to the lighthouse (woolf)

Virginia Woolf occupies a strange place in both British literature and my personal literary cosmology. For me, in so many ways, she has become identified with so much that is wrong with British literature. A dilettante child of restrained privilege, whose merry band of Bloomsburyites swanned around, happy enough with their places in an unjust society, (one whose injustices persist), creating art which has been adopted by the upper middle classes as emblematic of a certain kind of aloof englishness. The films, the guided tours, the country houses, the wisteria, the pebbles in the pocket, the archness, the afternoon teas, the sound of voices retumbando in rooms that are too large and too chilly.

Obviously, this is an unfair appraisal of her talents, and those of her fellow artists. Obviously this too reflects my own hang-ups regarding my own englishness. What they might call projection. All the same, it colours my idea of her and her work.

So returning to Woolf after decades of steering clear of her is an interesting process. And dare I say it, but did it not to an extent blow me away, the reading of To The Lighthouse. There is something in its poetry and its generosity which won me over. The characters examining their own weaknesses and strengths, just as we always exist as characters within our minds, trapped between our weaknesses and our strengths. Our inclination to tell the paternal figure what for, and our reluctance to commit to that inclination. Our consciousness of the nearness of death, whilst still holding death at arm’s length. Our quest to reach the fucking lighthouse, even if it’s just a tower on an old rock. Woolf weaves time through the book, the comings and goings, the actual futures, the contemplated futures, the actual pasts and the contemplated pasts. All swishing through our minds like the tides, one way and then another. The truth is almost that we don’t live in the present. We live in a space that is defined by the circularity of time. The sweep of the lighthouse’s arc.

It’s a dense book that stops and starts, that trips you up, that feels as though it’s reaching towards being profoundly un-comfortable. And in that reaching, perhaps, I came back round to the writer, as she absents herself from the image that has been constructed of her and her world by history’s winners, an image of cosy teas on sheltered lawns, of happy families and a scabrous perfection. 

ivan moscow (boris pilnyak, tr aaron schwartzman)

Pilnyak’s post revolutionary text is a tiny box of surprises. Structured around the brief life of the eponymous hero, it moves from Moscow to the deep Russian countryside, where Ivan Moscow is seeking to construct a factory that will produce unlimited nuclear energy. The fact that the novel is written in 1927 and the author was executed by Stalin in 1938, only adds to the unexpected nature of Ivan’s project, which is somehow connected to his love for an Egyptian mummy and the enigmatic Alexandra. Ivan fights in the revolution and dies in a plane crash, but the details seem incidental to a novel which feels like a forefather to the writing of Pelevin and incorporates in its 120 pages an interpretation of revolution, futurism, the conflict between urban and rural russia and its inherent mysteries and much more besides. 

metropolis (d. fritz lang, w. thea von harbou)

Metropolis is almost a hundred years old. Watching this still astonishing vision, it crossed my mind that it feels as though it is perched between two centuries. Just as someone my age feels as anchored in the last century as this one, the film seems to be looking back to the 19th, from whence the great struggle of labour arose. The workers are despatched to labour and live in the lower depths, whilst the rich inhabit soaring spaces in the sky. The scene where the top hatted toffs are overrun by the workers, filmed from above, like some kind of choreographed Brownian motion, seems to encapsulate this conflict, which the 20th century would seek to ameliorate or export or dress up in other costumes where everyone more or less dresses the same, no matter which class they belong to.

The vision of the future contained within Metropolis is still, dare one say, futuristic. Just as in Blade Runner, which it surely influenced, the visionary world feels in some ways more representative of our actual world than the actual world does, like a future we are driving towards at full speed, the details coming in to focus but never quite arriving. Another thing one notes watching the film in its entirety is to what extent the images Lang constructed have remained embedded in the visual culture. Watching it is a bit like seeing a Shakespeare play were you find yourself hearing phrases which are now part of the language. The robot, the man-clock, the skyline, these are all now visual reference points which popular culture has recycled. In a sense it feels as though this is more than just Lang placing his signature on the way we think, it is all that remarkable coalescence of inter-war German thinking, with post-imperialism, revolution and fascism boxing together on a pinhead, seeing which will prevail. 

the gentle art of tramping [stephen graham]

This 1927 tome is a softly spoken meditation on the joys of ‘tramping’. It comes from the epoch of Chaplin and Ragged Trousered Philanphropist, as well as having rural echoes of Benjamin’s urban flaneur. Other points of reference are the Wandering Jew, the hobo, On The Road, the shwami. The tramp is a man whose material possessions, though enumerated and valued, are few. What he has he carries with him. Graham outlines the significance of the book, the coffee pot, the blanket and the other accoutrements of the road. But none of these should impede which is the tramp’s most valuable possession, his liberty.

There’s something fascinating about the tone of Graham’s book. It has a knowing, urban air. There’s a conscious romanticism at work. His tramp is not some skin-and-bone figure desperate for his next meal. As much as this tramp might be said to hark back to a pre-industrial landscape, s/he might also be linked to the modern backpacker. Graham’s walking took him to the US, Russia, Mexico and large swathes of Europe. He was a bounty hunter searching for experience. There’s the assumption of a surplus wealth which allows the tramp to select his adventures, to dip in and out.

Graham’s book tallies with a new, contemporary interest in man’s relationship with the natural world, apparent in the writing of the likes of Macfarlane but also the ‘living-with-nature’ television of Mears or Grills. Modernity is clinging on to the very notion of nature, scared it will be swept away forever by our treasured ‘digital revolution’. We don’t seem to need nature much anymore. Yet we can’t help suspecting that we’re missing out on something through its gradual annihilation. Which could go hand in hand with a terrible revenge, caused by our neglect and disrespect. Graham’s tome prefigures this crisis, but does so in a jaunty way, at a time when melting icecaps and global warming were not even conceived. Nature is still bountiful, the fruits and berries there to be plucked. So this is a book which sings of another age, whilst hinting at our own.