Elizabeth: And the different sections are different rhythmically aren't they?
Kim: Mmm.
Cahal: And the tone changes a lot doesn't it, from a sort of a jocular boisterousness to quite heightened language.
Kim: I know this isn't in section 5 but I'm a bit worried about "unthwarted fun". It's sort of more interesting to do "thwarting fun" ... Zeus has been thwarting all these poor women who want to be virgins. It's just a suggestion to think about that phrase, and also think about the line "compared to the dullness of his present life." I don't think you need that line. Everything afterwards is so obviously dull.
Cahal: Yeah. It's curious that that piece and the reference to "hipster" and "latest model" and "colour coded", there are two things going on. One is converting it into a more demotic speech which works for a while: and the other is dropping in contemporary references which aren't necessarily part of the same project. I think you can have the ordinary language making the story more real and less heightened and more believable (maybe) without the kind of jokiness of his "colour coded speech" or the "latest model" or an "ageing hipster" which bring in some other kind of satirical project, of using modern language.
Elizabeth: If there's a sort of fundamental satirical intent about the piece as a whole then maybe those things are planted quite deliberately to you know ...
Cahal: Yeah, I suppose if it was seamless, but I think there is a split between the two. The jocular references and the kind of servants and the attitude to the servants and the excuses and the "Maam" and all that don't seem to sit in the same contemporary world as the "latest model" stuff, so maybe what's wrong is not that you can't have both projects going ahead at once but that they don't sit with each other in this language. This isn't sort of late 20th Century. The language of these people talking to their servants and Zeus talking about unthwarted fun and so on isn't the same language as people who talk about "latest model" and "colour coded". So you either bring it up into some kind of '90s jargon, or street-speak or whatever, or you use this different register which wouldn't recognise expressions like "colour coded" I think.
Elizabeth: I'm just thinking about, I can't think of any sort of examples in enough detail but it seems to me that in these sort of projects people are doing now like translating bits of Ovid and so forth that some people will mix in that kind of way, will just like spice up a few lines in a way that doesn't actually, you know, isn't consistent with the rest of the poem. You know, they'll just like throw in one or two very deliberate anachronisms or whatever, or words etymologically related from languages that are quite wrong ...
Cahal: Yes. Maybe it's not a problem about the actual project itself as much as they just sort of jar. But no, I mean it's a subjective thing rather than saying it's something you can't do.
Kim: Well it's just that "ageing hipster', ...
Cahal: It's an ageing cliché. Well it's a dated cliché isn't it, it's the 'oldest swinger in town' syndrome.
Kim: And I loved "I feel as desirable as a drain."
Cahal: The other, just on language, the other point I think is that there's something going on with deliberately awkward adjectives like "unthwarted fun", like "the taper's degraded glow", if, say, it was 'diminished' or 'reduced' or 'flickering' or any of those things, 'faded' even would be OK, but "degraded" seems to be like deliberately choosing a complex adjective. There was something else that struck me as a more powerful example of that, "and purposing inchingly towards her" as opposed to 'inching purposely towards her', and there is a deliberate ...
Duncan: Yes it's a deliberate inversion isn't it? But I think that's to heighten the sense of pomposity and there are quite a few examples of it. There's even one complete split infinitive: "plucked from below the horizon as though it were a coin in a velvet bed, the glistening sun." Better to say 'plucked the glistening sun from below the horizon as though it were ...'
Leona: I thought it was on purpose.
Elizabeth: I don't think any of these things are not on purpose.
Duncan: Well the interesting thing is that there is a narrator. There is a narrator's voice as well as the characters. Well it's more a kind of monologue isn't it, a dramatic monologue to the characters as they come in, and the narrator's voice itself partakes of this same very very elaborate diction, which I think is unique. I mean I don't think you can say that it belongs to the past ... It's a language that Chris has concocted; it's something he's strung together.
Elizabeth: It seems to me to go with the sort of miniature versions of epic similes that crop up all the way through.
Duncan: Yes. I like the similes when he fits them together perfectly. For example, how many times have you read the course of Apollo across the sky? Sometimes it's contrived, but whoever it is ... you make changes such as your saying he's the world's first. This doesn't in any way change the simile but at the same time it adds to it, and I think that's where it works best because complete fidelity to the story is obviously what's going to happen all the way through, right down as you say to Demeter's pretty grim and inhospitable character. I could see that going all the way through. In the last section there is a definite shift towards subjectivity, partly I suppose because I'm trying to find a consistency. . You may say I'm being a bit fussy here, but there is a shift between the language of Persephone in 5 and the language earlier on where she's a young girl on her own (it's part 4), because you've got this almost Oscar Wilde-ish character, you know, the sort of nubile, untutored child with thoughts of her own ...
Kim: Oh not 'middle aged dame' ...
Duncan: No I'm thinking of the characters that you get in Lady Windermere's Fan ... and in The Importance of Being Earnest, you know.
Cahal: And that would have been Wildean, not Wilde-ish. But she doesn't speak in the last piece does she, well I mean she does, she has one, two thoughts. She thinks "I'm trapped in a shark's jaw" and "I'm abducted", but other than those pearls of wisdom we don't have her discourse whereas the kind of Violet Elizabeth discourse that she uses earlier is appropriate.
Duncan: But if Violet Elizabeth were to wake up in the cave I think she would be slightly different.
Cahal: She'd scream.
Duncan: Mmm, she would have screamed. She would scream. Why doesn't she scream anyway? I think that's an important dramatic point to think about. Why is she quite so passive about all this.
Elizabeth: Well of course she's only a kid. And she's woken up in a cave, it's completely quiet.
Duncan: Well presumably if you were a little bit more sophisticated, you might not have screamed.
Elizabeth: She doesn't necessarily want to attract attention.
Cahal: "A scream petrifies
everything is that pastoral glade." I think the accusation of her not
having screamed enough is streaked with doubt.
Duncan: Well yes ...
Cahal: If she screamed, the filmic sort of shift from the incident which
blurs, cuts, and then the argument afterwards about how can this child, this
girl, be missing and then that's a fairly standard way of telling a story isn't
it without going on page after page.
Duncan: Well, for example, in the third stanza, the picnic in the meadow,
the wine soaked conversations of her friends and escorts, well I seem to pick
up in that earlier section it wasn't so much that the conversation was
boring and that she was isolated, she was actually on her own, almost as if
in that area the narrative actually was making her an isolated figure to be
picked up, whereas the other thing is looking back more to a ...
Cahal: More communal.
Duncan: Yeah, being more in the middle of things. It is being a bit
pedantic but I think the thing about narrative is that like in short stories
etc. consistency comes to the forefront. Particularly, when you're writing a
very specific narrative. I really do like the speech at the very end actually
where Hades tries to get it together, because it's a brilliant piece of clumsy
writing if you see what I mean. It's a brilliant piece of totally tongue-tied
inarticulate writing but psychologically I think it's very very insightful because
when you're really embarrassed you do immediately choose something which is
totally irrelevant to talk about and crawl all the way around the subject. And
he does that I mean there's that, but also I like the idea of the judge because
that's a very, very clever mis en scene for the role that Hades had. Just as
in Zeus, you know, the arch administrator, the brother who's a judge, and to
a certain extent the context is Victorian. You think of him as being a kind
of imperial administrator with his brother who's a judge and therefore who resented,
the power, the glory of what was going on in the front office. And of course
the girl too, she's liberated but only in 19th Century terms, she has her place
so to speak. And Demeter too really is a kind of healthy hearty type matron,
in the end. What I think is very good about it is the way in which it's able
to explore these different levels within the language without too much description.
Just one or two places where I think you do what in a poetic narrative you can't
do whereas in a novel you can and that is you actually say too much to the reader
sometimes. I agree with what Kim was saying a little earlier that, about –
the very line she mentioned – "compared with the dullness of this present
life" it's enough that he should grow "embarracked" in his room really. And
also at the very end too "He trailed off overcome, bad syntax completing
with bathos." Well that's what you've succeeded in doing. There's no need to
tell us, you know.
Kim: Mmm, but you'd need some sort of an ending.
Duncan: Well I'm assuming it's in progress and that therefore there's
going to be more. I would say though that there's a problem about length with
this poem and that is that you could end up doing three or four volumes of this,
at the pace in which you're going through it ... sort of try and think what
...
Leona: I would like to know how much longer it's going to be. Is it
four sections or six or ...?
Poet (Chris): Well I think that probably the feeling is that the sections will get shorter because actually the narrative is going to speed up. Do you want me to speak now?
Leona: ... Just that, the length ...
Poet (Chris): The narrative is going to speed up so the sections will be shorter and in terms of length, I've plotted it out, and there will probably be eight sections or something like that, but there's going to be very rapid change in the scenery. I'm trying to work out how this is going ...
Duncan: Well we all know what's going to happen next.
Poet (Chris): I'm aiming to speed up, so the trajectory will be
faster, although there will be one longish set piece, generally narrative will
be compressed.
Duncan: We're intrigued. There has to be the search of Demeter of course
and the lizardisation.
Poet (Chris): I have a few bombshells on the way ... but the basic is
I'm not intending multiple volumes, I mean I've got to the point where I've
got all the material, or most of it, and I've got a form to it now, which has
taken me a long time ...
Elizabeth: "I've worked for years to perfect my empire."
Duncan: I like the allusions to pastoral literature too. In a way choosing
this is really very clever because it enables you to do all sort of things
which on their own you couldn't do. You couldn't just write a pastoral pastiche,
but you could if it was a narrative bringing in a kind of upgrades, mythological
upgrades. I like "Oh nymphs".
Leona: But I find that odd, that's of a piece with all the other
stuff that you don't like. Have you got an explanation?
Duncan: Why do I like "Oh nymphs"?
Leona: Yeah.
Duncan: Yes because it's a total and utter travesty. Again it's getting
away with it. It's the only situation in which, rather like say amateur dramatics,
you know, where say a novelist is describing amateur dramatics within a story,
and of course the actual, rather like Hamlet's visiting troupe, it's the
sheer bad style which itself underlines the success of the stilted style because
the context is so perfectly chosen, you know.
Elizabeth: Between the acts s a good example. There are
long sections of this masque about the history of England
Duncan: Yes, yes, again it's the narrative that does that. "Oh
perpetual autumn, oh nymphs", but it also is so viscerally related to sexual
desire as to be almost, you know, sort of, I wouldn't even say a cri de coeur,
I'd put it as of different organ, you know, but that's what it is. There is
actually a rhyme "Oh nymphs je vous …"
Elizabeth: L'apre's midi d'u faune?
Duncan: ... Yes, L'apres midi, yes, ah, it's Mallarme of course,
yes. Maybe that's why ... yes.
Poet (Chris): That is completely unconscious.
Duncan: But you can nick it without, you know, I always think it's good
fun to choose a particular context where you can get away with a lot of things.
It puts the defences down and I think that all good style can do that.
Elizabeth: Mind I mean that big thing that you're trying to get away with here is, you know, a long narrative poem on a mythological theme, I mean that's quite a big thing to embark on isn't it?
Kim: It isn't in section 5, but I don't think you can get away with
those young breasts "standing".
Cahal: They peeped did they not? I would have thought the only thing
wrong with that stanza was the word "too" because I can't see how
they also peeped through her muslin dress.
Poet (Chris): Yes , there would have to be something else peeping through.
Cahal: Yeah. "She was a young girl", you know, I think it
has to be a sort of subordinate clause in that sentence saying "young breasts
peeping through her muslin dress" if that's what it has to say … Apart
from this group a young girl stands ... or her young breasts, or whatever, but
it's; "they too", "they too".
Elizabeth: [LAUGHING] Oh yes, they kind of have legs at this stage,
I think that's quite funny.
Kim: I'm not very happy with what these old people have to say to her.
Wouldn't it be much better if they just went on with their own conversation
and ignored her?
Cahal: What did they say?
Kim: They get very philosophical.
Elizabeth: It gets a bit Tennysonian there, it gets a bit lotus-eaterish.
Leona: I mean, isn't that fun?
Cahal: Yeah I like that. The mystery of beehives, it's like "the
myth of the fingerprints" isn't it? It's one of those things –
what is "the mystery of beehives", you know?
[ELIZABETH HUMS A BIT OF THE PAUL SIMON TUNE]
Duncan: It's an allusion to Virgil, isn't it? Now, who was
the inventor of the bees?
Kim: Perhaps they shouldn't be addressing her, they should just
be talking amongst themselves? I mean young girls aren't invited to talk, adults
just ignore them, which explains why she's wandered off.
Elizabeth: This thing about "new information will not help …" may
be very important … I mean without the whole poem I have got no idea what
this enterprise is fundamentally, aside from …
Duncan: It's the pessimism of classical world, isn't it. "Oh my soul
do not hope to fathom the transcendent but exhaust the possibilities of the
finite". We've got our world, if you attempt to go against it, what's the word,
hubris, if you tempt fate, if you try and go beyond, you'll end up like Prometheus.
Elizabeth: Except that it seems to be a kind of psychoanalytic hubris
here. What we're not going to be able to do is redirect it to the source of
our distress.
Duncan: Mmm. Well isn't that in its way part of the consistent …
I would defend that really, consistent with this whole idea of very broad upgrades,
very broad, getting into sort of parallel.
Kim: Except they speak with exactly the same vocabulary as she does
and the same kind of speech rhythms, which makes it very hard to tell the difference
between the two.
Duncan: Well it is a poem and not a radio play.
Cahal: The rhythm is the same, yeah, or similar, yeah.
Duncan: It also has the character of a chorus, I mean there has to be a chorus doesn't there? And also of course the anticipation of fate at the middle of the final line: of course now it's your job to get out there and get nicked by Hades, go on , because that's what's going to happen next, and the way in which in classical drama it's all anticipated that the next thing is going to happen. It's a bit like Virgil, Virgil always anticipates what's going to happen next when dropping a few hints at the end of the Georgics, before the next one; and there're lots of beehives in the Georgics, aren't there?
Kim: Well you could almost get away with them as a chorus … if
you drop the first two of their stanzas and their last, start with "new
information …" so that they're not actually directly speaking to her.
Elizabeth: You've got to have something before that, you can't just
start without.
Duncan: It would make it a bit too elevated wouldn't it?
Kim: Well, they're talking plural, she's talking singular.
Elizabeth: Yes, I mean you can't just start with that.
Leona: That's exactly it. I mean when she's talking, she's talking about
herself; and they are talking about themselves, and she is a convenience to
whom they address their thoughts. But on the other hand she's pretty important,
she's the daughter of Zeus and Demeter, and so she actually gives importance
to their thoughts.
Kim: I think the explanation of how she got lost though is shortened
a bit. You know, I mean it goes straight from them saying she must get on with
things in section 2, stanza 18, to them saying "it wasn't us" in section
4, stanza 2. "Our senses were fuddled with heat and wine and when we woke
she was gone." There. Because that places all the responsibility on her;
it was all her fault that she wandered off.
Duncan: When she picks the argument with the oldies it's a little bit
artificial isn't it? "Why are grown ups quite so boring" through "of
the passing day" is really a monologue and it's really a …
Kim: Kate Winslett on the Titanic.
Duncan: I have to see her yet. … It's a bit artificial that she
should just simply hop inside this circle and then start giving this great big
speech.
Kim: Mmm, I like that.
Duncan: And then in turn they come back with this beautifully prepared,
scripted sort of reply.
Elizabeth: That's exactly what grownups do.
Duncan: It's a Pastoral debate.
Elizabeth: Yeah ... they don't listen to what you say and they say the
things that they say all the time.
Cahal: It's a lecture following the clichés of their time or
any time I guess. You know, don't try and tell me we should change the world,
we've been through all that and if you could just get by and all these new ideas
you have are only getting in the way, we've got to get by …
Kim: [SINGS] "if you want you can marry; look at me, I am old"
Cahal: That's it, Cat Stevens.
[PHONE RINGS, DUNCAN GOES INTO HALL TO ANSWERS IT]
Can we focus on section 5 now purely as a poem, purely as a piece, having
done all that background work and talked about the language and the project
as a whole, and then actually say – this is the previously untried bit
and therefore let's approach that as if that was just a poem in front of
us now, knowing the background, yeah?
Duncan: [ON PHONE] Are you coming home, or are you staying out? Is that
why you phoned? To remind me? [RETURNS FROM PHONE CALL]
All they want. There's two things they want: lifts or money, lifts or money.
[LAUGHS] It's either you have to get the Vulcan out, or the wallet.
Kim: I don't know why Persephone doesn't think that she's been 'taken'.
Cahal: Why are you asking him? I have no idea why you're asking him.
What's this about? Why are you asking Chris?
Kim: What?
Cahal: What you're asking him. Don't answer, don't answer. [RULES
OF WORKSHOPS]
Kim: I don't know why she doesn't suggest
that she's been 'taken' which is a much more colloquial term and 'taken'
also has a sexual connotation that "abducted" doesn't.
Leona: Because, you don't want it to have, it doesn't need to have
a sexual connotation, that's the first thing; and the second thing is that's
not how she thinks, that's not how she talks.
Kim: Why not abducted for kidnapped then? She's quite colloquial.
Leona: No she isn't colloquial. She's not at all colloquial.
Cahal: She's quite grand, she's quite classical.
Kim: "Chattering" is a colloquial sort of word.
Leona: When she presses herself to it she puts her thoughts into words
like that.
Kim: Come on, she doesn't: "I'm trapped in a gigantic shark's jaw
…"
Elizabeth: Yeah that's exactly like "abducted," exactly like
"abducted".
Cahal: No, no, hold on, but "abducted" is mentally in quotes,
isn't it. She's saying this is what they mean by "abducted". 'It has
finally happened to me.' They've been talking about don't play in the meadow
or you'll get abducted, well it's finally happened hasn't it? [WOMEN LAUGH]
It's a realisation of this is what abducted is as opposed to saying 'oh gosh,
I was abducted on the way home from school'. It's meant to be non-colloquial
because it's part of that register of the adult world that she's clearly shown
she's coming to terms with in the earlier piece.
Kim: OK
Leona: What I like about this whole thing is this absolute control of
the character's own slipping of register.
Cahal: So we're letting abducted stand?
Kim: Mmm ... I think you've convinced me.
Leona: Yeah, what I like about this, and what makes me think that the
rest of it up to section 5 needs a little bit of adjusting here and there, but
not the tone and not the vocabulary, is this: it's like Mark Twain who maybe
had the same kind of education as Chris and some of his characters maybe had
the same kind of education, and they talk out of this background that they do
have, and it's a funny mixture of things, it's a classical overlay and there's
a kind of heightened language overlay on top of dead colloquial stuff. I like
that, and I don't see what the problem with it is, and I'm scratching my head
over a lot of this conversation.
Kim: Part of the reason that I would rather have 'taken' than "abducted"
is because her own metaphor is 'plucked' and you can 'pluck something', you
can 'take fruit', but you hardly ever 'abduct' fruit.
Leona: I think that's the kind of poem that you or I would write, but
not what Chris has written. What I'm trying to say here (and then I'll stop
going on and on about this) is that it seems to me that a lot of the criticism
tonight is not about the poem that's been written, it's about the kind of poem
that people think should have been written.
Kim: But, no no, criticism is only to suggest what may have gone wrong
…
Leona: Maybe I've misunderstood what's going on here.
Elizabeth: What with the poem or this discussion?
Leona: No, with the poem. Maybe I've misunderstood what's going on here
because a lot of the criticism just seems to me to be off beam, which is not
what I usually find in our workshop. That is, usually I may think individual
bits of criticism are completely off beam, but not the whole tenor of it, and
so I'm just puzzled.
Cahal: We spent a little while talking about the
whole thing. We're now going to talk about section 5 as a poem end to end, doing
some close reading, and there's a slight problem with the tense here. I always
start by dealing with practical things I can cope with, and it isn't as big
a problem as I thought because the more I've looked at it I think "shimmered"
may be the only one. It's in that present tense, continuous present reportage,
so "a spider forages", "the young girl stirs" etc., so the main events of the
recent past slowly shimmer back into her mind, yeah, to keep the whole thing
going …
Elizabeth:In section 5, stanza 5 it goes into the past tense doesn't
it?
Cahal: It does it again, yeah.
Elizabeth: Yes. "Hades could barely contain his excitement …
Such musings were interrupted by the entrance of Ascalaphus …"
Cahal: So it's "he can", I think the whole way through, I'm
not going back to the rest of it now but I'm just saying if that whole piece
will stay in, the wakening up scene and the being taken to Hades scene, in the
present tense, 'she does', 'he does', 'he says', 'she says' …
Poet (Chris): That it should all be consistent you're saying.
Cahal: Yeah I think so.
Poet (Chris): So shimmers rather than shimmer.
Leona: No, shimmer.
Cahal: The main events shimmer.
Elizabeth: It would be possible to have it, you know this section, actually
in two halves. The beginnings of regaining consciousness could well be in the
present tense as it is, and then you might want to go into the past from ‘once
up', or something so that once something has actually started happening
it then becomes ...
Duncan: I think sometimes composing in a tense is a bit like composing
in a minor or major key. When you want to try to make a transition you can't
transpose it, you can't change the key, all you can do is to create a bridge
passage between the two, because as often as not if you've chosen the tense
you've done it for a particular reason.
Elizabeth: It is more sort of inside your head isn't it to talk about
it in the present tense.
Duncan: The first past tense is "groped" isn't it ... ?
Cahal, Kim: [BOTH SAY] That's present.
Duncan: "Grope". So there you could have it 'groped' perhaps.
Elizabeth: That's the point at which I would switch it if …
Cahal: If you would want to.
Duncan: Yeah, because you see you're now the narrator outside of her
consciousness and sub-consciousness, although in fact you introduced it if you
like to begin with when it's present.
Duncan: "A spider forages then stops" is what?
Cahal: Present.
Duncan: Then you go inside her mind, "I'm trapped" etc., which
is …
Elizabeth: No, I mean, you know, I wouldn't be tricksy and joggle in
and out, you know.
Cahal: My comment was that the first page, apart from shimmered, is
consistently present, continuous present.
Poet (Chris): Shimmer ...
Cahal: Well, and then Elizabeth bagged that up by saying the second
page is in the past tense. There's an argument that says you could keep the
whole of the sequence up to a point in one tense and then shift into another
but not try and bounce about. It's only that it needs looking at ...
Duncan: Where is shimmer?
Cahal: Better look at the first page. I think we should try and ...
Leona: ... back into her mind.
Cahal: ... decide which ... but not ... I think we've done that haven't
we? You know.
Kim: Yes, because the summons acts as a natural break …
Elizabeth: This is much more a tiny detail, I very much dislike the
word forages or foraged or whatever it might be, that verb, for what the spider's
doing.
Cahal: Because there's no food involved.
Elizabeth: There isn't really. The spider's just running about presumably.
Cahal: 'Grubbing,' 'staggering'.
Duncan: Travelling ...
Elizabeth: Well yes, whatever.
Cahal: Not bringing home the bacon as it were.
Elizabeth: Yeah, you forage for something.
Cahal: There would have to be dead flies on your face for a spider to
find you worth foraging, I would have thought.
Leona: Well, maybe there are dead flies on her face.
Duncan: Spiders only ever catch flies in webs.
Elizabeth: Well it's become intransitive to a degree which is disturbing.
And it doesn't say anything about spiders or anything.
Cahal: No. Some kind of activity that might be more the sort of thing
that would wake her up or the sort of thing that she'd be aware of the minute
she awakes … Also forage contains a kind of intentionality. You know what
the spider's doing rather than you feel its activity. Crawls, you know, the
lowest level, crawls, will be something that you recognise more than the fact
as to whether it's foraging or not, yes, then stops. I like "Her awareness
lies small and curled and slowly expands to her outer rim." You're not
sure that you understand this sentence until it gets on a bit. That's quite
nice.
Cahal: There's something beautiful and slow about the whole of the way
we fall down that page and … the cacophonous sound of dripping, we're a
whole stanza away from that before we've finally got the full measure of that
water dripping, the stalactites and the stalagmites, though I wonder about stalagmites
rising from below, as if we were being reminded of something we ought to know.
Elizabeth: Yes.
Cahal: There's a little problem, I don't know whether it's rhythmical
or the nature of this discourse here which spells things out, but it's rather
like some exit for escape. There's a slight problem and some other form of words
might do it, but there's a tautology there just as there is with stalagmites
rising from below.
Elizabeth: I thought "the
crack begins to enlarge itself", you know ...
Cahal: Right, 'a crack appears' ...
Elizabeth: You know, a crack can't just enlarge.
Duncan: You know we need to talk about rhymes really,
because there are the odd rhymes and I'm just not too sure how ...
Elizabeth: What ... ?
Duncan: Well no, it's 'composition' and 'peroration' for example, that
'tion' in the final page. And there's also the 'below', 'hello'. 'Fall', 'walls'.
I just find it a bit too random really. I'm not going to go the whole hog and
say that you have to be consistent or there has to be a pattern, but I think
if you want it, very often you're better off making it internal like the 'girl'
'stirs' thing. If you want a sort of casual rhyme it's usually best to make
it internal by changing the line endings … but how quite to do that I'm
not so sure. Are there any others that I've missed ?
Elizabeth: Up/grope/escape.
Duncan: No, that's not a rhyme is it?
Elizabeth: 'Tis in my book.
Duncan: Grope and open, but that's lovely and internal ... I'm not so
worried about grope, escape.
Elizabeth: There's that good rhyme on the next page, tone and tone, that's
...
Cahal: Excellent.
Elizabeth: Then there's say and a.
Cahal: There's a kind of a plotted syllable in rhetoritician ...
Duncan: I think rhetoritician isn't right.
Cahal: There's an 'it' too many, that's all, rhetorician.
Poet (Chris): I think rhetoritician sounds better.
Cahal: OK, well I'd go along with that.
Duncan: Well it's just what Hades would say
isn't it?
Cahal: OK A justified syllable then.
Leona: Because it was a direct quote I thought it was intentionally
there.
Cahal: "Sic."
Leona: I thought it was meant to be funny. I thought it was intentional.
Is some of this meant to be funny?
Poet (Chris): Yeah , yeah... it is.
Leona: Sorry, you're not supposed to say.
Elizabeth: Um 'Such musings were interrupted by the entrance of Ascalaphus.'
Leona: Another thing I'd like to ask the poet about someday in the future
is why he called it Persephone rather than Kore.
Elizabeth: We did notice that the name Kore was actually used internally
did we not? What is actually the difference Leona, I mean it's not ... Who
else has had a classical education here?
Cahal: No, not me, don't look at me.
Elizabeth: Duncan.
Leona: Duncan undoubtedly will have had one.
Cahal: If there was one going he'd have had one.
Elizabeth: Because they're both Greek, those names.
Cahal: Yeah, it's not the Greek and Latin thing is it? But isn't that
... Demeter and Ceres are the same problem, or is Ceres Latin? It's the same
person.
Cahal: But there's another name for Persephone then isn't there?
Kim: Proserpine.
Elizabeth: Duncan - Kore and Persephone – what's the connection,
difference between the two names for, as we take it, the same person?
Duncan : Kore and Persephone are the same person, except for Kore is
part of the Elusion mysteries, and therefore she in fact is being invoked under
her symbolic state as the returning of the spring. It's the transition between
the winter and summer seasons. That's all I know.
Elizabeth: And the poet was nodding like a jack-in-the-box then, so
…
Leona: Right, OK
Duncan: When you publish it, I'll expect my usual kickback. Somebody's
written a very good book about Kore and I can't remember, Guthrie, you know
Guthrie? Myths of the Greeks, a very good book about classical myths
called, I think it was a man called Guthrie, he gets hold of the original
liturgies from Eleusis and reconstructs them from some of Aristophone's
comedies. Very good.
Elizabeth: OK, good, that's that sorted.
Duncan: Yes. Ascalaphus
doesn't exist, it's an invented name isn't it? Escalopes of course.
Cahal: But presumably he's a fairly minor character. He's just a person
that's been sent down to get her out of the cavern.
Duncan: He must be a messenger of Hades. Hell's
messenger. OK There are various occasions throughout the whole poem where a
hyphen or two would have helped, with these very classical linked nouns as adjectives
like …
Cahal: "Colour-coded speech" ...
Duncan: … "wine soaked", there's one actually where ...
you've given us one in "colour-coded". If you'd left it out altogether
you could have argued you didn't like them, but having given us one in colour-coded
you've got to go back and put them all in, you know ...
Chris (Poet): Right ...
Duncan: I'm still a little bit unsure about
the influence of Victorian translations from the classics, I'm just trying
to think, ponderous ones, you know, like Murray, Gilbert Murray. Who else
is there? Campbell, remember the old Campbell translation. We've all got
Campbell up there somewhere, I mean I could recite it, you know ... 'Telemonian
child whose hand guides our waving closed land', this kind of stuff.
Elizabeth: Well that would stand to reason wouldn't it, if that's how
one comes to the classics.
Duncan: But what it does is to introduce the language of the Victorians
into the narrative and by so doing, I mean you've got Zeus by the window,
it's a Victorian window, and that to me is quite skilfully done, and it could
even be the kind of imperialist Sicily which is really a kind of, what would
it be, what would be the island, it would be Corfu or somewhere like that,
you know, where the embarrassing, not-so-legitimate daughter of the imperial
administrator would be farmed out and this kind of thing, you know. It all
fits in, you know, you can visualise it, you can see it fitting in. I would
say I'm still a little bit unsure about this. Some of the conversation between
the young Persephone and her elders reminds me a bit of some of those very
stagy conversations that take place in Tennyson's, is it The Princess,
Elizabeth: The Princess, yeah.
Duncan: …where Tennyson's convention is that they're having debates
because it's a ladies' school and that what they would do, but, you know, it's
a little bit too formal – but again you may want to exploit that. You could
for example (here I am writing the poem again) put in a little thing to say
that perhaps one of the things they were getting up to in this pastoral academic
landscape is having mock debates or something. I'm saying that because I do
feel that there's a slight hiatus, all of a sudden there's a debate, it's terribly
difficult to have anything effectively dramatic happening anyway in pastoral
landscapes because they're only there for mythic characters to get bitten in
and for Persephone to be abducted in etc., Nothing else ever happens there,
you know.
Cahal: It's interesting, there's either a certain
irony haunting the words "good intentions" or they're the wrong
words. I mean I think all his confidence deserted him certainly, because
the speech that he's going to make, he's going to keep cool, even keel and
all that, disappears. But I'm not sure whether "good intentions",
unless you read it heavily ironically. I mean I'm just exploring that.
Leona: He thinks his intentions are good.
Cahal: "Success lies in the tone", I don't think he thinks
his intentions are good, does he?
Leona: Oh no, I think he thinks so absolutely! All the way along he's
meant to do the right thing. He's gone to her father and asked for her hand
in marriage, he's gone to her wanting to make flowery speeches.
Cahal: But those aren't the good intentions we're talking about here.
Leona: His intentions here are to mollify her but they're also to dress
it up: he has two sets of intentions here, one is presentational and one
is content.
Kim: And they're both good intentions? Do you think intentions on both
counts are good?
Cahal: But they don't disappear the moment he sees her there. Surely
those are heightened the minute he sees her. What happens when he sees her
is that he becomes nervous. As "her beauty electrified him" he
becomes nervous. He doesn't change from a good person to a bad person or
he doesn't cease in his desire to make her welcome there, whatever his ultimate
intentions are.
Leona: It's the effects of his good intentions that are dispersed.
Cahal: No it's the techniques that are dispersed. It's his confidence
that is going to win her over that he loses. But, you know, it doesn't seem
a problem when you read it first, you just sort of think again that it's
not quite ...
Leona: Well you know what it means when you read it.
Elizabeth: Yes but it does strike you as being wrong actually, or it
struck me as being wrong actually.
Leona: I guess what it really means is: in spite of all his good intentions,
he falls apart.
Cahal: That's right, yeah, and his desire to get it right, whatever the morality of the intentions behind that, whether good intentions or, anyway ...
Elizabeth: Falteringly
hasn't got a 'u' in it.
Duncan: I was just going to say that it's an interesting misspelling
though, isn't it?
Elizabeth: It is an interesting one, yes, clearly.
Duncan: It's pointing to the idea of fault as in guilt, faulteringly.
Kim: But that doesn't explain why 'its' is misspelled.
Poet (Chris): Spelling is never my strong suit, Darling.
Leona: It wants a lot of copy editing.
Cahal: Not at all, not at all.
Duncan: Where's the "its"?
Poet (Chris): "its a masterpiece"
Kim: I liked the
last section. Some of the others seemed a bit dispersed but this was
very good. And I loved his speech. It's just disjointed enough.
Duncan: Actually Persephone isn't there yet. You've gone from Persephone
following, that is, Ascalaphus leading Persephone.
Kim: She's actually there, because her beauty is busy electrifying him.
Elizabeth: Yes.
Cahal: Unless he's leading her on a very very long lead.
Duncan: Very very slow, yes.
Cahal: She's there, she's there, believe me. I mean I think the interesting
thing about 'bad syntax competing
with bathos' is, which one wins?
Leona: Oh, bathos wins, absolutely, that's why he trails off.
Cahal: Yes I suppose the bad syntax stops. Well, right, OK, yeah, absolutely.
It's strange though that that speech would seem so like a speech out of some
epic battle or letter coming from the government, and yet it seems only marginally
different from the kind of speech that would be made today. Apart from the slight
inversion, "Great Honour do you do me", but "I hope you will regard your permanent
residence in the spirit intended as a compliment", it's not exactly modern language,
it's as if it's showing the fact that for this particular kind of task ancient
language is still in vogue. It's like a Lord Mayor making a speech isn't it?
Duncan: For example, you know, if you really are feeling tired, you
might say on the phone ‘Oh it's taken me aeons to do that' and
you wouldn't even think that you'd said it until you realise what
a daft thing to say.
Cahal: It's aeons since I've used the word to be honest.
Duncan: Aeons yes … that would prove my point wouldn't it?
Cahal: I think I wasn't so much talking about "aeons"
as the rest of the rise and fall, "the life of the judge has a few compensations".
... In fact it's like a kind of a cumbersome proposal in a 1950's
American movie. There's all sorts of things hanging around it there.
Kim: "A woman's touch, your touch."
Cahal: That's it, yes. "Oh how I've longed", it's
like that song, like nearly every song isn't it, oh how I've longed,
"lonely nights without sleeping when I've longed for your touch".
Leona: There was another one as well, which I noticed as it went by.
[SINGS: "What is this thing called love, this crazy …"]
Kim [LAUGHING]: Yeah, where's the Dylan quote?
Chris (Poet): Sorry.
Elizabeth: ... It is a section of two parts,
this section isn't it?
Duncan: Like a game with two halves you mean?
Elizabeth: Well there's a lot of very interior, you know, stuff in the
opening about, you know, which is really quite, I mean it's within as it were
the play of the poem but nevertheless it is quite sort of spirited, you know,
it's not jokey, and then we're into this kind of scene which is a scene
… and it's like sort of a theatrical thing again, but, you know,
it's almost like a sort of counterbalance in terms of the weight of attention
between these two different scenes and two different characters. Are they completely
different orders of reality or of consciousness and does that relate to what
this whole thing is really all about?
Cahal: Certainly the first bit is psychologically realistic in a contemporary
way, even though the events that have preceded it may be in a meadow somewhere
in the ancient past.
Elizabeth: That's right, whereas the second bit is kind of almost
linguistic.
Cahal: But he's also on a stage, not just when he's making
the speech, but the description before it. "Such musings were interrupted",
it's that distancing technique again of pseudo-classicism whereas "Her
awareness lies small and curled and slowly expands to her outer rim, a perpetual
aching bruise" is not using that same distancing at all. It's actually
in the brain there, in the human feeling. Whether that's a deliberate contrast
or whether the subject matter at different parts of the story take it into different
realms, but of course one could have written that in a distancing way as well
as the original classic probably did. You know she woke to find herself in a
cavern and then go on to describe the cavern and not tell you anything about
what she felt, you know.
Elizabeth: Whereas here the description of the cavern almost enters
into the psychological realm actually.
Duncan: I get the feeling sometimes when you watch these totally daft
science fiction films where people get taken before leaders, you're always
asking the question why didn't they want to do that one, why didn't
they get away through there, why didn't they climb out of that window?
Elizabeth: Have you ever been abducted Duncan? It's not as easy
as that.
Duncan: I did actually, I have been abducted.
Cahal: Switch the tape off. Please we're not having this on tape.
Duncan: I have been abducted. I was abducted when I was President of
the Students Union
Cahal: [DERISIVELY] Yah!
Duncan: and they had this business of kidnapping Presidents Elect in
order to hold them up to ransom and I was set up by the outgoing President of
the Students Union who, you know, was on the inside of this. They pushed me
into a van, took me down to Kingston ...
Cahal: How awful!
Elizabeth: Well I'll bet you were too scared, I bet you didn't
make a run for it.
Duncan: I did and I was the only one who did escape. I don't understand
why, you know.
Leona: Everybody else played along with the game.
Duncan: It got a bit nasty actually because some of them refused to
sign cheques and, you know, they got duffed, I escaped with a person from some
other Union, Imperial College I think, two of us escaped.
Cahal: Could you imagine anything worse than escaping from captivity
and carrying your own case. That's a little unfair.
Duncan: We got out of Kingston pretty fast too actually. That was the
mistake of the Treasurer. The Treasurer of Kings College decided he was going
to go into a pub where apparently he was promptly re-abducted.
Leona: I was abducted once and I got away by dint of my abductor having
neglected to lock the door.
Duncan: That's what they do. Emergency exits are usually open.
Elizabeth: So you weren't too scared to run away.
Leona: Yeah, and also I had very sharp long fingernails and bit, and
I don't think the guy quite expected that kind of response.
Duncan: Just every single time Dale is in front of Emperor Ming there's
thousands of ways in which you could get out, plus the fact that the guards
are usually off at a lesson, now what occurs to me here is that you've got this
very sort of rhetorical, again it's a speech isn't it you see, it's not so real;
what I'm thinking of here is really that an awful lot of the language underpins
an implicit realism to it, I mean all we need to do really is just sort of touch
the Victorian base and then leave it alone. There's no need to sketch it in
more than it's already there but every now and then, in the pastoral scene and
I think now also in the exchange of speeches, or in this speech at Persephone,
presumably she's going to say something back, there's that slight staginess,
slight formality. You'd think if Persephone was shrieking her head off and writhing
and running all over the place and being brought back, while he's trying to
make this speech it would just I think be a little bit more … Or if on
the other hand she was totally passive and almost collapsing as people do in
some situations it would make a bit more sense; but just being there?
Cahal: Isn't that a characteristic though of narrative anyway that
things always appear to stop.
Elizabeth: Well you've only got one line, you can't have two
speeches going on at once actually unless you have …
Cahal: But even in theatre a great deal of the time things stop for
speeches, even in quite realist theatre because you can't have everybody
running about all the time and if somebody's going to escape you get to
a point in the speech where somebody escapes and then they drop back and then
the speech carries on. You don't try and …
Duncan: I know what it is, it's opera. That's what
it is. It's opera though isn't it really? It's these maddening producers
who have to insist that people pick up washing or, you know, while the prisoners'
chorus is on in Beethoven or something like that. I agree but it is opera
in a sense. This really is an aria that Hades is singing isn't it?
Elizabeth: I don't think we need to go into opera. We've got
the convention in, you know, long poetry, for God's sake.
Duncan: Well I don't know, I definitely think there is something
operatic about the whole poem actually. I'll tell you why it is. It's
because the characters have dramatic monologues and they occupy their space
and then when the narrative moves onto the next character, each time they create
their own space because …
Elizabeth: You mean there's no dialogue.
Duncan: There's not really, no. There's no …
Cahal: Well we couldn't mistake the opening section, the first
three stanzas of section 5 for anything on stage or opera.
Duncan: No this is the orchestral prelude. It definitely is, it's
Wagner.
Elizabeth: No, there's more content than that.
Cahal: This is poetry, there's nothing else you can do with that.
You can't do that … you know …
Duncan: She's just lying there and then there's the subjective
mood music coming in.
Cahal: Oh sure, there may be music too, but you couldn't do that
with anything other than poetry. You could not describe that …
Duncan: And then Escalopes comes in, you know, and then it's sort
of monotone ..."My master summons you ..."
Elizabeth: You couldn't, you know, strong musky smells.
Duncan: Yes but that's Wagnerian.
Kim: Hm, sniffodrome.
Duncan: That would be a violin concerto wouldn't it, strong musky smells.
Cahal: We've lost it again.
Duncan: … the Brahms. But again it's not a criticism because
if anything it's something which you're exploiting here too.
Kim: I'm not sure about this but it seems like poetry to me ...
Duncan: Most opera is poetry actually, set to music.
Cahal: Anybody here not been abducted by aliens, not been to an opera
recently and not had a classical education?
Duncan: Well come on then Cahal!
Cahal
Good. I mean I think the real tension here, just in section 5, is between the
authenticity of the contemporary, emotional, focused poetry in the first half
and the kind of stagy classical or Shakespearean or science fiction film or
opera or whatever, the thing that we know as the set piece, and yes we can see
the person in that set piece is no longer a grand emperor, he's a human being
who's twitching and worrying, and yet when he makes his speech he's exposed
as using this kind of mayoral grandiloquence that we know is associated with
speeches welcoming people whether they're willing guests or not. You know, "For
you Englisher the war is over", the kind of speech that pretends to welcome
but actually has some other agenda and his agenda here is to persuade her that
she's going to like staying here which is a ... Where I think there might be
a problem is that the stanza at the top of the second page of section 5 is his
thinking to himself "The tone, the tone, success lies in the tone, steady now,
even keel, just read it calmly ..." is believable. The language in the next
stanza "He fumbled nervously" etc., again is our narrator moving us completely
into the present day. And yet there's something odd about "Such musings were
interrupted" and if that wasn't there we would believe in Persephone as a person
like us experiencing this and we would believe in Hades as a person like us
in the contemporary world. Even though his speech is pompous that doesn't mean
there's anything wrong with him per se, and "Such musings", the distancing
isn't right there because this particular piece of the story isn't normally
using that technique and there are little problems with the bit in the cavern
that fall into this same trap of elaborate language. In the cavern, I mean the
"terrible ache of loss" is again totally contemporary and it's the voice of
the narrator and it then needs to move more quickly. I think we've pointed out
problems with "some exit for her escape" but "what her eyes cannot see", it
seems superfluous, "a crack begins to enlarge itself" seems superfluous and
"part of the rock face glides silently open on a hinge", it's too grandiloquent
for what's actually happening to her.
Kim: ... metaphor: hinge because hinges and traps and doors ...
Cahal: I'm not objecting to the hinge but what I'm saying is that it
ought to be seen, but from her perspective, not from somebody who is writing
about this as a mechanism: so it's "once up her hands grope the cavern walls",
defines an escape, "when a crack or part of the rock opens on a hinge" ... "My
Master summons you, come with me". That's all I'm getting at.
Elizabeth: Now I kind of agree with a lot of what you've said but
I don't agree that Hades' speech is as it were in fact in the same
world as the interior intimations of Persephone. I think it's "With
such musings", and I think that …
Cahal: Just say that again.
Elizabeth: Well you were suggesting that "Such musings were interrupted"
was the thing that was out of kilter on that page.
Cahal: Because the speech is a false artefact, but "Such musings"
appears to come from the voice of the narrator, and the narrator hasn't
been talking to us in an old fashioned, Victorian (or epic or grand or anything)
way.
Elizabeth: Hasn't he?
Cahal: No, I'm just thinking about section 5, just for a moment. It's
experiential. I mean I think I would have ... as slightly shorter, but that's
to re-write; but I think it's "On her face a spider does something or other
and then stops ... Her awareness lies small and curled" etc., "The young girl
stirs" isn't necessary there and there are a few other little bits that seem
to be telling us ...
Leona: You're going to have a problem with taking out "The
young girl stirs" because otherwise you've got spiders doing the acting
there.
Cahal: OK I'm not actually trying to re-write it but something that
takes out the sense that it's a story, it's felt rather than told I think in
most of the first three stanzas isn't it?
Leona: You're saying you can get back inside her head a bit more
there.
Cahal: Yeah, just maybe one or two words on that first page and certainly
in the last bit of the first page that would tighten it up and get us absolutely
close to where she is, and then we move on, we have to deal with it from Hades'
perspective, but he too is human I believe in this bit. He was a bit pompous
earlier on but he's human except when he speaks.
Duncan: Yes but the Gods are always human in any Greek mythology.
Cahal: Yes but I mean human in the sense that we understand, not in
the way that the Victorians understood, and this is, apart from "barely
contain his excitement", it's a lot about clichés, but what
he says to himself is believable, "The tone, they tell me I've got
to get the tone right, I've got to keep it cool, I've got to keep
it steady" and then she comes in and his good intentions or control or
whatever goes to pieces. He fumbles, "after spending so long" he embarks
falteringly on his peroration and then we're into the artificial language,
but it would stay more artificial if the language around it was more like that
than like "Such musings" or ... "Barely contain his excitement"
is just a wee bit clichéd but …
Duncan: Isn't the narrator always going to be to a certain extent
in collusion with the characters as far as the pitch of the voice is concerned?
In Jane Austen for example the narrator is definitely another character who
was there at the party, who was there witnessing these scenes in the front rooms
etc., the narrator, it's as if it's some gossip telling all this and
she's on the same level as anybody else who's there and therefore
her language to a certain extent internally chimes with the language of the
people whom she's talking about.
Elizabeth: But the narrator can chime with different with people on
very different registers.
Duncan: Yeah. I mean you do get a deliberate continental way of ...
narrative. In Tolstoy for example when there's definitely the loftiness, the
lofty tone, but it's not needed here. I mean I think the narrator is equally
as pompous as a Victorian mythologue, as anybody else.
Cahal: Not in section 5. The narrator is 'one of us' in section 5. A
Victorian mythologue does not say "Her awareness lies small and curled
and slowly expands to her outer rim." They didn't even know people
felt that way in Victorian times for some obscure reason.
Leona: They probably did, but they didn't have the vocabulary for
it.
Duncan: Maybe that's why they were so happy; but, yes I see what you
mean.
Cahal: That's a completely modern concept, but I also think that Hades'
own language is not "Our passion will ignite the stars. Tartarus welcomes you."
His own language is "The tone, the tone, success lies in the tone, steady now,
just read it calmly" as though this is somebody going over and over in his own
mind what he's been told about how to get it right. It's any one of us. It seems
to me that Hades is entitled in this section to be an ordinary contemporary
person except when he's making his speech, but that's a different issue.
Elizabeth: I don't know, because I think that maybe what the poem
might be partly about is some sort of clash between a sensitivity and something
other than what we would understand to be a sensitivity, and that might be what
expresses the fundamental theme of the whole poem, and I mean I could go on
with my theory about what that was.
[SOUNDS OF WINE POURING INTO GLASSES]
Duncan: Well no because I was pouring this wine at the time and therefore
your theory was completely drowned in ...
Elizabeth: I don't know, well I think one would have to see the
whole thing ...
Cahal I'm struggling here to make it all behave in one way throughout section
5 except for the speeches. And you're saying let them stay different, maybe
there are two languages in which the voice speaks.
Elizabeth: That's right, yeah, and I mean if you ... something
to do with, you know, a consciousness in childhood in relation to kind of growing
up or coming to terms with the world and the world of adults or school, I suppose
I am reading this in the light of Chris's other work which may be the wrong
thing to do, but it was to do with as it were, you know, the growth of XYZ,
both the child's mind in relation to the adult world and the world of education
and the world of rhetoric and you know all these external things, maybe, you
know, maybe all the rest of the people in the poem are inhabiting really another
register and maybe we shouldn't want to kind of psychologically naturalise
them …
Cahal: Too much.
Elizabeth: Too much.
Cahal: Because they are part of … Hades isn't that different
from the girl when we see how nervous he is about meeting her.
Elizabeth: Well I don't know.
Cahal: He's a bit different, yeah.
Elizabeth: I mean but it would be possible to as it were play that as
a character in a sort of humorous film or whatever without genuine psychology
…
Cahal: Yeah, I guest it's a different kind of insight. It's
making him appear human and slightly foolish rather than human and intensely
serious.
Elizabeth: Yes. I mean cartoons can be incredibly acute but they're
not actually interior.
Cahal: You're right. There's a difference between how close
we get to Persephone and how close we get to the fumbling, faltering, pompous
Hades, even when we get an insight into him.
Elizabeth: Or even how close we get to Zeus actually.
Cahal: Because although he has all these contemporary worries he still
remains outside as a figure … yeah.
Duncan: It's interesting isn't it that Persephone's subjectivity
has got a special status to it which to a certain extent you're objecting
to it in a way, you know, you're objecting considerably.
Cahal: I want the whole thing to be like that.
Duncan: You want the whole thing to be?
Cahal: Like that, no, I mean I'm trying to look at section 5.
Duncan: You're not saying which way you're coming. Are you
saying that maybe the whole thing should be much more like the narrative in
the previous sections of the poem? I mean maybe the narrative in the previous
sections of the poem ...
Leona: We're talking about only the two in section 5.
Cahal: I'm saying that section 5 has two modes and I was arguing
that the voice in the poem, the narrator's voice, should be as uniform
and contemporary as possible because such a good job as been made of it three
and a half stanzas into the piece, although stanza probably isn't the right
word, but in those three plus this I'm totally with this, then there's
a going back to describing it but still keeping quite close to contemporary
language and I somehow wanted that to be more authentic but there's an
argument that says we're not really going to feel very close to Hades anyway
because he's one of the boring old so-and-so's in this story and therefore
his self justification as a judge's life has a few compensations and so
on, he's a Lord Irvine kind of character rather than a Tony Blair of a
character.
Duncan: Gilbert and Sullivan really.
Cahal: That's right. Just as Hades is at the beginning with all
his problems, you know, his drainage and all that, these are his worries. Well
Zeus: "The rearrangement of a continental mass, the scheme for ... policy
..." I'm sure these are references to some specific historical or
mythical fact, but the point about it is that that kind of litany that someone
goes over, is not the character, even in a sitcom, that we're meant to
like very much. He's the fussy guy with his list of troubles and he maybe
contemporary but that doesn't mean we like him and that doesn't mean
that the voice in the poem wants to identify with him in this incredibly impressive
way, I think is what I'm saying.
Leona: Well I think that there are a lot more than two registers in
this, and I think that throughout what's happening is that we are looking
at this story through all kinds of layers including the Victorian one, yes.
You're looking at it through all the different filters that you've
ever looked at this story through: the Freudian one and the Victorian one and
the schoolboy translation, you know, the Latin meant-to-be-translated one, and
so on, all that stuff is there. And where you come to the really contemporary
bits it isn't when you're with a particular character, but when you're
in the bits that really matter, the bits that are about real emotional truth.
I think that comes mostly with Persephone's own bits, some of her bits,
most of her bits even. And it also comes – you know I don't think
you can discount Hades; I think he's important in the story.
Kim: Well he's such a technician when he's talking about ...
metaphors earlier on, and then he just makes a balls up of his big moment.
Duncan: Don't we all?
Leona: Don't we all!
Kim: "Such musings
were interrupted" That's a real delight. That isn't Hades' voice and
it isn't Persephone's either, it's an actual real narrator.
Leona: When we were talking about this before, we talked about this
difficulty of matching the tone to the moment and the perennial difficulty in
knowing when you can afford to move from one register to another and at which
bit does it have to be in one register or another. So, it's a really difficult
task. It's not just about when the tone's right, it's also about the movement
between the tones being right and in the right place; and maybe this section's
not quite got it yet. But I think that's the task. I don't think there
is a task other than that.
Cahal: Yeah, because whichever register the voice finds itself in, the
words seem entirely appropriate to it. We're not saying it doesn't
work in each of these different registers. We're only debating in a sense
off the point. It's whether they should be like that at that point so it's
convincing. When it moves from one mood to another the work done in that mood
is highly effective. The speech is incredibly typical of that kind of speech.
The Persephone sequence is more or less perfectly right for that frame of mind,
and there's that kind of metafictional thing going on there where Hades
is saying "The tone, the tone, success lies in the tone", but of course
that's what we've been talking about for the last couple of hours,
you know. I don't know about even keel, I wouldn't say that there's
much of an even keel in this.
Duncan: There is a lot, I mean just to widen it out a bit, and I know
we're supposed to be confining ourselves to the final section. There seems
to be a big preoccupation with Persephone's subjectivity. It's as
if because the poor character only ever has a passive role in this bit anyway
she's got to be the one who's subjective and has her head opened,
whereas everybody else can be dashing around doing things. I suppose it's
part of the myth, you know, as in the opera, Persephone's on stage and
therefore she sings a lament and of course what's really happening is happening
elsewhere all around her so I suppose in that sense it's inevitable but
I'm not quite sure that the way in which you're treating Persephone's
subjectivity is always consistent. Is Persephone a consistent character, because
I just get this feeling that in the second section she is this brave new thing
who challenges tradition, then she shifts in section 3 to really being almost
like a picture.
Cahal: In section 2 she's a bold young thing who really stamps
her foot ... I think it's her boldness.
Duncan: Except, you know, she is very interested in the activities of
termites.
Cahal: But that's a rant at the adults isn't it. Look these
million of things that have gone on while you've been standing here talking.
Larva have hatched and grown twenty years older. I have plaited my hair and
invented a game. That is pure Violet Elizabeth isn't it?
Elizabeth: I love it, I do like that.
Cahal: Yeah. I mean I think the thing about consistency of tone about
Persephone's bits being consistent throughout is not the kind of work this
is. It's more like a Ulysses in which a different manner, tone, register,
tradition ...
Duncan: Ulysses
Cahal: Joycean Ulysses... which is a different form. I mean it's not
different enough for that. You can't say, you know, this is written in the style
of X, this is written in the style of Y, but if the jumble, if the changing
of styles is deliberate then that changing of styles is to say something about
the way in which these things are written about in contemporary time or in Victorian
time or elsewhere rather than merely that the voice in the poem has a Persephone
who is different in one page to how she is in the next.
Elizabeth: Doesn't that relate to what Leona was saying about,
you know, the levels, the variety, different levels or angles or whatever?
Cahal: Yeah. What I'm trying to do is sort of, Duncan's saying
he's concerned that the voice isn't consistent, but it would seem
to be part of the work that the voice isn't consistent.
Elizabeth: What is the case is that, again like Leona was saying,
seems to be in a sense the most important thing. I mean this is the sequence
that we're actually looking at now. It's sort of playful and it's like a little
rote and it's not like the interiority of her waking up in the cavern, but nonetheless
it's one of the nicest bits of the poem. You kind of like it and therefore you
like that character and you relate more closely to that character.
Duncan: I think what's interesting is the fact that it doesn't seem
to be exploiting the irony between the situation of, "I
chafe against this prison of enervating leisure, I am a stone in the river polished…
by the rushing waters, I gleam but no one dare pluck me" and then of
course she gets plucked, and then in section 5 there she is really a prisoner
and of course an irony, put it this way, there's a potential ironic context
here that doesn't seem to be exploited, especially as they're using exactly
the same metaphor ... the water clears, just as a river settles, you know, so
the mind, the main events of the recent past slowly shimmer back to her mind,
and of course if we go back to where she was a river polished to no purpose
by the rushing waters.
Leona: But look at what she thinks there you see: she isn't thinking
she's been plucked, she's thinking she's been abducted, which is different.
Elizabeth: [LAUGHING] Yes, how true, how true.
Leona: The whole question of the poem: is there a difference between
the beig plucked and being abducted?
Duncan: Well obviously it's always a problem because we're
reading a poem that is still in the process of being written and therefore to
a certain extent half of the comments we're making, we're really throwing
in our bit and saying listen can you make it into this kind of a poem, but if
you develop it this way, can you make it this, but I think that, you know, the
problem with Persephone is that she doesn't do anything except get abducted
and get taken back ...
Cahal: Well, women were like that in the old days.
Duncan: Well this is myth isn't it, you know, neither old nor young,
and therefore if you're going to bring them in at all, you're going
to have whole sectors where literally it's you and Persephone and that's
it. The myth won't help you because there's nothing there. But I mean
that potential irony I think, you know, her social imprisonment in the middle
class, upper middle class atmosphere in the Victorian suburbs presumably and
then her real imprisonment in the real mythological Hades ...
Elizabeth: It is a cliff-hanger, because we really don't know how
she's going to react or what she's going to say or think next. Is
she going to think it is preferable actually to being out here ... ?
Duncan: Does she think Hades is fun, yes?
Elizabeth: Or not?
Duncan: That's the thought I had actually, yes, because that's
the one thing that you can exploit without changing the myth because after all
she does settle for fifty-fifty whatever happens. I mean whether it's in
fact that she wants the hell ...
Leona: I think we'd all want to settle for that.
Duncan: Oh yeah, yeah. You could have her overhearing the "Has she eaten
anything" as she quickly crams down pomegranate seeds, just to make sure that
...
Kim: Well it is warm in hell in winter really.
Leona: You know you'd spend summer in London, and the winter, I
don't know...
Poet (Chris): Tenerife.
Kim: Well, more, that's what we want from you Chris.
Duncan: Otherwise we'll finish it ourselves.
Poet (Chris): I'm happy with that.
Leona: Chris thinks: why didn't they do this before, and after I could
have taken it and tidied it up.
Elizabeth: Duncan wants to say one more thing and then Chris gets his
turn.
Duncan: There's a brilliant
line in section 4 actually. I like the fact that these guards, or whoever
they were, these pastoral also-rans, are being interviewed about why they didn't
prevent this teenage girl from being abducted and then they say "we fell asleep
and whilst in the arms of Morpheus she strayed too far". Now again it's a wonderful,
it's a typical classical epithet, but at the same time when you're making excuses
you've got to find somebody else to blame: when in the arms of Morpheus, you
know, what can I do, I mean this Morpheus was going around you know. It's very
very clever.
And now a speech from the poet.
Poet (Chris): Well it's getting to the point where ...
Elizabeth: It's getting to the point, yeah.
Poet (Chris): … where the rabbit has to come out into the open.
The writing is getting more difficult. The thing is balancing ... It's really
interesting listening to the discussion. I mean all this is sort of subliminal
while I'm writing. [SOUNDS OF WINE BEING UNCORKED IN BACKGROUND] All I'm aware
of is it's getting harder to do, because, I'm actually in the process of doing
it now, I'm becoming more conscious of what I'm interested in, but I don't want
to be overly so at this stage. I don't want to be too enquiring about it so,
you know, it's a delicate balance. But coming just back to simple things I think
it's important for me to feel that it actually works as a spoken thing, and
I do regard it as a sort of performance item in a way. I mean it's got to work
dramatically, it's a dramatic poem.
Duncan: Now when is a performance item a dramatic
poem? I mean it's an opera surely?
Poet (Chris) The opera thing actually is interesting; but it is about
all these tones, it's the register of voices, trying to get from ancient
to modern. The going gets harder as we get to the close of the story, and
I've got an intuition now, I've actually got an intuition about tying it
up. Just one thing about it, is that Persephone – I guess she's a character
of changes, you see. I guess one difficulty of writing is that I want her
to change, I think she changes. In a way I think it's about addressing us
now, I mean you know the trajectory of the poem. Anyway I don't want to say
more about that because if you say too much you kind of dissipate the tension
necessary to write it.
[SOUNDS OF WINE BEING POURED IN THE BACKGROUND]
Just in terms of the formal thing, I mean I'm aware that there's, again
I'm deliberately not analysing it at this stage because you just get
too knowing if you start understanding too much about the mechanics of the
way you're writing, you know in composition at any rate too early, but
there is, you know, the first bits, they have a sort of form of their own.
Is it disturbing, I mean I'm talking on the page now, not necessarily
about the way I'm delivering or that it's orally perceived, but,
you know, I'm aware that it's written in different forms, different
stanza lengths, I mean I'm just writing it as it feels, you know, I'm
not writing to a predetermined form.
Elizabeth: I think it's fine like that. I even think it's
a merit actually. You know in terms of reading something ... I think it's
nice that it shifts its step, you know.
Leona: Yeah.
Poet (Chris): I mean I suppose there is such a convention in long pieces
that they should have a type of, you know, cloth which has been cut and you're
writing to it but it doesn't feel right for me.
Leona: Putting yourself in that kind of box, you do it if it's useful,
you know, and I don't think it would be useful.
Poet (Chris): It's not useful, I mean I don't feel it is, but I'm just
wondering, you know, I don't know, it's just about the length of
the poem.
Leona: It feels organic.
Poet (Chris): I think, you know, reading it, it feels that there is
a type of unity to it. There is a rhythmic unity there. I mean there may be,
you know, lots of sort of cross rhythms.
Cahal: Different shapes within that, yeah.