Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition
In Competition No. 2666 you were invited to supply an example of pretentious tosh in the shape of a review of a TV or radio soap opera or any other piece of entertainment aimed at the mass market.
It is tempting with this type of comp to go over the top and points were awarded to those competitors whose tosh, however affected and overblown, had at least the semblance of developing an
argument. Patrick Smith and Adrian Fry were unlucky losers; the winners get £30 each except Brian Murdoch, who nets £35.
I am not I, they are not they, Coronation Street is not Inkerman Street. Coronation Street is, however, an ongoing paradigm, a speculum humanae vitae, whose cobbles incorporate the Heideggerian
necessity of existence. The street qua street is no thoroughfare, it has no beginning and no end, a Ding an sich leading nowhere, but with at its still centre the Rover’s, the bourne to which
all travellers return. Birth, copulation and death revolve around the old gods: Ken, whose very name means ‘knowledge’, an aged Silenus set against the Ewig-Weibliche, Deirdre of the
Sorrows. The all-too-human plotlines are suffused with original sin — bodies remain in the concrete, love-children in others’ cradles, and the commercial proximity of kebabs and
lingerie scarcely needs a Freud to interpret, nor need we speculate why the factory is called Underworld. The populating she-devils would grace a Mystery play! Foucault once remarked…
Brian Murdoch
When, in glossing Hegel’s famous remark that history repeats itself, Marx added ‘the first time as tragedy, the second as farce’, he might have been proleptically describing the
classic series of Carry On films that distinguished British cinema between 1958 and 1978 — the last two decades of consensus politics in the UK. As Professor McCabe has suggested, their
‘deep springs of creativity’ derive from the perilous but socially unifying years of the second world war, imaging a nation which had not yet suffered the divisive impact of
Thatcherism. Moreover, in pursuing the multiple semantic associations of ‘carrying on’ they add to a traditional ribaldry the sophistication of an approach to language that foresees the
postulated ‘flux of signifiers’ found in Barthes and Derrida. Equally, in engaging with material previously treated by Shakespeare, Carlyle and Kipling they erode the cultural Berlin
wall between the ‘high’ and the ‘popular’.
Basil Ransome-Davies
Numerology has heritage: in the arithmancy of the Chaldeans, in the rabbinical tradition of the Qabalah. I am not writing here of the duplication and re-duplication of sums in the incrementally
impoverished sequencing of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? (‘New’ or otherwise), the lineal descendant of Double Your Money: but of the radical indeterminacy of numerical selection
presented in Deal or No Deal. The opening of the red box mimics not only the trappings of political power, but also the ‘mouth’ in a priestly or psychosexual sense, inviting the
voyeuristic to participate in transformational spectacle. The mimicry here of both reproductive and liturgical overtures is what identifies the programme as superior. There may also be a nod to
popular culture, as in Mick Hucknall’s song ‘Open Up The Red Box’ and its reference to ‘An overweight greasy little man with a mouth/ That opens more than now and
again.’
Bill Greenwell
Mother Goose’s Funbook is an opulent repository of tribal myth, arcane religious lore and Freudian/Jungian archetypes. The lecteur is offered, in brief rhymed capsulets, a surrealistic
interrogation of nothing less than suffering humanity: the scourged Polly Flinders, Jack and Jill who replicate in miniature the terrible narrative of The Fall, Humpty-Dumpty fractured beyond
repair in spite of royal patronage by his indecision, Miss Muffet, sexually menaced, the abused infant, Hush-a-bye, primed for destruction in the tree top. In this monograph I shall refer
particularly to the religio-sexual dilemma of Goosey Gander. Torn between ‘upstairs’ (Paradise) and ‘downstairs’ (Hell) and ‘my lady’s chamber’ (female
pudenda) he is obliged to ‘wander’, thus cognate with the Wandering Jew of tradition. The ‘old man’ is liable to divaricate exegesis: he would not (could not?)
‘pray’ (prey?); therefore he is brutally punished for his atheism and impotence, by expulsion and exile. Furthermore…
Gerard Benson
To appreciate the paradoxically complex simplicity of this allegorical conceptualisation, one need only consider its title, which embodies both direction and destination which, by definition, is
terminal. The seeds of what must surely be a journey to oblivion are propagated through a diversity of characters whose sum represents what might be regarded as a single entity reflecting the
multilayered personality facets integral to everyman. Janineic jealousy and Philian ferocity augmented by the idiosyncratic attributes of the entire dramatis personae combine to form an existential
unity symbolising an inseparably synthesised universality. Turning to technical considerations, the association of title tune and script with the ‘estrangement effect’ or, in Brechtian
parlance Verfremdungseffekt, encourages a critical view of what is clearly a representation of reality rather than reality itself. Believable or not, the stentorian echoes of ‘Oi –
Rickay’ will doubtless reverberate in the collective unconscious long after EastEnders eventually ‘goes west’ and ends.
Alan Millard
No. 2669 Take two
You are invited to take one of Shakespeare’s soliloquies (please identify) and recast it in the style of the author of your choice. Verse or prose permitted: 16 lines/150 words max. Please
email entries, where possible, to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 13 October.
Comments