George Saunders’ ‘A Swim in a Pond in the Rain’

This book emerges from George Saunders’ experience leading a class in Syracuse University on writing the short story form. The texts which have shaped his understanding, as laid out here, are all Russian. Seven stories from Chekhov, Gogol, Tolstoy and Turgenev appear in the edition, followed by a chapter in which Saunders lays out the lessons it offers.

I have never undertaken an MFA programme but I have attended a couple of creative writing classes both in and outside of a university context. The bulk of the information I have sourced on how they function come from articles or books, parts of the syllabi which appear online, reading novels written by, or conversing with people who have completed, been employed on them. One such is Anne Enright who spoke in an interview on the question of whether or not writing can be taught. As a graduate of the prestigious University of East Anglia creative writing programme herself, Enright’s chosen analogy was athletic; when making a throw one can be told how to tuck one’s elbow in. Enright also spoke about her hubris as a young writer, studying under Malcolm Bradbury while at the same time being certain that he had nothing useful to impart to her, a genre of student she has since encountered a number of times since taking her post up. Relationships friends of mine have had with their creative writing lecturers have tended towards the adversarial as their responsibility is often to turn young writers away from their favoured vice — over-writing — which appears to the young writer as a figure of authority trying to domesticate or homogenise those aspects of their style which seem most principled and vital. I have known them to concede, years later, that their lecturers had a point.

I would truly love to construct a dataset of prose produced by a set of authors before and after completing an MFA programme — as well as a control set of texts produced by writers whose applications for entry were rejected — and produce a comprehensive analysis of what MFAs do to writing, but lacking this infrastructure I will outline what I saw happen to a friend’s story, a first draft of which I read eight years ago, and a second when he was two months into an MFA. The story was about a man and his wife or partner in their suburban house. A corpse turns up in the garden and the man dies. I do not intend for this two-sentence summary to create the impression that the characters, setting or plot were underdeveloped, but even if they were this would be beside the point. Four phrases or descriptions have remained in my mind in the years since I read it. It was a perfect object, a mind-to-mind system for the delivery of these four images. Its status as such was typographically and syntactically emphasised; one or two of them had been set apart from the text’s body and appeared in the form of a list.

A year later I read another version that had been through the workshop. The corpse had been accounted for. It became the source of a petty resentment between the man, his wife and the next-door neighbours. There was information pertaining to who knew what about it and the staggered delivery of same was used to up the ante. The images were re-integrated into paragraphs. They remained suggestive but had become functional. The story was no longer a static — and I use this term non-pejoratively — object, it had assumed the shape of the short story as conceived by Saunders, a temporal unfolding, engaging the reader by pulling them forward, sentence by sentence, with non-trivial detail. It had also, as a consequence, been integrated into a ‘chloroformed world’ populated by ‘clockwork cabbages’, to draw on Beckett’s description of Balzac’s novels. According to any honest inventory of the field of play here, rightly so. The number of people who pay thousands of euro with a view to publishing a manuscript with Dalkey Archive must be wholly insignificant in comparison to those looking for guidance on producing a commercially viable work of literary fiction.

Saunders, and I presume anyone useful who teaches creative writing, are not dictating what literature has to be. Each ‘what have we learned here?’ section is followed by Afterthoughts which partially roll back his recommendations in emphasising the importance of informed intuition. I think this is really crucial. Though anyone who has spent a reasonable amount of time reading fiction and has put the hours in at the desk can write a banger paragraph, this cannot be taught. However one can be graded on their ability to sculpt a credible representation of a human being being punished for aspiring to be fully human, experiences a mental event in which they grasp their smallness relative to the universe, or realises how a flaw in their character has led them to commit enormous and harmful errors in their personal or professional lives.

If arguing that naturalism is the dominant generic strain to emerge from the Programme Era would be too generalising we can at least say that it is fundamental to Saunders’. Joe Cleary’s means of differentiating naturalism from realism rests on the position of the reader relative to the writer and the narrator. In naturalistic fiction the reader and the narrator share a sense of superiority over their object of study.

The social predicates which would lead to the emergence of a genre which attempts to conceive of human agency, when everything around you seems to confirm your meaningless, powerlessness and, in the words of Richard Seymour, whether you even are alive are not far for to seek, least of all in Russia, where a disaffected petty-bourgeois intelligentsia found itself caught between absolutism and a rural idiocy bolstered by the orthodox church. We can accommodate British, French and USian naturalism to this model with the addition of a more generalised experience of a squalid and debased urban lifeworld, its dangers and indignities correlating with a growing and brutish working class population.

Naturalism’s high point was towards the end of the nineteenth century. After World War I’s appearance in the chronology and onwards, authors and critics look to a less representative set of writers, who sacralised naturalist detail by locating it relative to symbolic frameworks and / or incarnating it within a high stylistic logic. This was the last historically consequential European literary project before its subordination to the culture industry and American imperial hegemony. Naturalism is therefore the last time literature is intelligible, in the sense that one can qualitatively apprehend a set of guidelines which we can be confident in our ability to convey, in a way that we would not about, for example, Finnegans Wake or a story written by Donald Barthelme.
I got the idea for the short story I am currently writing after reading a hostile review an Irish historian wrote of a collection of research papers. Some of them were written by his peers, others older and more established than him, still more were graduate students. I have a decent hold on the successive interpretative and methodological waves in Irish historiography following the post-revolutionary period, how the war in the north raised the fortunes of a school which emphasised the illegitimacy and sectarianism of the Irish revolutionary tradition, how the Decade of Centenaries has given a larger public profile to feminist critiques of the Saorstát dispensation and the ways in which Sinn Féin’s electoral ascendency in both of the island’s statelets has rendered a post-political perspective focusing on ‘shared history’ or Irish complicity in Empire seem more embattled than in previous years.

From Saunders’ point of view, a set of petty and interpersonal feuds, character sketches of the eclectic set of people one gets in academia, imbued with that specific oddness that derives from being extreme in one’s interest in a particular subject, give us some of the raw materials, but we are still looking for an engine. One way Saunders proposes of getting yourself out of a rut of this type is to write the sentence ‘and then something happened which changed everyone forever’ then figure out what justifies it. What would this be here? The occasion of the review ruining a scholar’s career? The protagonist reflecting on the promise of the empty page feeling at the end that he has betrayed himself and his chosen field? How would one use Saunders’ book to write a story about thought?

This is an important question. One of the most notable features of these programmes is that their defining critical mode is appreciative. It strikes against every theoretical development in literature departments over the past century, which have been, for better and for worse, characterised by a subsumption to vibes-based sociology. An attention to plot, craft, character and language should not be left to those who are seeking to understand literature in order to write it.

Pulling on the strengths both of historical grounding and informed intuition (to leave the issue of the destruction of humanities departments in general to one side) seems particularly urgent since Saunders manifests the aesthete’s lack of interest in social life. He refers to one character’s critique of feudalism as ‘emotional Bolshevism’, uses the word ‘bourgeoisie’ in places where he should be using the word ‘bourgeois’ and cites Alexander Solzhenitsyn to the effect that Stalin lowered people into vats of acid.

So, worth reading, but should have included excerpts from Lenin’s book on the development of Russian capitalism.

Tunnel of Toads: Excerpts

Tunnel of Toads, a novel I wrote about how Dublin is increasingly difficult to live in, will be coming out from Marrowbone Books in a few weeks.

Until then here is a podcast episode in which a few excerpts from the book appear, performed by Roxanna Nic Liam.

Politics and Letters: Repeal the Eighth, the Six Counties and Irish literature

I’ve done a few episodes of the podcast since I last posted about it here, they appear below.

Interview with Sinéad Kennedy about the campaign to repeal the Eighth Amendment from Bunreacht na hÉireann

Interview with Odrán de Bhaldraithe about his book just out from Ebb Press, Neglect in the North of Ireland

Interview with Joe Cleary of Yale University about his book Outrageous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland

Wayside Monuments

‘Perpetual Motion’, or the Naas Ball, a hollow sphere of plastic cast over a skeleton of metal, is approximately nine metres in diameter. It was commissioned in 1996 by the National Roads Authority and Kildare County Council, who chose Remco de Fouw and Rachel Joynt’s submission from a list of thirty. The sculpture is between the Dublin Road roundabout and the N7 which forms a part of the broader M7, beginning at the Naas bypass and continuing to Rossbrien outside Limerick, bypassing towns in the counties Laois, Offaly and Tipperary. Composed of functional materials, traffic markings in thermoplastic, fragments of yellow boxes, intermittent dividing lines, contrasts of white and yellow reflective surfaces, the Naas ball is from one point of view an extrusion from its surroundings, a moment in the efflux of commuters from Naas to Dublin and back, as well as the broader expanding network of carriageways.

Road infrastructure developed under British rule was designed to establish military supremacy, boost trade between plantation towns and extract resources — agricultural products, labour and timber. The persisting legacy British domination is why the first dual carriageway and section of motorway in Ireland, the Sydenham bypass and the M1, were constructed in the six counties. It was not until 1983 that this first section of motorway in the Saorstát opened, a late but important symptom of the statelet’s re-fashioning as a USian beachhead into European markets, allowing it to roll back the more obvious symptoms of underdevelopment to outpace the six counties in just a few years. Taken with the lack of accommodation and public transport, these roads transformed Leinster into an effective suburb of the capital. The modes of being associated with this process — two-storey, terraced or semi-detached individual houses with pocket front and back gardens, driveways, women as privatised stay-at-home caregivers — represent the hard limits of the world most people who will read this post live in, and offer a number of insights into its ongoing collapse.  

The early twentieth century granted sculpture, along with drama, film, literature and painting greater amounts of reflexivity, emphases on colour, form, ornament and expression over referent. Sculpture is therefore no longer a specific product of human labour, or an object in multiple dimensions. It may be an experience, a found object, a process. The ascension of the values associated with the avant-garde to the level of an ideological default was fraught in an Irish context. The anti-colonial tendencies of twentieth-century Ireland registered a challenge to established forms of authority, but deserting convention for newness would validate the social forces that had undone indigenous forms of cultural and social life in the first place. It is this impulse towards conservation, as well as a new bourgeoisie securing its position by riding the back of multi-national capital, and not mere backwardness, behind Ireland’s belated Cubism and Pop Art. 

This ambivalence was also present in public sculpture, given its historic role in pledging loyalty to monarchical authority against the revolutionary movements of the eighteenth century. Even with the emergence of more widespread commemorative practice, following the centenary of the 1798 Rebellion and Emancipation, statues representing Erin, Daniel O’Connell and Charles Stewart Parnell held with the realism and theatricality of Victorian sculpture even as they rejected the Nelson and Wellington. Later statues of Thomas Davis and Wolfe Tone register the unsustainability of venerative sculpture but revivalism remains present in the works of Oisín Kelly, Oliver Sheppard as well as the more vernacular expressions of the Republican Graves Association. 

Roadside art, consumed by people moving along primary roads at speed, make claims on public attention. Being exposed to the Irish weather, they are made from durable materials. When County Council websites blurb them, they emphasise their accessibility and light-heartedness, defensive against accusations of wasting public money. 

Maurice Harron’s four and a half metres tall representation of Aodh Ruadh Ó Domhnaill was unveiled in 1999 on the highest point of the Curlew Mountains, along the N4 outside Boyle in County Roscommon, to commemorate the 400th anniversary a successful Irish rebel ambush of a relief force under Sir Conyers Clifford during the Nine Years War; English forces suffered heavy casualties, while Irish losses were minimal. A post-modern equestrian statue, two kilometres south-west of the actual site of the battle, the sharp and irregular pieces of steel and bronz, in tension with the visible wire skeleton, symbolise weaponry and armour. While the angularity of the panels capture the living flesh of both figures, implying movement and agitation, the stance is relaxed and contained . Though the episode takes place in the remote past, the hit-and-run attacks on the English formation, harassed from woods alongside their route to the point of exhaustion, resonates across centuries of irregular warfare, a doctrine conceived in response to occupation by a foreign power with greater military capacity. 

The notion that modernism represents a friction-based model of literary, sculptural or cinematic production can begin to ring hollow as it remains a global artistic lingua franca deployed for the purposes of chemical or pharmaceutical factories, assembly plants in industrial parks, shopping centres and office towers, repeatable and functional enough for further expansion, maximising rentable spaces and ironing out cultural particularity.

When consumerism and technology have allowed the ephemeral and middlebrow to predominate, artists find it difficult to define themselves and I personally expect that the present period will be regarded as noteworthy by its plainness, uniformity and lack of engagement with place, climate or history. The Spire stands out here, to read it as post-national on a street offering a pantheon of national figures would seem to grant it too much credit, rather than an uncritical monument to Celtic Tiger hubris becoming more risible the more the social fabric in the northside of the city erodes.

As an entity, the sculptor is here at once central and subordinate, retaining a relationship with the two prime movers of contemporaneity; state institutions and private capital. The experience of these artworks, in retail parks or corporate premises, are unconscious ones. They offer themselves up as exogenous shock; a refurbishment, a stray look while waiting at reception, the occasion of inconvenient glare on a screen. This grants sculptors a prominence unimaginable to a poet or playwright but brings with it a vulnerability to flows of construction and property speculation.

As a critique, reaction and reproduction of modernism, post-modernism offers some means of challenging these universalist tendencies, even if its privileging of the local over the global, the exception over the rule can terminate in a lack of ambition. Some attempts to mediate the gap can be seen in Fouw and Joynt’s other works which draw light through the monumentality of bronze, fibre optics, glass, quartz, steel and stone through which natural forms — the brain, coastlines, the heart, ocean currents, ova — encounter one another. 

Two further other collaborations:

1. ‘Waggle Dance’, in plate bronze. Like ‘Perpetual Motion’ spherical, but partial. Set in a water feature designed by Scott Tallon Walker outside the Iontas Building in Maynooth University. It affords a view into its internal bee-hive structure, reflecting the aspirations of the interdisciplinary institute outside of which it is set. 

2. ‘Eccentric Orbit’, limestone, bronze, stainless steel and cement. The playfulness of it being tipped on its side, the modelling of global currents, the compass needle pointing in the direction of the north star, offering a broader, cosmic significance.

These are instances in which i) a work of art changes its meaning over time, from developmentalism to ecology, ii) subsequent stages of an artists’ career recapitulating concerns latent in those previous and making them different in the repetition, the reason why, from my perspective, these things are worth paying attention to. Perpetual motion is impossible and if there is an analogy posited between the movement of the arrows over the concrete surface simulating the texture of tarmacadam, and currents in the air or sea, given that exhaust from car engines and construction together compose nearly half of Ireland’s greenhouse gas emissions, the Naas Ball has become sardonic.

The prominence of animals in roadside sculpture, Jarlath Daly’s Salmon, Kevin Holland’s Irish elk, Dick Joynt’s ram, Lynn Kirkham’s horses, have encouraged critics to regard them as regressive celebrations of national identity, criticisms that seem ready to hand whenever subjects regarded as specifically Irish are under consideration, but given the precarity of Ireland’s bio-diversity, they begin to take on a new significance, a giving way to particularity and detail away from administrative overtones. A positing of these synthesis of these two, a dependence on some notion of rootedness can lead one to very dubious conclusions, no relationship between human beings and ‘the world’ can ever be natural, but finding some means of threading these two is going to be fundamental, not just from the point of view of climate, but the artistic and cultural project that attends the athghábhail.

In January of this year a Green Party councillor Colm Kenny sought information from Kildare County Council about leveraging the visitor attraction potential of the Naas Ball. Here we have a new turning point, from patterns of consumption associated with capital investment to service economy, not a roadside sculpture, but a roadside tourist attraction. Just like they have in America.

Cleary, Joe. Outrageous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland. Field Day, 2005.

Farrell, Clarissa. ‘Centenary Harvest’. Irish Arts Review, vol. 35, no. 3, 2017.

Moss, Rachel (Editor). et al. Art and Architecture of Ireland. Royal Irish Academy, 2015.

A few notes on Adam Hoschild’s ‘King Leopold’s Ghost’

At the start of May Samuel Moyn approvingly posted a critique which appeared in The American Conservative of Adam Hochschild’s book King Leopold’s Ghost (1998), a narrative study of the atrocities the Belgian rubber trade inflicted on the peoples in the Congo, as well as the adventurists, opportunists and bureaucrats who made themselves indispensible to colonial rule in Central Africa. Moyn was sufficiently chastened by the response his post elicited, the article is unabashedly pro-imperial, that he took it down, so reconstructing the discourse requires us to dig through a few fragmented threads and /or depend on my unreliable memory. The reply or replies I want to focus on comes from Anton Jäger, a Belgian scholar, who when prompted, recommended the Belgian historian Jean Stengers, on the basis that these two were less prone to ‘personalisation’ and ‘inaccurate estimates’.

Sadly Jäger did not reply to someone asking him for i) estimates of what and ii) by how much Hochschild was wide of the mark. I think its a reasonable assumption that Jäger thinks Hochschild overstates how many people were killed as a consequence of the rubber trade in the Congo, as opposed to the size of rubber quotas, productivity, how long the Congo river is etc.

I happened to be reading King Leopold’s Ghost at the time this discourse started up and I found it to be very good. My understanding of the rubber trade and Belgian imperialism was highly impressionistic and though Hochschild’s book is a popular history with a lot of novelistic detail that we should be suspicious of, he is not a pro-imperial historian; his sense of moral outrage is present without distorting this history. But against those who argue that Hochschild paints a morally binaristic picture whereby ‘Leopold = evil, Morel = good’ he is clear-eyed about the oversights of Western humanitarians who lobbied for reform; E.D. Morel was soft on German imperialism as was his collaborator and friend Roger Casement, who once wrote colonialism was the fault of peoples who spoke Latin languages, a perspective presumably influenced by his intentions to secure German arms for the struggle against British imperialism in Ireland.

The imperial apologia in the article was obvious and I suspected that there was some also at work in the historian who was cited as a superior alternative so I was interested in investigating further. In a chapter towards the end of the book considering the numbers of deaths that might be blamed on the Belgians, Hochschild presents a number of different sources, including both expert estimates and well as references to relevant materials in the documents and scholarship he’s come across in his research.

An official Belgian government commission estimated that from the outset of Leopold’s operation to 1919, the population in the Belgian Congo (nearly 2.5 million square kilometres) had ‘been reduced by half’. Hochschild bases his own estimate on the conclusions of this commission combined with a Belgian census in 1924, which put the population at 10 million. On that basis, Hochschild concludes, the Belgian rubber trade killed 10 million people. Neal Ascherson, who Jäger recommends as better than Hochschild on these questions, cites exactly the same sources and in an edition of The King Incorporated published in 1999, cites Hochschild’s work approvingly. Hochschild also cites the Belgian historian Daniel Vangroenweghe (author of Red Rubber) who, examining Belgian headcounts, found that adult women outnumbered adult men 2:1 in a large number of surveyed villages, at a time when the trade was at its height. Incidentally, in an interview with the Guardian Van Grienweghe describes how his research resulted in him being investigated by the Belgian government and how attempts were made to get him sacked. (This is probably not the reaction of Belgian scholars Jäger has in mind). In a later edition of the book Hochschild also cites a Congolese historian Isidore Ndaywel è Nziem (sadly once again not available in translation) whose own research puts the death toll at 13 million.

Sadly Stengers’ works, are, insofar as I can see, only available in French; this is a large part of the reason why the title of this post begins with ‘A few notes’. However, in a 2008 article published in The Journal of Modern History Vincent Viaene tells us that Stengers’ line on Belgian imperialism can be summed up in two articles, one of which I was able to find in English.

Stengers’ argument as it appears here, is that the Congolese rubber trade was not imperialism as Leopold’s endeavours were characterised by pillage through state monopolies, far too unsophisticated from an economic perspective. Leopold was also not motivated by self-interest – arguing that he was individually impoverished by the enterprise – but selflessly re-invested his capital to ‘enrich the Belgian national heritage by acquiring property, building monuments and developing towns’. He also makes the point that foreign acquisitions were unpopular in Belgian society at large and that the Begian parliament had no hand in it.

Stengers also writes, ‘Leopold’s imperialism was a was a product solely of his own beliefs; it reflected nothing other than his own mind’. I found this sentence, as well as the lengthy verbatim quotations from Leopold’s diary, particularly interesting to read, given Jäger presents Stengers as an antidote to a non-personalising historian; Hochschild gives us plenty of data on the Congo itself, particularly on the working conditions and logistics surrounding the rubber and ivory trade, the role of colonial overseers, the development of local methods of transport, how the venture was represented in the media, effectively the minutiae of how the trade functioned on a macro and micro level.

It may be said that given my language skills, all I have presented here is supposition and ad hominem attacks. This is a fair critique. However, as anyone who pays a reasonable amount of attention to the National Question will know, debates on matters of empirical detail often turn into proxy wars for the legitimacy of the colonial enterprise overall. I would bet that Stengers, a man who describes Leopold as possessing ‘extraordinary dynamism’ and praises him for his ‘ingenuity’, referring to the Congo as ‘a gambler’s success’ is coming from a pro-imperial point of view.

However, perhaps Stengers has engaged with these questions productively. On that basis I would invite Jäger to put his language skills to good use and tell us what estimates historians writing in French have regarding the Belgian enterprise in the Congo and why their figures are more reliable than Hochschild’s.

Politics and Letters: Conor McCarthy on Edward Said

I’ve started a podcast on which I intend to interview authors about their books. As the title suggests I’ll be talking primarily to authors of non-fiction and criticism but I hope also to move out into fiction and poetry as times goes on.

Here’s a link to the podcast homepage on Spotify, and here’s the RSS feed.

The first episode is the extended version of interview I did last year with the Irish historians Ferghal MacBhloscaidh and Kerron Ó’Luain on the Irish Civil War, the most recent one is a conversation with Conor McCarthy of Maynooth University’s English Department on the life and work of the Palestinian literary critic Edward Said.

Hope you’ll listen, enjoy, find it useful.

Return of the Blog

I recently announced the end of the blog but I guess a not insignificant number of people still read old posts, so I’m going to continue posting updates here along with those on my more aesthetically pleasing actual website.

Since I was last on here I wrote a review of Roland Grigor Suny’s Stalin: Passage to Revolution, which you can read here, a short piece on the Demands Most Moderate Substack on Leon Trotsky’s analysis of fascism in Germany and a critique of the views of the late Scottish Marxist Tom Nairn on Ireland for Heckle magazine

End of the Blog

WordPress has become increasingly cluttered / difficult to use and I thought my time would be better spent learning how to build my own website in a cleaner format.

You can find it here, I’ll be transferring everything I think is any use from WordPress over the next number of weeks and I will begin blogging on the new site whenever the mood takes me.

I hope there’s some stuff I’ve put up here over the past few years that you’ve found useful or worthwhile.

Beir bua,

Chris

Publication: ‘1980’

Steve Barbaro was kind enough to ask me to publish a short story in the sixth issue of his avowedly distinct literary journal / zine / website new_sinews, I recommend you take an hour or two to rattle around in its archives this weekend in order to remind yourself what some people are still interested in having literature do. This is always a healthy exercise.

The story is called ‘1980’, you can read it here, it’s an attempt to do justice to Irish politics.

Direct thanks due of course to Steve, as well as Odrán, TMITBP and xenorealisms, who all read this in draft, indirect thanks due to Alan Kinsella and Brian Hanley.

Podcast: Rupture Radio

The good people at Rupture Radio had me on to put a few questions to Bill Rolston and Robbie McVeigh about their monumental study of colonialism in Ireland, ”Anois ar teacht an tSamhraidh’: Ireland, Colonialism and the Unfinished Revolution‘.

You can listen to the podcast here and read my review of their book which appeared on Liberated Texts here.

Many thanks to the good people at Rupture Radio for having me on, I recommend going through their back catalogue for any other episodes you might be interested in listening to.