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Janean Patience: Interesting that you think it needs to be a shorter, better edited book. I know exactly where you’re coming from and at the same time I think that the book’s structure is purposefully constructed to resist that – that it is its disorientating, scene breaking connections, its mismatch of art, its quality of “too-muchness”, that’s one of the main messages the book tries to convey.
I was leafing through it the other day and there’s a bit when, mid Shakespearian quotation, the Talbot as narrator character starts moaning about getting old, going grey, losing memory, talent, vitality. And in any normal work we’d say that’s something extraordinarily informal, self-indulgent, distracting, something “not done” in a proper work, but there are so many repetitions of that sort of interruption to the main narrative that I think we’re supposed to question that idea of a perfectly controlled, contained, impersonal work of art and particularly in this case of looking at any person or place without looking at their larger context, and consequently the danger that the more you examine something the more the connections that can be made extend and multiply until your original point of reference is obscured.
In those terms I think you can either ignore or just subtly hint at the wider connections of the text, or you can embrace the other extreme and overload the text with an overwhelming level of connections. At least, I think that what Talbot is trying to do is suggest that the nature of studying both history and art is to allow us to perceive in a limited way the limitless connections that surround us, but that both forms aspire to move away from the controlled, ordered, pinhole camera tendencies of most of our observations to a view of art and history as necessarily encompassing the irrelevant, unnecessary, ephemeral, distasteful, excessive and decentralised moments that would otherwise be excluded. There were a couple of terms you used, JP, like “driving force” and “constant presence”, and even the absence of “meaning in the wider context of the narrative”, which (and they all seem like reasonable descriptions of what’s not there in the book) I think Talbot’s actually striving to avoid, because he’s trying to demonstrate the artificiality of those ideas when the camera pulls back a bit.
The problem, I suppose, is that once you’ve said that, you’ve pretty much given any author who (literally) loses the plot of his work to say “Aha! I didn’t actually lose control of the text, I was being clever and literary and demonstrating the ultimate unresolvability of the medium. So tough luck if you didn’t follow it chum!”. I’ve forgotten most if not all of the facts contained in Alice in Sunderland since reading it, but again I think that’s intentional – you’re not really expected to be able to recall the colourful swirl of information it contains – but I’m still genuinely pondering (beyond finding it entertaining at the time) whether I think Talbot makes a success of the book, with its didactic delivery and with its own share of bum notes and fluffed lines, when throughout that idea of success and permanent value is being opposed by those of transient entertainment, the imperfect nature of art and the generosity the reader has for the author’s imperfections, rather than the controlled skill of the author. I don’t think it’s insignificant that the interrupted speech from Henry V mentioned above, which starts as a plea for an almost perfect, all encompassing work of creation, for perfect actors and audience, would have had the narrator going on to say:
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts:
Into a thousand parts divide one man,
And make imaginary puissance;
Think when we talk of horses that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i’ the receiving earth;
For ’tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,
Carry them here and there, jumping o’er times,
Turning the accomplishment of many years
Into an hour-glass: for the which supply,
Admit me Chorus to this history;
Who prologue-like your humble patience pray,
Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play.
Sorry, I actually meant this to be a short reply when I started and I got carried away. As I said, I’m still thinking about it. I’m not actually trying to be annoyingly excessive myself. |
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