Current issue now on sale!

The Lost & Found issue of Helicon is now on sale!

32 pages glossy pages filled with art, poetry, photography, short stories and features - compiled by students from Bristol University. We only have 200 of these limited edition copies so make sure to get your hands on one!

Where can I pick up a copy?

This Friday 31st January, between 11am and 3pm we will be in the foyer of the Refectory on Woodland Road selling copies.

How much does it cost?

If you're a member of Helicon, it's free! The price for non-members is £1, but by signing up to be a member for just £3 you receive the following benefits:

• Free or discounted entry to all Helicon events and workshops - this term we have crafty workshops, creative writing workshops and film trips lined up

• Opportunity to sign up for the Helicon Book Club - announced February

• Free copies of this and future issues this year

• Sign up on Friday, and you will also be entered into our competition to win Boston Tea Party vouchers!

How do you sign up to be a member?

You can sign up for membership this Friday at the Refectory. If you are already a member, come along to pick up your free copy of the magazine then too. Some of us from the Helicon team will be there for a chat if you'd like to find out how you can contribute content to the blog and the next issue!

A big thank you to everyone who contributed to the Lost & Found issue - with your help, we really enjoyed putting the magazine together and we are looking forward to another term with lots more creative events for you.

Eleven Untranslatable Words

I came across this article as part of my Linguistics course - it was a nice surprise after reading pages and pages of very heavy essays! Ella Frances Sanders compiles a list of eleven 'untranslatable' words, some of them beautifully poetic, complete with some great illustrations.

In linguistics we learn about linguistic relativity: this is the idea that as long as the world shares the same concept, a language can survive. That is to say, words themselves are arbitrary and are only symbols for what we collectively understand- the word 'dog' is irrelevant whether we call it a 'chien', a 'perro', or a 'hund'. 

So this means that these words are untranslatable because their meaning is not generally shared- true, we don't have one exact word for 'komorebi-sunlight that filters through the leaves of trees', but that's not to say we can't translate it's meaning? Personally I think 'dappled light' is pretty close...?

If you agree with me here, take a look at Michelle Hume's food blog which takes a stand against the idea that these words really are 'untranslatable' and gives us an example of what really is.

Sacha 

Infinite Jest's transferrable language

I’m in the midst of completing my dissertation on David Foster Wallace, and found myself trying to explain to someone the other day how Infinite Jest changes your life (this is a cliche, I don’t care, if you read it you’ll know exactly what I mean). One of the things I described was how, for at least a month after I finished reading - and still now, at times - words or phrases from the book pop into my head, and I find myself describing things (only internally, obviously) in Wallace’s lingo. Language can do strange things to you. 

I’ve had a look on the internet, and found a ‘wiki’ for Infinite Jest, but nowhere that seems to detail particular phrases that he uses that you could actually use (if you ever find yourself in a situation with a gun and some weed). So, here is a (by no means exhaustive) guide to Infinite Jest’s wonderful, idiosyncratic lexicon.

Head-gaming/ Jonesing/ Mokus - Intellectual play: ‘I hate Todd, he’s always jonesing’. 

Map - Head: ‘My map is in a mess right now’.

Eliminate/d ‘his/her’ map - killed him/her: ‘Billy eliminated Joe’s map’. 

[to] Eat cheese - Rat someone out, inform: ‘John went to jail and ate cheese’.

Screaming Fantods - the creeps: ‘that movie gave me the screaming fantods’.

Greebles - those bits of tissue that are left when you rub something wet/‘sleep’ in the corner of your eye: ‘there are some greebles in your eyes’.

Item - Handgun: ‘Tom pulled out his handgun’. 

Material/Bob Hope - Dope: ‘Hey, you got any material?’

The Disease - Addiction: ‘the Disease ate away at him’. 

I’ll probably add more as I remember them! But, here you go, some new ways of thinking, new ways of talking: that can never be a bad thing. 

JEM. 

Join the Helicon team!

Perception in narrative ~ Stream of Consciousness

If the narrative of a book is formed to reflect the protagonist's perception of the world, then we can see how the introduction of stream of consciousness into literature reflects the writer's aim to return to the very basic roots of the way we experience. Loosely defined as being the written equivalent of the character's thought processes, the stream of consciousness narrative style comes to mimic the way humans think and verbally respond to external stimuli. It toys with the idea that humans do not think in a linear manner as previously suggested by the straightforward narrative development of previous novels, but that instead we are subject to the endless repetitions, developments, retractions and hesitations which occur in our minds. 

I first came across this when reading Virginia Woolf, whose novels play with the blurry boundary between past and present, the pain and pleasure of nostalgia. Yet we see how, essentially, her subject matter is language itself, and the way in which we strive to find a narrative in our lives in order to impose a certain comprehensible order upon it.
As she writes in 'The Waves':

“Let us again pretend that life is a solid substance, shaped like a globe, which we turn about in our fingers. Let us pretend that we can make out a plain and logical story, so that when one matter is despatched—love for instance—we go on, in an orderly manner, to the next. ” 

For life to be something that we can take hold of and control, we must be able to examine it and thus order it into a 'plain and logical story'. Stories become symbolic of order, as it is through telling stories that we have the ability to neatly arrange complex matters ('love for instance') in a way that lets us understand it. Yet it proves increasingly difficult to do so, as the aim to find the one 'true story' becomes increasingly obscure. With a vocabulary that hints at its religious undertones (considering how many live a life which follows the 'one story' found in a religious text), Woolf writes:

“I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found the story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories?” 

Instead, we see how everything is subject to external perception:

“I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.” 

for each individual has the ability to 'draw' different meanings from what they experience.

~ M. D.

'If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite'

The theme for our next issue is ‘Perception’, a theme which I feel is paradoxically very easy, yet frustratingly difficult to respond to (in written form). Really, any and every piece of creative writing ever composed is about perception; of the author, the protagonist, the world. Concurrently, it can be extremely difficult to know where to start (how does one even begin to tackle such an expansive and fundamental thing). Here I have tried to narrow the scope slightly, and included some examples from some well-known novels that tackle the tricky issue of ‘perception’ with flair, ingenuity, and originality. 

The excerpts I have chosen, largely, discuss heightened or troubled perceptions, respectively; a story-book tale of reality turned upside-down by a little girls day-dreaming fantasies; a strange and alienating picture of a dystopian landscape; the documentation of a heady trip full of trips (of the drug-induced variety); two - first-hand - accounts of the effects of mind-altering substances; the mental-meandering of a protagonist with a remarkably keen sensual-perception; and finally, the musings of a mind troubled by the paradoxically liberating and oppressive power of synesthesia.  In each of these novels, the ‘uncanny’ plays a significant role; the selected authors focusing on that which is simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar, of this world and outside of it, factual and fictional. You may also notice that all the excerpts I have chosen have a strong focus on the senses (taste, touch, hearing, sight, smell), accompanied with and manifested by; richly imagery, extreme metaphors, palpable contrasts, antithetical juxtaposition, dripping adjectival detail, pointed alliteration, multitudinous tongues, fusing of dialects and languages: everything in these passages works to exaggerate, to draw our attention to the out-of-the-ordinary within the ordinary. 

So, without further ado, here's some inspiration to get your creative juices flowing: read, absorb, enjoy... 

Carroll’s Alice visits a topsy-turvy wonderland filled with inexplicable happenings and strange encounters -

Presently [Alice] began again. 'I wonder if I shall fall right through the earth! How funny it'll seem to come out among the people that walk with their heads downward! The Antipathies, I think--' (she was rather glad there WAS no one listening, this time, as it didn't sound at all the right word) '--but I shall have to ask them what the name of the country is, you know. Please, Ma'am, is this New Zealand or Australia?' (and she tried to curtsey as she spoke--fancy curtseying as you're falling through the air! Do you think you could manage it?).

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll. 

Huxley imagines a strange, distorted future - 

The Director opened a door. They were in a large bare room, very bright and sunny; for the whole of the southern wall was a single window. Half a dozen nurses, trousered and jacketed in the regulation white viscose-linen uniform, their hair aseptically hidden under white caps, were engaged in setting out bowls of roses in a long row across the floor. Big bowls, packed tight with blossom. Thousands of petals, ripe-blown and silkily smooth, like the cheeks of innumerable little cherubs, but of cherubs, in that bright light, not exclusively pink and Aryan, but also luminously Chinese, also Mexican, also apoplectic with too much blowing of celestial trumpets, also pale as death, pale with the posthumous whiteness of marble.

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley. 

And, in a different context, but with equally rich detail, he recounts the tumultuous emotions (now despairing, now enlightened) of an experiment with Mescaline in a book (aptly) entitled The Doors of Perception - 

I continued to look at the flowers, and in their living light I seemed to detect the qualitative equivalent of breathing--but of a breathing without return to a starting point, with no recurrent ebbs but only a repeated flow from beauty to heightened beauty, from deeper to ever deeper meaning. Words like "grace" and "transfigu- ration" came to my mind, and this, of course, was what, among other things, they stood for. My eyes travelled from the rose to the carnation, and from that feathery incandescence to the smooth scrolls of sentient amethyst which were the iris. The Beatific Vision, Sat Chit Ananda, Being-Awareness-Bliss-for the first time I understood, not on the verbal level, not by inchoate hints or at a distance, but precisely and completely what those prodigious syllables referred to. 

The Doors of Perception - Aldous Huxley. 

Thompson’s ‘Fear and Loathing’ is a drug-fuelled whirlwind of a text, which picks the reader up and carries them off in its pages -

Stand in front of this fantastic machine, my friend, and for just 99c your likeness will appear, two hundred feet tall, on a screen above downtown Las Vegas. Ninety-nine cents more for a voice message. "Say whatever you want, fella. They'll hear you, don't worry about that. Remember you'll be two hundred feet tall."

Jesus Christ. I could see myself lying in bed in the Mint Hotel, half-asleep and staring idly out the window, when suddenly a vicious nazi drunkard appears two hundred feet tall in the midnight sky, screaming gibberish at the world: "Woodstock Uber Alles!"

We will close the drapes tonight. A thing like that could send a drug person careening around the room like a ping-pong ball. Hallucinations are bad enough. But after a while you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. 

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S. Thompson.

The Shulgins’ PiHKAL similarly details experiences with drugs; yet their experiences are far more controlled, calculated with a chemist’s precision. However, the literature produced is just as mesmerising and profound - 

There I felt myself at baseline and accepted (unusual for me) a little marijuana. And with the utmost quiet and delicacy, a rather incredible change of state took place. The most memorable event was the awareness of a clarinet playing somewhere, and the sneaky sounds from it actually coming along the carpet out of the dining room and into the hallway and through the door and into the room where I was, and all of them gathering at my feet like docile kittens waiting for me to acknowledge them. I did, non-verbally, and I was amazed at the many additional follow-up sounds that came from the same clarinet along the same twisty path along the floor and through the door and into my space, over what seemed to be the next million hours. I ended up with a marvelous collection of notes and phrases at my feet, and I felt somehow honored. My speech sounded OK to me, but I knew that it would be odd to the ears of others, so I kept quiet. A final measure of the weirdness of the ALEPH-6/LSD/Pot combination was the viewing of the Larkspur ferry at its dock, abandoned for the evening and with no one aboard it, and with all that clean, dry sleeping space going to waste with so many people sleeping on the streets these days. Once home, I slept soundly and for a long while. Incredible experience.

PiHKAL - Dr. Alexander Shulgin and Ann Shulgin. 

Miller’s Tropic of Cancer - obscene, majestically pornographic, extremely hard to follow - achieves an unparallelled quality of graphic description - 

Tania is like Irene. She expects fat letters. But there is another Tania, a Tania like a big seed, who scatters pollen everywhere – or, let us say, a little bit of Tolstoi, a stable scene in which the foetus is dug up. Tania is a fever. too – les votes urinaires. Cafe de la Liberte, Place des Vosges, bright neckties on the Boulevard Montparnasse, dark bathrooms, Porto Sec, Abdullah cigarettes, the adagio sonata pathetique, aural amplificators, anecdotal seances, burnt sienna breasts, heavy garters, what time is it, golden pheasants stuffed with chestnuts, taffeta fingers, vaporish twilights turning to ilex, acromegaly, cancer and delirium, warm veils, poker chips, carpets of blood and soft thighs. 

Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller. 

Nabokov’s Fyodor is a brilliant young poet, who experiences synesthesia, (the neurological condition in which one or more sensory modalities become strangely linked) - 

After this I would voyage for more than an hour through the dark of my bed, arching the bedclothes over myself, so as to form a cavern, at whose distant exit I glimpsed a bit of oblique bluish light that had nothing in common with my bedroom, with the neva night, with the rich, darkly translucent flounces of the window curtains. the cave I was exploring held in its folds and fissures such a dreamy reality, brimmed with such oppressive mystery, that a throbbing, as of a muted drum, would begin in my chest and in my ears; in there, in its depths, where my father had discovered a new species of bat, I could make out the high cheekbones of an idol hewn from the rock; and, when I finally dozed off, a dozen strong hands would overturn me and, with an awful silk-ripping sound, someone would unstitch me from top to bottom, after which an agile hand would slip inside me and powerfully squeeze my heart. or else I would be turned into a horse, screaming in a mongolian voice: shamans yanked at its hocks and lassos, so that its legs would break with a crunch and collapse at right angles to the body – my body – which lay with its chest pressed against the yellow ground, and, as a sign of extreme agony, the horse’s tail would rise fountain-like; it dropped back, and I awoke.
the glistening facings
of the stove to determine
if the fire has grown to the top.
it has. and to its hot hum
the morning responds with the silence of snow,
pink-shaded azure,
and immaculate whiteness.

time to get up. the stove-heater pats

Vladimir Nabokov - The Gift. 

Of course, a piece of writing about ‘perception’ need not be about such extreme topics (or involve as many drugs), as the ones I have mentioned. However, I hope to have highlighted how all of these writers share a remarkable sensitivity to the various modes of human perception, and translate them into beautiful and disturbing verse. A good writer on ‘perception’ is expertly attuned to the minute fluxes of the mind, the power of the senses, and, most importantly - the way in which these factors influence and transform our perception of the world in which we live. 

(Title quotation is from William Blake 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell' - "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern".) 

JEM. 

The Snow Queen

End of term and a day spent listening to Billie Holiday, whilst making Christmas presents has left me a suitably festive and nostalgic mood.  So much so, that I decided to unearth from the depths of Underneath The Bed my favorite, and most Christmassy, childhood book: The Snow Queen. 

A Picture Puffin book, this edition is adapted by Naomi Lewis and illustrated magnificently by Errol Le Cain.   Ever since first being read it as a child, right through re-visiting it as inspiration during my English A-Level and up until this evening, the story has always left me feeling distinctly unnerved.  It kind of scares me or perhaps half disturbs some long-forgotten childhood memory that Freud would probably like me to recall.  There is one passage in the book that catches onto this feeling rather well:

As she climbed the staircase something seemed to be rushing past along the wall – shadows of lord and ladies, many on horseback.  There were the dreams of the sleeping people.

Perhaps the feeling of unease comes from tapping into something unsettling in the collective unconsciousness or perhaps it is the narrative and the hauntingly beautiful illustrations themselves. 

The Snow Queen tells the story of two poor children, Gerda and Kay, who are bought up in the same village and play together all the time.  One winter’s day, the little boy, Kay, goes missing after inadvertently attaching his sledge to that of the Snow Queen, who takes away his memory and imprisons him in her castle.  When the spring comes, little Gerda goes out into the wide world searching for Kay and along the way encounters a host of other characters, including a (relatively) friendly old witch who buries all the rose bushes under the earth to try to make Gerda forget Kay.  When this fails, Gerda continues her journey and meets with a Princess who has just accepted to marry proposal of the requisite pauper; a beautiful robber girl who, with her black hair and great swathes of bright clothing, always entranced me as a child; and a homesick reindeer named Bae, who takes her to the Lapland woman and the on to the home of the Snow Queen.  When Gerda finds Kay, her soft warm tears melt the ice that the Snow Queen has frozen his heart with and the shards of ice he is playing with spell out the word ETERNITY and thus break the Snow Queen’s spell and allow him to go free. 

There has been a lot written about how traditional fairy tales and later children’s tales in a similar vein, such as Narnia, are often imbued with thinly veiled Christian moralizing.  What I never realized until I read it again tonight, is that this version of the story does something quite interesting:

When playing together at the beginning of the story, Kay and Gerda often sing the song:

“In the Vale the rose grows wild;

Children Play, all the day.

One of them is the Christ-child.”

I had always assumed this to be the little boy, Kay, and that this formed part of the reason why it was so important to rescue him.  Upon re-reading it, I see now that it is actually the little girl, Gerda, as made clear when the Lapland woman says:

“I can give her no greater power than she has already.  Don’t you see how, everywhere, men and beasts have to serve her? And how wonderfully she has made her way in the world alone on her two small feet? Little Kay is bewitched by the Snow Queen.  He remembers nothing of Gerda and his home.  Only Gerda’s love can win him back.”

Aside from this subtle twisting of theology and tradition, it also made me smile to read (my heroine) the robber girl’s nicely cynical parting words to Kay:

“You’re a fine one,” she said to little Kay. “I wonder if you deserve to have someone running to the end of the world for your sake!”

Throughout the book, the illustrations as stunning and often echo the works of famous artists.  For example:

J.M.W Waterhouse and The Lady of Shalott:

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Hunters in the Snow:

A fusion of Gustav Klimt and Art Nouveau paintings such as Alphonse Mucha’s Les Saisons:

On a purely aesthetic level though, they are just beautiful and definitely worth diving under the bed for.  

R.E.C.

Call Unto Your Remembrance the Month of May

Studying a course on Middle English literature may sound pretty dull. But the coffers of the literary canon offer up a rich wealth of texts, which display the most modern of techniques; polyglot, intertextual, poetical and memorable, works such as Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur deserve ressurection.

The Arthur legend identifies itself as a story which engenders and expects reproduction, spawning a variety of imitations, from TV to film, children's cartoons and art. Ploughing its pages, you can see why. It is chronicle of epic proportions, at once romance, tragedy and quest. Yet the most notable, and most reproduced, aspect of the tale is the illicit love-affair between Queen Guinevere and Sir Lancelot.

As she fled fast thro' sun and shade,/ The happy winds upon her play'd,/ Blowing the ringlet from the braid./ She look'd so lovely, as she sway'd/ The rein with dainty finger-tips,/ A man had given all other bliss,/ And all his worldly worth for this,/ To waste his whole heart in one kiss/ Upon her perfect lips.

From Alfred Tennyson's Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere.

Tennyson accurately exemplifies the potent, all-or-nothing nature of Lancelot and Guinevere's love. In tempests or breezes, war or peace - their love is the singular constant. Lancelot rescues her from any danger, and forgoes the advice of his noblest companions to unite with his lover. 

'I dread me sore that your going this night shall wrath us all' - Sir Bors.

- Sir Thomas Malory - Le Morte Darthur.

When their affair is discovered the Round Table is blown apart. A bloody and devastating war is enacted between King Arthur and Lancelot; ranging two countries, consuming uncountable bodies and severing the closest bonds of brotherhood and fellowship. When the war is won and the King is dead, one expects the lovers to be happily reunited. Yet Malory, unwilling to present a satisfying conclusion amidst such blood and shame, thwarts our epistemophilia. 

'And therefore, Sir Lancelot, I require thee and beseech thee heartily, for all the love that ever was betwixt us, that thou never see me no more in the visage. [...] For as well as I have loved thee heretofore, my heart will not serve now to see thee, for through thee and me is the flower of kings and knights destroyed'.

- Malory

Many critics have keenly attacked Malory's paratactic style, noting his sparseness and directness as a result of his limited ability. Yet, Malory's clean, simple style works so effectively at poignant moments such as this. Superfluous words and flourishing imagery would damage Guinevere's sentiment. The King is dead, the Round Table is disbanded - there is no possibility of recovery. The only possible salvation is not to be found in this world, but in heaven; Guinevere resigns herself to that end, renouncing earthy delight and human love, for the love of a higher power.

Following Guinevere's death, Lancelot, unable to sustain himself without her, promptly dies too. It is a familiar construct, yet Malory figures the twin deaths in such beautiful, simple and memorable prose, which arguably rivals (or even overshadows) the hyperbolic death-scenes of later writers such as Shakespeare. Malory concludes his epic chronicle with the exquisite, yet harrowing image of Lancelot smiling on his death-bed. Done with all the war, strife and shame of the mortal world, our protagonists enter another realm, one which remains necessarily unseen and incomprehensible.

'So when Sir Bors and his fellows came to his bed, they found him stark dead; and he lay as he had smiled, and the sweetest savour about him that ever they felt'. 

- Malory

Although we are deprived of the expected happy ending, Lancelot's smile signals that all may not be lost. From the gutted wreck of England, and the shattered splinters of the Round Table, a glimmer of hope and redemption shines forth. 'True' love, whatever that may be, transcends corporeal ties - residing somewhere we cannot possibly know, until like Lancelot and Guinevere, we succumb to death. 

'I liken love nowadays unto summer and winter; for like as the one is cold and the other hot, so fareth love nowadays. And therefore all ye that be lovers, call unto your remembrance the month of May, like as Queen Guenivere; for whom I make here a little mention, that while she lived she was a true lover, and therefore had a good end'. 

- Malory

I want diversion, and I have done with men and women. Play

Movies have an awful habit of ruining books. Whilst there is no way of predicting whether the impending production of Great Expectations will be monument or travesty, I thought I'd take this opportunity to revisit Dickens masterpiece, just to be on the safe side. Only the second novel in English to be written in first person, Great Expectations displays the wonder and horror of Victorian England from the perspective of an uneducated, yet lucid, child. 

Pip's reception of Miss Havisham is a moment of textual brilliance which will be hard to recreate in film form (I fear Helen Bonham Carter is going to ramp up the insane-factor). Dickens' characterisation of Havisham really is exquisite, and there is a much more complex and profound element to her character than people appreciate: she is not simply the 'mad jilted bride'. Havisham luxuriates in her misery; adorned in the dress that never served its purpose, smothered by air that has stagnated for decades,  bed-fellow with rats and spiders - living out her self-imposed incarceration. 

But, I saw that everything within my view which ought to be white, had been white long ago, and had lost its lustre, and was faded and yellow. I saw that the bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and like the flowers, and had no brightness left but the brightness of her sunken eyes. I saw that the dress had been put upon the rounded figure of a young woman, and that the figure upon which it now hung loose, had shrunk to skin and bone. Once I had been taken to see some ghastly waxwork at the Fair, representing I know not what impossible personage lying in state. Once, I had been taken to one of our old marsh churches to see a skeleton in the ashes of a rich dress, that had been dug out of a vault under the church pavement. Now, waxwork and skeleton seemed to have dark eyes that moved and looked at me. I should have cried out, if I could.

- Charles Dickens, Great Expectations. 

Havisham is more uncanny curio than physical being. Like the body dug from the church she protrudes from Dickens' text: a thing of strange beauty, of a different landscape and time, inspiring marvel and revulsion. Like Heaney's bog men and women, Havisham is distinctly 'other', and like those creatures she bares the scars of violation and abuse. 

I lay waiting/ between turf-face and demesne wall,/ between heathery levels/ and glass-toothed stone./ My body was braille/ For the creeping influence:/ dawn suns groped over my head/and cooled at my feet,/ through my fabrics and skins/ the seeps of winter/ digested me,/ the illiterate roots/ pondered and died/ in the cavings/ of stomach and socket./ lay waiting/ on the gravel bottom,/ my brain darkening,/ a jar of spawn/ fermenting underground/ dreams of Baltic amber./ [...]

My skull hibernated/ in the wet nest of my hair./ Which they robbed./ I was barbered/ and stripped/ by a turfcutter’s spade/ [...]

The plait of my hair,/ a slimy birth-cord/ of bog, had been cut/ and I rose from the dark,/ hacked bone, skull-ware,/ frayed stitches, tufts,/ small gleams on the bank.

- From Seamus Heaney's Bog Queen.

In our modern era, where being unmarried is no crime or shame, it is hard to appreciate the life-altering consequences being jilted at the alter would cause for a women of Dickens' time. Yet Havisham conveys these consequences in every possible way: embodying devastation and evidencing of what would happen if one decided just to give up, on everyone and everything. The change in social climate simply heightens Havisham's 'otherness', meaning we must work harder as readers to imagine the position she is in. It also causes us to imagine how her living-death would be accommodated in our world, of social media, and helplines and police. In 2012, would Havisham be able to create such an isolated, secluded microcosm of sorrow, unheeded by modern support networks and intrusive institutions. 

For those who believe Dickens style is stuffy and his characters one-dimensional, Miss Havisham is your rebuffal. An obscure persona, strangely human and inhuman, for the most part unfathomable and in the literary world, unmatchable. Yes, Helena Bonham Carter -unmatchable. 

Although Havisham is stuck in time, her clocks eternally fixed at the moment of her destruction, she resurrects in a reading (or watching) of Great Expectations: a character for all time. 

JEM

Mo Yan

The (very) recent US Election campaign has put the world's focus very much on America. This post looks not to the US, but to another major world player, China. Arguably, in the past month China has achieved a massive cultural, political and literary milestone. On October the 11th Mo Yan became the first resident of mainland China to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. This award has been a long time coming, Yan has been producing outstanding literature for over 30 years. His style is a hybrid; fusing realism, traditional folk-tales, history and the contemporary. Read one of Yan's books and you become immersed in a hallucinogenic textual universe. Peter Englund, head of the Swedish Academy claimed that 'if you read half a page of Mo Yan you immediately recognise it as him'. Yan has such a unique and engaging style, one which is worthy of an award in itself, and certainly worthy of the praise Englund accords it. 

‘I know I earned the unspoken respect of many of Yama’s underworld attendants, but I also know that Lord Yama was sick and tired of me. So to force me to admit defeat, they subjected me to the most sinister form of torture hell had to offer: they flung me into a vat of boiling oil, in which I tumbled and turned and sizzled like a fried chicken for about an hour. Words cannot do justice to the agony I experienced until an attendant speared me with a trident and, holding me high, carried me up to the palace steps. He was joined by another attendant, one on either side, who screeched like vampire bats as scalding oil dripped from my body onto the Audience Hall steps, where it sputtered and produced puffs of yellow smoke. With care, they deposited me on a stone slab at the foot of the throne, and then bowed deeply.

“Great Lord,” he announced, “he has been fried.”

From Yan’s ‘Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out’ (2008)

In many ways reading Yan recalls a the work of another of my favourite authors, Vladimir Nabokov; both writer's works are enriched by the poly-linguism of their authors, and fully evidence the richness of books which are written by non-English authors or translated from their original language. Yan himself is a firm supporter of Goethe's idea of 'world literature' claiming that 'literature can overcome the boundaries that separates countries and nations.' Yan's work then, is not simply exquisitely written, or darkly humorous; it is a move towards something higher, towards the celebration of literature that transcends politics and is not allied to a particular nation, but is available to all who seek it. So then, Yan's success in winning the Nobel Prize perhaps shouldn't be seen as a victory for China, but a victory for the literary world in general, and a victory for the reading public whose lives will undoubtedly be enriched by exposure to Yan's beautiful and harrowing texts. 

You need an umbrella in this kind of weather

Last Thursday the writer Will Self came to the Arnolfini, Bristol to promote his new novel, Umbrella. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize which Hilary Mantel won with Bring Up The Bodies, Self's novel has mainly been discussed as a work of modernism.  Indeed, last week's edition of Start the Week on Radio 4 posited that whilst a modernist work may now be nominated for the Booker, something more conventional like historical fiction would always win it.

This comparison annoyed me and, moreover, struck me as erroneous.  Modernist writing is a form or way of writing with strong connections to a particular historical period (making Self's 2012 offering more unique).  It is not de facto simultaneously the narrative or genre or subject of a book.  Virginia Woolf's The Lighthouse, Faulkner's The Sound and The Fury or Eliot's The Wasteland are not at all about the same thing just because they are written in various modernist styles.  Therefore to say 'Mantel's book is about Cromwell and Self's is a modernist novel' is making a weak comparison.

As it is, Self does deal with many aspects and concerns of modernism and the modern period in his text, perhaps explaining why he self-consciously chose to also write in the style.  He also discusses hospitals, London, families, odd diseases, ageing and many other things. Self's book is modernist in two ways.  Firstly it is written in a modernist style and secondly it explores the modernist period by making the main protagonist, Audrey Death, representative of the mechanisation of the 20th century in Britain.

Too little of this has so far been discussed in criticism of the book.  Instead, as with all discussions about modernism, a trite comparison is made between the new text and Joyce's Ulysses - frequently succeeding in scaring potential readers away by implied ideas of it being impenetrable - and then little more.

When Self read a section from Umbrella, he did so in multiple voices.  Once I had got over how exciting it must have been to have him as a father who could 'do the voices' at bedtime, I also realised how much it added to the text.  Roughly, each piece of italicised text is said in a different accent - frequently cockney.  'Momentarily sandwiched between two sandwich men' with the sandwiched said in a cockney accent reads very differently to the entire sentence read all in RP.  A member of the audience had earlier made reference to Thomas's Under Milk Wood, and it is a good comparison to make.  Once Umbrella is read as a montage of all these different voices and sounds it is the very opposite of impenetrable, it bubbles up and out and around your ears.

Umbrella has a lot to say about modernism, the majority of which can only be accessed by those who bother to walk within the text rather than make one blanket comment about its surface structure.

Escaping the Body

My favourite fashion blogger Susie Bubble recently completed the Nike Women's Half Marathon:

http://www.stylebubble.co.uk/style_bubble/2012/10/run-for-life.html

Susie's description of the journey from panting through 3 kilometres in her first training session to sobbing over the finishing line in San Francisco chimed true with experiences of my own. Since having a major back operation to correct scoliosis in September, 2010 the route back to making my body function again has been frustrating and arduous.

I abjectly hate my body much of the time.  Perhaps more so because adages about health mattering more than looks do not ring true.  I can cover my skin in pretty material, but I can't make my skeleton work properly.  X-rays of a body full of metal do not appear to represent me, maybe since although I know it is there, I cannot physically see the scar that covers it.  Boyfriends are used to tell me what it looks like.

However, one of the rare opportunities I get to experience feelings of appreciation for my body and test its limits is when I cycle.  Before my operation I became quite obsessed with cycling and getting fit..I used it as a way to exert some control over the body that was rebelling against me.  I lived on salads and always pushed myself to go as fast as I could over the 14 miles (7 miles each direction) I went through to work and back each day.  Toned legs and protruding clavicles let me pretend I could control and shape my body as I wished.

Nowadays - as those who know me will attest - I eat cake, drink beer and have clothes in my wardrobe I can no longer fit into.  I don't want to go back to starving myself.  I will never be remembered for being skinny and I cannot write (the thing I live for) if I am hungry.  What I still crave though, is the adrenaline of going slightly too fast down hill after getting dizzy fighting my way up the other side.

I have recently began cycling again and, like Susie, I am quite a wreck when I do so.  Gone are the days when I floated daintily along on my dutch bike in a floral flock.  These autumnal mornings I wheeze and wimper as I cut through the sludge of cold air.  My legs feel like they are wading through trench mud and I hate myself, curse myself, for being made of chubby beer fat and assorted aches and pains.

But I will get there.  Perhaps by next summer I will be able to enjoy half falling off my bike, a sweaty mess in the late afternoon heat, and diving into the shower.  After flummoxing through two years of pain, only imagining it as a means to an end, the aim is now to enjoy the journey once more.

Rosemary Ellen Cherry