Mark Bold

There are few subjects that Colin Wilson does not feel compelled to write a book about. His output over the last fifty years, since the momentous release of his existentialist handbook The Outsider, has been over 100 volumes on crime, the occult, science fiction and fantasy, the paranormal, pop psychology and just about any cranky subject that approaches his radar. What marks these books out is that they are usually argued from Wilson’s New Existentialist standpoint as he manages to shoehorn in his obsessive concepts of optimism and heightened consciousness. Yesterday he was in Stratford to talk about his next book, this time taking on Shakespearean scholarship. Just how he’s going to fuse his “peak experience” philosophy with the work of the “second-rate” Bard remains to be seen.
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John Gray is writing in the Guardian about fundamentalist atheists (again). “It is a funny sort of humanism that condemns an impulse that is peculiarly human. Yet that is what evangelical atheists do when they demonise religion.” It is an excellent critique of zealots like Dawkins, Dennett and Hitchens, and the progress and eventual new dawn for humanity that their atheist project seems to promise, using the same tilts against secular humanism that were found in Straw Dogs and Black Mass. Very enjoyable and thought-provoking, but I always wonder what sort of solution Gray would offer to the problems he identifies. He’s assured at corroding others’ arguments and pointing out contradictions, creating a terrible pessimism in his writing, but how does he assure himself that it’s worth getting up in the morning?

(For a little balance, and to refresh your belief in progress, try AC Grayling’s criticisms.)

In the second section of Straw Dogs, John Gray makes a suggestion that is perhaps the aim of his book: ‘to discover which illusions we can give up, and which we will never shake off’ (p83). It is a fact, he says, that human beings cannot live without illusion. The belief that we can is just one of the illusions we need to shake off, and Gray traces the roots of this misconception through a sustained attack on the over-rational, anthropocentric beliefs of liberal humanism.

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The best essays in Jonathan Franzen’s collection How To Be Alone are really only a set of appendices to his bestselling novel The Corrections; some of the others, although often thought-provoking and very well-written, seem to exist only to crave attention, and have little substance other than providing an insight into the author’s self-absorption and exploration of his American identity. But in the interstices of the collection, there are some refreshing and revealing insights into the nature of modernity, and into a mass culture that is frighteningly out of control.

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Primo Levi did not want a film or theatrical adaptation made of his Auschwitz memoir If This Is A Man. It is not difficult to see why, given the way Hollywood rewrites history and trivialises human experience. Imagine how a Zemeckis-Hanks film of Levi’s testimony would ladle on the sentimentalism and sensation until it became an obscene tear-jerking hero myth of one man’s struggle against his Nazi oppressors. No, actually don’t.

Instead, If This Is A Man is free of all sentimentalism, and does not turn away from describing the full horror of a work camp within Auschwitz in clear and calm prose. There is no self-pity, or a defining moment that makes a man determined to survive; there is no place in the memoir where it is the heroic character of the narrator that leads to his final freedom. This is a simple and honest account of what happened to an Italian Jew when he was transported to Auschwitz.

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“As Shakespeare spoke for mankind on the threshold of the modern world, you speak mankind’s farewell in the authentic voice of the twentieth century.”

Alan Bennett directs these words at Kafka from the character of Max Brod (Kafka’s best friend and executor) in his play Kafka’s Dick. There is no doubting Kafka’s position as one of the greatest writers of modernity, but the writer and man himself tends to be hidden in the shadow of this reputation, or, more often perhaps, confused with the main characters in his stories and novels. The story of his life may be quite well known to readers of Kafka through the publication of his diaries and voluminous correspondence with the women he was often engaged to, but it is to rescue Kafka from the simplifications of the adjective Kafkaesque that Murray has written this new biography.

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‘The revolutions of thought which shape the basic outlook of an age are not disseminated through text-books – they spread like epidemics, through contamination by invisible agents and innocent germ-carriers, by the most varied form of contact, or simply by breathing the common air.’ (1979, p151)

Koestler is describing the impact of the Copernican revolution in the sixteenth century, comparing it to changes in belief that spread through Western society from the work of other writers, such as Darwin and Marx. The terminology is eerily memetic, yet his real concern is to show how established ideas (in this case the Ptolemaic belief that the sun revolves around the earth) hold sway over thinkers until there is a sudden break with the past, and a completely new belief system becomes accepted. The process of scientific advance he describes is very similar to the paradigm shift, introduced by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (published within a few years of The Sleepwalkers), and now a familiar term. Both writers are trying to show that science does not move forward in a gradual advance of knowledge, but in fact jumps forward and sometimes sideways in leaps and gear shifts.

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Perhaps Bryan Sykes, an Oxford Professor of Human Genetics, started out on this book by attempting a serious study of the Y-chromosome, and the ability this gives geneticists to trace paternal descent and the groupings and origins of the common male ancestors of all people on the planet. He had achieved a similar study of mitochondrial DNA and our common female ancestors with The Seven Daughters of Eve. But this time maybe the publishers insisted that he rewrite his manuscript with a slightly hysterical style, speculate about how men are doomed, and slap the dystopian title Adam’s Curse, A Future Without Men (together with a misleading picture of monkeys becoming men becoming women) on the front cover. The result is a strangely uneven mix of scientific explanation and wild speculation.

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Pop science publishing relies on metaphors and often inadequate conceptual comparisons to make ideas from academic and scientific activity easier to understand for the mass market. Converting hard data and theory, analysis and documentation from universities and laboratories into a paperback format involves massive simplification, a disregard for accuracy, and a bubbling mix of metaphorical allusions. Richard Dawkins’ blind watchmaker and Susan Blackmore’s meme machine spring to mind, without even attempting to enter into the always farcical world-views of full time social scientists. But the technique has reached its limit with Steven Johnson’s Emergence, in which the reader is subjected to an onslaught of similes and inept conceptual mismatching until the argument of the book is completely unclear.

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Cecil appears late in A Room With A View; we do not meet him in Italy, but at Windy Corner in Part 2 of the book, where Forster is concentrating on the resolution of Lucy’s muddle. The first mention of him, in a letter from Lucy’s mother while she is still in Florence is inauspicious. The news of Cecil is what “interested her least”. And this ambivalence of Lucy’s towards Cecil is continued when he appears in Part 2, and we learn it is his third attempt at proposing marriage.

Because of this late addition to the characters, Forster is explicit in his description of Cecil. But this description is of a Gothic statue, and the impression we gain at this early stage is of an inhuman character. The posture of the statue suggests the superiority and arrogance that Cecil will reveal as the narrative continues. Forster also connects Cecil and Mr Beebe, hinting that both represent the “medieval” that conflicts with the “Renaissance” of Lucy’s development. Mr Beebe’s early judgement of Cecil is that he is “better detached”, and this opinion seems increasingly accurate as we learn more of Cecil’s character.

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