pressing details of actual experience

As a coda to my last two posts, here's a quote from Felix Holt, the Radical.

He had had to do many things in law and in daily life which, in the abstract, he would have condemned; and indeed he had never been tempted by them in the abstract. Here, in fact, was the inconvenience; he had sinned for the sake of particular concrete things, and particular concrete consequences were likely to follow.

George Eliot, like Helen Garner, reminds the reader of the difference between ideas as they are conceived in the head and ideas as they are carried out in the world. If the people behind Alice in Wonderland, Tim Burton, and the scripwriter Linda Woolverton, saw the way I wrote about them in the last post, they could use Eliot's quote as an argument in their favour. "Your accusation of cowardice is an abstract judgement," they might say. "Do you really think we sat around saying, "We're afraid of the audience, let's make this film as stupid as possible"? Do you think we said, "Well, we could act like hypocrites or not-hypocrites, let's pick hypocrites"? It's not that simple. Read the interviews! Don't you see we wanted to make a coming of age story? Didn't you see the interview on the Disney website? Here," says my imaginary Tim Burton, "read me here --

What I liked about this take on the story is Alice is at an age where you're between a kid and an adult, when you're crossing over as a person. A lot of young people with old souls aren't so popular in their own culture and their own time. Alice is somebody who doesn't quite fit into that Victorian structure and society. She's more internal.

See? So this teenage Alice has to go to Wonderland and fight a dragon to develop some adult self-confidence. What's cowardly or hypocritical about that? If only you'd been there, you'd know that we thought about it very carefully."

And this is how Felix Holt measures both of us:

But these things [ie, cowardice, dishonourable behaviour] which are easy to discern when they are painted for us on the large canvass of poetic story [or, I'd add, in a newspaper report, or any outside analysis], become confused and obscure even for well-read gentlemen when their affection for themselves is alarmed by pressing details of actual experience. If their comparison of instances is active at such times, it is chiefly in showing them that their own case has subtle distinction from all other cases, which should free them from unmitigated condemnation.

The idea that "things, which are easy to discern when they are painted for us on the large canvass of poetic story, become confused and obscure … by pressing details of actual experience" is present in Garner as well. What does it mean to judge? What assumptions do we make when we judge? How do we see ourselves in relation to the judged person?

as far as I know

I strain and fail to see it only in abstract terms. I don't want to keep going 'like, like, like'. But I can't stop myself.

If we take abstract here to mean that the thing is contained, unassailable, removed, so complete that it can't be described with "like" because it is like nothing but itself, then I wonder if Helen Garner's sensibility could be investigated in the light of the clash she is describing, which lies between that which is self-contained, on one hand, and the complications of human habit and human sprawl, which can't be kept out, on the other. Her books begin with ideas that can be stated quite neatly. You are a good woman. Your friend is dying. What do you do? You help her and keep her comfortable. Or. A man has died, apparently murdered. What should happen? The law should discover the person who did it. And then? Punish them. Or. A female student says that a male professor, sexually suggestive, has frightened her. What should happen? We should find out if she is telling the truth or not and judge both parties accordingly. And so on.

But once these ideas come off the page and enter the world, what happens to them? This is her question. In her non-fiction books she inserts herself in the situation to find out. (In The Children's Bach, a photograph of a nuclear family won't stay stuck to the wall.) She reports on it; she reports that is, on the world as she finds it -- and she is careful, with regular use of I think and I feel, to point out that these things are happening to her alone, in other words, they are experiences confined to herself, they are not universal. She writes about the gap between intention and action. I want to be a good friend. Very nice. How? I don't know. Let me see. She is an anecdotal journalist; anecdotes for her are a way of perpetually putting the idea of human fallibility in front of us. The narrator of these essays is the most fallible one of all. She undercuts herself. Humblest of writerly voices, at times she is too easily impressed. Her colleague is not the literary essayist but the video documentarian with her hand-held camera.

Here's an example, not untypical. In "Das Bettelein", one of the essays in The Feel of Steel, she remembers a holiday she took in 1980 with a group of gay male friends. Garner recalls her opinion of them, and the recollection is unflattering -- unflattering to herself, not to the young men: she is making herself look severe, unfriendly, and two-faced.

Privately I disapproved of their obsession with fun, with youthful beauty and clothes and sex … in my heart I thought of them as moral lightweights.

An anecdote follows. She commits a small social cruelty, and they, shocked, tell her to set things right. Then the kicker, the sentence that bounces back against the word lightweights.

Twenty years later, as far as I know, only two of them are still alive.

The fact that they told her to set things right does not cancel out her earlier judgment -- it's not as if moral lightweights don't judge people too -- and nor does the fact that two of the men are dead, but it places them all closer together, she is not above them, they are all on a similar moral plane, able to judge and be judged; they are all human, and humans, as she has reminded us, are never perfect. It's not the judgment she is calling into question -- the thing that pretends to be abstract -- but the high ground she thought she was standing on when she made it. If they, with their character flaws, really were moral lightweights then what was she? There is no answer. She ends the essay reminding herself to study a piece of music; obliquely the lesson is: life is always more complicated than we think; there is always more to learn. But, oh, oblique. Rarely does she end a piece of writing with a firm conclusion. She's more likely to propose a number of scenes and let the larger matter pause there, unresolved, suggestive, "because," she seems to silently say, "resolution is impossible, but -- suggestive -- everything is suggestive: the world is suggestive." The tangle is too great, and things go on and on, infinitely complicated, one thing leading to another, all connected by unpredictable circumstance as unaccountably as with like, like, like.







Weeks after I'd made this post I came across a review of a memoir written by a doctor who'd worked in various Aboriginal communities around Australia -- Garner helped him. The reviewer wrote:

I was puzzled by the staunchly episodic feel of the book, the continental meandering that brought [Howard] Goldenberg no closer to a resolution--a moral, if you will--that he could construct out of these many experiences. As I relaxed my expectations a bit, I began to appreciate the matter-of-factness of his retelling of these lives he has encountered in the course of his work. If this is not exactly a vehicle for Aboriginal people to tell their own stories, Raft at least provides something very like an objective portrait of the people he encounters. I began to respect the author for the simplicity of his reporting and to be grateful to him for his refusal to embellish.

In the acknowledgments that close the book, Goldenberg offers the briefest of explanations for this tone, noting that among his advisors in style was Helen Garner, who urged him "strenuously to publish the pieces she liked and to incinerate those sections -- 'posturing and rhetorical' -- that she did not. It is precisely that lack of an attempt at fiery moralizing that distinguishes Raft from many otherwise similar memoirs of encounters with remote Australia.

It sounds like the kind of advice she probably gives herself when she writes. Avoid posturing. Beware fiery moralizing. Do not embellish.

like, like, like

In Helen Garner's essay, "Regions of Thick-Ribbed Ice", she sees her first chunk of Antarctic ice floating in the sea, and writes,

At once I'm seized by an urge to to compare it with something -- with anything: it's the size of a loosely flexed hand, palm up, like a Disney coronet with knobbed points; as hollow as a rotten tooth. For some reason I am irritated by this urge and make an effort to control it.

Other people on the tour ship begin to make comparisons of their own.

Then someone likens the iceberg to a face. "It's got a sad eye. See its nose?" On and on people go: it's like a sphinx, a Peke's face, an Indian head with its mouth open. Again I am secretly enraged by this, and by my own urgent desire to do the same.

The word "like" annoys her.

I strain and fail to see it only in abstract terms. I don't want to keep going 'like, like, like'. But I can't stop myself.

I thought of Gerrit de Veer, ship's carpenter, quoted in John Livingston Lowes' Road to Xanadu, who, in 1597, compared icebergs to swans without being either enraged or irritated.

The fifth, wee saw the first Ice, which we wondered at, at the first, thinking that it had beene white Swannes, for one of our men walking in the Fore-decke, on a sudden began to cry out with a loud voice, and said: that hee saw white Swannes: which wee that were under Hatches hearing, presently came up, and perceived that it was Ice that came driving from the great heape, showing like Swannes

There is grandeur in this, in the idea of these men sailing through freezing seas at the end of the world when without warning comes a flotilla of giant serene swans (this is how I see them, necks curved, still as silhouettes and stylised as plastic toys or novelty soaps, pure white, and the man on deck standing there in the role of a witness, and even though we've been told they're Ice, I still see swans). Lowes is so pleased by descriptions like de Veer's that he gives us pages of examples to prove that the "persistent association of of strange with familiar things" is "one of the voyagers' most alluring traits." (These "voyagers" are the old sailors whose travellers' tales, Lowes believes, rounded out the descriptions in Coleridge's Ancient Mariner.)

Garner wishes for "abstract" impressions; Lowes doesn't seem to have considered the idea that an abstract impression might be desirable -- it doesn't occur to him -- he is for the concrete, the shaped, the romantic comparison, the colour at the centre of the iceberg "of a pale green colour like vitriol", and, "as green as an Emerald"* -- or romantic absolutes -- so that the ice was also "the fairest blew that can be," or "of a perfect Azure colour and like to the skies," as de Veer had it, both blue and green -- which Garner, hundreds of years later, saw too.

Each one is fissured, flawed with a wandering seam of unnatural cellophane blue-green, almost dayglo: older ice, someone explains, more densely compressed. A lump of ice needs to be only the size of, say, a small washing machine, for this faery green to be present in it, like a flaw in an opal.

As I read over this I realise that the objects she's comparing the ice to would have been as strange to de Veer as the ice itself, cellophane, a washing machine, and the opal, rare stone, which was assumed, in his day, to be cursed or magical. (And, writing this, I think: if I hadn't read Lowes' book with those quotes in it, would Garner's essay have reminded me of something else, or of nothing at all? Garner wishes a thing could be that thing, self-contained, itself only, otherwise abstract. Lowes wishes that it could be everything, many things, outward-expanding, and seep into the rest of the earth: the Ice as Swanne, as vitriol, as Emerald, everything, onward and outward. As if Garner is saying, "I am a fallible human being, how can I judge? I judge against my will. I resist, I fail," and Lowes' travellers are saying, "We shall judge, it is our duty as writers to judge, in other words, to describe, thereby to value, and the ice has this value, x, the value of a swan." As if suggesting two different mysteries, the unknowable (complete in itself), and the indescribable (partaking of so many other things that it is none of them: if the iceberg is Ice and Swanne then it is neither of them, and falls somewhere between, not an iceberg, not a swan, but a thing-in-between, and also it is both, which leaves it open to be like other things as well: like a Swanne and "a sphinx," and "a Peke's face."

Otherwise you go the Gertrude Stein route, and say, The ice is the ice is the ice. And that is that.))








* Two of Lowes' sources describe the interior colour of the icebergs as "emerald," and so, he points out, in their wake, did Coleridge.

And now there came both mist and snow,
And it grew wondrous cold :
And ice, mast-high, came floating by,
As green as emerald.