A - Me &; 'Manley &; I'
By Jack Cade
- 1749 reads
I should start by proclaiming that, for the purposes of this essay,
it needs to be an accepted fact that I have written a novel of around
eighty thousand words called Manley &; I. It is very much necessary
to proclaim as such, since this is not something easy to accept. I
myself find it very unlikely that I have written this novel, since I
can clearly remember, before I began writing it around fourteen months
ago, intending to write a very short series of humorous anecdotes about
myself and my friends. Judging by the text that now litters my
notebooks and hard drive, what I remember of my intentions does not in
any way account for what Manley &; I is. In fact, I only know what
it is not because I know what I intended to write, but because I can
remember what I have written. I can remember the instance of writing,
and I can remember reading it now and then too. Considering the product
of my writing as I currently look at it, I can only conclude that I
have written a scrapbook novel - a heavy block of prose with a
continuous narrative made up of many assembled parts. I cannot call it
a diary anymore, since the order of events in Manley &; I do not
completely match the order or events in my life as I remember them. One
is pretty much separate from the other, even if they have strong
similarities.
What am I to do with Manley &; I? If I am to trust Roland Barthes
when he says that "the author enters into his own death" at the same
time as "writing begins," surely that means I don't know my novel as
well as I think I might, even having lived with it, and for it, for
over a year. As the author, I am dead, and can have no opinion. Perhaps
then, it has qualities that are hidden to me, and as such I might apply
the philosophical principle of charity to the text, that being: if
there is a way to interpret an argument, or in this case a text, in a
way that makes it stronger, I should do so. If I am to, for a moment,
distrust Barthes and resurrect myself as the author, then I would
interpret Manley &; I as a very weak text. It is a young man's
self-indulgent and untrustworthy scrapbook novel of events in and
around Waveney Terrace, on the campus of the University of East Anglia,
from September 2001 to September 2002. It does make attempts to explore
the reality of the young man's situation, but mostly consists of jokes
and character sketches. Clearly, Manley &; I can only benefit from a
generous reinterpretation.
But then "the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of
the Author." If Barthes is right about this too, then I have a dilemma.
I am the author of Manley &; I. Must I, or that part of me, die
before the reader can be born, before I can reinterpret the text? Or
can it be merely forgotten? Or perhaps I can simultaneously recognise
both points of view? To begin with, I consider this example:
DO NOT STEP ON
ON THE GRASS
The text was written as "Do not step on on the grass." It's an
illusion that takes advantage of the reader's expectation of language.
We have seen the phrase 'Do not step on the grass' before. Thus, in the
crucial stage between image and music, we obliterate one of the 'on's
in order to create our understanding of the text. But once I have
explained, as I did in the first sentence of this paragraph, that the
text was written as "Do not step on on the grass," can we ever again
interpret it as 'Do not step on the grass' without forgetting - without
'killing' the author? Similarly, since I know the processes involved in
the creation of Manley &; I, is it actually impossible for me to
become a reader and reinterpret it?
The answer lies in Shelley's Ozymandias, and, in particular, the words
on the pedestal: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my
works, ye mighty, and despair!" This is more like it. Key to the effect
of the entire poem (at least, my interpretation of it,) is the reader's
ability to simultaneously recognise that the intentions of the author
of those words (Ozymandias, presuming the sculptor wrote what he was
told to write, word for word, without reinterpreting,) are different to
the way they may now be interpreted. Ozymandias meant for the reader to
look out beyond his statue and see that the king's work far exceeds
anything the reader has accomplished. They are to despair because they
can never hope to achieve what Ozy has. But the author is literally
dead, and he has lost command of his words. The reader now looks beyond
the "vast and trunkless legs of stone" to find only that "the lone and
level sands stretch far away." His despair is that whatever greatness
Ozymandias had achieved has now been wiped out, and by implication so
will everything that he, the reader, achieves. The words on the
pedestal no longer represent the voice of Ozymandias, nor of Shelley,
nor of the antique traveller. They are carved out of nothingness by a
voice that only belongs to the text.
So it is entirely possible to simultaneously recognise two
interpretations of a text, one of which is the author's. I must for the
moment suppose that when Barthes spells 'Author' with a capital 'A', he
refers to the myth of the Author as omnipotent being, not the author
(with a small 'a',) who has a separate relationship with the text. That
is to give a generous interpretation of Barthes' argument, I feel, and
one that may not hold up when considered in relation to his essay as a
whole. For the purposes of this essay, however, let it be assumed that
when I refer to the 'Author,' I mean the omnipotent Author and that
when I refer to the 'author', I mean the part of a person that was
involved with the text at the instance of its emergence.
With Ozymandias as my example, I may now allow a new relationship
between myself and Manley &; I to develop alongside that of author
and text. Unlike Umberto Eco, who writes similarly of his changing
relationship with his novels, I can't rely on any clever reader other
than myself, so I must be especially clever. I do have the advantage,
however, of having been a particularly careless author, which Eco is
most certainly not. In developing my new relationship, perhaps I can
give a more generous and complete interpretation of the text than I do
as the blunt and unimaginative author who has to trust his rusty memory
for knowledge the text.
From reading the first handful of chapters - Hi Ho, Hot Gin, Wolfson
Close Flat 10, Norwich Rock, Helen's a Whore's Name, Tight Nightmare -
I can identify the characters on the front cover, and guess that the
background photographs are of the novel's setting - the Waveney Terrace
digs in the University of East Anglia. The pink fellow is Manley, the
yellow is Hen, who I heavily suspect is the 'I' of the title, since
these two are introduced first and since the narrative concerns itself
with Hen's activities. The top three faces are, left to right, demon
fiend Helen, vamp countess Si?n and mercenary tigress Lianne. The faces
at the base of the picture are ninja witch Besse and goblin princess
Mary. In the text, they are called the five harpies; a prime example of
the comic convention which occurs most often in Manley &; I, that of
transposition of identities. The impermeance of identity is
demonstrated by the girls being dressed up linguistically as
monstrosities, and their behaviour being likened to that of animals.
This device represents the boys' unfamiliarity with girls, their fear
of them and fascination with them, mirroring mankind's relationship
with the unknown. Hen, in particular, is equally ill at ease with the
idea of growing up, saying to Manley in Hi Ho, "After this, it's
heating bills, bad shirts, hair gel, house insurance, a subscription to
the tabloids and - God - dating lines. So let's enjoy this while we
can, even if one of us should end up living under a bridge after the
first year." These are young men on the cusp of manhood, living with a
bleak vision of the future. This is emphasised to a greater extent in
later chapters, particularly Rubber covered brake unloaded castors, a
fantasy based on Hen's experience of summer employment, in which one of
the characters bitterly remarks that office work is little better than
living in Stalinist Russia. More comically, in House Hunting, Hen is
mortified at the idea of his parents moving out of his house, which he
laments to as he would a lost love, while in Snowball, Hen relates the
fate of Max Sebald (a writer who died in a car crash,) to his own
situation as an aspiring writer and a driver in training.
The theme of materialism also comes through strongly in the initial
chapters. Hen's identity manifests itself in a raincoat and Russian hat
that he insists on wearing throughout the day. The members of their
corridor are introduced partly by a list of possessions they keep in
their rooms - the Buddhist keeps plants, the bronzed weight lifter has
his bike, the 'lad's lad' has a mass of electronic entertainment
systems and every member has a sound system of sorts. There is little
space in the digs, and the students are said to live like
'demi-dervishes' so these items represent what is absolutely vital to
their lifestyle. Materialism also seems to be the solution to the
fear-of-the-future theme of the novel. Hen and, to a lesser extent,
Manley, forget the concerns of their possible future by indulging in
artifacts of the present - chiefly in food, alcohol and sex.
What does the author have to say about this? Well, to be honest, I was
only relating my weeks on campus in a humorous way. I am Hen, and all
the rest are friends I made. I chose to call the girls 'harpies'
because I thought it would be fun to insult them a little. Of course,
this is of no interest to any reader who doesn't know them personally.
I honestly don't know of any particular concerns, because as far as I
remember, I had a great time, and meant to make this apparent in my
account. I mentioned the food and alcohol because they interested me,
and the list of possessions because they seemed like colourful traits.
A fair enough explanation, but in this case, hardly satisfying. The
author seems out of touch with the text, while the reader engages with
it on a deeper and more thorough level.
Now! Another example. I've noticed that Manley and Hen appear in
almost every scene in Manley &; I. Thinking back to the original
writing process, this can be explained by the fact that I, as Hen, have
to have been somewhere in order to recall it in anecdote, and Manley,
as my close friend, is often there too. There is no reason to suppose
that any other explanation is necessary, as the result follows directly
from the cause. As the author, I have a complete, satisfying
explanation that none-the-less is boring and tight-fisted. As the
author, I say that Manley and Hen are the key characters of Manley
&; I through a coincidence, a freak occurrence at the instant of the
text coming into being.
Deliberately casting this explanation aside, however, what is it about
Manley and Hen that makes them necessary elements of each chapter? The
first and most obvious clue is in the first chapter, Hi Ho, where the
two are described respectively, as Shaw's reasonable man alongside his
unreasonable man. It quickly becomes apparent that the two respond to
the same situation in the way these roles demand, and the outcome often
supposes which attitude is more successful in dealing with a particular
relationship or dilemma. Their separate approaches to the issue of (and
cultural obsession with,) materialism reveal Manley as the more
satisfied of the two. His twin loves are coffee and film. Film itself
is a medium which transcends the conflict between materialism and
spiritualism; Manley must buy and possess the actual objects (videos
tapes and DVD's,) while his appreciation of them rests on the spiritual
experience. In coffee too he finds both a ritual and a pursuit. The
regularity of his consumption of coffee, and his desire to experiment
with flavours balances easily obtained satisfaction with personal
drive. Manley is both content and motivated, and thus exists at ease
with his environment.
Hen, on the other hand, pursues distant, often diametrically opposed
objectives, and fulfils neither. He wishes to halt the process of
growing up, the process by which he will become absorbed into society,
but simultaneously desires acceptance as an adult, a symbol for which
is the driving license he almost secretly pines for. He attempts to
carve out of air and light a space for himself with his absurd image,
but defends himself against accusations of being overly outlandish or
confrontational. He covets friendship with Besse, but refuses to cast
aside those aspects of his behaviour that alienate him to her. He is
insatiable and uncomfortable. Manley, meanwhile, gets on fine with
Besse; she even, at one point, confides in him. His relationship with
the rest of the harpies is also less strained, but, crucially, he
doesn't get the girl, and it is almost certainly Hen's unreasonable
nature that wins him Si?n. In line with Shaw's statement, it is also
Hen who drives the narrative, who forces progress throughout the novel.
Notably, however, Si?n is almost a sole victory in a bed of failures
and near-failures though, most substantially the near destruction of
Hen's relationship with Lianne, which I refer to in more detail later
in the essay.
By the end of the novel, it is Hen who has resolved to become more like
Manley, rather than the other way round. He has passed his driving test
and is coming round to accepting his fate, and even as he stares out
across the enduring image of mindless consumerism - the shopping mall -
he tells Manley, "I've think I've learnt that if you do harbour any
desire to get a finger on the old life business, then you've got to
meet it all half way."
It seems, therefore, that I must infer that the reasonable man is the
inevitable role of any person, but that one must arrive at that
position naturally, through the experience of passing through the final
stage of childhood. As the unreasonable man learns to become
reasonable, the narrative grinds to a halt. Through maturity and
experience, real progress becomes impossible.
Now I am in a position to see the effect of discarding my authorial
'omniscience.' To me, as the reader, 'Manley &; I' has become, in
part, a series of experimental situations that judge the successes of
the reasonable and the unreasonable man in a modern competitive and
materialistic environment. One of these experiments, in the chapter Hot
Gin, leads on to the question of which role the Author fits into, and
the effect this has on him. Hen's disgruntled attitude to 'writing' is
an absurd mixture of ambition and individualism. He thoroughly dislikes
the idea of adding to an established institution, telling Manley, "If I
were a writer, now, then I'd be like the samurai of the Sengoku period,
when they were all ronin, dying out. Too many of them, you see, all
freelance, or in little schools, many with followers and admirers
purporting their master writer to be the best - everyone has what they
want already where writers are concerned."
The identity he consequently chooses to define himself with is that of
a 'scrap poet.' Yet poets are consumed almost anonymously in today's
society - a relatively unpopular medium, overcrowded with beginners and
read mostly in the form of the poetry collection, where the author is
often only a name at the top of the page. His definition of 'scrap
poet', meanwhile, appears to define nothing more specific than the
average poet:
"What scrap poets do, you see, is collect scrap - the er discarded, the
throw-offs of other people's concerns, and they assemble it into
something that is suddenly, actually of concern to someone or
other."
This mirrors Hen's attitude towards education, and the institution of
University; he has distaste for following where others have been, yet
finds these paths the most rewarding. Again summing up their roles, Hen
is revealed as a character who wishes to avoid his fate whilst taking
its bounty, as opposed to Manley, who is resigned to his fate and its
conditions. More importantly, this chapter undermines the authority of
the author, specifically the author of Manley &; I, who Hen
effectively claims is himself. He opens the conversation by saying to
Manley, "I'm going to write a scrapbook novel about us two, Manley. A
hackjob, and I'll be pretty Suetonian about it - an untrustworthy
account - a crafty fox of a book."
If Hen is both himself and responsible for the authorial voice, can we
trust anything the text tells us? I can examine his claim further by
investigating the voice. Its point in time is constantly changing; it
sometimes speaks in the past tense, but usually from the end of the day
in which the chapter is set, so that it has no knowledge of what will
happen in the ensuing chapters. Often, it speaks in the present tense,
as if directly observing. This would appear to bolster Hen's claim that
the voice is his own, yet there is something missing. The voice has
little insight into Hen, treating him as an alien entity, referring to
him from the third person, and only able to hint at his machinations
from external observation. Ironically, considering the myth of the
author as an omniscient being, the voice seems to know less than any
one of the characters, although at times it will deliver information
from some unknown source. In Crowded Room, we are told that, "when they
arrived back, Hen found one of the literary events of the year pinned
on his noticeboard."
How can the voice objectively judge what is a 'one of literary event of
the year'? Is this voice merely me, as the Author? But then how could I
not read more deeply into Hen when I base him on me? Then there's the
matter of his absurd position as a writer - he ridicules the whole
institution , and simultaneously, perhaps in revenge, the authorial
voice ridicules him, observing that, "the skirt of Hen's dressing gown
leaps about in the wind, exposing his shins, knees and lower thighs to
the bunnies."
The dignity and authority of the author falls away completely under
this many-pronged attack, and we are left with an authorial voice that
comes from nowhere, just like the voice speaking from Ozymandias'
pedestal, and allows itself a subjective opinion. Manley &; I has
slain the Author (with a capital 'A') from within.
Incidentally, tying those two points together and speaking as Hen
before he was twice reinterpreted (by the acts of writing Manley &;
I and then this essay,) I can say that I am more enthused by the idea
of completing poetry collections than individual poems, those strange
shapes submitted to competitions alongside Jacquelyn Z. de Bray and
William Oxford Tate. This impulse of mine is relevant to the question
of the survival of the Author. It's been over two decades since Barthes
wrote The Death of the Author and while, in theory, his proposal is
widely accepted, in practice the Author still holds considerable sway.
Just as teenagers idolise popstars despite it being well known that
they're the puppets of a music-manufacturing engine, so too does the
Author remain as an icon in literature, a marketable face to front
"that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away."
We cannot kill the Author - he's too romantic a figure - and my planned
contribution to keeping him alive is the front cover to a poetry
collection, which is a picture of me in my garden, on a frosty morning,
looking gothic. I'm wearing cargo pants, and a pair of 'barely black'
tights that have been pulled up to just under my nipples. The legs have
been cut off - I'm wearing them on my arms, with holes cut for the
fingers. Aside from a pair of boots, that's all I'm visibly wearing. I
have sooty blackness under my eyes and on my cheekbones from the
make-up I wore the previous night - I was the Crow for a Halloween
party. We used a child's face-painting kit. My hair is long and thick
with spray-on black hair dye that washes out. The fringe, and some idle
strands are, for some reason, coloured the pale pink of red faded to
white.
I find it suitable that a deathly image such as this should hang over
each of the poems in my collection as a kind of spectre, reminding the
reader that while the Author may be theoretically dead, he is very much
called upon to shape the experience of reading, to give it some earthly
chain. Yet, for the purposes of continuing this essay, I must suspend
his life again, or else remember that Hen is only a recurring name in a
collection of personal anecdotes. To do so would ruin the picture I am
building of Hen - as the character who has effectively destroyed the
Author by professing himself to be the authorial voice, even as that
voice, or absence of voice, makes a fool out of him. The author has
been reduced to an opinion, in conflict with the characters.
Naturally, as the author of Manley &; I, it is not in my interests
to discover this. As the reader, however, I'm lapping it up. There are
several more key points in the novel where the author is undermined,
and others where the nature of interpretation dwelt on to comic
effect.
In the chapter entitled Coat angel of death, the authorial voice
backtracks considerably over the issue of Manley's drunkenness. This is
not the only occasion it does so. More substantially, in Hammer horror,
the text examines the consequences of interpretation within the
narrative gulf, when Hen impersonates Lianne over an internet messenger
program. The internet itself proves to be a great example of the gulf
between author and reader, as correspondents communicate through the
medium of written word, similar to the way they might in a letter, but
with all the immediacy of phonecall. When a missive is read not as the
writer intended it to be read, it is called a misinterpretation, but
what if the writer intended to deceive? Surely, he is utilising the
obscure quality of the text to the extent that his sole aim is the very
effect that we would call invalid, if we believed in the omniscient
Author? Hammer horror explores this idea to comic effect. Since Hen
does not look or sound like Lianne, his impersonation relies entirely
on his correspondent interpreting the text as Lianne's voice. When
another character, Joe Hell, intends to reveal the deception by writing
something so boldly nonsensical it can surely only be read as a joke ,
Hen's correspondent instead interprets it as a mental imbalance on
Lianne's part! Even more revealingly, when Hen rounds off the
conversation with, "Take care," he intends it as a simple goodbye - but
his correspondent finds the phrase so out of ordinary for Lianne's
voice that she takes it to mean a serious problem, and immediately
rings Lianne on her mobile phone. The correspondent is revealed to be
Lianne's mother, and Hen is duly unearthed and punished by Lianne's
threat of never speaking to him again. Symbolically, the author is
chastised once his real intentions have been found out. Meanwhile, an
entirely new Lianne was created by her mother's interpretation of Hen's
words, one that was perhaps formed partly from Hen's desire to change
her in the way only an omnipotent Author could . Hen, however, does not
know how his correspondent receives this voice until he sees the
reaction; ergo, he is not in command of the voice. The voice cannot be
traced back to Hen, to Lianne or to the authorial voice of Manley &;
I. She is another example of a voice from that belongs only to the
text, and which only a model reader can recognise. As the author, Hen
has no way of comprehending it.
A final word from the author of Manley &; I: I had absolutely no
idea the text deals with these issues before I became a reader. Once
again, I can only say that the chapter Hammer horror was intended as a
slightly altered account of a terrible incident. Writing it up was
almost an act of coming to terms with my own actions, a Conradesque
distancing myself from the memory with the borders of fiction. The
authorial backtracking - well, I can't even remember that. I think I
was trying to imitate the film Withnail &; I at the time, which,
incidentally, is where the idea for the title came from. It had nothing
to do with the undermining of the figure of the Author. Indeed, why
would I wish to undermine my own position? If I were to contribute to
the destruction of my own existence, then I'd never get any recognition
for writing Manley &; I.
Having argued that the author on his own is something of an unreliable
idiot, what am I to do with my new 'model reader' interpretation? I
certainly haven't finished with him, as the examples above are only the
beginnings of a reinterpretation of the novel, a project so vast and
ongoing that I feel certain the text will soon fulfil Barthes' criteria
of having lost its origin and become a 'volume of indeterminations.' At
such a stage, its origins and relationship with its author are an
unhelpful burden on the text. The author, however, is not finished yet.
With my newly found intimate knowledge of the text, I can return to it
as the author and rework it, enrich it, and ultimately pursue a more
active relationship with Manley &; I.
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