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alex
Username: alex
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, April 04, 2008 - 9:04 am: | |
Just bought myself Paul Schofield's reading of The Waste Land and Four Quartets - they've been my drive-time listening for the last couple of days. Marvellous stuff. I'm also reading The Course of The Heart for the umpteenth time, and listening to John Fahey's Fare Forward Voyagers (whose tracks tiles are taken from Four Quartets - e.g When The Fire And The Rose Are One). Anyway, I perceive Eliot in Harrison: has MJH ever commented on an Eliot influence? Or is it just that they both absorbed The Golden Bough, for example? |
iotar
Username: iotar
Registered: 6-2006
| | Posted on Friday, April 04, 2008 - 9:11 am: | |
I think MJH himself has commented on the influence of Eliot. The Waste Land is there in Viriconium and indeed in Nova Swing.
Personally I love the Four Quartets - I have a tape of Eliot reading it that I used to listen to while cooking - but I think MJH prefers the earlier Eliot.
Slowly reading Ackroyd's bio of Eliot at the moment. |
iotar
Username: iotar
Registered: 6-2006
| | Posted on Friday, April 04, 2008 - 9:16 am: | |
Found this:
"All in all, by atmosphere, parallels, significances, allusions, and even a direct reference, we now cannot escape the sense of a close relation between this book at least--and most likely the very idea of Viriconium--and the poetry of T. S. Eliot. Consider first The Hollow Men:
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rat's feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion . . .
Such indeed are the folk who populate the Viriconium of In Viriconium. And, not inappropriately for consideration of Viriconium the idea, the poem famously concludes--
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
Possibly even more germane is Eliot's masterpiece The Waste Land:
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Viriconium: Viriconium, of the Evening Cultures . . . .
What can these hollow people make of their dry, dusty lives? That is what Harrison asks, and answers. But what his answer may be harks back to the Vidal quotation I opened with: we, you and I, must color in the painting for it to be complete. Harrison is not a facile moralist with mind-numbing homilies to offer; he offers life in raw, sometimes bleeding chunks, and you and I must digest it as we can.
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question...
--The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
The parallels with and reflections of Eliot's work abound in Viriconium. From The Waste Land:
Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards.
From In Viriconium :
She was sitting there on the floor with Fat Mam Etteilla, the fortune teller and cardsharp.
Although the "Viriconium" series is usually called "science fiction," that label clearly derives from the first two books. No one reading In Viriconium can mistake it for anything but fantasy (a curious and perhaps unique mid-series transformation). Not that it matters: the point of speculative fiction--once called fantastic fiction--is, as I seemingly endlessly repeat, to allow the author to throw light on the human condition in ways not easily accomplished in mainstream fiction.
As Eliot's Waste Land drew its inspiration directly from Jesse Weston's interpretations of Arthurian legend, so in turn does In Viriconium depend, in at least one crucial way, on an aspect of the Arthur cycle, the episode of the Fisher King (a source of inspiration to many fantasy writers, such as C. S. Lewis). To say much more would be a spoiler, but Harrison has interpreted the crux of that business in a simple yet profoundly insightful way that turns the entire tale, seemingly desultory till that revelation, near the end, into a tightly wound spring that then explosively powers its significance into the reader's consciousness.
With the short stories that make up Viriconium Nights, Harrison takes us yet further into that curiously distorted and distorting version of the place that he described in the prefatory note to the previous volume; he repeats that note in this book, with small but perhaps significant changes; notably, we now read:
Even the name of the city changes. The world is a muddled old woman, obsessed with the futility of action in the face of contingency and an absurd universe. What seemed clear to her yesterday she remembers today only by remaking it. . . .
That is an even more explicit and pervasive nihilistic gloom than we saw before (when "what seemed clear to her yesterday she remembers today only as a glove and a ring, or a hand drawing aside a curtain")."
http://greatsfandf.com/AUTHORS/MJohnHarrison.php |
iotar
Username: iotar
Registered: 6-2006
| | Posted on Friday, April 04, 2008 - 9:16 am: | |
Also:
"I grew up reading everything. I read Science Fiction along with Boy's School Stories, Girl's School Stories, T.S.Eliot, books about horses... from the age of eleven to about age twenty I read genuinely omnivorously. I preferred fantasy with a religious flavour if I could get it - C.S.Lewis, Charles Williams, Tolkien. I adored T.S.Eliot from the moment I read the first line of "The Wasteland". And I still do."
http://www.geocities.com/jeremyalansmith/harrison/ harrison6.htm |
iotar
Username: iotar
Registered: 6-2006
| | Posted on Friday, April 04, 2008 - 9:19 am: | |
Also, also:
"
Out of the classroom window I saw the pictures in my head. They featured sex, insects, motorcycles, and a mixture of characters from T S Eliot and Alfred Bester; and ran to a soundtrack of Bob Dylan's second album. I could not play the guitar, though I had a denim jacket and a copy of On The Road, and would recite large parts of Ginsberg's "Howl". At the same time I managed to keep reading the C S Lewis Narnia stories. I had already written my first book. It was a thriller in the idiom of Mike Hammer and does not survive."
(from the old ES bio) |
alex
Username: alex
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, April 04, 2008 - 10:01 am: | |
Well that undoubtedly clears that one up, then! Thanks! |
iotar
Username: iotar
Registered: 6-2006
| | Posted on Friday, April 04, 2008 - 10:36 am: | |
Sorry, I was having an enquiry desk moment. |
martin
Username: martin
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, April 04, 2008 - 10:59 am: | |
You forgot the Practical Cats! |
alex
Username: alex
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, April 04, 2008 - 12:11 pm: | |
I've got the feeling the white couple owe something to Eliot, too, but I can't place it. |
alex
Username: alex
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, April 04, 2008 - 12:53 pm: | |
And didn't Eliot coin the word 'infolding'? |
martin
Username: martin
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, April 04, 2008 - 1:52 pm: | |
"Infolding" - first used by the anatomist Mivart in 1873 to describe the surfaces of organs (OED).
Which may well be another way of saying, "the course of the heart." |
alex
Username: alex
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, April 04, 2008 - 3:50 pm: | |
Interesting. But I do think MJH might have had Eliot's 'when the tongues of flame are in-folded into the crowned knot of fire' in mind. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Monday, April 07, 2008 - 11:51 am: | |
Infolded reminds me of Hopkin's Inscape and Instress: some initial variations on that theme. I admire Eliot but I can't say I like him. In tone, in voice he never fully seems to escape the bank clerk that he was - and then again, I can remember people quoting Eliot at me; all that "what are the hands that clutch" business, which by association has rendered many of his lines irremediably pathetic for me. It is something of a prejudice in this way. A sense that if NN likes that then there must be something wrong with it. The poets I most greatly admire come after Eliot. Jon Silkin for example. Almost wholly ignored nowadays but one of the most fabulous exemplars of poetry's capacity to render the familiar alien. |
martin
Username: martin
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, April 09, 2008 - 9:49 am: | |
Over in Viriconium, of course, there's another poem called "The Waste Land":
http://www.melicreview.com/archive/iss18/ctgeorge. html |
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