The Unseen University and Us

Last week, you may recall, I attended a couple of graduation ceremonies. As I left work on Friday, I notice a row of large limousines - apparently the poorer the council, the bigger the mayor's limo -  depositing well-fed gents (and some ladies) for a slap-up feed with the Vice-Chancellor. It's the kind of thing a university has to do: we're always looking for attention, planning permission, funding, shared activities and ways to serve the community. Plus we want to tie in big businesses, so we hand out honorary degrees to lubricate the exchange.

It all reminded me of this section from Terry Pratchett's Jingo, in which the Patrician ruler of the city explains why cheesy ceremonies are part of the social ritual:

… officially he's here because the wizards have invited him to their big award ceremony. An honorary doctorate, that sort of thing. And one of their lunches afterwards. I do like negotiating with people after the faculty of Unseen University have entertained them for lunch. They tend not to move about much and they'll agree to practically anything if they think there's a chance of a stomach powder and a small glass of water. 

Then they agree to a procession through town in silly medieval costume, much like the one I joined last week:

It demonstrates the friendly alliance between the University and the civil government which, I may say, seems to consist of their promising not to do anything we ask provided we promise not to ask them to do anything. 

We're a bit more closely entwined these days, and the Russell Group universities decided that they'd do whatever the government wanted in return for more cash, especially in research priorities: a cynical deal which has backfired badly. Universities should be critical and independent of power - less Hegemonic, if you'll forgive me. A certain spikiness is to be welcomed, but governments over the years have decided that as they control the purse strings, they're in charge. Sadly, a large group of VCs has accepted this argument without demur.

The Death of the Author. Live.

The Death of the Author is a 1967 essay by Roland Barthes which posits that the author's intentions and context shouldn't be taken into account when reading a text: meaning is repeatedly created in the space between the words on the page (expressed in a language which predates and survives the author) and the reader's interpretation(s) rather than fixed. An author might try to constrain interpretation, but it's hard to do: the reader might be 200 years later, in a completely different context. Not that authors don't try: read Susan Suleiman's excellent Authoritarian Fictions for some examples.

However, the Death of the Author means something slightly different today. I've just ordered Terry Pratchett's new novel, Snuff. The title alone is redolent of death - snuffed out, snuff movies - and the work is a fantasy take on the murder-in-the-library country house crime genre. As a fan and admirer of Pratchett's increasingly leftwing satire, I'm sure it will be a winner.

But - I'm increasingly aware of a personal and public interest in Pratchett that impinges directly on the Death of the Author. Pratchett announced some time ago that he's contracted Alzheimer's disease. He's made documentaries about its progress, spoken movingly about the need for euthanasia, and donated large amounts of money to research. What concerns me is that there's a morbid interest in the books that isn't literary. I'm starting to feel that we aren't reading the books, we're reading the author, searching the text for indication of Pratchett's mental decline - perhaps a narrowed vocabulary, maybe a looser plot. It's like rubber-necking a car crash.

The problem is that I can't ignore it. If I didn't know about Pratchett's condition, I'd read the book and judge it by comparison with his previous work, with other authors, with my own mental conception of a successful novel. Now, I'm forced to read the novel in the prism of Alzheimer's, and I resent that. I'm not a purist Death of the Author critic: I'm interested in the context of a work's generation, but I'm finding it hard not to read Pratchett through the novel, as though it's an index of its author rather than a discrete work of art, which I'm sure he'd hate too.

We can hardly blame the media for milking all the pathos it can out of the situation - one could hardly expect vampires to swear off a drop of the red stuff - but I don't like it one little bit. When's the decline coming? How much editing is needed before publication? Will the publishers wring him dry or do the decent thing when the time comes? The clock's ticking. It's Celebrity Literary Deathwatch - and we're all hooked. Ugh.

The oracle speaks

I keep trying to explain to students that 'reality' is a narrative constructed by the individual, influenced by his or her cultural context to explain events. It rarely goes in. Now I find that Terry Pratchett made the same point much more clearly in Moving Pictures:

What was it they said about gods? They wouldn't exist if there weren't people to believe in them? And that applied to everything. Reality was what went on inside people's heads.

Quite enough of that, thank you

Despite having an awful cold, I really enjoyed the Henry V workshop this afternoon. It was great. Wasn't it? Well? I'm waiting, student readers… I've received Terry Pratchett's latest, Unseen Academicals, Nancy Elizabeth's lovely new album of folk minimalism - Wrought Iron - and Fuck Buttons' Street Horrrsing (yes, it is spelled so), and I'm off to bed with my new purchases in the hope I'll be compos mentis for Poetry tomorrow afternoon.

Nerd love

Click here for a larger image, and move your mouse over it for a hidden message. Rather poignantly, it reads 'You know what really helps an existential crisis? Wondering how much shelf space to leave for a Terry Pratchett collection'.

It's sad because it's true. I genuinely believe that if, in 15 years, we have an enlightened young government which believes in public services, kindness, quality of life, basic decency and the value of nerds, it will be because those people have grown up, as have millions, on Pratchett's books. His last ten or fifteen novels have all been witty, fantastic expositions of liberal-left values - and they've sold millions of copies.

Now he has a variant of Alzheimer's disease, and we don't know how much more he can write. I think of him sitting in his bizarre study, pulsing with intelligence and yet feeling it all gradually slip away from him. Which is kind of selfish - his life matters, not the fans who just want more of his work.

Ever read 'Flowers for Algernon'?

Kids' stuff?

In a break from the L. M. Montgomery marathon, I read Terry Pratchett's Nation yesterday. People can be snobby about Pratchett, but who else is writing consistently good, funny, socially-engaged books which tackle the big issues. Nation propounds the joys of liberal humanism and atheism in a thoughtful and sensitive way, amongst other things. Pullman does the same thing in a more dramatic fashion, but TP quietly explores them in this book. We'll miss him when his Alzheimer's takes over. Curiously, the author photograph is the only hint of Pratchett's condition. Instead of a full-frontal one, his face is turned away from the camera, making him unknowable. Given that he has a white beard and always wears a black hat and clothes, the effect is one of darkness - very poignant. 

On the theme of children's fantasy, I saw Inkheart yesterday. I'm a fan of the books (they're about the power of reading), and grew to like the film. They give away the central conceit in the first line of the voice-over which is ridiculous, and Brendan Fraser is the worst actor I've ever seen. Keanu Reeves would have put more primal energy into the role.