7. LitCritShit



I started my university studies ‘reading’ English, as trendy and popular a subject in the sixties as Media Studies became in the nineties. When asked “Where are you studying?” and “What are you reading?” - the latter question not meaning what books are you reading but what degree are you taking - I would self-deprecatingly and casually say, as if oblivious to the status implications of my answers in the eyes of anyone who cared enough to ask such questions, “Cambridge” and “English”. I would then wait smugly to see what awe the information invoked.

The university and its English programme were rightly held in high esteem and the staff whose lectures I attended included great names to drop in literary society - C.S. Lewis, Raymond Williams and F.R. Leavis. Don’t get me wrong. It was a privileged and wonderful experience but it was about ‘reading’ English not writing it. The purpose of our studies, and the practice of our own writing as undergraduates, was critical analysis and dissection of creative literary works. At no time were we encouraged to write original material of our own yet we developed considerable skill as critics, that category of indeterminate matter that in the eyes of many creative artists is beneath contempt – ‘people who find lice in bald heads’, Balzac called them, and D.H. Lawrence’s epithet – ‘they are smoking, steaming shits’ - doesn’t really belong in a genteel blog like this.

One consequence of my two years of study of English – I then changed my degree and graduated in Economics – was that I was hugely admiring of quality creative writing and totally intimidated by it. I had effectively internalised the analytical critic to such a degree that I self-censored my own creative efforts and was intimidated to the point of silence as a potentially creative writer myself. I was not alone in this.

Auckland Anniversary Day, Monday 28 January 2002
It’s Auckland Anniversary Day so everything that floats is out on the Waitemata Harbour or Hauraki Gulf and Lake Pupuke has a thin covering of windsurfers gliding gently round in the breeze. I have been lying out on the front deck reading (well skimming, more accurately) A.S. Byatt’s Possession. One of the first things I came upon is the experience of one of her characters, Blackadder, when studying English under F.R. Leavis at Cambridge. It is reminiscent of my own experience of all that lit-crit-shit. Byatt writes:

Leavis did to Blackadder what he did to serious students; he showed him the terrible, the magnificent importance and urgency of English literature and simultaneously deprived him of any confidence in his own capacity to contribute to, or change it. The young Blackadder wrote poems, imagined Dr Leavis’s comments on them, and burned them. He devised an essay style of Spartan brevity, equivocation and impenetrability.

Byatt goes on to describe a seminar on dating short quotations from novels or poems. Many, like myself, were terrified of making absolute prats of ourselves by dating something early Victorian which turned out to be a modern pastiche of early Victorian literary style and had within it all the clues as to its inauthenticity, if only we had had the wit to see them. [Of course that’s how tutors and lecturers (and barristers) make themselves look so clever – they only ask questions to which they already know the answers.]

And that is why I am only skimming A.S. Byatt. I found in an early school report a teacher commenting that I should articulate my own opinions more forcefully. Which rather presumes that I knew what they were at that age, or indeed now. The problem with reading authors of ‘literary fiction’, like Byatt or Saul Bellow, is that their skill and artistry and use of language totally puts you off writing yourself. Now that I want to write for myself, in my own voice, I feel it best to avoid reading too much quality fiction (or am I just being lazy?).

I had the same experience in the photojournalism workshop last week. On the Monday afternoon before any of us had gone out to K Rd to take some photographs (which we did on Tuesday mostly), the tutor Wayne showed us a video presentation he had put together of his current work. It was on the Dance Culture, that all night stuff with body surfing and ecstasy and the DJ is a big star remixing the music by hand as he goes. They were colour photographs and the images were quite stunning, the kind of thing you just know takes an immense amount of skill and professionalism and a very long apprenticeship to handle with such confidence. I loved it but it was quite off-putting too and I nearly didn’t bother on the Tuesday to go back and take photos of my own. But I did and they were OK, so that was a good lesson for me not to self-censor so much; because I’m not a creative genius doesn’t mean I should hide what talents I do have under the proverbial bushel.

That realm of privacy behind the public façade is not just what my Journeying on the Circle Line novel is all about but also, rather astonishingly when I came to see what I had shot on the workshop Tuesday, what my photographs turned out to be about too. About outside and inside, and the inside of the inside, and the creation of private space in public places. 

So I have been busy finding all sorts of exciting and interesting parallels between photography and writing, realising that the creative impulses and technical craft in both have remarkable similarities – the image in the mind translated or mistranslated to the image on the paper (what you photograph/write is never quite what you set out to photograph/write when you start out); - the new stories you can create when you look at your work, photos, life, writing, marriage in retrospect; - the fun of the creative conceptual stage (the 10% imagination) and the relative drudgery of crafting it all into a finished piece of work (the 90% perspiration, the hours in the darkroom painting with light, the endless fussing over whether you have exactly the right word/image to convey the precise meaning, texture, ambience you are after).

Anyway, it’s a lovely day so I must go take a paddle along the beach and not spend it all inside. I wandered along to Thornes Bay yesterday afternoon and watched the Volvo round-the-world yachts go up the Rangitoto Channel to pass on the shoreside of the tallship Soren Larsen (which some will remember as the Charlotte Rose in The Onedin Line) moored off Mairangi Bay, on their way to Rio via the Southern Ocean. There was a good breeze and they were doing about 17 knots and I hadn’t realised before how powerful they are – partly their height and chunkiness, and partly the way they stand to the wind tipping over at an angle like they do. It made the power boat flotilla in pursuit seem puny by contrast. And so different from the skittish windsurfers blasting across Lake Pupuke, periodically capsizing in a great splash of sail and board rider. Like writers.