Something New

We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books

“N.W.” by Zadie Smith (Hamish Hamilton – Penguin $NZ37)

            N.W. means North-West London and when a novel has a geographical location presented assertively as its title, it is reasonable to suppose that the author intends some sort of social comment on the place. So it proves with Zadie Smith’s latest. N.W. follows the lives of three or four Londoners who all come from the same London N.W. estate.

            Leah Hanwell is a white woman in her early thirties, married to a French-African. She’s come to the point in her marriage where her husband really wants children, but she herself is still clinging to the hedonistic image she had of herself when she was younger - the banality of copulation without reproduction, the cult of youth and the attempt to pretend that we don’t age and that the biological clock isn’t ticking away relentlessly. As Zadie Smith puts it in one of the sort-of stream-of-consciousness monologues she gives to Leah:

            “To be very objective about it, it is the woman’s fault that they never discussed children. For some reason it had never occurred to her that all this endless and wondrous screwing was heading towards a certain, perfectly obvious destination. She fears the destination. Be objective! What is the fear? It is something to do with death and time and age. Simply: I am eighteen in my mind I am eighteen  and if I do nothing I will stand still nothing will change I will be eighteen always. For always. Time will stop. I will never die. Very banal this fear. Everybody has it these days. What else? She is happy enough in the moment they are in. She feels she deserves exactly what she has, no more, no less. Any change risks fatally upsetting this balance. Why must the moment change?” (Pg.22)

            Leah and her Irish mother and her family are defined in this novel by the wider community they inhabit, now very definitely multi-cultural and as Caribbean as it is ancestrally British.

            One of Leah’s old school-friends is the Jamaican Felix. He takes up the second section of the novel, which Zadie Smith chops up with precise geographical markers indicating which parts of London each piece of narrative is set. NW6, W1 and so on. Also in his early 30s, Felix is a former small-time drug-dealer who has dabbled in those ephemeral things that young people think are glamorous, such as being an errand boy on film sets and pretending he is part of the film industry. He now wants to grow up, settle down and have kids. But his environment doesn’t help him. When he visits his father, he finds a dope-smoking old man who still thinks he is part of the cutting edge of consciousness because he spouts late hippie slogans. He visits the pathetic white woman Annie, posh heir to a decaying estate, still doped in her forties, still attempting to party and refusing to recognise that her life is going nowhere.

            If Leah wants time to stand still and let her remain a kid, Felix desperately wants time to reach some sort of fulfilment, but he is thwarted for various reasons – not least his own weaknesses which keep him in the dopey environment. Its not unreasonable to see ageing and the encroachment of a genuinely adult consciousness as one of the novel’s main concerns.

            But N.W. is at its sharpest and most readable when it reaches the third and longest section. Divided into brief and sometimes bite-sized observations and episodes, we are given the life story of Leah Hanwell’s best friend from school, the Jamaican Keisha Blake, who has apparently achieved all the things her proud parents and community wanted her to. She has been to university, adjusted to its residual snobberies, qualified as a lawyer and learnt how to get on in what is still largely a male and white profession. She even seems to have negotiated the problem of balancing career and home life – after a little initial resistance to the idea, she and her West Indian-Italian husband have produced a family. 

            Unfortunately, all this comes at the price of a raging identity crisis. Zadie Smith doesn’t put it as starkly as I am doing here, but basically the successful Keisha – who has re-made herself under the name Natalie – realizes that in succeeding as a professional, she has totally alienated herself from the values of the community in which she grew up. When she looks at the clothes she wears for various occasions, Keisha-Natalie reflects:

             “Daughter drag. Sister drag. Mother drag. Wife drag. Court drag. Rich drag. Poor drag. British drag. Jamaican drag. Each required a different wardrobe. But when considering these various attitudes, she struggled to think what would be most authentic, or perhaps the least inauthentic.” [Pg.245]

            There are another couple of characters who recur in this novel – I haven’t mentioned the more shady Nathan Bogle – but you will understand from this what the basic structure of N.W. is. Three or four lives are interwoven to take the pulse of a whole community.

            There are some things that Zadie Smith does extremely well. She can enter into the consciousness of her minor characters by letting us hear the way they think. Here, for example, are the dated prejudices of Leah’s old mother Pauline as she tries to adjust to a non-white community:

            “All of them are Nigerian, all of them, even if they are French, or Algerian, they are Nigerian, the whole of Africa being, for Pauline, essentially Nigeria, and the Nigerians wily, owning those things in Kilburn that once were Irish, and five of the nurses on her own team being Nigerian where once they are Irish, or at least Pauline judges them to be Nigerian, and they’re perfectly fine as long as you keep an eye on them every minute….” (Pg.15)

            Zadie Smith can also capture the collective stream-of-consciousness, as in this account of a journey across part of the city:

            “Sweet stink of the hookah, couscous, kebab, exhaust fumes of a bus deadlock, 98, 16, 32, standing room only – quicker to walk! Escapees from St Mary’s, Paddington: expectant father smoking, old lady wheeling herself in a wheelchair smoking, die-hard holding urine sack, blood sack, smoking. Everybody loves fags. Everybody. Polish paper. Turkish paper, Arabic, Irish, French, Russian, Spanish, News of the World. Unlock your (stolen) phone, buy a battery pack, a lighter pack, a perfume pack, sunglasses, three for a fiver, a life-size porcelain tiger, gold taps. Casino. Everybody believes in destiny!.....” (Pg.34)

            The micro-communities she creates are micro-communities with a believable self-consciousness, as in this sketch of one of the law-firms for which Keisha-Natalie works:

             “At RSN Associates the law burst from broken box files, it lined the hallways, bathroom and kitchen. This chaos was unavoidable, but it was also to some extent an aesthetic, slightly exaggerated by the tenants, and intended to signify selflessness, sincerity. Natalie saw how her clients found the chaos comforting, just as the fake Queen Anne sofas and painted foxhounds of the Middle Temple reassured another type of client. If you worked here it would only be for the love of the law. Only real do-gooders could possibly be this poor…. Wins were celebrated in-house with cheap plonk, pita bread and hummus. When an RSN solicitor came to see you in your cell, they arrived by bus.” (Pg.215)

            The novel is certainly panoramic and it is understandable that some have seen it as being in line of descent from the great state-of-London novels. To her credit Zadie Smith does not spell out time-specific cultural references (she lets readers get them for themselves) although it is possible that the novel will be best appreciated by those who know London well.

            She also makes her stabs at symbolism unobtrusive. The novel’s epigraph is the familiar medieval jungle from the Peasants’ Revolt “When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?”  - that is, a reminder that social  class is an entirely artificial construct. It is not until we get to Page 190 that we have a direct reference to this epigraph and its social context when Natalie, becoming a lawyer, imagines history with “bloody peasants burning lawbooks.”

            Early in the novel, there is an extended image of an overgrown church with a vandalised graveyard. Late in novel we are told that the apartment blocks on the tatty estate where the protagonists live are all named after materialist and rationalist philosophers -  Smith, Locke, Bentham, Hume, Russell. Zadie Smith doesn’t milk either image, but seems to be implying that two distinct received philosophies (Christianity and rationalist humanism) aren’t up to fixing the problems of N.W.

            Unfortunately, for all its vibrancy and colour, there is much in this novel that jars. Nostalgie de la boue is one implicit theme as Keisha-Natalie, the novel’s most interesting character, tries to deal with her identity crisis and re-immerse herself in the community of her birth. But the way Zadie Smith resolves this character’s problems is improbable, melodramatic, slightly pornographic and a bit of a cop-out. I accept that casual drug-use and casual sex are parts of the communities that Zadie Smith is depicting. In this instance, however, it tips over into the sensationalist and is ridiculously out of keeping with the character Smith has built up. It is an act of desperation from a novelist who isn’t very good at resolutions.

            Even more difficult to take is the novel’s awkward narrative structure. Eventually we are given a coherent connection between the lives of Leah, Natalie, Felix and Nathan; but for most of the novel the links are arbitrary rather than necessary. Certainly it is established early that Leah and Natalie are friends. Even so, the result is more in the nature of three or four separate stories than a satisfying whole.

            Zadie Smith hails from a North-West London environment like the one in the novel, had an English father and a Jamaican mother and was educated at the University of Cambridge. There is doubtless much that is autobiographical in N.W. – especially in the character of Natalie - and the novel’s cityscapes and impressions of the community are convincing. But with the clunky and unresolved plotting, this ends as a book of brilliant but disconnected bits. It evokes without touching.

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, Nicholas Reid recommends "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published five or more years ago.

“THE APES OF GOD” by Percy Wyndham Lewis (written between 1924 and 1929; first published 1930)

            Reading Zadie Smith’s N.W., I praise her for not explaining ephemeral cultural referents, and for allowing readers to work them out for themselves. It certainly makes for brisker and less patronising writing when the modern world is being depicted. We do not have to be told what this casually-mentioned TV show is about or what that casually-mentioned public figure did.

            And yet something nags at the back of my mind.

            What will happen to the novel when all these unexplained ephemera are no longer so easily recognisable to intelligent readers? Will it have to be edited with copious explanatory footnotes, or will it simply become unreadable?

            Perversely, this reminds me of a novel that is totally unreadable now because of all its time-and-place-specific topical cultural referents. At best, it is of interest to specialist antiquarians.

            In a mood of what can only have been intellectual masochism, I once sat down and ploughed my way through all 650 pages of the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Percy Wyndham Lewis’s The Apes of God.

            Percy Wyndham Lewis – now there’s a name not to conjure with.

            Lewis (1882-1957) was once mentioned in the same breath at Yeats, T.S.Eliot and D.H.Lawrence as one of those early 20^th century right-wing Modernists who broke literary boundaries in interesting ways en route to affirming deeply elitist and traditional faiths. Intelligent articles in refereed journals were once written about Lewis as much as about the others. But the hard fact is that, while the literary reputations of Eliot and Yeats and (for some people – but not for me) Lawrence have endured, the literary reputation of Lewis has long since vanished down the gurgler.

            His name-dropping memoirs Blasting and Bombardiering are still readable. His paintings (especially his portraits and First World War landscapes) are still good Modernist works and earn their place in British galleries. But his novels and short stories? They are overlong, tedious pieces of attitudinising. Once they had a small intellectual audience. Now they have no audience at all. Even Lewis’s sympathetic biographer Paul O’Keeffe (Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis, published in 2000) readily admits all their defects.

            The Apes of God is Lewis’s attack on the pretensions of London’s literary world in the 1920s.

            It is set in 1926 (although Lewis began writing sections of it before that). The plot, such as it is, concerns the extremely naïve and bashful 19-year-old Irishman Dan Boleyn who, on the strength of having written one poem, has been taken up and is being promoted as a “genius” by the literary critic and entrepreneur Harold Zagreus. Dan is too innocent to realize that Zagreus’ interest in him is mainly homosexual, as is that of other males who are introduced.

            Zagreus commends Dan to various characters who clearly represent all the things in the literary world that Wyndham Lewis detests. The “hearty” Dick Whittingdon who, as he tries to concoct a best-seller, lives off money sponged from a faded aristocrat. (Dick turns out to be a devotee of flagellation,  which I suppose is Wyndham Lewis’s judgement on the John Buchan and “Sapper” school). Then there is the lesbian artist who mistakes Dan for a life model and gets him to strip naked before he flees, blushing, into the night. (Lilywhite Dan does a lot of blushing in this novel). Next is the “split-man” Julius Ratner, who knows how to criticise the works of others, but is capable only of producing rubbish of his own. And the lion-hunting literary host and hostess Mr. and Mrs. Lionel Klein, with their pretentious tea-table talk.

            Zagreus introduces Dan to his theory of “apes” – that is, those poseurs and pretentious arty people who merely “ape” the work of true artists by imitating one another and following the latest fads.

            Most of the latter part of the novel (at least 300 static pages of it!!) takes place at a Lenten Party thrown by three aristocratic literary siblings, the Finnian-Shaws – Lord Osmund, Lord Phoebus and Lady Harriet. Described in Lewis’s wayward punctuation as “God’s own Peterpaniest family”, the Finnian-Shaws are presented as overgrown children who imagine they are in some sort of meaningful cultural revolt because they tease their aged father, as overgrown children do. They exchange repetitive baby-talk in loud tones across the heads of their assembled guests.

            And, tediously, in the course of the party, all the other poseurs whom we have already met once again act out their roles. For some reason, innocent, blushing, naïve Dan is made to dress in drag, which makes him subject to the groping of various males.

            At this point a vigorous young Welsh Fascist, Starr-Smith, called “the Blackshirt”, interrupts the festivities to make some obvious points about the vacuity of literary poseurs. Zagreus is attracted to the Blackshirt’s muscular virility. The novel ends with Zagreus dumping Dan for the Blackshirt. Disillusioned, Dan wanders weeping through a quiet London which is caught in the grip of the General Strike – but Wyndham Lewis depicts the strike as a complete fizzler which did little apart from provoking alarmist rumours. There will be no revolution.

            Zagreus takes the place of hearty Dick Whittingdon in sponging off a decaying aristocrat – which seems designed to tell us that even an observer of “apes” can turn out to be an “ape” himself. The literary scene won’t change for the better.

            If my synopsis makes the novel sound mechanical, dull and lacking in vigour, then I beg to report that I am making it sound far more tightly structured, lively and coherent than it actually is.

            I’m sure that the Bloomsberries and their ilk were ripe for sharp satire in 1920s London, but Wyndham Lewis cannot introduce a comic effect or make a satirical point without labouring it over many, many pages. Repeatedly as I read this bloated monster, I kept thinking how much more efficiently Evelyn Waugh (or even the young Aldous Huxley) could have demolished the same targets in about 200 brisk, farcical pages, in the manner of Waugh’s Vile Bodies.

            There is the additional problem of placing one-dimensional Dan Boleyn at the centre of the (disjointed, episodic) action. Perhaps Wyndham Lewis intended some sort of Candide effect -  innocence as a foil to expose sophisticated corruptions. But blushing, weeping Dan, who understands absolutely nothing, is naïve to the point of mental deficiency and quickly becomes a complete bore as he fails to understand the twentieth homosexual pass.

            Quite apart from its glaring defects as a piece of writing, there is much that is problematic in the novel’s ideology. Wyndham Lewis wasn’t the only observer who saw London’s literary scene as being over-weighted with homosexuals, but he was certainly one of the few who made a fuss about Jews. There is definitely a minor strain of anti-Semitism in the novel, especially in the way the character of Julius Ratner (nicknamed “Joo”) is presented. [For the record, Wyndham Lewis dabbled in anti-Semitism, at first welcomed the advent of Hitler, but by the later 1930s was already distancing himself from his earlier enthusiasm and loudly denouncing the Nazis.] We might also note that there is something unbalanced in a novel which denounces poseurs and false literary figures, but never once shows us somebody who could be called a true artist or writer. Against what criterion do the characters in the novel stand condemned? I can’t help noting that in his contemporaneous, and vastly more entertaining, piece of head-cracking Point Counter Point, Aldous Huxley at least gives us his positive reading of D.H.Lawrence in the character of “Mark Rampion”. More misanthropic, Lewis has nothing positive to show us. Spleen rules.

            Never introduced as a character, there is a sage called Pierpont who is sometimes quoted on such matters as Time and desirable forms of government. He seems to be Wyndham Lewis’s idealised image of himself.

            And what about those dated “time-and-place-specific topical cultural referents”, which were my excuse for beginning this rant?

            It is conceivable that the British literati reading The Apes of God in 1930 would have been able to recognise the originals of the people upon whom Lewis’s characters are based. Lord Osmund, Lord Phoebus and Lady Harriet Finnian-Shaw are transparently the posing siblings Osbert, Sacheverell and Edith Sitwell, and Lewis was not the only person to depict them in this satirical way. The catty relationship between Lewis and the Sitwells is chronicled in Paul O’Keeffe’s biography of Lewis, but also in Victoria Glendinning’s biography Edith Sitwell – A Unicorn Among Lions. Without having to look it up, I readily recognized the South African poet “Zulu Blades” (who wanders into The Apes of God for about two pages) to be a version of the South African poet Roy Campbell.

            But who are all the other people who inhabit what is so clearly a roman a clef? At first I thought Mr. and Mrs. Lionel Klein were caricatures of Leonard and Virginia Woolf, but O’Keeffe, Glendinning and others inform me that in fact they, and nearly all the other leading characters in the novel, are based upon extremely minor fringe literary figures of the 1920s who are now justifiably forgotten. Minor literary patrons. Minor Vorticists with whom Lewis had quarrelled. Minor everything. If there are incidental swipes at the likes of James Joyce and Aldous Huxley, they are not a central feature of the novel.

            So what do we end up with? Voluminous gossip and lampoon imagining it is biting satire. A laboured and over-long novel which smirks at length over people who were at best worthy of a very short smirk. It might have seemed an absolute scream at the time when some of the originals were recognisable in the novel’s caricatures. But now that they are gone and forgotten, there is nothing here for us but a literary freak and back-number.

            The perils of being too topical indeed.

Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

LONG HAUL OR SHORT STRETCH?  

            Among general, non-specialist readers, there has long been a lowbrow way of dividing up historians. There are deep diggers and there are broad scopers.

            Deep diggers tell you everything there is to know about one small specialist topic. Broad scopers write historical narratives covering hundreds of years.

            Deep diggers take 600 pages to examine the class, gender and ethnic composition, voting records, ideologies and interrelationships of the members in one three-year parliament. Broad scopers take 600 pages to cover half a millennium of national history.

            Deep diggers are more likely to be academic specialists. Broad scopers are more likely to be going for the mass market.

            Of course the two approaches are complementary. Without the detailed specialist monographs, there would be little but unreliable generalizations upon which to build broad narratives. Without the sense of history as an endless continuum, the specialist monographs would have no context.

            It’s easy enough to categorize history books in this way. But I think I’ve found an analogy in imaginative fiction.

            There are those novelists who go for minutely-detailed prose, covering every psychological and physical aspect of a given episode or situation. And there are those who write in broad brush-strokes, but have a firmer grasp of how the overall narrative develops.

            And it is odd how these two different approaches affect readers.

            If I am caught up in the fine prose of the novelistic deep digger, I relish it, but I am likely to get to the end of the novel with only the foggiest notion of where the story went.

            If I am galloping along with the novelistic broad scoper, I’m not paying too much attention to the prose, but I am likely to finish with a firmer sense of structure and story.

            At this point I was going to line up two teams of well-known novelists to contrast these approaches. Deep digger Henry James versus broad scoper Charles Dickens – that sort of thing. But the weakness of my generalization would at once become apparent. Whoever said Dickens was negligent about his prose? And whoever said James was always fastidious about his?

            Still, I’m left with the impression that some novelists work better in the analysed moment, and some in the structured narrative – and usually it is the latter that stays longest in the mind.

Something New

We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books

“A COMMON STRANGENESS” by Jacob Edmond (Fordham University Press, recommended price in New Zealand $NZ39:99)

            In the lives of poets, as in the lives of most other people, there has been a great change of consciousness worldwide over the last three or four decades. We have gone from a contest between capitalist West and communist East (with an ill-defined “third world” bending this way and that in the background); to the apparent dominance of capitalism and the market, even in officially “communist” China (with the rumblings of nationalist particularities in the background, especially in the Muslim world). We are also aware of how different cultural exchanges have become in the age of the internet, high-speed communication and a pervasive and internationally-marketed “pop culture”. With varying degrees of approval and disapproval, and with varying and competing definitions, terms like multiculturalism and globalism are now tossed around.

            The debate over the “universality” of literature – including poetry – is not a new one, but it becomes more acute in this new global context. By definition, poetry is language, but languages are not universal. Traditionally, the universal was seen to be best expressed in the particular – hence, a poem “understood” worldwide was nevertheless rooted in a particular language and culture, and much of even the most “universal” poem was always untranslatable for those outside that particular language and culture.

            How are poets, especially avant-garde poets, responding when they are now – like nearly everybody else – also wired in to an international ‘global’ culture?

            Put crudely, this is what Jacob Edmond, of the University of Otago’s English programme, examines in A Common Strangeness, which is published by an American university press. The book’s concerns are spelled out in its subtitle Contemporary Poetry, Cross-Cultural Encounter, Comparative Literature. In his introduction, after noting the global socio-political changes between the 1970s and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991,  Edmond asks rhetorically:

            “How have these economic and geopolitical events transformed the way we think about literature and culture on a global scale? How have avant-garde poets … and their readers… participated in and responded to these historic changes? What might their responses tell us about how we have come to understand our own era as both more global and more diverse? What might they reveal about the rhetorical and historical structures that produce these poles of sameness and difference? What is the history – and what is the poetry – of this common strangeness?” (Pg.2)

            Edmond claims that, post-Cold War, there is no longer an assumed binary opposition between “them-and-us”, but a more trans-national and multicultural awareness, and this is reflected in the poets of the United States, post-Soviet Russia and China.

            He notes that post-circa-1990, “building on the search for a poetics that traverses the boundaries of nation and culture, which had been a major driver of avant-garde  poetry for the past one hundred years,  many writers had a powerful if ill-defined dream of an imagined trans-national  poetic community whose shared sense of location was based paradoxically on dislocation.” (pg.6) They posited a new sort of consciousness and  “inter-subjectivity” where poets attempt to step into the shoes of others. And yet this condition was easier to conceptualise than to realise.

            Jacob Edmond is apparently fluent in both Chinese and Russian. After the theoretical introduction, A Common Strangeness becomes six critical and reasoned case studies of six specific avant-garde poets, the Chinese Bei Dao and Yang Lian; the Russians Arkadii Dragomoshchenko and Dmitri Prigov; and the Americans Charles Bernstein and Lyn Hejinian. Much as I attempted to follow the theoretical and unifying thesis that runs through this densely-written and –referenced book, I found myself again and again drawn to the particularities of each poet whom Edmond considers.

            It is fascinating to discover, for example, how Chinese poets used Charles Baudelaire’s poetics as a way of standing back from their society and viewing it with the distanced eye of Baudelaire’s flaneur (stroller; walker). Yang Lian was in Auckland at the time of crackdown in China in 1989. Edmond remarks “Yang’s exilic writing negotiates the temporal and physical disjunction of exile through the figure of the walker in the city.” (Pg.26). In his collection Unreal City, Yang’s poetry superimposes Auckland on Beijing (or Beijing on Auckland?), with that sense of being physically present but spiritually elsewhere that informs so much of Baudelaire’s Parisian verse. Appropriately, Edmond’s chapter on this poet ends under Grafton Bridge, at the memorial for those Chinese killed in 1989 crackdown.

            When he considers Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Edmond documents how this Russian poet was stimulated by his correspondence with the American Lyn Hejinian and out of this came his Sky of Correspondences, where the very word “correspondence” has a multiplicity of meanings. These include literal letters between individuals and the correspondence between languages; but also the correspondence of language to external reality and the symbol-and-association-fraught way every language functions. Once again there is an obvious Baudelaire referent, for Baudelaire’s sonnet Correspondances [together with Rimbaud’s “Je est un autre”] is one of the foundational texts of literary modernism.  Grappling with post-Soviet reality, says Edmond, “Dragomoshchenko’s poetics of co-response engages current theories of comparative literature by addressing what happens to the idea of comparison across languages and cultures when the notion of cultural unity, totality, or vertical correspondence to a universal ceases to be tenable” (Pg.48)

            Not only does this suggest a world after the breakdown of a totalist ideology, but also a world bereft of God. Having broken with a “total” concept of the universe or of external reality, the poet goes for the fragmented individual encounter. Dare I say (even if Edmond doesn’t) that this is the spiritual moment when modernism slips into postmodernism?

            Incidentally, the chapter on Dragomoshchenko is interesting not only for the poetics it explores, but for what it reveals of the aesthetic (and ideological) divisions within the “unofficial” literary movement in the late Soviet Union. Not all those who reacted against Soviet officialdom reacted in the same way, and Dragomoshchenko was a often a gadfly even to his fellow dissidents.

            Lyn Hejinian, the American poet who corresponded with Dragomoshchenko, is seen first as one of the American “Language” school of poets i.e. those who were happy to be influenced by “formalism” and to attempt to avoid naïve lyrical self-expression by examining the nature of language itself. They confronted the way the world is in effect structured by language. She immersed herself in Russia culture and made repeated attempts to show how languages work [or don’t work] in translation. Of one of her collections, Jacob Edmond remarks “Even her apparently more personal work My Life…. Focuses more on the language that makes up a life, than it does on the phenomenology of being a person. Hejinian’s increasing tendency to link estrangement to her notion of the person can be attributed at least partly to her contact with Russia.” (Pg.85) The autobiographical element here is Hejinian’s “estrangement” in finding herself in a country where she did not speak the language and hence, in gradually learning Russian, she gradually re-made herself as a person. Of her “short Russian novel” Oxota, Edmond  comments that she “aims to overcome predetermined structures for experience, such as the essential self, to restore perception of words and the world” (pg.91). Edmond does, however, raise the interesting possibility that Hejinian may have unwittingly romanticised Russian collective identity – the “Russian soul” – in contrast with Western individualism.

            If I read Jacob Edmond’s argument aright, when he deals with Bei Dao he is suggesting that, whereas this Chinese poet may have in some ways worked against the officially-imposed constraints upon Chinese literature, this does not necessarily mean that his poems are the template for a homeless “world” literature, or that they are truly universal and hence independent of the specific language that they use. Having raised the question of my own comprehension, I would also say that his chapter is the most accessible and raises the whole question of how anything can be truly “universal” if it does not also inhabit a specific home.

            For me the most problematic and troubling chapter was that on Dmitri Prigov, the Russian conceptualist artist and poet whose work often depends on iteration, endless reproductions of canonical Russian texts and objects and (in his earlier work) the figure of the “Policeman” – at once ironical AND a celebration of Russian culture vis-à-vis the rest of the world. In his Soviet-era poems, Prigov imitated, in order to mock, grandiose Soviet nationalism and Soviet attempts at cultural hegemony. But as soon as the USSR collapsed, he mocked equally samizdat culture and its techniques. He gradually came to a renunciation of poetry in the face of triumphant pop culture.

            Why does this trouble me? Because it really rejects a place for poetry at all and – in spite of all the articulated theory – also seems to reject the place for the individual voice, be it affirmative or dissident. (For me, submitting to pop culture is akin to the triumph of dullness at the end of Pope’s Dunciad. Accusations of “elitism” be damned. The only literary culture worth having has to define itself against the mass – a rebours!) Incidentally, Edmond does not say it, but nearly all the examples he quotes of Prigov’s works seem the most playful of dadaism.

            Finally there is the American Charles Bernstein. Edmond notes that  “addressing the changes wrought between the late-Cold War era and the post-9/11 world, [Bernstein’s] work stages the interplay between political statement and poetic diversion.” [pg.165]. This would suggest that Bernstein’s tone is mainly satirical and responsive to externalities as opposed to the reified consciousness.  I would argue that, with its reconsideration of Bernstein’s reconsideration of Ezra Pound’s poetics and ideology, this Bernstein chapter is the most ideologically fruitful in the book – or at least the most ideologically coherent for this reader who is versed in neither Chinese nor Russian. Jacob Edmond moots such matters as multiculturalism being potentially a code for (Western) cultural hegemony over other cultures; or multiculturalism as simply the cultural arm of economic globalism.

            As you can see, I have followed my familiar defensive route of giving you a summary of this book’s contents with only the occasional evaluative comment. Like most of the book’s potential readers, I am at a great disadvantage in reading A Common Strangeness, because, unlike the author, I cannot read the writings of four of its six poets in the original. Naturally, Edmond does supply English-language translations of the cited Russian and Chinese texts, but there is still that niggling sense that we are not able to follow the author in all the connections and interpretations he is able to make.

            Perhaps it is redundant to say that this academic book is not one for non-specialists and certainly not one for those uninterested in poetry. To put it simply, it is a very “hard read”, assuming of the reader an acquaintance with literary theory and its specialist jargon; and assuming, too, an ability to negotiate long sentences with many subordinate and dependent clauses. I do not note this as a form of negative criticism. I simply note it.

            A Common Strangeness is a work of real and very wide scholarship. Many of its longer end-notes are in themselves the length of independent essays. Its bibliography is extensive. Although much of its frame of reference was unfamiliar to me, I nevertheless found its arguments about particular and ‘global’ literary cultures, about the old concept of ‘world literature’, about cultural hegemony and about pop culture all fruitful and interesting. But, as always, I found comments on the [six] individual poets more illuminating than the framework. Perhaps the universal does best inhabit the particular.