Re-reading Lord of the Flies

 

This will be the last book in my 2020 re-reading challenge, and I believe it was the greatest positive surprise. I first read it when I was 20-ish and had never re-read it. A fellow student lent me her paperback that someone else had probably lent her. Remember that in Russia of my youth all foreign books that crossed the Iron Curtain were random. We didn’t know anything about the book or its author. By that time I had heard of, if not read The Lord of the Rings and was struck by the similarity of titles.

For inexplicable reasons this novel has been on school syllabi in many countries for years and years. Inexplicable because although the existential message is transparent, it is, I would claim, of little relevance for young readers, now as much as then. The adventurous plot is slow, and a significant portion of the book is exquisite nature descriptions that, as research shows, young readers skip. I am sure I did, even if at that time I regarded myself a sophisticated reader. If the novel had been subjected to the same kind of adaptation as Robinson Crusoe there wouldn’t be much left. (What most people remember or know by hearsay in Robinson is his encounter with Friday which is a minor episode toward the very end of the book).

I remembered most of the plot, although misremembered some details. For instance in my memory (spoiler!) Piggy was brutally murdered, while it was in fact Simon. I had forgotten the paratrooper. Knowing the plot, what I enjoyed most was the language, these beautiful, poetic, vivid descriptions of the island, the sea, the sky. For their sake, I will probably re-read the book again. And if you decide to re-read it (or read it for the first time – it’s one of those so called classics that people have heard of but never actually read unless they were forced to in school), take your time. You know what happens, but make sure you notice how it happens, how the tiny change in tone is rendered, and of course the elaborate setting that brings you right in the middle of this terrifying paradise.

Re-reading The Sound and the Fury

My re-reading project is getting more and more revealing. I chose The Sound and the Fury of all Faulkner novels we read fifty years ago because it is perhaps his most famous, and I have referred to it repeatedly in my research as an example of mission impossible: giving verbal expression to something that a character cannot express by words. Benjy as this impossible narrator features in every work on narratology, and I wonder whether I have done the unforgivable: cited someone else rather than going to the source. For I hadn’t re-read the source when I was referring to it, and now I wonder whether I have read it at all. Maybe it is one of those books you believe you have read, but actually haven’t. I cannot be sure, because this re-reading exercise has clearly demonstrated that I had no memory whatsoever of books I had definitely read. So maybe I did read The Sound and the Fury fifty years ago and not only pretended I understood it, but pretended I liked it and went on pretending, to the degree that I gave it five stars on Goodreads when I was building my shelf about twelve years ago (it was called Shelfari then). Maybe I did read it, but I am totally confident after re-reading it now, that I could not have understood much of it. Not just because of Benjy, since all other narrators are just as incoherent, and although this time I was reading slowly and carefully, I cannot claim that I was able to reconstruct the course of events. I didn’t enjoy the language enough to ignore the plot, and I wasn’t too engaged with the characters. If I hadn’t been reading for my challenge I think I would have given up, just as I have repeatedly given up on Ulysses.

Re-reading The Glass Bead Game

The last book I read in 2019 (or in the 2010s if you insist) was Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game, one of the very, very few books, books as physical objects, that have followed me through all moves and other hurdles in the last fifty years. Its dust jacket is falling apart, its pages are yellow. I am not sure why I suddenly decided to re-read it; possibly it happened in the short interim when I didn't yet have internet in my new home and couldn't download whatever was queued on my Kindle. I opened the moving box marked “Books” and pulled out a book at random. This was a moving box from Gatehouse where I only had a handful of books. The fact that Glass Bead Game was in that box is telling.

It was a cult book in Russia – as elsewhere – fifty years ago, during my so-called formative years when certain books could be life-changing. Everybody read it, young and old. Translated books were rare in the Soviet Union then. Translated books other than by explicit supporters of the Soviet regime were exceptions. Translated books that didn't describe the horrors of capitalism were more than exceptions. Considering it now, I wonder how this book could be published in the Soviet Union at the time when every attempt at freedom of speech was crushed. Of course Hesse was anti-Fascist, and there was something called “the subtle art of forewords”; and indeed the foreword, written by a literary critic, promptly explains to the ignorant Russian reader that the novel presents the decline of spirituality in capitalist society. I am not even sure I read the foreword fifty years ago, but if I did, I probably laughed at it, together will my Russian fellow readers. We recognised the rhetoric only too well.

But today I see that it is precisely what the novel does.

I wonder how much I understood reading this extremely complicated novel at the age of seventeen. I wonder how much my parents understood. There is almost no plot, dialogue is sparse, and paragraphs go on for page upon page. Did I skim the pages? Wasn't I bored to death? Did I fake my fascination just to show off? However, I do remember that the novel made a strong impression on me – as already said, strong enough to save my precious copy for fifty years.

I also remember that I re-read it a couple of years ago. What strikes me now is that I have no memory of the book from this re-reading. Surely, a few years ago I would read it slower and deeper; I am also, I believe, more educated and knowledgeable than fifty years ago, with years and years of literary studies to equip me in both understanding and enjoying the novel. Yet when I re-read it now it was as if I hadn't re-read it since fifty years ago. I remembered the beginning and the ending of the minimal linear plot. I had even forgotten that there were also appended stories, purportedly written by the main character. Metafiction. I may not have known what metafiction was fifty years ago. But surely five years ago.

I had forgotten that the story takes place in the distant future, two hundred years from now and told by someone even further away in the future. Goodness, I have written tons of critical work on narrative temporality, and I didn't notice it in Glass Bead Game? And of course it is a dystopia. I wasn't as well-versed in the genre fifty years ago as I am now, but I had read 1984 and We, and I was living in a totalitarian state. But Glass Bead Game is a much more subtle dystopia than Orwell's or Zamyatin's. It is a seductive book, and I believe we were all seduced back then. I remember in my upper teens and early twenties we referred to our existential conversations as glass-bead games. We genuinely believed that it was the highest intellectual achievement of humanity. But why then does the main character, Magister Ludi, give it up? If we saw him as our role model, shouldn't we at the very least question his choice? We didn't. Probably we simply ignored the ending, which is, as reading research shows, a common reaction to unsatisfactory resolutions. And of course the Game continues – they still play it in the narrator's distant time.

What I clearly see now – and again, how carelessly must I have read it three or so years ago that I didn't even contemplate it – is that the narrator is unreliable (another favourite scholarly subject I have put much effort into), that he – only men could become Game masters – admires the legendary Magister Ludi whose objective biographer he pretends to be. But the reader is supposed to see through it and realise that the Game is a parasitic, pointless escape for a handful of self-proclaimed geniuses who have rejected science, arts, religion, social life, human relationships, for the sake of a safe and secure life within a strict hierarchical structure. Didn't we see it when we were young? No, because we saw what we wanted to see, extreme spirituality, and ignored the rest. But three years ago I should have noticed.

This is a rather long reflection on the tricks of memory. I always tell my students: Don't trust your memory, re-read! I should listen to my own advice. 

Literary Stockholm, part 1: Tomas Tranströmer

Read about the background for this blog series.

It was my intention to start with two young adult novels, Johnny My Friend and Winter Bay, but it so happens that the nearest library that has copies is closed on Fridays (and weekends), and they aren't available as e-books, which is sad, because they were once very important books; at least Johnny My Friend was probably on every children's literature course syllabus in Sweden. Not any more.

While exploring e-books, I found out that the author next on my list, Nobel Prize winner Tomas Tranströmer, had his collected works as an e-book so I downloaded it (first downloading a Swedish-compatible e-reader software), and it will thus be the first of my blog posts on literary signs in Stockholm.

I have always claimed that is it a token of hubris to try reading and understanding poetry in a foreign language. Famous Russian semiotician and literary scholar Yuri Lotman defined poetry as “extremely compressed meaning”, and while this may be partially true of prose, in poetry much of the meaning is beyond words, in a huge semiosphere. Unless you are a native speaker, layers upon layers of auditory associations will be lost, and you need a subtle understanding of the structure of the foreign language to capture the nuances. A good example is instrumental case in Russian, often used instead of similes, that may sound odd to a foreign ear. In Swedish, you can easily fuse words in most bizarre ways.

All this to say that I have always been cautious with poetry in non-native languages. I would never do research on English or Swedish poetry, and I have been reluctant to teach it. In an undergraduate course in Stockholm I was required to teach one epic, two sets of poetry, one classic and one contemporary, likewise two dramas and two novels. Contemporary poetry was a particular challenge, because with my Russian training in poetry, a pile of short, non-rhyming, non-rhythmical incoherent lines wasn't poetry. (I am now taking great risks of causing my Swedish colleagues' wrath, but I can afford it). I consulted my husband who fully shared my opinion, but said there was one exception: Tomas Tranströmer. I started reading and immediately saw the profound difference between piles of short lines and Tranströmer's Poetry, with capital P. It was “extremely compressed meaning” in which aurality was key. You could memorise it. You cannot memorise piles of short lines. You could recite it, and it was pleasurable.

Of the poetry in a collected volume in our bookshelf, one poem specifically attracted my attention, maybe because of the title: “Gogol”. For copyright reasons, I cannot quote it here, but if you are interested, there are plenty of good English translations of other poems on the web, and many printed collections. 

I put Tranströmer on my syllabus, and I chose “Gogol” to discuss in class. As a semiotician, I ignored the so-called interpretation (“what did the author want to say”) and focused on the form. I enjoyed it. I believe my students did as well. It's a luxury to spend a two-hour session on a single poem.

As we were moving to Cambridge and massively decluttering our bookshelves, we donated the first edition of Tranströmer's debut collection, 17 Poems from 1954, to someone who could appreciate it. I hope they have kept it.

How do I feel now, re-reading Tranströmer, particularly the poem “From winter 1947”, quoted on his literary sign? I have no memory of this poem; it is like reading it for the first time, but I recognise the Tranströmean flow of language, still pleasurable for the ear, or maybe more pleasurable now that I have been away from the Swedish language for such a long time. I want to read it outloud. I read it outloud to my teddy-bear. I roll the words around in my mouth, savouring every sound. Imagery flashes in my mind. I want to read the poem more than once, like you listen to your favourite piece of music. I don't care what the author wanted to say.

Of course I know much more now about what poetry does to our brain. How unusual word combinations make our right hemisphere hop, skip and jump with joy, and the left hemisphere struggle to make sense.

I read through the first hundred pages, or the three first collections, slowly and deeply. I realise that I need to borrow the printed book. Poetry on screen doesn't really work.

The next day I go to the library and borrow the printed book. Then I make myself a cup of coffee and sit on the balcony, in my lush vertical garden, reading poetry. Is there a better way of spending a Saturday morning?

Topographic idiot

This year's Nobel Prize in medicine has been awarded for identifying the spot in the brain that enables us to know where we are.

I must have been born without this spot, or it was somehow damaged early in my life.

My father used to call me “topographic idiot”. In those days it was acceptable to say something like this to a child without considering life-long trauma. But I was an obedient child and believed what I was told.

I have been lost in places I had known for ages. I have been lost driving, biking and walking. I have been lost in Moscow and in Stockholm, my two hometowns; and I have been lost in unfamiliar places more times than I like to remember. I have been lost while picking up people from airports – it's totally embarrassing. I once had to call my best friend from a payphone – it was long before mobiles – and ask her to come and find me because I was lost, two blocks from her house where I has been hundreds of times. I can still get lost in Milton Country Park where I walk at least twice a week. I constantly get lost in central Cambridge. 

Obviously, this important part of the brain that helps other people to know where they are is missing.

But there is hope for people like me. (I am sure I am not the only one in the world; it is just too embarrassing to admit). Last Sunday I went to Ely to see a friend. I have been to Ely scores of times, and I know how to get to the Cathedral parking, and if it is full, I know how to get to another parking. Anything beyond that is too challenging for a topographic idiot. In such situations I gratefully remember one of my wonderful granddaughters who insisted, two years ago, that “Granny wants a smartphone for her birthday”. There are many things I use my phone for (least of all for phone calls), but is was the first time I used voice navigation. Wow, how much I loved this nice lady who told me, softly and patiently, like you should speak to a topographic idiot: “In a quarter of a mile, in the roundabout, drive straight through and stay on the road”.

Never have I felt so lonely...

In my diary for today I have a pink post-it with an arrow pointed to noon, saying "Nobel prize". At noon I rolled out of a three-hour long meeting, running to the dining hall to grab some lunch before the next meeting, back-to-back with a third meeting, and then a private and confidential conversation with a colleague, and then a student coming in for a chat, and after he was gone I saw the pink post-it. It was almost half past six, empty corridor and no one to shout to: "Yes!". Except for Mary Anne in the office next door, bless her! - I most humbly asked her to share my joy and have a sip of wine.

If Staffan had been at home, he would have met me with champagne and the best cut-glass crockery (and he would have probably phoned and emailed me fifteen times by now). But he is in the middle of the Baltic Sea, and I assume that someone on that boat listened to the radio, and the whole boat has been celebrating ever since.

Of course Miso is an incredibly intelligent cat, but I am not sure she appreciates poetry. So I will now go to bed and read Tomas Tranströmer, the Nobel Prize winner, to myself.