Monday, February 23, 2015

that old horse is alive still



When I mention magic I remember Frank Kermode in his essay Between Time and Eternity, writing, "All plots have something in common with prophecy, for they must appear to educe from the prime matter of the situation the forms of a future," and I wonder vaguely about the predictive or coercive power of systems (a system in itself is a prediction; to note a system is to note a prediction) -- and also I consider the mechanisms that trigger or indicate or introduce you to those systems, and then naturally I think of the aged horse in the opening pages of The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn (1859), that book by Henry Kingsley, the brother of Charles (The Water Babies (1862-63, serialised)).

"Bless me!" I said; "You don't mean to say that that old horse is alive still?"

"He looks like it," said the major. "He'd carry you a mile or two, yet."

"I thought he had died while I was in England," I said. "Ah, major, that horse's history would be worth writing."

"If you began," answered the major, "to write the history of the horse, you must write also the history of every body who was concerned in those circumstances which caused Sam to take a certain famous ride upon him. And you would find that the history of the horse would be reduced into very small compass, and that the rest of your book would assume proportions too vast for the human intellect to grasp."

"How so?" I said.

He entered into certain details, which I will not give. "You would have," he said, "to begin at the end of the last century, and bring one gradually on to the present time. Good heavens! just consider."

"I think you exaggerate," I said.

"Not at all," he answered. "You must begin the histories of the Buckley and Thornton families in the last generation. The Brentwoods also, must not be omitted,-- why there's work for several years."


So if you tell the story of those families then you will also have to tell the stories of the people connected to them and so on and so on until by Major Buckley's logic the entire world is swallowed (recalling that Ruskin in one book contemplates the holy profusion of leaves), which is the problem Gertrude Stein enunciated in The Making of Americans, when she talks about the neighbours and then the neighbours of the neighbours, until she reaches the same conclusion as Major Buckley, this playful and useless idea that any grossly representational book would be "too vast for the human intellect to grasp" and what does that say about the human intellect and also Kingsley's playfulness, and then Gertrude Stein's playfulness, which is an oblique or self-defending reflex, and also self-conquering as it indicates that it is biting off more than it can chew, in fact creating that too-much obstacle and showing it to you so that it can throw up its hands and say, "Non" – here is the book desiring to have that Non-action inside itself and going to these abnormal lengths to get it, and asking you to observe its crippledness, its broken-wingedness, ha, ha, ha?


8 comments:

  1. That "naturally" is nicely played.

    It's interesting that so few people notice how narrative chops away at reality, hewing it down and down and putting up walls to narrow it, to focus is possibly a kinder word, to make it small enough to fit into a hat. "Realism" in fact the ignoring of most of reality, the creation of a tidy fantasy. I wonder if (and this is no original thought) people are attracted to magic tales and myths because we suspect the infinity of history but are afraid to really consider it, and tales where the imaginary walls of "reality" are broached are exciting but, of course, safe. People seem to mistrust narratives that leave the breaches in the walls, that side-shadow and point outward beyond the immediate focus of the story. This is stuff I think about a lot. It's also funny, ha ha ha, how books that point out that they are aware of how they're banging up against the impossibility of true realism (wow, the universe is so much bigger than this book it contains!) are all so self-conscious, how "metafiction" is, yeah, still kind of a joke. Who's writing "Tristram Shandy" in earnest? Someone must be. I'm now talking past your point, at some other point, I know. But why must this awareness of the limitations of narrative be a joke? Joyce and Beckett tear at the walls but hide behind the idea of comedy. Even Nabokov did that, I think, drawing our attention to the language games he was playing while pretending that his...no, now I'm just rambling.

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    1. Are Joyce and Beckett hiding behind comedy though? In the case of Beckett I've thought of comedy as the only possible outcome for a point of view that pictures life as tragedy without dignity. And a book-narrative would be a kind of dignity as well. It would legitimise his language and frame his grim flailers as if they were respectable characters. So they shouldn't have it. Whatever's metafictional in him is primarily there because it serves his notion of what is actually true. That's been my reading of the man.

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  2. So interesting to read, as just now I do happen to be reading Tristram Shandy. And, in perpetuity, Finnegans Wake.

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    1. That sounds like a very interesting programme of reading.

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  3. It is, but it's not from my own personal agenda.

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    1. Are you in a class? I'm trying to think of a reason why someone would be reading Finnegans Wake if it wasn't a personal choice.

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  4. No, I don't mean that I'm against reading it. It's just that I'm reading it in a group that was started by a friend, and reading Tristram Shandy is because another friend wanted to discuss it together. I'm not being coerced, but I don't want to give the impression that I am more ambitious than I really am.

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    1. Modesty! There are people who would probably argue that a humble spirit of discussing and roaming is better than ambitious reading anyway.

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