Martin Amis, "The Information"

Here's the first page of The Information, by Martin Amis.

Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing. It's nothing. Just sad dreams. Or something like that... Swing low in your weep ship, with your tear scans and your sob probes, and you would mark them. Women – and they can be wives, lovers, gaunt muses, fat nurses, obsessions, devourers, exes, nemeses – will wake and turn to these men and ask, with female need-to-know, “what is it?” And the men say, “Nothing. No it isn't anything really. Just sad dreams.”

Richard Tull was crying in his sleep. The woman beside him, his wife Gina, woke and turned. She moved up on him from behind and laid hands on his pale and straining shoulders. There was a professionalism in her blinks and frowns and whispers: like the person at the poolside, trained in first-aid; like the figure surging in on the blood-smeared macadam, a striding Christ of mouth-to-mouth. She was a woman. She knew so much more about tears than he did. She didn't know about Swifts Juvenilia, or Wordsworth's senilia, or how Cressida had variously fared at the hands of Boccaccio, of Chaucer, of Robert Henryson, of Shakespeare; she didn't know Proust. But she knew tears. Gina had tears cold.

Richard raised a bent arm to his brow. The sniff he gave was complicated, orchestral. And when he sighed you could hear the distant seagulls falling through his lungs.

“Nothing. It isn't anything. Just sad dreams.”

Forget the mild, straight-faced sexism, or the fact that women cry at night as well (let's not argue about all that) or the imprecise unhappiness that runs through the whole novel, and gets tiresome after while; forget the references to the outer universe, the frailty of a novelist who ventures into the details of phsyics, and the foolhardiness of anyone who does so with the aim of asking the tired question of “what are we in the eyes of the universe?”

Forget the forgettable bits. But remember the bits that get stuck in the mind because they are strung with hooks of great prose. “Swing low on your weep ship, with your tear scans and your sob-probes, and you will mark.” That line would look good, I think, at the start of a poem, let alone a novel. And the “distant seaguls falling through his lungs.” Where does this come from, and how does this strange image do its meaning-work? I don't know, but it works all right: empty sea, emptying sky. The striding Christ is superfluous, isn't it, as far as meaning goes? If anything it goes too far and upsets the solemnity of the occasion. But it doesn't matter, because it is a boastful, playful flourish, full of the joy of writing.

For hunters of metaphors, Amis is a teeming plain.

“Now in the dawn, through the window and through the rain, the streets of London looked like the insides of an old plug. Richard contemplated his sons, their motive bodies reluctantly arrested in their sleep, and reef-knotted in their bedware, and he thought, as an artist might: but the young sleep in another country, at once very dangerous and out of harm's way, perennially humid with innocuous libido – there are neutral eagles on the windowsill, waiting, offering protection and threat.”

“Now came the boys – in what you would call a flurry if it didn't go on so long and involve so much inanely grooved detail, with Richard like the venerable though tacitly alcoholic pilot in the cockpit of the frayed shuttle...by the time he rounded the final half-landing the front door was opening – was closing – and with a whip of its tail the flurry of their life was gone.”

But perhaps there is more to analysing a book than listing metaphors. Well.... perhaps. In a limited sense, on some days. I have to admit that there's a plot in The Information, something about sex and a well-read hitman and literary jealousy. There are themes as well. Ageing, the vastness of the physical universe, the power of art and the pushiness of life, sons and fathers, the search for the “universal.”

But I'ld say that these galvanising agents do not do as much to unite the novel as does the mood of the thing. The book has a sad, tired mood, bitter but impotent. This is the mood of the main character, who is the emotional centre of the book. We see the others through the smog of Richard's unhappiness. In this atmosphere, Gwyn's bright visions of a better earth, laid out peacefully in his best-selling novel, are depressingly fake. Richard's wife is an obsession he fails to satisfy, and her coldness towards his art is another example of her distance, the obscurity of her “private cosmogony.” America is a deafening mystery that Richard can observe but not absorb. He returns to England to the safety of its past, the place where students spend “three years in twelfth century universities with Paradise Lost on their knees.” But the past of England is also absent. England is an old baron, comically senile; a shambling mansion; the success of fake novelists; dead children on the muddy paths of Dogshit Park.

If we wanted to sum up Richard in one word, the word would be “isolation.” In the fog he hears his sons play in the park, but he cannot see them and he cannot understand their sounds. His best friend is a man he despises. His wife is part of the flurry of life, and Richard is standing on the stairs. To the men in the local pub he is a knowledge-freak, an impressive man but an outsider. Arguably, the person with whom he is most intimate is Scozzy, the well-read hitman. And Scozzy, arguably the most confident character in the book, is an irreversible misanthrope.

The Information was written in 1995, in a pre-internet age (the writer predicts that postmen will be superseded by the fax). This may be related to the fact that, in this book, “information” is not treated as a false thing, mere data, something to be contrasted with “knowledge” or “understanding.” For Richard, information is desirable, something contrasted favourably with the silence or gibberish of family members, and with the short platitudes, endlessly repeated, of publicists and sham novelists. Richard has a radio interview that is meant to be twenty minutes long but ends up at two minutes. He is determined not to label himself with a slogan, but he ends up saying nothing about his writing:

“But what is it saying?”
“It's saying itself. For a hundred and fifty thousand words. I couldn't put it in any other way.”
“Richard Tull? Thank you very much.”

Richard wants to be incompressible but ends up being invisible. Perhaps the problem of his wife is similar: in wanting to say everything he ends up saying nothing. Certainly this is a problem at other times. Extraordinarily, Richard gives a passionate speech (“You don't think that's extraordinary? Oh, but it is”). Predictably, he loses a job. Richard may want information, but not everyone does.

Is there any success or salvation in this book, any productive exchange of information, any victories of expression that are not just a retreats into obscure art or private clarity? We'll see. In the meantime, mark the prose. I can open the book at random and reliably come across a piece of writing that matches the rhythm and vividness of the first page. Perhaps it would take a long time and groping to get the message of the whole book: at that level, information is not easy to come by. But the transmission of mood and speech and image, at the level of sentence and paragraph, is as clear and informative as you could want. Does that constitute an overall message? Look for meaning in the fridge or the Friday morning, not in the stars? Look for pixels, not pictures? Whether it is or not, I think it works well as a novelists' mantra, this anti-message message. But this is too broad: if Amis has something to say here, it must be more specific than that. And whether he has anything to say or not, he has a lot to give to anyone who reads authors for their verbal gifts, their non-prosaic prose.

Music and Poetry in English

If I ever get around to teaching English at secondary level, I will make sure that I exploit the analogies between music and literature. I think the analogy is quite illuminating, with regards to the distinction between “form” and “content” and the relationship between them. More importantly, it is likely to interest students more than a lesson that stuck solely to poetry or prose. Most school students have musical interests of some kind, and with a bit of prodding most should recognise that the appeal of a piece of music is bound up closely with the relationship between its form and its content.

In a song, of course, the relationship holds between the lyrical part of the work and the instrumental part. The distinction between form and content, when made out in this way, is easier to grasp than the same distinction as it is manifested in poetry. It is easy and natural to make a separation, even a physical separation, between the words and the music in a song; whereas it is not so easy to make the separation between the “message” of a poem and its “delivery” (Partly because a student needs to know about things like rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, assonance, metaphor etc., before they can give a full account of the distinction; and partly because the distinction is problematic in poetry anyway).

As well as this pedagogically convenient difference between music and poetry, there are pedagogically convenient similarities. Much of the “form” of a poem comes from its sonic effects. Also, at least one thinker (Walter Pater) has held that it is the mark of a good poem that it gets close to the condition of music; and some interesting poetry has been written on the basis of this idea (eg. Gertrude Stein).

Many of the ideas about the form-content distinction that one needs to learn in the poetry case, can be straightforwardly carried over to the music case. Here are some examples:

That a good piece of art should achieve a match between form and content; and also that there may be some exceptions to this rule.

That the same content, given a different form, can be given quite a different meaning.

That form and content can match up in different respects: they might match in their mood, their tone, their pace, their degree of order and regularity.
That the work can vary in these respects, and the artist take steps to ensure that form and content vary concurrently.

That some elements of form are (for various reasons) quite rigid and non-negotiable, while others are easier to manipulate.

That it is tempting to relax the more rigid elements to give the artist more “freedom of expression” (Radiohead, Walt Whitman); but that this relaxation can have its downfalls as well as its advantages.

One of the dangers of doing this sort of thing, apart from annoying the class next door, is that students might resent this intrusion of school life upon their music life. Putting Nirvana in a classroom might “take all the fun out of it.” But I should think it more likely that a student would welcome the opportunity to discuss and explore their out-of-school interests during class time. And the idea that excessive analysis can destroy an artwork, or at least fail to illuminate its appeal, is an idea worthy exploring; and another of the useful analogies between music and literature.

Loose Relation

“The poems stand in some such loose relation as a ring of flushed girls who have just stopped dancing and let go hands.”

From The Notebooks of Robert Frost, edited by Robert Faggen. More over here.

Joe Bennett's "Land of Two Halves": Metaphors

By “metaphor” I don’t mean just metaphor, but any kind of inventive and striking comparison. Joe Bennett is a prolific manufacturer of metaphors. His writings, including “A Land of Two Halves,” are jumping with them. Most of the time they are good: they are vivid, original, funny, and suiting the rest of his prose in being compact, deft, unlaboured, more witty than eloquent. Even when they are not so good they are worth reading. Here is a selection from “Two Halves.”


Landscapes

Away to the West lie the purple foothills of the Southern Alps, a range of mountains like a dog’s back teeth that form the spine of the island.

..the sky stretches out, as delicately blue as a thrushes’ egg.

…where the land is carpeted in tussock the colour of a lion’s pelt.

Below us in the last of the afternoon sun the lake is crinkled like kitchen foil. A paddle-steamer chugs across it like a toy in a bath. Mountains climb straight out of the water…their jagged tops like the crest on a tuatara’s spine.

Fed further up the valley by waterfalls like straight white pencils, the water gathers here in swirling pools of green translucency, like thick stained glass slowly on the move.

The landscape was green as an ad.

When the whale rose, it rose like an island, a grey-brown hugeness.

I’m standing in shadow but the sky holds tufts of clouds like fading vapour-trails lit pinky-orange from below. The sinking sun has turned the highlands to the north the colour of ginger biscuits, slashed by the deep black shadows of the gulley. Waterfowl of all kinds are swinging across the sky to roost, like packs of slow arrows. The plaintive calling of a pair of paradise ducks carries forever across the stillness. The lake’s a mirror. Ducks tow rippled vee’s across it. And on the far side of the water the lights come on in Te Anau and the town seems dwarfed, puny. Eye-candy comes no sweeter.

A plane offers a view that we probably shouldn’t have, a view we can’t live in. It presents the land like a brochure.


…billiard table bush…

…knitting needle bush…

The spur-winged plover, a sort of lap-wing, with jowls as yellow as lemon-peel…and they take off into the night making a noise like train brakes.

It’s crown is an asymmetric mess, like an inverted root system. I lean against it, give it a slap. It’s like slapping a building.

A pair of ostriches with necks like vacuum cleaner hoses.

…feta, goats cheese in brine, huge waxed bowling balls of Gouda, Parmesan that crumbles like weather-worn sandstone.

I can understand the appeal of a steamtrain rattling along beside a lake…the gleaming beams of steel that link the wheels to the engine and circle like elbows.

Weather

The West side of each marquee is concave. The east side balloons like a pregnancy. Any unsecured corner of the canvas slaps like staccato applause. Guy-ropes thrum like the strings on a double bass.

Sudden full-blooded rain sweeps in from the Tasman sea, hitting the roof like flung gravel.

People

Unmatching Formica tables, unemptied ashtrays, a carpet like a disease, a drunk woman with three kids in need of a slap…

Their stereos thrum with bass, like heartbeats heard through a stethoscope.

His every movement is laboured and deliberate. He chews as if making a series of conscious, disconnected decisions to move his jaws.

They lean like a picket fence, their backs to the bar, their elbows on it, watching a Super 12 game between the Wellington hurricanes and an Australian team.

As he runs the whole pub stands on tiptoes and purses, tenses, clenches fists as if trying to hold back an orgasm.

The crows groans and oohs and cheers as one and surges like a school of fish.

His van looks like he’s deliberately pelted it with rocks.

Unkind

A lone woman strides the bank in three-quarter leisure-wear, power walking to the next cappuccino, and fiercely swinging her arms as if into the balls of an assailant.

She’s got the arse of a shire horse, a mighty thing ballooning on either side of the chair like two taught bags of cement.

Grim

The beach is stark. Waves the colour of dishwater pound the sand, receding to leave a scum of soiled froth that gasps and subsides like a spent fish.

Walking its streets feels like touring a cemetery that is not quite historic enough to be interesting. [Greymouth]

[motel rooms] resembled temporary porn studios, and probably some of them were – though rarely while I was in them.

A ceiling of stippled plaster, each stipple minutely tipped with dirt like a smoker’s tooth. Every guest has left a molecule of self…The air is like gravy.

Clouds weigh down like a press.

Most of the pokie players are over forty. Their faces are the faces of cattle in the rain.

Amusing

Sleek as bullets, they [pukekos] step high over the wetlands on their huge splayed feet as if studiously avoiding dogshit.

The penguins waddled along, like waiters with piles.

…and a lot more convincing than the concrete moa, which looks at first glance to have been surprised by a proctologist. And at the second glance, it still does.

In fifth-form Physics I learned that if you filled a matchbox with nuclei and then dropped it, it would sink thirty feet into the ground. New Zealand pies are similar.

By far the most vigorous thing on show is a fibreglass salmon, thirty feet tall and sculpted in the act of leaping, perhaps because of the telegaph pole stuck up its arse.

Each mussel is the size of a dighy..and has a frilly fringe of flesh attached to it, like a pensioners gumline.

Unexpected

Pukeko corpses are a common sight on the verge…their sleekness gone, like wrecked umbrellas.

Clouds mass out to sea like grey-black cauliflowers.

The foresters drop me in sunshine that feels brittle, like elderly sellotape.

Queenstown squats beneath the mountains like a whore in a palace. But she’s a rich whore, and a pretty one. The prices in the real-estate windows have strings of zeros in them like the wheels on the Kingston Flier.

Like a Typewriter: An Introduction

I do not collect material objects, but I can sympathise with people who do. If I were such a collector I would collect typewriters. I would begin by wandering through Buy Sell and Exchange stores past the crockery and cricket bats and old bags, and I would buy typewriters irrespective of price. Next I would wander around the country stopping at all the junk stores on the way and buying typewriters there as well, looking for common ones and uncommon ones and ones that were broken in unusual places, and when I returned I would put the least praise-worthy typewriter on a solid wooden bench and test each key one by one on a piece of new paper, and then do the same for the other typewriters on the same piece of paper.

I would do this for every typewriter I found, so that in the end I would have a collection of letters to go with my collection of typewriters. I would name each typewriter after a new and interesting word. The word might be expressive of some peculiarity in the typewriter, but it might not. The first typewriter might be called “strabysmic”, for example, or “boondoggle.”

I would buy books about the history of typewriters and the history of ink, and I would collect typewriter anecdotes and famous typewriters and typewriter trivia and stories about typewriters who changed history. I would follow the geography of typewriter development as carefully and delicately as I followed the geography of an individual typewriter, its field of soft keys and its deep inner rumblings, its steep and solemn face that slopes up towards rift in the crust where the paper plunges down and is transformed under the fierce pressure of the keys.

And in doing all this I would not just find out about typewriters. I would find out about words and about history and about the interior decorating of Buy Sell and Exchange stores, and about the junks stores and the small towns in my country, and I would also find out all sorts of odd facts about the physical properties of metal and ink and paper, and perhaps also about the gradual displacement of handwriting as the primary means of text construction in official documents.

People might say: “You see nothing but typewriters. You have become blinded by your typewriters. You have forgotten other things, like lawnmowers and sunshine and good food.” If I did things properly, however, these people would be quite wrong, because they would be blind to the fact that typewriters gave me sight rather than taking it away, that typewriters were a way of giving form and purpose to the broad facts of experience, of bringing them into a better order, and not a way of denying or ignoring those facts.

“Granted, my typewriters colour my experience of the world, and they do so in a stubborn and unchanging hue. But without that colour it would be no experience at all, and without a stubborn hue it would be a disorganised sort of colour. Although this collecting habit puts a sheet between me and the bare force of the external world, it is not an obstruction but an aid: it is (here my voice would rise triumphantly) the ribbon through which the stuff of life is forced, and without which there would be nothing on the page of my mind but a dim and brutal mark, an impression that is very hard to make out when it is there, and very quick to disappear, when the pressure is no longer applied.”

The point of all this is to prepare the ever-patient reader for the information that, although I do not collect material objects, I do intend to begin a collection of a different kind. I have a perennial fascination for what I will call “likenesses.” When I come across a metaphor in a piece of fiction, I stop and wonder at it with a collector’s glee; when I hit upon a particularly sharp analogy, or even a not-so-sharp analogy, I run my mind over it with a collector’s tenderness; and when I come across some philosophical thought about these two kinds of things, or about any other kind of model or similitude or resemblance, I am drawn into it by a mind filled with the collector’s dual satisfaction: the satisfaction which comes from discovering a new source of interest; and that which comes from extending an old pattern of curiosity.

In this short (ha) introduction to my interest in the topic, I will try to describe the source of my interest and the current pattern of my curiosity. I should begin by saying that one of the attractions of likenesses is that without too much strain they may be seen to give one way of joining together, or at least diminishing the gap between, the scientific and the non-scientific disciplines. In the form of metaphors, we use likenesses in literature, to serve the purposes that are distinctive of literature: they lend vividness, novelty, intimacy to our prose.

In the form of models, we use likenesses in science to serve the purposes that are distinctive of science: they allow us (at least in some sense) to explain phenomena, to predict future events, and often to abstract, from the chaos of surface appearances, the structures in the world that give it a look of order. Of course, I should be careful here: first, to insist that the account I have just given is very vague, and needs a lot of clarifying to make it philosophically interesting; second, to remind myself that this has been said many times before; and third, to mention that it is far too easy to be misled by what science and non-science sometimes share, into ignoring what they do not share.

One pattern in my curiosity will, I hope, be my attempts to make the above thoughts philosophically interesting. There is a vast philosophical literature on metaphor in general, and on the role of metaphor and analogy in science and in cognition (so cognitive science is relevant here as well). I could not hope to read all, most, or even a representative portion of this literature; much less make a real contribution to it. But those of us who are not participants can at least be active spectators, cheering events on and adding an original commentary every now and then; and that is what I hope to be. I want to begin this project by writing a “taxonomy of likenesses”: what are the main variables over which likenesses range? Hopefully I will find time to do this some time in the next month or so.

But there is more to the world than Philosophy; and (more controversially, perhaps), Philosophical inquiry is only one way of coming to discover what the world is all about. So I want to indulge my interest in likenesses in other ways, ways that I suspect come more naturally to me. Fiction, and any kind of expressive writing, is filled with likenesses, especially of the metaphorical kind; and I want to undertake a general pillaging of the books that I read in order to smuggle out of them the best treasures that metaphor can offer (and perhaps also some of the worst attempts, for the sake of contrast), and to lay them down for all to see in the glass cases that I have prepared in various high-security regions of my blog. I do not know if anyone else keeps a running database of metaphors, but if someone does do this then I intend to outshine him, with the quality as well as quantity of my gems.

Another and related project is to discuss the metaphors of particular authors. I think that the distinctive qualities of an author’s work are often quite useful guides to the distinctive qualities of their work as a whole; similarly for individual novels. Hemingway is spare on metaphors, preferring a more plain sort of expression; Jane Austen is spare on them as well, though perhaps for different reasons. A lot of Dicken’s peculiar charm, his wit and playfulness and comic sense, are conveyed in his peculiar choice of metaphors; Graham Greene’s metaphors tend to have the taunt efficiency that is an obvious feature of his writing in general. And so on.

Anyone who has tried to explicate a metaphor will probably know that it is not an easy exercise. Metaphors are special partly because they do not need much explication (or perhaps that they do not admit it), and explications can be tedious and damaging as well as unnecessary, like explaining a joke. But along the way I doubt that I will be able to resist the temptation to describe and analyse the examples that I come across, to set them alongside eachother and pick out the similarities and differences. Hopefully I can do this in a way that illuminates metaphors without putting them in too harsh a light. If I cannot, never mind.

A third route, and one that takes something of middle path between the philosophical and the literary routes, is to look at likenesses as they exist in education. Education is one of my labels, and somewhere on this site I will give a more detailed account of this interest: here it is enough to say that I am interested in education, and hence that I am interested in how students can best come to know and understand the things they are meant to learn. What kind of role can likenesses play in the learning process? I don’t know exactly, but I intend to find out.

My hunch is that they can play a large role; certainly, if they can play a large role in the process by which professional scientists come to learn about the world, there is a good chance that they have a similar power in, say, school education. But I said that this route is a middle path, and so I do not intend just to pontificate about the nature and purpose of likenesses in education: I would also like to come up with some of my own, to try and illuminate some things I have studied by way of likeness.

All of this sounds terribly ambitious: vain, in both senses of the word. But a true collector of typewriters would not let such things worry him, since his interest in the subject would be natural and spontaneous, and he would not feel that he is bending himself in order to satisfy this interest: he would consider it an act of bending, of strain and hardship, to turn himself away from this interest. And if one day his interest snaps, or gradually turns, then he would not worry too much that he had failed in something: for to fail in a project that one does not value is not much of a failure; at worst, it is a waste of time. So I will just do what I suppose any collector would do: start collecting, and see what happens.