David Bowie, Enid Blyton and the sun machine (Manchester University Press, 2023) by Nicholas Royle

Reading notes on pages 1-60

By way of introduction:

Nicholas Royle's 2023 book David Bowie, Enid Blyton and the sun machine is a reflection on some 2020-2023 experiences refracted through lenses of exhilaration and extracurricular thinking.*

Chapter one details the impact of the Covid shutdown on Daddy, Mummy, and two very young sons, ages five and eight.

Excerpt:

[Daddy] telling Mummy stuff she knew already. He said that what uncanny has that weird doesn’t have is a feeling of the strangely familiar. He told her that in his lectures he’d encouraged his students to think about the meaning of ‘uncanny’ in terms of creepily uncomfortable recognition. The familiar becoming unfamiliar, but also the unfamiliar itself as spookily already know

*"This has to do with what is outside the system, not part of the programme, not ‘core’ or ‘central’ to one’s educational or to one’s otherwise usual activities. Bowie uses the word in the context of painting, acting and mime, referring to things in his life that remain mysterious."

youtu.be/r-MAIVDj8ME

---

[Daddy, Mummy, and two young sons are stuck at home during Covid lockdown. Daddy decides to take voluntary severance.]

[....] There was no reason why Daddy should prepare any lectures for anyone at all. But that was precisely the appeal.

Part II A sense of the ending

Memory of a free festival (first lecture) 

[....] You are all familiar with trigger and content warnings. I hereby issue as many as you care to imagine. You may think I’m joking, but please note the possibility of being offended, disturbed, reduced to tears or terrified at any time. What did you want to study literature for otherwise? Literature is indissociable from madness.

[....] location is going to be a focal point for our concerns. Among other things, this question: Do people follow people around, or do places follow people?

[....] prosopopoeia…. the rhetorical figure for the ‘voice from beyond the grave’. Literature and prosopopoeia are inseparable bed-fellows. Queer or straight as you wish. Prosopopoeia is an ancient Greek word that literally means ‘giving or making a face or mask’, ‘forming or making a person’.

[....] You can rate your professor, but you can’t rate your own funeral. [Spike] Milligan’s witticisms are resonant in another way: they invite us to think about the idea that literature – whether fiction, poetry or autobiography – is prosopopoeia.

[....] Literature is about the resurrection of the dead.

[....] the way the voice or voices of the dead return. Or keep talking.

[....] condamné.   Note:A condemned man or woman is going to be executed. American English: condemned /kənˈdɛmd/ ...

[....] These lectures are about the love of reading and about that peculiar, slippery thing called literature. They are about what E. M. Forster called, in his remarkable eponymous book,                      aspects of the novel.

[....] relationship between literature and music, the musicality of language, rhythm and refrain, the lyrical and enchanting dimensions of voice and writing.

[....] The title of this lecture series is A Sense of the Ending.

[....] I am at least equally interested in the joy of falling, in the descent or descents of an ending.

[....] Bowie’s preoccupation with the idea that ‘we are the dead’ runs all through his work, right up to Blackstar, the album whose release coincided with his death and which has been too hastily and crudely categorised as ‘death art’.

[....] Bowie was, by his own account, ‘always aware [of] death’ and this gave him a ‘feeling of buoyancy’ that led to a lifetime of ‘colossal, obsessive activity’.

[....] All art of any interest is death art, impelled by the passions of life. When the absurd Russell Harty asked him who or what he worshipped, Bowie said simply: ‘Life. I worship life.’

[....] Bowie’s singularity: he is a singer-thinker not of identity or identifications, but of uncanny resemblances.

[....] Satori: Japanese word for ‘sudden illumination’, ‘sudden awakening’ or simply ‘kick in the eye’.

[....] sun machine is Bowie’s figure of illumination or enlightenment, strangely like – but different from – satori.

[....] This Bowie festival happened, in fact, the same weekend as another free festival, the biggest of all time, namely Woodstock, in upstate New York.

[....] ‘Memory of a Free Festival’ is a song about music as coming, as event. There is a sun machine. And it is coming down. It’s like the planetary collision at the end of Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia, but without the lugubriosity.

[....] Something big is ending – but something new is coming.

[Play David Bowie, ‘Memory of a Free Festival’]

[....] The song is about a sun machine, but it also aspires to be the sun machine that it is about.

[....] “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. [Pater ]” ‘Memory of a Free Festival’ is about the eerie beauty of what Beethoven called hearing in heaven. You know that Beethoven was quite deaf at the end of his life and his last words were ‘I shall hear in heaven.’

[....] attunement to silence will be a recurring focus in these lectures, especially in the context of Bowie’s music.

[....] something demonic about the repetition of the line about the sun machine in the second half of ‘Memory of a Free Festival’.

[....] also a son machine. It’s spelt ‘s-u-n’, but the homophone of ‘s-o-n’ is there to be heard. Some listeners feel a close connection between the second part of the song and the chant in the Beatles’‘Hey Jude’, which came out a year earlier, but Bowie’s song is foreboding in a quite different way. It’s closer to the hypnotic, haunting quality of Pink Floyd’s ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’ 

[....] Bowie’s is about the event, in its emergence.

[....] There’s something delirious in the promise – of a party that is going to happen. In this respect it seems to prefigure a haunting Talking Heads song that appeared about ten years later, called ‘Heaven’– the idea of a song that would be ecstatically shared, at a kind of dream party. A party to come.

[....] ‘Here Comes the Sun’ and ‘Sun King’, on Abbey Road, are also concerned with the idea of the sun coming. I don’t know if this is just coincidental or not.

[....] Bowie, as everyone knows, was a great nicker. He was constantly assimilating and adapting stuff from others. This is what makes him such ‘a sponge for the zeitgeist’.

[....] songs sing to each other, like ghostly birds, over alien acoustic territories, unknowing.

[....] I want to explore the idea of a sun machine as a way of approaching literature. I have in mind Pater’s idea of ‘the condition of music’– that is to say, the experience of voice, the sound effects of language, the musicality of poetry and fiction. This is about the words, but also the pauses and interludes, rhythm and repetition.

[....] What is a sun machine? It’s something at once visual and auditory, even – I’m tempted to suggest – a kind of phantasmagoric synaesthesia

[....] a novel can be a sun machine. I’m not talking about reading on a sun-drenched beach or lounging in a comfy chair on a bright patio

[....] by the time I began teaching, I’d come to see that reading is more or less the most vital thing a person can do. Unfortunately, British governments have long taken a different view of the matter and as a result they have facilitated a major, ongoing disaster. It’s called the education system.

[off piste,   Note: Skiing in back-country unmarked areas.]

[....] digression itself is at the heart of thinking and life. For the upside of the business about trigger or content warnings with which I initiated today’s proceedings has to do with those moments when, in the course of a digression, we discover something of which we had little or no idea. Unanticipated, in a word, and of a perhaps beautiful, transporting, even life-changing kind.

[....] reading a book can be akin to having a sun machine descend on us.

[....] a notion of Bowiesque reading, a passion for reading that has nothing to do with any programme, institution or curriculum, and a good deal to do with chance, experiment and adventure. As you perhaps are aware, David Bowie was very into reading. He was constantly at it. He never went anywhere without books. When he was asked ‘What is your idea of perfect happiness?’, he replied without hesitation: ‘Reading.’ Very Bowiesque.

[....] It’s all about identification or, better perhaps, resemblance. It’s about encountering someone, a narrator or character who reminds you of yourself, or someone you know or would like to know (perhaps even in a biblical sense), or someone you would like to be, and so on, and it’s about encountering a situation or event that reminds you of something you yourself experienced, or something you know someone you know experienced, or something you yourself would like to experience or definitely not like to experience, and so on.

[....] The example is what counts. There’s no strong critical thinking or writing without it.

[....] a Japanese novel I read recently called Sanshirō by Natsume Sōseki.

[....] It’s a novel in which nothing much happens and there are lots of disappointments – it’s all about disappointment – and yet it is a very beautiful, haunting and curiously uplifting book.

[....] What really chimed for me was when the narrator describes Sanshirō’s experience of attending university lectures:

     He found it strangely pleasant that he could not understand the lecture. As he listened, cheek in hand, his senses became dulled, and he began to drift off. This was the very thing, he felt, that made lectures worthwhile.

[....] That somnolent, semi-dreaming, dislocated drifting and submission to incomprehension was what made the whole thing important

[....] A book would be a sun machine. A work of light. Its darkness is created in the penumbra of that light. The book generates, reflects and carries its own sun. In a sense, any and every title of a novel bears a trace of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. There is a sun that rises in a book as well as in the world. It rises and also of course comes down.

[....] The Bible of course works on a pre-Anthropocene basis: generations come and go, but the sun still shines and the earth doesn’t change, it ‘abideth for ever’ .

[....] links between the sun and the father and thus the s-u-n and the s-o-n are to be found throughout human history and still mark many languages today. In French it’s le soleil (masculine), in Spanish el sol, in Italian il sole, and so on. In English we say the sun has got his hat on: if only unconsciously, the sun, in English, is male.

[....] What makes a book a sun machine is in part its capacity to show, to bring to light, the artificial nature of this sun, of how we think of the sun. Every book of fiction invites us to read it for its own sun and therefore its own moon and its own darkness. The moon, after all, is only visible to us thanks to the sun.

[....] One of the wonderful things about the novel Sanshirō is its preoccupation with looking at the sky and especially at clouds.

[....] The sun machine is, if you like, a theory of the love of reading. I’m thinking here in the first instance of what, for the past few centuries, we have called novels, but the sun machine is also a figure for thinking about books in which the distinctions between fiction, poetry, drama and memoir melt.

[....] Falling in love with a book, the book is falling too, it descends on us, it impacts, it lights us up. It invites us to think sun and earth afresh.

[....] To be an author, to put together a sun machine, is about closing your eyes. It’s as much about listening and rhythm as it is about vision. In any case, a book engineers its own special solar character and lighting effects.

[....] books that have the greatest impact are perhaps those that let us appreciate that the sun itself, the sun as we think and talk about it in everyday language, is a fictional thing.

[....] You can’t look at it. As the Victorians said of masturbation, it makes you go blind. It’s the source of life but it burns you up.

[....] the memory of earlier years. That’s the fuel for a sun machine. Memory of childhood, if you are lucky, is like the memory of a free festival. Memory is or can be a free festival. That’s what Bowie’s song gives us to think.

[....] A literary work is a sun machine insofar as it makes the sun other, lets us feel the otherness of the sun.

[....] A sun machine is made of words and the sounds of words. A mad song, as Yeats might say.

[....] As David Bowie liked to say: ‘Let go, or be dragged.’

https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_nGfmB-byu_2jnN9DRnA5G-cwkq1MpzSo4&feature=shared

Jay

13 January 2024