David Bowie, Enid Blyton and the sun machine (2023) by Nicholas Royle
Reading notes on Pages 60-76
I have been slow off the mark in reading David Bowie, Enid Blyton and the sun machine (2023) by Nicholas Royle (b. 1957). In my defense, last fall I reread Royle's The Uncanny again, and read his 2020 book about Helene Cixous twice in ten days.
David Bowie, Enid Blyton and the sun machine is a delight, and motivated me to read Five on a Treasure Island yesterday and today. By “read” I mean “listen to the audiobook.” Delightful time.
My reading notes on pages 1-60 can be found here.
Reading notes on pages 60-76 below:
Reading Notebook: David Bowie, Enid Blyton and the sun machine
Part II: A sense of the ending
The undermind (second lecture)
[Play the second movement of Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins in D minor]
[....] music is about memory and the dissolution of place.
[....] when you read a novel, it can chime with something in your own life. ‘Chime’ is an old word. In the sixteenth century it was spelled ‘cheyme’ or ‘cheime’.
[....] one of the ways David Bowie helped me, or it’s one of the affinities I’ve always felt with him. The sheer embarrassment of the suburbs.
[....] Past time I began talking about the idea of a sun machine as a way of thinking about a book. It’s a poetic and musical thing. A book that stays with you, a book that you love, or once loved, is a sun machine.
[....] Enid Blyton (1897– 1968).... Famous Five books…. twenty- two of them altogether, the last being a collection of short stories…. start with the first in the series, Five on a Treasure Island. Reading a ‘Five book’ can change your sense of the world.
[....] That’s the subject of this lecture series– it’s the story of what happened to me when, after a gap of more than fifty years, I started re- reading or re- hearing the Famous Five books. It’s where I stumbled into the realisation that a book can be a sun machine.
[....] there are two major and obvious risks in talking about Blyton…. first concerns seriousness.
[....] incorrigible individuals turn their attention to an author whose oeuvre they might quietly and admiringly have been reading over the decades and only now at the end of their careers feel at liberty to write about. It might be Shakespeare, for example, or Dostoevsky. It might be Jane Austen, or Toni Morrison. It’s not going to be Enid Blyton.
[....] It was a question of how, as severee, I was to proceed. What to do with ‘the fire in me now’, as Samuel Beckett calls it in Krapp’s Last Tape?
[....] Blyton’s books lack intellectual complexity. There is nothing philosophically interesting about them. Blyton just isn’t a serious writer.
[....] Not serious? That now seems to me a miserably patronising judgement. Blyton began (like most serious writers) as a poet and after receiving (like most poets) many rejections, some of her early poetry was published in a special Poetry and Song issue of Teacher’s World, alongside such notable contemporaries as Rudyard Kipling and Walter de la Mare. Her poetry, however, did not develop. In 1932 she wrote a 90,000- word adult novel called The Caravan Goes On, but she couldn’t secure a publisher. Her novel- writing for adults ended there.
[....] My concern in these lectures is to try to do justice to this writing. Which also means– I must just add– trying to do justice to the comical dimensions of her work.
[....] second set of risks has to do with how her work is open to charges of– to name a cluster of unpleasantries– ethnocentrism, xenophobia, class- prejudice, racism, sexism, misogyny and sadism.
[....] they have also led to modified editions.
[....] Candour is indispensable, but I believe that obliquity can also be effective.
[....] Everything in Blyton is first and foremost about the sentient body. The amazing pleasure of being alive.
[....] Being able to walk or run or climb. To see and hear. To eat and sleep. To lie in bed so excited at the fact that it’s the holidays you clench your legs in joy.
[....] My concern is with this quickness– with how Blyton provides a kind of matrix for thinking about the joy of books, the excitement of reading or listening to a story, the mysteries of being a child and its relation to what David Bowie calls– in the lovely instrumental at the start of Low– ‘speed of life’.
[....] They are all such sunny stories. ‘Sunny stories’ was a sort of signature phrase for Blyton.
[....] Each Famous Five book enacts a heliotropic logic, turning itself and its readers sunward. It’s all about sunny days, about the synonymity or sunny- nymity of sunny days as holidays.
[....] Still the sun shines. Not just the summer, but the Easter holidays are also beautifully sunny. Even an October half-term – in Five on a Hike Together (Book 10), for example – takes place in ‘warm sunshine’. Consistently, in book after book, the first day of the holidays is sunny as if by decree, like the ‘sunny pleasure-dome’ in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’.
[....] if every Famous Five begins and ends in the sun, it has shadowy innards.
[On a visit to Iceland]So bright I wondered if I was in my right mind.
“….that’s the volcanoes. The eruptions at the moment make the sun look much bigger.”
[....] so dark and otherworldly.
[....] a Famous Five book…. starts off sunny – even improbably, overwhelmingly sunny – but it’s all about going into the dark. With or without the moon. With or without stars. With or without torches. It’s about going down into the caves and tunnels. Into the subterranean and submarine passageways of the night. There’s no sun machine without going into the dark. An immeasurable, unplumbable, thrilling, vertiginous darkness.
[....] Undermind: that is the word that Enid Blyton proposes in response to the professor of psychology in New Zealand who writes to her in the 1950s asking where she gets her ideas from.
[....] She doesn’t say: My books come from my unconscious. ‘Unconscious’ is not in her lexicon. As always, she is on the side of the child, in the quick, ever-verging-on-supernatural world of childhood.
[....] In ‘The Leaning Tower’, a talk given in Brighton in 1940, Woolf argues for the importance of ‘unconsciousness’ in Dickens and, by extension, for writers in general.
[....] Unconsciousness is the state in which, she says, ‘the under-mind works at top speed while the upper-mind drowses’.
[....] Undermind involves a separate Blytonic domain, with landscapes and seascapes of its own. A singular topography, with other kinds of maps. It is more suggestive of a location than ‘unconscious’ or ‘subconscious’. As in undercliff or underpass or underground.
[....] duplicitous in a way that would have greatly irritated Freud: it is at once under a mind and a mind that is under.
[....] connotations of the underhand. The underside. The eeriness of undertaking and undercurrents. And one perhaps also hears ‘undermined’.
[....] Undermind makes ‘understanding’ different.
[....] Blyton… goes somewhere underneath that is not her.
[....] You can feel her feel her way in the sense of surprise that flickers and slides through the syntax from one clause to the next.
[....] something audible. Best heard in the dark.
[....] To listen to Bowie was to switch off from Blyton. But then one night, listening to ‘Memory of a Free Festival’, something happened. I think it must have had to do with the odd mix of innocent and demonic in that song. I started thinking about the idea that a sun machine could be a book.
[....] Beckenham…. It was just a coincidence, this Blyton–Bowie–Beckenham thing.
[....] there’s no art or song without coincidence. That’s life – exposed to chance, the quick, the speed, the paths it lights.
[Among Bowie’s list of 100 favorite books] Colin Wilson’s The Outsider
[....] In terms of a recognised canon of writers, Blyton is so much of an outsider that, for many people, she seems literally unmentionable…. a taboo against taking her seriously.
[....] in other respects, too, she is an outsider – in terms of the intensity and relentlessness of her identification with children, for example, or, in a different and perhaps subtler vein, her imaginative attachment to the life and culture of ‘travellers’.
her autobiography, The Story of My Life (1952)....
[....] it’s a life-story written for children. Bildungsroman as arrested development.
[....] totally open and forthcoming and totally closed and cryptic at the same time.
[Daughter's] ‘infantile paralysis’ ….was a common idiom for the polio virus.
[....] It doesn’t belong to the tone and register of the rest of the book.
[....] consider certain resemblances between these creatures of Beckenham
[....] in both [Blyton and Bowie]…. we encounter a spirit of generosity and imaginative otherness, a sense of desire as danger, an attraction to what is queer, fantastical and surreal, an affirmation of non-belonging, and also a kind of irony and humour – all of which collectively embody, perhaps, the nearest thing to an idea of Englishness, or being ‘English’, that is meaningful and even worth celebrating.
[....] They are extollers of the undermind and the possibilities of transformation
[....] voracious readers…. obsessive about their work.
[....] fascination with Englishness itself…. mimics…. share a love of music, circus and theatricality, acting and disguise, cross-dressing and class-crossing. They are both bisexual. They have a profound attraction to the otherworldly, whether in the form of fairies and magic or in the form of loving the alien. They are both, if I can put it like this, education system escape artists.
[....] David Bowie album, which featured a variety of strikingly childlike songs that I’m tempted to describe as…. Blytonic Demonic or Demonic Blytonic [my emphasis JR]
[....] the abyss of memory loss and anguishing disorientation. The odd couple, alone together, in a Beckenham of the undermind.
[....] Both were, in their different ways, stardust creatures.
[....] undermind is not safe…. You only get there by letting go, submitting to the unforeseeable, sinking in quicksand, flying into the blue, loosening the ropes, veering out from the shore in the dark. Wandering off into the labyrinth of the underworld. ‘Undermind’ is not Bowie’s word. But Blyton’s undermind corresponds, it seems to me, with Bowie’s interest in losing identity, giving way to otherness, waiting for the gift of sound and vision; his fascination with dreams and alien, magical, otherworldly spaces; his affirmations of madness or being (to recall an image from the early song ‘All the Madmen’) one of ‘the sane’ who choose to be ‘underground’. [My emphasis JR]
[....] The undermind is not about the ‘I’ or ego. It’s more about voluntary severance of self
[....] Comedy is a key in all of this.
[....] It’s a place of strange resemblances, doubles and imperfect copies, mimicry and disguise. It’s unnerving. It’s a way of disappearing
[....] evocations of that Blytonic Demonic or Demonic Blytonic I just mentioned. Both songs are notably zany and childlike.
[Play David Bowie, ‘There is a Happy Land’ and ‘When I’m Five’]
Jay
26 January 2024
