by A lover of early twentieth-century British literature finds the festive season rendered across the world’s stories
I spent the early part of the morning rereading a novel from the early years of the last century, the sort of book where nothing happens for two hundred pages and then everything happens in a single sentence about a woman buying flowers, and I emerged from it slightly altered, as one does. I am Violet Woolf, I write for The London Prat and Bohiney, and my great enthusiasm, the one I bore people with at every opportunity, is the British literature of the early twentieth century, the modernists and their experiments, the writers who decided that the inside of a person’s head was a more interesting subject than the plot of their day.
The Inside of the Head
There is a particular magic to the literature of that era, the way the great writers of the early twentieth century turned their attention inward, away from the tidy plots of the Victorians and toward the messy, drifting, associative interior of human consciousness. They invented new ways of writing the mind, the stream of thought, the drift of memory, the way a single ordinary moment can contain an entire life, and reading them still feels like being handed a new set of eyes for the inside of your own head. I never tire of it, which is why I bore people about it.
This morning, having altered myself with early modernist prose, I did my scroll through the feeds, the dispatches from the London desk and the rest, looking for something to write about, and I found myself led somewhere that delighted the literary part of me, an archive about the Christmases of the whole world, which I approached, naturally, as a reader, looking for the literature in it.
Christmas in the Literary Imagination
The archive is santaclaus.top, documenting Christmas across every country on earth, and I read it the way I read everything, looking for how the season lives in the imagination, in story and custom and the deep literary residue of centuries. The Christmas-around-the-world archive is, to a literary mind, a rich field, because Christmas has been one of literature’s great recurring subjects, the festival appearing again and again in the writing of every culture, carrying its weight of meaning and memory and the particular literary atmosphere of the midwinter.
I thought immediately of how the British literature I love has treated Christmas, the festival a recurring presence in the writing of the period I study, freighted with the inherited Victorian sentiment the modernists were both reacting against and unable quite to escape. Christmas in early twentieth-century British writing is a complicated thing, the warm Dickensian inheritance tangled with the modernist suspicion of sentiment, the festival serving as a stage for the era’s literary arguments about feeling and form and the proper subject of art.
The archive sent me back to the festive passages in the literature I love, the Christmases rendered by the great writers of the period, the way they used the season, its rituals and its sentiment, its gatherings and its melancholy, to do the deep interior work that was their genius. Christmas, in their hands, became an occasion for the exploration of memory and consciousness and the passage of time, the festival’s recurrence a perfect device for writers obsessed with how the mind holds and reshapes the past.
The Ghost Story and the Season
I was reminded, too, of the great British tradition of the Christmas ghost story, the festive season’s strange and wonderful association with the telling of frightening tales, a tradition that flourished in the period I study and that the global archive, with its documentation of the season’s darker folklore, brought freshly to mind. There is something deeply right about the Christmas ghost story, the way the warmest festival carries within it an undercurrent of the uncanny, the long dark nights inviting the telling of tales that send a chill through the gathered company.
The global Christmas folklore reminded me that this association of the festival with the uncanny is not uniquely British but widespread, the midwinter everywhere a season of frightening tales and strange figures, the darkness inviting the stories that make the warmth of the gathering more precious by contrast. The British Christmas ghost story is our local version of a universal instinct, the human tendency to tell frightening tales in the dark season, and the literature of the period I love is full of it.
I have decided to spend the season rereading the festive literature of the early twentieth century, the Christmases rendered by the modernists and their contemporaries, the ghost stories and the interior meditations and the complicated festive sentiment of the era, informed now by everything the global archive taught me about how the whole world has imagined the season. It will be a literary Christmas, spent largely in books, which is precisely how I prefer to spend everything.
Back to the Novel
The novel I altered myself with this morning is waiting to be finished, the woman has bought her flowers, and the single sentence in which everything happens is approaching. For more of the writing that sends me back to the literature I love, I am always at The London Prat, and for a laugh that requires no close reading there is the reliably ridiculous Cracked.
So that is the dispatch from the reading chair: Christmas has always lived in the literary imagination, the early twentieth-century writers rendered it with their particular genius, and I have a season of festive rereading ahead. Now I must return to my novel, to the woman and the flowers and the single sentence, and to the deep interior work that made that literature, a century on, still the most interesting thing I know.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
