Bryan Murphy's Blog - Posts Tagged "identity"
Background to Heresy
I cannot offer an unbiased review of my own work, so I’ll try to “add value” with some background.
This was a classic “manuscript left in a drawer” for decades. It wasn’t even one of my drawers. Recently, an old friend came over to visit from England and brought this and another one I’d forgotten I’d ever written. It seemed a bit dated, but there was a spark there, so I rewrote it into its present form. Among other things, I relabelled it from “Cod’s Roe” and clothed it in the fashionable historic present.
I inserted the expression “arithmetical democracy”, although I first heard it later, from the mouth of Alvaro Cunhal, head of Portugal’s Communists, who used it disparagingly to explain why his party should run the country even though relatively few people voted for it. I guess he favoured the kind of “emotional democracy” practised in “Heresy”, not that it would have got him into power anyway.
My story is a child of its time, though the the notion of diet replacing politics as the focus of identity was ahead of its time. In Italy, where I’m living today, the infusion of technology into politics has become fashionable, and politics are becoming ever more emotional.
Back in 1971, I was an out-of-work new graduate. One day, I went to the unemployment office to sign on, and they offered me a job there. I took it like a shot. In “Heresy”, I have a little fun with the strange rituals of bureaucratic life, above all the idea that conformity and orthodoxy are the supreme virtues.
All in all, I think “Heresy” is humorous, thought-provoking and short enough to be well worth the time you’ll spend reading it. Let me give it five stars to encourage the young writer I was then.
This was a classic “manuscript left in a drawer” for decades. It wasn’t even one of my drawers. Recently, an old friend came over to visit from England and brought this and another one I’d forgotten I’d ever written. It seemed a bit dated, but there was a spark there, so I rewrote it into its present form. Among other things, I relabelled it from “Cod’s Roe” and clothed it in the fashionable historic present.
I inserted the expression “arithmetical democracy”, although I first heard it later, from the mouth of Alvaro Cunhal, head of Portugal’s Communists, who used it disparagingly to explain why his party should run the country even though relatively few people voted for it. I guess he favoured the kind of “emotional democracy” practised in “Heresy”, not that it would have got him into power anyway.
My story is a child of its time, though the the notion of diet replacing politics as the focus of identity was ahead of its time. In Italy, where I’m living today, the infusion of technology into politics has become fashionable, and politics are becoming ever more emotional.
Back in 1971, I was an out-of-work new graduate. One day, I went to the unemployment office to sign on, and they offered me a job there. I took it like a shot. In “Heresy”, I have a little fun with the strange rituals of bureaucratic life, above all the idea that conformity and orthodoxy are the supreme virtues.
All in all, I think “Heresy” is humorous, thought-provoking and short enough to be well worth the time you’ll spend reading it. Let me give it five stars to encourage the young writer I was then.
Who are we?
A few years ago, I was at a social gathering in Turin at which two people from Ghana were also present. One of them started churning out negative stereotypes about the English, whereupon his compatriot, a friend of mine, interrupted him with an anecdote of her time in London. She was waiting outside a telephone box when the occupant stumbled out, cursing the machine that had swallowed his money and badmouthing the phone company responsible, too. “Damn them,” he said to her, “they just want to take our money from us.” She now pointed out that in her ten years in Italy, none of the locals had ever so clearly included her as one of “us”. Zadie Smith has now written a whole novel on the question of who “we” are, although “Swing Time” is about much else besides: dance, friendship and parenting are among her themes. Her main character is a British woman of mixed race, whose life is constrained by people disregarding logic and mathematics to decide that in the UK and the USA she is “black”, and in Africa that she is “white” (and “American” to boot). This constant buffeting by other people's perceptions and misperceptions of her does not make her endearing, but it does draw our attention to the range of stronger, well-drawn characters with whom she interacts. Remarkably, Smith has her finger on the pulse of several cultures and subcultures. The only notes that rang false in my ears were an Iranian man identifying with Arabs and a Brazilian talking German English rather than Portuguese English. I was fascinated by the English that the young English characters spoke. I wonder if I'll live long enough in this country not to learn to speak that new variety but for it to come to seem normal, though I guess that if I do, the youngsters will already have changed it again, to keep it out of reach of “us” old fogies. Even so, I expect Zadie Smith's prose will continue to be a joy to read.
