Adventures in Eng. Lit.

As regular readers to my blog will know I used to say that I don’t do literature. It all goes back to a traumatic experience with my English literature A-level, which has left me marked for life. But since I bought my Sony Reader I have once again ventured into the world of literature. It And now I have begun listening to a course at Open Yale on literary theory. I will try to keep an open mind but I am sceptical about it. I will be getting my dose of Semiotics, Deconstruction, Lacan, Derida, Postmodernism etc. To be honest, this may be more for its comic value. I guess what I said about having an open mind… Literary theory has become something of a laughing stock in the last few years and really does bring academics into disrepute. Frederick Crews, and Professor Emeritus of English at the University of California, Berkeley, had a book called Postmodern Pooh, where he laid into the kind of meaningless pretentious drivel these people come out with. Some of the fake essays in it include:

Why? Wherefore? Inasmuch as Which? by Felicia Marronnez

The Courage to Squeal  by Dolores Malatesta.

The Fissured Subtext: Historical Problematics, the Absolute Cause, Transcoded Contradictions, and Late-Capitalist Metanarrative (in Pooh) by Carla Gulag

You Don’t Know What Pooh Studies Are About, Do You, and Even If You Did, Do You Think Anybody Would Be Impressed? by N. Mack

In another of the essays Sisera Catheter provides a ‘gynocritical approach (The term gynocritical was coined by Elaine Showalter and refers to the branch of modern feminist literary studies that focuses on women as writers, as distinct from the feminist critique of male authors.):

Seeing himself castrated and thus ineluctably “female”, Eeyore bends his head between and behind his forepaws, evidently attempting an acrobatic autoerotic feat that, if successful, will not only restore his depleted narcissistic libido and give him something to chew on that’s nicer than thistles but also exchange his former adult self for a polymorphous perversity whereby the oral, anal, and genital stages can merge in an endless preoedipal, nonphallic loop. In short, he is so unsure of his maleness that he now hopes to transform himself into an unborn baby woman.’

I have also been working my through the Western canon. So far, I have read four – The Picture of Dorian Gray, Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Pride and Prejudice, and Moby Dick. The canon itself has been part of the culture wars, getting a lot of flak with critics attacking the dominance of dead, white male Europeans. I am critical of a lot of literary theory but it has shown some of the limitations of the traditional ways of seeing literature. We do need to know the role of class, race and gender. How can these not have influenced literary output? My problem is that most of the theory comes from one particular ideological perspective. Add the pretentious language, meaningless jargon and it’s enough to put you off literature for life. Compare this to Richard Dawkins describing evolution or Steven Pinker setting out the mechanics of human language. I know which one I think gives you a better understanding of our world.

The problem I face when reading is that reading the Steig Larsson Millennium series is easier    than the classics. The problem is how to find the balance between enjoyment and enlightenment. Of course, they are not mutually exclusive. I am a bit out of practice with literature but I think it is going to be worth the effort. You should at least give the book fifty pages to get into it, after that you can be excused. What I love about reading is the way your tastes evolve. I have no idea what I will be reading in ten years’ time

I think the canon is a positive thing but that doesn’t mean we have to slavishly adhere to it. I like to be an omnivore trying to look for variety. It’s nice to have the canon as a source of ideas but there is no way I’m going to do anything but scratch the surface of that august list. In Changing Places David Lodge invented a wicked literary game he called ‘Humiliation‘, in which participants have to own up to their most horrendous literary lacuna. All the participants have to come up with the name of a classic book which they haven’t read and which they assume their rivals will have read. You score one point for every person in the group who has read the book that you haven’t touched. In Lodge’s novel American academic, Howard Ringbaum, admits that he has never read Hamlet – winning the game but losing his job.  My humiliation would be War and Peace or Wuthering Heights. However I don’t think I could outdo Hamlet. I would be most interested in your choices for the game. I’ll let you know how I get on with the Open Yale course and with the classics.

Here is the syllabus for the Introduction to Theory of Literature course you can download at Open Yale:

1. Introduction

2. Introduction (cont.)

3. Ways In and Out of the Hermeneutic Circle

4. Configurative Reading

5. The Idea of the Autonomous Artwork

6. The New Criticism and Other Western Formalisms

7. Russian Formalism

8. Semiotics and Structuralism

9. Linguistics and Literature

10. Deconstruction I

11. Deconstruction II

12. Freud and Fiction

13. Jacques Lacan in Theory

14. Influence

15. The Postmodern Psyche

16. The Social Permeability of Reader and Text

17. The Frankfurt School of Critical Theory

18. The Political Unconscious

19. The New Historicism

20. The Classical Feminist Tradition

21. African-American Criticism

22. Post-Colonial Criticism

23. Queer Theory and Gender Performativity

24. The Institutional Construction of Literary Study

25. The End of Theory?; Neo-Pragmatism

26. Reflections; Who Doesn’t Hate Theory Now?

My favourite links #36

SparkNotes is a website where you can find study guides for literature, poetry, history, film and philosophy. It is a free website funded by advertising. But if you want you can buy the material in PDF as an e-book or in print format. There are hundreds of books available.

In the literature guide you can click on the following headings:

Context

Plot Overview

Character List

Analysis of Major Characters

Themes, Motifs & Symbols

Summary & Analysis

Etymology & Extracts

Chapters Summaries

Important Quotations Explained

Key Facts

Study Questions & Essay Topics

Quiz

Suggestions for Further Reading

The site has attracted some controversy with teachers accusing it of being a tool for cheats. Apparently students will use it instead of reading the actual book. I can’t believe it! It can even be used to cheat during tests using mobile phones with Internet access. I can still remember a friend of mine getting an A for an essay about Oliver Twist based on the Lionel Bart musical.

In defence of trivia

I have just finished reading The Importance of Being Trivial by Mark Mason. This delightful book, which deals with the author’s quest to find the perfect piece of trivia, has interviews with aficionados, and scientists as the author seeks to explain the appeal of trivia and what it tells us about being human. The book is peppered with titbits and here is a selection of my favourites:

• Pete Conrad was the first man to fall over on the moon.

• George Foreman’s sons are all called George.

• Gordon Brown, who is blind in one eye, decreed that the font for Number Ten emails change from Times New Roman 12 to Arial when he became PM

• Oasis’s Liam Gallagher has an IQ of over 160.

• The only female in Lawrence is Arabia is Gladys the camel.

• The first government ban on smoking was instituted by the Nazis.

• Jack the Ripper was left-handed.

• In 1977, when Elvis Presley died, there were 170 Elvis impersonators in the world. By the turn of the millennium that had grown to 85,000. At that rate of growth, by 2019 one third of the world’s population will be Elvis impersonators.

• The leg in the famous poster for The Graduate was not Anne Bancroft’s it belonged to Linda Gray, who would go on to play Sue Ellen in the hit TV series Dallas.

I want to have a look at what trivia is. The word comes from the Latin for three ways. It referred to the arte triviale the trivium the three liberal arts (the education appropriate for a free man) taught at university namely grammar, rhetoric and logic. The other four liberal arts were the quadrivium – arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy, which were considered more intellectually demanding and thus trivia came to mean “of interest only to an undergraduate”. Its modern incarnation is, rather surprisingly for me, is from the USA; two Columbia University students, Ed Goodgold and Dan Carlinsky, ran quizzes at  their university with questions about culturally significant but ultimately useless information, which they called trivia contests.

There is no doubt that trivia has its detractors. It is considered shallow and its practitioners are considered anal In English we have that rather despective word, coined by Norman Mailer, factoid, facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper. I remember a teacher at school calling participants on the quiz programme Mastermind as human dustbins. It does seem to be a particularly masculine activity drawing on the male brain that is dedicated to systemising.

One thing that is clear is the incomplete nature of knowledge. There are so many things we think we know but that turn out to have no basis in truth. Facts once they get out seem to have a life of their own. Sometimes we do it ourselves when we fill in the gaps in our memory by unconsciously inventing something. The programme QI has a section called General Ignorance where they debunk myths that have gained acceptance: Marco Polo was in fact Croatian and his name means Mark Chicken. Nelson’s last words were not “Kiss me, Hardy” or “Kismet, Hardy” but “Drink, drink. Fan, fan Rub, rub.” The steam engine was actually invented in ancient Greece. I guess that in the Internet age we have learnt that the truth is complicated.

If you are a regular reader of my blog, you will know that I don’t agree with the critics of trivia. If you look on the right hand side I have a category dedicated to it. I am an intellectual dilettante a knowledge junkie. I love finding out about theories and ideas but I do enjoy that special feeling when I discover a magical piece of trivia. I do agree that facts without theory is trivia and theory without facts is bullshit. But trivia is a way of making knowledge attractive and is just great fun. And that’s more than enough for me.

My new toy

About a year ago I did a post called Some Thoughts on Books. In it I mentioned The Kindle, Amazon’s electronic book. I expressed some scepticism about this kind of device. However I now have availed myself of an electronic reading device – but not the Kindle. I plumped instead for the Sony PRS 505, which cost me £159 at WH Smith I’ve had it for just over a month now and so far I have read nine books and the experience is very satisfactory.

           

            My one is silver. It weighs around 260 grams and its size is a very convenient 175mm by 122mm by 8mm. The great thing is that it is compatible with a lot of different formats, which is not typical for the Japanese multinational. The internal memory of 200MB holds around 160 e-books, although this depends on the size of the book and also the format. PDF files can take up a lot of space. For example, a 250-page book on PDF could use up a lot more space than War and Peace. SD and Memory Stick slots can be used to expand the memory but surely 100 books is enough? I prefer to keep the rest of the books on my computer. The e-book comes with a CD featuring 100 classic works – Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde to name but a few authors. It’s incredibly easy to use – its navigation very intuitive. The page turning does take a split second to refresh the page. Some people find this slow but when you are reading a normal book, it also takes a time to turn a page. This page turning is what uses up the battery. You can do some 7,500 turns before you need to recharge the battery, which for me is about two weeks. The recharging can be done with the USB port of the PC. It is compatible with a lot of different formats, which is not typical for the Japanese multinational.

 

 

            What are the pros and cons? For me the biggest advantage is space. My house is already overflowing with books. I love being able to have my books stored on my computer just like with music. There is so much stuff available for free on the Internet. The reading experience is also excellent; e-ink is nothing to like reading on a computer screen – it’s very easy on the eyes. With the option of three font sizes, it is actually more comfortable for me.

 

        For me the con is still the price. In the future I hope there will be a models costing under  100. What  I would like is a simple model without too many bells and whistles. The Kindle has a lot of gee-whiz technology; you can order a book and have it on the device in one minute. You don’t even need a computer. This is all great but I feel that the cost of e-books doesn’t reflect the savings in materials and transport. As a person who would always wait for the paperback, $9.99 is a bit steep for a book.

         What is the future of these machines. I really don’t know because these gadgets are constantly changing. They say that dedicated devices are on the way out and we will have multipurpose machines are the future. I have noticed that when I show it to people they don’t say I must buy that. I also never see commuters on the underground reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo on an e-book . Maybe it is just going to be a niche market. What I don’t know is how I’m going to find time to do my blog with the thousands of books I have to read.

Dan Brown’s 20 worst sentences

This week Dan Brown’s new novel The Lost Symbol came out and the Telegraph celebrated with a piece about Brown’s 20 worst sentences. The critics do not share the public’s enthusiasm. The article quotes Edinburgh professor of linguistics Geoffrey Pullum says “Brown’s writing is not just bad; it is staggeringly, clumsily, thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad.”  I’m sure the author won’t be too bothered and I have to confess I shall be one of those reading it. Anyway, here is the Telegraph’s top 20 with comments:

 

20. Angels and Demons, chapter 1: Although not overly handsome in a classical sense, the forty-year-old Langdon had what his female colleagues referred to as an ‘erudite’ appeal — wisp of gray in his thick brown hair, probing blue eyes, an arrestingly deep voice, and the strong, carefree smile of a collegiate athlete. They say the first rule of fiction is “show, don’t tell”. This fails that rule.

 

19. The Da Vinci Code, chapter 83: “The Knights Templar were warriors,” Teabing reminded, the sound of his aluminum crutches echoing in this reverberant space. “Remind” is a transitive verb – you need to remind someone of something. You can’t just remind. And if the crutches echo, we know the space is reverberant.

 

18. The Da Vinci Code, chapter 4: He could taste the familiar tang of museum air – an arid, deionized essence that carried a faint hint of carbon – the product of industrial, coal-filter dehumidifiers that ran around the clock to counteract the corrosive carbon dioxide exhaled by visitors. Ah, that familiar tang of deionised essence.

 

17. Deception Point, chapter 8: Overhanging her precarious body was a jaundiced face whose skin resembled a sheet of parchment paper punctured by two emotionless eyes. It’s not clear what Brown thinks ‘precarious’ means here.

 

16. The Da Vinci Code, chapter 4: A voice spoke, chillingly close. “Do not move.” On his hands and knees, the curator froze, turning his head slowly. Only fifteen feet away, outside the sealed gate, the mountainous silhouette of his attacker stared through the iron bars. He was broad and tall, with ghost-pale skin and thinning white hair. His irises were pink with dark red pupils. A silhouette with white hair and pink irises stood chillingly close but 15 feet away. What’s wrong with this picture?

 

15. The Da Vinci Code, chapter 4: As a boy, Langdon had fallen down an abandoned well shaft and almost died treading water in the narrow space for hours before being rescued. Since then, he’d suffered a haunting phobia of enclosed spaces – elevators, subways, squash courts. Other enclosed spaces include toilet cubicles, phone boxes and dog kennels.

 

14. Angels and Demons, chapter 100: Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers glorified the four major rivers of the Old World – The Nile, Ganges, Danube, and Rio Plata. The Rio de la Plata. Between Argentina and Paraguay. One of the major rivers of the Old World. Apparently.

 

The Da Vinci Code, chapter 5: Only those with a keen eye would notice his 14-karat gold bishop’s ring with purple amethyst, large diamonds, and hand-tooled mitre-crozier appliqué. A keen eye indeed.

 

13 and 12. The Lost Symbol, chapter 1: He was sitting all alone in the enormous cabin of a Falcon 2000EX corporate jet as it bounced its way through turbulence. In the background, the dual Pratt & Whitney engines hummed evenly.  The Da Vinci Code, chapter 17: Yanking his Manurhin MR-93 revolver from his shoulder holster, the captain dashed out of the office. Oh – the Falcon 2000EX with the Pratt & Whitneys? And the Manurhin MR-93? Not the MR-92? You’re sure? Thanks.

 

11. The Da Vinci Code, chapter 4: Captain Bezu Fache carried himself like an angry ox, with his wide shoulders thrown back and his chin tucked hard into his chest. His dark hair was slicked back with oil, accentuating an arrow-like widow’s peak that divided his jutting brow and preceded him like the prow of a battleship. As he advanced, his dark eyes seemed to scorch the earth before him, radiating a fiery clarity that forecast his reputation for unblinking severity in all matters. Do angry oxen carry throw their shoulders back and tuck their chins into their chest? What precisely is a fiery clarity and how does it forecast anything? Once again, it is not clear whether Brown knows what ‘forecast’ means.

 

10. The Da Vinci Code, chapter 4: Five months ago, the kaleidoscope of power had been shaken, and Aringarosa was still reeling from the blow. Did they hit him with the kaleidoscope?

 

9. The Da Vinci Code, chapter 32: The vehicle was easily the smallest car Langdon had ever seen. “SmartCar,” she said. “A hundred kilometers to the liter.” Pro tip: when fleeing from the police, take a moment to boast about your getaway vehicle’s fuel efficiency. And get it wrong by a factor of five. SmartCars do about 20km (12 miles) to the litre.

 

8. The Da Vinci Code, chapter 3: My French stinks, Langdon thought, but my zodiac iconography is pretty good.

And they say the schools are dumbing down.

 

7 and 6. The Da Vinci Code, chapter 33: Pulling back the sleeve of his jacket, he checked his watch – a vintage, collector’s-edition Mickey Mouse wristwatch that had been a gift from his parents on his tenth birthday.

The Da Vinci Code, chapter 6: His last correspondence from Vittoria had been in December – a postcard saying she was headed to the Java Sea to continue her research in entanglement physics… something about using satellites to track manta ray migrations. In the words of Professor Pullum: “It has the ring of utter ineptitude. The details have no relevance to what is being narrated.”

 

5. Angels and Demons, chapter 4: learning the ropes in the trenches. Learning the ropes (of a naval ship) while in the trenches (with the army in the First World War). It’s a military education, certainly.

 

4, 3, and 2. The Da Vinci Code, opening sentence: Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum’s Grand Gallery.

Angels and Demons, opening sentence: Physicist Leonardo Vetra smelled burning flesh, and he knew it was his own.

Deception Point, opening sentences: Death, in this forsaken place, could come in countless forms. Geologist Charles Brophy had endured the savage splendor of this terrain for years, and yet nothing could prepare him for a fate as barbarous and unnatural as the one about to befall him. Professor Pullum: “Renowned author Dan Brown staggered through his formulaic opening sentence”.

 

1. The Da Vinci Code: Title. The Da Vinci Code. Leonardo’s surname was not Da Vinci. He was from Vinci, or of Vinci. As many critics have pointed out, calling it The Da Vinci Code is like saying Mr Of Arabia or asking What Would Of Nazareth Do?

Common traits of dystopian fiction

The following is a list of common traits of dystopias, although it is by no means definitive. Most dystopian films or literature includes at least a few of the following:

 

a hierarchical society where divisions between the upper, middle and lower class are definitive and unbending (Caste system).

a nation-state ruled by an upper class with few democratic ideals

state propaganda programs and educational systems that coerce most citizens into worshipping the state and its government, in an attempt to convince them into thinking that life under the regime is good and just

strict conformity among citizens and the general assumption that dissent and individuality are bad

a fictional state figurehead that people worship fanatically through a vast personality cult, such as 1984’s Big Brother or We‘s The Benefactor

a fear or disgust of the world outside the state

a common view of traditional life, particularly organized religion, as primitive and nonsensical

a penal system that lacks due process laws and often employs psychological or physical torture

constant surveillance by state police agencies

the banishment of the natural world from daily life

a back story of a natural disaster, war, revolution, uprising, spike in overpopulation or some other climactic event which resulted in dramatic changes to society

a standard of living among the lower and middle class that is generally poorer than in contemporary society

a protagonist who questions the society, often feeling intrinsically that something is terribly wrong

because dystopian literature takes place in the future, it often features technology more advanced than that of contemporary society

 

To have an effect on the reader, dystopian fiction typically has one other trait: familiarity. It is not enough to show people living in a society that seems unpleasant. The society must have echoes of today, of the reader’s own experience. If the reader can identify the patterns or trends that would lead to the dystopia, it becomes a more involving and effective experience. Authors can use a dystopia effectively to highlight their own concerns about societal trends. For example, some commentators say that George Orwell originally wanted to title 1984 1948, because he saw the world he describes emerging in austere postwar Europe.

 

Source: Nationmaster

 

Dystopian literature: a list

1984 by George Orwell

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

Among the Hidden by Margaret Haddix

Anthem by Ayn Rand

Angelwings and Finerthings by Paul M. Jessup

Ape and Essence by Aldous Huxley

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (This could perhaps be considered a utopia, as the people in that society are certainly happy, but it is more generally regarded by critics as a dystopian satire, as they actually have no choice in whether they are happy or not.)

The Children of Men by P.D. James

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

Doc and Fluff by Pat Califia

Die Andere Seite by Alfred Kubin

The Domination by S. M. Stirling

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

A Friend of the Earth by T. C. Boyle.

The Giver by Lois Lowry (Again, perhaps a Utopia, however it is at a cost)

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut

The Iron Heel by Jack London

It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis

Jennifer Government by Max Barry

Kallocain by Karin Boye

Level 7 by Mordecai Roshwald

Logan’s Run by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson

Lord of the Flies by William Golding (an example of a dystopia that takes place in the present)

The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster

Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison

Neuromancer by William Gibson.

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle

Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut

The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick

The Running Man by Richard Bachman, a pseudonym for Stephen King.

The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner

The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

This Perfect Day by Ira Levin

Time out of Joint by Philip K. Dick

Tl?Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by Jorge Luis Borges

Triage by Leonard Lewin

V for Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd

The Wanting Seed by Anthony Burgess

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut

 

Source: Nationmaster

How stories made our world

In unsettled times like these, when world cultures, countries and religions are facing off in violent confrontations, we could benefit from the reminder that storytelling is common to all civilizations. Whether in the form of a sprawling epic or a pointed ballad, the story is our most ancient method of making sense out of experience and of preserving the past.  William Collins

 

Our species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories. Mary Catherine Bateson

 

Many people don’t realize the extent to which stories influence our behaviour and even shape our culture. Think about how Bible stories teach the fundamentals of religion and rules of conduct. Think of the fables and parables that moulded your values. Think of how stories about your national, cultural or family history have shaped your attitudes about yourself and others.  Lawrence Shapiro

 

The story was the bushman’s most sacred possession. These people knew what we do not; that without a story you have not got a nation, or culture, or civilization. Without a story of your own, you haven’t got a life of your own. Laurens Van der Post

 

We are constantly being bombarded with stories. Newspapers have their news stories. Cinema is based, almost exclusively, on dramatised fiction. Prime time TV is largely the same. Novels dominate the bestseller lists. Companies spend billions of dollars every year on advertising, trying to get their stories across to us, so as to influence us to purchase their products. Political leaders and states have also fostered stories about the past in order to construct a sense of community or nation. The founders of the world’s great religions understood the importance of stories, handing down our great myths and legends from generation to generation. Elaborate conspiracy theories intrigue us. Much of our conversation is taken up with anecdotes, jokes and of course gossip – all forms of story. Even when we go to bed at night, our dreams are stories produced by our sleeping brains. We are indeed storytelling apes.

            We may not feel comfortable with the idea of applying human evolution to the understanding of literature and narrative in general, but it can undoubtedly provide many valuable insights. We can say this for two reasons. Firstly, storytelling goes back a long way, pre-dating not only the invention of writing, but of agriculture and permanent settlement as well. We do not know exactly when humans developed language but a 100,000 years ago is as good a guess as any. Secondly, storytelling is ultimately a product of the human mind, which itself is the product of evolutionary pressures.

Storytelling has grown immensely in its scope and power from its origins – telling stories around the campfire. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories. Freudians have their three stages of psychosexual development, the oral, anal and phallic; in terms of narrative Walter Ong, a linguist and narratologist described the oral, print and media stages. It is a good idea to get an idea of the time scales involved. If we began using language 100,000 years ago, the print and media stages represent a mere blink of the eye.

What are the functions of storytelling? Within evolutionary science there is a debate as to whether it is an evolutionary adaptation or a by-product of the human mind I favour the latter but whoever is right stories serve an essential role in our society; they can teach morals, cultural expectations, and behavioural norms. The knowledge we acquire through storytelling vastly outweighs the firsthand knowledge we have about the world. Stories are indeed a wonderful teaching tool. It is clear that we respond far better to stories than we do to graphs and numbers. Thomas Sowell’s book Basic Economics: A Citizen’s Guide to the Economy contains no graphs or mathematical formulae. It does however contain lots of stories that really bring the dismal science to life. Mathematician John Allen Paulos tries to do similar things with mathematics. We need to be given a context and stories are wonderful at doing that.

            However, stories have their dangers. Life is not a Hollywood narrative. It does not imitate art. Many events have no meaning and are purely arbitrary occurrences but humans need to try to impose order on all this chaos- we have a need to use the word because; we are a pattern-seeking species. This is why we’re all so riveted by stories of any kind – we can’t live without explanations so we make up all kinds of theories with insufficient information and a blatant disregard for empirical evidence. This has been called narrative fallacy and we are suckers for it. In at the beginning of a Hollywood film we see someone buying a gun we know that that he will use it very soon. If someone coughs, it is because they have a terminal illness. In real life many things occur but they have no particular connection to what comes after they are merely random, meaningless events. In economics we often hear stories about how individuals are affected by a particular factory closure but we don’t see the overall effects. We hear from the most vocal groups but we won’t hear from people whose future jobs will be destroyed by protective tariffs. Anecdotes are not necessarily the best way to carry out an economic policy. Anti-semitism is an example of a terrible story that has been handed down from generation to generation culminating in the horror of the Holocaust.

            So, stories are all around us. We cannot escape from them. They do many wonderful things but we should also be aware of the dangers.  I would like to claim the wisdom to be able to see beyond them but we will probably never be able to transcend all our biases and see things in an objective way. 

The seven basic plots

In 2005  a journalist called Christopher Booker published The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories, a Jungian-influenced analysis of stories and their psychological meaning, a labour of love on which he had been working for over 30 years. Although he got very bad reviews in the press, he did receive praise from many novelists, playwrights and academics.  He attempts to answer the answer to the age-old riddle of whether there are only a small number of ‘basic stories’ in the world, using examples, from ancient myths, folk tales, plays, novels, movies and soap operas. Here are the seven archetypal themes, which according to Booker, recur throughout every kind of storytelling:

 

RAGS TO RICHES Story of an ordinary person who finds a second, more exceptional, self within. Examples include Cinderella, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Jane Eyre and Hollywood films such as The Gold Rush and My Fair Lady

 

THE QUEST A long, hazardous journey to reach a priceless goal far away. Examples of this include The Odyssey, Jason and the Golden Fleece, King Solomon’s Mines, Around The World in Eighty Days and Raiders of the Lost Ark

 

VOYAGE AND RETURN Story in which some event — a fall, crash, shipwreck — propels the hero or heroine out of their familiar surroundings into a disconcerting and abnormal world. Examples include Alice in Wonderland, Robinson Crusoe, The Ancient Mariner, The Time Machine

 

COMEDY Not just a general term, but an identifiable form of plot which follows its own rules. Examples include Tom Jones, the novels of Jane Austen, The Importance of Being Earnest, Fawlty Towers, Some Like It Hot

 

TRAGEDY Is an archetypal plot, with a five-stage structure culminating in destruction and death. The main character is overcome by a desire for power/passion, which destroys them or they become monstrous. Examples include Macbeth, Doctor Faustus, Lolita, and King Lear

 

REBIRTH Someone falls under a dark power or a spell that traps him or her in a state of living death. An miraculous act of redemption takes place and the victim is released and brought into the light. Examples include Sleeping Beauty, A Christmas Carol, The Sound of Music

 

OVERCOMING THE MONSTER A hero or heroine confronts a monster, defeats it against all odds and wins treasure or a loved one’s hand. Examples include David and Goliath, Nicholas Nickleby, Jack and the Beanstalk, Dracula, James Bond stories, Jaws

Mission Accomplished!

Matthew Parris has a new book, co-authored with Phil Mason, called Mission Accomplished! Things Politicians Wish They Hadn’t Said. It sounds a lot of fun. Here are a few examples from the book:

 

This skunk is unbelievably powerful. It’s completely different to – I think I’ll stop there.

Conservative leader David Cameron on drugs control plans.

 

The number of women aged between 15 and 50 is fixed. Because the number of birth-giving machines and devices is fixed, all we can ask is for them to do their best per head.

Hakuo Yanagisawa, Japanese Health Minister, on his country’s low birth rate. He later said he was “sorry to call them machines.”

 

Italy is now a great country to invest in…today we have fewer communists and those who are still there deny having been one. Another reason to invest in Italy is that we have beautiful secretaries… superb girls.

Silvio Berlusconi visits the New York Stock Exchange .

 

Do you have blacks, too?

George W. Bush to Brazilian President Fernando Cardoso. Witnessed, but not reported, by the White House press corps. Brazil has the largest population of blacks of any country outside Africa.

 

There are neighbourhoods in Baghdad where you and I could walk through today.

John McCain visits a market in the Iraqi capital in April 2007, during which he was flanked by 22 soldiers, ten armoured Humvees, and two Apache attack helicopters.

 

Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran

McCain, singing a riposte (to the tune of the Beach Boys’ Barbara Ann) on being asked about his post-Iraq policy towards Iran. When asked if he was not being insensitive, he replied, “Insensitive to what? The Iranians?”

 

Iran, Cuba, Venezuela – these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don’t pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us.

Barack Obama, campaign rally, Oregon, May 18, 2008

Let me be absolutely clear: Iran is a grave threat.

Obama, campaign rally, Montana, May 19, 2008

 

I think it’s time for us to end the embargo with Cuba… [It] has failed to provide the sorts of rising standards of living and has squeezed the innocents in Cuba, and utterly failed in the effort to overthrow Castro… it’s time for us to acknowledge that that particular policy has failed.

Obama, to a university audience, Illinois, January 2004

As president, I’ll maintain the embargo – it’s an important inducement for change.

Obama, to a Cuban-American audience, Miami, August 2007

 

I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.

Hillary Clinton, campaigning in March 2008, describing her visit to Bosnia in 1996. In fact, television footage showed her and her daughter, Chelsea, calmly disembarking from the aircraft at Tuzla airport and being welcomed by a local girl. Clinton was shown hugging the child wreathed in smiles for the cameras.

I misspoke.

Clinton explaining her account, May 2008

 

I supported the President when he asked for authority to stand up against weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Bill Clinton, speech in Mississippi, May 2003

I…opposed Iraq from the beginning

Clinton, campaigning with wife Hillary in the presidential primaries, November 2007