Critiquing Calypso

[steepholm]

My fiction hasn't really received critical attention, beyond reviews. There have been a few mentions here and there, and for those I'm grateful, but nothing sustained - other than one very good unpublished dissertation on The Fetch of Mardy Watt which I was sent out of the blue a few years ago.

So I was surprised and trepidated to the core to find that New World Orders in Contemporary Children's Literature (2008), by the renowned Australian critics Clare Bradford, Robyn McCallum, Kerry Mallan and John Stephens, had no less than four pages on Calypso Dreaming.

That's the good news. Unfortunately, they don't like it at all. In fact, they talk about it principally so they can use it as target practice for ecofeminist criticism. Oh well, those are the breaks, and although I would take issue with much of their argument (not least because almost everything they say about gender in Calypso Dreaming could be said in reverse of my previous book, Timon's Tide, to make precisely the opposite points), there's an element of truth in some of it, too - especially as regards the tropes I derived rather lazily from Garner.

There was one passage, though, that seemed to me really sloppy, and I'm going to indulge myself to the extent of saying "Now, just hang on a minute!" repeatedly about these few lines.

Our authors begin by quoting a description near the beginning of the book, about the island of Sweetholm:

The Haven was the island’s one harbour. Elsewhere, the land plummeted in stark cliffs, or was skirted with lavish margins of mud. The undredged quicksands were an asylum for the wading birds. The sand and mud squirmed with life, but had also sucked down sheep, dogs, even (the guide-book said) occasional unwary humans. A party of Edwardian nuns had made their last pilgrimage to the site of St Brigan’s ancient chapel and been swallowed, a hundred years before.

Rather than existing as an unmarked natural environment,* the wetland** is an uncivilised and hostile space, as denoted by the extended lexical sequence, "skirted with lavish margins... undredged quicksands... asylum for wading birds... squirmed with life... sucked down... swallowed." The assumption of culture's superiority over nature is especially evident in the negative formulation "undredged", which implies that in a proper order of things the wetlands would be drained.*** The horror associated with "quicksand" - that is, nature, in its destructive aspect**** - is underlined by the contrast between the site as an "asylum" for birds but a threat to humans,***** and by the implicit horror of female bodily excess ("skirted with lavish margins").****** (p. 87)

* Is there an implication here that it should be represented as an "unmarked natural environment"? I'm not entirely sure. But of course there's no such thing, at least in this country. (Could this have something to do with the authors being Australian? I doubt there's any such thing there either, after 50,000 years or so of human habitation.)

** "Wetland" is a strange word choice, referring as it usually does to fens, swamps, bogs, etc., rather than the foreshore of an island. It's used here (as the discussion makes clear elsewhere) to allow the authors to cite the associations of swamps with patriarchal notions of dejection and negative notions of femaleness.

*** Good luck with draining the Bristol Channel! Dredging and draining aren't the same thing: you're thinking of those swamps again. More importantly, why would anyone read "undredged" as a negative formulation here? (In the sentence "The ferry ran aground because the channel leading to the harbour had been undredged for too long", it would be a different matter.) And why would anyone want to dredge the mud flats which are the home to wildlife and wading birds?

**** Does the horror of quicksand need a gloss, let alone such a general, vague-making one? You don't need to live round here long to hear stories like this one about people being sucked into the mud-flats around the Bristol Channel. It happens quite regularly, and it is horrific.

***** Isn't it clear that the quicksands have both negative and positive aspects? It's dangerous to humans, but it's a source of food for birds. It's full of life, but it can cause death. These statements look quite deliberately balanced to me (as indeed they were). Why on earth should its abundance of food for waders be seen as underlining its "horror"?

****** So "lavish" now also implies "horror"? That's not how I've generally heard the word used. Anyway, shouldn't that be sartorial rather than bodily excess, if we're going to read "skirted" as referring to female clothing? (If anything, it's a fashion statement about low hemlines.)

Good, I feel better now. Tendentious readings usually betray a lack of confidence in one's conclusions, but in this case it seems to me that a lot of the horror of nature (female or otherwise) on display here was brought along by the critics.

Comments

[kalypso]

What is a marked natural environment? Does it have little plaques pointing out how natural everything is?

[steepholm]

Quite. Once you bring in language (which is hard to avoid in a novel) then you bring in ideology - as John Stephens is fond of pointing out, on other days.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

Culture is superior to nature. We'd be in a hell of a fix if e thought otherwise.

[sheenaghpugh]

Not always. It depends where it is and what it's doing. Putting factories in the Arctic woulds hardly be an improvement.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

I had more in mind reading Homer in the original.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

The suggestion that you have a "horror of female bodily excess" because you used the word "skirted" to refer to a dangerous region invites Isaac Asimov's reply to a similar critical inanity: "You are welcome to continue thinking so, en route to Hell."

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I'm only grateful that my use of "asylum" didn't make them think I was commenting on the mental health of plovers.

[sovay]

I'm only grateful that my use of "asylum" didn't make them think I was commenting on the mental health of plovers.

This would be where one of those thumbs-up Facebook "like"s goes.

[gillo]

Hmm. I think it's a critique that says more about the writers than the book. It does not, to me at least, say anything significant about a book which is principally set *on* the island anyway, and certainly suggests a very significant lack of knowledge about the specific location.

IOW, bloody furriners.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think the "draining the wetlands" boob kind of vitiates whatever else they've got to say about this particular passage.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

Even I saw you were talking about a tidal area--but then I've seen David Attenboroguh walking through something similar--i guess the eco-feminists haven't.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

It's odd, because they're aware it's an island, as their discussion elsewhere makes clear. I think it's a case of commitment to a particular discourse ("Wetlands are for draining! Forests are for deforesting! Paradises are for paving and putting up parking lots!") overwhelming their ability to read what's on the page.

[sheenaghpugh]

It's more ignorance than horror, I think, witness their confusion of foreshore and wetland.

And nobody has EVER described an environment without having some sort of agenda - that's pretty much the point, for writers. I used to do an exercise with third-year students based on Dickens's description of Jacob's Island in Oliver Twist. He slants it towards misery and criminality (it's about to be Sikes's last refuge). I got them to describe the recognisably same place with a positive slant. It was great fun.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I love that kind of exercise too! And you're absolutely right: even a photographer chooses the angle, exposure, etc. for a purpose. And guess what - I was setting up the island as a place where nature was a source of both beauty and potential danger! Something no one had ever thought to do before, so it's not surprising they missed it.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

*rolls eyes* Don't get me started on critics! Throughout both my OU degrees, I have, wherever possible, avoided literature courses because the way critics approach fiction clashes horribly with how I see it, either as a reader or a writer*.

Far too many of them impose their own agenda on the story. Analysis is fine (even if it doesn't float my boat), but when you push things too far trying to shoehorn every aspect of the story into your particular theory of how things are, then it becomes all about you the critic and not about the story. Their issues with the way the island is described also seems to show a woeful ignorance of how viewpoint functions in fiction. The narrator is not the author and even if there was still any such thing as an "unmarked natural environment" in the British Isles, the narrator may not see that as a good thing and the reader may or may not be supposed to agree with that opinion. Or in other words, if you quote bits out of context, you can prove anything!


*More or less unpublished, unless you count the handful of short stories quite some years ago now.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Of course, with my critic hat on, I feel conflicted about this one! But shoehorning is definitely a problem, especially when you're looking at a book not for its own sake, but (as here) in order to expound a particular critical approach. That makes for a strong temptation to pass over evidence that doesn't fit, and to use literature to show the theory in the clearest possible light rather than vice versa.

I don't know Mallan's work, but Stephens, Bradford and McCallum really are quite a formidable group - as you'll probably know from having done the OU course. On the other hand, I had occasion to criticize Bradford in Four British Fantasists, and there'll be some criticism (as well as praise) of Stephens in the book I've just written with lady_schrapnell. New World Orders is an odd book, because although it has four authors they appear to have taken a cabinet-like collective responsibility for all the chapters, rather than divvying them up. I'd still be interested to know which of the four penned this passage, though.

[malkhos.livejournal.com]

The critic is supposed to find out what the author meant. these people have taken the Derrida oath to only impose their own meaning on a text.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

That looks like a lot of their critique was driven by a need to demonstrate their purity in theoretical terms, not by any in-depth reading. And yes, an assumption that there is only one kind of landscape.
I do wish the theory faction would be less dismissive of, y'know, text.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think it's a shame when the adversarial approach leads critics to flatten out texts, slide over ambiguities, miss distinctions, impose univocality, and generally make literature both simpler and duller than it was before they arrived. I'd make that criticism of their reading generally (albeit they score some hits too), but this passage is especially egregious.

LitCrit

[l. lee lowe (from livejournal.com)]

When I run across such blatant nonsense, I love to quote Philip Roth:

"Ha, ha," he [Roth] says. "Now you're talking! I would be wonderful with a 100-year moratorium on literature talk, if you shut down all literature departments, close the book reviews, ban the critics. The readers should be alone with the books, and if anyone dared to say anything about them, they would be shot or imprisoned right on the spot. Yes, shot. A 100-year moratorium on insufferable literary talk. You should let people fight with the books on their own and rediscover what they are and what they are not. Anything other than this talk. Fairytale talk. As soon as you generalise, you are in a completely different universe than that of literature, and there's no bridge between the two."

Is he completely serious? Who knows. But he's Roth, and he's great. About as great as it gets (sigh of envy).

Link to interview:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/dec/14/fiction.philiproth

Re: LitCrit

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Since being a critic is my day job, you won't be surprised to hear that I don't go all the way with Roth on this one! I do think that criticism can reveal unexpected aspects of meaning, provide tools for understanding what we do when we read, put literary works in enlightening contexts, and so on. Even the chapter this entry is about, for all my criticism of it, has the not ignoble aim of making readers more sensitive to the way that descriptions of physical environments can intersect with ideas about gender.

Actually, thinking about it, I suspect that telling people just to read literature and not bother with the critics, is a similar argument to the one that people ought just to live life and not bother reading novels (more "fairytale talk"). But I'll have to think about that one...

Re: LitCrit

[l. lee lowe (from livejournal.com)]

'Actually, thinking about it, I suspect that telling people just to read literature and not bother with the critics, is a similar argument to the one that people ought just to live life and not bother reading novels (more "fairytale talk").'

Probably this is not quite the right comparision. More like telling people just to live life, not to read all those 'how to be happy' self-help books.

That said, go ahead and send a couple of critics my way. They can write whatever they like about my fiction - the more, the better!