Updates
1 May 2015: PEN and Freedom of Speech
Asking people to decide for themselves how much offense they want to take misses the point, unless you are advocating open slather on offensive remarks. Surely the more important question is how, why and to what extent might this be offensive to someone from a particular background or who has particular beliefs.
PEN and Freedom of Speech
My view is that the writers who have withdrawn from the PEN event have made the wrong call – though I have some sympathy for their attempt to acknowledge the cultural complexities and the underlying sensitivities of the issues – just as I think it is clear in hindsight that the writers who squirmed and hedged in 1989 when the fatwa was pronounced on Salman Rushdie, those who suggested in one way or another that maybe he shouldn’t have been quite so provocative or offensive, also made the wrong call.
Gig Ryan and difficulty
The idea that poetry is more difficult than fiction has a lot to do with the failure to recognise that a different method of reading is required by each. A collection of poems is typically 96 pages in length. A novel could be anywhere between, say, 250 and 500 pages. If you allow the same time for the reading of each – on the basis that the same degree of effort has gone into the writing of each – then, simply on that basis, you would have to accept that a page of poetry requires three to five times the attention given to a page of fiction.
Edward O. Wilson and the Meaning of Existence
It is Wilson’s central contention that science and the humanities should cease to regard each other as separate or competing endeavours that turns out to be the weakest aspect of his argument. In principle, the idea is a good one, but his characterisation of the humanities is dismayingly reductive, and often condescending. His perspective is, in essence, a form of conventional humanism.
Samuel Johnson and Critical Matters
One of many charming essays by Samuel Johnson is number 176 of his Rambler series, first published on 23 November 1751, in which he takes up the subject of criticism. It is a short essay, and not necessarily one of his greatest, but it is one in which his singularly gruff and appealing persona is very much in evidence, in the way that he moves from archness to sober reflection, and on to his rather melancholy moral conclusion.
On novelists and poets
The prejudice against poetry goes deep, and it isn’t simply a matter of it being ‘difficult to read’. I have often heard this criticism levelled at literary novels too – ‘it’s difficult to read’. What actually rises before me at this moment is the phrase, ‘the market says no’, delivered in the same self-righteous whine that David Walliams uses in Little Britain to defer to the authority of his computer. But deeper than the sense that the poets are trying to put one over their readers is the assumption that they are bludgers as well as con artists, and therefore have no right to be in the marketplace at all.
Ishiguro and Genre
The release last week of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Buried Giant, his first in a decade, has sparked an exchange between the author and the venerable science-fiction and fantasy writer Ursula Le Guin. The point at issue was Ishiguro’s apparent reluctance to embrace wholeheartedly the term ‘fantasy’ as a descriptor of his novel, even though it has obvious affinities with the genre.
On The Stella Prize
If I were a novelist longlisted, or shortlisted, for the Stella Prize, and I lost out to a historian, I would wonder at the criteria that had been at work in deciding the award. If I were a historian and I lost to a novelist, I think my hackles would be raised at the possible implication that the imaginative penetration of the writer of fiction was once again being placed above the interpretive powers of the historian.