Whatever it is, I Don't Like it (29 page)

Do not mistake me. I do not value difficulty for difficulty's sake.
Ulysses
is sometimes harder work than it need be and
Finnegans Wake
too hard altogether. Our ears prick to self-indulgent obfuscation, or the out-of-touchness of a writer who has for too long kept company only with himself. And yes, there is merit in clarity. The Plain English Campaign fights a good fight against the jargon that means to disinform, or keep out those who don't share the ideology of the speaker. But what happens in a novel or a play is not subject to the strictures of Plain English. There is no clear external meaning to which a complex line of poetry answers. There is no arrival point of knowledge which the words delay our reaching. The meaning of a line of poetry or prose is found in the utterance that creates it and nowhere else.

‘If it can be said it can be said simply' is an unctuous piece of flattery to the electroencephalogramically challenged. Some anti-elitist concept of ‘communication' lies behind it, as though what the ear of the dunderhead cannot comprehend the voice of literature dare not speak. It is an assumption that lies close to those other reading-group inanities – ‘I can't identify with the characters' or ‘I don't find the hero a very nice person' – where the limitations of the reader's mind and expectations are paraded not in shame (in my day you kept your dwarf imagination a closely guarded secret) but exultation, as though the book in question is at fault, not you.

So, if an electroencephalogram can show how unexpectedness of syntax (and therefore meaning) will educate the brain into ‘more complex variations and syncopations', to borrow a lively phrase from Professor Davis, will it also do the opposite? Can it measure the brain's inertia when fed utterly familiar syntax and the utterly familiar attitudes and emotions which utterly familiar syntax serves? It's not strictly necessary: whoever reads only what the ignorant find ‘readable' has neural torpor inscribed across his countenance. But it would be fun to have scientific proof of what we know: that simple books make simpletons. And limpid prose is sure to leave us limp of mind.

Hodgepodge

 

Another week, another inanity. If it's not Balls, it's Hodge. Not schools this time, the Proms. New Labour, New Culture. Only for New Culture, read No Culture. Alternatively, Hodgepodge.

‘Collective Cultural Belonging' is what the Culture Minister (don't ask) has been banging on about, a phrase a wise person would think twice before using in the aftermath of Stalin and Pol Pot. But Margaret Hodge sips from a poisoned chalice. Terrorism, immigration, integration, assimiliation, identity, nationhood – all awaiting the salving balm of culture. If we can get everybody together – ‘associating their citizenship with key cultural icons' is how she puts it, which sounds like having your photograph taken with Elton John and pasting it on to the back page of your new British passport – all will be well. By which standard, whatever fails of inclusiveness must be viewed with suspicion. Inclusiveness will always bedevil a Labour Party. Inclusiveness was the argument for getting rid of grammar schools. And now, in the begrudging hands of Hodge, it's an argument for getting rid of the Proms. Or at least for changing their character. Which amounts to the same thing.

‘Ease' is suddenly the criterion. The problem with the Proms being that they're ‘still a long way from demonstrating that people from different backgrounds feel at ease in being part of this'. I've tried counting the number of questions that broken-backed, shit-eating sentence begs, but this column is not long enough to enumerate them. So let's just stick with the begged assumption that a public event – we don't even have to call it a cultural event, just an event, cherished by some, not cherished by others – is obliged to put everyone, or even anyone, at their ease. What's sacrosanct about ease?

Nothing about this country has ever put me at my ease. I didn't feel at ease when processions of weeping Catholics passed my house carrying plaster saints. Didn't feel at ease at school when they sang hymns in assembly about famous men I'd never heard of, or accused ‘some boy' of stealing toilet rolls. Didn't feel at ease at university where hearties in blue blazers ran up and down the towpath of the Cam shouting ‘Olly, Olly, Jesus!' and moral tutors called me Abrahamson, Isaacson, Greenberg and Cohen. Don't feel at ease in the Athenaeum, or Glyndebourne, or the Courts of Justice, or any police station, racetrack, garden fete, rap concert or pole-dancing establishment.

Many are the ways a person whose family hasn't owned land on these islands for a thousand years might feel frightened, discomfited, embarrassed, or just not one hundred per cent at home. That will hold true for most of the population in one place or another, even those who do go back to the Domesday Book. There is always something to fear in the rites of others – whether older or younger, or of another class, religion or colour – but alongside the fear might exist, if we allow it, curiosity, admiration, and – why not? – the deep affection of the outsider looking in.

The experience of feeling ill at ease can be very powerful. A spur to emulation sometimes, but I don't doubt the cause of hostility, too, where the outsider is unstable. What doesn't follow is that, against such an eventuality, we are obliged to water down everything we do. Must a pole dancer dress herself to spare my blushes? Must Judaism, Christianity and Islam make changes to their practice and liturgy to accommodate any unease I might feel in the synagogue, the cathedral or the mosque? The one thing we do know is that religion never looks more contemptible than when it forgets it's for its own elect and turns populist. The disaffected do not scorn our institutions for their strength but for their tepidity. It is with culture as it is with the bringing up of children: a strong clear message is always best, however copious the bedtime tears.

Behind the ease and inclusiveness assumption lies a highly indulgent ideology of selfhood – the right of any individual to feel the centre of the universe, or, to borrow a phrase I heard at a dinner party the other night, to have his or her ‘experience validated'. A teacher of French literature was telling me how the mother of one of his pupils had objected to his teaching her daughter French drama of the seventeenth century. The girl was uneasy reading these plays. They felt old and foreign to her. (Corneille and Molière – foreign!) Her mother agreed. How were these works, she wanted to know, ‘validating her child's experience'? Because he was a charming man, the French teacher didn't tell her that the daughter's experience, if it was anything like the mother's, was the thing least worth validating in the entire universe. If her daughter felt at sea, so much the better. Study is meant to make you feel at sea. The self is not a precious entity that must be soothed and eased at every turn. Sometimes, the self is something you must learn to lose. Validation of the self, madame – again this is me speaking, not him – is what you might get from a finishing school, but not from a humane education.

I say something very similar to those pupils at a Jewish girls' school in London who recently refused to answer questions on Shakespeare in a national curriculum test as a way of protesting against the character of Shylock. Given the opportunity for some close textual analysis, I have no doubt I could persuade the girls that Shakespeare was not an anti-Semite, whatever that means in an Elizabethan context. But that's beside the point. Reading Shakespeare is not conditional on his loving Jews. The study of literature becomes no study at all if you read only writers whose attitudes chime with your own and with whom you therefore feel at ease. Encountering what is not you, indeed what might well be inimical to you, is one of the first reasons for reading anything.

So the Proms are more a problem for those who don't attend them, for whatever reason, than for those do. I wouldn't myself go to the Last Night of the Proms even if they offered to stand me between Cecilia Bartoli and Jitka Hosprová; but were I new to this country I would regard the Promenaders with the same degree of baffled awe that travellers experience when they behold a carnival in Rio, or Thasipusam in Kuala Lumpur. If cultural integration is the issue, there needs to be a culture to integrate with. And a culture that can't express its peculiar vitality without worrying how much upset it might be causing, isn't a culture at all.

Tristan and Isolde

 

Thought my marriage was over last week. Or at least the free and open, disputatious, relishing dissent and disagreement part. The occasion was the BBC Proms concert presentation of Act 2 of Wagner's
Tristan und Isolde
, an opera I have long been in a dozen minds about but whose best bits I wanted my wife to enjoy as much as I did, Wagner having largely passed her by.

My being in a dozen minds about Wagner has nothing to do with his Jew-hating. An artist may hate Jews if he wishes. If it isn't Jews, it will be someone else. All you can ask is that the art itself rises above the hatred, harmonises all the ugly flotsam of single-mindedness that fed it. We make art to be better than we are when we are not making art. There is no more to say.

Which said, I've heard it argued that the Orphic inflexibility that made Wagner an anti-Semite remains residually there in the music; and I suspect anyone who goes to pagan saga for his inspiration, not because the stories aren't overwhelmingly wonderful, but because a pre-Christian heroising is the usual motive, an admiration for aristocratic man before what Nietzsche called ‘the slave revolt in morals' was initiated by the Jews.

But all this is by the by, as we weren't watching
Der Ring des Nibelungen
but Act 2 of
Tristan und Isolde
, a distinctly post-Christian legend, where what's imperilled is chivalry not Valhalla, and what does the imperilling is love or, if you prefer – because there can be a difference – sexual desire. Concert performances of opera are often thin gruel, but in the case of
Tristan und Isolde
there is something apposite about the principals just standing there, never touching, scarcely looking at each other, simply delivering their protestations of erotic abandonment as though to the unseen forces of the air. They aren't, you see, in the slightest bit interested in each other. Ask Tristan what Isolde is wearing and he wouldn't be able to tell you; ask Isolde to enumerate the personal qualities for which she loves Tristan and she'd be hard pressed to come up with any. This is not a complaint. I don't ask them to be lovers in the romantic-comedy mould. They are, after all, only in love because a love potion made them so. They have, in other words, no choice in the matter, so it's neither here nor there what either thinks of the other. Love strikes, and that's it. Which is sometimes, and maybe more than sometimes, the way of it.

I might be in a dozen minds about Wagner but I am sure of this: that the music of
Tristan und Isolde
celebrates an erotic transport that is entirely impersonal, and that this superbly orchestrated swoon of self-consummation describes love better than it is comfortable for us, in our twenty-first-century sentimentality about affection and the family, to admit.

Isolde does not want Tristan's baby. Tristan does not want to introduce Isolde to his friends. All Isolde hopes for is to vanish from the world while protesting her love of Tristan. He the same. Though the music is orgasmic, even sex isn't really what it's about. Death is what it's about.

I don't mind admitting that I am swooning to the music. When Tristan and Isolde finally and as it were in the abstract get it together, calling on love to ‘free them from the world', I am a goner. Death can free me from the world as well. My wife is motionless in her seat, barely breathing. She irradiates love's tragedy, the great paradox at the heart of desire – loss in plenty, plenty in loss. Has death claimed us both?

It's at this point that I believe she has begun to judge me – not as a man, not as a lover, but as an artist. Why am I not Wagner? More specifically, why have I not sought to make tragic art as uncompromising as this? There is no comedy in Wagner. One laugh and that's the trance blown. But I have always argued for the primacy of comedy; comedy is what makes Mozart greater than Wagner. I don't mean jokes, I mean the illumination of another way of seeing, the sudden turning of an action on its head, not to make light of it but to enrich it, in such an instance as this, for example, to show the lovers why life has more going for it than death. Hence my own practice as a novelist, which is to take comedy into the very heart of desolation, to affirm life when it is most threatened.

At the end of an exhausting day at the theatre, watching tragic heroes putting out their eyes and tragic heroines murdering their children, Greek audiences would be treated to the wild burlesque of a satyr play – the invigorating comic obscenity of man as beast sating his lusts and never mind the consequences being what they finally took home with them. In the satyr play I have seen my own justification. Once upon a time I just wrote the satyr play, leaving the preceding tragedies to others. Now I try to create the whole cycle, but always going for that final invigoration of comedy. But what if I am – what if I always was – wrong?

There's no trace of satyr play in
Tristan und Isolde
. Of all lovers, Tristan and Isolde would be the last to admit that they share concupiscence with a goat. They own no allegiance to life in any of its robust forms; their medium is night, far from ‘day's empty fancies'. They seek to be beyond corporeal existence, bodiless, obliterated, distilled into nothingness. They are satyr-proof. And I am lost in the music that celebrates them. As is my wife. And how can she be thinking other than what I'm thinking – that
this
, Wagner, unremitting, exhausting, serious to the point of annihilation, is what art's about?