My University’s Library

The University Library is not really a place I happily frequent. I think people naturally divide into two camps: those who prefer to work at home and those who prefer library spaces. I’m steadfastly in the former because I like to eat while I’m thinking, and lie down if I’m doing some very hard thinking, and resort to doing the washing up if I’ve ground to a halt in my thinking. But the library cannot be avoided when it’s a question of research work; on the positive side, it’s a very good resource, with over five and a half million books inside it. On the negative side those volumes are picked over every day by academic vultures, with the result that, by definition, the good books have already been taken out by someone else. It’s also a disquieting space that I don’t find conducive to comfortable working. The outside is far from attractive; the library was designed by the architect Giles Gilbert Scott who, so they tell me, was famous for his power stations, and a glance at the exterior could clearly confirm this. It’s a brick monstrosity with a certain je ne sais quoi of incarceration, two large flat fronted wings, and a 48 metre high tower in the middle, at the top of which legend suggests the dirty books are held. Apparently it has an uncanny resemblance to The Ministry of Love in Orwell’s 1984. However, the inside never seems to correspond to the outside, for me, as corridors stretch off in all directions and eventually the weary traveller comes across an inner courtyard. Librarians pop out of doors that hide unimaginable spaces, and book trolleys can be heard grinding their way up service lifts from the bowels of the building. Most people have their own little circuits that they trot round, visiting the book stacks for their own subject areas and the two main public gathering spaces, the reading room and the tea room (this latter providing the venue for what passes for gossip and intrigue in the groves of academe). The library certainly contains vast tracts of book storage space, rare manuscripts, administrative areas etc, that I have never set foot in. All I know about labyrinths is that minotaurs live there, so I’ll stay clear of those shadowy regions, thank you very much.

The books I need to consult are split into two categories; more recent publications that are in paperback format and which have to be ordered from the reading room, and hardback books that are available off the book stacks. In the case of the former you have to fill in a little form and check an old-fashioned notice stand that tells you how long you will have to wait for them to be fetched. Where do these books come from? I have no idea. They lurk in the mysterious hidden zones of the library where only those with special access passes may enter. In the meantime you can hang around the reading room which is large, vault-like and lined with the kind of tomes that even I, who sprints to the bookshelves of friends to see what they’ve got, would never dream of bothering to look at. It is filled in orderly fashion with heavy oak desks that seat 6-8 people with a reading lamp suspended in the middle. For years I never knew how you managed to turn them on, and sat peering at volumes in the gathering dusk, wondering what miracle one had to perform to allow there to be light. This is not a place you want to linger in over the examination period when you can cut the air into thick slices of panic. Generally I wander off to check out the book stacks.

Now the idea is that you look books up on the state-of-the-art library catalogue at the banks of computers in an adjoining room. I have my suspicions that the new cataloguing system is simply a way for librarians to have a good laugh at us impractical, technology-unfriendly academics as many a time I’ve searched for research books that I know are in there somewhere, only to be told they have either vanished without trace or never existed. So I’ve found it better to browse, which is possible once you have got your head around the way the books are organised, which is by size (oh yes) and then by subject area and then by chronology. The book stacks are long, claustrophobic, dingy rooms with tiny desks at narrow windows with bars on one side, and lengthy floor to ceiling shelving units stretching down the other. There are lights on timers that click away like death watch beetles while you search, and then abruptly plunge you into darkness. I find the book stacks incredibly spooky, particularly up on the sixth floor, somewhere around the theoretical anthropology/ philosophy sections where people hardly ever go. A couple of years ago when I was still writing fiction, I began a thriller in which the murders all took place up in these book stacks. Anything could happen up there and it might be days before a body was found. Such thoughts often cross my mind as I scrabble about on hands and knees peering at the bottom shelf (where the books I want inevitably are) as the lights suddenly go out. It’s a relief to get out of there and back to the main corridors which are always busy with people.

Apparently there is an unofficial paper trail game being played out in secret amongst the library users. A cryptic clue tucked inside a book leads to another book, inside which is another clue and so on. It’s said that those who reach the end are honour-bound to provide another clue, but I’ve never even come across one yet myself. And the other little fact that pleases me about the library is that its biggest donation came from one Lord Acton, Catholic Historian and Professor of Modern History 1885-1902. On his death he bequeathed his research library, which consisted of a cool 60,000 volumes. For all those litbloggers out there who worry about the size of their book collections, never fear; this might put them in perspective.

It’s not all libraries I dislike, however. My college library is lovely, with a blond wood and glass mezzanine level that seems wonderfully airy and is great for spying on everyone coming and going. Perhaps other bloggers have library spaces they particularly like or dislike?

The World’s A Sudden Place

The heatwave continues here with no sign of relief – the promised thunderstorms never materialised and instead a fine layer of cottony mesh clouds trap the heat ever closer to the earth. Much as I dislike this kind of weather, it’s proved the perfect context for reading Carson McCuller’s extraordinarily fine novel, The Member of the Wedding. It’s the dog days of August when ‘the summer was like a green sick dream, or like a silent crazy jungle under glass,’ and 12-year old Frankie Addams is hanging around the house with her old housekeeper, Berenice, and her young cousin, the prim and bespectacled John Henry, waiting to attend the marriage of her older brother. War rages in Europe and much as Frankie longs to join in, ‘the war and the world were too fast and big and strange.’ For Frankie stands on the cusp between childhood and adolescence and this is proving to be a disquieting, troubling position to hold: ‘This was the summer when Frankie was sick and tired of being Frankie. She hated herself, and had become a loafer and a big no-good who hung around the summer kitchen: dirty and greedy and mean and sad.’ This feeling is exacerbated by the peculiar emotions stirred within her at the prospect of her brother’s marriage. The novel provides a beautifully wrought evocation of the kind of jealousy that corrodes the heart of the displaced, overgrown child, for the impact of seeing her brother and his bride-to-be has left Frankie painfully, if inarticulately, conscious of all the lacks in her confined existence. ‘Her voice had a ragged and strangled sound. “They were so pretty,” she was saying. “They must have such a good time. And they went away and left me.”’ Carson McCullers recreates with such skill the intolerable emptiness of the pre-adolescent’s life that is then overstuffed with poorly understood emotions. Frankie simply doesn’t know what to do with herself, and everything she does do is ‘wrong’.

At the heart of this bitter dissatisfaction, as sickly hot as the summer itself, is Frankie’s burgeoning sexuality. McCullers manages to evoke this condition with the lightest and surest of touches, and I fear I’m about to trample over it with my lit crit boots, but her portrayal is so intriguing I can’t really let it alone. Frankie’s fall from grace is, I think, essentially the unspoken loss of innocence, and I’m wondering what it is we mean exactly by that notion of ‘innocence’. One of my favourite psychoanalytic writers, Adam Phillips talks about ‘the astonishing capacity for pleasure’ that children have, an immense curiosity that is indistinguishable from appetite, and as such, from nascent sexuality, which he calls ‘an ecstasy of opportunity.’ Children live, then, with a kind of feckless, aimless, erotic sensuality that is turned outward upon the world. ‘The child – unlike the adult – is not merely compensating for not being an adult, for not being self-sufficient,’ Phillips argues. ‘Because there is no purpose to the child’s life other than the pleasure of living it. It is not the child, in other words, who believes in something called development.’ Now to me, this is innocence: the belief that life can be sensually enjoyed for no reason or purpose whatsoever. I’ve often felt that children are a species apart, utterly different from the adult they will grow into, and that the radical difference that separates the two states is the cause of much mutual misunderstanding.

Frankie is no longer a child because she is no longer satisfied by her innocent pleasure, and this seems to have happened to her overnight: ‘The world is certainy a sudden place’ she says, as a mournful refrain. But she is not yet an adult and it is this in-between stage that McCullers portrays with such brilliance. There’s another theory about the way that children develop sexuality that is expounded by the American critic Leo Bersani. He argues that sexuality springs out of an excess of stimuli in moments when the self is intensely aroused but uncomprehending as to this state of arousal. For Bersani, it becomes an ‘evolutionary conquest’ to transform those feelings of extreme, intense, almost unpleasant excitation into what will be subsequently understood as sexual pleasure. It seems to me that Frankie is on the road towards this kind of wordless understanding. Certainly the sensations that cause her the most bittersweet satisfaction are accompanied by random acts of violent aggression in a way that seems to mirror the confluence of pleasure and pain bound together at the heart of this masochistic understanding of sexuality. Discussing the sight of her brother and his fiancé, Frankie is simultaneously carving a splinter out of her foot with the biggest kitchen knife she can find. And her darkest secret, that ‘In the MacKean’s garage, with Barney MacKean, they committed a queer sin, and how bad it was she did not know’ is accompanied by the feeling that ‘She hated Barney and wanted to kill him. Sometimes alone in the bed at night she planned to shoot him with the pistol or throw a knife between his eyes.’ What a mess human emotions are! How paradoxical and contrary and ignoble. McCullers describes how one evening the radio seems to be playing a mixture of stations, ‘a war voice crossed with the gabble of an advertiser, and underneath there was the sleazy music of a sweet band.’ Can we read here a metaphor for Frankie’s disoriented self, crisscrossed with different frequencies of emotion that are all muddled up and discordant?

It is still oppressively hot here, and Frankie is still stuck in the kitchen of her childhood, swearing that after the wedding she will never return. Will the spell of stasis ever be broken? I will let you know what happens next in this supercharged dream of a novel, but for the time being I am profoundly impressed by the immense talent of Carson McCullers.

Adventures Through the Looking Glass

Yesterday’s comments on my post really gave me pause for thought, particularly over the breakdown of the distinction between private and public life to which Ms Make Tea drew attention, and over the concept of the confessional memoir that the Literate Kitten mentioned. I’ve spoken before about the obscenification of the everyday, the way that what was once off- or ob-scene is now placed centre stage, and it seems to me that our contemporary culture has managed to confuse significance with visibility, so that the concept of ‘revelation’ no longer means a spiritual epiphany, but rather a public undressing. Let’s talk about that most degraded and corrupted of all 21^st century concepts, celebrity. If ever there was a modern rewrite of Faust’s pact with the devil, celebrity is surely it. It used to be the case that people became well known because they had something tangible to offer the world – a talent, insight, wisdom, skill. Nowadays the criterion for celebrity is a willingness to be turned inside out for public consumption (and don’t get me started on the irresponsibility of the media – we could be here all day). Yet there is clearly a demand for such a structure of interaction based, I can only deduce, on the erroneous assumption that some form of intimacy arises from it. That celebrities feel gratified in some way by being ‘known’ to the public and that the public feel excited to be somehow ‘closer’ to the images on the screen. All this leads me to think that it is the notion of intimacy which has suffered most in the modern world, and that the permissiveness of our society has not in fact lead to a form of emotional utopia, but to a heightened awareness of our own isolation and a longing for ever more intense forms of recognition.

Two thoughts occur to me, the first being that humans have always overinvested in the power of their own image. In psychoanalysis, the supreme moment of identity formation occurs when the young child recognises itself in the mirror for the first time. It’s known as the mirror stage and is readily recognisable in toddlers who laugh and point and can remain fascinated for long stretches of time by their own reflection. All kinds of important things happen here: the child, who has up until this point experienced their body as a random, fragmented assortment of sensations, now has a neat carapace under which to house a sense of self. S/he abandons the confusing body and latches onto the lovely mirror image of wholeness. The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan was very scathing about humanity’s adoration of the mirror. Chimpanzees, he said, also recognise their reflections but have the sense to just walk on by. They don’t invest an entire sense of subjectivity in an image outside of themselves. However, the mirror stage is also understood as fixing in place the structure for language acquisition. If a child can make the leap of imagination that unites its bodily reality with an image, then it is ready to accept that a symbol, like a word, can stand in the place of the thing itself. It’s not like we can choose to be without the mirror stage – it’s a fundamental part of human development, but the fascination with the empty image speaks to me, once again, of a certain regressive tendency in contemporary society.

The second thought that occurs to me is to see how these elements of intimacy and recognition are played out in the blogosphere. What intrigues me is the way that they are entirely differently organised to any of the other modern forms of media. Whilst blogs have a highly visual dimension, and are often the site for montages of photos and images, it is very rare indeed to find those images glorifying the self who writes. In fact, bloggers are notable for maintaining anonymity. Yet at the same time they are platforms from which their owners speak to gain recognition for their views. So what I’m working my way around to saying, is that blogging is a way of making visible what is on the inside of a person as opposed to creating a cult out of externality. Bloggers then, are people who venture through – and beyond – the looking glass. Rather than become arrested at the level of the mirror, we seek instead to regain contact with that jumble of sensations, thoughts and feelings that constitute the more authentic subject. This is not to say that bloggers write their own online version of confessional memoirs – a few do, but it seems to me that the vast majority of even what are termed personal blogs are not detailing their lives in order to obtain ‘celebrity’ but to bear witness to their own authentic voice. What I’m saying is that bloggers shun, more than anything else, the artificiality with which the modern subject seems so enamoured in other contemporary forms of media, in order to reconnect with a more complex, genuine sense of self.

The Ugly Truth

Over at So Many Books, Stefanie has a fascinating post on the proliferation of overly intimate memoirs, often detailing horrific and disturbing experiences as justification for the book’s publication. Why is it that we have become so trauma-obsessed in the 21^st century? Partly it’s due to a confusion between celebrity and intimacy, and the breakdown of a sense of community in which we are fully known, but it’s also due to a particular fascination with the nature of trauma. Trauma studies has been an area I’ve researched in the past few years, and in fact yesterday I was cleaning up the copy of a chapter on the prevalence of child abuse narratives, arguing that many tread an uncertain line between an ethical desire to let people know the enormous damage caused by abuse, and an overly-voyeuristic, prurient interest in what actually occurs in traumatic sexual encounters. Wherever you look in the diverse media, we are being offered stories of both private and public catastrophe whose publication rests on the underlying belief that their huge popularity means they are commercially rewarding to the publisher. There’s big money to be had in people’s misery, it seems.

Yet one of the many paradoxes in this contemporary craze for trauma is the fact that real trauma is something that is not easily articulated. The experience of Holocaust survivors provided the origins of what we call trauma theory today. When those starved and tortured waifs were released from Buchenwald and Auschwitz they needed to tell people what had happened to them – it was historically, ethically, politically and personally essential that they should do so. And yet language proved recalcitrant to their horrific tales, and the listeners they encountered found it almost impossible to hear the experience they were recounting. No one knew how to deal with these poor, tormented souls, many of whom eventually committed suicide. The psychoanalysts Van der Kolk and and van der Hart subsequently proposed a distinction between ordinary ‘narrative’ memory, which is organised on a soap opera principle, whereby every daily event fits into an ongoing storyline and is therefore understood, digested and filed away, and ‘traumatic’ memory, whereby the event that occurs is so horrific, so abnormal, so terrifying, that no frame of reference exists into which it can be slotted and it therefore remains like a lump of undigested matter in the mind. ‘Narrative’ memory is fluid and flexible and often somewhat distant from the lived event; ‘traumatic’ memory is detailed and vivid and has lost none of the power of experienced reality. As such it keeps returning over and over to the victim, as if it were happening again. The key in this instance is to introduce flexibility into the traumatic memory, because until it can be processed and its deadly power neutralised, the event will be experienced as a gap or gaping wound in the victim’s life, and this is almost impossible to tolerate.

So trauma studies looks at narratives, films and also witness accounts that attempt to find ways to express events for which there are no given, satisfying formulations. It’s been a significant field of study because of the questions it poses to language and representation when pushed to their limits, and also because of the profound links with history, politics and psychoanalysis that are simultaneously forged.

Ok, so why should it be that this highly specific form of experience has become such a dominant part of our modern culture? One answer to this might lie in the work of cultural theorist Georgio Agamben (who is utterly fab, if you like this kind of thing). He proposes that the way we think about experience has altered significantly since the 18^th century. It used to be that experience of the world carried great value, hence authority was placed in the older members of a community, and life was seen as a continual garnering of experience that would eventually culminate in the final plenitude of death. However, the great seachange in our culture has been from a humanist perspective on life to a scientific one. The structures of science now dominate our way of understanding the world, and so rather than value what people have experienced, we value what people know. There’s an immediate disadvantage here: valuing experience meant that it was possible to believe we could all have a full and complete life; whereas if we value knowledge it becomes impossible ever to reach an end point of complete integration. We can only ever add to the sum of our knowledge and die incomplete.

Now it strikes me that trauma has become an odd way of reassigning significance and importance to the fact of having had a life experience. Trauma is resolutely not about knowing things; it’s about having been through an event that was radically alien to knowledge and understanding. But turning it into a narrative gives it the look of having been mastered – there’s a powerful transformation at work in the victory of words over dangerous, untamed experience that we can all share and marvel at. Equally the experience of trauma is one of the few in our society that is given a special form of authority. No one can deny or argue with a trauma victim’s experiences, which is a pretty unique state of affairs in the modern world. And it’s fundamentally democratic; it doesn’t matter if you are rich or poor, or educated or not, so long as you are in the wrong place at the wrong time. So in our topsy-turvy, mixed up world, trauma becomes a real achievement, a short cut to a significant life, whose significance cannot be challenged. However, I imagine, given the blanket bombing of trauma stories by the media, that times will eventually change: not because we have found a way to value the richness and complexity of so-called ‘normal’ life experience, but because of that ugly quality in humankind – compassion fatigue.