Google sometimes directs to the wrong page on this site. If you don't get the page you were expecting type book author name into the search bar below All books reviewed have been purchased by me unless very occasionally indicated. For more about the reviewer, google "Trevor Pateman". I do not have an X account and never had a Twitter account; that is another Trevor Pateman
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Sunday, 31 July 2022
Tuesday, 3 May 2022
Review: Gary Gerstle The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order
This is an excellent
book. It starts from what seems to be a very simple and even simplified model of
American economic and political history in the past century and proceeds to
document the case for its explanatory value. What convinced me of the model’s
value was the realisation that it could be transferred to British history
of the same period and equally well-supported from evidence.
Gerstle’s key concept
is that of a political order. This
captures the reality that in democratic polities with competing parties a
common ground can emerge which is sustained for long periods across changes in the
political complexion of governments. In the USA, Roosevelt’s originally
Democratic Party New Deal of the 1930s persisted and was even doubled down on
by the Republican administration of President Eisenhower. In the same way in Britain, the Labour Party’s
war time and post-1945 creation of a mixed economy and welfare state was sustained
by Conservative governments through to the administration of Edward Heath. Here
the common ground was locally identified in the expression Butskellism built from the names of the Conservative politician RA
Butler and the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell. Butskellism also embraced a
commitment to NATO and the Atlantic alliance.
Political orders fail
and are replaced for complex reasons not always understood at the time. The New
Deal and Butskell political orders were replaced by neoliberal orders which are
often characterised using the names of the leaders who drove through the initial
changes; thus we have Reaganomics and
Thatcherism which survived through
the Democratic administrations of Clinton and Obama in the USA and the Labour governments of Tony Blair in the UK.
Neoliberalism was a political order which transcended and survived political party
differences.
Gertsle concludes by documenting
how the neoliberal political order has fallen apart in the USA with Donald
Trump finding a constituency to vote for the destruction of at least its
internationalist aspects. The UK narrative would focus on Brexit and the ongoing
confusion within a Conservative Party whose neoliberals dressed in ethnonationalist
clothes have cut the UK out of its principal free trade area. The eventual outcome
is unclear. So far, all that we know is that the USA was weakened by Trump and
the UK weakened by the Brexiteers, to the satisfaction of Mr Putin if no one
else.
Saturday, 30 April 2022
Review: Peter Salmon An Event Perhaps A Biography of Jacques Derrida
I am one of those people
who would rather read a book about Jacques Derrida than read a book by Derrida.
This one, though very well-written and diligent, isn’t going to change my mind.
Derrida is just not my cup of tea - a phrase which the late Richard Wollheim
used at the end of a superb essay on the work of Jacques Lacan which had
involved him in a great deal of diligent reading. Nonetheless, I must have
picked up something and not so long ago cheerfully titled an essay “Social
Construction Deconstructed”. But then there is a generic use of “deconstruction”
which is almost certainly not faithful to an original idea. To use the term doesn’t make me
one of the (dwindling) band of the Derrida faithful.
When I arrived in Paris
for a year’s graduate work in the autumn of 1971 I promptly spent most of my
money on a pile of books by celebrity theorists of the time, intending to read
them all. I bought Derrida’s De la Grammatologie
and L’Ecriture et la Différence, both
published in 1967, and probably read half of each book - I don’t have the
physical books any more so I can’t be more precise. But the material seemed at a
distance from my more immediate concerns at the time and I didn’t finish them or do anything with them.
Nonetheless, I found my way to the Ecole Normale Superieure and sneaked into Derrida’s
(very sparsely attended) lectures in which he was offering a close reading of
Hegel on the family and marriage, and that was even less of concern to me. So I
stopped going. Salmon’s book (p. 166) tells me that those lectures were
the basis of his 1974 book Glas. It
was common practice in the Paris of the time for professors to use draft
chapters of next year’s book as their teaching material. I stuck with Foucault
for the whole year and he was working on his Pierre Rivière study and presented
work in progress in seminars. But his approach was different, and it was much
more of a teaching situation that he created, not least because he had dissuaded the tourists
from attending: at the Collège de France all teaching was supposed to be open
to anyone and Foucault devoted his first session grilling those present about
their motives for being there. The grilling was severe enough to reduce numbers
substantially at the second session. From Foucault, I got the idea of studying minor or parallel thinkers alongside major figures and a few years later writing about John Stuart Mill tried to show how part of his system of thought had been more fully fleshed out by the more or less forgotten Sir George Cornewall Lewis. Likewise, I sought to show how you could make sense of Rousseau's arguments in Du Contrat Social by putting them alongside Condorcet's work on probability theory and majority voting.
Later, in the 1980s when teaching at the University of Sussex one of my colleagues was Geoff Bennington
who has now devoted a lifetime’s talent to promoting Derrida’s work, initially by translation and then in many other ways including direct collaboration with Derrida. There was an occasion when I complained
that Derrida was an improvisatore and Bennington replied “I think he’s the bee’s knees”. I had put Derrida into the same category as Lacan, whose “seminars” (attended by hundreds at Saint
Anne) were theatre in the tradition of Anton Mesmer and, by this stage in his career, more or less unintelligible.
He entered each week wearing a fur coat; a female assistant helped him take
it off and held on to it for the duration. In stark contrast, I greatly enjoyed
the patient and relaxed seminars offered by Roland Barthes, who was my director
of studies.
I made one more attempt
to engage with Derrida’s work in 1997 at a Colloque held at Cérisy la Salle in Normandy devoted to Derrida and the topic
of L’Animal Autobiographique. Derrida
spoke at length, uninterrupted, and certainly for longer than Fidel Castro’s
record. I found it exasperating. Peter Salmon now tells me that Derrida “presented
a ten hour lecture” (p 273). It certainly felt like it.
Unless you are very stupid, then if you spend your life writing eighty books (Salmon’s figure for Derrida) then you are more or less bound to say something interesting somewhere. But I’m happy to leave it to others to discover where.
Sunday, 13 March 2022
Review: Toril Moi, Revolution of the Ordinary
There are so many
universities in the world that we have only estimates of their number; an App
can’t track them because some don’t call themselves universities (MIT and many
others) and because some are bogus. But I’m fairly confident that spread across
those universities there are thousands of Departments which offer undergraduate
degrees in Literature, most commonly the Literature of the country in which
they are based or, at least, written in its national language.
I’m also fairly
confident that poems and novels are always taken as exemplary for Literature and that survey courses which introduce students to representative samples of
different periods and genres within the national literature are very common.
It’s for that reason that I can walk into my local bookshop and buy cheap,
well-edited editions of nineteenth century English language novels easily
identifiable by their black Penguin Classics spines. I benefit from the student
demand for these things.
Undergraduates are
expected to read the representative material assigned and quite often do. But
what else are they supposed to accomplish? For over a century now departments
of Literature have struggled to make their work - well, more disciplinary.
Various approaches have been proposed and almost certainly more approaches than
in the harder sciences where a textbook author can even dream of writing a book
which will be used world-wide - at school in the 1960s my textbook for
Economics was simply called “Samuelson” and probably got close to having world-wide
success outside the then Communist world.
To begin with, the new
Literature departments could trade off what was already an established way of
responding to poems and novels which could be found in pre-1914 European and
North American journals, reviews, and newspapers where Response often took the
form of assuming a moral high ground from which, in particular, immorality
could be seen for what it was. Literature was often immoral and readers needed
to be told that in their own interests. How else could they know which novels
to buy for themselves but keep from their servants (for whom a separate category
of improving literature was available - The
Blind Washerwoman, and such like). The new university departments could
easily accommodate to such disciplinary activity and still do though nowadays
there is much debate as to whether students are in the same category as
servants and to be protected from immorality. Remarkably, students can now be
found who will, in any case, demand protection, whereas In My Day ….
Beyond moralising raps
on the knuckle the next most common form of Discipline was the demand that
students Pay Attention to the words on the page in such a way that they would
not attribute character traits or motives or moods or conclusions clearly
contradicted by words to be found at page 123 et seq.
You could read Toril
Moi as urging the case for a more subtle and sophisticated version of that kind
of (elementary?) discipline, basing herself on the later philosophy of
Wittgenstein as mediated by Stanley Cavell in particular. Literature makes use
of ordinary language to do fairly extraordinary things and paying careful, engaged attention to it - and to one’s own responses - is the way in.
But is the way in also
the goal and conclusion? When you’ve read something attentively is that
it? Toril Moi does not think so - she is
not trying to resurrect what was once called the New Criticism whose advocates
would tell you very firmly that if it wasn’t on the page you had no
business talking about it and that if you did talk you couldn’t expect an A or
even a B. Like Rita Felski who uses the
“flat” ontology of Bruno Latour [see my review of Felski’s Hooked on this site, 24 February 2022 ],
Moi accepts that to fully appreciate (acknowledge) what the words on the page
are being used to do it may be entirely appropriate to draw attention to the
author’s biography, to the historical circumstances in which the book was
written, to the author’s assumptions about likely or desired readers, to the
author’s awareness of current censorship practices (an awareness which, in my
reading, for example, blights Oscar Wilde’s The
Picture of Dorian Gray, this site 16 August 2021). She wants us to think of
poems and novels as forms of action or enactment connected to situated human
existence and not detached “texts” which could have dropped from the skies.
But at the same time she wants to resist the
approaches of those who just want to put the “text” through a grinder -
Marxist, Freudian, Feminist, Post-Colonial ….. basically in order to
demonstrate how the work Fails but, as just reward, enables the grinder-operator to get an A.
She is interested in keeping a mind which is at once open and informed so that
the “text” has a chance to lead us to new ways of looking at things which we
may otherwise take for granted. At page 211, for example, she separates Viktor Shklovsky
from other formalists and says that he got things right when he championed defamiliarization as something rather
more than simple “technique”. I agree - and the idea itself can be found a
century earlier in Coleridge’s response to Wordsworth. The genuineness of
Shklovsky’s commitment is to be found in his memoir, A Sentimental Journey.
*
If you show
experimental subjects the two arrow-headed lines which comprise the Müller-Lyer
illusion they will all agree, independently of each other, that the arrows are
of unequal length. Even when told that they are not, the illusion persists.
The illusion reveals
something about how human vision works; that we agree in our responses is a distributive agreement which has nothing
to do with anything we have learnt, been taught, or discussed. Similarly, young
children (before the age of four or five) make drawings which develop in ways
and in a sequential order which is common across cultures and owes nothing to
the surrounding cultures of visual representation into which some children will
subsequently be inducted. The naïve child artists agree in the way they think
faces and figures are to be represented though no one has taught them this (or,
in Wittgenstein’s language, trained
them). Pile up such examples of distributive agreement (being frightened by a scary story…) and you can
then begin to think of agreement in responses as something natural and you can read some of the things Wittgenstein says as
supportive of that and you can make him into a naturalist as did Colin McGinn in Wittgenstein on Meaning (1984). Wittgenstein does not make it easy,
however, because he has very little to say about babies and infants and what he
does say seems bleakly conventional and uncomprehending.
But, of course, there
is another kind of agreement which can be called collective. This does not require that we have voted or held
debates or even talked about it though sometimes we will have done so. We can
come to agree by various means but by those diverse means our form of life
comes to have a social or communal or conventional character as explored by philosophers
like David Lewis in his Convention (1969)
and much subsequent literature including the work of Margaret Gilbert. We agree
collectively, not distributively, to drive on the left not the right, and so
on. Social constructionists think that everything (or nearly everything) has this character and they can find ways of reading
Wittgenstein which turns him into a sociologist of culture. They did a lot of
that in Oxford where Wittgenstein’s account of “following a rule” got construed
as “following our rule and don’t dare disobey”, as if the nature of language could be entirely understood via
the local dialect. This emphasis on the social is found most
clearly in the work of Gordon Baker and Peter Hacker in books such as Language, Sense and Nonsense (1984). My
own view is that the Oxford Wittgensteinians fell into the trap which Dennis
Wrong once characterised as “The Oversocialized Conception of Man in Modern
Sociology” (a 1977 article).
Toril Moi’s book covers
a lot of ground and is really the product of a life time of careful engagement.
It’s lucid and held together by the thread provided by Stanley Cavell’s work,
which is much more humane and resonant than anything the Oxonians came up with.
Whether Moi’s book will in practical terms solve or dissolve the problem of what kind of Discipline is best suited to deal with Literature is
another matter.
Thursday, 24 February 2022
Review: Rita Felski Hooked
I was introduced to Rita Felski’s work in 2020 when I consulted what in England we call an Early Career Academic about an essay on Lolita that I was writing (now published as Nabokov’s Dream); he suggested I read The Limits of Critique (2015). In that book, Felski writes about the importance of the pleasure we get from reading novels or looking at paintings, and so on. In this new book she starts from a reflection on the often odd and idiosyncratic ways in which we become attached, or attach ourselves, to a work - maybe re-reading it frequently or humming the tune every day. (In another book I was reading recently, an anecdote was told about the philosopher Gilbert Ryle who was once asked if he read any fiction. Oh , yes. Jane Austen. All of them, once a year).
In Felski’s work there
is a background hum of unease with what has happened to the humanities during
her career and even before her career begun. Both institutional and broader cultural
pressures have turned teachers of the humanities into purveyors of artificially
narrowed pre-occupations often enough combined with a narrow-minded demand for
conformity, usually in favour of some politico-cultural orientation deemed
progressive but not always seen as such by outsiders. (So, for example, myself
I see the “critique” of cultural appropriation
as both a bit absurd - because opposing itself to what is probably the main dynamic
of all cultural change - and a bit backward-looking - which is to say,
reactionary).
Felski occupies a
prominent position in the academy and her own particular reservations (cultural appropriation
is not something she discusses in this book, I should add, though it often involves getting hooked on something) are expressed in a more nuanced way
than might be used by an outsider and perhaps some are not expressed at all.
Her response to claustrophobia
is to try to open up the field of what can and should be done under the rubrics
of “The Humanities” guided by a theoretical commitment to the Actor Network
Theory (ANT) pioneered by Bruno Latour - who I haven’t read. But it seems that
the slogan of ANT might well be, “Only connect!” Let me give an example of what
might be involved in an ANT-ish opening up. (This is my own example and will
show whether I have grasped the point or not).
Suppose we have
hitherto worked on the assumption that response to a painting begins at the point
when we stand before it (at an appropriate distance) on a gallery wall. Well, how did we get to that Point? In the
immediate past, we ascended the steps of what is probably an architecturally impressive
building (that counts as an actor in ANT), passed through turnstiles and past security
guards and gallery attendants (there are people who want to steal paintings because
they are often worth a LOT of money and the guards remind us of that so they
are actors too). We have side-stepped
other gallery-goers who may look older or younger than us, better dressed or worse,
unevenly distributed by sex and ethnicity in ways which we may note as placing
us in a majority or a minority. So many actors! Eventually, we get to the painting
only to discover that twenty seven people got there before us. (Tourist tip: If
you are thinking of visiting the Louvre to look at the Mona Lisa…well, Forget It).
All this contributes
towards the state of mind in which you at last (hopefully) look at your painting,
the identity of which you may now check against the gallery label (another
actor).
All that has happened
since you climbed the steps has gone into creating the state of mind in which
you now stand before the painting. In addition, of course, there is all the
preparatory reading you may have done about the painter whose work you are now
looking at, or about the period or school within which they worked, and the title of the course requirement essay you have to write. What chance
some supposedly pure unmediated response to what is now in front of you?
You might feel that your chances of unmediated response are better when you walk down the street listening to a new album through headphones until one song catches you and even hooks you enough for you to spool back and listen again. And perhaps again. This scenario is also capable of being written up in the terms of Actor-Network Theory,though it might seem that a sudden epiphany, a break -out experience in which you suddenly and unexpectedly attach to something with delight is actually a breaking out from your usual networks. Epiphanies could be described as an unlearning experience. (See footnote) .
Felski
is particularly interested in this kind of experience and it explains the title of her book.
She thinks we are often coy about admitting that something has hooked us, and
especially so in a college classroom where to admit to such enthusiasms might
seem out of place - a bit childish, perhaps; a bit down-market; a bit
politically incorrect - there are now many readers, female and male, coy
about owning up to enthusiasm for Lolita,
novel or films.
There’s not much to argue with in what Felski argues. But the danger - which she seeks to address - is that in place of scholarly narrowness and puritan exclusion we end up with seminar discussions of marshmallow softness, lectures which are hopelessly idiosyncratic (…if I may digress for a moment, I recall Bob Marley and the Wailers ... You what? Yes, it was their first UK tour (Awed silence).Yes, it was in 1972…. (long digression)), and books which though interesting don’t close in on any claims which might exclude other claims. And I’m not sure about claims which do not exclude other claims but rather seek to bundle them all up into a narrative which nods to every interested party.
I'm also doubtful that the dynamics of places like university seminars can actually accommodate every interested party: in my experience (and it may have been my fault) they tended to gravitate towards vicarage tea parties in which the tutor has fingers crossed that no one will say Fuck or take their clothes off (the latter once, the former more frequently).
I enjoyed
reading Felski’s book. She has an especial talent for incorporating references
to the literature - and there are many - into the flow of her writing, so that
you are never confronted with Tombstone Quotes which always lead me to the
thought that they might be skippable.
*
(Helen Thaventhiran writes an interesting review of Felski’s book in London Review of Books, 27 January 2022 and Rita Felski has a Letter in reply on 24 February).
*
Tuesday, 22 February 2022
Benjamin J B Lipscomb The Women are Up to Something.
This book is better than its rather desperate American titling - it's published by Oxford University Press America rather than OUP Oxford and that is relevant. It’s fluently written and readable, making no great intellectual demands. But it will also help, I suspect, if as reader you are rather over-awed by OXFORD, a place you would never dream of calling Oggsford or Oxfraud.
For his American
audience, Lipscomb provides an accurate, lucid guide to how the University is
organised - the collegiate structure, the tutorial system, methods of
examination in Arts subjects, character of the degree courses, and so on. But
he doesn’t see that many of these things have their downsides nor does he see
through the mysteries.
The college system, for
example, has always allowed for the creation of backwaters of one kind or
another where students may get a poor deal, academically, though the
accommodation and the food and the team sports may be good. The colleges have been clublands and their Fellows often enough people -
historically, all male and until recently bachelors - only too happy to settle down to a
life-time of boarding school existence with the usual private languages, arcane
rituals, insider dealing, and hysterical feuds - the latest 21st
century one at Christ Church, very obscure and lasting several years, has used up a great deal
of money from its supposedly charitable funds and diverted the energy of
Fellows from their proper work.
Lipscomb makes sustained early reference to the use of unseen written examinations as the basis on which
scholarships, prizes, and degree classifications are awarded and is clearly
awed by the thought of how brilliant the scripts must sometimes have been. He is not
the only one: Oxford philosopher Michael Dummett seeking to explain (many years
after the 1941 event) how Elizabeth Anscombe got a First Class degree in Literae Humaniores (Classical Studies)
despite History papers which were indifferent or bad says to an interviewer,
“her philosophy papers must have been astonishing” (p 73). The truth is, we
can’t know whether they were or not because all those unseen hand-written
examination papers, scribbled under invigilated time pressure in the Examination
Schools, were burnt very soon after the event. And until recently, no external
examiner would have had a chance to look at them before bonfire night since OXFORD saw no need for
external examiners. From the nineteenth century on it provided them to
upstart provincial universities who, of course, needed to be policed. (By the way, Oxford is not in London; it’s in heartland Church & King provincial England, but don’t mention that …). Anyway, we can’t know how astonishing some of this student scribbling was; none of it was ever
published to show what a Model Essay might look like. In Anscombe’s case, all
it took for her to get a First Class degree - against the norm that to do that you had to
show some merit in all your papers - was for the Philosophers to outvote the
Historians on the Examination Board and leave them to grumble later over the
port.
I discovered about the burning in 1967. I had sat for a university-wide undergraduate prize in Economics awarded on the basis of the usual timed examinations, answering previously unseen questions. One paper required that just one question should be answered in the three hour time allocation. I wrote an answer to the question, “Is Economic Growth a Good Thing?” - precisely the kind of “general” question in which Oxford specialises and about which Lipscomb writes several times. I was pleased with what I had written - it must have run to three or five thousand words. So when I got the letter telling me I had been awarded the prize (worth about twenty percent on top of my total annual income) I wrote asking if I could have my script back because I thought I could work on it and improve it. Back came the reply: It’s already been burnt. So no one will ever know how astonishing (or not) it was and don’t ask me because I don’t know either.
(Imagine an Art College where the drawings and paintings submitted for your Degree Show were assessed and then burnt).
You might say that the mysteries of Oxford are those of a literate culture
which has never placed high value on the written word, and preferred oral debate, oral traditions, and gossip in the cloisters.
Lipscomb is good when he situates the formation and rise of his selected Quartet of female philosophers in the context of the Second World War. Though the four have been selected as a friendship group all born in 1919 - thus completely excluding their near contemporary, Mary Warnock, born in 1924 and also a noted Oxford moral philosopher - the four were part of a war-time cohort of female students who benefitted from the sudden disappearance of all the young men sent off to war. Only the men who were old, infirm, or claimed to be especially devoted to doing God’s work, remained. As a result, the proportion of female students increased to the extent that they were no longer a marginal presence, living in out-of-town poor colleges where the food and the wine cellar had never been up to much. But the women's colleges were probably more meritocratic than the men's - where birth and private school attended counted for more - with Somerville possibly the most meritocratic and Lady Margaret Hall the least among the women's colleges. But I don't have data and I don't know if they exist, though schools attended are probably reconstructible for many cohorts from even the distant past.
The war time female students got better tuition than normal since there were underemployed college
tutors all over Oxford. Lipscomb
documents their access to well-above-average tutors, notably Donald MacKinnon.
He was a talented and charismatic figure and female students who had the hots
for him could and did disguise their infatuation as enthusiasm to join him in a religious
Quest. Much more exciting than having an
affair with a married man. (Lipscomb documents it in the case of Iris Murdoch
but is less cynical about it all than MacKinnon’s wife was, or I am).
It’s because they are all
dead that Lipscomb can write about such things and include the scurrilous
anecdotes, notably those which feature the eccentric Miss Anscombe, mother of
seven children by her husband, Peter Geach. Anscombe and Geach were Roman Catholic
converts of the More Papist than the Pope kind - some of it really quite inhuman. The message got through to
their children, at least according to the one anecdote I recall from my time in
Oxford (oh, it’s apocryphal and false, of course, of course): A new babysitter had
gone to the house one evening to look after the children; left alone with her,
they lined up to declare: You can’t tell
us what to do. We are the Anscombe - Geach children.
Pulling rank was not the preserve of children and it did happen too among marginalised female philosophers. But the men were
clearly worse and Lipscomb shows the Great Men of the time behaving badly,
though not necessarily atrociously so and not always without provocation: J L
Austin, A J Ayer, R M Hare, Gilbert Ryle …. The way I look at it some of
these figures, both male and female, were indeed important cultural figures whose work has been
influential and will continue to be read in different cultures. Austin and his
colleague H P Grice (who doesn’t figure in Lipscomb’s narrative) were the inspiration for a whole new world-wide scientific approach to language,
language pragmatics, and are read as such now. So their work eclipses their time, their personal weaknesses, and their eccentricities.
But some of them were simply
big fish in a pond smaller than they imagined. Oxford in the past was a small university, reflecting the fact that
only a very small fraction of each age group in Great Britain proceeded to
university education, maybe 3 to 5% - it was 5% as late as the early 1960s as
far as I can establish. In the sciences both Cambridge and Oxford were world
leaders from early in the twentieth century. But in the Humanities the
stand-out figures are few, the most obvious being Wittgenstein who though
eventually a Cambridge professor was an institutionally marginal figure.
Anscombe succeeded to the same university chair and kept up the tradition of personal eccentricity and obnoxiousness. But though a significant figure in
twentieth century British philosophy with three volumes of Collected Papers published in the 1980s, is she more than that? And as a Roman
Catholic thinker?
Friday, 4 February 2022
Review: Jean Rhys Good Morning, Midnight
I think of Jean Rhys as an
Expressionist writer whose short sentences are like bold brushstrokes in startling, unpredictable colours. It’s the kind of writing facilitated by
having a bottle of wine or whisky or both beside you, and provides fresh supporting
evidence for the old claim that in vino
veritas.
In her writing, Rhys has to get
past both internal inhibition and external censorship. In real life, she does
things like taking money for sex which place her outside polite society and into the demi-monde and she takes as husbands and lovers men who are
accidental or professional criminals - criminal enough to go to jail.
The alcohol helps her evade
inhibition but the external censorship is evaded by literary crafting of a
character sometimes described as obsessive. Whether the crafting was done drunk
or sober I don’t know; either way, Rhys is a great stylist.
Good
Morning, Midnight published in 1939 and set mostly in Paris of
the period contains significant material written in French, not just in
passages of spoken dialogue but in narratorial sentences written in a mix of
English and French. Sometimes the French is left untranslated even (and
especially) when the words are not ones which would have been learnt at school,
like maquereau [pimp] at page 72.
It’s not glossed though the context at least half-way enables a guess as to its
meaning, “What she wants is three hundred francs to give to her maquereau. Will
I give her three hundred francs for her maquereau?” Sometimes it is glossed but
with a delay.
In one long passage which
extends over pages 42 - 53 and is then picked up again at page 149, much is
made of a contrast in register which could not in 1939 have been clarified with
accurate English translations; the censor would have intervened.
Thus, a tall English girl who
“speaks French very well” (page 38) looks at the narrator sitting in a café and
exclaims, “Et qu’est-ce qu’elle fout ici, maintenant?” (page 39). The
dictionaries, even supposedly modern ones, are coy but this could be translated as, “What
the fuck is she doing here, now?”, the fout
being in the same register as that in
the common expression, Foutez-nous la paix! [Fuck off and leave us alone!]. Things change over time, and in the
1930s, maybe less forceful translations would be in order: What the hell is she doing …? Piss off.../Clear off … Rhys does not
translate but instead writes, half a page later, “But what language!
Considering the general get-up what you should have said was, ‘Qu’est-ce
qu’elle fiche ici?’ Considering the general get-up, surely that’s what you
should have said. What language, what language! What would Debenham &
Freebody say, and what Harvey Nichols?” [These are the names of middle-class/upper middle-class London department stores where most of the shoppers would have been female].
But nothing has been translated
at this point; the reader may be able to work out that ficher is less coarse / vulgar/ offensive than fouter but even though “Qu’est-ce qu’ elle fiche ici?” could have
been glossed as, say, “What on earth is she doing here?” without troubling the
censor, it has not been done.
The narrator returns to the
language issue at page 41 when she speculates that the girl said fout,
“partly because she didn’t like the look of me and partly because she
wanted to show how well she spoke French and partly because….” But though no
translation has yet been provided, the narrator then pulls herself up for her obsessional
behaviour, “…why get in a state about it? (page 41).
But the theme is continued at
page 42, where she adds an implied thought to the original and at last provides
a translation, but a censored one:
“Qu’est-ce qu’elle fout ici, la
vieille? What the devil (translating it politely) is she doing here, that old woman?
…. I quite agree….I am asking myself all the time what the devil I am doing
here”
That’s at top of page 42;
bottom of page 43 the theme is again reprised:
“Now it’s getting dark. Now the
gates are shutting. (Qu’est-ce qu’elle fout ici, la vieille?)”
The play with language then
shifts at pages 44 -47 to simple repetitions in the key of Shakespeare. She
starts with a half-allusion (“tomorrow, tomorrow…”) and then runs through
“Back, back, back…”, “Hours and hours and hours”, “Courage, courage”, “Jesus, Jesus….Mother,
Mother”, “Chloroform, chloroform”, “Back, back, back …” and several more.
But fouter / ficher gets another outing at page 53, when a male
acquaintance describes a friend he wants her to meet and sums up in
untranslated French, “Mais au fond, vous savez, il s’en fiche de tout, il s’en
fiche de tout le monde”. And the narrator then takes one line to comment, “He
sounds fine” which in the context of all that has gone before ought to raise a
smile.
“The damned room, grinning at
me. The clock ticking. Qu’est-ce qu’elle fout ici, la vieille?”
Microsoft has had a field day with
green and red squiggles all over this. I guess it struggles with many
novelists. They do things differently.