human beings only take advantage

As I look at The Porthole again I believe that I could spend a long time going through the book page by page and listing all the variations that Spatola finds in this thwartation or resistance play. Why did Samuel Richardson write books that put him (not him but his written voice) in situations of apparent anxiety and why did he (his voice) exacerbate those situations instead of ending them? Asking, "Why did he create such a perfect character as Grandison?" might be something like the same question. You picture a man observing his voice as if he is watching a very exciting film. Spatola describes a war in which his character Guglielmo takes part on both sides at once (meaning that the name "Guglielmo" is partaking in contrary actions simultaneously in different places), torturing people, stealing horses, etc, baffling the normal expectation that an author who writes about conflict will ask you to sympathise more with one body of combatants than the other. This is a bit shocking: shouldn't he give you a position; shouldn't he find some noble rebels or reluctant army recruits or something to sympathise with? Removing a dead war-horse's shoes, the narrator 'I' also removes its "glasses, watch, ring, gold teeth, hair, and orthopedic limb." I think of Alice in Wonderland's argument for the dominance of algebraic principles in language. By insisting on the vigilant mediation of words, the Wonderland characters point towards a hypothesis of language that has been changed from a common property to a private one. As a Wonderland person you are not inevitably unhappy. You appear abrasive to others, but your privacy ensures your character. It is like having a house to live in. If Alice could handle language algebraically like the others then she would not have to worry so much about warping and stretching. She would be the manipulation of formula.

The inhabitants of Wonderland are living machines in costumes. (Is a living machine also a malfunctioning machine?) Reading the art historian T.J. Clark's 2006 book The Sight of Death I notice how often he refers to boundaries in his work; how he notes the overlapped straightnesses of the landscape in the two Poussin paintings and the outstretched arm of the fleeing individual in Landscape with Man Killed By a Snake, c. 1648. I am interested in his appreciation of the stillness this helps to create upon the canvas; and how his description of a real event, a trip to Michael Heizer's Double Negative earthwork, 1969-1970, is a lifeless sketch. The people in the car gave a "great shout" when the cutting finally comes into view, he says, a phrase so routine in British English that he can rely on it to represent nothing much. Returning to the boundaried world of the paintings he goes back into evocation again. Double Negative has not been an opportunity for thought. Eventually he comes to this idea about the intersection between the painter and the world: "The lake's level, or the balance of branches on a tree – human beings only take advantage of order already present. It is just that nature gives no such clear priority to such orders." It will be interesting to see if Heizer really goes through with the plan to shore up Double Negative with concrete.

you'll see what I say you'll see

Having, now, The Glass Canoe next to Little, Big in my mind I wonder about the different ways in which the two authors find a character or structure for the Unknown in their books, Crowley building a kind of horizontal (rather than hierarchical) maze in which a revelation in one story will lead you sideways to another story – not a clarity through the unknown but a passageway into another room of it. Mrs Underhill says "Wear this," as she sticks a magic leaf on Lilac's forehead but the enlargement is only in a certain direction, "and you'll see what I say you'll see." By implication, what I don't say you won't see, and who knows what size that is. The dream that seems to be taking Grandfather Trout into a memory of his original human self turns, instead, towards the story of (maybe) the Frog Prince, disenchanted, leaping from the water, "legs flailing and royal robes drenched," then to the Fish-Footman from the first Alice, a "bewigged fish in a high-collared coat, a huge letter under his arm" – till the trout wakes, in shock, back to his own edition of the tale. *

Irrevocable revelation in the Glass Canoe, however, is not only achievable, it is horribly forced on you, and you will be catapaulted into the misery of knowledge against your will when you point out the anthropomorphic mystery of the record player to your girlfriend and she easily shows you the knob that explains the technology.

The Meatman, who loved not knowing, is troubled by the new absence of his pet ignorance, and the information is not an addition to his mental landscape, it is a loss forever. He laments.

Binarily he shifts over into that knowledge as if through a door that shuts behind him. And there are other such doors in the book, but he avoids them: he won't look in the sealed barrel, and he won't draw the obvious conclusion when he sees his girlfriend in the window with several men. The knowledge is being offered so starkly; Crowley's people should envy him. But it would mean sadness if he took it (we know that from the record player episode), and sadness with no compensation that the reader is ever allowed to see. He is wiser than Victor Frankenstein; instinctively he has resisted (or shied away from, take your pick) temptation, he is aligned with those books and authors who have worried about the effect that technical knowingness, ie science, will have on the state of knowledge-less anticipation that is described with words like wonderment. Lord Dunsany wrote with a feather pen in the age of biros.

When I think that we, as a species, have only just become aware of the lymph vessels that run up into our brains, and that this discovery is not the end of anything (as the discovery of the lymph system itself was not the end of anything, and the mapping of it, falsely wholly, over a century ago, was not the end of mapping it or knowing it), I want to believe that, out of the two of them, Crowley's formulation of the Unknown as story beyond story is closer to what is …



*After I posted this I went over and read, for the first time, the post from June 4th at Wuthering Expectations, which also mentions the Alice Footman. Coincidence.

Alice never knows whether she is looking at a fish or a man: "she considered him to be a footman because he was in livery: otherwise, judging by his face only, she would have called him a fish." Carroll's illustrators are always sure that he is a fish-headed person but this is more than you can say for the author, who only ever refers to a resemblance in the face. And the way he has packed man into footman is very strange: if the person had been naked, without the livery, but still running up to a door with a letter under his arm, then what would Alice call him?

subject us further to its power

Whatever is going to be, is learning from what is; whatever is happening is possessed by whatever has already happened, and "If each word wins us a victory over nothingness, it is only to subject us further to its power", wrote Cioran the pessimist. Nothing is fated until it happens. Everything present is its own premonition. The ruin from Ossian occurred to the writer of Romance, and I was interested to see that Ann Wroe in her book on Shelley described the poet working in a way that was not like that Radcliffian leap from one phrase into another; instead, she said, he would mark down the rhythm of the poem (that was the main thing, the propelling thing) and spaces were often left blank, waiting to be filled in later with some word that wouldn't sound out of place.

Before this I imagined Marguerite Young rolling from word to word in her sentences but Miss MacIntosh, My Darling depends so much on rhythm that the Shelley method could have been used instead and it would have had the same result: she could have written it one way or the other way, and there is no rule that says you have to write one word after another, or even a book in order. John Crowley once said that he starts his books in the middle, and the landscape to right and left of that island a whitened tundra where the moss whistled to the wind.

So the shape of a finished thing doesn't always let you know how it was done, and mystery novels, no matter how many observed details they include, will never be realistic; they are attuned to an a-real philosophy, or a hopeful one.

All of Young's words are her own, she's not a quoter, or if she's quoting or misquoting excerpts then she doesn't give herself away. She resuses herself but not anyone else; large areas of Miss MacIntosh are made of words that have already been used, as all books are, if you want to be pedantic, everybody lifting everybody else's "the" and "but" and "I", doing this without remorse or shame because nobody ever detects them, or everybody does but nobody calls them out, we are this collective of thieves, and you have to reach a higher status of word before people start shouting plagiarism or sequel. You have to reach the arena of proper names, and even then you can disguise it. I could write a serious book about a girl named Alicia and, as long as I was careful, nobody would know that she belonged to Lewis Carroll, whose own name cannibalised the words Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.

"This pseudonym was a play on his real name; Lewis was the anglicised form of Ludovicus, which was the Latin for Lutwidge, and Carroll an Irish surname similar to the Latin name Carolus, from which the name Charles comes," explains somebody on his Wikipedia page. They refer you to Morton Cohen's 1996 book Lewis Carroll: a Biography for proof, but none of the Carroll biographies I've been able to actually get my hands on around here will support the theory, although they don't support any other theory either, they just don't mention it at all. In my local Carroll biographies it's as if he pulled the name out of nowhere and relied on nothing, nothing inspired him, there was no forerunner, only pure Carroll.



(n.b. Wroe's book is an alchemical biography, Becoming Shelley, devoutly researched, which is more than I did for those Carroll biographies, scuffling around in the UNLV library among the England 1800s shelves under D, Dodgson, with the black weight of Dickens falling to my left and Eliot nesting like Eagles on the right.)

it is the play of itself

We saw Alice in Wonderland with friends a few nights ago. Tim Burton, who has never shown the tiniest desire to attempt Carroll's logical extremism in any other film, doesn't attempt it here. Helena Bonham Carter's Red Queen was so much like Miranda Richardson in the second series of Blackadder that even M., who was unfamiliar with the show until he migrated, picked up on it. Anne Hathaway floated through the role of the White Queen with gestures that M. (who adored them) described as "camp," holding her elbows cocked and her fingers wafting, like a woman waiting for nail polish to dry.

Hamish, the glossy young lord who proposes to adult Alice in the real world before she goes down the rabbit hole, was played beautifully by someone I'd never seen before. Leo Bill? He filled his minor role with the pantomime roundedness that Alan Rickman brought to the Sheriff of Nottingham, and the alertness and glee of this, the private fun he was having, made him seem awake while everyone else on screen was sleeping upright, tucking his jaw down chinlessly, and pootering on about his digestive tract. The other real-world actors played it straight, which was a mistake, because 'it,' that is, the script they were given, did them no favours. Clump, thud, plop, went the script, both story and dialogue dull.

So. And writing like this reminds me of Pepys criticising performances of Shakespeare, which he does several times in the Diary. The Tempest, he says, has "no great wit; but [is] yet good, above ordinary plays." At the Opera he "saw Romeo and Juliet, the first time it was ever acted [after the theatres were re-opened following the fall of Oliver Cromwell's Puritan government].

But it is the play of itself the worst that ever I saw in my life, and the worst acted that ever I saw these people do"

At the King's Theatre he watched A Midsummer Night's Dream

which I have never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life.

The decision to turn Alice into a fantasy adventure seems to have been born of cowardice and nothing else; the script makes modest gestures at a kind of rote feminism -- Alice is sometimes forthright and sometimes not, to suit the plot, and she doesn't want to wear a corset -- but there is no other justification for it, other than the fear that audiences might be bored by Lewis Carroll. So, given that they've eviscerated the Nonsense and turned the Jabberwock into a standard fantasy movie dragon it's funny to hear the characters pop out lines about the importance of the imagination and the majesty of doing something new. In fact I'll go further: it's hypocrisy.

I've never loved the Alice books, or hated them either, but I remember, when I think back to reading them at the age of somewhere-under-ten, believing that Wonderland was a chilly and oppressive place. Alice goes to a world where everyone is smarter than she is, or, at least, more powerful, more knowing, more commanding, and these other people understand the way society works while she doesn't -- which is what life is like for a little child overall, if you think about it. You're ruled by adults who lay down laws in accordance with a logic that you are not privy to, logic which goes mostly unexplained, or explained in words that seem beside the point. "You have to go to bed now," they say, and, "No I don't," you reply, and "If you don't you'll be tired tomorrow," they tell you, but how, how, is that relevant to now? "No I won't be tired," you explain, and you're sure that this is true; why shouldn't it be true, and why should their guess about the future be more accurate than yours? How could they know? There is some mechanism back there, some knowledge, that they seem absolutely sure about. There's nothing you can do to penetrate their certainty. You will be tired tomorrow, they tell you. They're certain of it. When you're six this might as well be Nonsense-logic.