Peter Stothard's Blog, page 41

The festival consensus

By TOBY LICHTIG

Having greatly enjoyed last weekend's Latitude Festival – as described in my previous post – I do have one small whinge.

On the final evening, there was a debate about the future of the arts in Britain. Producers and critics lined up to argue for increased government arts funding and less emphasis on measuring "value". Michael Gove and his legacy came in for a general pasting and a pleasant glow of mutual righteousness hung about the Literary Arena. Everyone was in agreement. Or almost everyone.

Despite my own instinctive support for state arts subsidies, I found myself relieved to hear a dissenter in the crowd make the case for self-funding. Good art, she argued, needs to pay for itself; hand-outs can lead to complacency, a sense of entitlement. Not a popular view, but a different one, and a reminder that a good panel consists of competing voices. There was a murmur of disgruntlement among the audience before the event was sadly called to a close, punch-up averted.

This brief episode seemed to expose a fault with the Latitude programme – and the programming of so many similar festivals I've attended over the years. Crowds at such events tend to be overwhelmingly middle-class (weekend tickets cost well into three figures) and liberal in sensibility (the carnivalesque atmosphere doesn't exactly lend itself to conservatism – at least not social conservatism). And the programming, rather than challenge the consensus or provide fodder for a decent debate, tends to reflect this. I'd have liked to see a rebel voice or two on that panel; a case for the right – if only to bolster my own generally leftist sympathies.

It's worth noting that even Hay, despite being sponsored by the decidedly un-left-wing Daily Telegraph, isn't immune to cries of leftist elitism, as evidenced by last year's row over the "exclusion" of Margaret Thatcher's biographer Charles Moore, along with David Goodhart of Demos, whose book on immigration, The British Dream, led the festival's director Peter Florence to complain about "Tory posh boys". (Moore did appear at this year's event.)

If festivals such as Latitude really want to rock the boat, then I'd argue for some representation from the right. Preaching to the converted may leave everyone feeling warm and fuzzy but what, ultimately, does it achieve? This thought had also struck me on the previous day when I'd found myself walking briskly past the tent in which Vivienne Westwood appeared to be agitating for the takedown of the global capitalist order. People sat nodding in agreement – before toddling off to buy their £5 smoothies.

To be fair to the panel on Sunday night, they did engage with the dissenting voice before the event ended. Alistair Spalding, the artistic director of Sadler's Wells, argued that it is above all necessary to convince the public that the arts matter, rather than just demand money from the government and expect it; and Lyn Gardner of the Guardian reminded us that those who spend the most on the National Lottery (in the northeast of England, for example) also tend to get the least return in terms of arts investment.

Gardner also made the point that festivals such as Latitude encourage experimentalism in art because productions are devised "on the hop", audiences are free to come and go as they please, risks can be taken and polish jettisoned in favour of innovation. "It stops prissiness", she said – a supposition borne out by much of what I saw last weekend. If some of this radicalism and diversity could be injected into Latitude's political programming, too, then it really could be, as I'd previously suggested, a Total Festival.

Total Latitude

By TOBY LICHTIG

If the Hay Festival is "the Woodstock of the mind" and Port Eliot "the Glastonbury of books" then Latitude near Southwold in Suffolk needs no comparison. The experience of attending might be labelled Total Festivalling.

Though many people are drawn to Latitude by the biggish-name bands – this year's line-up included Damon Albarn (excellent), James (ditto) and Lily Allen (whom we arrived too late to see) – there is no one artform that feels privileged above the rest. The sheer range of culture on offer is overwhelming, and much of this year's content was of a very high quality.

Latitude isn't enormous (this year's attendance was 35,000 compared to, say, Glastonbury's city state of around 140,000) but it makes up for size in breadth. Over a whirlwind forty-eight hours, I took in ballet, performance poetry, theatre, film, philosophy, literary debate, audio-visual DJ sets, a lecture on the neuroscience of memory, comedy, circus, cabaret (some of it desperate, some compelling in a Dadaist sort of way), Shakespearean criticism in a tiny shed, "live art", contemporary dance – and even found time for some old-fashioned gigs.

I missed out on a great deal too: Forced Entertainment's adaptation of Agota Kristof's The Notebook, for example, which Michael Caines recently wrote about in this blog; a selection of documentary films which featured at this year's Sheffield DocFest. The main gripe about Latitude is that there's barely opportunity to scratch the surface. And nor is there space. With the pleasures of high octane local cider and four main music stages to lure the revellers away (not to mention the beautiful sunshine radiating over this year's lush surroundings), I was delighted to see how crammed the "non-music" tents were: queues snaking around the block to catch the latest production from the Battersea Arts Centre; children and adults hanging at the fringes of a bulging marquee to catch snippets of Michael Rosen; people crowding on the bridges and river banks to watch the English National Ballet perform Van Le Ngoc's "Four Seasons".

The Literary Tent at music festivals can sometimes feel like a tokenistic affair, a place for partygoers to cower from the rain, nurse hangovers, find a quiet cushioned corner to catch up on some sleep. At Latitude there are three separate and generously spaced arenas for poetry, literature and science, as well as a 480-seat theatre and dozens of other smaller venues. And not one of them sat empty.

My personal highlights included a performance in the woods of a theatre piece by Clean Break entitled Meal Ticket: a deeply affecting series of interlinked monologues featuring three women reflecting on chaotic lives of alternating hope, desperation, dissolution and addiction. Snippets of memory ("I'm fourteen and sitting on the school bus") mingle with dreams and financial realities ("I need to pay £10.80 a week to visit my son"), the human drama given heft by doses of wry humour and jarring juxtapositions, such as when a comical anecdote about an acid trip is followed by one character's recollection of having no money for her dealer, "so I hit him with a hammer".

Clean Break is a charity that uses theatre to work with vulnerable women; all three performers were graduates of the organization's programme, and the stories were their own. With narcotic abuse a central theme, it was a canny piece of programming: recreational drug taking is widespread at British festivals and Meal Ticket explores its nasty underbelly. (Disclaimer: my wife works for the charity but she had no hand in the production.) 

Also highly memorable was the RSC's production of Alice Birch's Revolt. She said. Revolt again: a witty dissection of everyday sexism in all its pernicious banality. In the opening scene, which sets the tone for the whole, a man tries to seduce a woman, who subverts his witlessly domineering attempts at charm to imagine an erotic scenario in which – like a nightmare from the poetry of Rochester – she overpowers him, "enveloping you and consuming you". Further scenes challenge the language and expectations of the workplace, marriage, parenthood and pornography ("I am having a genuinely wonderful time", one debased pornstar assures us), before the various strands culminate in a hectic crescendo of competing sexist clichés.

More soothing was Patrick Barkham in the Literary Arena, speaking about his recent book Badgerlands and attired for the occasion as a badger. Barkham made a convincing case for why the nation's biggest predator needs to be nurtured rather than culled, and why the answer to Bovine TB lies in vaccination. The question is a fraught one, and at least one farmer spoke up in favour of culling. As Patrick Evans wrote in his TLS review of Barkham's book, part of the reason for the fierceness of the debate is that "nobody can decide whether . . . they are a pest or a national treasure".

Joyce scholarship: a male preserve?

Joyce photographed by Ottocaro Weiss, Zurich (1915)

By ADRIAN TAHOURDIN

While writing my most recent post, about the supposed unreadability of Finnegans Wake, I was struck by one particular aspect of Joyce scholarship: the large gender imbalance in those who have published books about the writer. A glance at the bibliographies of some of the books I was consulting reveals the following figures:

Finnegans Wake (Penguin ed): 16 male authors cited, two female authors

Ian Pindar’s Joyce: 22 male, as against Brenda Maddox’s 1988 biography of Nora Barnacle (Joyce)

Umberto Eco’s The Middle Ages of James Joyce, meanwhile, lists 66 works consulted: books and several articles (a few in Italian) – all by men

The edition of The Ondt & the Gracehoper (a newly published extract from Finnegans Wake prompted no doubt by the fact that Joyce’s work is now out of copyright, and discussed by J. C. in NB, June 6 and 13): 22 men, two women

Of recent publications I have come across in the office, meanwhile, only in the bibliography of Kevin Birmingham’s The Most Dangerous Book: The battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (2014) is there a slight redressing of the balance: 47/10. And the James Joyce Quarterly that recently came into the office has a 36:12 ratio of articles. 

Inevitably there is a fair amount of repetition in the lists of works, and this is, I admit, a rather unscientific and cursory survey, but I don’t recall over years of working at the TLS seeing many (if any) secondary works on Joyce by women. This is surprising given that Joycean studies are a veritable industry and open to all.

Why is this the case? Is Joyce a particularly phallocentric writer? Surely not if one thinks of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the end of Ulysses. And are Joyce's themes not universal?

Meanwhile there can scarcely have been a bolder-sounding response to Joyce’s last work than the performance Thea Lenarduzzi reported on earlier this year: Olwen Fouéré's one-woman hour-long adaptation of Finnegans Wake. It sounded extraordinary.

What would the author have made of it all?

 

 

 

Is 'Finnegans Wake' unreadable?

 

By ADRIAN TAHOURDIN

The answer in a word is no. Although Seamus Deane writes in his 1992 Introduction to the Penguin edition (with its caricature of the author by César Abin on the cover, above), “the first thing to say about Finnegans Wake is that it is, in an important sense, unreadable”. By which he means that the reader “must forgo most of the conventions about reading and about language . . .”. It is, he goes on to say, a book “written in the English language, and also against the English language”; in fact, Joyce has drawn on sixty-five different languages.

None of this makes the book unreadable of course but, like many, I have for years been daunted by the Himalayan challenge the book presented, and I won’t deny I feel a certain satisfaction in having now read it cover to cover. What are the pleasures to be derived from the novel James Joyce took seventeen years to write (1922–39), “to keep the critics busy for three hundred years”?

What kept me reading – and I’m sure this is the case for most readers of Finnegans Wake – was the exuberantly, endlessly inventive language and wordplay, which can sometimes be extremely funny. “I am only an Irish clown, a great joker at the universe”, said Joyce.

Ian Pindar, whose excellent brief Life of Joyce (2004) is not without its own humour – “Reading Finnegans Wake can be a frustrating experience. Why can’t Joyce tell his tale in pure undefallen engelsk?” – recently described the book to me as a “long modernist poem”, which is an interesting idea: over 600 pages of dense, lightly punctuated prose aspiring to the condition of poetry.

And as Deane says, it is “a joyous work”. Joyce described it as “pure music” and suggested that “if anyone doesn’t understand a passage, all he need do is read it aloud”. That can work.  

Needless to say it hardly found universal favour on publication. Joyce’s long-suffering younger brother Stanislaus wrote to him in these harsh terms: “With the best will in the world I cannot read your work in progress. The vague support you get from certain French and American critics, I set down to pure snobbery. What is the meaning of that rout of drunken words? . . .”

And what of the words? Here are some that will strike a chord: “Ghinees hies good for you”; “Roamaloose and Rehmoose”; “It’s an allavalonche that blows nopussy food”; “. . . the twattering of bards in the twitterlitter . . .”; “Bad Humborg”; “and we list, as she bibs us, by the waters of babalong”; “In the name of Annah the Allmaziful . . .”; “A king off duty and a jaw for ever!”; “Also Spuke Zerothruster”; “Se non é vero son trovatore”; “the man in the Oran mosque”; “Childe Horrid”; “Where it is nobler in the main to supper than the boys and errors of outrager’s virtue”; “Bottisilly and Titteretto . . .”; “Gee wedge!”; “See Capels and then fly”; “. . . one man’s fish and a dozen men’s poissons, . .”; “beyond the boysforus”; “. . . when he’s not absintheminded, . .”; “. . . my shemblable! My freer!”; “urban and orbal, . .”;     

Then there is the alliteration: “Right rank ragnar rocks . . .”; “(the calamite’s columitas calling for calamitous calamitance)”; “this Calumnious Column of Cloaxity, this Bengalese Beacon of Biloxity, this Annamite Aper of Atroxity, . .”; “tel a Tartaran tastarin toothsome tarrascone tourtoun, . .”.

It can at times feel strangely modern: “You is feeling like you was lost in the bush, boy?”; “Is you zealous of mes, brother?”

James Atherton’s The Books at the Wake (1959), as well as having chapters on major influences on Joyce’s work, contains fifty-eight pages of “Literary Allusions”, many of them to obscure writers. Atherton’s earlier chapters move from Giordano Bruno and Giambattista Vico to “The Irish writers” via Swift, Carroll, the Church Fathers, to the Bible, Koran, The Book of the Dead, the Eddas. It is all utterly daunting.

Complementing Atherton’s book in some respects is Anthony Burgess’s Here Comes Everybody: An introduction to James Joyce for the ordinary reader (1965). Joyce and Burgess have always seemed a natural fit: both polyglot, both musical, both Europhile and both addicted to playing with words. Burgess is one of Joyce’s most lucid expositors and his long chapter on Finnegans Wake in Here Comes Everybody is an almost pointlessly brilliant tour de force. And as always with Burgess, there are the arresting aperçus: “Whatever Finnegans Wake may be, it is not a highbrow book”. Language may be the novel’s “only character”.

For Umberto Eco, Joyce was “the anarchist of language”. “It may seem that Ulysses violates the techniques of the novel beyond all limit, but Finnegans Wake passes even this limit”. Joyce’s close friend and model for Buck Mulligan in Ulysses, Oliver Gogarty, called the book “the most colossal leg pull in literature since Macpherson’s Ossian”. J. G. Ballard more recently called it “the best example of modernism disappearing up its own fundament”.

And what, you may wonder, did the TLS make of the book on publication? Under the lordly heading “Mr Joyce expresses himself”, the reviewer wrote that “the style and language which Joyce was in the process of developing have become exclusively and extravagantly his own. Those who have found “Ulysses” difficult but quite intelligible will obviously not yield to a first impression which suggests that this new book is gibberish” (shades of Evelyn Waugh’s assessment of the “lunatic” Joyce’s work in that last comment). But after expressions of mild exasperation, the reviewer begins to find a way in: “The best first approach to it is through the ears, not the eyes”. And the anonymous reviewer is swept along: “. . . the author presents it all with so much gusto and animation . . . as to make us feel that he is not in the least concerned about the goodness or badness, ugliness or beauty, of his exceedingly remarkable world, . .”. He concludes: “But heaven forbid that it should be imitated. This is Mr. Joyce’s individual mode of self-expression, and therefore nobody can do anything properly comparable with it without doing something quite different”.

 

 

John Clare and a straw bear (and Iain Sinclair)

Photo: Andrew Kötting

By MICHAEL CAINES

"on the third day I satisfied my hunger by eating the grass by the road side which seemed to taste something like bread . . . I remember passing through Buckden and going a length of road afterwards but I dont reccolect the name of any place untill I came to Stilton where I was compleatly foot foundered and broken down . . ."

John Clare, when he wrote these words, was recalling a time when he had been between ayslums. Escaping from High Beach, the private asylum in Epping Forest to which he had gone voluntarily a few years earlier, he had headed north, in the belief that Mary Joyce – his "phantom bride", Iain Sinclair has called her, "already buried in Glinton churchyard" – was waiting for him.

In Edge of the Orison, a book set in the "traces" of Clare's great journey, Sinclair described the poet as a man walking the "cusp of a final exile", between identities (the "Peasant Poet" lionized in London) as well as asylums. Bewildered as anyone would be who had, for some time, believed themselves to be Lord Byron, Clare wandered lonely roads, slept in ditches, lost his way ("the road very often looked as stupid as myself") and depended on strangers to throw him a penny so he could buy half a pint of beer.

When he eventually located Mary's parents, they had to tell him she had died in a fire. When he returned to his real wife and children, it quickly became clear that he needed help. Back to an asylum, then, this time in Northampton, where he would die twenty-three years later, in 1864.

It's just a little bit too late to do something good for John Clare, but some are treading in his comfortless path at the moment, and they need another kind of assistance: the actor Toby Jones, Iain Sinclair and the filmmaker Andrew Kötting, who has described Sinclair as an "immaculate geographer-confabulator" and is possibly, right now, for all I know, one step behind Jones, dressed as a straw bear that is also a "metaphor for 'otherness'".

To mark the sesquicentenary of Clare's death (a meaninglessly neat half-century before the birth of another, more luck-graced English poet of the road, Laurie Lee), Kötting & co are making By Our Selves, a film that promises to recreate, in its own brilliant, quizzed way, Clare's long walk, what he called his "Journey Out of Essex", in an eighty-mile journey of their own between Epping Forest and Helpston, where Clare was born. The production is well under way, but funds are needed – by the date on which the journey began, July 18 – so that By Our Selves can be "fully realized as an independent film". Donations are acceptable the Kickstarter way. And, in fact, even you're not in the penny- or pound-giving mood, follow that link just in order to watch the trailer, which features the three figures in the still reproduced above.

Many years ago, before my career in misfiling e-mails and hoarding too many books really took off, I worked in that part of the world, on the edge of Peterborough, in occupational therapy. Plenty of people passed through the hospital where I worked (I only worked in the day centre, and fairly ineffectually at that) in poor mental and physical health; I imagine barely any of them could have walked across town unassisted, let alone made it eighty miles north.

Despite having plenty of spare time, however, I never made it to Helpston. But it was around then that I learnt to agree with Edward Thomas (at least, I hope it's true), who said of Clare that "no one reads him but loves him", and quotes, towards the end of the relevant chapter in A Literary Pilgrim in England, a list of place names from one of the Asylum Poems: "Round Oak", "Sneap Green", "Puddock's Nook". These "were music to him", Thomas thought, "and become so to us".

And can become so still, apparently: a new study, Clare's Lyric by Stephanie Kuduk Weiner, suggests that certain later poets have turned to Clare to assist them in their own writing at significant moments in their writing lives. (A TLS review is forthcoming; for some reason, the thesis reminds me of Richard Ellmann's Eminent Domain, about Yeats and his influence on later writers, although I'm sure that there are actually plenty of differences between the two.) Here's hoping that others will turn to Clare in the future, and discover how, as he himself put it, "to cheat the sway / Of winter" in a "pleasant book". Or in a film, maybe. One that walks the cusp of a final exile.

Smiljan Radić's pavilion and a new kind of architecture

Serpentine Pavilion 2014. Photo: John Stillwell/PA Wire

By MIKA ROSS-SOUTHALL

It's been compared to a doughnut, a spaceship, an egg shell, a Neolithic burial site, a futuristic cave –  even one of those papier-mâché balloon-shaped heads you made at school. The Serpentine Gallery’s fourteenth Summer Pavilion opened on Friday with a talk from the Chilean architect, Smiljan Radić, followed by a lecture from Justin McGuirk, whose book, Radical Cities: Across Latin America in search of a new architecture, was published earlier this month. (The event – which is the first of the Serpentine’s Park Nights – coincides with the London Festival of Architecture.)

Last year’s pavilion – an exquisite white steel, grid-based structure, like a crosshatched drawing – was designed by the Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto. Radić’s offering is very different. Layers of off-white fibreglass create a translucent pod structure (the walls are only twelve millimetres thick but measure eighteen metres in diameter). It rests on huge rocks and centres around a trunk-like column; solid on one side, it is exposed to reveal a ground level “atrium” in the rocks below, on the other. The dappled light inside the pavilion and angled cut-out openings framing Kensington Gardens make it feel like you’re under the canopy of a tree. A snaking track of white LED lights hangs from the ceiling. At night, the structure glows. But is it strange that an outdoor pavilion relies on artificial lighting during the day?

As in his previous work, mostly in Chile (the Serpentine only commissions architects who haven’t built in the UK before), Radić uses what he calls “found” objects, such as earth and rocks, to question what the built environment is. When designing this pavilion, he cannibalized models, taking sections from earlier attempts to add to the next one. “It’s a collage way of working”, he explained on Friday night. “There’s a sense of freedom when putting things together and changing their contexts, but as an architect I’m always conscious of the total.”

Architecture in Latin America is booming. And it’s based on the same principle: unexpected experimental collaboration. The Open City, established in Ritoque, Chile, in the 1970s, is still the main reference point (buildings were erected without plans, and inspired by a movement towards responsiveness to life and emancipation from rules). With little money and simple materials, these avant-garde architects created complex, fragile constructions built on top of each other.

If you’ve never seen the Open City projects, “imagine Frank Gehry and Mad Max pushed together”, Julia Peyton-Jones, the director of the Serpentine, explained. The top level of Radić’s own home is a tent, apparently. It’s a room he’s only able to use for eight months of the year, but it’s about adapting to your environment. “My architecture’s not about what looks beautiful and polished”, Radić added.

Open City buildings

They are “activist” architects with a social aim, not “starchitects”, McGuirk declared; they initiate design projects rather than waiting for commissions from the government. This new kind of architect talks to the self-built communities and finds out what structures would help improve their lives – as with the cable car built a few years ago in barrio San Agustín in Caracas (one of the poorest areas of the city). Residents can now reach their homes in ten minutes rather than an hour-and-a-half walk up the mountain. The cable cars have words emblazoned on them – “igualdad” (equality), “inclusión”, “libertad”.

Antanas Mockus, the mayor of Bogotá 2001– 2003

And in Bogotá – previously known as the murder capital of the world, with an infrastructure in total disrepair – while he was mayor in 2001– 2003, Antanas Mockus (a real-life superman, or "supercivilian", as pictured above), led a civic movement to improve the city. “If you can’t change the hardware, change the software”, he claimed. He invested in public spaces, building the best structures in the poorest areas, to encourage respect and education. He also initiated more playful, but nonetheless successful, schemes: he replaced traffic police, who were being ignored by the public, with mime artists, and printed red cards for drivers to use to enforce their own road safety (more shameful to be caught out by your fellow citizens).

An architectural revolution in Latin America is slowly being recognized, and Smiljan Radić is certainly a key figure. But, Justin McGuirk asked: have we caught the end, or is this just the beginning?

 

Smiljan Radić's pavilion and a new kind of achitecture

Serpentine Pavilion 2014. Photo: John Stillwell/PA Wire

By MIKA ROSS-SOUTHALL

It's been compared to a doughnut, a spaceship, an egg shell, a Neolithic burial site, a futuristic cave –  even one of those papier-mâché balloon-shaped heads you made at school. The Serpentine Gallery’s fourteenth Summer Pavilion opened on Friday with a talk from the Chilean architect, Smiljan Radić, followed by a lecture from Justin McGuirk, whose book, Radical Cities: Across Latin America in search of a new architecture, was published earlier this month. (The event – which is the first of the Serpentine’s Park Nights – coincides with the London Festival of Architecture.)

Last year’s pavilion – an exquisite white steel, grid-based structure, like a crosshatched drawing – was designed by the Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto. Radić’s offering is very different. Layers of off-white fibreglass create a translucent pod structure (the walls are only twelve millimetres thick but measure eighteen metres in diameter). It rests on huge rocks and centres around a trunk-like column; solid on one side, it is exposed to reveal a ground level “atrium” in the rocks below, on the other. The dappled light inside the pavilion and angled cut-out openings framing Kensington Gardens make it feel like you’re under the canopy of a tree. A snaking track of white LED lights hangs from the ceiling. At night, the structure glows. But is it strange that an outdoor pavilion relies on artificial lighting during the day?

As in his previous work, mostly in Chile (the Serpentine only commissions architects who haven’t built in the UK before), Radić uses what he calls “found” objects, such as earth and rocks, to question what the built environment is. When designing this pavilion, he cannibalized models, taking sections from earlier attempts to add to the next one. “It’s a collage way of working”, he explained on Friday night. “There’s a sense of freedom when putting things together and changing their contexts, but as an architect I’m always conscious of the total.”

Architecture in Latin America is booming. And it’s based on the same principle: unexpected experimental collaboration. The Open City, established in Ritoque, Chile, in the 1970s, is still the main reference point (buildings were erected without plans, and inspired by a movement towards responsiveness to life and emancipation from rules). With little money and simple materials, these avant-garde architects created complex, fragile constructions built on top of each other.

If you’ve never seen the Open City projects, “imagine Frank Gehry and Mad Max pushed together”, Julia Peyton-Jones, the director of the Serpentine, explained. The top level of Radić’s own home is a tent, apparently. It’s a room he’s only able to use for eight months of the year, but it’s about adapting to your environment. “My architecture’s not about what looks beautiful and polished”, Radić added.

Open City buildings

They are “activist” architects with a social aim, not “starchitects”, McGuirk declared; they initiate design projects rather than waiting for commissions from the government. This new kind of architect talks to the self-built communities and finds out what structures would help improve their lives – as with the cable car built a few years ago in barrio San Agustín in Caracas (one of the poorest areas of the city). Residents can now reach their homes in ten minutes rather than an hour-and-a-half walk up the mountain. The cable cars have words emblazoned on them – “igualdad” (equality), “inclusión”, “libertad”.

Antanas Mockus, the mayor of Bogotá 2001– 2003

And in Bogotá – previously known as the murder capital of the world, with an infrastructure in total disrepair – while he was mayor in 2001– 2003, Antanas Mockus (a real-life superman, or "supercivilian", as pictured above), led a civic movement to improve the city. “If you can’t change the hardware, change the software”, he claimed. He invested in public spaces, building the best structures in the poorest areas, to encourage respect and education. He also initiated more playful, but nonetheless successful, schemes: he replaced traffic police, who were being ignored by the public, with mime artists, and printed red cards for drivers to use to enforce their own road safety (more shameful to be caught out by your fellow citizens).

An architectural revolution in Latin America is slowly being recognized, and Smiljan Radić is certainly a key figure. But, Justin McGuirk asked: have we caught the end, or is this just the beginning?

 

Smiljan Radić's pavilion and a new kind or achitecture

Serpentine Pavilion 2014. Photo: John Stillwell/PA Wire

By MIKA ROSS-SOUTHALL

It's been compared to a doughnut, a spaceship, an egg shell, a Neolithic burial site, a futuristic cave –  even one of those papier-mâché balloon-shaped heads you made at school. The Serpentine Gallery’s fourteenth Summer Pavilion opened on Friday with a talk from the Chilean architect, Smiljan Radić, followed by a lecture from Justin McGuirk, whose book, Radical Cities: Across Latin America in search of a new architecture, was published earlier this month. (The event – which is the first of the Serpentine’s Park Nights – coincides with the London Festival of Architecture.)

Last year’s pavilion – an exquisite white steel, grid-based structure, like a crosshatched drawing – was designed by the Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto. Radić’s offering is very different. Layers of off-white fibreglass create a translucent pod structure (the walls are only twelve millimetres thick but measure eighteen metres in diameter). It rests on huge rocks and centres around a trunk-like column; solid on one side, it is exposed to reveal a ground level “atrium” in the rocks below, on the other. The dappled light inside the pavilion and angled cut-out openings framing Kensington Gardens make it feel like you’re under the canopy of a tree. A snaking track of white LED lights hangs from the ceiling. At night, the structure glows. But is it strange that an outdoor pavilion relies on artificial lighting during the day?

As in his previous work, mostly in Chile (the Serpentine only commissions architects who haven’t built in the UK before), Radić uses what he calls “found” objects, such as earth and rocks, to question what the built environment is. When designing this pavilion, he cannibalized models, taking sections from earlier attempts to add to the next one. “It’s a collage way of working”, he explained on Friday night. “There’s a sense of freedom when putting things together and changing their contexts, but as an architect I’m always conscious of the total.”

Architecture in Latin America is booming. And it’s based on the same principle: unexpected experimental collaboration. The Open City, established in Ritoque, Chile, in the 1970s, is still the main reference point (buildings were erected without plans, and inspired by a movement towards responsiveness to life and emancipation from rules). With little money and simple materials, these avant-garde architects created complex, fragile constructions built on top of each other.

If you’ve never seen the Open City projects, “imagine Frank Gehry and Mad Max pushed together”, Julia Peyton-Jones, the director of the Serpentine, explained. The top level of Radić’s own home is a tent, apparently. It’s a room he’s only able to use for eight months of the year, but it’s about adapting to your environment. “My architecture’s not about what looks beautiful and polished”, Radić added.

Open City buildings

They are “activist” architects with a social aim, not “starchitects”, McGuirk declared; they initiate design projects rather than waiting for commissions from the government. This new kind of architect talks to the self-built communities and finds out what structures would help improve their lives – as with the cable car built a few years ago in barrio San Agustín in Caracas (one of the poorest areas of the city). Residents can now reach their homes in ten minutes rather than an hour-and-a-half walk up the mountain. The cable cars have words emblazoned on them – “igualdad” (equality), “inclusión”, “libertad”.

Antanas Mockus, the mayor of Bogotá 2001– 2003

And in Bogotá – previously known as the murder capital of the world, with an infrastructure in total disrepair – while he was mayor in 2001– 2003, Antanas Mockus (a real-life superman, or "supercivilian", as pictured above), led a civic movement to improve the city. “If you can’t change the hardware, change the software”, he claimed. He invested in public spaces, building the best structures in the poorest areas, to encourage respect and education. He also initiated more playful, but nonetheless successful, schemes: he replaced traffic police, who were being ignored by the public, with mime artists, and printed red cards for drivers to use to enforce their own road safety (more shameful to be caught out by your fellow citizens).

An architectural revolution in Latin America is slowly being recognized, and Smiljan Radić is certainly a key figure. But, Justin McGuirk asked: have we caught the end, or is this just the beginning?

 

‘The Vatican Cellars’

By ADRIAN TAHOURDIN 

On May 21, 1913 André Gide writes in his Journals: “First finish my book. Spurn everything that distracts me from it”. The book in question was Les Caves du Vatican, which was published in two parts, on April 15 and 25, 1914.

The enterprising Gallic Books are bringing out a new translation by Julian Evans, The Vatican Cellars, in August to celebrate the centenary. In his short Introduction, Evans writes that his version "deliberately modernises the text in line with Gide's own decision to adopt a more straightforward, vigorous style" than in his earlier, more classically inflected prose. As Evans points out in a concluding "The Vatican Cellars a hundred years on", the book had an influence on Cocteau, Anouilh and Ionesco, even arguably on Sartre and Camus.

Les Caves du Vatican is easily Gide’s most enjoyable book – and reading it again recently confirmed this impression. It’s a world away from the Protestant guilt-wracked narratives of La Symphonie pastorale or La Porte étroite (Strait is the Gate), the solipsistic Immoraliste,or the dark Les Faux-monnayeurs (The Counterfeiters). It’s almost as if the author put all his sense of fun into this one book. Gide called Les Caves a “sotie”, which the Oxford Companion to French Literature defines as “a kind of satirical farce, closely akin to the satirical moralités of the same – later medieval – period”. Other fictional works tended to be characterized as “récits”. In 1925 Gide dedicated his “first [and only] novel”, Les Faux-monnayeurs to his close friend the novelist Roger Martin du Gard.

According to Gide’s biographer Alan Sheridan (whom, coincidentally, Michael Caines mentions in his blog of June 25 as the translator of Agota Kristof), Gide kept press cuttings that he was to use in devising the plot of Les Caves, which includes an attempt to rescue the Pope from kidnap. According to Sheridan, “in 1893 . . . a rumour began to circulate that the Pope, Leo XIII, had been taken prisoner by a group of cardinals, working in concert with a Masonic lodge, and an impostor put in his place”. As Sheridan writes, such events and their fictional potential offered Gide “an escape from self . . . . Gide was quite capable of narrative invention; he was less adept at creating the raw materials out of nothing”.

In the young Lafcadio Gide creates his most dangerously attractive character: rootless, amoral, wreckless and insolent. Sheridan writes that “Literary antecedents have been suggested: Stendhal’s Julien Sorel and Fabrice del Dongo, Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov”. And then there’s the small detail of Lafcadio’s place of birth: the Schloss Duino, where Rilke wrote his Duino Elegies. Lafcadio has five pederastic “uncles” and runs rings round the representatives of the haute bourgeoisie who people the book, such as the pompous writer and aspiring member of the Académie française Julius de Baraglioul, who is as fastidious in his conversation – “La manière, encore qu’excessive, dont vous me parlâtes, à Paris . . .” – as he is in his dress.   

Then there is poor, feckless and unworldly Amédée Fleurissoire (on the cover of the novel above), who, travelling away from his home in the south-west of France for the first time in his late forties, in order to lend his weight to the papal search, finds himself staying in a Roman brothel, with significant consequences, and becomes victim of Lafcadio’s infamous Nietzschean acte gratuit in a railway compartment on a train between Rome and Naples.

André Gide by Jacques-Emile Blanche, 1912

Sheridan refers to the book as “the novel of the new [liberated] Gide”. In his Journals in 1931 Gide was to say that he wrote Les Caves du Vatican and Les Faux-monnayeurs as “a revolt and a protest” against his “Christian formation”. It’s perhaps no surprise that the Dadaists were drawn to the “light-hearted, frivolous attitude adopted towards the Church” (in Sheridan’s words) in the book. Proust, meanwhile, wrote “In the creation of Lafcadio, no one has been objective with such perversity since Balzac”.

But Sheridan points out that “Les Caves was generally either ignored, condemned or misunderstood. It was, Gide himself said, ‘one of my biggest flops’. The critic of Les Marges made the expected, facile remark that Les Caves should have been called not a sotie, but a sottise (stupidity). Another declared that he would not care to share a railway compartment with M. André Gide”. Who, one wonders, was guilty of a sottise?

Julian Evans’s new translation will be reviewed in a forthcoming issue of the TLS.

 

   

 

 

 

Agota Kristof: The Notebook on stage

 

Photo: Hugo Glendinning

By MICHAEL CAINES

“In an unidentified country, at an unspecified time, in the midst of an unnamed war, twin boys are foisted on their peasant grandmother . . .”

Earlier this year, Eimear McBride deftly reviewed for the TLS two books published by CB Editions: The Notebook and The Illiterate by Agota Kristof. The first is a novel, originally published as Le Grand Cahier in 1986, the second a brief memoir, originally published as L’Analphabète in 2004. The first is written in French, the second recounts the experience of “enforced illiteracy”, as this escapee from the Eastern Bloc, who fled to Switzerland as an eleven year old during the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, learned her new language.

At the same time as The Notebook testifies to the history of atrocity and conquest that Kristof was lucky to survive, it isn’t a history lesson: as above, the basic setting is “unidentified”, “unspecified”, “unnamed”. The twin boys through whom the story is told are never named, the “Big Town” they have come from is just that, their neighbours are “Harelip” and her mother, the parish priest is just the parish priest, and so on. If you’ve read this far, you already, in a way, know more than you need to know to appreciate this uncanny little demon of a book; it was a great success on its first publication, and deserves to be so again now.

I’ve not only read The Notebook this week but had it read at me by Robin Arthur and Richard Lowdon, the two performers in Forced Entertainment’s suitably stripped-back adaptation of the book – their first adaptation of a novel, apparently, in thirty years of experimenting on stage. (Other productions this year include the six-hour Speak Bitterness and the twenty-four-hour Quizoola!, as well as The Notebook on tour; I saw it at the Battersea Arts Centre, where it is running for three nights as part of LIFT 2014.)

For some theatre critics – not all, certainly – this double dosing isn’t a completely unusual experience. You might read, say, Henry IV parts 1 and 2, before daring to comment on what a recent RSC production at Stratford-upon-Avon directed by Gregory Doran and starring Anthony Sher does with Shakespeare’s words. (I can’t think why that particular example should come to mind.) The Notebook on stage, however, is notably astute in its mimicking of Kristof’s unsettling, sometimes brutal yet, even more unsettlingly, often humorous tone – down to its unidentified, unspecified, unnamed minimalism. Others have not always recognized that this is the source of the novel's strength.

As in the photo above, the actors dress identically and read from scripts that look like identical large notebooks or exercise books. Sometimes they stand, sometimes they sit. At radical moments, they move the chairs. (Just once, I think, I caught Robin Arthur sitting while Richard Lowdon stood.) The focus remains constantly on the telling (not showing) of the story. There are no sound effects or incidental music as such. Among other lighting effects, side lights burn two human shadows onto bare theatre walls.

The effect is compelling, but, when the two actors speak in unison, “we” twins, indivisible and, to everybody else in the story, unknowable, it can also be very funny. The twins outwit everyone, including the audience, who have to attune quickly to their incantations; the two voices are a sharply trained blending of modulations playing off one another, barely, if ever, a consonant out of time. A glance at one another, a breath, and they’re off, over wry phrases (the twins boast a disquietingly prodigious perspicuity of expression) and deadpan pauses. Each “chapter”, announced in unison, feels like a movement in music.

(This may be why, the morning after, I can't forget that I was seated near a man who couldn’t stop fidgeting and sniffing. Then, rows away, a phone vibrated – “silent mode” isn’t the same as turning the thing off. A siren wailed outside. . . . Petty irritation aside, perhaps it's best to take your own sensitivity to such “interventions” as a measure of how much a performance is drawing you in.)

The programme speaks of Kristof’s sense of “the potential of a straightforward approach to language” but doesn’t appear to acknowledge Alan Sheridan, whose straightforward English translation is what CB Editions have published. If it’s not his, it would be interesting to know; the smoothly made adjustments to the story would seem to be all Forced Entertainment’s own ingenious work, but the language is not, strictly, the Hungarian-into-French-speaking Kristof's.