Margaret Atwood / In Thrall to the Casually Colloquial Tone

 

Margaret Atwood

In Thrall to the Casually Colloquial Tone

Tony McKibbin

January 16, 2018

Let us provocatively generalise from the particular and suggest that Margaret Atwood is not always an especially curious writer; that in stories like Bluebeard’s Egg (1986) and the essays Negotiating with the Dead (2002), and on occasion in the earlier, often superb, short story collection, Dancing Girls, she asserts a position rather than suggests one. Yet even if someone might agree with our claims, why should a writer convey curiosity in their work, and is this just not one of many modes of expression available? To help locate what we mean by curiosity here we can offer as examples writers who very clearly seem to possess it, including Doris Lessing, J. M. Coetzee and Bernard Malamud, and in a very different way Borges and Kundera. In the first three examples the emphasis is ethical; in the latter pairing more metaphysical and epistemological. But they are all enquiring writers who often work out of a conundrum that leads to further entanglements. In Coetzee, it might be central character David Lurie’s belief inDisgrace that his pleasures shouldn’t be hampered; better the healthy beast than the neutered creature. In Borges, it might rest on wondering where exactly the I exists for a writer who both walks along the street and also has an abstract called ‘Borges’ who we are reading in his absence, and now after his death.

Blonde / Writing in the Femenine

 

Blonde

Writing in the Feminine

Tony McKibbin

September 3, 2018

Blonde is almost a thousand pages long in the Fourth Estate paperback and an unequivocal account of Marilyn Monroe without quite passing for a biography. It is a work of literature rather than of research, with Joyce Carol Oates saying “I’d hoped to evoke a poetic, spiritual, “inner” truth”, and insists she did not do “considerable research” (Prairie Schooner) It is instead an autobiography of the dead, ghostwritten, with Oates trying to find her way into the mind of Norma Jeane Baker/Marilyn Monroe. It is a work of interiority rather than exteriority and this requires the skills not of the logistical tabulator of life experience, but the novelist who wants to put together the emotional reality of somebody’s life. We would make very poor biographers of our own existence as we so often settle for the approximate over the precise: our childhoods, for example, are a jumble of impressions, of imprecisions, yet they are held together by a consciousness giving them a contiguous place, allowing us to marshal them according to various emotional and psychological needs in the present. Even in therapy, we wouldn’t be expected to remember our past with biographical accuracy; simply to give it a fuller context in relation to the impact events have had on our lives.

Italo Calvino / Inessential Melancholies

Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino

BIOGRAPHY

Inessential Melancholies

Tony McKibbin
29 October 2011

In the first of his Six Memos for the Next Millennium, ‘Lightness’, Italo Calvino says, “from what I have said so far I think the concept of lightness is beginning to take shape. Above all I hope to have shown that there is such a thing as a lightness of thoughtfulness, just as we all know that there is a lightness of frivolity. In fact, thoughtful lightness, can make frivolity seem dull and heavy.” Calvino wrote this in the mid-eighties; Difficult Loves contains stories published between 1949 and 1958, yet as much as any work by the writer, best known probably for Invisible Cities and If on A Winter’s Night a Traveller, it searches out this lightness of thoughtfulness as it shares with work by Kafka and Robert Walser a triviality so reckless that sometimes we may wonder what exactly the story has been predicated upon. In ‘The Adventure of a Reader’, the story concerns someone trying to read his book whilst attending to the modest charms of a young woman by the sea. ‘The Adventure of a Soldier’ shows a young private making tentative advances towards a bourgeois woman from the provinces, and Calvino reveals far more about the soldier’s own thoughts than creating narrative incident. Equally, in ‘The Adventure of a Traveler’, Federico V. journeys from a northern Italian city to Rome to meet the woman with whom he is in love, but the story concludes at the end of his journey, before he meets the woman he is going to visit.