The Seizure of Power

A good author creates characters who sit beside you while you while are reading and walks beside you when you are not. Sometimes you identify with them, sometimes not; sometimes you empathise with them, sometimes sympathise, sometimes neither. A good author writes characters into life.

But have you ever encountered a character who is you? One who tricks you into believing you're not alone or crazy, until you remember that they're fictional. (Perhaps that is better - they will remain frozen in time, never disappoint you and never grow into someone you don't recognise.)

Peter Kwinto (Quinto) in The Seizure of Power by Czeslaw Milosz is my fictional doppelganger. He is an officer in the half-Russian, half-Polish army that is pushing back the German troops who have captured (and razed) Warsaw at the end of World War II. At the beginning of the novel, he is plagued by conflicting emotions, but is essentially idealistic, justifying the fear the army instills on communities already traumatised by war as part of the process of attaining freedom.

Despite having been exiled to the Urals and now implicated in the tragedies of war, he remains idealistic about life and human nature: "The bliss of being among the living... Peter lifted his hand and moved his fingers, overcome with wonder at the year, the month, the day and the hour."

As the war ends, Polish Socialists fight the influence of Russian Communists, who believe they have equal rights to the minds of the Polish people given that they made up half of the victorious army. Those minds are plagued by unexpressed doubts: about whether the Socialists can offer anything different to the Communists or the capitalists, about the future, about whether the war has really ended.

Peter is no different, except that these doubts coalesce into doubts about humanity, about the repetition of history, about the nature of time and existence. After he learns that his wife is dead, these doubts became increasingly, conflictingly hopeful and nihilistic. The death of his wife confirms what he has always known: that he is alone.

He comes to believe (hope?) that only a traumatic history can create a utopian future, through incremental changes in the collective consciousness. Thus he, stuck in this traumatic moment, can only hope for the absence of death or the absolution of escape.

Yet, in appearance, he bends to the requirements of society, acquiring a job in the government and even informing on another man. This leads to other doubts - about one's accountability for one's self, toward other people, within a community. Is this accountability or blame, and with whom does it rest?

Around him, people smooth over these doubts saying, "Everyone plays a part nowadays and nobody believes in anything."

Despite the absolute statements that he finds in doubt, Peter is essentially at the whim of his emotions. Towards the end of the novel, he cries, "Why? Why are you responsible for what you really are? Can anybody say: 'I am myself' when he worships in spite of himself, worships what he hates?"

The final line embodies Peter's quest: "...was it not better, instead, to ponder the only important question: how a man could preserve himself from the taint of sadness and indifference."

I wonder, how can one not come to the same conclusions, not be assailed by the same doubts and the same conflicting emotions, focus on the everyday when questions like these, seemingly only theoretical, form the foundations of this moment in time? Life is an eddy of trauma and joy and more, but these become blurred in the larger context of human history. There are really only two options in this moment: to escape or to find whatever joy one can in each day. Sometimes the two options are the same.

A Suicide, a War and a Shipwreck

Just as a piece of writing is threaded with symbols and themes from the writer's subconscious - it being the real writer, I would argue, and us just fingers pounding a keyboard like the hypothetical monkey - so that same piece of writing adopts the symbols and themes of the reader's subconscious, and is kneaded into a slightly different, still recognisable shape. Nothing revolutionary here: the author never died; he just joined hands with the reader, the text itself, the larger context and so on. Like a nursery rhyme. (What this means for the higher power that Nietzsche pronounced dead, who knows. Maybe he was always just a pretty rhyme.)

Everything I read is forced into conversation with everything else, into saying things they perhaps didn't mean to or didn't know they were going to say.

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides references a scene from Mrs Dalloway and by extension, for me, The Waves both by Virginia Woolf and, of course, the movie The Hours. From postmodernism to modernism, from a novel in which the collective narrator points to us as fellow voyeurs, to a novel in which we are invited to watch. All of this ends in Ms Woolf walking into a river with a pocketful of rocks and nods to Sylvia Plath with her head in an oven. Giving the finger to a world that we are all forced to watch consume itself. By defiantly consuming one's self. Although Mr Eugenides might argue that this act is really desertion, leaving one's fellow soldiers to advance on the front-line alone.

Then there's A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood, the structure of which mimics that of Mrs Dalloway, but with only brief moments of her sympathy, which is demoted to sentimentality, as if to protect one's self against the fire from the front-line. And briefer moments of shining transcendence, which are even more self-consciously sentimental and ultimately held underwater until they stop shining.

And where has this extended metaphor of war come from? From The Seizure of Power by Czeslaw Milosz, where political allegiance is a bit of flotsam being hurried along the world's oceans. From here to the desecrated naivety of Three Farmers on their Way to a Dance by Richard Powers (both of the characters and the author) and a leap to A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel, in which the French Revolution is a soup of naivety, childhood traumas and survival mechanisms.

I could swim my way into science fiction, psychology texts, African literary fiction and South American magic realism in a few strokes, but I suspect you're already swimming in another direction or colliding against one of those pieces of flotsam - or perhaps clinging to it together with Pi's tiger from Life of Pi by Martel Yann.

The world is just another text or a library (an underwater one if we want to continue the metaphor) - gosh and here we escape into the corridors of Jorges Louis Borge's infinite library and his lottery.

If you want to see my soul, here it is, laid bare. (Prometheus and his liver.) It's as good a map as you're ever going to get, although there is no key except that of your own subconscious. (And ricochet back to A Single Man and on to Michel de Certeau's 'Walking in the City' and Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, Marco Polo....)

What, on earth?

This morning, literally three minutes ago, it hit me again: What am I doing here?! This crisis is getting old, but somehow it’s not getting wrinkled as it ages – it’s as shiny and appealing as it was five years ago. What on earth am I, a bibliophile, a writer, doing making books to sell? Who do I think I am?!

I recently moved up the ranks (well, one rank) as a publisher. I love the strategic thinking that my job requires: analysing the market and feeling out weak points, devising something to buffer that week point and then making it look pretty. Well, I would if this was what my job entailed. Except that in moving the book through the process, it comes out looking just like everything else. And the market doesn’t want to buy it – we have to convince them that it fills that weak point. Twist their arms into a Chinese bangle. Join the system and convert people, like a Jehovah’s Witness.

But do these books really do anything? Of course a book is a valuable thing. But are these books priceless or just pricey? I don’t think open learning will be effective – copyright exists because people want to be paid for their creative property. Open learning is only appealing because universities need more funding and entrepreneurs want to make money while being considered to be philanthropists. Open learning is the market of the wealthy and well-meaning but naïve liberals.

So again I say, publishing should be left to those who like books and those who don’t care, never to those who worship at their altar.

An update

Having moaned for the last few years about publishing and the sense that it is both the right and the wrong place for me, I am a-moving on. But not away from publishing - further into it. What are you doing? part of me yells (referring to herself in the second and now the third person). Finally, yells another. I (first person, singular) am becoming a publisher.

Note: I have no delusions about the new post. Technically, it's a promotion. Realistically, I am exchanging one set of challenges, perks and frustrations for another. The industry is the same no matter where you go.

But one day, I want to be in charge of a little part of that industry. I want to put my over-inflated sense of responsibility to good use. I want to make decisions, however difficult, and be responsible for them, rather than being held indirectly responsible for and suffering the implications of decisions I do not and cannot make. To do that, I have to do my time, earn my stripes, gather the scars and make a hit-list. No, not really. Only in my imagination.

Now I am not so lost in my imagination that I think that one day, oh one day, we will stop carving up our beloved pets and serving them in paper take-away bags. No, I may be idealistic but I am not stupid. But, I think, maybe one day I can dish one of my favourites up on a silver platter and feed starving children all over the world. Or something (this metaphor is running away with me a little).

Oh, and I bailed on Nanowrimo on Day 1

I can't be a Data Capturer, but neither can I do this

Again I wonder: Is publishing really the right place for a bibliophile to be? There are all these stories out there about people in corporate jobs who long to do something more meaningful and other stories about people who feel grateful to be doing something they love. But they mean something they love, on their terms. And those of you in the land of corporate greed, consider how you would feel if you had to bring something you love as you might love a child into that environment. Would your life be more meaningful? Or would the thing you love have less meaning? And what if you were surrounded by people whose only real qualification for the job that they are doing is that they like to read or that they studied literature. Ah, literature. You might appreciate beautiful gardens, but that doesn't mean you can plant and sustain one yourself. You might appreciate great photography, but can you really be Pieter Hugo?

I can't be a Data Capturer because it wouldn't take long before I'd wonder off from data-caturing land and find something more stimulating to do. So what's the problem with the job I have? Apart from the fact that I feel like a vet having to cut up the carcass of her favourite pony for dog food: I have patience, but not enough of it to outlast the type of incompetence of the type of person who would demand human sacrifices and pyramid-esque monuments if they had been born with that type of authority. Except that this person would demand that the pyramid be built upside down and the sacrifices take place in its shadow and suspended two metres from the ground without support because it meets some obscure sense of aesthetic. Next she'll be asking me to print on blotting paper, or perhaps buy an ancient press from a museum and typeset the pages myself, or delete every punctuation mark and every serif because it ruins the zen of the page.

My favourite ghost stories

I use the word 'ghost' in the title of this post as shorthand for Gothic. I love Gothic literature - the good stuff, not the penny 'orribles. The stories in which the ghost or monster is a metaphor for some social or individual repression (conscious on the part of the author, not accidental). In which the ghost leads you into some larger conspiracy with each step and ultimately, sometimes, to some kind of enlightenment, or at the least revelation.

So, here goes:

• The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. (Disclaimer: I adore James as I do EM Forster, Rebecca West, Virginia Woolf and most of the Modernists. I assert that I am a Modernist trapped in a Post-Modernist's frame of reference, which is a ghost story in itself.) The Turn of the Screw is the story on which the movie The Others was based, although the movie takes the plot and its sub-text in a different, more existential (more Post-modern) direction. James' version shows the preoccupations of the time, in which people were searching for transcendence and finding only traces of it in nature, human interaction and even human psychology. Also touching on the dichotomy of male and female, and sexuality. There is so much written about hysteria that I won't even touch on it here. Let me just say that this book made me a little jumpy.
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. The same issues that haunt James' story haunt this novel. Bronte's symbolism is rich and its sexual metaphors far juicier. However, unlike James' story, this mystery is solved. But even this solution brings in more questions, about the role of women in a household and in relation to men. Again, there is so much written about the Madwoman in the Attic that I won't go into it here. But once you have read Jane Eyre, read the Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, a post-colonial novel that unpicks the psyche of the Woman. Then consider, by comparison, whether Bronte's novel is proto-feminist, or perhaps not. That's my ghost here.
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. Even if you haven't read the novel, you must have heard of Heathcliff and Katherine and their violent love. They spend their lives haunting each other in various forms: torturing each other, being tortured by memories and what-ifs, and finally a literal haunting in a setting that seems conducive to these kinds of things. Their longing for each other is so extreme that it seems almost to take on physical form. Wuthering Heights is an ancestor to Twilight and self-destructive/abusive relationships. But, in the former, there is meat that Twilight lacks and that lingers with you.
• Other Rooms Other Voices by Truman Capote. Mr Capote is my latest find, and I wonder what took me so long. His writing is always haunted by something, perhaps a mocking voice, a cynicism that is without the failed idealism that most cynics have. In this novel, a young boy whose mother has died is sent to live with his father, who no one knew was still alive. The boy is filled with hope at all his dreams coming true. However, all he finds are the ghosts, physical and metaphysical, that anyone must face if they are to mature, evolve. This is a coming-of-age novel that rings with the uneasy truths of Catcher in the Rye. There is a theory about the presence of the orphan in the great coming-of-age stories: Cinderella, Snow White, Great Expectations, Jane Eyre, Portrait of a Lady. We all as children had the fantasy about being orphans and the steerers of our own ships. Perhaps there was some greater truth here than just an interesting psychological fact: perhaps our parents do have to die in order for us to grow up.
• The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski. Ok, I know I keep going on about this novel, but it is great and I did warn you that I was lost in it. (To be precise, I am lost in a cornfield with a dog in front of me and a fire raging behind me.) There are a few ghosts in this novel, apart from the obvious one (the boy's father). There is a second ghost, of a farmer, who haunts a shed that Edgar is cleaning out and who tells a love story - two, actually. Then there is the ghost that Edgar becomes and who returns home to exact vengeance. There are the ghosts of the conflict between the Sawtelle brothers, a man named Henry, who is the ghost of his own life, and a dog named Forte.

I think five is a good number at which to stop, although I could go on (Frankenstein, Dracula...). These are some of the ghosts that haunt me, and believe me, it's crowded in here.