Actually

Having thought about it, I don’t think you can say that the postmodern structure of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is, per se, its meaning. Rather it’s the vehicle for the meaning, the vehicle by which David Mitchell takes something very simple – a love story – and recreates it without the influence of cliché or sentiment. All those switchbacks in the narration serve to do is conceal the outline of Jacob and Orito’s story, before revealing it again in the book’s final chapter, in stark relief, silhouetted against the patterns of all that came before. Viewed objectively, their story, of two people separated by circumstance (and a gulf of cultural incomprehension), is only too mundane and common. Where this book takes off is in its ability to make us see afresh how love erupts within the boredom and waste of the everyday, and feel again that tremendous body-blow by which we experience love and its loss in the space of a single heartbeat.

Head Soup

The last two months have been pretty tough, not so much on me as on the people I love. As a result I haven’t had any time to work and, as I sit down at my desk again – back in Sao Paulo, with the air clear after a storm and the lit boxes of other people’s lives remote across the rain-sweet night – I feel horribly blocked up. And I keep suffering from the urge to use this space to try and say something which will sum it all up and perhaps make sense of it. But it’s not my place to do that and, also, I can’t get away from the feeling that it would make pretty heavy going for a disinterested reader.

So instead of talking about life-stuff, I’m going to try and throw down here some of the head-stuff which has been sluicing around my mental washing-up bowl for the past couple of months. I’ll try and write it as a one-shot (I’ve got a fearful-big pile of other stuff to be getting on with), and I’ll try and keep it short and sort of impressionistically interesting. Hopefully if you join the dots you might see some kind of pattern. 

1. When Baroness Mary Warnock claimed that we don’t recreate our moral outlook, but simply revert to the one we learned during formative educational encounters, it was really just the flipside to James Murphy singing ‘I wish I could complain more about the rich, but then / All their children would … Come to every show / Drugged and unwashed / And no one / Wants that’. The point is, kids listen even when their parents are too far gone.  

2. Don’t let your inner Mondeo driver tell you that poetry (a.k.a. philosophy) makes nothing happen. Ideas only gain substance in the act of transmission, after you’ve let them go.

3. The Occupy Movement is the latest iteration of non-conformist thought. The exact same impulse has existed ever since there was a feudal landlord or factory owner and someone became suspicious not merely of power but the mechanisms of power. The Diggers, Peter Kropotkin and the CNT during the Spanish Civil War are other examples.

4. Kropotkin’s idea that it is mutual aid rather than competition which determines the survival of a species (pace Darwin) is supported by the fact that homo sapiens ensured its survival by coalescing into farming groups and learning to mill and bake grains which were otherwise indigestible, thereby securing food sources unavailable to other species.

5. I nicked that idea from A History of the World in 100 Objects. Another interesting bit of trivia I picked up from that show was that the maximum number of contacts in most people’s mobile phones is around 200 – which happens to be the same size as the average Stone Age community. This suggests that we’re genetically programmed to live in small communities and everything we did after the invention of the wheel was a big mistake.

6. According to Rousseau, natural liberty is the freedom we enjoy in a primitive communion with nature. It’s antithetical to society, but that’s OK, because once we enter society we exchange natural liberty for civil liberty, which is the freedom to determine our own condition (morally, financially and so forth) within the limits imposed by the general will. This is the only way, according to Rousseau, in which man (or woman) truly makes himself (or herself) his own (her own) master (mistress).

7. You can walk into a restaurant in India and there’s a sadhu sipping his tea next to some workmen, a clerk from the railway, a couple of women travelling home for a wedding. That faraway look in his eyes could merely be the desire for another sandwich or a glimpse of the infinite. As far as I know, you don’t get that proximity to mysticism anywhere else these days. Europe had it in the Middle Ages, but the excessive power of the church led to the excesses of the clergy, which led in turn to Martin Luther, and mysticism was eventually buried beneath the austerities of Protestantism. And what filled the vacuum? Pleasure, consumption, the endless hunger of capitalism.  

8. A very tidy construction from Bernard Henri-Levy: theology is philosophy, he said, because even if you think God is dead, He left his testimony to man – and that testimony is philosophy.

9. Whenever you exit from the anxious, deracinated limbo of international air travel, passing up through the insomniac hum of the jet bridge, it’s the smell which first anchors you to your location: in Brazil, a warm blanket of cheese and cologne; in the UK, Chanel No. 5 and baked beans.

10. Remember that complaint from Fox News about how the new Muppet movie is the latest instalment in Hollywood’s unfair victimisation of down-trodden oil magnates and the hard-working folk of the American right? Well, I call shenanigans. Surely the illiberal contingent on this planet (Fox News anchors, dictators, psychopaths) get to call dibs on every action movie ever made, from Rambo to Spiderman to 300. And the reason for that is because any film where power and violence are fetishised is readily available as a massive wank bank for paranoid, violent nuts. Nerds (like me) love things like Spiderman because it fulfils our underdog fantasies. But Spiderman also speaks to the wacko, proto-tyrant who distrusts the government and wishes he could kill the man in front of him for taking too goddamn long in the ticket queue. 

11. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet should have won more awards. I suspect that it didn’t because David Mitchell put a postmodern engine beneath the bonnet of a historical fiction, and this juxtaposition was simply too much for most critics. By a postmodern engine, I mean that he took great delight in alternating not only between genres (from orthodox historical fiction to a love story, then a ghost story, a samurai story, a high-sea story, and so on), but also tones – from scatological humour to minimal, haiku lyricism to salty nautical prose. Perhaps the cognoscenti prefer the monotony of a serious novel, while the history fans prefer their history straight. If so, they’re forgetting that the age we live in is absurd and contradictory and that art has the option of reflecting this condition by distorting its surface. Then the distortion becomes the meaning. In this sense, which is to say in its structure, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet emerges as a thoroughly serious, intellectually rigorous modern novel fully the equal of the other big names on the list.

12. Trying to write something which looks delicate is just as bloody hard as hammering the ideas out properly – and takes just as long.

Male Madness, Female Despair.

Being a scruffy and hastily cobbled-together thought about stuff I don't understand. 

Could it be said that men tend towards grand existential madness while women find their madness (and depression) in the social expectations placed upon them by their sex, the million tiny cuts of the quotidian? Could it possibly be the case that female psychosis tends to be less egocentric and self-regarding?

Of course, drawing a simple two-part distinction based on gender is a fairly ghastly and reductive trick. Men also suffer from OCD and depression and women no doubt go mad in ways I dread to imagine. And yet I still wonder whether men, being more confined, in my experience, to linear or singular thought processes, are effectively derailed and whirled away to god knows where by their mental illness, while women are embedded deeper into their own setting. I suppose I’m thinking of Woolf and Plath in the latter case.

Medea is the obvious contradiction to this hypothesis. Her actions constitute a spectacular and horrific repudiation of the bonds of domesticity and motherhood. Except what if her actions didn’t emancipate her, but rather tied her in more closely to the role she was condemned to live and die for? Hmm.

I don’t know.

Perhaps a better question would be whether or not female mental illness is commonly associated with the home. That is, do the house and the domestic pressure of house-holding cause the physical space to become an extension of the body, with the house becoming a living thing which breathes back and whispers new forms into the anxieties of the sufferer? There’s a clear lineage of that in literature, after all, from Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre through to The Haunting of Hill House and Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger.

And, if this is the case, does it explain why the main action of King Lear must be transferred to the heath, away from the nexus of the hearth?