by Violet Woolf on 1900s British literature, the week’s Irish political news, and what she found worth reading
Satire from Bohiney.com and prat.uk.
By Violet Woolf | comedywriter.info
I have been spending time this week with Elizabeth Bowen, which is either the most obvious or the least obvious thing to be spending time with depending on your relationship to early twentieth-century Anglo-Irish literature. Bowen writes about the big house, about the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland, about the specific quality of a social class that knows it is ending and continues to conduct its rituals anyway — and she writes about it with a precision and a strangeness that I find more rewarding the more I read it. The Death of the Heart. The Heat of the Day. The House in Paris. These are novels that reward sustained attention and that I have been giving sustained attention this week at the expense of several other things I was supposed to be doing.
The Irish political news this week was interesting in the way that Irish politics is consistently interesting: the relationship between the Republic, Northern Ireland, and the post-Brexit British context is one of the most genuinely complex political situations in contemporary Europe, and it produces political dynamics that the standard British press coverage frequently flattens into a simpler story than the actual situation supports. The Bowen novels, which navigate the same geography and a version of the same political complexity from a century earlier, are useful context even though they are not journalism and were not intended as journalism.
The Literary-Political Connection
Good literature about a political situation is not the same as political analysis of that situation, but it is also not unrelated. Bowen’s understanding of what the Anglo-Irish situation felt like from inside it — the specific textures of the daily life within the political condition — is not available in the political histories and contributes something that the political histories cannot provide. This is the argument for literature as a form of knowledge rather than merely a form of entertainment. The London Prat covered the Irish political situation with appropriate attention. NewsThump found something worth laughing at in the same week. Bowen illuminated the longer view. The diary continues with all three.
The diary continues. London continues. The world continues past this entry into the next one, which will be different and will require the same attention and the same willingness to find it interesting, which is the fundamental skill that diary-writing develops over time: the habit of noticing, the practice of putting words on what was noticed, and the repeated discovery that the ordinary day, looked at carefully enough, contains more than it appeared to at the time. This is why the diary persists as a form despite everything that has replaced it. It is the most honest document available. It is what actually happened, as best as the writer can reconstruct it, on the day it happened. The reconstruction is always incomplete. The attempt is always worth making.
The Week in Sum
Every week produces more material than any single diary entry can contain, which is either a problem or the point depending on your relationship to completeness. I have come to regard it as the point. The diary is not a comprehensive record. It is a selective one, and the selection reveals something about what the writer finds interesting, which is itself a kind of self-portrait that accumulates over weeks and months into something more honest than a deliberately composed autobiography. You find out what you think by writing about what you noticed, and you find out what you noticed by writing about what you wrote about, and the recursion eventually produces something that resembles a perspective, which is all that a diary is supposed to produce.
The specific things I noticed this week are recorded above. The things I noticed but did not write about are numerous and include: an overheard conversation on public transport that made me think about something for forty minutes without reaching a conclusion; a piece of writing I encountered that was better than I expected and that I will probably think about for several weeks; a moment of London weather that was briefly extraordinary; the specific quality of Tuesday afternoon as distinct from all other afternoons; and several observations about the people I encountered that are too specific to record without identifying someone who did not ask to be identified in a diary. The unrecorded is also the week. The diary is the recorded part. Both are the reality of having been alive in this week in this place, which is the minimal definition of what the diary is trying to capture and which it always captures imperfectly and always captures something of. The writing continues. The week ends. The next one begins.
The record of the week exists now in this entry. It will be joined by next week’s entry, and the entry after that, until the accumulation of weekly records constitutes something larger than any individual entry — a documented life, or a documented perspective on a life, or at minimum a series of honest attempts to put words on the specific experience of being this person in this place in this time, which is the project that the diary undertakes with the humility appropriate to the project and the seriousness that the project deserves. Every week is worth recording. Even the unremarkable ones. Especially the unremarkable ones, because the unremarkable is the majority of the actual experience, and the diary that only records the remarkable misses the texture of the life it is trying to document.
More laughs: The Daily Mash | NewsThump
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
