| Author |
Message |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, May 29, 2007 - 8:17 am: | |
When I first read Swallows and Amazons as a boy, as with many of the other novels that I read, but especially this one – I remember being struck again and again by the way that here was a story – that here was something I didn’t have, not in my actual life – a story. My life lacked this altogether; it had no story in it at all. Indeed this introspective feeling of an absence was something often mentioned in the stories themselves as part of the story’s framing concept. The boredom of ordinary life and the yearning for adventure. The children would be moping around at home on a rainy day with nothing to do, pining for something to happen; wishing that anything at all would happen. And then of course it arrived; something did happen. They found themselves plunged into an adventure in which they found themselves pining for the normality which they had so thoughtlessly undervalued. This was a general perception therefore but with the Ransome novel it was especially poignant for me because of the way Ransome managed to symbolise a just vanished world – the tail end of the pre-industrial.
The symbols of industrial life that were around at that time seemed spurned in the novel, and yet the time in which the novel was set was recognisably connected with my own. For example, the novel had nothing to do with cars, even though cars existed. It had nothing to do with modern boats even even though they too existed and the story revolved around boats. No. This was a story about an *old* style of boat, a clinker-built dinghy in which only the natural elements were harnessed; where everything was NATURE. The wild was the subject; a kind of direct communion with it through camping, sailing, walking, exploring and so on. Here it seemed was an adventure in reality that contained no sissy compromises. |
al
Username: al
Registered: 11-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, May 29, 2007 - 9:07 am: | |
Hmm, not so much compromise, more a feeling of an opening up of nature; a full access to its pre-industrial riches. I read those books living in Hampton, the closest thing we had to a run down to the lake and into a boat was climbing over the back wall into the round-ball-game field behind us.
Tho' having said that, I did spend a fair amount of time in Devon sailing as a child, and I absolutely hated it. My experience of it was very opposite to the one in the books; a space of profoundly restricted movement, generally under quite intensive adult control, at best leading to a trip into the bay to go backwards and forwards aimlessly for a couple of hours for no apparent reason with no destination in mind. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, May 29, 2007 - 10:09 am: | |
sailing about for >>>a couple of hours for no apparent reason with no destination in mind
That nicely chimes with the argument; the lack of a story, the absence of a destination, but finding it in Ransome's image of the pastoral, in the vast inner sea that he invents for the Lakeland; as one finds equally with the Lost World of Jules Verne say. So we come to the bigger argument - which we have looked at already - of not knowing or not having a story of the present. |
al
Username: al
Registered: 11-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, May 29, 2007 - 10:32 am: | |
Hmm - well, in part that's a problem with all fiction! Which is why it's fiction... a partial selection of aspects of the world to create a narrative equation making an implicit, metaphysical point about how the world should be.
And there's the sociological thing as well. As I recall the S&As spent a lot of time camping out, hanging out with strange old men on barges, etc, completely out of parental supervision. Was this more likely back then? Have we lost this?
In a sense overwhelming parental control is an attempt to prevent a child from engaging with narratives. Narrative involves risk, potential loss, change through (not always pleasant) experience - all things that *generalises wildly* modern parents wouldn't really want their children to engage with. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, May 29, 2007 - 12:22 pm: | |
This is what the Amazon blurb says>>>Camping under open skies, swimming in clear water, fishing, exploring and making discoveries is the stuff of dreams which serves to make this so charming a tale. The author manages to capture the innocence of a time when all this was real and possible. Swallows and Amazons will transport children to a fantastical place where they can play safely and roam freely, without an adult in sight.
The story can only happen in the absence of the adult. So the suggestion that the book speaks of >>>all things that *generalises wildly* modern parents wouldn't really want their children to engage with >>>> has a resonance on different levels. One is that it is only in those 'innocent days', when children could be allowed out to fend for themselves, that stories could happen at all. The other - and this is what I felt as a child - is that in the modern world *there is no story*. The two concepts are convergent. There is no story because that is the adult world - the industrial or post-industrial landscape of Britain which did not or could not allow for this kind of innocence. I remember thinking as a child: what kind of story does the fact of television have? I meant: what kind of meaning? Or a car? Electricity? What kind of meanings - stories - did these things have? None as far as I could see. So they represented a corruption of the innocence that one found in Ransome. To get to a story - meaning - one had to go back to innocent things, proper things, to a clinker built boat, to sail, to the natural unspoiled landscapes that Ransome seemed to find all over Britain, in the fens etc, worlds in an ideal state. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, May 29, 2007 - 2:51 pm: | |
"I want a story about me." I want to be the hero of the story. Says the child. "Make one up."
Of course we have to identify with the story.
(Here: "I always hated Ransom. Enough!")
So here is a story about me. Once there was a little boy who lived in an apple. And the apple said ...
Since I identify with (( here I put my favourite - racing driver - tennis ace - author - beauty - celebrity - philosopher etc )) in a way their story weaves itself in and out of my life like a coloured wire in a forest of manifold cables sequencing time, catching the drift of the present and the way that events register like clouds. |
al
Username: al
Registered: 11-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, May 29, 2007 - 2:54 pm: | |
Hmm - well their life is surely given a narrative shape that doesn't exist in yours by the media that bring that story to you? Have begun to think that celebrities are manufactured to exist as the 'after' for when you engage with consumer brands - we're all the 'before'. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, May 29, 2007 - 3:23 pm: | |
That's a good way of putting it: we are the before of a perpetually offset after. |
al
Username: al
Registered: 11-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, May 29, 2007 - 4:11 pm: | |
>> we are the before of a perpetually offset after
Ho yes.
*ponders* |
al
Username: al
Registered: 11-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, May 29, 2007 - 4:12 pm: | |
Or rather, it's the creation of a fictional 'after' that makes of each of us a before. So the non-fictional shape each of our lives is in fact given meaning and structure by the fiction we see it in contrast with. The beforeness of our selves is a willed creation. |
al
Username: al
Registered: 11-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, May 30, 2007 - 9:59 am: | |
Is this a core function of being human? IE we imagine an aspiration and then move towards it, making it real. So the perpetually offset after is the never-achievable destination that helps us navigate through time, making decisions about what we will / won't get up to? |
alex
Username: alex
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, May 30, 2007 - 11:45 am: | |
Time is a perpetually offset after, isn't it? There's always minutes to go.
And of course, everything we experience happened a fraction of a second ago. So really, we live no time. |
al
Username: al
Registered: 11-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, May 30, 2007 - 12:55 pm: | |
Hmm - we live the time of the experience, rather than of the event - an entirely solipsistic and detached experience of time! |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, May 30, 2007 - 2:16 pm: | |
Something interesting here is that since a 'before of the after' reads Hello magazine for example - sitting on a train before work - spelling themselves into a restful frame of mind with each new picture - it also follows (if you follow me) that an 'after' (such as a Catherine Zeta Jones) is only an 'after' in so far as the 'befores' play their role in order to provide a space for the after to be in. In the end you have to wonder who benefits. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, May 30, 2007 - 2:23 pm: | |
I know it seems that the 'after' benefits. But you have to ask, if the 'after' only exists in the minds of the 'befores' (after all), if the 'after' is therefore really in charge of herself - and therefore happy.
Really it's all a terrific waste of money. |
al
Username: al
Registered: 11-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, May 30, 2007 - 2:32 pm: | |
>> the 'befores' play their role in order to provide a space for the after to be in
Absolutely, every actress needs an audience! An unwitnessed performance isn't a performance... maybe the best way to see the lives of the afters is as an ultimate kind of reality theatre? Hence the jealous guarding of what privacy these folk have; it's the backstage time, when the performance is dropped and they're not at work. Cameraman hiding in the bushes to get Zeta-Jones in her garden = your boss calling you at 2am at home to hassle you about completing the presentation etc! |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, May 30, 2007 - 2:57 pm: | |
Yes but the afters are really befores themselves too aren't they? Aren't afters after all.
Trying to get a grip on these concepts is like trying to juggle bananas by moving only one's finger tips. There is no release trajectory. We are all befores and afters in the three dimensional social mirror and there is no getting out of it. I can't pretend I am not there myself, whereas he or she is. But maybe out of the corner of my eye I can occasionally get a glimpse of the whole fiasco.
Understanding it as a story seems useful.
"Excuse me sir but why have you got a banana in each ear?" "To keep away the crocadiles you fool." "But there are no crocadiles." "You see, it works." |
al
Username: al
Registered: 11-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, May 30, 2007 - 3:00 pm: | |
>> the afters are really befores themselves too aren't they
Yup, but they're befores in a different way - their aspirations aren't mediated through celebrity culture in the way that a celebrity fixated before is. So the question is, who do they aspire to? Don't know any to ask, alas... |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, May 31, 2007 - 9:47 am: | |
I think it is exactly the same. David Bowie regularly leafs through Hello. Why not? |
al
Username: al
Registered: 11-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, May 31, 2007 - 10:24 am: | |
Right on cue, here's Britney joining in with her thoughts on life as a celebrity:
http://www.britneyspears.com/
Can we get her a login?
>> David Bowie regularly leafs through Hello
Hmm, but for him it's professional research! |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, May 31, 2007 - 10:55 am: | |
Al someone famous is subject to the same social forces; albeit from a priviledged position. It doesn't immunise them to the forces that e.g. make people prone to identify with others wholesale - possibly it makes them more vulnerable to it in certain ways. When Victoria Beckham met Tom Hanks, she said she felt awed by the fact that she was talking to Forest Gump. When Ewan McGregor was asked to act in Star Wars, he couldn't help reflecting on his experience of being a kid and wishing that he was in that world up on the screen - which he now would be! I don't think that there are any *real* differences therefore. Last week I read about the novelist who wrote The Graduate, Charles Webb. It seems that he is currently living in poverty in Eastbourne, supported by the social services; accompanied by his mad wife Fred, who has a split personality. He has written a sequel: Home School. (I've ordered it.) The point is: there is no 'other side' to the mirror. We are all on this side of it. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, May 31, 2007 - 11:11 am: | |
We are constantly in the mirror. Think of the importance - and the simultaneous trivialty - for instance of clothing. Suppose you were to radically change the way you dress; cross dress; Al stalking about as a woman!; that would have a major impact on you. The fact of wearing trousers may be trivial in a nominal sense but it is absolute as a matter of course in the day to day. So one is ruled over by a mirror image; I mean, by the ways that one is convinced one appears socially. Hair loss can be devastating to some people. A cutting remark timed right by the right person can plunge one into days of abject misery. All this is utterly obvious in a way and yet we totally ignore it mostly. It 'doesn't register'. So that there tends to be this impracticality about how we think of ourselves and the world. We have almost no detachment from our social self-images but suppose that that is irrelevant say when thinking of green issues; or what this or that politician means to us. It needs listing! |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, May 31, 2007 - 1:09 pm: | |
In fact I would say that it amounts to politics itself. Thus. Politics is the act of self-reflection by other means. ("I am a bird but the bird is caged. I am a free man otherwise engaged. I'm a fool! I'm a fool!")
But how does one dramatise the origins of drama? If what gives drama its life stems from identity, then there is no absence to propose its withdrawal; there is no margin to limit it to since it is the whole subject. Finally! It is the one thing I am unable to speak of! |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, May 31, 2007 - 3:28 pm: | |
The child asks: "Tell me a story with me in it."
Life demands a narrative.
There they stand, the bride and groom. A narrative beginning / end. The bride in ruffles and lace. The groom in a suit. They have incorporated themselves into a story.
Smile for the camera. Click. "That's me there two years ago shading my eyes from the sun."
It demands a hero. "There I am! Sitting, no walking with the King! What have I done to deserve this?" "Babe - you haven't done a thing."
When I read Swallows and Amazons I immediately identified with Roger 'tacking' across the field.
That was me. Lost at home among natural forces. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, June 01, 2007 - 8:15 am: | |
Alex >>>So really, we live no time.
A story translates this into the moment.
(If time is a mystery; thus its 'translation'.) |
alex
Username: alex
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, June 01, 2007 - 9:31 am: | |
I'm heavily involved in corporate storytelling at the moment. Corporations have realised (or rather, consultants have told them they should realise) that it's easier to get their employees to buy the idea of change (etc) if it's told to them as a 'story'. So: we want you serfs to start being nicer to our customers. But you don't like being told what to do. So instead we'll tell you a story about Mr. Singh from Widgets who is so incredibly nice to his customers that his heart bursts with happiness every day. One day, a workmate comes up to him and says, "how come you're so nice to your customers every day?" And Mr. Singh from sales comes up with some bollocks Indian legend about a yogi who beat his camel and came to a sitcky end under said camel. Or something.
Storytelling as mind control. I arsks you. |
alex
Username: alex
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, June 01, 2007 - 11:06 am: | |
Actually Io could you delete the above post if you're around? Cheers. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Monday, June 04, 2007 - 11:40 am: | |
That was remarkably quick. If you go to M John Uncle Zip you'll find a response to my own blog in which I have put thoughts modified from the above. I only put them up last night! I was still tinkering with it this morning. I am thinking of cannibalising some of the stuff I have expressed and using it restitched for Mindspace. |