First published, 17th April 2013
At least I’m going to start this month’s blog on a positive note but when I slide into the panic that comes, quite regularly these days – in the way it used to come to me as a child when I read or heard apocalyptic fables of the last tree or Nevil Shute’s last survivors of nuclear war waiting for the inevitable death cloud – over the almost certain fact that, as the world’s human population thunders like some steam punked-up juggernaut towards eight billion, so does it get dumber and dumber as if there were some genuine natural inverse law relating quality and quantity, I delve into the YouTube archives for those times when intellectuals, academics, philosophers, learned and shrewd individuals were allowed on television.
Whoa, whoa! Stop! Am I mad? I can’t get away with writing sentences like that. Come on. Short. Gritty. Think transgressional. Single. Simple. Clauses. I want to hit that publisher in the eye. More WHacKy LesS EgGHeaD…
Hmm. Well, I started difficult to ensure that no one would get this far. After all, I don’t want just any dribbling cretin reading my private stuff.
At my age, I do get unnerved when my belief system is challenged. For example, my daily morning ritual is to check my Facebook wall to ensure it’s still streaming brainless shit: dogs, cats, banal quotations, etcetera, etcetera. To wake up one morning, check out my wall and find even one intelligent post would counter example my cosmology into a tail spin. I’d be beside myself. Utterly lost. Bereft.
Start again.
Actually, before I forget, one of my favourite egghead archives is the BBC series of master classes. I think it started in the 1970s. One series was Julian Bream. My favourite is the Tortelier master class. I remember seeing one of Paul Tortelier’s last performances in Bristol back in the ’80s. He played the Dvorak ‘cello concerto and, I recall, gave a little impromptu speech in that showman way of his. Here’s a sample from his class on the first movement of the concerto:
It’s an important reference because it affirms a number of positives for me. Actually, four: The first thing, of course, was in those days – before Thatcherism and Reaganomics ground the final stake into the heart of western civilisation – what might be called high culture was permitted for the masses and was not regarded as likely to cause them brain damage. People were actually allowed to watch this sort of thing. Can you believe that? The second point is that here was a guru (a concert ‘cellist guru) passing on wise things to a young person. The audience is young. Young people are being encouraged to rise to inordinately demanding challenges. Didn’t it scar them? The third thing is that difficult stuff seemed to inspire passion, intensity of interest and humour. Really? Finally the master does not patronise the student seeking knowledge, skill and understanding. Kids can cope with tough stuff. Some thrive on it. The teacher demands the highest standards and the student strives to rise to the challenge. There’s risk. So much risk. And in the relationship there’s that fizz of energy and excitement. Easy is dull.
Keep it dull. Keep it safe.
Now to the church of dullness. First, a little invocation from Alexander Pope:
The Mighty Mother, and her son who brings
The Smithfield muses to the ear of kings,
I sing. Say you, her instruments the great!
Called to this work by Dulness, Jove, and Fate;
You by whose care, in vain decried and cursed,
Still Dunce the second reigns like Dunce the first;
Say how the Goddess bade Britannia sleep,
And poured her spirit o’er the land and deep.
The self-appointed arch priest of the glittering generality is, of course, Paulo Coelho. Recently, he felt it was about time that icons of the difficult should be toppled from their pedestals. In The Guardian back in August 2012:
“James Joyce’s Ulysses has topped poll after poll to be named the greatest novel of the 20th century, but according to Paulo Coelho, the book is “a twit”.
Speaking to Brazilian newspaper Folha de S Paulo, Coelho said the reason for his own popularity was that he is “a modern writer, despite what the critics say”. This doesn’t mean his books are experimental, he added – rather, “I’m modern because I make the difficult seem easy, and so I can communicate with the whole world.”
Writers go wrong, according to Coelho, when they focus on form, not content. “Today writers want to impress other writers,” he told the paper. “One of the books that caused great harm was James Joyce’s Ulysses, which is pure style. There is nothing there. Stripped down, Ulysses is a twit.””
I’m feeling the panic rise again.
Watch out Proust scholars, Dostoyevsky lovers et al., there’s a Guru of Glittering Generalities in town. In fact, watch out just about anything difficult or anyone who dares to enjoy or extoll the virtues of the difficult, the enigmatic, the challenging, the erudite, the esoteric, the demanding. Down with the running dogs of intellectualism!
But there’s a trick being played. The likes of Coelho claim to possess a rare and relatively new gift. With a few insipid, magic words, they are able to make the difficult sound simple. No longer do stupid people have to feel thick. Apparently, intellectually demanding stuff is actually really simple. The whole of general relativity, for example, is a complete fraud. Couch it in the simplest terms, it’s really easy. Thickies, for centuries, have been denied access to the great intellectual advances of mankind simply because a fraudulent élite has been pulling the wool of complexity over their eyes. It’s wicked beyond evil. Of course it takes a rock band song writer to reveal the treasures to all through an alchemy that can turn wine into water. Amen.
In an interview, again in The Guardian (12 March 2013), to plug Coelho’s recent dabble in Dan Brownianism, Manuscript Found in Accra, Stuart Jeffries reports:
“The Jesus of the gospels was, Coelho argues, similarly contradictory. “Jesus lived a life that was full of joy and contradictions and fights, you know?” says Coelho, his brown eyes sparkling. “If they were to paint a picture of Jesus without contradictions, the gospels would be fake, but the contradictions are a sign of authenticity. So Jesus says: ‘Turn the other face,’ and then he can get a whip and go woosh! The same man who says: ‘Respect your father and mother’ says: ‘Who is my mother?’ So this is what I love – he is a man for all seasons.””
Only a writer who thinks Joyce’s Ulysses hides a “twit” could see nothing odd in asserting that contradictions are proof of authenticity.
Okay, let’s replay that just one second: “contradictions are a sign of authenticity”. Now that really is a quotation for my Facebook wall. Sure to get lots of likes and thumbs up and shares and nods and shit. Maybe a follow up post: “The greatest wrongs are simply the greatest rights … Think about it…” Of course Coelho’s assertion must be self-evidently true because if a contradiction is a truth and this is a contradiction, then it must be true. See? The Ontological Argument never did die. Simples…smiley face.
I think we have a religious mind at work here. N’est pas?
Stuart Jeffries, a mind after my own heart, adds in the same article:
“Those of you who may so far have resisted the endorsements of Madonna, Julia Roberts or Bill Clinton may now be tempted to read him if only to test the proposition that Paulo Coelho exists to make Alain de Botton look deep.”
Ah yes, Alain de Botton. Another simplifier, democratiser of the demanding … Arse.
We live in cultural times where presenters of general knowledge quiz shows are paraded through the streets of social media as the intellectual giants of their century. I’ve nothing against Stephen Fry (after all it wasn’t my Visa card he stole) and would like to think he is justifiably embarrassed by all the lionisation, the odes, the eulogies paid to his enormous intellect – though I doubt that he is.
I’m in danger of sliding into a blog rant and that would be lazy of me. Before I peel myself away from bad temper, I might also mention that dreadful novel Life of Pi cribbed from Moacyr Scliar’s 1981 novella Max and the Cats, about a Jewish-German refugee who crossed the Atlantic Ocean while sharing his boat with a jaguar. Scliar’s novella presents a clear allegory relating to Nazism, and the symbolism works pretty well. Martel’s stolen version, like all stolen goods, doesn’t sit so comfortably in its new role as, what Barak Obama claimed to be, “an elegant proof of God”. It isn’t an elegant proof of anything. It’s shit.
I wrote a comment on a Facebook posting that was citing the cost of the Thatcher funeral last week. I wrote: “We live in hideous times.” I think there have always been far more stupid, dull human beings than creative intellectuals. In that respect, times have not changed. What has changed is that there is a new culture of the dumbass. In the democratisation of opinion through technological advance, now everyone has a say. In the resulting deluge of mindless babble, the intellectual voice has floated off.
My next novel, by the way, is about a ‘cellist who ends up in a lifeboat with Paulo Coelho. It’s a tale of how dullness eventually takes over the Pacific Ocean to be captured in four hundred pages of Christian drivel about setting out on journeys and stuff. The ‘cellist eventually loses the will to live and is dulled to death by authentic contradictions that elegantly prove the existence of God. Okay, so how else will I ever get a readership?
Someone throw me a bone here.