Why I prefer literary writing …

These days there is something embarrassing or unpalatable about being a literary writer as ‘though you were showing off your underwear in public which in a sense you are: because nobody can write well without some literary undergirding not even commercial writers. Ruth Rendell has read swathes of Victorian literature, a fact which becomes quite obvious the minute you open Judgement in Stone, her first novel published in 1977 which reads as a stylish late Victorian thriller in novella form. Everything about it is uncontemporary and elsewhere which makes it immediately pleasurably (apart from her very direct literary style) because who wants to be in the here and now? We write to move ourselves from the ghastly reality of contemporaneity.

When I start to write up a new subject I am hoping to jettison myself elsewhere; to lose myself in a set of circumstances and emotions and historical references that have nothing to do with my current understanding of the world. I don’t want to consider now and although I almost certainly traunsfer something over of my current sensory state —- because it is through the senses we know where we are and who we are in relation to the world as David Hume the empirical philosopher reminds. Our perception is but a heap of impressions as he writes in A Treatise of Human Nature: “The only existences, of which we are certain, are perceptions, which being immediately present to us by consciousness, command our strongest assent, and are the first foundation of all our conclusions.”Treatise. 1.4.2.47). And we rely upon this heap of impressions in order to make sense of the objects and people we see around us. I don’t know about you but I’d rather gather mine from moments distilled from the past because such moments allow me to gather my impressions with some sense of perspective. After all, that is what history is for.

The same might be said for literary texts which grant me — a reader — more imaginative perspective; more space in which to gather sensory information and experience; more room to assess my own attitude to this place. Time has passed and the objects I read of may no longer exist in my daily life. They maybe worn out, forgotten, but nonetheless they are recognisable because everything comes round again.

Here is the opening (the chapter following the brief first chapter) of Ruth Rendell’s novella:

‘The gardens of Lowfield are overgrown now and weeds push their way up through the gravel of the drive. One of the drawing room windows, broken by a village boy, has been boarded up, and wisteria, killed by summer drought, hangs above the front door like a dried old net.’

Reading of Lowfield I am immediately transported to the past. I am moved elsewhere as I am asked to consider a set of circumstances I recognise from the literature I’ve read. Rendell’s Lowfield s not too far from Charles Dickens’s Bleak House which she refers to soon after this opening. 'It has become a bleak house, fit nesting place for the birds that Dickens named….’ Being able to recognised where Ruth Rendell is coming from is part of the pleasure. Her writing is less dense than Dickens’ but her references create a similar effect: a literary atmosphere which is also the atmosphere of history and experience; of people having lived and died; of bodies moving through a place living behind traces of their existence.

I am now reading Angela Carter for similar reasons. She is a highly literary writer whose imagination works around a sense of the antique — old and inherited things — which she turns into fairytales. Carter takes objects and makes them strange and magical to her characters; she grants them unique, talismanic qualities. In her worlds objects transmute; and because her characters are attached to these objects, they also transmute. They change shape emotionally and mentally into something ‘rich and strange’ as Ariel sings in Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

‘Onee a week, Aunt Margaret defied the banging, popping, gangrenous, gas-flaring monster of the bathroom geyser all for Victoria’s sake, to give her a bath in three inches of snot-green, brackish, warmish waster, which took ten minutes to trickle from the geyser’s brutish snout into the tub.’ (The Magic Toyshop, Angela Carter, Virago: 1967).

Aunt Margaret’s boiler appears to Melanie Flower, the narrator of this magical world, as a gangrenous monster; the monstrous effect arises from the strange percussive effects Carter grants this domestic object which turn it into a ‘gas-flaring monster’ with a ‘brutish snout’ disappearing into the tub in which sits her younger sister, Victoria, waiting to be bathed. This sort of monstrous boiler-behaviour is familiar to most of us growing up in delapidated Victorian houses or indeed even more modern homes; there has been much discussion in the last few weeks among my neighbours in Oxford — those who live on canal boats as I do and those who live in houses - of misbehaving, beastly boilers. It is a common wintry complaint. In Carter’s world, however, it is a mode of being which Melanie and her siblings and the entire Flower household live with: they live close to objects turning monstrous on them as they live with the monster within themselves. Monsters appear in the most unwanted places as Melanie finds out when Finn, the orphaned Irish boy living in this strange household, tries to kiss her. Monsters pass through even in the brief or extended moment of a kiss.

They were standing on opposite sides of the fallen queen. He lightly set his feet on the stone buttocks and sprang across, and, seized by some eccentric whim in mid air, raised his black p.v.c. arms and flapped them, cawing like a crow. Everthing went black in the shocking folds of his embrace.’

This moment wouldn’t be half so magical and strange if the fallen statue of queen Victoria were not there offering Finn a plinth from which to launch himself upon Melanie. I will leave you to work out where they might be but by this time in the novel Carter has worked her magic enough her characters are traipsing through an abandoned Victorian pavillion in the suburbs of South London looking for ways to alter themselves; to experience the sort of intense sensual encounters teenagers long for; we all long for. Carter’s liteary spells turn her characters, in a brief and sudden moment of special effects, into creatures of fairytale and fable. Strange, feral, frightening, enchanting monsters sent to embrace us. This moment wouldn’t be the same if weren’t for the strange body of the fallen queen lying on her side, her buttocks exposed: an object of historic commemoration turned into an object of absurd ridicule we are invited to climb over, appropriate, use to our own imaginative ends.

For my students endeavouring to read and write, for all of us trying to cast spells.