The Right Box

A lot of people around my age will remember the hour or so in school when you were sat down in front of a computer by the teacher and did the 'career test', answering a long list of questions about your interests, what you were good at, what you weren't, and at the end you would be presented with a list of job matches.

Of mine, I can only remember the first two: midwife and librarian. Two more different jobs it would be difficult to imagine - in experience, training, working hours, emotional baggage - and to this day I don't know how I managed to get the system to produce such an answer, apart from being 'interested' in a lot of things (I may have said I was interested in medicine, in a sort of abstract way garnered from watching ER and from thinking 'It's interesting how chemicals and surgery can do all of this stuff to our bodies'; the non-abstract reality of pulling a baby out of someone's womb was not, it's fair to say, foremost on my sixteen year old mind). Even more annoying was the fact that I already worked in a library for a Saturday job, and the three hours a week haggling over 20p fines and Dewie decimalising were more than enough for me without making a career out of it.

The unintended lesson I took away from this whole exercise was that I could potentially direct myself towards any job at all, but that only one or at best a handful of those would actually be satisfying to me, and that I wouldn't know which until I'd taken the plunge, presumably at the exclusion of all the other choices. Somewhere on the spectrum between 'Midwife' and 'Librarian' was my perfect job, but how to know what it was? The matches stretched to maybe a hundred different jobs, each with their own specialisms, a supermarket of possible lives stretching out for my choosing. I searched for Writer and found it a third of the way down, which I took simultaneously as proof of my calling and as the test's way of telling me there were a lot more things I could and should be spending my time on. I felt like a Lego man in the factory with a blank body, waiting for the machine to assign me my place and have my toolkit or librarian's glasses or nurse's uniform painted on and be put in the right box, except the machine was never going to come, and now suddenly I was expected to do it all myself. Duped, would be another way of putting it. When would someone tell me what I was meant to be doing?

Others have written about how this is a modern phenomenon, some linking it to the vastly increased amount of choice in the modern world as a whole (the supermarket again) and the anxieties this can cause - to which most conclude that while a farmer's son in the 17th century may not have had to worry about choosing what he wanted to be when he grew up, he would surely have preferred that worry over no choice at all. He would have chosen choice, in other words, over the 'easy' certainty that he would be a farmer. But still the anxiety over the freedom to choose our careers (which is really the freedom to choose the direction of our own lives) remains - the fear that we may make the wrong choice, and the linked fear that other people, perhaps most people, have made the right one.

There are a number of books, TV programmes and films that explore this anxiety - Joshua Ferris' And Then We Came to the End is the most obvious example that springs to mind, but also Friends, Spaced, Girls to name a few. These are fairly random examples, but it's interesting that they all centre around 20- to 30-somethings, drifting around in a directionless way to humorous effect. There is indeed humour to be found in privileged Westerners (and they are all white, middle-class, and child-free) trying and failing to find their way through life when it should be so easy for them. We find it funny because in it we see the shadow of our own failures, and there is pleasure in realising that we are not the only ones that feel this way.

The converse of this are the books, TV programmes and films that show, rather than anxiety, characters that throw themselves into their work, abandon themselves to it - abandoning their partners, their children, their own happiness. This is a heroic fantasy of work, like the labours of Hercules before it, a great struggle for a higher purpose. Or to put it another way, these are characters who have found the right box. The characters of The West Wing provide one of the clearest examples of this. Several times in that programme, the characters will comment and make jokes about how little sleep they get, four hours or less a night, the meetings that go through till dawn, the weekends in the office, and how little they are actually paid for any of it. President Bartlett's body begins to fall apart as the stress he puts himself under exacerbates his MS; Chief of Staff Leo McGarry suffers from a massive heart attack for the sake of his job. All this because they are working towards a higher moral purpose, which in The West Wing is the White House and more generally the United States of America and the values it represents - of left-leaning Democrats, of truth and the belief that there is a space for intelligence and nuance in the forums of debate.

Why do we get pleasure from watching other people work on TV? Is it that we too would like to have a job like those people in The West Wing, one that we feel matters and is worth throwing ourselves into (and, by extension, throwing some of our lives away for)? Or is it a vicarious pleasure of watching other people do this while not having to ourselves - watching them work their guts out while we are at leisure on our sofas?

Mad Men is another example, but here there is an added tension in that the characters have thrown themselves into something amoral - their aim is creating good adverts that both please their clients and their (or, mostly, Don Draper's) creative ambitions. Mad Men is about the struggle to sell the American Dream, whether through the medium of Lucky Strikes or Chevies. The big, moral issues of the day like the Civil Rights movement, or the Vietnam war, happen on the peripheries, on TV or to fringe characters. That none of the characters that work for the ad agency ask the question 'What really is the point in what we do?' can then be seen as an ironic comment on the characters themselves - these are people that truly believe, at least while they are working, and in spite of all the unrest and trouble around them, that the American Dream of the 1950s is unproblematic, can still be sold. It is both naive and cynical: they naively believe in the Dream, and cynically use it (and others' belief in it) to sell things, things which, furthermore, cannot hope to live up to the promise of the Dream they are sold on. The Dream is thus undermined constantly by the people who are selling it, who need it the most in order to sell it.

It is strange, isn't it, that we watch Don Draper and his team of creatives struggle towards an idea, and actually get pleasure from watching them succeed in finding and delivering it. The pleasure is not because the idea will save lives, or even improve them - indeed, in the case of Lucky Strikes the opposite is true. The pleasure is not moral, but in the shared experience we have had in our own lives, of pulling together to meet a challenge, of hard-won success. Mad Men shows us that success, at least in the realm of work, feels good in and of itself. It doesn't rely on the thing you are successful in being good, or meaningful. And as we cannot all be doctors or firemen (or midwives), if we are to get that kind of experience in our lives, then it is only outside of work, in the time left which is not in the office, that we will find it.

HEART OF DARKNESS by Joseph Conrad

"A voice! a voice! It rang deep to the very last." (110)

New readers are advised that this review makes details of the plot explicit. All page references are for the Penguin Classics edition, 2000.

One of the strengths of Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, is the sense, pervading the entire film, of Kurtz's presence. Like Orson Welles in The Third Man, Marlon Brando's Kurtz is in only a handful of scenes, yet is somehow in every scene. The other characters orbit around him, and he haunts the entire film.

Apart from the use of the river, this haunting voice of Kurtz's is perhaps the element of Coppola's adaptation that hews most closely to the novel. In it, Marlow is setting off from London with three other colonial adventurers, and tells them the story of his voyage into the heart of Africa, where he was sent on a mission to retrieve Kurtz, an ivory merchant of incredible, almost supernatural abilities. He eventually finds Kurtz, who is desperately ill, and is being worshipped in some way by the indigenous tribe of the area, who have been giving him ivory in offering to him. Kurtz dies on his way back to the outpost on Marlow's steamer, uttering possibly the most famous last words in literature, "The horror! the horror!" (112). Marlow, upon returning to England, meets Kurtz's fiancée, and, unable to tell the truth, tells her that Kurtz's last words were her name.

Marlow, telling us the story, repeatedly emphasises the power of Kurtz's voice. "The man presented himself as a voice" Marlow says of Kurtz, "...the gift of expression, the bewildering, the illuminating, the most exalted and most contemptible, the pulsating stream of light, or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness." Yet, like Marlon Brando, we actually get very little of Kurtz's voice indeed, and what little direct speech there is is garbled, incoherent. "'Save me! - save the ivory, you mean. Don't tell me. Save me! Why, I've had to save you. Sick! Sick! Not so sick as you would like to believe. Never mind. I'll carry my ideas out yet - I will return" (100).

The voice that is most striking to the reader is not Kurtz's, but Marlow's. Like his fellow travelers on the boat on the Thames, we listen to him telling his story, and it is his voice that is compelling. "It had become so pitch dark that we listeners could hardly see one another. For a long time already he [Marlow], sitting apart, had been no more than a voice" (50). This is a direct comment by Conrad on the act of storytelling itself: we cannot see Marlow on the page anymore than the listeners now can, we can only hear him. Conrad is making us think about what it means to listen to a story, and is thereby drawing attention to his own act of story telling. This is called self-reflexivity, and is one of the things that makes Heart of Darkness a modernist novel.

So what does Marlow's voice 'sound' like? To the modern (white) reader, I would liken it to being cornered by a very interesting, tough, funny, ironical man with the politically incorrect-verging-on-outright racist world view of a different era. Some of Heart of Darkness makes very uncomfortable reading, and there is no doubt that were it published today the author would be condemned as a racist on all sides, as it has been by some, most famously Chinua Achebe. (Himself the author of what may be my favorite novel, Things Fall Apart, which can clearly be read as a reaction to the kind of colonial writing that Conrad here is part of.)

Moving away from criticising or defending Conrad, it is undeniable that in Marlow he found an extraordinary person to tell his story. The muscular, masculine prose is interrupted by the fragmentation that occurs when he is swallowed up in the madness of the colonial mission in Africa; he is an active man who is forced into long periods of inactivity and powerlessness; the surety he leaves Europe with is replaced with ambiguity and confusion.

Remembering the self-reflexive element from before, we must see that Heart of Darkness is not Marlow's tale, but is the story of Marlow telling his tale. This story-within-a-story structure does something interesting to the way we conceive of the different elements in the book.

In Marlow's tale:

• The concept or ideal towards which protagonists are striving = the colonial mission in Africa
• The voice = Kurtz
• Adventurer = Marlow
• Listener or reader = Conrad

In Heart of Darkness:

• Ideal = Kurtz
• Voice = Marlow
• Adventurer = Conrad
• Listener = us

In this configuration of Heart of Darkness, colonialism has been lost entirely as an ideal. It is the stated mission of Marlow, but as an ideal for the reader it gets entirely swept away by that of Kurtz - the reader's mission by reading the novel is to find and perhaps understand Kurtz. And, as Marlow modifies his view of colonialism having seen its reality, we become disillusioned when we find the reality of our ideal, the broken man of Kurtz.

The voice is Marlow: it is he who compells us onwards, it is he who we 'hear' in the dark. In the author's note to the novel, Conrad says it is Marlow’s voice, not Kurtz’s, that haunts him: “[Marlow] haunts my hours of solitude, when, in silence, we lay our heads together in great comfort and harmony; but as we part at the end of the tale I am never sure that it may not be for the last time” (10).

But how can Conrad be the adventurer? Again, the author's note is revealing:

"It is a well known fact that curious men go prying into all sorts of places (where they have no business) and come out of them with all kinds of spoil. This story...are all the spoil I brought out from Africa, where, really, I had no sort of business." (9)

For Conrad, this is the act of writing: an adventure into the heart of darkness. The spoils of his adventure, with all of the troubling history and morality that comes with it, are still exercising us as listeners today.

Reading Against the Grain - Big Brother

"Big Brother is watching you."

As I said in my previous post Reading Against the Grain, the interpretive work of reading is not limited to books: a text can be a film, a building, or a TV program.  Reading against the grain, or resistant reading, is when try to find a new and often opposing interpretation of a text than that of the dominant reading. This is often done by reading the text against itself. Let's look an example of how we can do this in the case of Big Brother.

The Big Brother TV series when it was first launched in the UK was presented both as entertainment and as a social experiment on the inhabitants of the house.  (This latter element was still there in later series, but was much reduced in place of the entertainment strand.)  The contestants were tested, rewarded or punished, and were watched 24 hours a day by ‘Big Brother’, the audience and the show’s producers.  Every week there would be sociologists and psychologists on the highlights program to explain housemates’ behaviour in light of their various theories.  So, the intention of the program was as an experiment on the inhabitants of the Big Brother house, which would then tell those outside the house (the audience) something about themselves.

Let’s read against the grain, and say that the program was an experiment on those outside the house, which then told the Big Brother contestants inside something about themselves.  How can we support this?   

First, we may look at what in science is called the observer effect.  This is the theory that the thing you wish to observe or measure changes in the observation of it.  The Big Brother contestants are obviously not in a natural environment: they know they are on TV and act accordingly, changing their behaviour in better or worse ways for the cameras.  The intended experiment on the housemates would therefore give bad results.  However, if the experiment was actually on the audience, then a very effective method of tricking them into thinking they are not being observed would be to place them in the apparent role of observer.  Throughout an episode of Big Brother are reminders of the hidden cameras watching the housemates – a few frames of a camera lens, the Big Brother ‘eye’ logo, the CCTV-like footage of empty rooms before the camera ‘finds’ the housemates.  Why have these reminders if it is patently obvious the housemates are the ones being observed?  The answer is that it is a misdirection on the audience to fool them into thinking that the social experiment is not, in fact, on them.

In this reading, now it is the contestants inside the house who are observing the audience.  The way they do this is through the public vote every week.  The contestants nominate the two people up for the vote, and are voted out of the house accordingly.  The contestants’ experiment on the public is in fact a much better model than the one of the audience on the contestants: not only do the public not know they are being observed (reducing observation bias), but there are also a lot more of them (providing a bigger sampling group), and there are only two possible options to measure in who gets voted out (limiting variables).

The results of this experiment are delivered to the contestants weekly by who is evicted from the house.  The results are revealing to the contestants what kinds of people they need to be like in order to win the money at the end (in this reading, the best ‘experimenter’ or interpreter of the results will succeed).  Not having watched enough of the series myself to say, I can only guess at what kinds of people these are: funny, yes, but not offensive, and certainly not racist; homosexuality fine, transgendered no; attractive yes, but not in a threatening or overtly sexual way.

The results of the Big Brother experiment are actually much less surprising or sensational than the program's advertised motives.  From a program that experiments on the contestants in front of an audience with controversial results, we now have one that experiments on the audience in front of the contestants with uncontroversial results. With this reading, it is perhaps unsurprising that the program's producers were forced to throw the contestants into ever more bizarre scenarios, in order to prop up the waining interest in the experiment strand with entertainment, and ultimately for the program to be cancelled as this side reached the limit of its effectiveness with the audience.

Reading Against the Grain

If you have ever watched someone reading, on a commute to work for instance, there is an odd disparity between what they look like they are doing, and what must be going on in their heads.  Readers are still, eyes dipped to the page; they are solemn, they may even look asleep.  Yet they are engaged in an activity with the words on the page, and far from switching off, they are active in their own worlds, travelling without moving.

The ways we read can themselves be active or passive.  Reading can be a more or less creative activity for the reader, much like writing can be more or less creative for the writer.  Sometimes this is due to the kind of text involved.  The way I read, for example, Kafka’s The Trial, is completely different to the way I read Iain M Banks’ Use of Weapons.  This latter is an extremely enjoyable, well written sci-fi novel, with huge, mind-bending ideas, but to a large extent I am happy to be taken along with the story as it is on the page, and not look too deeply into the mechanics of how it was written, or what real world and literary references there were in it.  The Trial however, as seen in my previous post, requires some interpretive work to be done by me as I go through it.  A passive reading of The Trial would have left only questions at the end of a long, boring book (not that it is long, but it would have felt long).  The contradictions, absurdity, and gaps between the lines of Kafka would have washed over me in a confused haze – many of them in fact still did, which is why texts that encourage active reading also encourage active re-reading.

English Literature courses don’t only teach you about the history and development of literature, but about ways of reading.  Nor is it confined to books: often they will refer to the ‘text’ that is being read.  The text can be understood as a newspaper,  a film, TV program, advert or architecture; virtually any man-made object or artifact that can be interpreted in some way.

One of these ways of reading is called reading against the grain, or resistant reading.  This kind of reading takes a text and tries to argue for an interpretation that is the opposite of what the author intended.  An elegant example of this is seen by interpreting the phrase “JFK was not a homosexual.” On the surface, the intention of this phrase is clear: the author is saying that JFK was not a homosexual. But now let’s take as our starting point the idea that the author is saying that JFK was a homosexual – how would we argue that interpretation of the phrase?

First of all, JFK’s sexuality is not, historically, something that has ever been seriously questioned.  We know (or are told) of the infidelities of Camelot, but these are all regarding young women, and no men have ever come out as JFK’s lovers.  So the author of the phrase “JFK was not a homosexual” is apparently telling us something that is obvious, that is without question.  Secondly, look again at how it is phrased: the matter of fact tone, as if we are reading from an encyclopedia or a well-researched book.  What purpose could there be to telling us something that everyone knows is true, and furthermore telling us in a way that implies someone has looked into the matter?  By writing this, the author has implied that JFK’s sexuality is something that needs proving, that there is serious doubt surrounding it.  In this way, the result of the phrase is the exact opposite of the author’s intention.

Reading against the grain can be an extremely powerful and revealing tool for people interested in looking at the mechanics of a given text.  In the next few weeks I will give further examples of this in non-book texts, starting next week with Big Brother.

THE TRIAL by Franz Kafka

"K. began to suspect there were many irritating problems to come" (144).

New readers are advised that this review makes details of the plot explicit.

The problems with The Trial are legion, not least because Kafka never finished it. It is a novel that puzzles, frustrates, perhaps even bores. It demands the reader's attention, and yet seems to offer little in the way of reward. It is perfectly possible to get to the end of this short novel wondering what, if anything, has happened. So why is it still read today, and seen by many as a classic of early modernist writing?

The novel follows Josef K., a city banking clerk who has risen in the ranks of his company quickly, and is a respected, capable man. The novel opens, "Someone must have been telling tales about Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested" (5). He goes to a courthouse to stand trial, but the identity of the organisation accusing him is never revealed, nor are his charges. Over the course of the next year he seeks advice from a number of people, including a lawyer connected with the court, and attempts to mount a defence. Finally, after dismissing his lawyer, he is led out of the city to a quarry, where he is executed by having his heart cut out of his chest.

The problems begin with the arrest: though K. is charged with the unknown crime, the two guards only place him under a nominal arrest, in that he is still free to go to work and do as he pleases. "Yes, you have been arrested, but that should not prevent you from going back to work. Nor should anything prevent you from going about your daily life as usual" (14-15). This is the first example of a trait through all of the characters in this novel: asserting one thing, then asserting another opposite or contradictory thing, with equal validation. K. is under arrest, but he is free. K. goes to the courthouse to find out more information on his trial, yet when the opportunity arises he does nothing (55). The painter believes K.'s innocence, yet his advice is for K. to imply guilt in order to draw the trial out further. The lawyer claims he is preparing his case, yet no hearings or progress happens for months (135). Finally, K. is taken by two guards to be executed; a policeman sees him being led away, eyeing them suspiciously. Rather than save himself, he pulls the men guarding him out of sight, and hastens his own death (163).

This exchange, between K. and an usher of the court who suspects his wife of having and affair with a student, shows K. reversing his position in only a few lines:

"'If that's the way things are, there's certainly nothing can be done about it.' 'Why not…give him such a thrashing he won't dare come near her again[?]'…'Why me?' K. asked in astonishment…'I'd be all the more afraid he'd probably exert his influence on the preliminary examination, if not the trial itself.' 'Yes of course,' said the usher…'But in general we don't proceed with trials we're not certain to win.' 'I don't agree with you there,' said K., 'but that needn't stop me dealing with the student, should the occasion arise'" (49).

See how each of K.'s statements cancels out the last: first he thinks it is pointless trying to help the usher, then believes it will harm his case, then he says it won't affect the case at all and he will help.

It is interesting to note the importance of belief in The Trial. Throughout the novel, K. attempts to not take the trial seriously: he believes that to do would be to make it more serious. But K. doesn't follow this logic back to his arrest. Remember that when he was arrested at the beginning of the novel, he is free to go wherever he please as before, even though he is still technically under arrest. K. comments that arrest is not so bad, when in fact he should simply deny the arrest has any authority over him at all. Later, he is the one to go to the courthouse and stand trial; no one forces or even suggests to him that he should go. He has already taken the trial far too seriously at this point, and is in this way doomed. Finally, with the execution, he goes without a struggle, and doesn't save himself, because he believes this is the will of the court, and he believes that will has a power over him. Belief has become power. Without K.'s belief in it, there is no trial, no court, and no execution. By choosing to be part of the system, he is at its mercy.

So how seriously should we, as readers, believe in The Trial? Throughout, we have no foundation upon which to hold, no authority (least of all the court itself) on which to rely. The narration is first person, and as we've seen is highly unreliable: K. does not even know what to make of his own thoughts, let alone his situation. What purchase can we get on this puzzling novel?

The character of the court is perhaps the most explored aspect of the book (better even than the character of K.). The court is neither reliably benevolent nor reliably malevolent, it is simply chaotic, literally with a mind of its own. The way it is talked about by those 'inside' (the lawyer and the painter especially) reminded me of the way economists today talk about the market. The market is nervous. The market is strong. The market will decide. 'The market' here, as with Kafka's court, is beyond the understanding of the human being, and we see that it behaves in an unpredictable way. It feels, it lashes out, it rewards. It is alive, perhaps, but it is bigger and infinitely more intelligent than any one human. The will of the market and the will of the court is, in fact, talked about in much the same way as people once talked about the will of God.

In the penultimate chapter of The Trial, K. goes to a cathedral, and there hears a sermon told only for him. The priest tells him the story 'Before the Law', a fascinating short parable which seems to encapsulate everything that K. has suffered in two pages. The priest reveals he is also part of the court, and he wants to help K. with his case. Thus the words of the court have supplanted the Word of God, and the work of the court the Work of God. In K.'s society, the court is God, just as in our society the market is God, though perhaps (Kafka throws us a lifeline) only insofar as we believe in them.

Part of the lasting critical standing of Kafka's writing must be due in part to how open he is to interpretation. Though K. is a banker, I don't for a moment think that Kafka is writing in The Trial a critique of capitalist market economics, as I suggested above. This is simply one interpretation of the story that the modern reader might see. Readers in Western Europe and America may lean towards interpreting The Trial as a parable about the consequences for a man who has nothing other than work in his life, whereas readers from the former Soviet bloc may see it as an all-too-realistic narrative of a man at the mercy of the all-seeing state. Crucially, we get to the end of The Trial with the feeling that something has happened. We may not know what that something is, but the book invites us to find out more. A successful reading of Kafka is an active, creative experience. We must try to hear in the silences between Kafka's unfinished chapters a voice, one which we may come to recognise as our own.

UPDATE: for a different, biographical reading of The Trial, John Banville's peice in the Guardian Review is worth a look.