I found Michael’s foray into the Swedish detective genre entertaining, and
particularly liked his rheumy-eyed, old string-puller with a taste for
Persian classics. But from then on his account becomes unrecognizable. I
wouldn’t quarrel – who would? – with his first proposition (‘And yet,
cultural establishments exist’) but with the way he goes on to describe
them: ‘like social classes....like the morale of sick institutions’. Once
these analogies are accepted – and, as Chris Hamilton Emery’s note suggests,
we all tend to think the establishment isn’t us – then ‘the outsider’
becomes the untainted figure whose perception is being suppressed and
‘silenced, if it can’t be dimmed’. Here we have the "mainstream" as a
tottering Arab dictatorship.
The imagined ‘response to the outsider-( "but you don't understand, if
only you could meet... you would soon see... etc etc")...manifests the
effective though invisible self-defence of the establishment.’ Hardly that
effective: such feeble pleading wouldn’t really be the manner of any
establishment that, as Mark argues, ‘holds most of the power’. I think by
this stage we’ve moved into Fantasyland - a fantasy which flatters the
integrity of the writer by assuming the lack of it among others writers
perceived to be more centrally placed.
Having been described on this list, without any apparent malice, as an
‘insider’ by someone whom I’d consider just as much an insider – or an
outsider – as myself, I’m inclined to agree with Chris’s sense of the
indeterminacy and relativity of the term. At what point does somebody cease
to be an outsider? When they are published by a bigger press? When they
receive reviews from newspapers? When they write for the newspapers? When
they have an institutional teaching post? When they start writing reviews of
their nephew’s translations from the Persian?
Best,
Jamie
----- Original Message -----
From: "[log in to unmask]" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, January 13, 2012 11:58 AM
Subject: Re: Chris Hamilton Emery on the elusive nature of a “poetry
establishment”
A familiar chapter in any Bildungsroman, when the hero begins to pierce the
outer layers of the establishment only to to find its centre constantly
shrinking and moving away, - to find that no-one including of course
himself is ever part of what once (from outside) seemed so monolithic and
solid. We chase it down, and after many Proustian penetrations eventually
reduce it to (Stieg Larsson-style) a single mild, old and terminally-ill
gentleman who views us through milky ice-blue eyes and murmurs that, these
days, he restricts himself to a few lines of Sir David Minnay's exquisite
translations from the Ancient Persian, but even so, this is really only
because Davie is a grand-nephew...
And yet, cultural establishments exist (it is better not to think only of
poetry); they are much better exemplified by the Institution and by mass
structures than by the supposed individuals concerned: e.g. in this case
schools, colleges, newspapers, radio programmes, prizes, societies,
diplomatic exchanges, tourism hotspots... They exist and their patterns
persist, like social classes, in spite of all the individuals who decry
social class or prefer never to mention it. They persist like the morale of
sick institutions, exemplified by no single employee yet hugely resistant to
transformation. The outsider's view, as so often, is the perception that
must be silenced if it can't be dimmed. And the response to the
outsider -( "but you don't understand, if only you could meet... you would
soon see... etc etc")- itself manifests the effective though invisible
self-defence of the establishment.
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