The Buried Giant by Kazoo Ishiguro: The Illusion of Allusion

The Buried Giant Kazuo Ishiguro. Faber  2015

 

‘The Romans have long since departed, and Britain is steadily declining into ruin.’ Blurb.

Discussions of literary allusions usually disappear into theories of intertextuality, rather than discussions of the effects specific examples have on the reading of a particular text. The Buried Giant is an example of conscious intertextuality, where elements of the story are deliberately waving in the direction of any number of famous texts.

A Saxon warrior brandishes his trophy: ‘…what they were looking at was not a head at all, but a section of the shoulder and upper arm of some abnormally large, human like creature.’(p76). In case the reader misses the reference, a character explains: ’Our hero killed both monsters. One took its mortal wound into the forest, and will not live through the night. The other stood and fought and for its sins the warrior brought of it what you see on the ground there. The rest of the fiend crawled to the lake to numb its pain and sank there beneath the black water.’ (p.76)

A Saxon hero, two monsters, one with its arm ripped off sinking into the black water. Minor variations, but too close to Beowulf to be anything else. Later, the same hero will go into combat with a dragon. But if Beowulf is being alluded to, knowing the poem adds nothing to an understanding of The Buried Giant, and The Buried Giant doesn’t offer any kind of insight into Beowulf.

There is a knight called Sir Gawain, a recently dead king called Arthur, a magic wielder called Merlin, there are wild women to be met on a blasted plain, a dragon to be killed….but what are all these allusions doing? Instead of adding significance, the ceaseless, enthusiastic pilling up of literary references empties the words of meaning.

 All the aging Sir Gawain has in common with the hero of Arthurian romance is the name. A cross between Don Quixote and one of the Knights Alice meets in Through The Looking Glass, who just might also have spent time in Browning's Child Roland. He is every literary Knight and no one in particular.

Arthur was a gift to medieval storytellers because he provided them with a ready built story world. And the basic outline of the story, established by Geoffrey of Monmouth, gave the world a beginning and end. But since Arthur became a character in modern films and fiction, the Arthurian story world is no longer coherent. Gesturing towards it gains the writer nothing. There are so many characters called Arthur, in so many divergent versions of ‘his’ story. The recent film ‘King Arthur: legend of the sword’ could have been called King Bob and his magic stick. Prior knowledge of King Arthur is of no help in understanding either that film or The Buried Giant.

The allusions do create an air of familiarity. A post ‘Arthurian’ world of villages and knights, Britons and Saxons, evil lords and inevitably crazy sado-masochistic monks. But nothing in the story alludes to anything specifically Arthurian except the names. The king could just as well be Good King Billy Joe Bob. Sir Gawain could be Barny, Billy Joe Bob’s nephew. Change the names, leave the story set in a fantasy world set in pseudo medieval times, and lose nothing. It would still be a fine story. It just wouldn’t feel quite so superficially self-consciously ‘literary’.

The Beowulf character Saxon tells his apprentice that the stone monastery was once built by Saxons as a defensible hill fort, which includes an ingenious stone tower to trap the attackers. If this is immediately post Roman Britain, then the Saxons didn’t build in stone until very much later.

The Saxons and Britons could be Twiggles and Boggles. The story world would then create and define the Twiggles and Boggles. Instead nothing in the story distinguishes them, they are labelled Saxons and Britons, but they have very little, if anything, to do with any meaning those words have outside the story in either history or literature.

The Arthurian/Beowulf background is short hand wall paper, a cheap set dressing, not to be taken too seriously, not to be examined too closely. It gives the book a ‘literary air’, in which the writer shows off his reading and a certain type of reader gets to feel literary because they recognise the texts. But the names and the words have been emptied of meaning. They point everywhere. They are full of sound and fury, and signify nothing.

 

 

Wildcat dreams in the Death Light by Regan M. Sova

This review originally appeared in the Brazen head Here

Reagan M. Sova. Wildcat dreams in the Death Light. First to Knock, 2022, 265 pages.

 ‘Wildcat Dreams in the Death Light is an incantatory work of narrative poetry. Infused with hobo melancholy, Jewish lore, bloodshed and hilarity…’.

It’s rare for a blurb to be so accurate. For the price of the book, Reagan M. Sova will perform as ring master, troubadour, high wire artist and magician to entertain and dazzle the awestruck crowd.

 Set in the first decades of the 20th century, the story is told by Mort Sloman, who leaves home at thirteen. He falls in with a circus, falls in love with a Gypsy trapeze artist, discovers friendship across the barriers of race and difference, witnesses institutionalised racism, violent death and corruption, joins the Wobblies and unionizes his circus, travels through Europe during the First World War to Egypt, returns to America to help the union cause and finally performs the festival of light for his dead relatives.

 A lot happens.

 At the beginning, the narrator sets out on a quest, mounted on a mule rather than a white charger:

 i/consecrated unto myself the sacred mission
the ceremony of light to honor Frank and Aunt J
i had the song in hand but i
could not do it without the right guitar
nor the Locksmith keys
not even the rabbis have them 

While this quest gives the story a beginning and end, the ‘sacred mission’ fades into the background, replaced first by Sloman’s devoted pursuit of the gypsy acrobat, then by his experiences with the travelling circus, and his involvement in the IWW.

Although set in a world anchored in the familiar by historical names; The Ringling Brothers, Big Bill Hayward, Eugene V. Debs, The IWW; recognisable conditions; whites only hospitals, and historical events like the Frist World War, the story moves in a liminal space that shifts Sloman’s journey into the realm of legend.

The circus, which Sloman calls ‘The Kingdom’, is a ready-made symbol of America, with its outcast others, unusual characters labelled as freaks, and self-confident, exploitive hucksters and frauds. An American Dream where the poor boy escapes the bullies, finds love and wealth, and where the good guys find friendship and love and win despite the odds stacked against them.

The poem exploits its own intertextuality in a cheerfully unembarrassed way. There are echoes of Whitman and the Ginsberg of Howl. But the influences are taken and adapted. A rambling man bound for glory with guitar on his back, writing songs and supporting the union, evokes Woody Guthrie, but the verbal inventiveness of Sloman’s songs is a world away from Woody’s. Like Sloman’s parade, which begins with himself and his friend and grows throughout the story, Wild Cat Dreams in the Death Light is robust and generous enough to accommodate whatever resonance the individual reader brings to the party.

The dominant stylistic presence, however, is Frank Stanford and The Battle Field Where the Moon Says I love you. Of all Sova’s many magic tricks, the most impressive is the way he  has managed to take Stanford’s instantly recognisable style, make it his own and adapt it to his own purposes.

By shortening Stanford’s line, leaving it unpunctuated and rarely end stopped, Sova has given the poem a rhythm which carries the reader through Sloman’s adventures. Stanford’s distinctive incantatory eruptions are present, but kept under control so they never take over the story the way they do in The Battlefield. They are a major factor in producing the slightly hallucinatory effect that keeps shifting the story from its factual, historical setting into the dream realm of legend.  

When Alf, the circus master, asks the 13 year old Sloman what he could have seen ‘with so few years under your cap’, he replies:

i have seen the elderly monk gored by the falling icicle
i have seen the family of elk sleeping next to me in the moonlight
i have seen bob’s jar of brandy
i have seen the vial of goof dust I used to trick the trickster
i have seen the blood trickling
from my grandfather’s ear when he died roller-skating
i have seen good luck without grace invite darkness
i have seen the Gypsy’s vision of my death by the mountain 

This early list is typical of the many that follow. They can include everything from the factual to the surreal, as Alf’s reply does. Sometimes it is not obvious how the items coalesce into coherence. Their exuberance often seems an enjoyable end in itself.

As well as contributing to the tone of the story, they serve another function. A long narrative poem needs variety in pace. A relentlessly onward rush becomes as boring as a story that goes nowhere. Part of Sova’s balancing act is to know when to allow the voice to narrate action without interruption, and know when to pause the narration and use the incantatory to add variety.

In the circus, the emperor’s armless great granddaughter plays the violin with her toes. As an image it’s simultaneously pitiful and ridiculous. Like the circus performers, the story risks absurdity. In the wrong hands, much of it would be silly. But the final magic trick, and perhaps the most subtle, is to make Sloman’s voice and story believable on its own terms and hold a reader’s attention for two hundred and fifty pages.

Stylistically assured, inventive, entertaining, Wild Cat Dreams in the Death Light is that rare thing, a well-written narrative poem with a distinctive style creating a distinctive story world.

The Release by Jeremy Hooker

 

This began as an attempt to write a review of Jeremy Hooker’s The Release (Shearsman 2022). Then I began to wonder if it is possible to write an honest response that wasn’t distorted by the paradigms of the literary poetry review.

‘The Release’ is a combination of prose journal recording time Hooker spent in hospital between June 2019 and August 2020 and the poems that grew out of the experience.

I read it in one sitting. The remains of ex-tropical cyclone Tiffany were still rummaging round the coast, occasionally crashing rain against the house. When the floor to ceiling curtains were blown horizontal, I remembered to stop and close the windows. Otherwise, I went on reading. 

A positive, enthusiastic response.

I wondered if I could review it. Then it occurred to me that what might be important was my reaction to the book, and my ability to explain that was secondary. We learn to read poetry in school, and we naturalise the idea that the appropriate response to the poem is analytical and critical. 

I am increasingly convinced that an enthusiastic response is initially more important than the cerebral one that comes in its wake. Without it, or at least an acknowledgement of its absence, criticism starts in the wrong place and is never more than a performance with a text as a starting point. I’ve read so many critical discussions of poets and poems that make me wonder if the critic or reviewer enjoyed the work they were writing about. 

In hospital, Hooker was reading Barry Lopez’s Horizon. It’s impossible for me to read his comments without remembering the first time I heard that name, who I was with, where we were, or remembering sitting on a sand dune watching the sun rise over the Pacific, reading Crossing Open Ground. 

It’s for me impossible not to be interested in what Hooker has to say about David Jones. His book on Jones is still one of the most sane and lucid discussions of that baffling writer, and over the years he’s qualified and revised his opinions and hasn’t been afraid of doing that in print. I’ve recently being struggling with a critical book on Jones published in 2021, wishing the writer had Hooker’s clarity and generosity. 

And the poems. The Selected Poems, published in 2020 were impressive, but these seem to have picked up and gone further, giving the lie to myth that poets do their best work in their twenties.  

However, to enter into dialogue with a third party about poetry it’s necessary to go beyond the subjective. Who cares about my reaction to Barry Lopez? Who was David Jones? And then there’s another immediate problem. How do you talk about poems? There are ready made tool kits available from which you could cobble a passible review if you were lazy. 

There’s The Reviewer Tool Kit. It contains phrases and words like ‘brilliantly original’ ‘innovative’, ‘genre breaking/bending’, ‘searing’, ‘coruscating’ ‘raw’, ‘honest’. The poet is ‘reinvigorating the language’, ‘redefining poetry’, ‘pushing the boundaries of the possible.’ Most of the time, if you’re honest and not ignorant or suffering from Historical Amnesia, you know they don’t apply. You can count the truly original, ground breaking genre breaking poets in the 1500 years of English poetry on one hand. 

There’s also an Academic Poetry Tool Kit which has changed so greatly in my life time. The formalist reading gave way to ‘theory’. That seems to have faded. Today, you don’t even need to read the poems. If the poet is dead, you can rifle through the biography and the letters, commenting on statements which suggest political affiliations no longer in fashion, or time bound attitudes that are no longer acceptable. Or the poems can be discussed in terms of ideologies, praised when flying the flag for whatever group is currently fashionable, or whichever particular ideology the critics are currently marching behind, damned when they don’t. 

Either tool kit allows the reviewer to sound like a wine connoisseur flaunting the appropriate vocabulary; the equivalent of a knowing wink or secret handshake for a limited circle of cognoscenti. To most people, it sounds like a wine connoisseur fraudulently trying to sell the nastiest chateau de plonk. Or for those of us old enough to remember, earnest music critics trying to intellectualise The Stones.

To strip away this sludge and get to the experience of reading a book requires an effort and the results are neither succinct nor pretty. In Joyce’s phrase, one is always going to be ‘almosting it’ teetering preciously on the border lines of an informed and hopefully intelligent subjectivity threatening to disappear into vagueness.

After all, the book that redefines your world can bore your best friends. Your highly erudite, well-read acquaintance thinks there’s something very wrong with you because you cannot see any value in the poet he or she is spruiking.

And discussing poetry becomes even more difficult, when dealing with a poet like Hooker who avoids the tricks and twitches of the fashionable. 

One of the earliest surviving comments on a poet in English is Laȝamon's succinct praise of Wace, whose work he must have lived with and known inside out and backwards as he translated the 15,000 lines of his work.

Boc he nom þe þridde; leide þer amidden.   
þa makede a Frenchis clerc; 
Wace wes ihoten; þe wel couþe writen.

‘He could write well.’ There may be few poets in history who are original ground breaking language reinvigorating or boundary pushing but there’s a host of great poets who wrote well and will always be worth rereading. Tongue in cheek, is there anything else needs be said about Yeats? 

However, (again) if I move from the subjective to the public, is my knowledge of poetry broad enough and deep enough, and have I considered it thoroughly enough, to validate the statement ‘This is well written’?

It is still not enough. There are any number of modern poets who can ‘write well’ whose work is instantly forgettable. Their books are on my shelves and once read rarely get taken down. Who would pay to hear a guitar player run scales? The poem has to be well written, and at the same time offer something to the reader beyond the spectacle of a self-applauding performance. 

I don’t know the answer, or if there is an answer.

END OF PREAMBLE.

The Prose.

The journal entries in The Release are an elegant record of a questioning intelligence moving through a difficult personal time and shaping that experience in clear precise prose. 

Presented as an integral part of that experience, there’s a perhaps unfashionable set of questions. What is the purpose of writing poetry in English in the 21st century; what is the purpose of art; is great art possible or desirable; what is the role of ego in first person poetry and why is the NHS so badly underfunded and staffed by overworked people who appear in the pages of the journal as compassionate figures doing their best.

For Hooker the first question seems as important as the last. He navigates his way tentatively, while recording his dealings with the other people in his ward, the staff, visitors and the inevitable health concerns, so the literary is not presented as something precious and off to one side but as mundane and important as being wheeled off for an ECG. 

‘Feeling his way’ [his term] allows the writing to perform its own contradictions and avoid didacticism. I might agree with him that we need admiration bordering on hero worship in poetry, immediately qualifying that by pointing out he’s hard on his heroes, but that thought is already qualified by his references to the television in the corner of the ward and the politicians we’ve been saddled with by a different kind of hero worship.

At a time when the concept of ‘Great writing’ is often treated with suspicion, Hooker advances a case for the human need for art that does more than pass the time or reassure the audience that they’re marching in the right direction with the right crowd behind the right slogans. 

He quotes Barry Lopez twice: ‘All great art tends to draw us out of ourselves’ and then Arvo Part’s wife telling Lopez that ‘what her husband composes can reassemble a person.’   

Hooker comments on the second quote: ‘This is perhaps the greatest claim for art’s potential effect that I’ve met. I know that it’s true.’   

Stand in front of a work of art, literally or metaphorically, and experience awe. Realise the gap between you and the made thing, and have the humility to recognise the gap and the confidence or faith to make that leap to embrace it in all its challenging alterity. If, as Hooker says ‘Poetry speaks human. And human is relational’ (p.30) then in doing so discover, paradoxically, in your reaction to the singularity of the work of art, a relationship to common humanity. 

Perhaps you’ve never done this. It is difficult. You’d have to overcome so much; the automatic qualifying doubt a modern literary education drills into students; the profound suspicion of art as ideological weapon with designs upon the audience; the baffling but popular idea that art should reflect the viewer’s aims and interests, should comfort it with platitudes and commonplace, should above all else agree or provide a fashionable banner to march behind, and if it doesn’t then the best response is the bunker mentality where you hunker down behind the barbed wire of your own unexamined beliefs and then wonder why the art you see, the poems you read, are so instantly forgettable.

For decades, Hooker has been engaged professionally with what used to be called ‘Great Writers’. His pantheon is personal: Richard Jeffries, Edward Thomas, David Jones, J.C Powys and others. Over the course of that engagement he has refined his own ideas about them and his own work. The knowledge that there is Great Writing, and the nagging questioning of what makes it great and what it does that other writing doesn’t, informs his own poetry. The concerns in their broad outline are common enough, what makes Hooker’s exploration of them is the honesty with which he’s willing to approach them, and the fact he does it without recourse to theory or its jargon.

There are no easy answers. There may not be any answers at all. But reading Hooker is to follow a single intelligence moving through them, and we don’t have to agree with where he goes or how he gets there, but we should be grateful someone is willing to mark out the terrain.

The journal records four stays in hospital. It provides the ground (in both the common sense and the old fashioned musical sense) for the poems. Hooker is present in the prose: his reading, his questions, his biography, his memories, but he’s absent from the poems. The prose at times risks making the reader answer the question: why are you staring over my shoulder? The poems are stand-alone works of art.

The Poems 

Escape

Over the hills

            as a shadow chases cloud

            as a clod springs up 

            becoming lark

as thought from the lamed body

            flies

beyond the blinds

as word leaps to lips

seeking a way

            over the hills.

 

One tempting manoeuvre for the bemused reviewer is to slip into a discussion of ‘What the poems are about.’ Cue memories of English classes and the teacher demanding ‘What is this poem about.’ ‘What do you think the poet is trying to say?’ Even if I thought those questions were worth asking, and outside the classroom I’m sure they are not, they are made redundant in The Release by the prose.   

The prose is a journal, as such there are parts of it that are personal: memories, the absence of a loved one, lists of names who visit or call that mean nothing to someone who doesn’t know them. An honest journal cannot avoid what Lewis called ‘privatism’. But the poems, while produced by the experience and the concerns, float free of their circumstances and stand alone as achieved works of art. 

This distinction is fascinating, not only because it seems to answer one of Hooker’s own questions: how to be a lyric poet and not be a poet who parades his own ego as subject matter. Perhaps the metaphor which allows me to get closest to what I think is happening is the idea of windows, which runs through the prose and then becomes a poem which ends: 

Truly we owe thanks 

to the art of the glazier

which lets the outside enter 

and the inside reach out

driving back the dark.

                                    In Praise of Windows. (p.76)

A man in a room, living his life, his memories, concerns, interactions, connected to the world allows the outside to enter. That’s the prose. But he’s looking outwards, and the poet practises the art of the glazier, letting the outside enter, but shaping it as poem, as objects to illuminate the dark. They capture bright moments of seeing. 

Metaphors are always inexact, therefore two quotes to qualify this image. The first is from Hooker’s tribute to R.S Thomas.

We have heard his voice.
It will not be unheard. 

We have looked with his eyes.
What he has seen
will colour our seeing. 

‘Eglwys Hywyn Sant, Aberdaron’ .  Selected poems, p. 251

It’s so very apt for R.S.Thomas, but I’d conscript it to describe Hooker’s best poetry. I live by an estuary and every gull on a post evokes Hooker’s poem of that name in his Selected Poems. The two seagull poems in The Release do the same thing. The everyday is presented in a way that is accurate as observation, but shaped in a way that invites the reader to look again. You’re being offered a glass to look through that frames the object. If you live on the coast no poem can make you see sea gulls ‘for the first time’, that’s nonsense. But a poem can colour the way you see them. 

As for style, it’s not easy to talk about a poetic that leaves out the tricks of the modern poet yet delivers far more than the simply declarative. The best way to illustrate Hooker’s style would be to reprint the book here. 

As that is not possible, another useful quote, this time from Briggflatts, where Bunting is praising Domenico Scarlatti. Initially it might seem strange to link Scarlatti’s fifty-five notes to a bar ripple and rush with Hooker’s uncluttered poems. Bunting first, then Hooker.

 

It is now time to consider how Domenico Scarlatti

condensed so much music into so few bars

with never a crabbed turn or congested cadence

never a boast or a see-here, and stars and lakes

echo him and the copse drums out his measure

snow peaks are lifted up in moonlight and twilight 

and the sun rises on an acknowledged land. 

 

Gulls

 

First, they were voices

speaking a language 

familiar to me, but

untranslatable, that

sounded like need need need 

 

I felt it was the sea

they were crying for 

the element that mothered them

restless provider, giving 

and withholding,

constantly unstill.

 

Ghost bird, pleading

theirs was the voice 

that troubled my cradle.

In age, it returns

with the night wind,

shrilling, bringing back

the beginning, promising the end.  

                                                 (p.93)

No pyrotechnical ‘see here’, no congested cadence of jumbled syntax, no boastful ‘Look at the vocabulary I pillaged from the thesaurus’ or ‘Be impressed by my references to things you’ve never heard of?’ Hooker writes well. It should be the highest praise. 

In the prose, he writes about art as conversation, and the poems have a conversational tone only someone who is tone deaf might think artless. However, Art as conversation means more than just tone. It’s difficult to explain. You know it when you read it and the effect is complex and profoundly satisfying. 

If the poet and the man in the hospital bed are the same man, unified not just by a shared flesh but by an intelligence that refuses to split them, a particular kind of intelligence which takes the world in and shapes it into verbal patterns, then it follows that the poem and the world it describes are not separate. 

The poem isn’t the world. It cannot make the sunrise or be the sun. And the sun cannot care for the poem. But the poem can acknowledge the world, frame it in a way that invites looking, and simultaneously situate both writer and reader in it. 

The last three lines of the Bunting quote get at this in a way that I can’t verbalise. 

The magic of the effect of an honest poetry in dialogue between the poet and the world and the poem the reader and the world lies in a complex of ideas clustering round that word ‘acknowledged’. 

[…] and stars and lakes

echo him and the copse drums out his measure

snow peaks are lifted up in moonlight and twilight 

and the sun rises on an acknowledged land. 

 

The short version review. 

Hooker’s ‘Selected Poems’, along with Maurice Scully’s ‘Things that Happen’, would have had my votes for outstanding poetry publications in 2020 had there been votes for such a thing. They are very different poets, but equally admirable. The poems in ‘The Release’ move on from those in the Selected with no loss of quality. Here’s hoping there will be more. 

Until then, buy ‘The Release’. And Hooker’s ‘Selected Poems’. And while you’re at it, buy Scully’s ‘Things That Happen’ and contemplate how two excellent poets can be so wildly different.

 

 

   

Treacle Walker by Alan Garner.

I have been rereading this little book with great pleasure for some weeks. My admiration for Alan Garner’s writing, see here for the long version, http://www.liamguilar.com/alan-garner,  is undiminished, and remains just this side of idolatry. 

But I’ve also been reading reactions to Treacle Walker. There’s a lot of discussion about meaning, and readers are off down the rabbit hole to learn about Bog Bodies and Knockout comics, folk beliefs about cuckoos and bone whistles, as they exist outside the story.

What does it mean? The question we learn in school. You read the book, or the poem, or the play, and someone asks you ‘what does it mean?’ and you have to provide a neat answer. 

It’s a linear, logical process, and it produces a reductive answer. Once you’ve answered the question you’ve made the story redundant. 

It’s one way of approaching a book, useful in a classroom where teachers have to assess language skills.

Two thoughts. 

If the story can only be understood after extensive research into a wide body of (possibly infinite) external information, then isn’t that proof the story fails as communication? By all means go and learn about Rag and Bone men, or comics and their essential role in teaching generations how to read. That won’t ‘explain’ the story.

Secondly: a more important question in terms of storytelling, rather than ‘what does this mean?’: ‘What does the story do to you, the reader?’

Between the first word and the last, there’s a space for thinking through and in language in a way that is unique to stories. Treacle Walker is not a memoir or an essay. It doesn’t matter if you read every Knockout comic or know everything there is to know about Bog bodies. It doesn’t matter if you’re not old enough to remember rag and bone men. 

What matters is what those images and phrases and individual words are doing for you, as reader, between the beginning and end of the story as you read it. Then in its afterlife after you’ve finished reading. There is no exam; no right answer, and you don’t have impose your response on anyone else, or have theirs imposed on you.

The story means itself. Let it come to you. Have the humility to trust the story teller. It may not work for you. That’s fine. That says something about you, not the story.

But If you can reduce its meaning to a couple of neat sentences, it isn’t much of a story. 

The Song of Achilles, by Madeline Miller.

Looking aslant at how other people retell famous stories  #2.  It's what Eliot called workshop criticism. Not so much 'reviewing' in this case as using some one else's work to critique your own and hopefully avoiding what another critic called 'a veiled self-indictment'. 

Eliot's presence is not mere name dropping; The Song of Achilles evokes Eliot's 'Mr. Pound's hell is a hell for other people.' which was his criticism of Pound's Hell Cantos.

The Song of Achilles, by Madeline Miller.

I suspect that this book and Barker's 'The Silence of the Girls' prove that retelling some stories kills them.

Stripped to its bare bones, The Iliad is the story of two brutal thugs fighting over a brutalised girl in the tenth year of a brutal war that has been watched over by Gods who would look immature in a kindergarten. The poem works because of what it does with that material, and at least in translation, seems fully aware of both the terror and attraction of war, the complexity of its characters, and the terrible human cost of 'heroism'. Heroic poetry might pretend to be realistic reporting from the front line, but it never was. Even Homer notes his heroes belonged to a past which dwarfs his present. 

I don't pretend to know The Iliad that well. I only read the whole thing recently when I was doing research for A Presentment of Englishry and realised the characters in the Brut would have the stories from the Iliad and the Aeneid in their bones.  

I'd always assumed Achilles and Patroclus were lovers but that didn't stop Achilles from using Briseis as his mattress. He's not nice or likeable in any way; he's terrifying in the extremes of his behaviour.  And while Patroclus, who I thought was the older of the two, showed some compassion for his wounded comrades, one of the most memorable images in all its gallery of graphic slaughter is this one:

 

Patroclus rising beside him stabbed his right jawbone
ramming the spearhead square between his teeth so hard
he hooked him by that spearhead over the chariot rail
hoisted, dragged the Trojan out as an angler perched
on a jutting rock ledge drags some fish from the sea
some noble catch, with line and glittering bronze hook.
So with a spear Patroclus gaffed him off his car,
his mouth gaping round the glittering point
and flipped him down facefirst
dead as he fell, his life breath blown away. (trans Robert Fagles)

Visualise that image.

Or in Christopher Logue's version:

As easily as later men/ Disengage a sardine from a tin.

which is so good. 

Retell the Iliad, or any famous or well-known story, and the original characters and their actions are going to be ghosting in the background.   

‘The Song of Achilles’ seems to be split in two. In the first half Thetis and Chiron are memorable creations and Miller evokes the god shadowed world of palace culture, even if at times the narrator seems to see his own culture from the outside.   

The first half sets up an intriguing tension its source. In Book 16 of the poem, Patroclus will fight heroically and die trying to scale the walls of Troy, alone. He's so successful he's only stopped by Apollo. If he doesn’t learn how to fight, how will he slaughter so many Trojans, including Zeus’ son? How will he narrate his own death; will the story go on from there? Is he already dead and telling the story in retrospect? Who is he telling this story to? Why is he telling the story? The tension created by these questions are part of the strength of the first half of the book.

Then the narrative moves to Troy and it’s as though we’re suddenly in a version of the Hunger Games or Divergent. The Trojan war sounds like an fun adventure, inconvenient at times but mostly picnics and swims and burgeoning relationships, with happy kind hearted work healing  the wounded and sick. If you can ignore the nasty people in your team, it’s all very nice. 

Thetis spoils things a bit as the disproving adult but our sympathies are not with her. It's not entirely clear why she disproves of Patroclus, or why Achilles loves him. Or in what particular way Achilles is admirable or loveable as a person? Agamemnon is once again reduced to a cardboard cut out no army would follow.   

The only thing that matters is that Achilles doesn’t kill Hector, because if he does, Achilles will die soon after and that would make Patroclus sad. It doesn't seem a good reason to make a war last ten years. It seems almost intolerably selfish. 

As the quote above suggests, ‘Homer’ never flinched from the nastiness of combat. Deaths tend to be detailed and rarely if ever anonymous. There was nothing nice about the Trojan war.

But this story doesn’t just flinch, it looks away. 

The war takes place ‘over there’. To make Patroclus and Achilles into fictional heroes for current fashions, so much of the story has to be reworked. Put a modern sensibility down in the Trojan war, the war would be intolerable. The killing is up close and personal, women are treated as sex toys. The heroes of the poem would be dysfunctional in modern society. Make the Trojan war tolerable for a modern reader, and you do strange things to the war. 

Even when Patroclus is slaughtering Trojans in his final day, (having only killed one person, by accident, in the whole book) it’s not really him that’s doing it. He might be killing Trojan after Trojan (with one exception they are anonymous) but he avoids responsibility. He’s just getting carried away; maybe it’s the armour that’s doing it. He's a nice boy really and gaffing someone off a cart and laughing at someone's death throes is not our boy. Achilles kills huge numbers but they are a test of his skill and anonymous. He kills with the indifference of a WW1 machine gunner cutting down faceless rows of enemy soldiers at a distance. Day after day.

The reworking of Briseis is probably the strangest shift in the story. Taking away the nastiness of the original allows our heroes to be kind and considerate, and allows Patroclus to have a friend in the camp and a potential wife. They have picnics together while everyone else is off fighting. You know you’ve entered a weird version of the story when Patroclus and Achilles are ’saving’ captured Trojan women. They give them their own tent, teach them Greek, and some find husbands eventually amongst the Greeks and that’s nice for them, isn’t it. 

Briseis has a crush on P. But P is faithful to A. And then you read: ‘Achilles stayed away. He knew they [the captured women] had seen him killing their brothers, lovers and fathers. Some things could not be forgiven’. (219) Why would he want their forgiveness? Or care? He is happy for Greeks to die en masse to make a point about his honour, or to kill anonymous Trojans en masse cos that’s his day job, but he doesn’t want to hurt the feelings of some captive women? What kind of disconnected person is he? 

P’s ‘saving of Briseis’ after she has been seized by Agamemnon is very strange. He tells Agamemnon that if he has sex with her, Achilles will be justified in killing him. And in fact it's a set up and this is Achilles’ plan. And...I almost gave up. But I didn’t. 

The famous 'Rage of Achilles' now reads like the peevishness of a spoilt adolescent, who runs to his mummy when things aren't going his way. The scene with Priam, which is one of the reasons you read the Iliad, is not that important to our narrator. Despite the constant reminder that he is 'half God', Achilles, stripped of his outrageous extravagance, becomes...? 

Our heroes are like well-behaved adolescents on a school camp. The war is a picnic interrupted by messy injuries to other people. Diomedes and Ajax and the others are brutal. But they are other. There are rapes in the camp. But they are committed by others.  The death of Briseis and the fall of Troy are brought about by Achilles' twelve year old son who is a card board cut out of a nasty piece of work. Bad people do the bad things. Hell is a place for other people.

And at the end the lovers die happily ever after and are reunited in Hades. Which if it's anything like the place Odysseus visits later on, isn't really the happy ending it pretends to be.

Overall, there's a tension in the story between the realised god haunted world of Ancient Greece, and the modern sensibility of the one dimensional central characters during the war. The tension splits the book in two halves. 

I wonder if this is symptomatic of a contemporary trend in treating the distant past. It seems to belong with the idea that Vikings were sexy. And perhaps any kind of moral ambiguity or complexity isn't possible in fiction any more. 

This isn't meant to be a review of The Song of Achilles. It's a fantasy novel with a pre fabricated setting. And if you like adolescent fantasy novels, this is a well-written one. But I wonder if anything is gained by setting your fantasy in the distant past if you're going to transport modern characters and modern sensibilities into that setting.

A review of sorts: The Gododdin, by Gillian Clarke


Gillian Clarke’s fine new translation of Y Gododdin


The Gododdin Lament for the Fallen A Version by Gillian Clarke. (Faber 2021)

 

Soldiers stormed, fired up by mead,
Mynyddawg’s men, as one they died.
Famous in the war, they paid
For all night feasting with their lives.

 Caradog. Madog, Pwyll and Ieuan,
Gwgon, Gwiawn, Gwyn and Cynfan,
Steel-armed Peredur,
Aeddan and Gwawrddur.
Shield-Shattered fighters slew and were slain.
Not one of them came home again.

(p.59)

 Y Gododdin may be the ‘oldest surviving British poem’. You can split hairs and call it ‘The earliest Scottish’ or ‘The earliest Welsh’ but those terms would be anachronistic. Although only surviving in a manuscript from the 13th century, it purports to be the work of Aneirin, who may have lived sometime around the end of the 6th, the same time as Taliesin. It is a collection of individual poems ‘Gorchenau’ celebrating the deaths of men in a battle that may have been fought on an unknown date in a place that is often identified as modern Catterick. 

Historically there’s a lot of ifs buts and maybes. 

There is no narrative, but the ‘background story’ can be pieced together. Mynyddawg the Generous, the Luxurious, the Magnificent, gathered an army by feasting it for a year. At the end of the year 300 or three hundred and thirty three rode south from modern Edinburg and were slaughtered. Only one man, the poet, survived the disaster. Or perhaps three men. And the poet. Or three men including the poet. You could be cynical and say this is the foundation text for the great British habit of celebrating its military disasters.

Establishing a text has taxed the skills of some of the most prominent students of early Welsh. Anyone interested in the difficulties should try Kenneth Jackson’s The Gododdin (Edinburgh University Press, 1969), in which he scrupulously provided a literal reading of the poems, acknowledging where he could not provide either a reading of the text or a translation of what he’d read.

The original manuscript is difficult to decipher, once deciphered the language itself is hard to read, archaic in places. What, if any, of the text can be reliably dated back to Aneirin is a matter for scholarly debate. This may seem academic but what Clarke calls the ‘earliest known reference to Arthur’ is only ‘the earliest reference’ if that particular line can be dated with confidence. 

While we should be grateful for all this scholarly attention, without it there would be little chance of reading the poem, it tends to reduce the poems to a potential, but highly problematic, historical source which might date to a period where there is an astonishing scarcity of insular texts.

If you’re not interested in the history, why bother? The first answer is obvious if you ever have  the chance to hear Y Gododdin read by a native welsh speaker. If poetry is words organised to pattern sound, or patterned sound organising words, Y Gododdin is a marvel.  

The experience of reading the poem takes the reader out of modern assumptions about poetry, poet and poem. The Gododdin is a public poem, designed to be recited to an audience. The Bard’s role here is to celebrate the dead, to record for posterity that these men earned their mead. 

In her introduction, Gillian Clarke shows she is aware of all the scholarly debates but sets them to one side, and approaches the poem as poem. This presents its own problems, of which she is also very aware. The languages and poetics are so different that any attempt to copy Welsh poetics into English tends to be unimpressive. It’s as though the high stepping, graceful Welsh pony has suddenly become an arthritic elephant with indigestion. Clark successfully avoids this. The book is very carefully titled ‘A version’, perhaps to ward off the attention of the small group of experts who could challenge the literal rendering of her work, and in her introduction she claims her aim was to produce a version which works in English. I think she has succeeded. 

Compare Jackson’s consciously literal version of these lines:

And unless one had been well-nourished it was not possible to withstand Cadfannan’s blow. (Jackson)

With Clarke’s and then with Clancy’s.

Armour and shield could not save them.
None but the nourished fight Cadfannan (Clarke p.9)

None could, on mead he was nourished,
Ward of the stroke of Cadfannan. (Clancy p 34)

So if you want an English translation of the Gododdin, this is it. It’s not literal, but it sings in English. If you’re curious what a poem written over a thousand years ago might look like, or you want to read a version of a poem that was important to David Jones and Basil Bunting, Clark’s version is the one to read. (There are others, but they are becoming impossible to obtain. And while we’re at it, Bunting’s ‘I heard Aneirin Number the dead’ passage in Briggflats is probably the neatest introduction to the poem you’ll find.)

 

2

Reading from beginning to end is a strange experience. The names blur, the verses blur, this is not the rhetorical device of repetition with variation, this reflects the fact that the options the poet’s culturehad offered for praise were limited. X was brave, X was generous, X fought like an animal, X died.

 The world evoked is also strange. The highest praise this culture could offer a man was to say he was eager for battle, a ferocious, exuberant, merciless killer, and he died slaughtering his enemies. And while my admiration for the translation should now be obvious, I’m not so impressed with the packaging. 

 I may be in a diminishing minority, but I prefer the past plain. (Or as plain as it can be). I don’t want it softened or censored. 

 The book is subtitled ‘A Lament for the Fallen’ and the blurb tells us that ‘Clarke animates this historical epic with a modern musicality, making it live in the language of today and underscoring, that, in a world still beset by the misery of war, Aneirin’s lamentation is not done.’

 From one of the UK’s leading poetry publishers the sloppy description of the poems as an epic is surprising. But what do the words ‘Lament’ and  ‘The Fallen’ evoke for you? A minute’s silence on Armistice day, the bugler playing the last post, the solemn laying of wreaths at the cenotaph and those seemingly endless rows of crosses in France? If you’re Australian or a New Zealander, the dawn service on Anzac day?  

 To present The Gododdin as a lament is to misrepresent the poem. There are occasionally verse that express sadness, but there are very few and they are swamped by the rest of the poems. The majority of verses are celebrations of the violent deaths of exuberant killers. 

 To present this as ‘a lament’ is to soften it, to use a loaded phrase like ‘the fallen’ is to associate these dark age killers with the volunteers and conscripts of the first world war or the professional soldiers of the twentieth and twenty first century. It seems like an attempt to make Y Gododdin more acceptable, more ‘relevant’ to a modern reader who obviously lacks the imagination or curiosity or willingness to encounter the past in all its confronting strangeness. 

 Medieval Welsh could do laments. In the poems of the Llwyarch Hen cycle, or the poems in Canu Heledd, the personal cost of warfare is made obvious. Heledd laments the death of her bothers:

The hall of Cyndyllan is dark tonight
Without a fire, without a bed
I will weep and be silent. 

But is this a lament?

Flaunting a brooch, he rode ahead,
Warrior, princely leader,
Killed five times fifty with his sword.
Two thousand men of Deifr and Brynaich’s men
Died in an hour in mire and mud and blood. 

Sooner meat for the wolf than to his wedding.
Sooner carrion for the crow than priest-blessing.
Before his burial, the field lay bleeding.
In the hall where mead flowed free
the poet will praise Hyfaidd Hir. 

The Gododdin is the lie one generation told the next. Be a ferocious warrior, disdain the soft things in life, be eager for battle, be happy to die knowing your name will live on forever in the poets’ words. (Ironically of three hundred, not all are remembered with their own verse.)

In the context of its time it was a necessary lie. These men are not fighting for creed, country or ideology. They are fighting for stuff; to protect their Lord’s boundaries, cattle, and wealth or to steal another Lord’s land, cattle, and wealth. 

At a time when the elite were armed and combat of one sort or another was a part of life, you want your young men to believe the lie. Because if your young men say, well, actually, no, we’d rather not fight, there are better to things to do, then you’re going to be raided, enslaved, or killed. And you’re not going to inspire the next generation if you tell them the reality of being stabbed and hacked and bleeding out on a battle field, or losing consciousness as the ravens start on your eyeballs. 

The poet wants his audience to believe that the heroes of the previous generation sought death in battle in the hope that their dying was worth a song. In reality, they risked death or injury in battle because that’s what men of their class did to earn stuff to improve their lifestyle. Their goal was to die of old age, surrounded by friends and family in relative prosperity. 

If they had all known they were all going to die at Catraeth, they might have preferred to stay at home.

Attempting to domesticate the past so it can be packaged to a modern audience might make sense to the marketing agency, but it is a trendy mistake. It’s the flip side of cancel culture. Neither wants to deal with the past as it was. 

The Gododdin is a relic from a very different world.

Sooner meat for the wolf than to his wedding.
Sooner carrion for the crow than priest-blessing.

Imagine saying this of a young man today? We criminalise or professionalise our killers. If this was true of Hyfaidd Hir, then he would be a disturbed, disturbing personality in our society. Pretending he is one of the ‘fallen’ like the volunteers on the Somme, who left their daily lives to become ‘soldiers for the duration’ is to misrepresent him and his culture and the soldiers on the Somme.  

The past, especially the early medieval past, should knock us back on our heels. Reading The Gododdin should not be a comfortable experience. And on the recoil, we should be thinking  that if the Aneirin’s of the world are ‘still singing’ their lie, then it’s about time they shut up. 

Gillian Clarke’s excellent translation deserved better packaging. 

 (And one minor quibble. It’s a bonus to have an easily available Welsh text of the poem, but there needed to be a note explaining how the editors arrived at this particular version of text.)

Laȝamon's Brut. Vortigern, Medieval Narrative and History 2/3 History

‘Fiction.’ 

(for ‘History’, see previous post)

So Laȝamon isn’t writing modern History. That’s not really surprising. ‘History’ was split decisively from ‘Fiction’ over a century ago, but ‘written fiction’ is just as artificial a construct as ‘written history’ and Laȝamon isn’t writing modern fiction either. .

Everyone tells stories from the time they can talk. But ‘fiction’ is conventional. And the rules governing it are as artificially made and as historically contingent as the rules governing the writing of ‘history’.

A modern fictional character is a proper noun, with a cluster of attributes and actions. In modern fiction the attributes and actions should be motivated and consistent. Would-be novelists are advised to ‘know their characters’, to work out ‘the back story’, to creat lists of likes and dislikes, even if these won’t appear in the novel.  Apparent inconsistency is risky but permissible, if the narrative explains the inconsistency. 

One of the underlying fictions of both history and fiction is that humans are rational and their actions are coherent, motivated and understandable by a third party. 

Which brings us back to Vortigern as Laȝamon presents him. 

Laȝamon makes no attempt to supply Vortigern with motivation. He flashes onto the screen as a fully-fledged villain who wants power. He’s ready to do anything to get it. That I could cope with. His past, what makes him who he is, is a blank. I can cope with that too though I find myself shading it in as I go along. 

But once he’s in power the story edges towards the preposterous. There’s nothing unusual in his willingness to hire Germanic mercenaries. This was standard Imperial practice. 

But we are then expected to believe this hard headed, power grabbing regicide is tricked into giving land to Hengist, the leader of his mercenaries.

When Hengist asks for Land, Initially, sensibly, Vortigern refuses the request, knowing his people will object. Hengist then asks Vortigern to grant him as much land as can be covered by a bull’s hide and oblivious to what’s coming, Vortigern agrees. When he’s found his ideal spot, Hengist has the bull’s hide cut into a single unbroken thong which allows him to map out a large plot of land where he builds Thongcaester.

At which point you’d expect any real, hard-headed military leader to have said, listen here, chummy, that’s not what I meant and you know it. But our man doesn’t. He just accepts it. It feels like the narrative has been conscripted by one of the Clever Hans type folk tales you find in the Grimm’s collections. 

With a place to call home, Hengist now sends for his wife and daughter. The wife is never mentioned again. But the daughter is trouble. We are now asked to believe that having allowed himself to be cheated out of land, Vortigern is going to jeopardise everything he’s worked for, to get his hands on a pretty girl. I don’t buy it. I see no reason why the leader of a group of mercenaries wouldn’t marry his daughter to his boss as part of family politics. But such a business transaction should have been hedged around with conditions. Blind Freddy can see that making your servant your father in law shifts the power balance in a dangerous direction. 

Nor does it make sense that Vortigern doesn’t insist she convert to Christianity first. It’s not as though he’d be waiting for her to take a theological degree. We’re asked to believe that he’s so besotted with her that he can’t wait to get her into bed and therefore skips the whole Christian marriage ceremony, although he must know it will annoy his British subjects and alienate the Church, which will not (then or now) accept the union as legitimate. He also gives away Kent as her bride price which is also guaranteed to infuriate both its current owner and his supporters.

I want to know how the original audience reacted to this.

And that will take us to the observation that something odd is happening in these stories with implications that go far beyond my interest in this narrative.

Vortigern and medieval narrative. 1/3 History

History, fiction and the strange relationship between the imagined and the known.

Part one: ‘History’ revisited.

I’ve finished the first draft of the story of Vortigern. And I’m still nagging away at what I can learn by trying to rewrite a 12th century story. I’ve tracked the story of Vortigern (see the legendary history on the main menu of this site) and how it changes from Gildas, via Nennius to Geoffrey of Monmouth and Wace, to Laȝamon.

Chapter one of my ‘versioning’ appeared in Long Poem Magazine, chapter two, three and four in the Brazen head.

To make the story work as a modern narrative, I’ve had to make changes. It’s the reasons for these that intrigue me.

But the more I do this, the more I’m beginning to believe that while there are many, obvious differences between the middle ages and now, if you strip away the technology, sometimes the differences are not as profound as they first seem.  

Take the twin ideas of ‘History’ and ‘Fiction’. It’s obvious twelfth century writers didn’t treat these ideas the same way we do. But who is the ‘we’ in that sentence. 

Laȝamon’s version of history, like all the other medieval writers in my list, is a record of individuals and their actions. The Picts attack Britain because Vortigern betrayed them. Roman Britain falls because Vortigern can’t control his lust for Hengist’s daughter. 

A modern Historian might explain the fifth century in terms of ideology and economics, as the inevitable result of internal and external pressures working on a weakened western empire. They will debate migrations, elite take overs, continuity vs change etc. They are unlikely to look to the actions of a single individual for explanations.

Which brings home the nature of ‘History’ as a modern discipline. For all its basis in facts and evidence, it is still an attempt to narrate the past, but to narrate it in order to know it in a peculiar way. If it ever succeeds, ‘it’ will ‘know’ the fifth century with a precision no one living in it ever did. Firstly because the fractured, localised experience of life in the fifth century cannot compete with the Historian’s overview. The written materials that do survive were written by people who could only write what they knew and what they knew was limited. 

Secondly, modern technology can measure time to a Zepto second: That's a decimal point followed by 20 zeroes and a 1, and it looks like this: 0.000 000 000 000 000 000 001. It’s unlikely that anyone is aware of time passing in such small increments. A modern ‘History’ of the fifth Century in Britain often seems to be based on the assumption that the past can be known with such objective precision. We have DNA testing, increasingly sophisticated dating techniques etc.etc. which leads to an increasing unwillingness to accept anything unless ‘scientifically proven’. And in extreme cases the strange attitude that says since there’s no evidence for roaming war bands in the archeological records there were no roaming war bands.

But just as you can’t remember a zeptosecond that occurred last week, people living through the fifth century responded to what they thought they knew, not to the objective ‘truth’ of the situation. Modern history may well prove them all to be deluded, and their writers were mistaken, exaggerating, or lying. 

But before we dismiss Laȝamon’s approach as ‘medieval’ it would be instructive to compare his treatment of Vortigern with journalistic treatments of the recent Trump Presidency, or of Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, or even Scott Morrison. (I’m not going to do that, reading about these gentlemen is depressing enough without spending more time thinking about them than necessary.)  

Power, politics and current events are presented by the modern news media in terms of personalities. The systems that made a Mr. Trump or Mr. Johnson inevitable are rarely discussed. Their personality, actions, words are. Laȝamon and his audience would be completely at home. 

And before we dismiss the medieval writer for his willingness to include the obviously fantastical or irrational, some of the vociferous responses to the Government’s attempts to get everyone vaccinated against Covid might qualify the idea that we are living in a rational age.

For most people ‘History’ as a discipline is something they brushed against at school. It’s not the way they think about the present or the past. 

And watching the state governments respond to the threat of Covid-19 in Australia, I’m not convinced that the actions and choices of the individual players aren’t capable of affecting history. 

In the next post, Fiction medieval and modern.