Bookclub #1: "The Collector" by John Fowles

[MissyO]

So hows everybody going on this one? I'm well over half way through, and am absolutely loving it. Great pick! Now lets start chatting.

[MSFixR]

I just starting the second section. Are you sure you want to start discussing the book when not all the club members have any where near finished it?

[Jocasta]

I'm only on about page 70 so if there are going to be spoilers then I'm out... see you later.

[Plastic Flute]

Dam Ill get the book today.

[Moshe..]

It's a nice book. And easy to read don't worry. We only just survived a seriously traumatic earthquake in england by the way! I haven’t had a chance to re-read yet. I’ll do some skimming now. THe collector was published and set in 1963. We need some context. 1963 is quite an exciting time.

ACcording to philip larkin:

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

Miranda is 20 (how old is fred clegg again? – about 26?). Anyway miranda is a little kid. She's still very childlike. Very innocent. She was born in 1943 (which is only six years older than my mum –-I’m the youngest in the family so basically have really really old parents who can actually remember the '60s). 1943 is a good time to be born. She’ll be 26 at woodstock. The wordsworth cliche sounds nice:

"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!—"

When she’s twenty, 1963, by far the most famous movie of the sixties is released - bande à part. And everyone in france dances the madison.

A year later, godard defines 'the generation of marx and coca cola'. Button down frocks!

and london starts catching up the year after that. 'the dazzle of the madness of london today'

she’ll be just 23 when ungaro launches his first ready to wear in paris.

And get her hair done up like marianne faithful, who is a total icon in london. Amazingly classic bowl-cut fringe-work.

The saddest thing about the novel is the fact that we already know from our vantage that she’ll be far too short to pull off an ungaro cocktail dress. Miranda’s 5.4. (Clegg is 6 ft). Quintessentially English (but so is clegg is in his own way). A blonde, she wears “her hair in a long pigtail. It was very pale, silky, like burnet cocoons” (how much fred loves his entomological analogies!). She's from a moderately-dysfunctional suburban bourgeoisie family (while fred is a suburban proletariat). She's out of a catholic boarding school, so Fowles must be referring to wycombe abbey by ladymont http://www.wycombeabbey.com/ (england's a small country, there aren't that many schools). Fred went to a grammer school? Anyway wycombe has made her slightly snobby - boarding makes people snobby, but you grow out of it eventually. They're on the cusp of the revolution of popular culture, the sixties revolution - the ascendancy of 'yob-art', which now rules supreme. And it's a somewhat ambiguous position. The sixties was the democratisation of culture in england, when the proleteriat finally took power. From balenciaga to the beatles - but.. will this constitute progress? This is one of fowles' main questions.

Miranda is an art student. She's studying at the slade (which is the most famous art school in england) http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/slade09/acStaff/index.php It looks like a really cool place. She's doing the BA in fine art http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/slade09/ugStud/index.php It's a four year course. And I think she's on her second year in '63.

Fred Clegg is an adminstrative clerk working in local government. His main hobby is insect collecting http://entomology.unl.edu/tmh/ent115...collecting.htm It all seems harmless fun.. until he wins the lottery.

[MSFixR]

Missy, you should have put a spoiler warning in the title although Moshe didn't give critical plot points away. The background info for us non-Brits is appreciated; thank you Moshe. I don't know if it was intentional, I assume it was, but Moshe hinted at the main crux of the story, class differences, which Fowles states quite plainly about half way through the first part.

[Jocasta]

1963 is quite an exciting time.

ACcording to philip larkin:
Quote:
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three

Yes, a good year and the Larkin quote is perfect for me or more appropriately for my parents (although I do have 2 older sisters, so maybe not).

A lot of the references remind me of my childhood, which makes it fun.

Fred's narration style is at times irritating but it fits the character; it's not fluid and engaging, which points to his.... spoilerish...
lack of social interaction and awkwardness?
highlight spoiler.

[Moshe..]

The best way to understand clegg's mind is to carefully study these websites (i hope this isn't too much spoilerfication):
http://www.insectcompany.com/howto/b...-setting.shtml
http://entomology.unl.edu/tmh/ent115...collecting.htm

When working with your collection, be sure to follow these instructions precisely and routinely. Improperly pinned insects in your collection will be discounted. The rationale and main goal in developing and using proper procedures in pinning insects is to effectively expose and display critical details of insect structure -- the taxonomic characters which are used by insect classification experts (taxonomists) to key and identify insects.

[MissyO]

Oh la-di-da. When have we ever done things correctly in here????

True, we probably should leave it a bit. But whatever you guys want. I just adore the book and want to start chatting as soon as I can.

[MissyO]

Originally Posted by Moshe..

The saddest thing about the novel is the fact that we already know from our vantage that she’ll be far too short to pull off an ungaro cocktail dress. Miranda’s 5.4.

Come now, Moshe, lets be optimistic. Is it not possible that she is the one in a million who can pull it off at her height?

[Ophelia]

I read the first page. I skimmed through all your posts. I am clueless. After one page, I am reminded of Lolita.

[Moshe..]

And nabokov was a butterfly collector too. That's not his best book by a long way, just a nice first page. The tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

Yeah exactly miranda can forget cocktails in paris. Anyway i think she'd either be into the san fran psychedelic hippyness, or just super modish. She's a really londony person. We don't have cocktail parties in london! We're too street-wise for ungaro. She spends all day covered in paint. It's not very glamorous. And all the london style idols have been totally bow-legged miniature blondes too.

twiggy was THE absolutely classic sixties mod. She was tiny.

I love twiggy style - it just says 'welcome to king's road chelsea'.

And psychedelic can be cool, if you do it right. The show gets amazing as it goes on, it's some stunning milanese boho

These are d&g haight-ashbury style folk dresses after 1:00 min. I don't mind hippy people as long as they remember about showers and flossing.

[MSFixR]

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo... Lee... Ta.

Poetry.

[Moshe..]

Yes definitely! Nabokov: the rolls royce of english prose. But I get slightly sea-sick when I read too much of him. It's like eating foie gras all day. Sometimes you just want baked-beans and a fiat uno! Fiat is so much easier to park. I've never actually parked a rolls royce (or eaten baked beans, in case you think I'm some kind of culinary eccentric!)

For something really similar to 'the collector', it's got to be 'pale fire'. You know that sense of profound subjectivity and lack of self-awareness in clegg, it's just like kinbote.
Pale Fire is a million times better than lolita! It was just a bit too much of a campus novel to catch on with the general public. It's too clever clever.

Speak Memory also wonderful, only it's so densely written!

And Bend Sinister, much preferable to 1985.

[MSFixR]

Baked beans and foie gras - a little of each goes a long way. The Rolls I could tolerate (if I had the money for the insurance and driver.)

[Moshe..]

But nabokov also makes you spend half the time reading a dictionary, I don't know if that's good or bad! It definitely raises my blood-pressure in irritation. I love his politics though. He was so conservative (in a good way). ANd he wrote nixon wonderful letters encouraging him increase the bombing of vietnam.

bbc interview:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/audioin.../nabokovv3.ram

And a typical quote:

What do you think of the so-called "student revolution" of 1968?
Rowdies are never revolutionary, they are always reactionary. It is among the young that the greatest conformists and Philistines are found, e.g., the hippies with their group beards and group protests. Demonstrators at American universities care as little about education as football fans who smash up subway stations in England care about soccer. All belong to the same family of goofy hoodlums--

And this is a classic article (to be printed off and treasured!)

Philistines and Philistinism
Vladimir Nabokov

A philistine is a full-grown person whose interests are of a material and commonplace nature, and whose mentality is formed of the stock ideas and conventional ideals of his or her group and time. I have said "full-grown person" because the child or the adolescent who may look like a small philistine is only a small parrot mimicking the ways of confirmed vulgarians, and it is easier to be a parrot than to be a white heron. "Vulgarian" is more or less synonymous with "philistine": the stress in a vulgarian is not so much on the conventionalism of a philistine as on the vulgarity of some of his conventional notions. I may also use the terms genteel and bourgeois. Genteel implies the lace-curtain refined vulgarity which is worse than simple coarseness. To burp in company may be rude, but to say "excuse me" after a burp is genteel and thus worse than vulgar. The term bourgeois I use following Flaubert, not Marx. Bourgeois in Flaubert's sense is a state of mind, not a state of pocket. A bourgeois is a smug philistine, a dignified vulgarian.

A philistine is not likely to exist in a very primitive society although no doubt rudiments of philistinism may be found even there. We may imagine, for instance, a cannibal who would prefer the human head he eats to be artistically colored, just as the American philistine prefers his oranges to be painted orange, his salmon pink, and his whiskey yellow. But generally speaking philistinism presupposes a certain advanced state of civilization where throughout the ages certain traditions have accumulated in a heap and have started to stink.

Philistinism is international. It is found in all nations and in all classes. An English duke can be as much of a philistine as an American Shriner or a French bureaucrat or a Soviet citizen. The mentality of a Lenin or a Stalin or a Hitler in regard to the arts and the sciences was utterly bourgeois. A laborer or a coal miner can be just as bourgeois as a banker or a housewife or a Hollywood star.

Philistinism implies not only a collection of stock ideas but also the use of set phrases, clichés, banalities expressed in faded words. A true philistine has nothing but these trivial ideas of which he entirely consists. But it should be admitted that all of us have our cliché side; all of us in everyday life often use words not as words but as signs, as coins, as formulas. This does not mean that we are all philistines, but it does mean that we should be careful not to indulge too much in the automatic process of exchanging platitudes. On a hot day every other person will ask you, "Is it warm enough for you?" but that does not necessarily mean that the speaker is a philistine. He may be merely a parrot or a bright foreigner. When a person asks you, "Hullo, how are you?" it is perhaps a sorry cliché to reply, "Fine"; but if you made to him a detailed report of your condition you might pass for a pedant and a bore. It also happens that platitudes are used by people as a kind of disguise or as the shortest cut for avoiding conversation with fools. I have known great scholars and poets and scientists who in the cafeteria sank to the level of the most commonplace give and take.

The character I have in view when I say "smug vulgarian" is, thus, not the part-time philistine, but the total type, the genteel bourgeois, the complete universal product of triteness and mediocrity. He is the conformist, the man who conforms to his group, and he also is typified by something else: he is a pseudo-idealist, he is pseudo-compassionate, he is pseudo-wise. The fraud is the closest ally of the true philistine. All such great words as "Beauty," "Love," "Nature," "Truth," and so on become masks and dupes when the smug vulgarian employs them. In Dead Souls you have heard Chichikov. In Bleak House you have heard Skimpole. You have heard Homais in Madame Bovary. The philistine likes to impress and he likes to be impressed, in consequence of which a world of deception, of mutual cheating, is formed by him and around him.

The philistine, in his passionate urge to conform, to belong, to join, is torn between two longings: to act as everybody does, to admire, to use this or that thing because millions of people do; or else he craves to belong to an exclusive set, to an organization, to a club, to a hotel patronage or an ocean liner community (with the captain in white and wonderful food), and to delight in the knowledge that there is the head of a corporation or a European count sitting next to him. The philistine is often a snob. He is thrilled by riches and rank—"Darling, I've actually talked to a duchess!"

A philistine neither knows nor cares anything about art, including literature—his essential nature is anti-artistic—but he wants information and he is trained to read magazines. He is a faithful reader of the Saturday Evening Post, and when he reads he identifies himself with the characters. If he is a male philistine he will identify himself with the fascinating executive or any other big shot—aloof, single, but a boy and a golfer at heart; or if the reader is a female philistine—a philistinette—she will identify herself with the fascinating strawberry-blonde secretary, a slip of a girl but a mother at heart, who eventually marries the boyish boss. The philistine does not distinguish one writer from another; indeed, he reads little and only what may be useful to him, but he may belong to a book club and choose beautiful, beautiful books, a jumble of Simone de Beauvoir, Dostoevski, Marquand, Somerset Maugham, Dr. Zhivago, and Masters of the Renaissance. He does not much care for pictures, but for the sake of prestige he may hang in his parlor reproductions of Van Gogh's or Whistler's respective mothers, although secretly preferring Norman Rockwell.

In his love for the useful, for the material goods of life, he becomes an easy victim of the advertisement business. Ads may be very good ads—some of them are very artistic—that is not the point. The point is that they tend to appeal to the philistine's pride in possessing things whether silverware or underwear. I mean the following kind of ad: just come to the family is a radio set or a television set (or a car, or a refrigerator, or table silver—anything will do). It has just come to the family: Mother clasps her hands in dazed delight, the children crowd around all agog; Junior and the dog strain up to the edge of the table where the Idol is enthroned; even Grandma of the beaming wrinkles peeps out somewhere in the background; and somewhat apart, his thumbs gleefully inserted in the armpits of his waistcoat, stands triumphant Dad or Pop, the Proud Donor.

Small boys and girls in ads are invariably freckled, and the smaller fry have front teeth missing. I have nothing against freckles (in fact I find them very becoming in live creatures) and quite possibly a special survey might reveal that the majority of small American-born Americans are freckled, or else perhaps another survey might reveal that all successful executives and handsome housewives had been freckled in their childhood. I repeat, I have really nothing against freckles as such. But I do think there is considerable philistinism involved in the use made of them by advertisers and other agencies. I am told that when an unfreckled, or only slightly freckled, little boy actor has to appear on the screen in television, an artificial set of freckles is applied to the middle of his face. Twenty-two freckles is the minimum: eight freckles over each cheekbone and six on the saddle of the pert nose. In the comics, freckles look like a case of bad rash. In one series of comics they appear as tiny circles. But although the good cute little boys of the ads are blond or redhaired, with freckles, the handsome young men of the ads are generally dark haired and always have thick dark eyebrows. The evolution is from Scotch to Celtic.

The rich philistinism emanating from advertisements is due not to their exaggerating (or inventing) the glory of this or that serviceable article but to suggesting that the acme of human happiness is purchasable and that its purchase somehow ennobles the purchaser. Of course, the world they create is pretty harmless in itself because everybody knows that it is made up by the seller with the understanding that the buyer will join in the make-believe. The amusing part is not that it is a world where nothing spiritual remains except the ecstatic smiles of people serving or eating celestial cereals, or a world where the game of the senses is played according to bourgeois rules, but that it is a kind of satellite shadow world in the actual existence of which neither sellers nor buyers really believe in their heart of hearts—especially in this wise quiet country.

Russians have, or had, a special name for smug philistinism—poshlust. Poshlism is not only the obviously trashy but mainly the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive. To apply the deadly label of poshlism to something is not only an aesthetic judgment but also a moral indictment. The genuine, the guileless, the good is never poshlust. It is possible to maintain that a simple, uncivilized man is seldom if ever a poshlust since poshlism presupposes the veneer of civilization. A peasant has to become a townsman in order to become vulgar. A painted necktie has to hide the honest Adam's apple in order to produce poshlism.

It is possible that the term itself has been so nicely devised by Russians because of the cult of simplicity and good taste in old Russia. The Russia of today, a country of moral imbeciles, of smiling slaves and poker-faced bullies, has stopped noticing poshlism because Soviet Russia is so full of its special brand, a blend of despotism and pseudo-culture; but in the old days a Gogol, a Tolstoy, a Chekhov in quest of the simplicity of truth easily distinguished the vulgar side of things as well as the trashy systems of pseudo-thought. But poshlists are found everywhere, in every country, in this country as well as in Europe—in fact poshlism is more common in Europe than here, despite our American ads

[Jocasta]

I feel I should have read The Tempest.

[MSFixR]

War and Peace, unabridged