A Book for the Common Man

It is time to reconnect Ulysses to the everyday lives of real people ...

for whom Joyce intially intended it, says Declan Kiberd in a beautifully argued piece in The Times (and extract in fact from his new book Ulysses and Us : The Art of Everyday Living) explaining that :

The more snobbish modernists resorted to difficult techniques in order to protect their ideas against appropriation by the newly literate masses.

Nowhere is this reclamation more important than in the classroom, where he reckons :

Today’s students have been prevented by a knowing, sophisticated criticism from seeking such wisdom in modern literature. In it they seek mainly tricks of style, rhetorical devices, formal experiment and historical insight, but seldom if ever lived wisdom. The contemporary gulf between technique and feeling cries out to be bridged in the classroom, through the work of teaching and learning.

Talking about Ulysses, don't you wish you had this first edition?

Enright and the Workings of Memory

Just a-musing for my own amusement ...

One aspect of Anne Enright's Booker winning novel that I found fascinating was the way the author takes apart memory.

As I mentioned in the review I wrote for the Star:

Most novels play out the past in flashbacks which make memory appear to be an instantly accessible video with every detail rendered distinctly. This is of course not at all how our minds work, and Enright shows how an apparently solid memory of an event has to be modified in the light of objective evidence. “I don’t know if I have the correct picture in my mind,” she says, and talks of “shifting stories and waking dreams” which she must sift through to find the truth.

How do we actually remember things that have happened to us in the past? In fact we don't, the brain quite simply creates an illusion.

Here's an extract from Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness. Try this on for size. :

If you've ever tried to store a full season of your favourite television show on your computer's hard drive, then you already know that faithful representation of things in the world require gobs of space. And yet, our brains take millions of snapshots, record millions of sounds, add smells, tastes, textures, a third spatial dimension, a temporal sequence, a continuous running commentary - and they do this all day, every day, year after year, storing these representations of the world in a memory bank that never seems to overflow and yet allows us to recall at a moment's notice that awful day in the sixth grade when we teased Phil Meyers about his braces and he promised to beat us up after school. How do we cram the vast universe of our experience into the relatively small storage compartment between our ears? ... We cheat ... the elaborate tapestry of our experience is not stored in memory, at least not in its entirety. Rather, it is compressed for storage by first being reduced to a few critical threads, such as a summary phrase ("Dinner was disappointing") or a small set of key features (tough steak, corked wine, snotty waiter). Later, when we want to remember our experience, our brains quickly reweave the tapestry by fabricating - not actually retrieving - the bulk of the information that we experience as a memory. This fabrication happens so quickly and effortlessly that we have the illusion (as a good magician's audience always does) that the entire thing was in our heads the entire time.

The other writer I said similar things about was John Banville - the way memories in The Sea cascade one from another.

Both Enright and Banville are Irish writers, so is there something in the drinking water that makes them so concerned with the depicting memory in a more realistic way?

Of course, they might be part of a legacy inherited from James Joyce, the grandaddy of stream-of-consciousness writing and they must be influencing each other.

Truth is, I'm getting less and less happy to read novels in which characters remember everything in full technicolour detail without the slightest hesitation.

But then there's the danger of slowing the narrative down so I suppose that as a payoff we accept the artifice.

So how do the writers among you deal with memory?

Perverted Commas?

Of the many accomplishments of the fiction-writer's art, dialogue is surely the least exalted, the literary equivalent of peeling onions during the course of preparing a grand feast. While theoretically it could call for quite as great a level of skill as the narrative that surrounds it, in practice it hardly ever displays evidence of any such effort, particularly in the contemporary novel. All too often, dialogue is simply the default way of maintaining a vague sense of momentum, or a recognition that, with any luck, the novel will end up as a film treatment anyway, and here is the embryonic screenplay ...

Stuart Walton on the Guardian blog has a sound-off about dialogue in modern fiction as:

... a fairly obvious bulking agent in the kind of writing that isn't about narrative drive ...

and has a go at writers (such as Iris Murdoch and Henry James) who:

... never got the hang of dialogue, but persisted anyway...

If so many writers fail at writing dialogue, as Mr. Walton suggests, why is it so hard to get it right? (And it is difficult! Many is the page of aborted conversation I've scrunched into the bin.)

Which writers do you think handle dialogue well? I love Roddy Doyle's dialogue in The Barrytown Trilogy (though Mr. Walton probably wouldn't have approved of the "rendering of accents" , and Magnus Mills' utterly banal conversations (used to great comic effect) in The Restraint of Beasts. Paul Auster also handles dialogue very well in The Brooklyn Follies where the plot is very much developed through conversations. Readers of the blog have plenty more suggestions to add in the comments.

And how do you prefer your dialogue to be punctuated? James Joyce took against what he called "perverted commas" preferring the long dash, while writers such as James Kelman, for example, use no punctuation marks at all, leaving the writer to work out where the conversation begins and ends. (I must say, I like this method the best.)