Professional Aesthete

It’s time for the never-ending carwash that is Dunedin’s weather, time to walk upon the transplanted Hibernian strand with the night owls and first-edition seekers. I’m presenting more Lowry work at the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand 2012 conference “Thinking Through Books”, hosted by the University of Otago.

The quotation in the title of my paper comes from the first draft of Malcolm Lowry’s poem ‘Indian Arm’, written between 1940 and 1947 at his Dollarton shack, near Vancouver. In this draft, Lowry anticipates that the “beauty and radiance” of the Dollarton inlet will fall—or suggests, perhaps, that it has already fallen—to the anthropogenic effects of squatters and industry. Though the autumnal land seems safe for the suspended moment, even the water’s “motion of eternity” is tainted: as “an oil tanker passes, trumpeting / like a Leviathan”, “A gull soars upside down in a brown toned pigment” and a “crab is drowning on the opaque surface”.

In the final version of the poem, Lowry reconciles natural and man-made (incidental) beauties. “Oil tracks make agate patterns”, the tanker is divested of its monstrous nature, and the “Mill-wheel reflections of moonlight” embroider the “waving windows” of the squatters’ shacks. The crab no longer drowns on the “opaque surface” of the inlet; the water is, indeed, no longer opaque. The poem itself is transmuted into a meditation on translucency and reflection, on the interplay of light and objects.

When we consider the publication and revision history of Lowry’s first novel Ultramarine, initially published some ten to fifteen years before this poem, we see this process in reverse. The first edition, however much a ‘cento’ it was, possesses a clearer dependence upon its source material than the posthumous revised 1962 edition. Lowry’s second wife Margerie carefully followed his marginal notes, deletions and emendations to the 1933 first edition, in the process making the novel more opaque—a result Lowry may well have intended.

TL;DR: veracity breeds opacity. The audacity! Further, I’ll talk about reading books distantly, as per my abstract below:

The proposed paper presents a preliminary method for automated distance reading based on stemmed word-level n-gram comparisons of related texts, using freely available software resources. Such computational approaches are significantly scalable, and may be used to provide elementary analyses of speculative source texts or unfamiliar works.

Malcolm Lowry’s Ultramarine (1933) is heavily indebted to Nordahl Grieg’s The Ship Sails On (1927); Lowry claimed that anything worthwhile in his novel was a result of “paraphrase, plagiarism or pastiche” from Grieg. Because of Lowry’s pronounced tendency to adopt phrases, sentences and scenes from ‘donor texts’ such as Grieg’s, distant readings and comparisons of the two novels allows rapid analysis of transcribed texts, and suggests potential avenues for more traditional textual interpretation.

Prior research on Lowry’s debts to Grieg has focused on the posthumous edition (1962) of Ultramarine; applying the above method to the first published edition (1933) reveals several phrases recycled from The Ship Sails On that were later deleted or amended by Lowry.

The paper also considers speculative computational readings as exercises in recursive provocation. Distant or surface readings such as the Lowry-Grieg analysis above may be disruptive to linear readings of the same texts, but still provoke close readings of both the primary texts and the automated methods used to parse texts and provide output: subjective interpretation thus equally shapes the process and the outcome of such distant analyses.

This week, I are been mostly indebted to Venkatesh Rao, who introduced me to James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale UP, 1998).

Scott is (justifiably) critical of what he characterises as the “authoritarian high modernist” style of thinking. That is, the overarching desire for legibility above true understanding – the desire to ‘straighten out’ a complex system, to typify and transcribe its rules, to posit and build* a representational model without full awareness of what it may represent. It’s pretending that unknown-unknowns are known-unknowns.

Venkat cites Scott’s ‘recipe’ for the failure mode of such thinking, as follows:

The Authoritarian High-Modernist Recipe for Failure

• Look at a complex and confusing reality, such as the social dynamics of an old city
• Fail to understand all the subtleties of how the complex reality works
• Attribute that failure to the irrationality of what you are looking at, rather than your own limitations
• Come up with an idealized blank-slate vision of what that reality ought to look like
• Argue that the relative simplicity and platonic orderliness of the vision represents rationality
• Use authoritarian power to impose that vision, by demolishing the old reality if necessary
• Watch your rational Utopia fail horribly.

James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State

Scott’s focus is primarily architectural, systems-design, urban infrastructure; I can’t help but read this in terms of literature and the metaphors, analogies or conceptual models I’ve been thinking about in my own work. I’ve fallen into this interpretative failure mode more than once. I get too attached to metaphor when I’m thinking about authors and the author-analogues in their fiction – Borges as a spider whose web is structurally dependent on source texts, who spins Adriadne’s thread in Whitman-esque fashion ‘of himself’ even as he builds a labyrinth of symbols; Lowry as a magpie, a bower-bird, a caddis worm whose forest of symbols was legible to him, but appears to novice readers as the “illegible natural” (Scott’s term, not Lowry’s).

The trouble with all of this simplistic metaphor or analogy, for a given interpretative function, is that they flat-out ignore the troubling non-functional elements of the author’s life, or the text, drawing only on evidence that suits the intended reading at hand. Venkat writes:

High-modernist (think Bauhaus and Le Corbusier) aesthetics necessarily lead to simplification, since a reality that serves many purposes presents itself as illegible to a vision informed by a singular purpose. Any elements that are non-functional with respect to the singular purpose tend to confuse, and are therefore eliminated during the attempt to “rationalize.” The deep failure in thinking lies is the mistaken assumption that thriving, successful and functional realities must necessarily be legible. Or at least more legible to the all-seeing statist eye in the sky (many of the pictures in [Scott's] book are literally aerial views) than to the local, embedded, eye on the ground.

It’s insidious, this desire to apply an artificial platonic order to a perceived irrational system. Only, sometimes it just works. Or it feels so much like it works that I turn from authoritarian high modernism to symbolism. I’ve just completed a draft article, based on my recent talk at the ‘Malcolm Lowry, encore’ conference at the Centre Culturel International de Cerisy-la-Salle, in which I discuss Lowry’s forest of symbols through Darwin’s “entangled bank”, past the bower-bird and caddis worm analogies and towards the novel Ultramarine, all by way of Julia Kristeva’s ‘genotext’ and ‘phenotext’. It’s a complex and confusing reality, for sure, though I certainly don’t conclude that the relatively simple orderliness of my readings represent rationality, hoping instead to more clearly delineate Lowry’s early authorial persona. And, Worstward Ho, to redraft wherever I fail to do so. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

I think it’s Kristeva’s entry into my argument that allows for the irrational, the ‘unknown unknown’. Her view of the genotext, as I apply it to literature, is necessarily all-encompassing – the process of the authorial subject coming into being through language, through signifying articulation (Lacan, langue), explicit and implicit intertextual references (Genette, text as palimpsest), and the “involuntary expression of a set of cultural possibilities” (Stanley Fish, “Biography and Intention” – indebted, I think, to Lacan). It’s almost too much, really, and it demands if not simplification, rationalisation and plastic/platonic orderliness, then at least a deeper exploration of each as it relates to Lowry and his authorial subject.

The article is pending review; if the publisher allows, I’ll post it here once I’ve revised it, having made sure that my rational utopic vision isn’t too much of an idealised blank slate.

* Scott, in my reading, casts the building of these limited representational models (the “scientific ordered” forest instead of the “illegible natural” forest) as a far greater sin than the simple ego-driven conception of the utopic model. It’s breaking the ‘measure twice, cut once’ rule, I suppose. This may well be the case in architectural terms – I’ve got no insight there – but surely systems or infrastructure design can allow for emergence? Freeway designs shift and turn, as traffic increases and arterial highways sprout capillaries to support the flow. Lowry writes a short story for a UK audience, rewrites it for a US publication three years later, rewrites again for its inclusion in a novel, links branching reciprocally between the short story and the novel. Twenty years later, the novel “needs” to be rewritten; given the increases in Lowry’s mental traffic – the extra shelves added to his “unimaginable library” – the novel is now a “problem”, an “embarrassment”. I draft my explanation of this process, redraft, extend, expand, repeat, but even this is never really finished. It’s a chaotic system representing a chaotic system, self-similarity all the way down.

One more conference paper for the road. I’m presenting a paper at the Centre Culturel International de Cerisy-La-Salle in France, for the colloquium ‘Malcolm Lowry, encore’ in June / July 2012. The paper pulls together the initial theory-base of my thesis, with the focus firmly on Ultramarine and, perhaps, its role in defining or delimiting Lowry’s later fiction.

If the art of writing is imitation the author has mastered it; if reconstruction enters into it he has yet some way to go, for he has not attempted to fuse the objective and subjective elements of his narrative into a whole.

– Review of Ultramarine, in The Times Literary Supplement: 13 July, 1933.

Ultramarine was received by contemporaneous critics as a promising first novel, albeit one lacking any integration between the subjective and objective. Further, in acknowledging his imitation of and reliance upon the prior writing of Nordahl Grieg and Conrad Aiken, even Lowry would seem to pigeonhole the text as ‘that usual self-conscious first novel’ (U, 89-90).

The proposed paper considers Ultramarine in light of Julia Kristeva’s concept of the genotext and the phenotext, and reframes the impact of the novel on Lowry’s later writing. Kristeva describes the genotext as ‘a process, moving through zones that have relative and transitory borders’, which has the effect of organising space for the text’s generation and signals the emergence of object and subject within the text. The genotext of Ultramarine thus encompasses Lowry’s 1927 sea voyage as well as the influential ‘donor texts’ upon which he drew. I argue that following the publication of Ultramarine, its phenotext – initially a matter of pure denotation – collapses back into Lowry’s default genotext, that topographical space enabling his production of new texts.

It is precisely because Ultramarine maintains the separation of Dana Hilliot’s obsessively subjective mind and the objective exterior world that the novel demonstrates a foundational process of Lowry’s oeuvre, the sought-after reconciliation of the individual and the perceived order of the natural world. The porous boundaries between The Ship Sails On, Blue Voyage and Ultramarine reflect those relative and transitory borders through which the genotext-process moves, creating space for what Kristeva terms ‘the advent of the symbolic’ and what Lowry would later anticipate to be ‘the voyage that never ends’.

I’ll present the paper in English, but most of the colloquium will be en français, which for me will mean a lot of note-taking, desperately trying to work out what’s being said, and probably recording and later trying to translate the papers. But it’s the first Lowry-specific conference I’ve heard of in the past few years, so I can’t miss it. And the prospect of being down and out in Paris and London, with Jen, is reason enough to risk whatever schoolboy French I’ve managed to retain. Insert generic upbeat French saying here.

After thirty-something hours in transit – some of which were well spent walking up to and tobogganing down from the Great Wall of China at Mutianyu – Vancouver comes into focus. People seem happy here. We leave. Get on board a ferry to Victoria, B.C., where a steady stream of horses, carriages, tourists and bicycle-hockey players clog the streets. I learn to look the other way first when I’m crossing the road, though I still feel like I’m daring myself not to face the traffic that my hindbrain is sure is coming from the right.

There’s a campus with more green space than recreated gothic buildings. The university bookstore has a proud display of bongo drums and collegiate-fonted frisbees. Malcolm Lowry books are now to be found in the ‘Canadian Literature’ shelves, which temporarily solves my frustration with the omnipresence of Robert Lowell collections. A room full of driven, data-hungry North American digital humanists starts clapping. Star Wars jokes begin to pile up. Are we building the first Death Star or laying hard-vacuum foundations for the second? No one really seems to care, but clearly we’re not identifying with the Rebels.

Classes start. Note to self: bring more data next time. Organise it better. Though organisation is ostensibly one prong of the week-long course’s trident [this metaphor made better sense in my notebook], there are many more post-it notes and permanent markers than I’d anticipated for the computer-based workshop. I begin talking, thinking out loud about cataloguing or documenting journeys, differentiating between the real and imagined trips, the travel diaries and the novel, and the grey area between them. I talk further with a researcher from Vilnius, the city directly beneath the pendulum of European trade.

The trouble is that the grey areas between fact and fiction are, to me, the more interesting part. Why it matters, for example, that Lowry thought of something (anything) when he was in a certain place. Recreating whatever analog waveform he had with my own (downsampled, low bit-rate) digital version. By Thursday I’ve abandoned my plans to create a workable database of the information I’m pulling from the air and start making notes about the tools everyone else is using. Omeka. Anything from MIT or Georgia State or Texas. Oh-so-briefly glossed and unnamed TEI interfaces that seem to allow textual and visual annotation on top of whatever OCR magic is already going on. The point is clear, though there’s little initial glimmer for putative funding applications – get all of your data first, throw it into an XML or JSON database, and only then start worrying about which to use. It’s a problem for another day, another research strand.

In the evenings, walk around Victoria with Jen. Dodge the vendors and the buskers. Come to the sudden realisation that the Fairmont Empress Hotel, viewed from a certain angle, looks like nothing more than an ivy-shrouded zombie, reaching out to the harbour with spindly cyprus arms.

Back in Vancouver, and straight to UBC and the library’s Special Collections, which houses the most extensive Lowry collections I could imagine. I photograph like mad, fill out new personal / research use copy forms every couple of hours. I probably verge on annoying their (wonderfully helpful) desk staff by requesting a new folder every fifteen minutes. Wander down the rabbit-hole of Lowry’s filmscript for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, a script so long that, if it were to be filmed, would have been in excess of four hours. Did Lowry realise he wasn’t supposed to do the director’s job for him, or did it simply not matter to him?

There are parkways and boulevards at UBC, and it doesn’t seem to be an affectation. A short walk from the main campus and the fraternity housing – through the permeable bubble of Monod’s abstract kingdom, perhaps – I’m walking through a Platonic Suburbia. Old men water their lawns, mow them the next day, water them the following. If I lived here, I think, I’d be home by now.

Back in the library, I find Lowry’s own copy of the first edition of Ultramarine (1933), annotated in his hand, and start to get really excited. His deletions, additions and emendations made it into subsequent editions of the text, but there are sentences here I haven’t read before. There’s a tendency to cut off Hilliot’s inner monologue with ellipses in the first edition; by the later versions it’s been standardised to an em-dash for inner monologue and ellipses for spoken dialogue. “God” is often struck through, and replaced with “Christ”. A paragraph’s worth of Hilliot’s musings on the second page is marked to be deleted, and only three lines make the cut. Questioning his motives for the voyage, Hilliot wonders in the first edition “Had that been, was this him here, himself?” These questions of self are subsumed in my later edition, partially buried in the text, but to catch that glimmer of the writer’s process is only just short of magical.

We’re altogether too excited to see raccoons and otters in Stanley Park, to see the Lost Lagoon, to be tourists. I start talking with a bookseller about Lowry, but having switched into holiday mode for the weekend, my facts aren’t entirely straight, and I’m not sure his were either. I hear another version of the story where Lowry and friends take a mission into the city to gather more alcohol, and end up walking by a church. Lowry is briefly lost, but shortly found kneeling in front of an altar. “He’s praying,” his friends say, “We should leave him be.” As it turns out, he was weeping over a bottle of gin.

In the Vancouver Daily Province, 1939, Lowry writes:

It is difficult, of course, to  pin down the original of any character in fiction for few, even when drawn from life, escape wholly from belonging to the composite order of architecture. An attitude from this person, an idiosyncrasy from that, Smith’s bowler hat, Jones’ sea boots – such are the materials which go to the creating of a character in a novel. In this respect Mr Chips, like Sherlock Holmes or Stalky, is no exception. We may track him down to his lair in the real world but he will seem, in the flesh, both more and less than the character for which he was the point of departure.

I write in my (growing) notebook that my Lowry, the Lowry of today, is both more and less than the real person who lived and wrote. Today that statement seems trite.

On our last evening in Vancouver, we are kindly driven out to Dollarton by the author of Vilnius: City of Strangers. We find the forest walk near where Lowry and his second wife had a squatter’s shack on the shore, and I pose next to the sign. The place was Eden for Lowry, a paradise just far enough away from the city to write and revise. I put my feet into the water, and try to think about coming back with a bottle of Bols and an unidentifiable paperback book. I take a photograph of a forest path that almost certainly didn’t lead to a spring, wish that the oil refinery across the water still had the word ‘SHELL’ written on it, and wish further that, like Lowry, I could have seen a plume of smoke obscure the ‘S’, leaving only the promise of Dollarton’s opposite.