An ecstasy of action: telepathy and the uncanny in Blyton and Bowie

Reading notes series: David Bowie, Enid Blyton and the sun machine (2023) by Nicholas Royle

Posts on earlier chapters: here and here.

Part II: A sense of the ending

Telepathy (third lecture)

[....]  I’d like to start off today, if I may, with the melancholy, rather hypnotic Bowie song I referred to last time, ‘All the Madmen’, from the 1970 album The Man Who Sold the World. As I said, it’s a song about the undermind.

[....]  ouvre le chien…. open the dog!

[Play David Bowie, ‘All the Madmen’]

[....]  telepathy in the context of works of fiction is, in many respects, normality itself…. readers take it for granted.

[....]  A work of fiction is a work of mind- reading: the book takes you inside the thoughts and feelings of another or others– inside the world of a narrator, inside the minds and bodies of characters, and so on.

[....]  Readers are mind- readers in turn. This is a role that they accept without really thinking about it. Readers are in fact quietly rather pleased to be telepathic. It’s an opportunity to indulge in magical thinking. They take it in their stride. Like breathing clear, country air. The most natural thing in the world. We all do this.

[....]  Naturalisation involves the artificial.

[....]  A sun machine is the kind of book that invites reflection on…. nature become fantastical.

[....]  A sun machine takes us down into the undermind.

[....]  the simple sun machine, a completely new and strange machine that is coming out under her fingers.

[....]  Let’s quickly recap on how a Famous Five goes. There’s Julian, Dick, George and Anne, plus the dog. And they have an adventure. You pick a number, any volume in the series, and it’s the same. The children are never at school, it’s always the holidays: escaping, breaking out from some educational institution, getting away, is Blyton’s starting point. The Five are always going somewhere– of the twenty- one full- length Famous Five books, eight have ‘go’ in the title. And they are always going to somewhere or else they are in it, on it or into it. All these little prepositions– ‘to’, ‘in’, ‘on’, ‘into’– give us a sense of happening, an intimation of the Famous Five books as, in Nicholas Tucker’s striking phrase, an ‘ecstasy of action’. Five Go Adventuring Again, Five Go to Smuggler’s Top, Five Go Off in a Caravan, Five Go to Demon Rocks…

[....]  She hands herself over to the typewriter. The manual of the undermind.

[....]  it comes out as it comes. There’s no going back. It’s an adventure in typing.

[....]  overlooked.

[....]  In the end, whether critical or creative, writing is a matter of how you get your telephone fitted.

[....]  So much oddity has already been smuggled into the opening pages of Five on a Treasure Island. Two adult brothers– with offspring of the same age– who do not see or communicate with each other. A married couple who– as soon as all the children are back from boarding school– cannot wait to send them away again for several weeks. A man who warmly recommends staying in a place by the sea which he’s visited but simply cannot remember. And then the 11- year- old girl none of them has ever met. The strange cousin who is simply referred to as unknown.

[....]  There are plenty of suggestions of the otherworldly, but we are always brought back to the everyday.

[....]  Children who can be themselves, children who have got to win, and as if grin every time: ‘We can be us!’

‘Uncanny’

 [....]  recalls the rather quirky Lawrence of ‘The Man Who Loved Islands’, which itself sounds, at least in its opening paragraphs, oddly like a story by Enid Blyton.

[....]  Children don’t find things uncanny. Adults find things uncanny because they are not children.

[....]  This is what Sigmund Freud noted about da Vinci: ‘the great Leonardo remained like a child for the whole of his life… Even as an adult he continued to play, and this was […] why he often appeared uncanny and incomprehensible to his contemporaries.’ In extraordinarily creative but singularly different ways, Enid Blyton and David Bowie were also childlike. They were both, we might say, radically childminded.

[....]  An uncanny feeling only lasts a moment. It’s a surprise. Like a shiver. A brief subsidence. You might think: Whoa! that’s strange! You experience a fleeting sense that something out of this world is occurring. But this quickly goes away. You may feel you’ve tapped into something, but it doesn’t last.

[....]  You don’t really want to hold on to an uncanny feeling…. that way madness lies. There’s the flickering realisation that madness is not a separate building. It’s not offshore. There are always tunnels. Surprise doors. A sudden cavernousness… Like déjà vu. It’s a funny feeling. It can even be titillating. But you wouldn’t want to hold on to it. Like déjà vu. It’s a funny feeling. It can even be titillating. But you wouldn’t want to hold on to it. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist that.)

[....]  Child abduction occurs in a literal sense in Five Get Into Trouble (Book 8), Five Have Plenty of Fun….

[....]  really it is underway from the start, and all along, in every book, at the level of the narrative voice. We don’t mind. It’s fine. Kidnap us, please! What an adventure!

[....]  This is about reading or listening to a book as an experience of mind- reading.

[....]  detective fiction…. is an integral dimension of Blyton’s storytelling.

[....]  It’s more the fleet- foot of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking- Glass, two of the books that, by Blyton’s own account, had a particularly strong influence on her.

[....]  what the Famous Five narrator does that the Alice narrator avoids, is to draw readers into the ‘feel’ and ‘atmosphere’ of telepathic collusion. ‘Feel’ and ‘atmosphere’ are the words Blyton uses and puts in quotes when, in The Story of My Life, she is reminiscing about the power of another book that deeply affected her as a child, George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin…. are like a party or group outing that includes the reader. The Alice books work quite differently.

[....]  Blyton isn’t really concerned with the not- child, except from the child’s perspective. There is none of Carroll’s somewhat sinisterly manicured dual- focus and telephoto- lens work.

[....]  sun machine of a Famous Five book entails a shared experience of listening, responding, having a sentient body that enables you to hear, laugh, eat, see the island in the sunlit sea and scramble up cliffs, and scowl and smile and say things that parrot or anticipate the Five themselves. You feel the same. You think the same. The narrator has tuned telepathically into her characters: she is recording their thoughts and feelings. But it’s also how the narrator involves the reader: you are participating in this telepathy.

[....]  verbs to collude and delude are both versions of the ludic– they come from the Latin lūdere, to play.

[....]  You feel the same. You think the same. Blyton never says these words in the Famous Five books. But they operate as guiding threads that run through every chapter and paragraph.

[....]  Blyton weaves her braid differently. She generally avoids the explicitness of ‘he thought’ or ‘she felt’ or their many variations (‘ she decided’, ‘he wondered’ and so on).

[....]  her telepathic tapestry is hung on dialogue and woven in adjectives and adverbs.

[....]  telepathy shared between character, narrator and reader, or just between narrator and reader.

[....]  Adverbs…. strung through the sentences like creepers in the forest…. suddenly, ….certainly, possibly, obviously, quickly, awfully, tremendously, properly, eagerly, urgently, generously, steadily, absurdly, unexpectedly, safely, brightly…. she plies and supplies the ‘ly’ of her surname across the page. This preponderance of -ly is a lovely feather in her cap, a fleur-de-lys in her forest

[....]  The Famous Five books are about being right. In Bowie’s words, doing it right. Taking and making things right.

[....]  Outside the Famous Five books Blyton speaks of the importance of Christianity, but the books themselves don’t conform to this. No one prays. There’s not a lot of churchgoing. There’s right and wrong, but Jesus and God and the immortality of heaven and hell are not relevant. It’s more about childhood as a Wordsworthian state of immortality, and about making order out of the chaos of the undermind.

[....]  everything is clear in the end. Good and bad. Right and wrong.

[....]  the energy of what I have been calling the Blytonic Demonic is always in play.

[....]  telepathic dog…. a sentient being without words.

[....]  I suspect that readers are disinclined to acknowledge telepathy in literature because it interferes with their ‘imaginative immersion’ in what they consider comfortable and familiar. To attend to the workings of telepathy is to engage with turbulent and uncertain dimensions of reading. It requires readers to register that what appears natural is not natural, like thinking about anthropogenic climate change and mass extinction.

[....]  structure of feeling

Telepathy

[N.B. More on Royle and telepathy here and here].

[....]  Novelists and playwrights and poets were deeply attuned to its literary ramifications. It is a significant and explicit focus in the writings of Rider Haggard, Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, Franz Kafka, August Strindberg and many others.

[....]  part due to the magisterial influence of Henry James, what came to dominate the language of literary criticism was a quite different term: omniscience. The omniscient author and the omniscient narrator.

[....]  We have an omniscient narrator in the driving seat. But there is no driving seat.

[....]  omniscience shores up a religious fantasy – the author or narrator as God-figure, and the reader or critic as a quietly gratifying reflection of that.

[....]  talking the ‘omniscient narrator’ talk, is disingenuous and falsifying. It is also a way of trying to close off the undermind.

[....]  Blyton…. gives us the workings and surprises of the undermind – not the know-all, calculating aloofness of the omniscient.

 [....]  Timmy is no God. He is just a god backwards, a form of comic divinity in reverse thrust.

[....]  Omniscience is also a male fantasy. It’s patriarchal and phallogocentric. Whereas Telepathy is about sharing and mixing it up. It’s about mastery relinquished. Telepathy is all over the place, strictly non-binary, easy come, easy go. Telepathy says: ‘Come and join, not sure what’s happening here but – we’re gonna have a party!’ Telepathy offers us a different opening, a different way of thinking about literature.

[....]  ‘Free Indirect Discourse’

[....]  fake-scientific fabrications of precision. These terms lose all sense of purpose and reality at the telepathic picnic.

[....]  desiccated old vocabulary of pseudo-control, all that deadly godlike self-importance and scientistic earnestness.

[....]  Blyton’s…. conception of a good book, as she describes it in her autobiography: it’s ‘like a very good dinner, sound and satisfying’. Let’s not forget that ‘Enid’ is ‘dine’ backwards.

[....]  with a few words about telepathy and David Bowie.

[....]  Ouvre le chien, for example: doesn’t that resonate in what I was saying about child-and-dog realism? There is an Open sesame! in the voice, giving admission to the past and what is hidden.

[....]  Bowie’s narratives tend to be fragmentary, cut up, left in suspense: he likes to, as he says, ‘fracture everything’

[....]  forms are, in any case, consistently unstable and shifting.

[....]  ‘Starman’

[....]  ‘There’s a starman waiting in the sky’: this is third-person narrative. The singer knows what this starman feels and thinks – it’s telepathic narration as I’ve been sketching it here – but then the moment in the telling when the singer picks on you is a telepathic clinch of another kind: so you heard him too.

[....]  his songs are in the tradition of the Romantic sublime,

[....]  in the wildness of the wind, and that is a fact, flying over mountains.

[....]  their highest fidelity is to interruption: they are songs of losing, cutting, veering off, becoming other, like birds, like dolphins, like aliens.

[....]  expectancy and presentiment trail the listener.

[....]  Bowie’s music is about letting go of identity, admitting oddity, becoming stranger.

[....]  about flight and becoming other – an unfinished becoming, veering and disappearing. David Bowie is, if I may put it like this, more a major veerer than a Major Tom.

[....]  desire to share in music (the sun machine)

[....]  Bowie is chameleonic disappearance.

[....]  ‘Sunday’, the first track on the album Heathen (2002)…. ‘ambient menace’ (in Nicholas Pegg’s fine phrase)

[....]  saxophone is David Bowie’s telepathic instrument par excellence.

[....]  sound-machine of longing and loss, bliss and fusion, notes on a wing, voice’s makeover. This ghostly saxophonic force, lingering and longing after the voice, is perhaps most uncanny on the final album Blackstar – on ‘’Tis a Pity She Was a Whore’, ‘Dollar Days’ and ‘I Can’t Give Everything Away’ in particular.

[....]  ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat’ from the 19 album Mingus Ah Um, with John Handy and Booker Ervin on tenor saxophone, Horace Parlan on piano, Dannie Richmond on drums and Mingus on bass.

[....]  elegy for the saxophonist Lester Young.

[....]  saxophone is perhaps the instrument that most hearkens towards the thought that mourning is originary (‘I mourn therefore I am’): there is a sort of telepathic communing in the very sounding.

[Play Charles Mingus, ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat’]

Jay

8 February 2024