The ultimate empty signifier

Not a time for soundbites, I know, but I’ve been touched by the hand of history this week. The Olympic torch came through Surbiton and I went out specially (apart from having to go to Waitrose) to stand by the road with the crowd and watch. So I can tell my grandchildren I was there and gentlemen of England who couldn’t be arsed to get up would have nothing to tell theirs.

I hated it. For half an hour before the torch’s arrival (from Tolworth, history-touched too) we had to watch a succession of heavily padded police on motorbikes ineffectually waving us back on the pavement, cars carrying important people (evidently--consultants, no doubt), bikes ridden by, I suppose, athletes, judging by their gear, a Coca Cola bus, a Samsung bus, a RBS bus and more buses of other ‘sponsors’, each emitting loud music and conveying compulsory jollity via grimacing ‘athletes’ inside and pom-pom and tutu girls on the roof. In short, tacky.

Then the torch and torch-bearer appeared. Such was the crowd that they were very near before I saw them, and then my first glimpse of the torch did nothing to alleviate my disillusionment. It looked as if it had been knocked up for a kid’s party by some desperate mum from a bit of gold paper and sellotape.

Finally I was able to see the torch bearer and at this point I stopped hating it and took back all my whinges. Unlike the actual or would be ‘personalities’, fellow-travellers and Coke groupies, carrying the torch was a manifestly ordinary teenage kid, a lad who didn’t have a personality’s looks but seemed disarmingly awkward and embarrassed. I thought, if all this is really all about acknowledging the likes of him, then I'm with it.

On its journey through Britain (8,000 miles, I keep hearing) the torch (or torches -- they’re apparently disposable, unlike the flame) has attracted large and enthusiastic crowds in an outpouring that seems genuine (though do you remember Princess Di?). And I wonder, what’s the enthusiastic outpouring for? and I'm driven to conclude it’s for -- enthusiastic outpouring. Certainly, many of the bearers are said to be admirable, but I wonder how many are known to more than a few of the watchers. I doubt if the motivation to turn out and pour out is mainly a desire to respect a respected or loved local.

It’s a celebration -- of a celebration. There’s nothing behind it, nothing it’s a celebration of; it stands for nothing, not, anyway, in the minds of the thousands who have turned out as opposed to the official blurb. When a flame was carried from a shrine in ancient Greece, it commanded respect or awe because it was sacred -- this was the nearest we’d get to the gods. But this torch isn’t anything sacred and isn’t even the symbol of anything, anything at all, let alone anything sacred.

Torch and flame are the ultimate empty signifiers, there simply to signify, intransitive, or to signify, transitive, supply your own object. The latter is just what I imagine people have done.

Unsatisfying literature

A long intermission, that was: high pressure period for inspecting and writing up data (book on the research -- Walworth and two other schools -- due November) so I haven’t felt like extra writing on top. The pressure has eased for the time being so no reason not to resume -- I.e to use this forum to do my musing -- with Wolf Hall.

Wolf Hall is a historical novel by Hilary Mantel about Thomas Cromwell and his relations with, at the political level, his two employers, Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII. My previous reading had been Canada by Richard Ford. After finishing Wolf Hall I realised that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d read two terrific novels in a row: I was absorbed in both and admired them immensely, and still do in retrospect.

I resolved after Canada that I’d read it again, as I increasingly do with novels. (I haven’t done it yet because I lent it to someone who I haven’t seen to get it back from, but I certainly will.) While reading Wolf Hall I was certain I’d reread that too -- but in the following days and weeks I haven’t felt so sure and haven’t felt the urge to start. There’s something importantly different about the two books, it seems, and getting at it seems of interest as a way of understanding something significant about English.

I've always felt inadequate -- under-educated -- in dealing with literature. I didn’t do A level English and when I switched to English at Oxford the ‘course’ was something of a joke: we read the books, wrote essays, and that was about it apart from the odd seminar with good young lecturers like John Carey. I did no thinking about what literature was, what poetry was etc., and I never had any help with reading ‘difficult’ 20th century poetry beyond The Waste Land; no one showed us and I'm still floundering with much modern poetry, though I like reading it. I feel there must be a key, an essential way of approaching it that, once you’ve got it, will banish many obscurities and show the motivation behind elements for the inclusion of which I can see no logic. And now I'm floundering thinking about those two novels.

Both are beautifully written, in different ways. With Mantel I wasn’t expecting much from the writing (I've never read anything else by her): this was a ‘historical novel’ and it would all be in the story and the characters. The description, scene-setting etc would be adequate -- functional -- but the prose would be flat. It wasn’t: the sentences were lovely, the texture was such savouring it was a large part of the pleasure. This was quality writing, I realised, as well as being a great story, the people in it fascinating and often sympathetic, the dialogue sharp and witty. (What’s more, the research behind the book had clearly been thorough; I felt confident that if you wanted to know about Tudor England, this would be a trustworthy place to start. Needless to say, I don’t really know that.)

But now, looking back, I'm not sure what it all amounted to. Was my reading essentially just a series of richly enjoyable and stimulating imaginative experiences, appreciations of beautiful texture -- and if so, what’s wrong with that and what else would it be if it wasn’t that? (The terrible judgment, ‘entertainment’, springs to mind.)

There are other good books, also well-written, that I ended up feeling the same way about. They all fall into the category of ‘genre fiction’. There are detective novels (Chandler, Parker etc), books like Robert Harris’s Fatherland, stories set in World War II and Cold War novels; Le Carré, of course, but I'm thinking particularly of an author I read more recently: military, espionage, USSR, Fall of France--Alan Furst’s The Polish Officer and Night Soldiers -- both well written and not just functional but, like all the others, I enjoyed them immensely but they left little behind except some scenes and situations that are still powerfully present to me. Wolf Hall seems, after this short time gap, to fall into that category; Canada doesn’t, though that, too, has left vivid impressions of the city of Great Falls, the boy’s world, the misery of the unbroken miles of Saskatchewan wheat fields.

Canada is more austere. The voice of the narrator (middle-aged man recalling his adolescence though one feels his voice hasn’t changed much in those years) is speechlike -- but not slangy -- and eschews literary types of expression while still doing all the descriptive work that was needed. Perhaps the quality the book has could better be described as formality, despite the relative informality of a style that owes much to speech. The language is of course written language in that it continues for the length of a book and is organised in paragraphs and chapters, and no doubt in features of syntax which I’d need the book back to demonstrate. Whatever its characteristics, it is above all consistent: the book establishes a decorum in its diction (see Donald Davie, Purity and Diction in English Verse) and sticks to it, with an effect overall that’s poetic. In Wolf Hall (and Furst) there is a pervasive poeticness -- exhilaratingly figurative and evocative -- but that’s a very different matter and doesn’t leave the lasting deposit in the mind that Canada does.

It’s something like -- this is the idea I'm playing with: the difference between a book that’s poetic and a book that’s, in effect, a poem, poetry.

Did some such distinction -- poetic, non-poetic -- lie behind Leavis’s distinction between the ‘Great Tradition’ of English fiction and less worthy writers like Trollope and Wells?

However, my judgment of books on one reading are unreliable. All this will have to be revised, no doubt, when I get round to re-reading, though whether I'll do that with Wolf Hall -- at least soon (I can’t see myself holding off reading the sequel, Bring Up the Bodies) -- I can’t say.

I wonder whether it’s its poetic character that makes for my willing re-reading of Kipling’s rather unregarded Kim over most Trollope, say, though I generally enjoy Trollope (the good bits, anyway), and for my satisfying rereading of Carlyle’s French Revolution (see marginal links). Will reflect.

My conductors

There have been obituaries of James Gaddarn, a conductor, one of two with whom I've had encounters in my life. In a summer vacation Johnny Walker (of Rastrick, Brighouse) and I were hitching from Oxford to Pembrokeshire to join my parents on holiday and Gaddarn pulled up in an old Rolls Royce and took us all the way. I remember more of the car than the conversation.

My second conductor was in Cambridge, Mass, where I'd arrived by car from Ottawa on a tour with my son in the 1990s; a bed-and-breakfast agency referred us to a house and said we'd like it because the owner was English.  It turned out to be Benjamin Zander, conductor of the lesser of the two Boston orchestras, who invited us to listen to his recording of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring on massive speakers, claiming that his was only performance that delivered the speed the composer had wanted: the players in Stravinsky's own time ‘couldn’t cut it.'  Having generously let us listen and handed us the CD he then informed us of the price. Of course I paid up and have never heard of him since.

Messing up classic drama

I've sounded off before about how Shakespeare directors feel the need to set their productions in some historical period (other than Shakespeare’s and any that have already been done).  It gets in the way of the text unnecessarily; but faced with the question of what a production would be like that doesn’t get in the way I gave up and voted for semi-staged readings.

But perhaps I should persist and go to more productions; perhaps some do work. I'm wondering that because Handel’s Rinaldo at Glyndebourne last year (BBC4 last Friday night, available for a week here)  was a really messed up production that worked; I thought it was fabulous. I've never, of course, seen Rinaldo done straight, or even listened to it on CD.

Instead of being set in the Crusades, the action took place in a traditional school with uniform, canes, gowns and mortar boards.  The main chap, Rinaldo, was a schoolboy/Crusader and was played by a woman; the whole of the Crusades stuff was this kid’s fantasy, a way of getting revenge on his horrible bullying classmates and the hateful teachers. The schoolgirls (pure St Trinian’s) doubled as Furies; the other school boys were play up, play up and play the game good chaps who made good English Crusaders.

Visually it was a treat with special effects, multiple revealings of sets, breathtaking choreography and enlivening lighting; the singing of course was superb. Above all it was hilarious, yet this wasn’t incompatible with the thing being moving and dramatically gripping. The characters were real and distinctive; I really liked Rinaldo and his speccy girlfriend and revelled in the evilness of the villains, male and female. The bondage and SM overtones added spice.

Perhaps the difference from Shakespeare is that Handel’s libretto couldn’t be taken seriously on its own merits; it was simply the vehicle for the music, which in the manner of the operas of the time used them, at least after the first occurrence of each chunk, less for their meaning and contribution to the story than as repeatable matter on which musical variations and developments could be constructed and subtle developments and vagaries of a character’s personality and feeling played out by changes in the singing and the repertoire of action and bodily and facial expression. So what happens is highly formal ritual (arias, repetitions) and constant development with nothing the same twice.

With Shakespeare, while there’s certainly ritual and formality -- patterns as unrealistic as those of opera, like the extended exchanges in As You Like It that I wrote about earlier and a few times shortly afterwards -- what’s repeated and patterned is mainly at a more general or abstract level and the words themselves are unique to each successive speech -- and thus carry much more of the meaning that’s essential to experiencing the play.

Perhaps the reason for the difference in my responses (Rinaldo as against many Shakespeare productions) is simply that in the opera the director’s superimposed setting was carried by the cast and the set stylishly and cleverly whereas Shakespeare is so often clunky, with lots of superfluous action that isn’t wonderful to watch but just irritating. Bloody actors. I assume Glyndebourne used dancers.

Richards on suburbs

I mentioned The Castles on the Ground (J.M. Richards, 1946) in my last post. Here’s how it starts.

1 The Englishman's Home


Ewbank'd inside and Atco'd out, the English suburban residence and the garden which is an integral part of it stand trim and lovingly cared for in the mild sunshine. Everything is in its place. The abruptness, the barbarities of the world are far away. There is not much sound, except perhaps the musical whirr and clack of a mowing machine being pushed back and forth over a neighbouring lawn and the clink of cups and saucers and a soft footfall as tea is got ready indoors. There is not much movement either: a wire- haired terrier lazily trotting round the garden in a not very hopeful search for something new to smell, and the pages of a newspaper being turned and refolded by some leisurely individual in a deck chair. It is an almost windless day. The leaves of the Virginia creeper (ampélopsis veitchii) which climbs the rough-cast wall just behind the window of the best bedroom hardly stir, and even the birds only hop—and flutter a few feet in the air, and hop again— along the ornamental ridge of the red-tiled roof.


Perhaps a tradesman's van is making its rounds. Perhaps at this moment, on the other side of the screen of privet hedge and may and laburnum which separates the garden scent of new grass cuttings from the warm peppery scent that radiates from asphalt pavements in summertime, the baker's boy is halting his cart. In another moment he will push open the low wooden gate with its embossed copper name-plate on the rail, and will carelessly let it swing to behind him as he strides up the gravel path with his basket of loaves on his arm. But this is only the tradesman's entrance, and the faint squeak of the hinge and the sound the latch makes as the gate swings back will not be very disturbing...

Richards wasn’t writing about my suburb -- definitely southern, Teddington or Twickenham, perhaps.

Childhood in suburb and city

The town I live in is a Victorian suburb that owes its existence to the railway line into Waterloo. This morning being springlike (birdsong, flowering trees, no leaves yet) I walked down to the river thinking how pleasant it was. One road was lined with 1930s semis which, though of unusual design, reminded me of where I lived in Bradford to the age of 12. The district was called Great Horton by the Post Office though it was on a plateau looking down on Great Horton, on what had recently been fields between the top of the slope and the old village of Wibsey. So Wibsey Infants was my first school, Horton Bank Top Junior my second. Where we lived was a 1930s lower middle class suburb of semis -- acres of them, all privately owned. Apart from the occasional doctor or dentist the highest status occupants were browbeaten teachers.

So, not posh--not the jasmined and aubretiaed fairy land with detached houses ‘Ewbank’d inside and Atco’d out’ and with roads lined with cherry trees described by J.M. Richards in Castles on the Ground of 1946. Still true suburb nevertheless from which all men disappeared into town by the morning bus or tram and archetypal in its monotony of low buildings and wide, underused roads with grass verges. The gardens were small; big enough for a privet hedge, small lawn and the odd laburnum but nothing like the landscaped grounds of more upmarket suburbs on the road to Ilkley near Harry Ramsdens. There was little call for Atcos.

Moore Avenue, though now I look they seem to be groups of three, not semis. 

In this world which seemed short of children of my own age the play was desultory among the bland, underpopulated spaces. To either village on foot was a long and boring drag. The only excitement was the leftover wild patch of Moor Fields on the edge of our plateau, and there at about age 8 a critical mass of boys was to be found ready for building dens and starting fires.

Widdy's house (on the left) from Moore Avenue where it goes down steeply to Great Horton Road.  Now those are semis. The front of Widdy's house looked onto Moor Fields.  Kenneth Widdowson was my best friend but we went to different secondary schools and I don't know what became of him.

There was also a quite unsuburban edge of dangerous reality: an unprotected quarry edge, with a path to one side down a less steep slope, at the bottom of which was the quarry (disused, with pools) and beyond that The Slums, packed Victorian terraces blackened with the smoke that poured from the chimneys of houses and mills. And here lived the Quarry Gang who we'd have called feral if we'd know the word. We occasionally caught glimpses of them careering about the spoil heaps in the quarry or converging up the separate cobbled streets under the gas lights. They may have even ventured up the slope onto our territory, causing us to flee into the snickets between the blocks of semis.

Great Horton from Moor Fields.  The grass is where the quarry has now been filled in and the slums (terraces with stone roofs, outside lavatories, one cold tap) are long gone and replaced.  All the buildings were as black as that church, including the giant Lister's Mill in the distance, above where we moved when I was 12.

The contrast between the classic working-class life of those kids and my own was brought to mind earlier this morning by reading the transcript of one of our research interviews. A former pupil of Walworth, from a peaceful and stable working-class home, refers to friends who often came to the sanctuary of his house from unhappier lives that were troubled by neglect and violence. Children growing up in that area knew things that I never did. Our play reflected our reality, bland, innocent and cocooned. They lived among men whose work, mainly manual, was nearby and visible, and some of whom got drunk, spent the housekeeping money, fought and beat their wives. None of those features entered my childhood. I never saw adults fighting or even seriously arguing, or drunk except when we came out of the Cosy Cinema on Wibsey from an evening show, hastening out of the village to safety on the boring 1930s Moore Avenue with its sodium lights and reassuring Tudorbethan frontages with lit windows showing placid family scenes.

Inactive blog

I'm aware a fair number of friends and sympathetic persons read this blog from time to time and I apologise for the sporadic nature of recent postings. The reason, as usual during such periods, it that I'm in a phase of having to do a lot of other writing, to do with the research I've frequently referred to. After a stint of that the prospect of more writing isn’t attractive. I don’t intend to drop the blog, though. I'll be back, but can’t at the moment say when.