Ups that are down, downs that are ups

I sometimes cut pictures out of magazines of smiling faces – the ones that make me want to smile back. The litoverlap in the middle of this post is not cheerful. The first component is impressive in terms of literary form, but as to content both components are more than sobering. So as a fortifying frame for this litoverlap, I’ve picked a couple of other written things, passages from blog posts, that make me smile – mostly for their figurative language and aptness.

On 1 September 2010, Jane Brocket commented:

Yesterday morning, with a feeling of mild sadness, I threw away the amazing frilly-knicker, head-turning gladioli that have been centre-stage in the kitchen for a week – they had created their own space and the table looks so empty now.

I know just what she means in the conclusion of that sentence. And the pleasure in the language is to be had in the image of flowers personified, flashing their brightly coloured knickers like cancan girls would toss their petticoats and turn heads whenever they appeared, like Brocket’s flowers, centre-stage. They’re neat and precise, this sentence and its sentiment, ending where they begin: with absence, which recalls presence.

Here’s the litoverlap:

In Anne Michaels’ novel Fugitive Pieces (1996, New York: Vintage), the first narrator points out a ‘harrowing contradiction’ in the anti-Semites’ attempts at dehumanising the Jews during the reign of the Third Reich:

'When citizens, soldiers, and SS performed their unspeakable acts, the photos show their faces were not grimaced with horror, or even with ordinary sadism, but rather were contorted with laughter. ... This is the most ironic loophole in Nazi reasoning. If the Nazis required that humiliation precede extermination, then they admitted exactly what they worked so hard to avoid admitting: the humanity of the victim. To humiliate is to accept that your victim feels and thinks, that he not only feels pain, but knows that he’s being degraded.' (p 166)

François Gantheret points out the same thing in his novel Lost Bodies (2006, London: Vintage, transl by Euan Cameron). The book is about a man who was one of several political prisoners confined for years in a well in a desert prison camp. Some of the soldiers guarding these prisoners were ‘attracted by the easy opportunities for bullying’ – the man had often ‘seen them laughing’ as they abused the prisoners in various ways (p 18). But

'such acts were not approved of by the others: not so much out of any humanitarian concern, but because they violated the required indifference. To humiliate a man was to acknowledge that he was still a human being, and in their confusion the soldiers sensed that they could not feel at ease in a place like this if they treated those who survived beneath the ground as humans.' (p 18)

On 28 May 2010, Paul Edmunds described a flight home to Cape Town:

I knew the ’plane was headed home when I caught sight of a Sunday Times headline in the galley. It could have been from 2 months ago: threat of strike action during the World Cup. After a mad dash through OR Thambo and a little hitch at customs, we boarded our connecting flight to Cape Town to find in front of us Archbishop Emeritus Tutu and behind us Badhi Chaabaaan, reminding us of the tightrope we walk, tautly strung and twitching side to side from hope to cynicism.

It’s striking, the tightrope metaphor; it’s also one that fulfils the requirements, as pointed out by Michaels in her article ‘Cleopatra’s Love’ (1994, Poetry Canada 14(2)), of metaphor’s quiddity – each component must work in its own context so that the metaphor as a whole works authentically (p 14). Tutu represents hope, Chaaban symbolises cynicism. Impromptu TV news interviews of the South African man and woman in the street often show just such a veering between optimism and pessimism, characterised by just such an attendant tension. And Edmunds experiences the metaphor personally because it reminds him of South African attitudes that he may have forgotten or put to one side during his time in New York.

Overlaps

(This photo by Rico Schacherl. It and the others are from Nieu Bethesda, the Karoo, in which thoughts such as the ones in this post have ample space to breathe)

‘I break open stars and find nothing, and again nothing,
and then a word in a foreign tongue.’

George Steiner quotes these lines by Elisabeth Borcher in Language and Silence (1974, New York: Atheneum, p 51). Anne Michaels quotes the same lines as an epigraph to her poem ‘What the Light Teaches’ (Poems 2001, New York: Alfred A Knopf, p 117).

I’m intrigued by this kind of literary overlap. It’s not a coincidence; Steiner and Michaels are both speaking of language as traumatised by events like the Holocaust in the Second World War. ‘Because their language had served at Belsen, because words can be found for all those things and men were not struck dumb for using them,’ Steiner points out, ‘a number of German writers ... despaired of their instrument’ (p 51). (He acknowledges also that ‘the failure of the word in the face of the inhuman is by no means limited to German’ (p 51).) Michaels, too, refers to language – German, Polish, Russian – that has been stripped of its more humane meanings (her implication: by the Nazis), just the alphabet remaining the same, the victim’s language revealing only ‘the one who named him’ (p 124).

Behind these texts lies Theodor Adorno’s well-known injunction (which he later qualified) about the barbarism of the notion of poetry after an ‘event’ such as Auschwitz. Whether or not he would agree with the statement, Steiner does not suggest that writers stop writing; rather he wonders, in 1966, whether they are writing too much – people speak far too much and far too easily, he feels, ‘making common what is private’ and creating of their culture ‘a wind-tunnel of gossip’ (p 53). In his view, ‘silence is an alternative’ to this situation (p 54). Michaels, among many other poets and writers, chooses not to remain silent, and refuses to accede to the pressure that squeezes and twists language out of its ethical shape. For her, language can take a vitally recuperative form. Her conclusion in ‘What the Light Teaches’ is that language is ‘a country; home; family’; ‘for those who can’t read their way in the streets, / or in the gestures and faces of strangers, / language is the house to run to / ... when you have no other place’ (pp 128–9).

The overlap is also not a case of appropriation. Michaels’s research is meticulous; although she doesn’t list Steiner among her sources in the acknowledgements page of Poems (nor in the acknowledgements page of Fugitive Pieces, which deals slightly differently with the same theme), she may well have come across his reference to Borcher. But that’s not the point; Steiner and Michaels’s uses of Borcher’s poetry are independent and legitimate – I’m simply identifying their congruence as an interesting phenomenon in literature.

Here’s another overlap:

The concept of the ‘aha moment’ as used by Oprah is well known to her fans (not so surprisingly, there’s even been a court case over it). AS Byatt knows about it too: in an ‘aha experience’, she suggests, a ‘structure felt to be defective or inchoate suddenly appears formed and harmonious’ (Still Life 1985, New York: Simon & Schuster, p 260).

In Oprahdom, these moments are memorable, connect-the-dots moments when everything suddenly clicks into place.* For Byatt the moment occurs when a human being feels a relaxation, a ‘release’, of tension caused by desire (p 260). If someone is hungry, they will have an aha experience not through the final goal itself, not nourishment, say, but rather in the act of eating (p 260).

While Oprah and Byatt are not speaking of quite the same thing, in both cases it brings satisfaction.

* Among all the definitions of this concept on the internet, it's difficult to find the original