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Fantasy Fiction League

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

In the first year of my MA, I remember a workshop discussion kicking off about whether the chapter I’d just presented was fantasy. People were using names like China Meiville and Michael Moorcock. It came as a surprise to me. I thought I was just writing fiction.

Perhaps I was naive: the chapter contained a time-lapse mirror, a mystical stream that animals refused to cross and a fob-watch made by Da Vinci.

I don’t read fantasy novels at all. Never have. The Hobbit was read to me at school, but I gave up 20 pages into the Lord of the Rings. I’ve never read Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams. When I’m in proximity to an adult reading JK Rowling, I become queasy.

I’ve always been aware of fantasy fiction. As a teenager I read lots of sci fi. I would buy yellowing short story anthologies from a long gone second hand book shop. It introduced me to authors I still love; Philip K. Dick, Tom Disch, Alfred Bester – even Borges and Ballard. I liked the multiverse narratives and time travel paradoxes. I loved soft, psychological science fiction. Speculative fiction, Harlan Ellison campaigned to have it re-labeled.

But, in all that time, I never knowingly made it more than a few pages into a bona-fide fantasy story. Or, perhaps I mean Fantasy – big, capital F – with their flutey names and fairytale-written-large world building.

The assumption that the novel I’m writing is Fantasy, with a big F, seems to come from the fact that it has magical and metaphysical elements. But, this in turn is simply a reflection of a wider interest I have in the nature of perception. I have, for example, a novel idea in the bank about deception and cons. Another (which I’m intending to write before I finish the larger project I’m currently working on) has a theme running through that explores the disconnection between the real self, the self people project and the self people perceive.

I am interested in fiction that has magical or metaphysical elements. But did Marquez or Calvino write fantasy? What about John Collier? Is Will Self’s Dorian a fantasy novel? Or Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow? Or Iain Banks’s The Bridge? Or Chuck Pahlahniuk’s Lullaby?  All have fantastic elements and other-worldly devices. All are considered contemporary fiction.

I’m not quite arrogant enough to put myself in the same league – but I’m aiming in that direction, rather than in the direction of, say, Raymond E. Feist or Robin Hobb.

Does that make me a snob?

I’m not sure. One thing I do know is, I’m not keen to have that label put on my work so early. Not because I categorically don’t think that it’s fantasy. It’s possible that you might find enough points of similarity to prove that it is. But, it’s also other things.

I’m keen to avoid the label because genre writing is a ghetto. Fantasy, horror, sci-fi… they have smart and loyal fans. If my work’s good enough, they’ll find it anyway. But, do mainstream readers venture into the section of Waterstones full of Harry Potter, Discworld and Twilight? Can you cross the other way?

The more I think about it, the concept of a mystical stream that animals refuse to cross seems plausible.

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A Joke for Marxists

Thursday, February 25, 2010

A guy walks into a theatrical agent’s office and says “Sir, have I got a really special act for you!”

So the agent says “OK, I’ll indulge you, how does it go?”

“Well, my wife, my twelve year old daughter, her four year old brother and I come onto the stage. In a loud clear voice I announce ‘My wife and I are in favour of a feudal system of subsistence in which we own the means of production, paying a downtrodden proletariat labour force minimum wage to work long hours in our factory while we ponce around in the countryside chasing foxes on horseback’. Then we send the kids to boarding school on the proceeds, spending the rest on big dinner parties, antique furniture and fine wines”.

The agent looks at the guy for a minute and says, “That’s quite an act you got there, what do you call it?”

And the guy says “The Aristocrats!”.

—

P.S. Go here if you didn’t get it.

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A Slight Apocalypse

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Rosie wrote her list on a sheet torn from a telephone directory. Mrs. Durkin wanted dusters and wax. The Reillys needed bedding; blankets, sheets – whatever could be salvaged. Eileen at number 64 was running out of flour, salt and patience.

On the blue Formica top a gallon canister of used vegetable oil glugged its contents into a bucket. To filter out burnt crumbs, she covered its mouth with an old pair of pants. Knickers, her mum used to call them. Everything these days is so Americanised, she would say.

Bag check. There was water in a Coke bottle and bread wrapped in newspaper.  There was an adjustable spanner and a screwdriver; tools on a good day, potential weapons on another. And in the bottom, in the blue light from a wind-up torch, a few sticking plasters, some ibuprofen and a cluster of sherbert lemons.

The pail brimming, she began unlocking the kitchen door. Dead-lock first, top bolt, bottom bolt, Yale. She looked out through the crack, the width of half a face, down the path and through the weeds. She’d need to take care of those. Back towards the garden – the communal garden she used to share with old Mary upstairs, that she now shared with the street – the potatoes were through and would need digging in again. No sign of carrots yet. She pulled the door closed for a moment, leaving a peardrop ghost of breath outside. She undid the chain and heaved the bucket through with two hands.

The funnel was where she’d left it; fixed with a length of hairy string, pendulum swinging from the passenger side wing mirror. She unlocked the old Volvo’s diesel cap, decanted the oil. It smelled like chips in a tray and plastic forks. The memory of them.

As she tipped fuel into the car she heard her name called hoarsely. Over her shoulder, a netball’s throw down the street, was Cecil Lumus. When she spelled his name in her head, it was See-sill. He had been jogging, trying to catch up with her, yellow vest patchy with sweat. Now he was resting, panting, palms on his cords. He waved.

“Rosie,” he said, with too little breath to say it, too quiet for her to hear. He had a bandage on his right hand trailing a grey tail, a stain like jam on the back. She put down the bucket.

“Cecil,” she said, “What you running for?”

“I didn’t. Want. To miss you,” he said, fat chest spreading, contracting and spreading. He put a hand in his pocket, pulled out a blue inhaler, clicked the cartridge and sucked. It was empty.
“You haven’t missed me. What’s the fuss?” she patted his back, his scratchy jacket.
“It’s Dor,” he said, hands still on his knees, “She’s not right yet,”
“You need me to get some medicine?”
“No. No,” he said, standing and stretching, “Ben. He’s looking out for her”.

Ben had done two years at medical school. Rosie remembered him from the Copywriter’s Arms; haircut like pineapple fronds and a posh voice that carried over the jukebox. His quiz team had always come second. Still did.

“Dor has a sister in Camden. My phone’s not working,”
“No one’s phone works any more Mr. Lumus,” said Rosie.
He took out an envelope, purple, smelling of lavender.
“You want me to take this to her?”
Cecil nodded. He took off his little grey trilby and fanned himself with it.
“No problem,” she said, “It’s already on its way,”

She put the note in her satchel and took Cecil’s hand. He was breathing more easily.

“Do you want a lift to the end of the street?” she asked.
“No, thank you,” said Cecil, “I want to sit for a while,”

The Volvo started on the third try, burping cobalt smoke from the exhaust as Rosie drove along South Terrace towards Bedford Road, past the park, past Alexandra Palace, slow enough to look long and hard at London through the black trees. Everything was the same as it had always been.

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Duet

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

A bit of a cheat this one… first draft was done in 15 minutes – but polishing doubled the word count. Not so much fast as medium paced, then.

I turned the brass knob, bigger than my hand, and entered the class room. Mr Crampton was waiting, trumpet poised, turning pages.  A Sugarloaf Mountain silhouette against arched, white-out windows, he inspects crotchets and minims, quavers and semitones, with half moon glasses.

There were two chairs. High, wooden and as brown as burning butter. Seats of brittle leather and horsehair stuffing were squashed into inverted buttock shapes. Mr. Crampton’s and mine.

I heaved the torn, brown case onto the desk and popped the clasps. Inside, a soprano cornet; a nest of tarnished tubes, unfathomable, like pipes in a cellar.

Mr. Crampton settled on a page, bent the spine of the book over his bristly knee. Rattling valves, the mouthpiece held close to his lips; a thin bow accented by a circumflex of moustache.

“Au Clair de la Lune, Mr. Bradley,” he said.

The mouthpiece, unwrapped, would not find its way into the instrument. A thin metal cuff, worn from replacement and removal, refusing penetration.

Mr. Crampton remained still, fingers in first position.

I sat and raised the assembled cornet to my puckered lips. The taste, like an old teaspoon.

“Au Clair de la Lune, Mr. Bradley,” said Mr. Crampton.

Starting on G – four crotchets, two minims. Another bar of crotchets, a dotted minim. The music rests for half a note. It stops for a breath and…

“No, no, no,” said Mr. Crampton, “Has this instrument been cleaned?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Open the water valve,”

I blew through the open cornet. Nothing but a pipe, now. A meagre dribble from morning practice leaked from the hole.

“Again,” he said.

One, two, three, four. Three. Four. One, two, three, four, one…

“Stop!” he said, “The minim is dotted, then a rest. Da da, DA da, daa… then wait,”

In the silence, Mr. Crampton’s amphibian eyes rolled white and skywards.

“Have you practiced?” he asked.

“Yes,”

“Every day?”

“Yes.”

He slapped down his hair, greased into a flap, short white bristles at the back and at the sides.

“Again. Two, three, four,”

And this time I only played two bars. Just eight beats.

“No!” he cried, slapping the book. The music stand teetered, wobbled and righted itself. He covered his eyes, inhaling long through congested nostrils, whistling a perfect C.

“I should be selling snow to Eskimos!” he said, mist popping from thin lips trained to spit air, “I may as well with all… this!”

He gestured towards me, my borrowed cornet, the mothballed room. My chair rocked back on two legs creaking.

“I ask you to practice, you don’t practice. I ask you to clean your instrument and it is filthy. It is filthy!”

His face was red. Red pushing at the walls of his veins and his body, trying to escape. And he trembled. A shiver and a twitch that pulsed accelerated in his pink hands and pounded inside his waistcoat.

“It is filthy like you. Filthy like all of you!” he spat, the valve now fully open. No music – just a tangle of pipes. And this time, when he hit the book, it flapped and clattered across the room along with the stand and the notes and the song about the moonlight.

Then I spoke. He did not hear me.  I could not hear myself over the sting. I was wet. My face and my new school trousers. I was filthy. My mum would kill me.

I said:

“I did practice,”

Though he did not hear, he looked. His face became soft, jowls quivering like an old dog’s. The blood drained away and he fussed in his pockets.

“Oh, my dear boy,” he said, “Blow your nose”.

He handed me a paper tissue. I wiped my face and blew my nose. I offered the tissue back.

“No, no, put it away. Save it for later,” he said.

I did as I was told.

“There’s no need for tears now,” he said, “It’s only a tune,”

I nodded. Held my cornet hard on my lap, hooks and collars catching my fingers. He picked up the book and the stand. Tears still came, swelling inside me and silently bursting through. One drip. Another.

“Here,” he said, holding out a brown mint in a cellophane wrapper, “There’s no need for all this. No need for anyone to know. We know how to play this, don’t we? You and I?”

I nodded. The humbug was buttery.

“What’s the first note?”

I looked. The dots and lines meant nothing.  Sticks and scratches, now. Doodles on a page.

“What are the notes on the stave. How do we remember?” said Mr. Crampton. He placed his hand on the back of my head.

“Every Good Boy Deserves Favour,” I said.

“That’s good,” said Mr. Crampton, “So the first note is?”

“G,” I said.

“That’s good,” said Mr. Crampton, “That’s very good”.

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The Man Booker Re-Run…

Friday, February 5, 2010

In 1971 the Booker switched from being a retrospective of the previous year’s pile of letters to the cutting edge taking of the literary pulse it aspires to be. So, while the prize was still run in 1970 and 1971 – the books that were shortlisted came from 1969 and 1971.

A year was missed out.

The Booker’s archivist, Peter Straus, is resurrecting the lost prize, with a long list drawn from the best novels of 1970.

The intriguing thing about this exercise is just how packed the list is with names you actually know, rather than reading room debutantes you’d usually have to Google.

Giants like Iris Murdoch, Christy Brown, Joe Orton, Shiva Naipaul and H.E. Bates. It’s like a greatest hits list. There’s also more than a little nod in the direction of populism with Melvyn Bragg, David Lodge, Ruth Rendell and Len Deighton appearing.  Christ, Brian Aldiss is even on there.

Brian W. Aldiss. The Science Fiction author who wrote the critically acclaimed “Barefoot in the Head”.  Imagine Iain Banks getting on the list now?

This stellar list is possible because, ironically, Straus stuck to Booker rules. All the novels in this re-run competition are still in print.

A couple of thoughts bubble up. The first is, what incredible work may we have missed due to the absence of the Booker that year? Which first time novelist, in an alternate reality, parlayed the attention they received into an entire career?

Of course, we could have missed some awful dross too.

This is a Darwinian Booker list. There may have been more novels eligible for the list in 1970, but perhaps the lack of demand for them 40 years on says something about their quality. This list has been chosen by time. By survival.  And so,  for once, it’s a Booker long list that you might actually want on your bookshelf.

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Breaking In is Hard to Do

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Literary Agent Janet Reid posts an annual breakdown of the reasons why she rejected incoming manuscripts from wannabe authors in the previous year.  Though her populist roster may not be pertinent to many (or any) reading this – it makes interesting reading:

Statistics to torture yourself with in 2010

Some of her older posts are informative too.

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They’re Plotting Against Me

Friday, December 25, 2009

People (tutors, writers, other students) have told me the same thing in different configurations: “Characters drive the narrative!”

I nod. I agree. I go back to quietly and tightly plotting and planning every aspect of the novel I’m writing – because, actually, I don’t really believe it. I read interviews with writers who say they invent characters and they sort of wander off and do their own thing.

“They’re out of my control!” they cry, “She wanted to spend the entire book weeping in a cupboard”.

Of course, character is important. Characters must be satisfying by whatever criteria you wish to measure satisfaction. But should they be given minds of their own and set free to do whatever they please? Moulded from clay like goylem?

Stephen King claims that’s what he does. Not actually renanimate mud, granted, but he says in his memoir On Writing that he starts with character first and plot grows from what those characters go off and do.

Funny, then, that in every single one of his novels his characters make bad decisions that turn out to be influenced by some guilty secret from their childhood/the past which manifest as destructive supernatural forces.

Because ultimately, it doesn’t matter how comprehensively characters are constructed, they are always invention. As such, they are subject to the same limits of invention as plot. They are fragments of the author.

I say this because, implicit in the notion that character is paramount – that modern fiction must be a facsimile of reality – is the twin idea that plot is redundant. Or, at best, secondary.

Thing is, I like plot. I learned how to love plot from reading science fiction short story anthologies, dozens of them, throughout my adolescence; one tightly described high concept after another. Characters reduced to cyphers.

And while I don’t subscribe to the view that characters should be mere pawns, shifted around in one of a number of finite patterns, I don’t feel satisfied unless I’ve been given a conundrum to solve; a set of ideas to work through.

A story.

And here’s  the link that starting me thinking about this, on this cold Christmas morning, instead of presents and egg nog; an interesting piece from the Wall Street Journal about a resurgence in plot.

(…) the discipline of the conventional literary novel is a pretty harsh one. To read one is to enter into a kind of depressed economy, where pleasure must be bought with large quantities of work and patience. The Modernists felt little obligation to entertain their readers. That was just the price you paid for your Joycean epiphany. Conversely they have trained us, Pavlovianly, to associate a crisp, dynamic, exciting plot with supermarket fiction, and cheap thrills, and embarrassment. Plot was the coward’s way out, for people who can’t deal with the real world. If you’re having too much fun, you’re doing it wrong.

Lev Grossman – Good Novels Don’t have to be Hard

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Breaking into Writing – Paolo Bacigalupi

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

How do you break into the literary world?  In an interview with Wired, Paolo Bacigalupi, tells us it’s 85% graft, 5% inspiration, and 10% reading lots of fantasy and SF magazines… sort of.  Here’s the relevant bit:

“Pocketful of Dharma” was the first story that I sold, and that was really my first attempt at writing something short.

I’d stalked William Gibson at one point at a book signing and had asked him what his secret to success was.  You know I was a very hungry, very needy sort of writer and was just looking for any kind of a clue about how the whole thing worked.  I sort of hovered over his shoulder while he was signing other people’s books.  I hit him with all of these questions and one of the things that he said was that he’d written short stories until somebody would take him seriously and that was when he managed to actually sell a novel.  So I sort of took that to heart and went home and sat down and was like: ‘OK, so I need to write a short story.  How the fuck do I do this?’  

So I bought some science fiction magazines–fantasy and science fiction magazines and stuff– and read all of the short stories in them and went, ‘OK, I just need to write something better than any these things.’  I sat down and started banging away and eventually what I got was “Pocketful of Dharma.”

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Remembrance

Thursday, December 3, 2009

First published in Scifantasic, Issue 3, 2005

I don’t know exactly where I am, but I know almost everything else.  Problem is, I’m forgetting it all.  In the last few minutes I’ve lost the entire lineage of mammals from prototype amoebae to the nascent apes, the French revolution and the collected works of Enid Blyton.  Half an hour ago I could have given you the blueprint for cold fusion, outlined a plan to reverse global warming and cured herpes (simplex and complex).  Of course, the losses are relative.  I estimate that I can still remember 52.3% of the knowledge in the Universe.  By “knowledge” I mean all the data that can be known about it and how it can be applied.  Yeah, I know.  I’m great.

Unfortunately, that percentage is dropping.  My head just dumped Terran arctic geography, the history of cheese and everything you need to know to work in Public Relations (which is, admittedly, very little).  I retain enough of my faculties to realise that you’re probably wondering how I came to be such a prodigious individual. It will surprise you to know that you and I were once the same.

Let me backtrack a little; give you a bit of “local colour” to help fill in the picture.  Just don’t expect me to stay inside the lines.

Some time ago – using the word “time” loosely here as I’m talking about a realm that lacks that dimension – I was waiting for a new body.  Though, to be honest “waiting” is a relative term too.  Long story short, I was absolute.  A being of infinite space and dimension, existing at all points in time at the same moment.  There was no short or tall, fat or thin for me; my physicality was minimal.  In the strictest sense I wasn’t a being at all, but the potential to become a being.  You might have called me an idea or a possibility.  It doesn’t really matter. You can call me George if you like.

News update; total knowledge retained, 26.4% and declining.  That’s still pretty impressive though.  I know how to splice DNA and which bits to splice with which.  I know how to breathe underwater.  Alas, it’s all leaving me – dripping like the milk from a cracked coconut.  Soon, all that will be left is the new flesh I’m locked in.

And that’s the key, really.  Have you ever made yourself a really big sandwich to take to work?  You know what I’m talking about – one of those triple-decker things with salad, tomatoes, cheese, ham and mustard; the works.  Then, you try to put it in your lunch box and you can’t quite close the lid.  Well, I’m trying to fit the biggest sandwich ever made into a tub that can barely hold a bagel.

Oh, listen to me being so dramatic.  Of course, I’ll remember some things; a tiny part of the original knowledge I currently hold.  I couldn’t put a figure on it – because I’ve already forgotten how to calculate it – but it’ll be a fraction of one percent.

There’ll be basic language structures, but no real language.  I’ll remember that crying brings me assistance and that I need to eat and sleep.  There lies the greatest irony.  Struggling to cope with the enormity of our loss we, all of us, spend the first months of our lives trying to pass what’s left of our knowledge on to anyone who’ll listen.  And everyone wants to listen to a baby; grannies and grandads, aunties and uncles, friends and acquaintances. Everyone listens but no one hears.

Then, the more language we acquire, the less knowledge we have to pass on.  Eventually, we’re reduced to a small palette of basic needs.  Feed me, burp me, change my soiled nappy you big lunk.  We communicate those needs through the medium of screaming really, really loud. Finally, the last whispers of omniscience simply fade away and we’re left vulnerable; tender as bruised fruit. Oh, the ignominy.

So, anyway, I’ll be seeing you soon.  I’m rotating into position now.  I’m pointing my head down so that I can begin the process of being born.  It’ll be a bit like fighting my way out of a padlocked sack submerged in jelly.  The womb’s a safe, soft place to spend nine months of contemplation, until the final few hours.  Then it becomes a cage.

What’s that?  You don’t remember?  That doesn’t surprise me.  It doesn’t surprise me at all.

You’ll remember one day.  One day you’ll be pruning roses or playing with your grandchildren or lying quietly in your bed seeing scary faces in the folds of your curtains.  It will come back to you like that – like the snick of claws cutting through bone.  You’ll balloon to three times your current size and spines of sharp cartilage will carve a row of fins into your back.  Your breath will become an acid gas and your eyes will acquire a second lid as the cones on your retinas multiply.  You will become what you have always secretly been.

Then the invasion will begin.

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Holden Back the Years

Wednesday, November 25, 2009
I’m reading “The Catcher in the Rye” for the fifth time – following on from a week dipping into Borge’s short story collection “Labyrinths”, The contrast between these two experiences has been instructive.
One of the themes of Labyrinths is the structuralist idea of reader as author.  Borges parodies the notion, belittles and criticises it by making it a joke.  In “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”, a cod-academic narrator unearths a transliteration of Cervante’s Don Quixote by a contemporary author. He describes Menard’s desire to make the text his own – to create his own Quixote.  But, we see that Menard has done nothing to the text at all; he has merely transcribed it.
In a key section, the narrator describes the difference between two identical paragraphs in the text:
“It is a revelation to compare Menard’s Don Quixote with Cervantes’. The latter, for example, wrote (part one, chapter nine):
‘. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor’.
Written in the seventeenth century, written by the “lay genius” Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:
‘. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor’.
The contrast in style is also vivid. The archaic style of Menard—quite foreign, after all—suffers from a certain affectation. Not so that of his forerunner, who handles with ease the current Spanish of his time.”
While this is clearly a stone thrown in the direction of New Criticism – the “intentional fallacy’ of Wimsatt and Beardsley that dictates  the irrelevance of authorial intention– I find that I can describe, anecdotally, a similar experience when re-reading The Catcher in the Rye.  The text is the same, but the meaning of the novel has changed for me over time, in the new contexts I’ve found myself in and with new experience to compare it with.
I first read it in the 1980s, when I was 16 – the same age as Holden Caulfield, the novel’s protagonist. The cliché is that when you read Catcher as a teenager, you become Holden.  That is, of course, what happened to me.  The first person narration, the post-pubescent angst, the easy colloquial style all contribute to the sense that your thoughts are Holden’s thoughts.  That he speaks with your voice and that you, like Holden, are in that limbo between child and adulthood.  You are disconnected and cynical and you know everything – just like Holden.
I read Catcher again at 21 and, if anything, I was in even more agreement with Holden’s rebellious take on the institutions of adulthood.  Curiously though, where I once felt that I was like Holden, this time I felt that he was like me.  I had by then a firmer grasp of who I was, what my thoughts and feelings were.  They had been, ironically, shaped by Holden and Rebel without a Cause and John Lennon. Of course, I wasn’t the first person to think like that.  Fortunately for me though, my relationship with the popular culture I loved didn’t make me want to kill my idols.
I had another go at Catcher at 27. At this point in my life I had been teaching at University level for three years – a job I enjoyed and was good at, but that was rife with political infighting at the institution I worked in.  At this point the first cracks in my love affair with Caulfield began to show. I felt ambivalent. I felt accused of selling out.  My Girlfriend of the time read Catcher too and, she said, found Holden “annoying”.  I didn’t finish the read through.
At 35 my dissatisfaction with Holden had come full circle. I saw him now as ungrateful and privileged; middle class and whiny.  His military school scholarship and New York brownstone lifestyle. His artistic siblings and mistrust of the popular.  I wanted to slap him.  It was, as reactions to made-up people go, a little extreme.
Which brings me to my current reading. At last, I’m detached from Caulfield entirely and Salinger is foremost in my mind. It’s the writing I see now; the narrative and its execution. Holden is a brilliant creation; a flawed and authentic anti-hero.  At 40, I can finally read that, see that, rather than looking for points of identification and reflections of self. I see, ironically, that Holden is a construction. He is a fiction. In his own words, he’s phony.  I’m the one who’s real.
Take that, Holden Caulfield. You little shit.

I’m reading The Catcher in the Rye for the fifth time – following on from a week dipping into Borges’ short story collection Labyrinths, The contrast between these two experiences has been instructive.

One of the themes of Labyrinths is the structuralist idea of reader as author.  Borges parodies the notion, belittles and criticises it by making it a joke.  In Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, a cod-academic narrator unearths a transliteration of Cervantes’ Don Quixote by a contemporary author. He describes Menard’s desire to make the text his own – to create his own Quixote.  But, we see that Menard has done nothing to the text at all; he has merely transcribed it.

In a key section, the narrator describes the difference between two identical paragraphs of text:

“The contrast in style is also vivid. The archaic style of Menard—quite foreign, after all—suffers from a certain affectation. Not so that of his forerunner, who handles with ease the current Spanish of his time.”

While this is clearly a stone lobbed in the direction of New Criticism – the “intentional fallacy’ of Wimsatt and Beardsley that dictates  the irrelevance of authorial intention– I find that I can describe, anecdotally, a similar experience when re-reading The Catcher in the Rye.  The text is the same, but the meaning of the novel has changed for me over time, in the new contexts I’ve found myself in and with new experience to compare it with.

I first read it in the 1980s, when I was 16 – the same age as Holden Caulfield, the novel’s protagonist. The cliché is that when you read Catcher as a teenager, you become Holden.  That is, of course, what happened to me.  The first person narration, the post-pubescent angst, the easy colloquial style all contribute to the sense that your thoughts are Holden’s thoughts.  You are disconnected and cynical and you know everything – just like Holden. He speaks with your voice and you, like Holden, are in that limbo between child and adulthood.

I read Catcher again at 21 and, if anything, I was in even more agreement with Holden’s rebellious take on the institutions of adulthood.  Curiously though, where I once felt that I was like Holden, this time I felt that he was like me.  I had by then a firmer grasp of who I was, what my thoughts and feelings were.  They had been shaped by Holden and Rebel without a Cause and John Lennon. Of course, I wasn’t the first person to think like that.  Fortunately for me, my relationship with the popular culture I loved didn’t make me want to kill my idols.

I had another go at Catcher at 27. At this point I had been teaching at University level for three years – a job I enjoyed and was good at, but that was rife with political infighting at the institution I worked in.  The first cracks in my love affair with Caulfield began to show. I felt ambivalent. I felt accused of selling out.  My Girlfriend of the time read Catcher too. She found Holden “annoying”.  I didn’t finish the read through.

At 35 my dissatisfaction with Holden had come full circle. I saw him as ungrateful and privileged during that reading; middle class and whiny.  His military school scholarship and New York brownstone lifestyle. His artistic siblings and mistrust of the popular.  I wanted to slap him.  It was, as reactions to made-up people go, a little extreme.

Which brings me to my current reading. Again, I’m enjoying the novel – but for different reasons.  I’m detached from Caulfield entirely and Salinger is foremost in my mind. It’s the writing I see now; the narrative and its execution. Holden is a brilliant creation; a flawed and authentic anti-hero.  At 40, I can finally read that, see that, rather than looking for points of identification and reflections of self. I see, ironically, that Holden is a construction. He is a fiction. In his own words, he’s phony.  I’m the one who’s real.

Take that, Holden Caulfield. You little shit.

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