31 May 2004
Imaginary world
There's a girl in a poem who weaves sunlight in her hair, standing on the highest pavement of the stair. It's a poem that creates an entire world.
There's a story that does the same where a man turns into a beetle.
In L'écume des jours, by the neglected Boris Vian, flowers are the cure for a flower growing inside Chloé's chest … but they are too expensive and she dies, and the mouse stops shining the sunlight tiles, philosophy draws great crowds and they can't affpord a good wedding so the verger runs after them calling them names as the service end.
Vian also wrote a book about a black man in the southern United Sates who could pass for white, pretended it was autobiographical and he was just the translator. It was the only way he dcould get it published in France. He called it J'irai cracher sur vos tombes (I will spit on your graves).
L'étranger by Albert Camus doesn't so much create an imaginary world as show that the real workld, the one we touch and feel and recognise, is utterly alien to the outsider.
Alienation is central to The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath – the bell jar is the conditionof islotatiopn she lives under. Alienation is perhaps the tragedy of Mary Shelley's monster, created in Frankenstein.
Sometimes we cannot stand to see our monsters. Sometimes they are us. Is that a reminder of The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde?
Do novelists have a knack for alienation, for bringing the unseen to life? Are novelists more than just a camera, as Christopher Isherwood suggested? Or is the goal the precision of Henry James' A Portrait of a Lady?
When it comes to precision, of course, poetry cannot be beaten. In my head is a remarkable world, conjured in just a few words, by the poet R S Thomas in his poem about history called Digest. We are at the airport and we see the VIPs getting on and off the stationary aircraft.
I imagine the Queen, Chirac, Madonna, the Pope, David Beckham, Cher - all living on the plane. Every so often they come down the air bridge for the cameras and kiss the tarmac ...
... in this imaginary world ...
... called Labyrinth.
