Buon Compleanno, Guglielmo Shakespeare

On this, his 459th birthday, I will dedicate a little time to re-reading some favourite sonnets – originally a Petrarchan form of poetry – by the Bard. I might even pass time with that overlooked early masterpiece Venus and Adonis, or else the now contentious Taming of the Shrew.

I might rewatch the excellent documentary series Shakespeare in Italy, from the BBC in 2012, featuring Francesco de Mosta, although it is alas not currently available on the iPlayer.

Or there’s always Nothing Like The Sun, Anthony Burgess’s tour-de-force novel of Shakespeare’s lovelife, which heavily features a Dark Lady who, for once, isn’t Italian. Burgess is somewhat of an outlier when it comes to Shakespeare. Despite having spent much of his own life in Italy, and married to an Italian, he tends to play down Shakespeare’s Italian connections.

Where most researchers and novelists have followed AL Rowse and identified the Dark Lady as Emilia Lanier, a woman descended from the Italian Bassano family, Burgess presents her as an unlikely Malayan in Elizabethan London.

This has always been my favourite of the covers.

Likewise, where many scholars accept that it is possible, though unlikely, that Shakespeare could have travelled abroad to Italy before his theatrical fame, Burgess elsewhere fictionalised a Shakespeare travelling to Spain to meet Cervantes at the height of both men’s fame. (He also wrote a short story where Shakespeare received literal inspiration for his plays from time travellers, so as a theorist of Shakespeare he was very much an outlier really!)

Despite Burgess, there is no doubt that Italy loomed large as a source of inspiration for Shakespeare. From the sonnets of Petrarch, to the sources of plays like Othello or Measure for Measure in works by Italian authors such as Ariosto, to the imagined Italy of his settings in Venice, Verona, Milan and elsewhere, to the Roman plays, Shakespeare’s work returns again and again to an Italy of the mind and soul.

I recently got the chance to revisit Stratford-on-Avon, and attend a performance of the recent RSC production of Julius Caesar, considered by many to be the best of Shakespeare’s Roman plays.

It was as magical and eclectic as one might expect from the RSC’s troupe. The lethal geopolitics of the late Republic and early Empire are distilled by the Bard into an almost claustrophobic clash of private loyalties and public interests.

I also went to visit Shakespeare’s schoolhouse, which is amazingly still in use as a school today, and was treated to a Latin lesson from his schoolmaster, an entertaining chap who may possibly have been an actor too. For it was of course in Warwickshire and not Tuscany that Shakespeare was first introduced to Italy and the literature of Latin and – by extension – Italian.

The more one reads Shakespeare, the more the influence of Italy, Romans and Italians becomes evident. I haven’t even mentioned his likely friendship with the English-born Italian John Florio, author of the first English-Italian dictionary, and a man who contributed almost as many words to English as Will himself.

Italy has no shortage of writers to be proud of, and no need to lay a claim to England’s finest. Nevertheless, Shakespeare would not be Shakespeare without Italy.

Buon Compleanno, Guglielmo.

Anthony Burgess versus Stanley Kubrick

I had the pleasure last week of speaking at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, as part of a panel discussion to launch a new book entitled Burgess, Kubrick and A Clockwork Orange.

The book is co-edited by Dr Matt Melia from Kingston University, and Georgina Orgill, the archivist of Stanley Kubrick. For those with an interest in the great brainwashing fable, in either literary or cinematic form, it’s a great read, from Matt and Georgina’s introduction, to the final essay.

The Ponying the Slovos team were honoured to be able to contribute to the volume, and eagerly grasped the opportunity to compare Burgess’s Nadsat to that which features in Stanley Kubrick’s script (and thereafter, the movie itself.)

Alas, as is so often the case with academic research these days, the purchase price is not so cheap. My suggestion is to ask a friendly academic librarian to consider purchasing it on your behalf. However, I can offer you a flavour of what we discovered, and subsequently wrote about in the volume.

M’learned colleague Benet Vincent has written up a fascinating article over at the Ponying the Slovos blog, explaining the differences between Burgess’s Nadsat and Kubrick’s.

I hope you will read it, and perhaps also get the chance to look at the book, not to mention its gorgeous cover.

‘Beyond Nadsat’ now in print and available for free via Open Access

Over at Ponying the Slovos, our ongoing project on invented languages in art and literature, I wrote a series of posts on Anthony Burgess’s other invented languages a couple of years back, of which there are more than a few.

These collected thoughts have now been expanded, revised and published in the peer-reviewed Hungarian journal of English literature, The Anachronist, and (almost all) the journal is free to read or download in the spirit of open access thanks to the publishers at ELTE, Hungary’s foremost university.

 View Vol. 20 (2022): Burgess and Droogs: A Post-Centennial Collection of Essays

In this paper, Burgess is used to demonstrate that the role of invented languages in literature goes far beyond the existing well-explored territories of Science Fiction (SF) or High Fantasy, though they predominate therein, and can also be found in historical novels, and even realist fiction, as Burgess’s variegated novels reveal.

This is Ponying the Slovos’s second publication for 2023, and it’s not even two weeks in. We might need a little lie-down!

Anyhow, feel free to read the article here, and the whole journal, all of which will be of interest to Burgess scholars, may be accessed from this page.

Ninety-Nine More Novels

Last week, I was asked to produce my own list of Ninety Nine Novels that I might recommend to others. The criteria were that the books must have been published in the past 38 years and be available to read in English. It’s an odd request, but didn’t sound odd to me. Allow me to contextualise.

In the early 1980s, Anthony Burgess was commissioned to write a book of book recommendations. He was well placed to do it, as a prominent international author himself, as well as a prolific reviewer of fiction since the 1960s. Lore tells us that he wrote the book in a mere three weeks. By contrast it has taken me three days just to produce my own list which takes us from where Burgess left off – that resonant year 1984 – to the present.

Ninety-nine Novels: The Best in English Since 1939 - A Personal Choice -  Burgess, Anthony - Libri - Amazon.it
A Personal Choice.

Burgess’s list covered 45 years, whereas mine covers a little less, of necessity. I can’t predict the future of the next seven years of publishing. Also, where Burgess appended excellent mini-essays on each text, I have spared you the tedium of my pontifications, though I am happy to elaborate briefly on my choices if there are any queries.

Burgess’s book, a compendium of these mini-essays, is therefore a deft and succinct potted history of Anglophone literature’s greatest hits from the war and post-war period of the 20th century, as he saw it. Ninety Nine Novels is a fascinating list in itself, and I don’t intend to comment on or critique it at all.

It’s certainly open to critique and has inspired much comment over the years. You should read it. Alternatively, you should consult the International Anthony Burgess Foundation’s website, where they are celebrating this book with a series of podcasts. If you’re REALLY stuck for time, Adam Roberts has an excellent summary of the book’s merits (and faults) here.

What were Burgess’s criteria? That they be a) novels, b) published between 1939 and 1983, and c) concerned with what he called ‘human character’. It is, as he wrote in the introduction to Ninety Nine Novels, “the Godlike task of the novelist to create human beings whom we accept as living creatures filled with complexities and armed with free will.” I have ignored his proscription against ‘comic strips’, which he himself in agreement with the critic Leslie Fiedler, felt was already an outdated exclusion in the Eighties.

Finally, he argues that novels should “leave in the reader’s mind a sort of philosophical residue.” Whether he intended that to be as didactic as it sounds is unclear, but it has been the guiding principle in selecting these books. They are therefore novels which I have read, which feature superbly drawn characters, and which have haunted my thoughts afterwards.

Hence, they’re subject to the whims and prejudices of someone of my age, gender, class and race, raised in the place I grew up and educated in the way I was, and circumscribed by which books were available for me to encounter. There’s probably a lot of Irish fiction here. I’m Irish. There’s probably quite a lot of science fiction too. Well, I study it for a living. If there’s an especial density of texts from the late 90s, that’s probably because I was having to read umpteen novels a week as the Books Correspondent for Dublin’s Sunday Independent at the time.

You will likely disagree, and have your own list. And so you should. There are many astonishing books missing from this list, I agree. There are some choices you might find baffling. I can only reiterate how Burgess concluded his introduction to Ninety Nine Novels: “If you disagree violently with some of my choices I shall be pleased. We arrive at values only through dialectic.”

1984 – Neuromancer – William Gibson

The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera

Empire of the Sun – JG Ballard

1985 – Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Oranges are Not the Only Fruit – Jeanette Winterson

Perfume – Patrick Suskind

The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Attwood

1986 – Watchmen – Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

The Old Devils – Kingsley Amis

The Light Fantastic – Terry Pratchett

1987 – Norwegian Wood – Haruki Murakami

Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency – Douglas Adams

The Bonfire of the Vanities – Tom Wolfe

Beloved – Toni Morrison

1988 – Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco

The Satanic Verses – Salman Rushdie

Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel – Milorad Pavić

1989 – Ripley Bogle – Robert McLiam Wilson

London Fields – Martin Amis

Billy Bathgate – E.L. Doctorow

And the Ass Saw the Angel – Nick Cave

1990 – Amongst Women – John McGahern

Vineland – Thomas Pynchon

Use of Weapons – Iain M. Banks

LA Confidential – James Ellroy

The Buddha of Suburbia – Hanif Kureishi

1991 – American Psycho – Bret Easton Ellis

The Famished Road – Ben Okri

Maus – Art Spiegelman

1992 – Snow Crash – Neal Stephenson

Red Mars – Kim Stanley Robinson

Fatherland – Robert Harris

1993 – The Shipping News – Annie Proulx

A Dead Man in Deptford – Anthony Burgess

Trainspotting – Irvine Welsh

1994 – How Late It Was, How Late – James Kelman

Dead Lagoon – Michael Dibdin

1995 – Independence Day – Richard Ford

1996 – Fight Club – Chuck Pahlaniuk

Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace

The Tailor of Panama – John Le Carre

Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding

1997 – The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy

Mason & Dixon – Thomas Pynchon

Enduring Love – Ian McEwan

Quarantine – Jim Crace

Underworld – Don DeLillo

1998 – My Name is Red – Orhan Pamuk

The Catastrophist – Ronan Bennett

1999 – Q – Luther Blissett

Ghostwritten – David Mitchell

Motherless Brooklyn – Jonathan Lethem

2000 – Atomised – Michel Houellebecq

White Teeth – Zadie Smith

Persepolis – Marjane Satrapi

Perdido Street Station – China Mieville

2001 – The Eyre Affair – Jasper Fforde

The Constant Gardener – John Le Carre

The Other Wind – Ursula K. Le Guin

2002 – Any Human Heart – William Boyd

Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer

2003 – Millennium People – JG Ballard

Brick Lane – Monica Ali

2004 – River of Gods – Ian McDonald

Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell – Susanna Clarke

2005 – Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – Stieg Larsson

2006 – The Road – Cormac McCarthy

The Book of Dave – Will Self

2007 – On Chesil Beach – Ian McEwan

The Yiddish Policeman’s Union – Michael Chabon

2008 – Bad Day in Blackrock – Kevin Power

Bog Child – Siobhan Dowd

2009 – 1Q84 – Haruki Murakami

Wolf Hall – Hilary Mantel

2010 – Room – Emma Donohue

Suicide – Édouard Levé

2011 – 11/22/63 – Stephen King

My Brilliant Friend – Elena Ferrante

2012 – Capital – John Lanchester

2013 – Journalists – Sergei Aman

City of Bohane – Kevin Barry

2014 – Annihilation – Jeff VanderMeer

The Bone Clocks – David Mitchell

The Three-Body Problem – Cixin Liu

2015 – Seveneves – Neal Stephenson

2016 – The Underground Railroad – Colson Whitehead

The Association of Small Bombs – Karan Mahajan

Central Station – Lavie Tidhar

2017 – Lincoln in the Bardo – George Saunders

2084: The End of the World – Boualem Sansai

2018 – Circe – Madeleine Miller

Milkman – Anna Burns

The Black Prince – Adam Roberts

2019 – This is How You Lose the Time War – Amal El-Mohtar

2020 – The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again – M. John Harrison

Utopia Avenue – David Mitchell

2021 – Klara and the Sun – Kazuo Ishiguro

There is no excuse for being idle now

Today is the 105th anniversary of the birth of John Wilson. Or to put it another way, it’s the 105th birthday of Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange and quite a few even better novels.

I was reminded of the opening lines of his two volumes of ‘Confessions’, his entertaining, erratic and often entirely fictional autobiography: “Wedged as we are between two eternities of idleness, there’s no excuse for being idle now.”

It’s a quote I often recall. In fact, over a decade ago, when I was embarking on doctoral research into Burgess, I was invited to write about the quotation which most inspired me. I chose this one, because it inspires and chills me in equal measure. That article can be read on this site, but I’m reappropriating it below, because you never know when the vicissitudes of the internet will darken a site forever. At least this one I can keep an eye on.

Happy birthday, old droogy. I raise a glass to you, and perhaps a cheeky smoke too. You’ve had your time, and you definitely earned your eternity.

In Love with Hell by William Palmer, review — alcohol in the lives of 11  writers | Culture | The Sunday Times

On initial encounter, this quotation from the beginning of Anthony Burgess’s ‘Confessions’ appears to be the Protestant work ethic expressed by one of late modernism’s greatest lapsed Catholics. But it is so much more than it seems.

In that first word ‘wedged’, we have the entirety of the existentialist condition succinctly summarised, the Beckettian paradox of ‘I can’t go on; I’ll go on’. We are, says Burgess, trapped in this plane of existence. There is no point debating it or fighting it. A calm acceptance of our lot is the principium mobile towards any meaningful achievement.

The ‘eternities of idleness’ is problematic. It suggests that there is some form of existence beyond this one from which we emerge and to which we depart, static states in which nothing can be achieved. This posits, perhaps, an afterlife and behind it a God-figure. Equally, it may be read as agnostic. We cannot know anything beyond the parameters of our existence and anything that may occur in such realms, should they exist, cannot influence our here and now.

That ‘idleness’ is perhaps judgemental; it suggests languid rest amid the clouds with the angels, but primarily it sets up the denouement of the statement, in which there is ‘no excuse for being idle now’.

It is a call to arms, an order to act in the face of existential malaise. Privileged to exist, we pay for that privilege by being required to do something meaningful with it. Burgess does not seek to define what is meaningful in this sense and what is not. He leaves that to the individual reader to define. For him, obviously, it meant artistic creation, both in literary and musical forms. But he does not prescribe this path for anyone else.

Fundamentally, this quotation always struck me as a kindly and paternalistic guidance from Burgess. He does not wish to see anyone waste a single moment of their finite existence. He desires that we live in the now, smelling the coffee and flowers, rising above our solipsism to perform, to act, to make an optimistic and definitive step towards engagement with our surroundings and with each other. He asks us to reach out and form communicative connections with our surroundings.

Anytime I have found my mind wondering, my heart slackening, I take solace from this quotation which then drives me back into the chair to write, back to the task in hand, back towards interaction, towards engagement, towards the completion of meaningful activity.

It is a warning of mortality couched in stern but highly optimistic terms. It offers us purpose.

Understanding the old Ultraviolence

It would of course have been more useful had I told more people about this in advance. Nevertheless, I’m a firm believer in the principle that people who need to know things find their way to that knowledge somehow. So it’s more as a marker of record, a waystone en route to the actual publication of an actual book, that I note the passing of this particular conference and my particular contribution.

So firstly, this was the conference, co-organised by my co-editor (of the forthcoming Religious Futurisms volume) Sumeyra Buran Utku and her colleagues.

I really wish I’d been able to attend more of the conference, not least because Francesca Ferrando is always box office, and I was especially intrigued to see what she had to say about violence and posthumanism, or alternatively posthumanism AS violence. (OK, she was unlikely to take that angle, but I must question her along those lines some day.)

Anyhow, as I said, as mark of record and waystone on the winding path to publication, here’s what I was talking about, nicked wholesale from the book I wrote last year and this on A Clockwork Orange:

So, yes, as you may have gathered, it featured some examination of women as victims (and as subalterns) in ACO, considered the novella as an anti-carceral text in the wake of the BLM calls to end incarceration (spoiler: ultimately it’s not, of course), and explored the extent of Alex’s psychopathic tendencies, and whether they can indeed be rehabilitated, and whether they are indeed rehabilitated in chapter 21 of the published novella (aka Schrodinger’s last chapter, the now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t chapter which materialises and dematerialises depending on which edition of the text you read), in which Alex waves goodbye to his misspent youth and embraces a life of banal domesticity.

I’ve probably said too much. But I will say more in the book. I just need to find the time to edit it first. More, as they say, anon.

Postscript: Apparently it was recorded and the stream is now on YouTube. If I’d known that, I’d have scrubbed up a bit more.

https://youtu.be/ELT-y02vXQM

Meanwhile, in Medieval Rat-Nazis…

At long last, the final post in the series on Anthony Burgess’s invented languages has appeared on the Ponying the Slovos project page.

This one takes us close to the end of Burgess’s career, when his work took an autobiographical turn and he was less inclined to linguistic invention (though no less inventive as his last two works published during his life – the reprise of Elizabethan English in A Dead Man in Deptford and the poetic pyrotechnics of Byrne indicate.)

Nevertheless, there’s some old favourite techniques herein, such as feral teen gangs using exotic and intriguing macaronic language forms, and there’s something quite new too – an invented language in an alt-history where Burgess doesn’t even give us so much as a single word (and doesn’t need to.)

More over at PtS.

Orwell and the Porn Dolphins

Another post on PtS about Burgess’s invented languages today. (I did say there was 10,000 words of this…)

This one is about George Orwell, multicultural Seventies droogs, whether language shapes thought, and Chinese porno dolphins.

Yes, you read that correctly.

Also some rumination on the linguistics of class warfare and the difficulty of predicting the future in fiction.

Rewriting the Bible

It takes a brave writer to rewrite the Bible, and perhaps a foolhardy one to invent his own macaronic dialect in so doing.

The latest article on Anthony Burgess’s invented languages at Ponying the Slovos examines how he attempted to evoke the linguistic milieu of the time of Christ in both TV and novel forms.