Literary style

Monday musings on Australian literature: The Australian bildungsroman

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Miles Franklin

Miles Franklin, c. 1940s (Presumed Public Domain, via Wikipedia)

I know the sad truth. About everything.
(Craig Silvey, Jasper Jones)

In past posts, I’ve talked of enjoying coming-of-age novels (aka bildungsroman) and so today I thought I’d share 5 (cos 5 seems like a manageable number for a list like this – and gives you an opportunity to contribute your own!) Australian novels in the genre.

In the introduction to a course on “The European bildungsroman” at Columbia University in the USA, there is a brief discussion on the definition of the term. The unnamed writer (so let’s call him/her Columbia) of the introduction says:

My particular approach to defining the genre … returns to Dilthey‘s original definition. According to Dilthey, the prototypical Bildungsroman is Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship in which the hero engages in a double task of self-integration and integration into society.

Columbia then expounds a little on this definition arguing that, while Dilthey see this as an affirmative, conservative genre which aims to find the “hero” a productive place in a valid society, s/he sees it as involving a tension – that between “the priorities of self-integration and social integration”, between personal desire and social obligation. For Columbia this tension is a major criterion for the Bildungsroman genre. This makes sense to me … perhaps this tension isn’t an issue for every young person who is coming of age, but a coming-of-age story without that tension, without some conflict to resolve, is probably not going to be interesting to read!

(By the way, I’m not sure that this necessarily negates Dilthey’s definition. The difference between Dilthey and Columbia seems to me to be that Dilthey focuses on the end result, while Columbia focuses on the process which may or may not culminate in Dilthey’s goal.)

And so, five Australian coming-of-age novels (choosing from those I’ve read):

  • Miles Franklin‘s My brilliant career (1901) is probably Australia’s best known book of the genre. It’s a semi-autobiographical novel about Sybylla, a young girl on an outback property who must choose between her passion for a man and her passion to be a writer. It was made into a film by Australian director Gillian Armstrong.
  • Henry Handel Richardson‘s The getting of wisdom (1910) is another novel about a blue-stocking girl. Laura’s innocence and idealism are sorely tested by the city sophistication of her well-to-do peers. In this story, the awakening is more intellectual and philosophical than sexual. According to the Henry Handel Richardson Society, this novel was admired by HG Wells. It was also made into a film.
  • Melina Marchetta‘s Looking for Alibrandi (1992) is a young adult novel (and, later, a film) which adds an immigrant background to the heroine’s challenge. Not only is she a young intelligent girl who confronts her awakening sexuality but she must do so within the strictures of a conservative Italian family.
  • Tim Winton‘s Breath (2008) explores the youthful drive to prove oneself, to take risks, and the complications that arise from choosing an imperfect male role model and from becoming embroiled in a rather unhealthy sexual relationship with an older woman. Eva is no Mrs Robinson. The question left for the reader at the end goes to the heart of Columbia’s disagreement with Dilthey.
  • Craig Silvey‘s Jasper Jones (2009) is set in rural 1960s Western Australia and, with a nod to To kill a mockingbird, combines a somewhat Gothic mystery with a more traditional coming-of-age story. Racism (against immigrants and indigenous people), sexuality and learning who you can trust are some of the adult issues that Charlie confronts in his growth to maturity.

I’m intrigued by how many of these books have a rural or small town setting. (Even Laura, in The getting of wisdom, is a country child, though the book is set in a city boarding school. Looking for Alibrandi is the only truly urban novel here.) Is this because we equate country with innocence? Because rural life tends to be more conservative and therefore presents a greater challenge to a burgeoning self? Is it simply that the books I’ve chosen are not representative? Or? What do you think?

Delicious descriptions from Down Under: Barbara Hanrahan on the sun

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When you read do you come across passages that you just want to hang onto forever – but (if you’re a blogger) when you go to write your blog review you can’t quite make them fit? I do, and have been pondering for some time what to do about it. Then, suddenly, it came to me. How about a series of posts comprising favourite bits from books (and other writing)? And so, “Delicious descriptions from Down Under” was born. The posts will be occasional – and some times more occasional than others – but I’ll just see where it takes me.

For my first one, I couldn’t go past Barbara Hanrahan‘s The scent of eucalyptus (1973) which I reviewed recently. It’s full of “delicious descriptions” but the one I wanted to share has to do with the Sun, with, specifically, hot sunny days in the city of Adelaide. I was in Adelaide on a scorchingly hot long January weekend many moons ago, and haven’t forgotten it. Here is Hanrahan:

Myilly Point, Darwin, shutters

Shutters

The sun is everywhere.

It is in the garden: peering huge-eyed over the berry bush, roosting behind the chimney, floating like a fried egg in puddles. It mocks me when I burn my bare feet on the earth and scorch my fingers on the iron fence. It peels my nose to jigsaw puzzles, gilds my skin with freckles, turns the hair on my arms to gold.

It is in the house: spangling the passage with leopard spots, turning the sheepskin rug tawny, casting zebra stripes through the shutters. It curdles the milk, melts the butter, shows the dust, fades the curtains. It steals into vases and drinks their water; creeps up the cold tap and turns it hot.

Such intense summer heat that goes on for days is typically – though not solely I know – Australian. I love the way she gives the sun life, the way she mixes up her imagery and yet consciously but not rigidly uses a symmetrical structure to make it read more like poetry than prose. It works beautifully – for me, anyhow.

On being a taxonomical reviewer

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I was reading a review this morning of a poetry anthology, and the reviewer, one Dr. Martin Duwell I believe, said that the book “encourages the taxonomist in me”. Ah, I thought, a person after my own heart … because I too have a taxonomical bent in my approach to literature. (I am, it has to be said, a librarian/archivist by training/profession, but I suspect the choice of profession followed the bent, rather than vice versa!). Anyhow, back to the topic in hand.

It is natural I think to apply some level of taxonomical* thinking to reviews of anthologies. How have the poems/stories been organised? It’s rarely random. Sometimes it’s simply chronological or alphabetical (as in The best Australian poems 2009 that I mentioned in a recent Monday musings); sometimes there’s a clear thematic grouping, with headings perhaps (as in Dorothy Porter‘s The bee hut); sometimes it’s more subtle, more organic, with the component parts flowing from one to the other, in which cases the reader may or may discern the connection; and sometimes, perhaps, it really is random. The challenge for we taxonomical reviewers of course is to work out whether the last truly is the case – or, have we missed something? It can exercise the brain exceedingly!

Cahill Expressway loop

Cahill Expressway loop - not the painting but this image can be used! (Courtesy: Angus Fraser, via Wikipedia, using CC-BY-2.0)

Having considered the organisation issue, the next thing the taxonomical reviewer thinks about is: are there over-riding themes or styles or [pick your issue]? Sometimes, there is and it’s very clear, such as in those short story collections specifically gathered around a theme. I have a few in my collection, including Sisters compiled by Brigid McConville (in which the writers explore – well – it’s obvious from the title, isn’t it?) and Expressway compiled by Helen Daniel (in which the writers were invited to respond to Jeffrey Smart‘s painting “Cahill expressway”). But sometimes it’s not so obvious, as in, say Nam Le‘s highly-varied-in-voice-and-subject matter collection, The boat. Besides the possibly cop-out but nonetheless valid-enough idea (given the author’s personal history) that it’s about the diversity of human experience, I did glean a theme of survival running through the collection. I may be right, or I may be wrong, but it satisfies my need to comprehend the work as a whole, as well as its component parts.

But, the truly taxonomical reviewer (reader), will also approach a single work like a novel, taxonomically. And I – we, I presume – do this largely by looking at the structure. How has the work been put together, and why. Is it told chronologically in one voice? Is it a multiple point-of-view novel? Is the voice first-person, third person or even, occasionally, second-person? Where, in particular, writers have diverged from the more traditional chronological-one voice structure, why have they done so?  And, more importantly, has it worked? Why did Martin Amis write Time’s arrow in rewind? Why did Jim Crace use his four-part backwards-forwards structure in Being dead? Why did Jane Austen set up her “sense” and “sensibility” (or “pride” and “prejudice”) dichotomy? Why, and I will be discussing this in a coming review, did Mario Vargas Llosa use the rather complex multiple-point-of-view structure in The feast of the goat? The answers to these questions often help me locate the essential meaning of the work. That is, the meaning of the work for me.

I realise that this may all sound rather mechanistic and, if applied rigidly, it could be – but I think that for we taxonomical reviewers this approach is just one of the pens in our pencil-case. Sometimes there is nothing really to categorise/dissect or the categorisation/dissection is straightforward, but sometimes it can help. Sometimes, in a large, complex, unwieldy and/or diverse work, it can help us get to the core. The trick, though, is to be flexible. Elinor and Marianne in Sense and sensibility may, respectively, stand generally for those two character traits, but if we try to bind our analysis too closely to those dichotomies, not only will we tie ourselves in knots, but we’ll miss the fundamental humanity of Austen’s worldview. In other worse, to paraphrase Hamlet, it doesn’t do to think too “precisely on th’ event”. Rather, keep it loose, and meaning just might appear …

* I define “taxonomical” loosely to mean, categorising, ordering, structuring.

The long and short of it, novelistically speaking

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The novella has ambivalence built into its DNA. It’s neither one thing nor the other and tends to make you think even as it lures you down blind alleys and serves up irresolute endings.

(The Daily Beast)

Readers of this blog know that I am partial to short novels, particularly novellas. I always feel a little self-conscious saying this. I worry. Does it make me sound

  • Lazy, as in I can’t be bothered to read a long book? Or,
  • Impatient, as in I want to rack up my book reading stats and long books slow that down?

And to be honest, maybe there is a little bit of truth in these.

Big Fat Book

A long book requires a long commitment. Reading any literature requires attention and if you don’t have the concentrated time to give to a long book, you risk “losing the plot”, figuratively and literally speaking. In other words, if you read it in too many short spurts over too long a period of time, it can be hard keeping it all in your head. In the same time-frame you could very well have read two, three, four  or even six novellas (if, say, you were reading Vikram Seth‘s A suitable boy). You would have experienced a number of different perspectives on the world rather than just one – and you probably would have been challenged multiply by the often elliptical nature of the short novel. And this brings me to why I really like short novels …

I like, as the Daily Beast quote above says, being made to think while being lured down blind alleys and served up irresolute endings. Of course, the modern long novel can do that too … But with a short novel you tend to get tight prose. There are no wasted words. There are no long digressions – or multiple storylines …

What, no digressions? This is where the Big Fat Book comes in. When I wrote my post on novellas nearly a year ago, I said I’d write a post on long novels – and finally I am getting around to it, because, despite my general preference for short novels, I have read and enjoyed long ones*. First, here are some that I’ve read and enjoyed in the last decade:

Not a lot of them, eh, but memorable every one. And the reason is, I think, that you live with long novels. A short novel can engage your emotions, of course, but it is, I think, a more intellectual engagement in which our feelings are continually monitored by our brains: what are we feeling and why? A long novel is different. You become part of its life; the characters become “real” in a way that they rarely do in a short novel and you feel their loss when the book ends. This makes the reading experience very different. The brain is engaged, of course, but the emotions take the upper hand.

In fact, generalising wildly, I see the reading experience as going a bit like this:

  • In the short novel, with its tight prose and often minimal plot, your brain works hard to understand what is happening, where it is going, what it is all about, and then is suddenly confronted with an emotional kick at the end.
  • In the long novel, with its multiple story-lines and often frequent digressions, your emotions become engaged as you live the characters’ lives with them, love, cry, hate, worry with them, and then, when it’s all over, your brain comes in to work out what it was all about.
Detail from photographic portrait of Charles D...
Dickens, who wrote short and long novels (Image: Presumed Public Domain, via Wikipedia)

I say this relatively not absolutely, because of course we engage both emotion and intellect in all our (fiction) reading. However, it seems to encapsulate, for me at least, the mechanics behind my rather different responses to reading a short versus a long novel. Does this make any sense?

Anyhow, I’d better finish here and get back to my current, long and rather engaging, novel, Peter Carey‘s Parrot and Olivier in America. Review coming just as soon as I manage to finish it …

* A NOTE ON DEFINITIONS: Leaving aside those specific terms of “novellas” and “big fat books”, my rule of thumb definition is that short novels are under 300 pages, and long novels over 500 pages. The rest are, well, just novels.

On polishing Jane Austen’s halo

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My American friend Peggy who, several years ago, very generously sent me the Pride and Prejudice Game, has now sent me a link to a short interview – with a transcript – conducted on NPR (National Public Radio) with Dr Kathryn Sutherland. Sutherland is the academic who has been researching Austen‘s manuscripts for the last three years and whose quoted-around-the-world comments I discussed briefly in a recent post.

This interview contains statements by Sutherland that are similar to those she made in a BBC interview (in a link provided by blogger Arti in her comment on my previous post). In Peggy’s link, Sutherland says that she has received some negative reactions to her comments. Not surprising, I suppose, given what was clearly out-of-context seantionalist reporting.

Anyhow, this is what she said to the NPR interviewer:

I’ve heard a range of responses. And I have had some very extreme and, I have to say, unpleasant responses to my work. All I can say is that, you know, as critics we should just stop polishing her halo.

There are very few authors that we put in this extraordinary position where we feel that we should never say anything critical about them. She can stand up to it. She’s interesting. She’s experimental. She’s an extraordinary writer. The idea that we can never question what she wrote I think is absolute nonsense.

Can’t say fairer than that …

Jane Austen’s manuscripts: Is she the writer we think she is?

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Jane Austen sketch by Cassandra

Cassandra's portrait of her sister, c. 1810

Well, it’s all over the web, Jane Austen‘s manuscripts are full, FULL they say, of errors. They’re being formally launched tomorrow, Monday 25 October, so we can all see them then, though as far as I can tell they are already up: Jane Austen’s Fictional Manuscripts. Is something more going up tomorrow? Or is this just a case of a soft launch versus a formal launch? Anyhow, what does the claim really mean?

Kathryn Sutherland, the Oxford University academic who has been looking at the manuscripts, says that

It’s widely assumed that Austen was a perfect stylist – her brother Henry famously said in 1818 that ‘everything came finished from her pen’ and commentators continue to share this view today.

Except that it is pretty well acknowledged that Austen’s family was protective of her reputation, so … we do need to look a bit further.

Kathryn Sutherland continues to say, according to what I presume is the advance press release:

The reputation of no other English novelist rests so firmly on this issue of style, on the poise and emphasis of sentence and phrase, captured in precisely weighed punctuation.

That is partly so – and I am certainly one to laud her style – though I’d say her reputation rests on three things: style, story and insight.

Anyhow, Sutherland then says that what we know as the precision of Jane Austen’s writing is not evident here –

We see blots, crossings out, messiness – we see creation as it happens, and in Austen’s case, we discover a powerful counter-grammatical way of writing. She broke most of the rules for writing good English…

– and suggests there was a strong editorial hand involved in getting the works to the state in which we see them. Hmm… isn’t this the case for other authors? And anyhow, on how many novels is she basing this opinion? If it’s just Persuasion and the unfinished Sanditon – besides some of the earlier juvenilia and minor works – then these two were written when her health was failing. In fact, a quick look at the website as it exists now shows very little crossing out, for example, in Lady Susan. In her letters, Austen wrote of a few small typographical errors in Pride and prejudice and the odd missing “said he” and “said she”, which presumably means that what was published was close to what she wrote? Added to this is the fact that I understood that very little survives in manuscript form of Jane Austen’s novels. In fact, the introduction to the site says that:

There is no evidence to indicate that Jane Austen saw the bulk of these drafts as anything other than provisional.  Hence the stark situation that no manuscripts appear to remain for works published or planned for publication in her lifetime (Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey or Persuasion, the famous six novels). The assumption must be that their working and finished drafts were routinely discarded once replaced by print forms. There is only one exception: the two cancelled chapters of Persuasion, which represent an alternative ending to the one that made it into print.

Has this “press release” (or syndicated article) been written to get some controversy going … or is Sutherland, a reputable scholar I believe, basing her statements on other information? Will there be more on the site tomorrow? I look forward to following the continuing discussion …

Did Shakespeare write Shakespeare? Did Austen write Austen? In the end what matters really is the work … isn’t it? Or is this just a little too naive?

POSTSCRIPT: I wrote the above last night as a bit of a “feeler”. While the statements in the news pieces did not accord with the knowledge I had about Austen’s manuscripts and her own practices, and while my research indicated that Sutherland is a reputable scholar, I wanted to raise the following issues:

  • had more knowledge/manuscripts come to hand (though I suspected not) to alter our understanding?
  • what difference does editing make to our assessment and appreciation of the works?

Let’s not even bother to raise the third one about  the ethics of such skewed reporting if that’s what I – and clearly others – believe is behind it all!

On endings – in novels, that is

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Road Ends sign

The End! (Courtesy: OCAL via clker.com)

Australian writer, Amanda Lohrey, was interviewed on this morning’s Bookshow about her new book, a collection of short stories titled Reading Madame Bovary, which Lisa at ANZLitLovers has well reviewed. I’m not going to talk about the interview here in any detail, but I did think she had something interesting to say about endings, particularly given the last two books I’ve read whose endings were a little surprising.

Before getting to Lohrey, though, let’s just recap EM Forster‘s famous (well, I like it anyhow) statement about endings in his Aspects of the novel:

Nearly all novels are feeble at the end. This is because the plot requires to be wound up. Why is this necessary? Why is there not a convention which allows a novelist to stop as soon as he feels muddled or bored? … Incidents and people that occurred at first for their own sake now have to contribute to the dénouement … most novels do fail here – there is this disastrous standstill while logic takes over the command from flesh and blood. If it was not for death and marriage I do not know how the average novelist would conclude.

Oh dear…that is certainly how novels in the past usually concluded isn’t it? Modern – Modernist and, particularly, Postmodernist (but don’t test me too closely on literary theory because I haven’t made a close study of it) – novels are more likely to have an open ending. They don’t necessarily subscribe to the notion that there must be a dénouement that ties everything up (except perhaps for genre fiction?) which creates a challenge for readers. You get to the end of an open-ended novel and are forced to ask “What was that about?”. With a traditionally ended novel, all you have to say is, well, boy met girl, boy lost girl, boy got girl again. Of course, it was usually about something else but a simple, straightforward plot can discourage further thought about the “about” question.

Amanda Lohrey expressed it this way. She said “I think that surprise is absolutely essential to satisfying fiction” but this surprise must not be too absurd, extreme or contrived. Rather it should be something that gives you a “hit of adrenaline”, that you didn’t see coming but makes you think “yes, of course, that must be how it will end”. She goes on to say that “plot isn’t everything” but there must be a journey…

So, where does all this leave us? Take my two recent reads. There was some consternation among my reading friends about the ending of Lionel Shriver’s So much for that. It was pretty much a surprise – but the question is whether it meets the second part of Lohrey’s criteria. For some it was a cop-out and diluted the novel’s intent but that, of course, depends on what you think the intent is. My other example is John Banville‘s The Infinities. It also had a surprising ending that could also be seen as a cop-out but, when I stop to think about it, particularly its somewhat playful tone, the ending did in fact make sense. (It’s telling, I think, that  part of the surprise of these two potentially “copout” endings is that they are reasonably positive!)

All this said, I must say that I often forget the ending of novels I’ve read (unless they’re of the traditional marriage or death variety). What I tend not to forget though is the tone and my emotional reaction – and that is good enough for me. What about you? What do you think about endings and do you have any favourite or problematic ones?

Monday musings on Australian literature: In praise of the “taker-outers”

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Today’s Monday musings post is not solely about Australian literature but it was inspired by an Australian writer, Kate Jennings, about whom I’ve written a few times in the last month or so. In 2002 she wrote an essay titled “Bone and sinew”, for our now defunct Bulletin magazine, in which she praises short novels (or, novellas*). Tony of Tony’s Bookworld likes novellas, and so do I.

Anyhow, Jennings starts her essay with a statement that F. Scott Fitzgerald apparently made to Thomas Wolfe. He said:

You’re a putter-in, and I’m a taker-outer.

It seems that Wolfe believed a novelist couldn’t be taken seriously until, to use Jennings words, “he or she had produced something that could hold up a three-legged sofa”. Jennings likes Scott Fitzgerald’s description and goes on to say:

Putters-in and takers-out – as good a way as any to classify novelists. Putters-in: writers who pile on atmosphere, adjectives ad arguments, who share with readers all their thoughts, and research, who follow storylines like a dog on the loose. Takers-out: writers who fiddle with each comma and finesse every word, who know exactly what Samuel Johnson meant when he said that when you think you’ve written a particularly fine passage, strike it out.

Jennings admits to her bias – after all, she says, she’s written a couple of short novels herself – but says she does also enjoy  the likes of George Eliot, Christina Stead, Patrick White and Rohinton Mistry. Her point is that their novels are not “superior because of their length” and that short novels should not be perceived as “slight” simply because they are “slim”. There are many short novels with proven staying power (such as The great Gatsby, Joseph Conrad’s The heart of darkness and George Orwell‘s Animal farm) and yet, she says, publishers, recognising that readers and reviewers are prejudiced against shortness, “often ask writers to pad out short novels with stories. The term ‘novella’ is now pejorative: a marketing kiss of death”.

Well, it isn’t for me. Jennings quotes David Mamet on elegance in writing. He asked “how much can one remove and still have the composition be intelligible”. I like this way of describing it. Taker-outers, I believe, trust their readers, viewers and listeners (because this also works for theatre, film and music) to get it. They don’t believe they have to explain every detail. Kate Jennings certainly doesn’t in Snake. She presents a series of little vignettes and expects her readers to “get” the whole picture – and we do, only too vividly!

Kate Grenville with her cello

The versatile Kate Grenville (Courtesy: Peter Ellis via Wikipedia using CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Fortunately for me, many of my favourite Australian writers (hmm … is this a “chicken or the egg” situation?) have written short novels (as well as, for some, longer novels). I have listed some before and so here will add some others, mostly lesser known, that have impressed me:

  • Thea Astley’s Coda
  • Kate Grenville’s Dreamhouse
  • David Malouf’s Ransom
  • Eva Sallis’ The city of sealions
  • Tim Winton’s In the winter dark

Jennings writes “That short novels can be tough, specific and encompassing can come as a surprise to readers. Sinew and bone …”. Really, though, it’s a matter of what you read for. If your preference is to escape into fat and flesh, then short novels may not be for you, but if you like chewier fare, then a good short novel will rarely disappoint.

* I think novellas are generally defined as those under 150 pages, but I tend to include in my personal definition books that are up to 200 pages (or so).

The importance of tone

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And I’m not talking muscle tone, as important as that is! This is a litblog after all, and so what I am talking about is the tone of a piece of writing. It’s important to me – it’s often what engages me first and what can keep me going when, say, the plot is weak or character development minimal. Is the book melancholic, or ironic, or satirical, or humorous, or playful or, heaven forbid, didactic or? Of course, the tone is not always consistent throughout a book, but it often is.

I was thinking about tone as I picked up my current read (review to come soon-ish), Haruki Murakami’s Blind willow, sleeping woman. It’s a collection of short stories, and I settled in for a good read because I’m a Murakami fan and one of the things I like about his writing is the tone. And, what should I come across 6 stories in but a little statement about tone. He read my mind! What Murakami writes, in the story “A folklore for my generation: A pre-history of late-stage capitalism”, is:

… I think things took place pretty much as I set out. I say this because though I might have forgotten some of the details, I distinctly recall the general tone. When you listen to someone’s story and then try to reproduce it in writing, the tone’s the main thing. Get the tone right and you have a true story on your hands. Maybe some of the facts aren’t quite correct, but that doesn’t matter – it actually might elevate the truth factor of the story. Turn this around, and you could say there are stories that are factually accurate yet aren’t true at all.

And there you have it. Tone = Truth! Now (if you have been reading my blog for a while) you can see why I like tone so much. It is through the tone that you glean the writer’s attitude to his/her subject and once you have  done that, then you can usually identify the underlying meaning, the main message or truth, of the work.

Take Murakami, for example. His tone is, more often than not, detached. His narrators rarely express strong emotion, but rather “speak” as if one step removed from what they are talking about. He does this in a number of ways. One is by using qualifiers (such as “maybe” and “perhaps”) and the other is by using imagery or telling stories that have a slightly bizarre or off-centre edge to them which effectively unsettles you and removes you from the central emotion that may be occurring. This tone is perfect for his themes which tend to be dislocation, alienation, being out of touch with or distanced from life/reality.

Jane Austen, on the other hand, writes with an ironic tone, that is, what is said and what is meant are often two different things. This is the perfect tone for her themes which are to do with mocking (and therefore exposing) the pretensions, superficiality and/or misconceptions of the world her characters inhabit.

Then again, sometimes the author can use a tone which appears to be in direct contrast with the import of the story, and in so doing shocks us into fully heeding the meaning. This is a risky approach and does not appeal to all readers. Good examples are the light-hearted tones used in two Holocaust novels, Marcus Zusak’s The book thief and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is illuminated. There are some who do not like to see humour and Holocaust in the same sentence, and yet I think these writers use a light tone well to convey the dark side!

I could go on, but think I’ve made my point. Is tone important to you? If so, I’d love to hear what books/authors, in particular, appeal to you for their use of tone.

On outdated books

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Most readers at some time or other confront the issue of “datedness” in literature. This book is “dated”, we say. The funny thing is that what seems dated to one person is often not so to another. So, what do we mean when we say a book is dated?

The writer Fran Lebowitz is very clear about what she means by it. In a short documentary titled The divine Jane:  Reflections on Jane Austen that was produced last year for The Morgan Library and Museum’s exhibition A woman’s wit: Jane Austen’s life and legacy, she says:

Any artist who has that quality of timelessness has that quality because they tell the truth. Jane Austen’s perceptions don’t date because they are correct, and they will remain that way until human beings improve themselves intrinsically, and this will not happen.

She argues that those works which date do so because “their ideas are wrong” not because the details date. All details date she says. This has got me pondering. How often do we argue that a book is dated because of the “details” – because of their language, or lifestyles, or values?

Old books

Old books (Courtesy: OCAL @ clker.com)

It’s easy with non-fiction to identify datedness: look at this blog with its “hilariously outdated books of the week” posts. With non-fiction it really is mostly a case of the details – in some way – being wrong. The website, Education World, discusses outdated books and reports on one librarian’s “shelf of shame”. This librarian, and others, would rather have no books than outdated books. “Outdated books”, they say, “give children misinformation … we betray children when we put outdated information on our shelves”. “Outdated books keep stereotypes alive”, they say. All this is largely true, but – and here is the rub – they also say:

If you don’t have nice new books that kids want to read, they won’t read. We’re trying to get children to read more.

This feeds into other notions of being outdated, doesn’t it? Today’s children for example may not want to read my old version of The lion, the witch and the wardrobe because it “looks” old, it doesn’t accord with modern book design. They will however read a new edition, one that looks like books of their generation. I wonder if it was always thus? Once upon a time books were so precious, people read whatever version/edition that was available. But, perhaps, these people were readers anyhow, perhaps back then there were many who didn’t read and these are the people today’s librarians are trying to reach?

Enough digression, back to Lebowitz. I think about CJ Dennis’ The moods of Ginger Mick which I recently reviewed. I was initially not very keen to read it because it has, I admit it, always seemed old-fashioned, dated, to me. Its language is certainly dated – in the way that slang quickly becomes so – and the life it chronicles is certainly dated. Some of its values are too – its style of blokiness, its general attitude to race and gender – and yet despite all this it is I think also timeless. It’s timeless because it deals with humanity – with fear and bravery, with our misconceptions about each other based on superficial things (such as class) and our realisation that underneath these superficialities is what really makes a person worth knowing (such as loyalty and “grit”), with, in fact, our discovery of self. As Ginger Mick says in one of the poems:

Sometimes a bloke gits glimpses uv the truth.

Isn’t this why most of us read?

So, what do others think about datedness in literature? Is it enough to “tell the truth” as Lebowitz says – or can a truth-telling book be dated?