Present Mirth
Howard Jacobson’s a funny guy. Writes well, too.
The other proof of our philistinism is our politicising of literature…The old complaint that Jane Austen left out the Napeolonic wars is making itself heard again. If a novel isn’t politically au courant, if it isn’t ratified by events outside itself, we have trouble remembering what it’s for.
What used to be (tediously) called ‘relevance.’ How is Shakespeare ‘relevant’ to the yoof of today? Answer: he isn’t, so let’s not read the pesky old bastard any more.
It takes the most responsible of writers to see why irresponsibility is so important…Once upon a time, when we knew aesthetically what we were about, the novel was comic or it was nothing…Gargantua and Don Quixote are novels of grand design and purpose; they mean to liberate us from the debilitating certainties of God and hero worship, whether those certainties take the form of sermons, laws, sagas, patriotism, idealism or romance…
Yeah. If only someone would – liberate us from all those debilitating certainties. We’re all badly in need of some certainty-liberation these days.
In their guidelines for aspiring writers of eroticism, the publishers of Black Lace warn specifically against comedy. What they do not go on to say is that laughter is the operation of intelligence, an act of criticism, and the moment you subject porn, soft or hard, to intelligence, it comes apart like a mummified artefact exposed to light. Ditto The Da Vinci Code. Ditto the modern novel of highly responsible ideological intent.
Now that is really interesting. ‘No comedy, don’t forget, it messes up the concentration. Focus on the throbbing genitalia, and leave the wit at home.’
The isolation of comedy from everything else we do is symptomatic of this. We are right to shrink from the very idea of a “funny” book. There should be no such genre. We should expect laughter to be integral to the business of being serious. We are back in a new dark age of the imagination. We read to sleep.
And that’s even more interesting (well, to me), because that’s the Dictionary. It is funny (in intention), but it’s also serious. We even bothered saying that in the introduction. And I felt quite squirmy about having it shelved in the comedy section with all the chav books and crap town books. It’s not that kind of book. (But, as Jeremy kept sagely pointing out when I whined, more people would see it among the crap town books. They still wouldn’t buy it, but they would see it.) But anyway, this idea of laughter being integral to the business of being serious – that’s very B&W, I think. B&W has been lashed and laced and intertwined with mockery from the very beginning – but it’s also been quite serious.
Some things, we believe, should not be scrutinised or ridiculed. And day by day the list of sacred sites and objects – like one of Gargantua’s spiralling menus of excess – gets longer. Soon parliament might even harden our jokelessness into law. A radical confusion between art and action is at the heart of this. What we consider unacceptable in human behaviour, we consider unacceptable in art, forgetting that art exists precisely to say the otherwise unsayable.
Just so. The list of sacred stuff gets longer and longer and longer. That trend really needs to be reversed.
‘In their guidelines for aspiring writers of eroticism, the publishers of Black Lace warn specifically against comedy. What they do not go on to say is that laughter is the operation of intelligence, an act of criticism, and the moment you subject porn, soft or hard, to intelligence, it comes apart like a mummified artefact exposed to light. Ditto The Da Vinci Code. Ditto the modern novel of highly responsible ideological intent.’
There is something so PC and self serving in this view. There is no good porn or myth or modern novel. Crass generalisations all. Take any category you like, pick some specific failings, and use that as an excuse to bin the lot. Did you spot the conflation of ‘porn’and ‘eroticism’? Vile.
But that’s not what he said. He said hard and soft porn comes apart when subjected to intelligence, ditto a particular, specified kind of modern novel, not all modern novels. (Though I guess that sentence could be read as saying that the modern novel in general is characterized by highly responsible ideological intent. But since we know from the rest of the article that he’s not saying that, I don’t think that sentence should be read that way.)
Conflation of porn and eroticism. Hmm. Maybe – but is it also possible that Black Lace dresses up porn by calling it eroticism? (And who decides, and these are all essentialist logocentric terms, and akakgffffpp.) I don’t know, it’s not a genre I’ve explored (sheer snobbery, or snobbery-prudery, I know, I know), but is it possible? Such things have been known to happen. ‘Put down that smut!’ ‘It’s not smut, it’s eroticism!’ ‘Tell that to the Marines!’
One happy day, in the not too distant future, all art and litrachoor will achieve the direct, utilitarian relevance of the San Francisco Mime Troupe. I have learned so much from them, and eventually all the rest of you can be instructed on the issues of the day in terms so clear and unambiguous that even my four-year-old niece can grasp them. Subtlety and irony are for bourgeois fascists.
Karl:
Have you read your own books?
I try not to: It might disillusion me if it turned out I didn’t believe everything the SFMT believes.
Ah, yes. Kinder, Kueche, and Kierkegaard, the 3 K’s, ja wohl!