To have sex with the ocelot, turn to page 45

At last! The literary world has found room for a contemporary twist on the Choose Your Own Adventure stories, of which I owned several as a young tyke. I can't remember which ones I read, though I vaguely remember Nazis featuring heavily, but I do remember finding them boring and frustrating:

I presume that the books were a response to the perceived threat of computer games, which were beginning to evolve from simplistically teleological (win/lose or live/die) narratives to more sophisticated texts in which simple actions were replaced by complex decision-making. I guess Skyrim is a decent modern version, as the quests can be ignored in favour of exploration to some extent. My favourite computer game, by the way, is this one. You can play it for free, for ever. I have memorised the books and still can't get far. I also used to play Civilization II but gave up once I realised that it was ideologically constrained: it was impossible to succeed by running a peaceful socialist state, and I hate being lectured to.

The other motivation is of course the perception that boring old novels with their starts, middles and ends were incapable of holding a cool 80s kid's attention, too bossy and prescriptive for Gen-X rebels. In this sense, I'd have to say that they were failures. The idea that the reader was 'free' to choose an adventure of his or her own was illusory, and the illusion was brought to the fore by the mechanism. The slim books only held room for a certain number of choices, and in particular of endings. The mechanism of narrative was laid bare in a really boring way for me, though that in itself was educational, I suppose.

Paradoxically, the classic novel affords the reader far more freedom than the CYA ones. The latter are solely about plot: there's almost no characterisation or narrative commentary. Entirely written in second-person ('You reach a fork: to turn left, turn to page 31…'), the destination becomes the only thing of interest and the outcomes were so stark that boredom is inevitable. Where the traditional Bildungsroman would end with the protagonist growing up, understanding society, himself and his place in (or out of) society, the CYA novels would end with 'You are dead' or 'you find the treasure'. Not much room for ambiguity or side plots, let alone allowing the reader to prefer death or not care about the treasure. While established genres have more or less authoritarian narratives, none of them are quite so reductive. Tristram Shandy's black page and the first-person narration of Tristram's own conception, various authors' use of pages to be read in random order, or the seemingly random flow of Ulysses leave the reader with far more freedom of interpretation, understanding and creation than the CYA sub-genre. Even the less experimental texts are implicitly more adventurous than CYA ones. Take Pride and Prejudice and its famous opening sentence:

IT is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

So many choices have to be made just by the time you reach the end of this sentence. Your choices dictate what kind of novel you read. Imagine assuming that this sentence is entirely seriously intended. The result is a novel in which the interest lies in getting the rich man a wife and we're just reading for a conservative happy ending in which the rich man acquires his female trophy. It's a romance, slightly undercut by the monetary foregrounding (which makes a 'straight' reading difficult). Let's choose another adventure: let's assume the narrator is being ironic. Just by changing the tone of voice, we have a completely different novel which uses satire to challenge established social conventions. There are other choices to make. Is this an external narrator, refereeing the action and characters, or are the attitudes of one particular character being relayed (we call this free indirect discourse) and perhaps even mocked? If so (and I'd suggest Mrs Bennet) then we have not just a social comedy or satire, but rather a cruel parody of a woman trying her best in difficult circumstances to provide for her daughters. Another possibility is that the text sympathetically explores the precarious situation of young women whose only salvation is in snaring the young man, whether they (or he) wish to or not.

That's not all: as long as Choosing Your Own register and genre, you have all the fun of reading with or against your narrator, picking your characters' clothes, appearance, back-story, preferred fates, accents and a host of other things. A decent book will leave you with lots of space to interpret events, statements, implications and endings for yourself, far more than a CYA novel will.

And what of the new Choose Your Own Adventure novels? Rather boringly, they're Choose Your Own Sexual Adventure texts. Not 'boringly' in the sense of 'middle-class academic takes fashionably dismissive view of sexual content', but boringly in the sense that this was inevitable and will inevitably be entirely reductive and predictable. In one way, sex is the ideal subject for a sub-genre (no pun intended) with the limitations described above. However you look at it, the basic permutations of sex are pretty limited and mechanical, and for men at least, lead quickly to a defined end-point, however one chooses to get there. As Pulp's jaded take on sex and by extension life, 'This Is Hardcore' puts it,

I've seen the storyline played out so many times before.
Oh that goes in there.
Then that goes in there.
Then that goes in there.
Then that goes in there. & then it's over.

Oh, what a hell of a show but what I want to know:
what exactly do you do for an encore?

The inventive aspect of sex, and sex writing, is how one dresses up the the permutations and divert attention from their repetitiveness. The books will feature a few relatively mild sexual options (light S+M, different locations, no doubt some class and racial mixing) all of which will tell you quite a lot about the idealised readership's cultural state, but they'll be as boring as porn, which I'm told also lacks compelling plots, characterisation or discursive variation.

The limited nature of the children's versions of CYA books will only be accentuated by the sexual versions. All the readers will know (at least in theory) what the preferred ending will be, and certainly won't be pleased by a realist treatment. Just imagine it:

p. 1. A rich man invites you to stay with him on his yacht. If you choose to go with him, turn to page 3.
p. 3. Your sexual adventure is over in 32 seconds. Your partner claims that this has never happened before and falls asleep. He later wakes up, gets your name wrong and explains that his wife doesn't understand him while ostentatiously looking at his watch. Go back 7 pages and try again. 

or

Your new acquaintance asks you to use some toys and 'sexy' clothes. Do you a) laugh derisively or b) give it a go? If b) turn to page 69.
p. 69. Your partner is snoring loudly. You lie awake in the dark empty, disappointed, unfulfilled and used. Do you wish to try again or browse dejectedly for LOLCats on your phone until sweet oblivion takes pity on you?

Actually, I'm tempted to give writing one of these a go. Although Joe Dunthorne, whom I admire very much, has already written one.

If you think I'm being overly mean, let's have a look at what these books actually do:

"you" are a woman who has been stood up in a swish hotel bar. When a stranger mistakes you for a high-class escort, slips you an envelope full of cash and invites you to his room, the first of many choices begins. 

Erotic adventures could include "enticing two young men into a memorable threesome", "dinner with a stressed-out executive involv[ing] more than food on the table", or a visit to a porn set. "Remember, even if you choose submission, the control is still all yours," says the publisher.

Interestingly, the author decides that some Adventures won't feature:

Dominatrix for instance, just didn't come out erotically.

So: choosing your own adventure starts by asserting a fixed sexual identity: female and heterosexual, with the cash-sex nexus and male dominance firmly established, despite the claims that the female reader at whom the novels are aimed remains 'in charge'. The only choice is between thinly-disguised variations of tired, conventional social positions (no pun intended, once again) with no opportunity for genuine transgression ('You arrive at the zoo. If you wish to sleep with an ocelot, turn to page 45…').

Choose Your Own Adventure indeed! The only real choice is whether to further enrich an opportunist publisher by buying another coil of old literary rope, or retire to bed with nothing other than your own imagination. Or a copy of Ulysses. And my answer to that would be:

yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Triumph

What a wonderful weekend. I spent it at Trentham Gardens, on an intensive, challenging but hugely enjoyable photography day. Armed with my trusty D7000, 50mm f/1/8, an 18-55, 70-200 and rather crappy Sigma 70-300, I turned up prepared to be dazzled. Trained professionals and animal handlers coached us in the finer points of the art of animal photography, and we all came away with a portfolio of which to be proud.

… Is what I wanted to be writing this morning. But for the fourth time, my birthday present from 11 months ago was cancelled and now I've given up. This time it was the weather (which turned out OK, but the cancellation was decided on Thursday), and previous occasions were called off due to low numbers.

As it happens, I had rather an excellent weekend: great company, huge amounts of reading and a day in the countryside visiting my dear old ma. Culturally, Radio 4's 7 hour dramatisation of Joyce's Ulysses, interspersed with learned commentary from Mark Lawson and friends, was a sublime experience. The acting was uniformly magnificent, the cuts judicious (the full version takes about 29 hours) and the writing, of course, was the height of literary perception. If you haven't read it, do. But not in one go - that's not how it works.

Plan for the day: I was meant to be at my annual appraisal, but my boss isn't here. I assume that means he's realised that I am academic perfection incarnated and appraisal would be an insult. Default victory to me, Plashing Vole lives to brainwash, propagandise (did you know Propaganda was originally the Vatican's missionary wing, catering for non-Catholic countries such as Britain?) and mislead for another year. Woo! And indeed Hoo!

Update: just had my appraisal. Got to write more articles… but I knew that already. Very supportive and friendly discussion. The system works!

A novel experience

Over at Tales from the Reading Room, they're discussing the relationship between psychoanalysis and reading (books have a subconscious, and the relationship between the reader and the text is psychologically flawed): you don't have to accept Freudian or other psychological claims to recognise that literary analysis and psychological analysis can follow very similar paths.

One of the books mentioned is Peter Brooks' Reading for the Plot, and wonderful book which heavily influenced me, and which I always recommend to students, alongside Rimon-Kenan's Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, Fish's Is There A Text In This Class? and Suleiman's Authoritarian Fictions.

Mrs. Litlove summarises Brooks' position thus:

akin to the Freudian fort-da game. Freud noticed his grandchild in his pram playing with a toy which he threw away from him, with the cry of ‘Fort!’, and then pulled back with the word ‘Da!’. Freud believed that in this way, the child was symbolically coming to terms with the absence of the mother. He could invest the toy with emotions towards the mother and make it go away (fort) and then bring it back at will (da), thus mastering the discomfort and anxiety he felt at the prospect of separation. Peter Brooks believed that plot worked in the same way. At the start of a novel, a problem is posed, something – truth, meaning – is posited as missing, and the plot works to resolve the enigma or the absence. We accept that our sense of significance (‘What does it all mean?’) will go away from us for a time, in the safe knowledge that it will be returned to us in a satisfying way at the end of the book.

In short, the act of reading is both a risky and a confident venture. The reader outsources autonomy to the absent author, trusting him or her to guide her towards something significant. This seems a little goal-oriented to me, but we'll press on for now (ironically, of course). With formulaic fiction, the problem is simple: whodunnit, or will he marry her and so on. The nature of the solution tells you a lot about the author's ideology, and that of the literary market which got the text to you. With the stuff we like to call 'literature', the problem might be more abstract - human nature, for instance. With what I consider literature, the 'problem' might be either unresolved and unresolvable, or permanently absent: the meaning might reside solely in the reading experience, with the denial of resolution a demonstration of this residual meaning.

(In passing: do we need to 'trust' the authors? Isn't a suspicious or a 'go on, impress me' reading equally acceptable? Is the author even there to be trusted? We all know now that the text is merely the physical signifier of a cultural network: author-publisher-marketer-consumer/reader. Are we trusting the author or are we testing our own judgement? I buy most of my own books, according to some semi-conscious criteria. Reading might be an aspirational act, or a performative one, a way of joining the 'group of people who read books like these'. It may represent an attempt to placate one's 'better' self, or indulge one's earthier side - if we are indeed divided between conscious and subconscious as Freud felt).

Handing over this interpretive control isn't something to do lightly. I know a book isn't working for me when I find myself checking the synopsis on the flyleaf or back cover to compare it with my reading experience so far. Sometimes it's a bad synopsis. Sometimes their emphasis - for sales purposes - is misleading (like the Sweeney Todd trailer which never quite found the space to mention that the film is a musical). Sometimes it betrays my insecurity, lack of trust or moronic goal-oriented consumption: when's the action going to happen? When do they do it? How do they catch him? 

If you - or the author or the marketers - have misinterpreted the nature of the text, you might feel cheated by the lack of neat ending in some texts. This feels wrong. We've all been led to believe by narrative that life has a beginning, a middle and an end. Justice will prevail. People will learn to be nicer to each other. They all live happily ever after. Death-bed repentance and forgiveness. All becomes clear. 

Sorry. All untrue. They're just the stories we tell each other to make the space between birth and death seem significant. Top marks for making the attempt, but wrong. Which is a very roundabout way (as seems fitting) to point out that tomorrow is Bloom's Day, on which we pay tribute to a novel - for want of a better word - which rejects such comforting fabrications in favour of a rambling (though carefully constructed) voyage through the consciousness of several people, a city and a culture. Underpinned with a curious structure but bursting with vitality, it's the ultimate novel in Brooks' sense: you can only surrender to it and hope that meaning emerges somehow. 

However, Ulysses also challenges Brooks' narrative: the book resists consumption - few people finish it, and it's almost unreadable in a conventional sense. Furthermore, texts don't yield up meaning if you put enough effort and faith in. They reveal - if they're any good - multiple meanings, both simultaneously and when you re-read them. The words stay the same but you change: meaning isn't in the book, it's produced with the book. Ulysses is the ultimate test of this, but even the glossiest, dumbest book in the airport concession should seem different (better, worse, or a host of ways) if you should ever go back to it. Though that's the last thing their authors want. If you accept that plot resolution is all that matters, you'll buy another one, rather than have another, more critical, go at the same one. (Actually, that's too harsh: like Brooks, I agree that there's nothing wrong with 'reading for the plot' - but there's always more). 

Anyway, enjoy Bloom's Day. Then see what effect all this has on your Andy McNabs and Jeremy Clarkson's. 

I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy.

Well, today is Bloom's Day, the annual celebration of James Joyce, named after his character Leopold Bloom of Ulysses fame. If you're in Dublin, as a couple of my readers are, you should be tracing the route he took today, from toilet to pub. I'm expecting to hear from Zoot Horn today, as he's Wolverhampton's - and thus the world's - premier Joyce expert.

Here's the opening line:

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

But it isn't nearly as evocative as the opening of Finnegans (or Finnegan's) Wake:

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

Sorry students (and my boss)

I should have been marking essays today, and just couldn't face it. So I ran away to Manchester for a day of culture. First up - the Manchester Art Gallery, which has a stunning pre-Raphaelite collection and a lot of other good paintings too. I was particularly pleased to get an eyeball level view of Ford Madox Brown's Work, a multilayered, slightly satirical work which featured in a very good Victorian literature lecture to which I went recently. I nicked the image from the wonderful Victorian Web

Whilst there, I had coffee with my lawyer, which made me feel very sophisticated. Actually, however, Jo is the long-suffering wife of Cynical Ben (yes, readers, he's taken), for whom I was officially Least Worst Best Man - there were three of us. She also returned my Map Twats flask, which I'd left at their abode on a previous walking trip: a joyful reunion. 

After that, skip a couple of blocks and you get to the John Rylands Library, an incredible mock-Gothic reading room stuffed with the finest collection of texts you'll ever see, from Egyptian papyri to early Gospels to Caxton, a Shakespeare First Folio and first Sonnets, a Gutenberg book and a first edition of Joyce's Ulysses, of which I've now seen three of the 1000 copies printed - the one for sale was €40,000. The core of the collection was the Spencer family's library - Diana's family gave up reading in the 19th century and sold the lot. Seriously though, if you like books, or architecture, or mad Victorian schemes for public improvement, the Rylands is amazing. (Both the Art Gallery and the Library are free, by the way).

Lunch in Chinatown, then home having only purchased two books: E. H. Gombrich's A Little History of the World which is utterly charming and you should all buy a copy, and a comparative book on different poetic forms which you may not appreciate so much.