Wagner was an anti-semitic proto-Nazi. I understand why some people don’t want to listen to music composed by anti-semitic proto-Nazis. I even understand if some people think that no-body else should listen to music composed by anti-semitic proto-Nazis. My difficulty comes when they say that Wagner was an anti-semitic proto-Nazi and therefore Ride of the Valkyries is not a very good tune.
Unless you think that art is always and only an expression of the artist’s personality: that Wagner’s music is Wagner’s soul transmuted into sound, and that if Wagner had a fascist soul then Wagner’s music is fascist music and would be fascist music even if you knew nothing about Wagner’s life.
Or perhaps you think that Wagner’s music has been irrevocably tainted by the uses it has been put to? Ride of the Valkyrie may not have been fascist music when Wagner composed it, but it sure as hell became fascist music once Hitler got his hands on it.
The story of Noah’s Ark means what Jews and Christians have understood it to mean for the past three thousand years. Some lost Babylonian poet may have originally meant it to mean something entirely different. But that’s neither here nor there. It’s not his story any more. Sensible scholars sometimes claim to have found traces of the original story, and what it meant, in the surviving text. That is, of course, terribly, terribly interesting. But I grimace when someone assures me that the God of the Jews is really a red headed giant with a gigantic cock because there may have been a deity with those attributes in the texts which may underlie some parts of the Old Testament.
Wagner’s operas are only encountered in production. The author’s ideas are mediated through the ideas of the producer and the performers. This is true if the singers wear their street clothes and stand in a row and sing the exact notes in the score, and it is true if Tristan and Isolde meet in a Berlin public lavatory and Lohengrin’s knights are giant rats. The absence of interpretative ideas is itself an interpretative idea.
But books, by that argument, exist only when they are read. The author’s ideas are mediated through the mind of the reader. If I go to the theatre, I don’t see Hamlet: I see Olivier’s Hamlet or Branagh’s Hamlet. But if I sit in my book nook with a copy of the Penguin Complete Shakespeare, I don’t just experience Hamlet: I experience Andrew Rilstone reading Hamlet.
Imagine that JK Rowling had written a Harry Potter book every year since 1997—so we are now up to volume 28. And imagine that each volume had been better than the previous one, that the books had grown up with the audience, that the wizarding world had become progressively less important, and the books had become character-centred experiments in literary form. Imagine that very respectable critics felt that the writing in the later volumes was possibly as good as James Joyce—certainly as good as Salman Rushdie. But imagine that J K Rowling’s obsessive gender essentialism was just as obsessive and just as essentialist as it is on our time line; and that the latter Harry Potter volumes had taken Rowling’s obsessions as their primary theme.
I have a full sized figure of Cerebus the Aardvark in my front room. I once had a post-card from Dave Sim. I feel your pain.
I remember a silly essay by a silly vicar in a silly newspaper. He’d just found out that Sylvia Plath was on the A Level Syllabus. Oh no, no, no and thrice no, quoth he: Sylvia Plath wrote about neurosis and morbidity. English Literature is about giving children the brightest and the best, not the maddest and the most suicidal. Why show them the outflowing of a diseased mind when you could give them words which flew out of the mind of the greatest and most healthy mind ever to grace this great country of ours, that belonging to Mr William Shakespeare of Stratford?
Are there any writers apart from William Shakespeare, I sometimes wonder? Educational vigilantes sound like KJV fundamentalists. Every book in the world either says the same thing as the Bible, in which case it is superfluous, or else it says something different from the Bible, in which case it is blasphemous. So get rid of any book which isn’t the Bible. Or, at any rate, like F.R Leavis: as long as Middlemarch exists, there is really no reason to ever waste your time reading Our Mutual Friend. Shakespeare’s poetry is wonderful poetry because it was produced by Shakespeare’s mind. Shakespeare had a wonderful mind because it produced Shakespeare’s poetry. Only the great poetry is truly Shakespearian: the silly bits and the dirty bits were inauthentic, forced on him by theatre managers and people in the cheap seats. As long as This Royal Throne of Kings and We Few We Happy Few exist, why on earth ever read anything else?
Sylvia Plath was a good (albeit obviously minor) poet precisely because she put her state of mind, unhappy as it undoubtedly was, into poetry. She may have been at times unhappy and unwell, but she made good art.
Did history, in fact, pardon Paul Claudel?
It would make a difference if it turned out that Alan Moore had all along been a mild mannered Church of England vicar who put on a false beard and adopted the magus persona as a prank. And it would make a very great difference indeed if it turned out that the Diary of Anne Frank was a purely literary creation—a well-intentioned hoax, perpetrated decades after the event. The actual words themselves are not quite the point: the point is that they are the actual words of a particular person in a particular situation at a particular time. “People are really good at heart” isn’t a very profound statement in itself: it’s a profound statement because it is spoken by a very young woman about to be murdered by one of Wagner’s fan-boys.
“Death of the Author” is a literary theory. Books can be read in more than one way: you can’t invoke the supposed intention of the original writer to disallow a particular reading. Olivier’s Hamlet and Branagh’s Hamlet and (most especially) Andrew Rilstone’s Hamlet are all valid. This doesn’t mean I am free to say “In my reading, Winnie-the-Pooh is a shark and Piglet is an exiled Jedi Knight.” But I am entirely free to like Rorschach and think that he got the better of the argument. The Rev Alan Moore has no right to tell me that I am wrong and that I am not allowed to have those thoughts about his story. It doesn’t belong to him any more.
What we now know about Marion Bradley makes it impossible to re-read the Mists of Avalon. Literally impossible: the book we read in 1983 no longer exists. What we now know about David Eddings doesn’t change the Belgariad in quite the same way. Partly, because Mists of Avalon is very much about sex, where the Belgariad is not particularly about cruelty to children. But also, I think, because the Belgariad is just not a very good book. The author doesn’t matter in quite the same way.
If you didn’t live through the 70s you can’t possibly understand how important Jimmy Savile was. It really does feel as if a whole chunk of your life has been overwritten. I can’t think about old Doctor Who without thinking about what was on directly before it. I can’t smile affectionately and tell the story about how there was Jim’ll Fix It stunt at my school ever again. (I can’t even laugh at Basil Brush singing The Noses on the Faces of the Ladies of the Harem of the Court of King Caractacus.) I am far from certain that pixellating faces out of old footage helps but I understand the urge.
At the turn of the 1980s, comic book writers started to acquire a rock-star status they had never had before. Stan Lee had inserted himself into his stories, of course, and given himself a Walt Disney status as Marvel Comics’ presiding spirit; but it was clear to everyone that this was mostly bluster and self-parody. The British 2000AD creators headhunted by DC had youth and good looks and a kind of post-punk prestige. I went to some comic conventions in the years after Watchmen changed everything. John Byrne (Superman) and Chris Claremont (X-Men) were firmly of the old-school, middle-aged, jobbing hacks who were quite willing to chat affably to fan-boys about the writing trade. Alan Moore and Grant Morrison and Neil Gaiman were cool and slouched and looked like characters in their own comics and had just the right mix of arrogance and self-deprecation and fashionable clothes. It was Cliff Richard, wasn’t it, who said that Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby were people you could listen to and admire: but Elvis Presley was the person you wanted to be.
We engage with popular culture in very particular ways. Doctor Who isn’t just a TV show; Star Wars isn’t just a movie; Harry Potter isn’t just a book. All fiction is about vicarious experience to some extent: but I don’t think Scandi-Noir enthusiasts long to have serial-killer themed wedding receptions. You don’t just read about Hogwarts: you imagine yourself to be a pupil there. Harry Potter wasn’t a character in a book, he was your only friend in teenaged night. There is a story about the little boy who told Alec Guinness that he had seen Star Wars a hundred times; and Alec Guinness told him to maybe consider not seeing it again. I can put myself on both sides of that argument. I saw Star Wars, not a hundred times, but certainly twenty: not to admire the cinematography; not even to have my breath taken away by the spectacle, but because I wanted a lightsaber of my own.
One of the kids in Skeleton Crew gets a lightsaber of his own. I wouldn’t be watching a TV show which amounts to The Famous Five In Space if it didn’t have a spurious theoretical connection to the movie I saw in 1978.
It has been quite a wrench to acknowledge that the thing which now goes by the name of Doctor Who is no longer connected with the TV show that I once loved. There is a kind of fan who believes that a single thing called Doctor Who exists forever through a kind of apostolic succession. Either there is no such thing as Bad Doctor Who and anyone who doesn’t love the current season is an apostate and a schismatic. Or else the current custodians have violated the holy church by introducing a new bad guy, altering the deep lore, casting a black man in the lead, making it, as they say, endlessly, “woke”. But I have come around to the idea that what is really happening is that a very clever and talented man is utilising tropes and signifiers which have existed for half a century to create his own new thing, a thing which some people evidently like although I happen not to. My memories are not changed or violated or overwritten, and I still have the DVDs.
But sometimes I think. These aren’t new adventures of Doctor Who. These aren’t new adventures of Luke Skywalker. This is something that someone has made up. Someone who used to read the stories is now telling them. What makes his made up story more valid than, say, mine?
You all know what I think about Sandman. I liked the TV show fine. I haven’t reread the graphic novel in thirty years. I always thought that it was good of its type, and in some ways very good indeed, but lacked patience when it was over-praised, particularly when it was over-praised by people who hadn’t read any other comic books, or, indeed, any other books. I don’t think I ever quite cared about coolness in quite the right way.
At that same convention, a joke went round that Alan Moore had long hair, a long beard, and didn’t wear glasses; and that at exactly the moment he announced he was quitting comics, a new English writer, with short hair, no beard, sunglasses and a slightly over-embellished writing style appeared and started reinventing moribund DC properties. Who, the joke went, are they trying to kid?
I never totally shook that thought. Neil Gaiman was a slightly inferior, milk-and-water version of Alan Moore, in the same way that Terry Pratchett is a slightly inferior, milk-and-water version of Douglas Adams.
Sandman was fine. It wasn’t Watchmen. It certainly wasn’t Cerebus. To some extent I preferred the in-your-face visceral lavatory wall philosophising of Preacher. Some people loved it to Death..
There was a meme went round: Harry Potter was never good. You were nine.
This missed the point completely. Star Wars, I think was genuinely good: and I happened to be twelve. A.A Milne was very good indeed, and I was, in fact, six. And the Beatles clearly would have been very good indeed if I had been sweet little sixteen.
But whether Harry Potter was “ever good” is not the point. The point is that you bonded with Dumbledore at the same age I bonded with Ben Kenobi, and wanted a wand as badly as I wanted a lightsaber.
There are I suppose a very large number of people to whom this kind of talk is meaningless. “These are just books and TV shows and effing comic books you are talking about.” Literary people, I suppose, who have read Jane Austen frequently but wouldn’t want to live there; movie buffs who think that Star Wars was definitely one of the top five movies of 1977. What fills the hole in their lives I couldn’t say. Sport, maybe? Pets? Actual three dimensional human families?
Christopher Milne, remember, didn’t feel any need to hang on to his toy bear and his toy donkey: he wanted the things that were precious to him now, the things which were precious to him as a grown up, not the things which had been precious to him When He Was Very Young. And there may be people who loved Harry Potter and Star Wars and indeed Sandman and never loved anything else; and perhaps we could say that their imaginative growth has been stunted. Larry Marder said that Jack Kirby’s visual language was so awe-inspiring that some comic book fans never bothered to learn any other, which is a wonderfully nuanced way of putting it. I think they are like that fellow who keeps his decorations up in July and eats turkey three hundred and sixty five times a year. He has rather missed the point of Christmas.
I was too old for the Harry Potter books. But I read them, because everybody else was reading them. When Sandman was a thing, I was jaded and purist about comics and thought that nothing again would ever be as good as Stan and Jack. Now I am very nearly a hundred, which means that Pooh is very nearly ninety nine, but I will never quite get over thinking that the Hundred Acre Wood is my true home.
In a few weeks, the boffins will have perfected Artificial Intelligence software — predictive text algorithms — which can generate entire novels without human involvement. They may already have done so: it would certainly explain Rings of Power.
Genre fiction and formula fiction exist. Lots of freelance hacks think that they can take a corrupt sheriff, a call girl with a heart of gold, a whisky priest, a stage coach, some Indians, a nineteen year old cowpoke keen to prove himself, an innocent man headed for the gallows, a wise bartender and some wholesome homesteaders, shove them into their Nutribullet and blitz out ten volumes of the Wild West Library as quick as they can type them. In golden age of pulp that may even have been true. So why not cut out the middle man and sell an AI predictive text app that can generate an infinite number of brand new cowboy stories at the click of a mouse. Or, at any rate, the same cowboy story with minor variations. But isn’t that what Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour spent their entire careers doing? Isn’t that what genre fiction means?
If the author isn’t literally dead, he is certainly very poorly: author-less texts are just around the corner.
It’s not an entirely unattractive proposal. I would be very interested in feeding the whole corpus of 1960s Marvel Comics in at one end of the Marvellous Mechanical Mouse Mill and seeing what narrative chocolate biscuit emerge at the other. New Lee/Ditko Spider-Man stories? Or, at any rate, very, very good pastiches? What’s not to like?
There are now more than two hundred Rainbow Fairy books, all written by the redoubtable Daisy Meadows, who lives in a rose bedecked cottage with a two cats and two dogs. Except that no such person as Daisy Meadows exists: she’s a pseudonym adopted by at least fourteen different children’s writers. But perhaps she is a necessary fiction? Perhaps little girls need to think that there is a story-teller behind their stories? Perhaps every time someone says “Daisy Meadows doesn’t exist” a fairy drops down dead?
I once read about a man, a decent writer, who read a few dozen Mills and Boon romances and tried his hand at writing his own. He got a polite rejection letter saying that while he understood the formula, it was obvious that his heart wasn’t in it.
I think that the lady with the cottage and the cats is part of the Rainbow Fairy stories, and that if she went away, part of the story would go away, too. I think that Stan and Jack and the Bullpen were a big part of Marvel Comics, even though Stan and Jack hated each other and the bullpen didn’t exist. And the diffident nice guy with the leather coats and the dark glasses who wants everyone to just make good art is a big, big part of the Sandman saga, even though he never appears in it. It never quite was just Sandman, it was always Neil Gaiman’s Sandman.
Sandman is, of course, very much about mythologizing the special power of Story and therefore of the Story Teller. Morpheus is Lord of Stories and there is a certain amount of entirely intentional confusion between the Author and the Character. If Sandman turned out to have been written by a committee or generated by artificial intelligence, it would no longer be Sandman.
This is even more true of Uncle Terry Pratchett.
If you loved Sandman then no-one can take from you the experience of having read it. But (it appears) no-one can ever give back to you the experience of having read Sandman in the voice of that particular storyteller because (it appears) that particular storyteller didn’t exist.
If you decide that you can still enjoy your memories of the stories, then I will support you. If you decide you can re-read those orphaned stories, I will support you. If you decide that the experience is tainted; that Sandman must be pixellated out of your life then will support you. If you decide that the physical artefacts must themselves be put on a bonfire then I may politely dissent. That sounds too much like the kind of thing Wagner’s number one fan might have done: but I understand the impulse. I think that I think that stories are stories and that once in the world they are in the world and that the Hundred Acre Wood would still be my true home even if something horrible came to light about A.A Milne or Christopher Robin.
Taking away Harry Potter or Luke Skywalker or Morpheus from a true fan is not like reassessing a work of literature or giving up on a TV series which has jumped the proverbial. It is closer, I think, to de-conversion.
I have a life sized figurine of Cerebus the Aardvark in my flat. Ride of Valkyries is a very good tune.
