlingit and other Native peoples) to communicate. A women is a mink or ee-na, and it takes little imagination to follow a discussion about her totooshes. Money is chickamin or blankets. The louts are bohunks, and they don't reckon, they kumtuks. I've spent enough time in BC to know what skookum means. Henderson obviously harbours a great love for Vancouver, but he keeps his eyes wide open. An overhead snipet of dialogue in the modern-day Vancouver man game left me howling with laughter ("So I teach yoga to get laid, but like, I also want to stay in shape"). He isn't scared to skewer sacred cows. Characters say "oot" and "aboot" throughout. The novel is a story of love, hatred, violence, art, men, women, cultural identity, family, labour and race relations. It is action packed. The societal issues facing 1887 Vancouver society may appear to have changed but at the core many of the issues simply appear in new guises. It calls out for a film adaptation (with built-in-product placement, what with all the Hudson's Bay blankets), except our society is afraid of male nudity. But, I love seeing this story set in Canada. I cannot believe it is Henderson's first novel. I've never read anything quite like it. I really think you'd enjoy it too, unless perhaps if you are from New Westminster. 36. Cake or Death by Heather Mallick. The problem with Heather Mallick is, in her own words, that she is "an appalling combination of socialist and snob". She shops at Holt Renfrew and wears pearls and has what I deem a perhaps overblown preoccupation with hygiene and cleanliness. However, she is often delightfully eccentric and self-deprecating. She cites Eddie Izzard for her title. She can be counted on to stand up for her convictions, and for that I admire her. She thanks Dr. Henry Morgentaler in the Acknowledgements. She calls out hypocracy when she sees it, isn't afraid of a fight and has a healthy, sarcastic and sometimes dark, ascerbic sense of humour. I recognize her descriptions of a stoic upbringing. I used to enjoy her column in the Globe and Mail before I gave up on seeing any decent newspaper published in this country. Mallick is never dull, but I wish this book were wittier. I think she is capable of it. The essay about "why Doris Lessing will never win a Nobel" was redundant before this book even had a chance to come out in soft cover. {Series so far: books read, more books read, books read, books read continues, more books read, I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII,XIX, XX, XXI, XXII, XXIII XXIV, XXV, XXVI, XXVII}

Reading is sexy XXVI

[image: via Wit of the Staircase archive] Wow, I haven't posted one of these in a long time. The reading this year has really been disrupted. All that fieldwork, I guess. Optimistically, I've been riding my bike more, and even I know better than riding-while-reading. Now that we have entered the shockingly cold autumn and I have to take the streetcar again, I think I will have some more time to read.

22. Babel Tower by A.S. Byatt. This is the third book in a quartet, which began with The Virgin in the Garden, followed by Still Life. {As such, any reference to this novel's plot must contain a spoiler alert: I cannot talk about this one, without alluding to the end of the previous novel.} This novel proved much more readable than the last. Once again we follow the Potter family, in particular, red-headed intellectual Fredrica. The first book was interwoven with the history of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and mirroring that with Queen Elizabeth I. The second novel runs along the theme of Vincent Van Gogh. The third is not intertwined with real characters from history, or art, but with a novel within the novel (dystopian fairytale 'Babbletower' written by one of the novel's characters, Jude Mason, like a smelly, unkempt, Shakespearian-style Fool) and the issue of freedom of speech and pornography. Such a strange collection of things! Further, it depicts the changing role and rights of women. Fredrica responds to her grief at loosing her sister by making an unwise marriage to Nigel Reiver. She is no country lady or landed gentry - not in politics, thought or action. Fredrica needs an intellectual outlet. Her marriage violently dissolves. She finds herself in London, as a single-mother, trying to get a divorce, living creatively amongst her friends, who reappear here. She works a collection of part time jobs related to literature in teaching (like her father) and in publishing. The text of Babbletower gives Byatt the opportunity to try the play-within-a-play trick from Hamlet; show off her ability to write in a style other than her own while simultaneously mirroring her plot to some degree. It also gives Byatt the chance to say what she has to say about obscenity and freedom of expression. The novel alludes to the Lady Chatterly trial several times. A disruptive character, identical twin of a lover, has a habit of making 'skoobs' (books backwards: a pile of burning books). Ironically, this man is a rock musian and performance artist - not someone who one would think would be against the book. The theme is about control and people who need to suppress others. This is the swinging 60s in London; hence the lovers, and the changing attitudes - but they change more slowly than surface appearances suggest. Though this is also about Frederica taking control of her own life once again. She starts writing herself - a book called Laminations including cut-ups of the letters from her husband's lawyer. I found the text of the disputed novel-within-the novel a bit tiresome (and occasionally gruesome), but the ensuing discussion of freedom of expression fascinating and sympathetic. The exposition of the breakdown of her marriage is also very deep. She manages to convey the injustice done to Frederica and the paternalistic attitude of society towards women seeking divorce, while managing to keep Nigel's character full. He commits egregious acts of violence, and yet, is not inherently a 'bad person'; he loves his son (and even Frederica - though in a deeply unhealthy way). The book also manages to have a thorough discussion of how to teach English to children - Alexander being on an expert panel on the topic. (This was very interesting to me, as someone who has served on such a governmental panel. I learn from wikipedia, so has Byatt herself.) This she interweaves with the recurring theme of Blake's Songs of innocence and experience, something which fascinates me. Of course, Byatt also manages to work ecology and snail genetics into the plot. Frederica, always the square peg, (I suspect, much like the author) says, "In the future, no one will ever believe that anyone left a happening to relieve the babysitter."

You rather need to read the first two books to fully appreciate this one, but you should read them all. Not the easiest read, but worth the effort. Look at the absurd number of times I have used the word 'fascinating'.

23. Birthday Stories edited by Haruki Murakami. Amongst his other activities, Murakami translates English books into Japanese. He writes that he happened upon a couple of short stories about birthdays, which really spoke to him, in quick succession. So, he decided to gather an anthology of English language short stories about birthdays, and translate them into Japanese. He added one of his own stories about a birthday. The clever publisher then turned around and published the collection in the original, having only to translate his introductions to each story and his own story (which has already appeared in English, anyway). I enjoyed this idiosyncratic collection.

Dear Publishers,
Very sneaky. The way you repeatedly make readers think they are getting a new Murakami story in English, when really, you've just re-packaged one - it's getting tiresome.
Sincerely,
minouette, a sincere fan

24. The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments by George Johnson A very nice piece of history-of-science writing including such gems as Galileo using music to measure acceleration due to gravity, all the way to Milikan's literally beautiful oil drop experiment (like stars in the night sky) to measure the charge-to-mass ratio of the electron (one still performed by undergraduates here today). It also covers William Harvey (the heart and the circulation of blood), Newton (colour and light), Lavoisier (oxygen and redox reactions), Galvani (with Volta of course, animal electricity and how they were both wrong and yet vital to the invention of the battery), Michael Faraday (electricity and magnetism), Joule (quantification of heat), Michelson (speed of light, and though he never quite saw it, the non-existence of ether), and Pavlov (the dogs and psychology). The book is compelling and clear and I would recommend it to interested parties and armchair scientists.

The afterword though, was irksome. I paraphrase, "Why these 10? Well it could have been another 10, but these are my 10. It was pointed out to me there are no women, sorry about that, but these are my 10. I could have included Marie Curie, but she was really just patient and precise rather than making a beautiful experiment. I could have included Mme. Wu, but, I didn't." This is just plain annoying. It is okay - the experiments are clever and important. Women have been excluded from or marginalized in science for so long, including women in a history of experimental science is challenging, and I do not mind his choices. He does include Mme. Lavoisier, along with her husband - but he could have written more about her influence on science in her own right. He includes some on Ada Lovelace, when writing about Faraday. But I found his pseudo mea culpa annoying. What's the point in writing "It's bad that I've excluded women but I did it anyway"? Either you think it's important, or you don't. After all, while any such list is subjective, Chien-Shiung Wu's experiment to demonstrate violation of parity is the most beautiful I can imagine! (They gave the Nobel to the theorists, Yang and Lee, and excluded her) Not to mention Lise Meitner (who explained nuclear fission - they gave the Nobel to her male colleagues who didn't happen to be Jews who had to flee Nazi Germany), or Rosalyn Franklin (whose incredible x-ray crystallography provided the first indication that DNA is a double helix - they gave the Nobel to the colleagues who helped themselves to her research and didn't happen to die) or Jocelyn Bell Burnell (who discovered pulsars - they gave the Nobel to her supervisor).... Some days, I want to write a history of science which only mentions women, as if this were unremarkable; of course it only mentions women.

26. In Evil Hour by Gabriel Garcia Marquez tells the story of a small town slowly torn by anonymous lampoons found on doors every morning. They report the gossip the townspeople know but do not say aloud. In his autobiography, he writes that he actually experienced such a thing, once living in a town terrorized by such lampoons. The novel reveals the evil, just below the surface...

27. Windswept: The Story of Wind and Weather by Marq De Villiers
This is a largely enjoyable non-fiction account of wind. De Villiers, who lives in Nova Scotia, writes from the point of view of one scared of the wind since childhood, when he was blown over and nearly off a cliff and out to sea in his native South Africa, and ties the book together with the story of Hurricane Ivan. He combines myth, history and science and covers a wide array of material. His discussion of the complexities of things like climate change is very good; unlike a lot of popular science he actually discusses contradictory evidence and acknowledges that the science is messy. However, he really needs a proper scientific editor. I found several errors. He describes tectonic plates colliding "deep within the mantle" - not bloody likely. The earth's plates - part of the crust - do interact with the mantle, and occasionally subduct into the mantle, but never deep within the mantle; deep within the mantle rocks, or the crust, would melt. In one place, low and high pressure are reversed. The following footnote (yes, I am now going to rant about a footnote - I know this is hopelessly nerdy) is idiotic ridiculous as written (Chapter Four, footnote 29),

"The energy within a single tornado has been calculated at between 10⁴ and 10⁷ kwh, not much less than the 20-kiloton bomb dropped on Hiroshima, which was 10¹³."

Let's look at all the errors in this single sentence. First, the most egregious: it appears to claim that 10⁷ anything is 'almost' the same as 10¹³ anything. That is, of course, absurd, as the second is a million times larger than the first. How can he make such a mistake? Well with a little thought and research, one can find that the energy released by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima is of the order 54 TJ, or 5.4 x 10¹³ J. So he has omitted a single letter, to disastrous effect. A true statement, that 54 TJ is approximately 10⁷ kWh (note, the W does need to be capitalized) is lost. He meant to imply that the energy was 10¹³ JOULES, not KILOWATT-HOURS. Never omit units! Now, let's talk about that unit, shall we? A kilowatt-hour (more properly written kWh) is a rather silly unit in which to measure energy, unless you are buying gel cells or paying your hydro bill. It is quite literally power (W) multiplied by duration (h)- but since a Watt is a Joule per second you end up mixing two units of time (seconds and hours). You could argue that it is useful in that the layperson might not have a good feeling for a Joule (let alone a terajoule) so use something they might have seen, or can relate to their own homes. Fine, but let's not then turn around and compare apples (kWh) with oranges (J)? Isn't it messy enough to compare something which is extended in time and space, like a tornado, with a localized explosion? In my book, this sort of sloppiness undermines his credibility. I like that metric units (such as km/h) are included alongside the imperial (miles/h), though it is a shame this in not done consistently. Plus "vortexes" is just plain ugly; why write that when one could write vortices? Certainly, there is no excuse for writing both. Really, McClelland & Stewart, I expect better.

Oh dear... I've just vented about an Afterword and a footnote, am I becoming cantankerous? Or, is it important to try and keep 'em honest? Books are precious people! They should be neither suppressed, nor burnt, nor edited without sufficient care.

On a happier note, here's a story about wind and irrepressible curiosity and inventiveness.

{Series so far: books read, more books read, books read, books read continues, more books read, I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII,XIX, XX, XXI, XXII, XXIII XXIV, XXV, XXVI}

Reading is sexy XVII

13. A. S. Byatt Still Life. This is the second book in the quartet, which started with The Virgin in the Garden, the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and harkening back to Queen Elizabeth I, which I read some time ago. I don't think I realized at the time that it was one of four. But, there are the characters, the Potter family, strangely still living in 1954 in England, where I left them. Frederica is still as cursed with intelligence, red hair, and little sense of the interior life of others; she goes off to Cambridge, of course, and continues to fall in love with impossible men. Stephanie starts her more docile, womanly life as wife and mother to Vicar Daniel. Marcus is recovering from his bizarre folie à deux and the strain of living with his angry, demanding, atheist father Bill. He is living with Stephanie and Daniel, and Daniel's horrible mother. Mother Winnifred is left alone in the house with Bill. Alexander is trying to follow up his play Astraea, and his writing about Vincent Van Gogh, and his relationship with Gaugain and his letters to Theo. His new play is The Yellow Chair. The staging involves the two paintings above, of Vincent's own chair and the chair of Gaugain. Many secondary characters are there too, including Wilkie and the Pooles and so on.
The story is compelling. The characters are real and full. She manages to evoke the time and place and its conventions and culture. To the point, for instance, that she made me angry at the way pregnant women in Yorkshire, in 1954 were treated like cattle, herded from waiting room, to hallway, to waiting room, without so much thought as to provide sufficient chairs. The prose however, feels dense and abstruse, in a way which differs from later novels. I found myself reading and rereading sentences thrice to try and glean their meaning. I have really enjoyed the way she weaves in allusions to other literature, say in Possession. Here it seems almost too academic, occasionally like a novel for people who read English at Cambridge in the 50s - a rather limitted audience. I am glad at least that I have read Lucky Jim, thanks to , so I could understand the discussion of it in terms of contemporary fiction. At times though, I felt like I would have to go read Mallarmé, Milton, D.H. Lawrence and Pound to know what they were going on about (even if I could recall the metaphors of Woodsworth or Andrew Marvell). Also, she managed to work her obsession with insects and taxonomy into this novel as well; this time it is ants.
Sociologically, it is very interesting to see how these people lived their lives. We tend to think of the 50s as sort of innocent and sheltered. Though the people are English - uncomplaining, reserved, polite - they are anything but innocent or frigid. Frederica of course, lives life to the fullest, and goes through quite the collection of men. At Cambridge they outnumber the women eleven to one. These characters are memorable, especially her Scottish cameleon friend Alan. Also the household in which Alexander lands, living with Thomas and Elinor Poole and their three children in London, while he writes his play, is certainly a fascinating arrangement.
She also breaks your suspension of disbelief sporadically by commenting on her own goals as novelist, or revealing the image in her mind which inspired the novel. She discusses how she planned initially to write a novel without metaphors, a particularly odd goal for her it seems to me. She quickly gave up this plan, and resorts instead to simply discussing it with the reader directly. She writes about her process and what happens in the minds of readers. Today this seems a bit self-consciously post-modern. However, she does seem to convey that the characters are none the less real, as if they were people, who lived their lives, and she just came along and wrote about these particular lives, to reach her stated goals, to look at the lives, particularly of women in England in the 50s, and the meaning and role of metaphor.
Not an easy read. Perhaps I needn't worry so much about the details. But, I will say, that I intend to read the remaining two novels in this series. I want to know what happens to these people. I do feel invested in their lives.