what do you think you're looking at?

For avoidance of all doubt, this piece is satire or an attempt at it - I loathe these recent 'patriotic' displays (aside from all else, they make the place look cheap and tacky) and I doubt the possibility of 'friendly chinwags' with those who create or endorse them. 

The other day, I met a chap – a bit younger than me, possibly not long out of university – who was carefully painting two perpendicular red lines across the white centre of a mini-roundabout to create the image of a St George’s Cross.

(This didn’t happen in London, obviously – a town where there’s always plenty to look at and to do – but at a place a few miles from the Kent coast where, aside from bouncy castles, Martello towers and occasional beer festivals and ploughing competitions, one must perforce make one’s own entertainment).

We fell into conversation and he was most enlightening about the St George’s Cross and what it means to him personally as someone committed to an inclusive, pluralistic version of Englishness, citing Linda Colley’s Britons: Forging the Nation State,  Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities and Tom Nairn’s The Enchanted Glass in acknowledgement of the historical contingency of what he was celebrating (implicit claims to time-immemoriality notwithstanding) and Pankaj Mishra's From The Ruins of Empire to disavow any residual taint of imperialism or racism that might contaminate such a project.

I thought later about the inevitable weathering and fading of anything painted on a road surface and then of Shelley’s Ozymandias. Would that I had thought of these things in the moment: ah, l’esprit de l’escalier!

He was then expansive about the nature of 'the symbol' as such – speaking of the Greek etymology which teaches us about that this concept denoting abstraction is, in another sense, a physical ‘throwing together’ and referencing not only Carl Jung and Roland Barthes as one might reasonably have expected but also, somewhat surprisingly, the Nicomachean Ethics (which I was evasive about having not yet read).

It’s always good to come away from a friendly chinwag with a reading list and… doubtless everything is going to be okay.

comedy tonight

I’m halfway through Terry Eagleton’s book on Humour.

It’s short (around 170 pages, New English Library early-1970s pulp science fiction kind of length, see also my 'Focus' article about James Herbert's 'Rats') and I’m reading it quickly, intending to go back over it more slowly another time as it’s packed with meaty nuance.

He’s a lucid explainer of some of the main ways of theorising comedy, together with those theories’ famous and less famous exponents:

• Hobbes & others: ‘humour is never very far from cruelty’
• Bakhtin & others: ‘humour is a ludic weapon in the class struggle, e.g. carnival’
• Freud & others: ‘humour, like the dream or the slip-up, is both a release and a reveal’

These theories are seldom found in their pure form and – humour being inchoate, mutable and tending to overspill – perhaps that’s just as well: a certain catholicity of mind is needed if we want to think sensibly about what’s funny and why.

All that aside ('I mean, take my ideological framework – please!'), he’s equally good at what we might call ‘the etymology of concepts’, conveying a sense of some of the main things that are being meant – and which famous writers and thinkers have previously meant them – when, for instance, we seek to put some aspect of our own experience into context as part of ‘the great human comedy’.

(I’m your classic Enneagram #9, The Mediator, so provided that my blood sugars are above a certain minimum, I’m tending to divert minor to medium-sized annoyances into this exact thing whenever I’m not asking myself how much any of this is going to matter a century from now. Jordan Peterson calls me lazy – I mean, not me personally, people like me, in one of his jauntier sideswipes in 12 Rules for Life. I’m not bitter and I still haven’t tidied my room).

There are some good jokes in Eagleton's book, mercifully. 

While a few are mainly of historical interest (there’s a good one about the difference between the Soviet and Yugoslav varieties of communism), others – such as the ‘doctor doctor’ ones – will remain applicable for as long as the oligarchs continue to allow us healthcare (so, fingers crossed, at least another three or four years).

He’s a good recommender.

I want to have another go at Tristram Shandy, for instance, hearing Eagleton explain it through the lens of Oedipal - and therefore, at one remove, ego-id - conflicts:

"One of the finest of all comic novels, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, puts this disintegration of the reality principle brazenly on show. Unable to maintain the unity and consistency of his narrative, not least because of the disruptive incursions of the unconscious and the need to leave absolutely nothing out of his account, Tristram’s narration finds itself adrift in a potential infinity of text, shuttling from one elaborate digression to the next, nipping from one time scheme to another, sinking under a surfeit of signification and unable to say one thing without saying half a dozen others simultaneously."

Let's qualify 'Oedipal': while children do tend to go on, certain kinds of heteronormative fathering are predicated upon strength, silence, even a convenient level of absence or postponement ('just you wait til your father gets home'). "The paradox of the contemporary family is that it is both patriachal and father absent," says Deborah Anna Luepnitz in The Family Interpreted: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and Family Therapy.  

And I’m a little more inclined to tackle Finnegans Wake for hearing Eagleton  talk about its geniality, its universality, its theme of eternal return and thereby its comedy – a quality I certainly found in Ulysses, which I read last year.

(I know, I know. I tell everyone this. Well, I say ‘read’. I listened to an audiobook. For one, you’re in the superb hands of Jim Norton and Marcella Riordan: this is an Irish book, and they ably bring out its many Irish accents. For a second, you can’t read James Joyce while driving down the motorway. For a third, audiobooks only don’t count as real books if you hate blind and partially sighted and dyslexic people. Just think about that for a moment).

Then in Eagleton’s first chapter, he says this -

"The bathetic is especially marked in British comedy, not least because of the insistence of the class system. Legendary British comedians such as Tony Hancock, Frankie Howerd and Kenneth Williams all trade on sudden, indecorous shifts from the civilised tones on the cultivated middle classes to the blunter idiom of the populace. It is as if such comics contain contending social classes within their own person, and as such figure as a kind of walking class struggle."

- which I like and may apply in more depth to Kenneth Williams, in particular, another time (the others too, for sure, but the above observation perfectly fits his particular experiences of social mobility, social shame, social and cultural aspirations, not to mention a troubled relationship with working or perhaps lower middle class parents: read the diaries, as many fixtures of British light entertainment did with both fear and chagrin when they were first published a few years posthumously in 1994, KW having not been above using 'I'll put you in my diary' as a threat).  

And speaking of Kenneth Williams, is Fantabulosa! (the Sheen-as-Williams BBC4 biopic from around twenty years ago) an affecting tonally-perfect portrayal of a troubled yet brilliant man, or does it boil his comedic flair down to catchphrases and tics while shamelessly and rather dismally overplaying ‘the self-hating homosexual’ trope? A bit of both, perhaps: The Mediator has spoken. It’s available on youtube, though, give it a watch, let me know what you think.

"a troupe of rhinoceroses, all dragged up as pierrots trolling about this Salford slum – and all of them singing ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning'" – the Bona Productions sketch (42’20” to 45’42”).

Or, better, spend time with the Julian and Sandy sketches from Round the Horne (featuring Kenneth Williams, Hugh Paddick and series host, here playing 'the straight man' in more than one sense, Kenneth Horne). 

Bask in what was, at the time, a sustained play on what is or isn’t ‘allowed’ or ‘understood’ (allowed by whom, understood by whom?) refracted through the near-constant use of the underground gay-and-not-only-gay slang Polari (which these sketches both revived and then, through the overfamiliarity of broadcasting them into every living room, thereby also killed)! 

Marvel at what becomes, in hindsight, a sociological slice through the rising-tide-lifts-every-boat hopey-changey mid-1960s (and we could all use some hopey-changey stuff now: isn't that the whole progressive damn point of nostalgia?)!

See also: knockers and flaps

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