In Kandinsky, more than in any other painter, I think, you see why abstraction is the logical conclusion of painting. For the ‘pure working of colour’ to be felt – and these are Kandinsky’s own words – a form of expression must be found that excludes the ‘fable’ we are always so keen to read in a painting – its ostensible references to objective reality – in favour of the ‘inner meaning’. And for Kandinsky the inner meaning is the music of colour. Rhythm. Anyone who finds that hard to grasp should hurry on down to Tate Modern and take in Kandinsky room by room, then pause – for eternity, if you have eternity to spare – before one of the great Compositions of 1913 or thereabouts, in which feeling, thought and colour become indistinguishable by virtue of the rhythm that unites them.
You could say that Western art – Christian Western art anyway – has always been abstract in the sense that the God in whose service art was made was never Himself paintably there. The artist can represent the symbols of belief, but not belief, or the reason for belief, itself. Remove even that abstraction and you have art with no subject or raison d’être but the spirituality of its own form. In a secular age the holy of holies becomes colour. And what unifies one colour with another is rhythm.
As is the case – to keep it brief – with the plays of Harold Pinter. Even as unmeaning is piled upon unmeaning, the rhythm of apparently ordinary speech, wrenched from its inconsequence, keeps us in the picture. Brutal, broken and more often than not malign, but ultimately pleasing, as art must be pleasing, by virtue of the harmony with which Pinter invests it. This is what strikes one about Pinter himself. Though to listen to him is often like being caught in the sights of a sniper – his delivery machine-gun abrupt, his thoughts flying about your ears like pellets – and though he sometimes seems to be in an argument he does not intend to lose with language itself, the overall effect of his speaking is minimalist-symphonic. Never mind the politics, which on their own are simplistic; just give in to the music, which is not.
The Scottish Person knew to do just that. Well briefed, skittish, neophytic, and now and then Hibernianly incomprehensible – try saying Hibernianly incomprehensible with an orange in your mouth if you want to know how hard pronouncing English words can be for her – she tended dutifully the fiery flame of Pinter’s discourse. But Pinter wasn’t put on earth to cosy up to television presenters. His conversation is with the unseen powers. Gripping to watch, for that very reason. And proof, were further proof needed, that what television does best of all is serious talk, though you wouldn’t expect BBC executives, with their devotion to the tunelessness of demotic, to agree with that.
It is a pity no one has thought of sending Sven-Göran Eriksson a tape of The Caretaker, even more of a pity there isn’t time to fly him back to see the Kandinsky exhibition before England play their presumably final game today. ‘Rhythm, Sven. You want to know why players who perform with such adroitness and athleticism for their clubs can’t stay on their feet for you? – rhythm! You don’t have any, so they don’t have any. You’re a man who loves fancy dining; you know what it’s like when you find yourself in a restaurant that’s badly managed. The individual dishes might be good but no course converses with another; the service doesn’t flow; food comes at the wrong time; the wine doesn’t come at all; waiters have no feel for what it is you want and when you want it. From first to last the evening is discordant. That the same holds true of an orchestra, I do not need to remind you, for you love music too, as I recall. No conductor with a sense of rhythm, no musicians with a sense of rhythm. Von Karajan on an off day and there was no Berlin Philharmonic. You on an off day and there’s no England. The trouble is – you are always on an off day.’
You can tell Eriksson has no rhythm from the way he speaks. He has a staccato personality and presumably a staccato mind. He talks as though he is belching. For all I know he is belching. His is a job, after all, that would put stress on anybody’s digestive system. But then what did we think we were doing employing a Swede as England manager in the first place?
I intend no disrespect to Swedes, a people I am otherwise disposed to admire, but rhythm is not their strong suit. I know there’s Abba, but Abba is rhythm for the hard of hearing and credulous of tempo. It was Swedish gaucherie in the matter of rhythm that led them into the trap of supposing that sex could be uninhibited. This is the sixties I’m talking about, when Sweden was invented. And when I speak of rhythm in this context I do not mean whatever Swedes call jiggy-jiggy, or rhythm in the birth-control sense, I mean aesthetic rhythm – that coalescence of the material and non-material that Kandinsky aimed for and achieved. As in painting, so in sex – that which seems to come naturally is in fact the result of labour. Only a people with no instinct for rhythm would suppose that if you are easy and open about sex you will enjoy it.
What hell it was going out with Swedes in those days. My first Swedish girlfriend laughed before, during and after. My second Swedish girlfriend wept in exactly the same places. I accept that in both instances this could have had something to do with me. I was a dissonant boy myself. But none of my friends reported differently. Sex with Swedes was a washout. You banged into them, you fell over them, you interrupted each other’s conversation, and in the end you interrupted everything else. No rhythm, you see. You might as well have been in bed with Sven-Göran Eriksson.
Next time we appoint a national coach, might I suggest an abstract painter. Or Harold Pinter, if he has nothing else to do.
If It’s ‘Readable’ Don’t Read it
I’m not usually in favour of electrodes. Not on the brain, I’m not. And certainly not on my brain. It’s possible I’m frightened of what they will detect. What if it’s not as busy in there as I like to think? What if everyone’s asleep? Or what if it’s a cesspit and the electrodes turn blue? But mainly it’s a decorum thing. Like the grave, the brain’s a fine and private place and I don’t want strangers looking into mine.
I have, however, just learned something that changes my attitude to electrodes entirely. Vindication, I call it. For word is coming out of Liverpool University, where the distinguished English Professor, Philip Davis, has been working with a group of eminent neuroscientists, that electrodes prove what some of us already knew but had either lost the confidence to argue, or grown commonplace in arguing – namely, Shakespeare is good for the brain.
And not for any of the usual high-flown Coleridgean/Arnoldian, Hegel/Schlegel/Schmegel reasons. Not because Shakespeare ‘acts and speaks in the name of every individual’, not because he is ‘the Spinozistic deity – an omnipresent creativeness’, not because ‘Others abide our question / Thou art free’, not because he makes his characters ‘free artists of themselves’; nor, indeed, because, in the words of our less exalted, prole-mad times, he wrote bloody good stories and would have been at home writing a weekly episode for EastEnders had he been alive today. No, the reason Shakespeare is beneficial to the brain is that his syntactical surprisingness, to limit ourselves only to that, creates something like a neural flash of lightning, a positive wave or surge in the brain’s activity, triggering a ‘re-evaluation process likely to raise attention’ at the time and stimulate new pathways for the brain thereafter.
If I understand the science correctly, what happens is as follows. When electrode-fitted subjects are shown passages of Shakespeare in which, say, there are parenthetical distractions (e.g. ‘that which angled for mine eyes – caught the water though not the fish –’), grammatical violations and compressions, nouns doing the job of verbs and vice versa (e.g. ‘He childed as I fathered’), and other examples of apparent misshapenness of expression, the electroencephalogram to which the subjects are wired notes modulations indicative of the brain’s leaping about, quickly adapting itself to surprise, rethinking its normal processes, priming itself to look out for more difficulties, in other words performing, measurably, those very feats of intellection which we Eng lit people have always claimed, though in fancier language, to be what we go to literature for. Hoorah!<
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Forgive my jubilation, but I have been waiting for this scientific proof a long time, both as a teacher of books and a writer of them. Of all the attacks the common-minded make on any book that can’t be started and finished on a Tube ride from Waterloo to Stockwell, the most usual is that it is ‘hard going’, that is to say fails to meet the contemporary criterion of unputdownableness. ‘Then thank me for it,’ I always say should the charge of ‘difficulty’ be levelled at one of my novels from the front row of a blowy tent in a muddy festival of letters field. ‘Struggling with a book has more of reading in it than flicking through it at a predetermined rate,’ I remonstrate. ‘And laying it frequently aside to scratch your head does greater justice to a book’s contents than never laying it aside at all. They also read who are not turning pages.’
Why people who gauge the quality of what they read by the speed and ease with which they read it always sit on the front row, I can only guess. Because they would find it too difficult to navigate their way any further back, is one explanation. Pertness, is another. The ruder readers of this sort mean to be, the closer they like to sit to you. It’s as though they are half offering you sex. Beneath your imperspicuities, their dull eyes say, we know what it is you really want.
Now I can add science to my denunciations. Nothing will ever stop the pert believing that a difficulty unnecessarily clothes a simplicity, and that the hard writer therefore has something devious to hide. But at least they can now be shown that if they want to register some sign of brain life on an EEG machine they’d better knuckle down to grappling with what is not straightforward.
Do not mistake me. I do not value difficulty for difficulty’s sake. Ulysses is sometimes harder work than it need be and Finnegans Wake too hard altogether. Our ears prick to self-indulgent obfuscation, or the out-of-touchness of a writer who has for too long kept company only with himself. And yes, there is merit in clarity. The Plain English Campaign fights a good fight against the jargon that means to disinform, or keep out those who don’t share the ideology of the speaker. But what happens in a novel or a play is not subject to the strictures of Plain English. There is no clear external meaning to which a complex line of poetry answers. There is no arrival point of knowledge which the words delay our reaching. The meaning of a line of poetry or prose is found in the utterance that creates it and nowhere else.
‘If it can be said it can be said simply’ is an unctuous piece of flattery to the electroencephalogramically challenged. Some anti-elitist concept of ‘communication’ lies behind it, as though what the ear of the dunderhead cannot comprehend the voice of literature dare not speak. It is an assumption that lies close to those other reading-group inanities – ‘I can’t identify with the characters’ or ‘I don’t find the hero a very nice person’ – where the limitations of the reader’s mind and expectations are paraded not in shame (in my day you kept your dwarf imagination a closely guarded secret) but exultation, as though the book in question is at fault, not you.
So, if an electroencephalogram can show how unexpectedness of syntax (and therefore meaning) will educate the brain into ‘more complex variations and syncopations’, to borrow a lively phrase from Professor Davis, will it also do the opposite? Can it measure the brain’s inertia when fed utterly familiar syntax and the utterly familiar attitudes and emotions which utterly familiar syntax serves? It’s not strictly necessary: whoever reads only what the ignorant find ‘readable’ has neural torpor inscribed across his countenance. But it would be fun to have scientific proof of what we know: that simple books make simpletons. And limpid prose is sure to leave us limp of mind.
Hodgepodge
Another week, another inanity. If it’s not Balls, it’s Hodge. Not schools this time, the Proms. New Labour, New Culture. Only for New Culture, read No Culture. Alternatively, Hodgepodge.
‘Collective Cultural Belonging’ is what the Culture Minister (don’t ask) has been banging on about, a phrase a wise person would think twice before using in the aftermath of Stalin and Pol Pot. But Margaret Hodge sips from a poisoned chalice. Terrorism, immigration, integration, assimiliation, identity, nationhood – all awaiting the salving balm of culture. If we can get everybody together – ‘associating their citizenship with key cultural icons’ is how she puts it, which sounds like having your photograph taken with Elton John and pasting it on to the back page of your new British passport – all will be well. By which standard, whatever fails of inclusiveness must be viewed with suspicion. Inclusiveness will always bedevil a Labour Party. Inclusiveness was the argument for getting rid of grammar schools. And now, in the begrudging hands of Hodge, it’s an argument for getting rid of the Proms. Or at least for changing their character. Which amounts to the same thing.
‘Ease’ is suddenly the criterion. The problem with the Proms being that they’re ‘still a long way from demonstrating that people from different backgrounds feel at ease in being part of this’. I’ve tried counting the number of questions that broken-backed, shit-eating sentence begs, but this column is not long enough to enumerate them. So let’s just stick with the begged assumption that a public event – we don’t even have to call it a cultural event, just an event, cherished by some, not cherished by others – is obliged to put everyone, or even anyone, at their ease. What’s sacrosanct about ease?
Nothing about this country has ever put me at my ease. I didn’t feel at ease when processions of weeping Catholics passed my house carrying plaster saints. Didn’t feel at ease at school when they sang hymns in assembly about famous men I’d never heard of, or accused ‘some boy’ of stealing toilet rolls. Didn’t feel at ease at university where hearties in blue blazers ran up and down the towpath of the Cam shouting ‘Olly, Olly, Jesus!’ and moral tutors called me Abrahamson, Isaacson, Greenberg and Cohen. Don’t feel at ease in the Athenaeum, or Glyndebourne, or the Courts of Justice, or any police station, racetrack, garden fete, rap concert or pole-dancing establishment.
Many are the ways a person whose family hasn’t owned land on these islands for a thousand years might feel frightened, discomfited, embarrassed, or just not one hundred per cent at home. That will hold true for most of the population in one place or another, even those who do go back to the Domesday Book. There is always something to fear in the rites of others – whether older or younger, or of another class, religion or colour – but alongside the fear might exist, if we allow it, curiosity, admiration, and – why not? – the deep affection of the outsider looking in.
The experience of feeling ill at ease can be very powerful. A spur to emulation sometimes, but I don’t doubt the cause of hostility, too, where the outsider is unstable. What doesn’t follow is that, against such an eventuality, we are obliged to water down everything we do. Must a pole dancer dress herself to spare my blushes? Must Judaism, Christianity and Islam make changes to their practice and liturgy to accommodate any unease I might feel in the synagogue, the cathedral or the mosque? The one thing we do know is that religion never looks more contemptible than when it forgets it’s for its own elect and turns populist. The disaffected do not scorn our institutions for their strength but for their tepidity. It is with culture as it is with the bringing up of children: a strong clear message is always best, however copious the bedtime tears.
Behind the ease and inclusiveness assumption lies a highly indulgent ideology of selfhood – the right of any individual to feel the centre of the universe, or, to borrow a phrase I heard at a dinner party the other night, to have his or her ‘experience validated’. A teacher of French literature was telling me how the mother of one of his pupils had objected to his teaching her daughter French drama of the seventeenth century. The girl was uneasy reading these plays. They felt old and foreign to her. (Corneille and Molière – foreign!) Her mother agreed. How were these works, she wanted to know, ‘validating her child’s experience’? Because he was a charming man, the French teacher didn’t tell her that the daughter’s experience, if it was anything like the mother’s, was the t
hing least worth validating in the entire universe. If her daughter felt at sea, so much the better. Study is meant to make you feel at sea. The self is not a precious entity that must be soothed and eased at every turn. Sometimes, the self is something you must learn to lose. Validation of the self, madame – again this is me speaking, not him – is what you might get from a finishing school, but not from a humane education.
I say something very similar to those pupils at a Jewish girls’ school in London who recently refused to answer questions on Shakespeare in a national curriculum test as a way of protesting against the character of Shylock. Given the opportunity for some close textual analysis, I have no doubt I could persuade the girls that Shakespeare was not an anti-Semite, whatever that means in an Elizabethan context. But that’s beside the point. Reading Shakespeare is not conditional on his loving Jews. The study of literature becomes no study at all if you read only writers whose attitudes chime with your own and with whom you therefore feel at ease. Encountering what is not you, indeed what might well be inimical to you, is one of the first reasons for reading anything.
So the Proms are more a problem for those who don’t attend them, for whatever reason, than for those do. I wouldn’t myself go to the Last Night of the Proms even if they offered to stand me between Cecilia Bartoli and Jitka Hosprová; but were I new to this country I would regard the Promenaders with the same degree of baffled awe that travellers experience when they behold a carnival in Rio, or Thasipusam in Kuala Lumpur. If cultural integration is the issue, there needs to be a culture to integrate with. And a culture that can’t express its peculiar vitality without worrying how much upset it might be causing, isn’t a culture at all.
Whatever it is, I Don't Like it Page 21