Theatre | Critical Dahl-ings

Last week I found myself in The Cambridge Theatre in London, watching Tim Minchin’s musical adaptation of Matilda, by Roald Dahl. On one hand, this confession should make it obvious that here at Silkworms Ink, a cutting-edge literary e-press, we lack the nous to track down any cultural events more significant or trailblazing than a children’s musical. On the other hand, I don't think there were actually any children present, other than onstage; the audience was rammed full of childless twenty-to-thirty-year-old adults, all of whom presumably went home afterwards and told their childless twenty-to-thirty-year-old friends that it was a show grown-ups and kids could enjoy alike.

            Anyway, I did enjoy it; it was a Tim Minchin musical, with the characters singing spoofy Tim Minchin songs in Tim Minchin’s favourite registers, making sly Tim Minchin polemic digs and being, in general, about as memorable as any of Tim Minchin's tunes. But it did remind me of the rather serious structural problem with Dahl’s novel; it’s two very different stories, tenuously connected, one of which sprouts out of the other and swallows it whole just as it's running out of steam. The second, eventually dominant story is a rousing, dark schoolyard tale, in which Carrie and Sheba Hart team up to defeat a villainous 1920s portrayal of a lesbian. The first story is the heartrending tragedy of a middle-class girl born into a working-class family, until eventually their inept criminality results in their fleeing to join their innumerable comrades in southern Spain, allowing her to return (hurrah!) to her own kind.

            Facile, yes, but both of the interlinked stories in the novel articulate two distinct sides to Dahl’s personality and his writings; the revolt of Matilda and her classmates against Miss Trunchbull is a characteristically dark and funny, rather wonderfully skewed fairytale in which the righteous young heroine actually gets to defeat the monster after the rescuer/woodsman figure (Miss Honey’s father, heroically named ‘Magnus’) has already been tragically swallowed up by it. Matilda’s psychic powers come out of nowhere halfway through the novel and never seem to relate thematically to her intelligence or her love of books; rather, they rise from her impotent fury at adult injustice, her innate sense of fairness and strength evolving into the power required to overcome the villain. And Trunchbull is, indeed, a fine villain, perhaps Dahl’s best; he could create a grotesque character without blinking, but like so many great monsters, the hulking headmistress is as pitiable as she is terrifying, an insecure obsessive who, similar to his Twits and Witches, regards children as an undefined species of louse - memorably visualised, too, by Quentin Blake as a buttoned-up mass of brawn just barely keeping its balance on two pin-slender legs.

            Matilda’s parents, however, have no such complexity; they’re bingo-playing, used-car-selling scumbag stereotypes who loathe their own daughter and her love of books mainly in order to give Dahl an excuse to bitch about television, a subject he thoroughly enjoys. Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, I seem to remember, contains a room devoted to television for no other reason than to horribly punish Mike Teavee, a small boy who, as you may have guessed, watches too much TV. Afterwards, the Oompa Loompas, serving as Greek chorus, caution parents to throw away their own sets. A brief reminder:

The most important thing we've learned,
So far as children are concerned,
Is never, NEVER, NEVER let
Them near your television set --
Or better still, just don't install
The idiotic thing at all.
In almost every house we've been,
We've watched them gaping at the screen.
They loll and slop and lounge about,
And stare until their eyes pop out.
(Last week in someone's place we saw
A dozen eyeballs on the floor.)
They sit and stare and stare and sit
Until they're hypnotised by it,
Until they're absolutely drunk
With all that shocking ghastly junk.
IT ROTS THE SENSE IN THE HEAD!
IT KILLS IMAGINATION DEAD!
IT CLOGS AND CLUTTERS UP THE MIND!
IT MAKES A CHILD SO DULL AND BLIND
HE CAN NO LONGER UNDERSTAND
A FANTASY, A FAIRYLAND!
HIS BRAIN BECOMES AS SOFT AS CHEESE!
HIS POWERS OF THINKING RUST AND FREEZE!
HE CANNOT THINK -- HE ONLY SEES!
'All right!' you'll cry. 'All right!' you'll say,
'But if we take the set away,
What shall we do to entertain
Our darling children? Please explain!'
We'll answer this by asking you,
'What used the darling ones to do?
'How used they keep themselves contented
Before this monster was invented?'
Have you forgotten? Don't you know?
We'll say it very loud and slow:
THEY ... USED ... TO ... READ! They'd READ and READ,
AND READ and READ, and then proceed
To READ some more. Great Scott! Gadzooks!
One half their lives was reading books!

There’s a triple irony in there; one, in advocating that an escape from reality via literature is somehow intrinsically of higher merit than an escape from reality via television, two, that it was written around the time of Nigel Kneale’s first glorious genre pieces and Dahl’s own Twilight-Zone-esque anthology series ‘Way Out’ (now available online; it's really rather good), and three, that a spiel about the medium of film rotting the brain was written by the man who inflicted You Only Live Twice upon the brains of adults and children everywhere. 

You can really tell this was written by someone passionate about creating intellectually challenging artforms.

I can’t bring myself to like this posturing, sneering Dahl any more than I like Boris Johnson for his godawful poetry collection The Perils Of The Pushy Parents, which steals openly from him;

Loving parents, learn from me.

If your children crave TV

Tell them, OK, what the hell

You can watch it for a spell ...

IF YOU READ A BOOK AS WELL.

SON, I'M TALKING IN CAPITALS TO INFORM YOU THAT YOU MUST COME TO ACCEPT THE INNATE SUPERIORITY OF ONE ARTISTIC MEDIUM OVER ANOTHER INSTEAD OF ANALYSING QUALITY ON A CASE-BY-CASE BASIS. IT MUST BE TRUE. I READ IT IN A BOOK.

There will always be an argument, which is to me at least part-convincing, that Dahl was a nasty man. It is, in fact, almost obtuse to point out that a highly-refined nastiness of spirit is what is so often utterly glorious and appealing to children and adults in his work, from the giants that reach into kids’ bedroom windows and gobble them up to the macabre turns of his Switch-Bitch stories. 

What’s a little sad, though, is that when we’re young we read his books as a sensational dive into a land of horrors and marvellous weirdness; we don’t pay attention to the crude attempts at messages (I’m not sure Charlie And The Chocolate Factory scared me off watching television as much as my quaking fear of changing the channel and accidentally encountering Gene Wilder in the film version), we don’t really take in the uncomfortable fact that the Oompa Loompas were originally gurning, simpleton African pygmies, and we probably don’t find ourselves sitting through a children’s musical about an extraordinary genius being held back by a society that encourages mediocrity, thinking, ‘Hang on, this is the exact plot of The Fountainhead’. Maybe, despite the popular cliché, Roald Dahl’s books demand to be read and loved while you're young and before you start to panic about his politics.

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He's...he's counting your money! THAT'S WHAT HE'S COUNTING! BLOODSUCKER! EAT HIM! EAAAAAT HIM!

Harker evidently meant to try the matter, for he had ready his great Kukri knife and made a fierce and sudden cut at him. The blow was a powerful one. Only the diabolical quickness of the Count's leap back saved him. A second less and the trenchant blade had shorn through his coat, making a wide gap whence a bundle of bank notes and a stream of gold fell out.


Dracula, as we all know, bleeds cash. Or he sort of does, anyway. More likely, he just happens to have a lot of cash stored away in his coat, and the "stream" of gold is just a poorly chosen word. But it's enough to have caused some academic discussion about the Count's true symbolic nature, perhaps because it seems a little strange that a murderous hypnotic beast with the power to wipe out entire ships and control lesser mortals should carry his money around on him. That under-recognised scene fascinates me, because the idea that the Count is a capitalist metaphor really muddles the idea that he's an STD metaphor - so, uh, Dracula drinks the blood of young women in order to get to the men, and then converts the blood into money through a system of uh, digestion...anyway, it's all a little illogical.


But it also reminds us of the fact that literature has almost never been in love with capitalism. In one corner, we have figures as diverse as Barabbas to Herbert Pocket, with his vague philosophy of the free market economy as one in which you "look about you...you see your opening. And you go in, and you swoop upon it, and you make your capital, and there you are!" Less comical are the 'cannibals' in Lu Xun's early 20th century short story, 'A Diary of A Madman', in which the titular narrator believes wrongly (and rightly) that cannibalism is an accepted part of society that every single human being participates in. More recently we've had the unpleasant Masters of the Universe and Patrick Bateman, that latter-day materialistic demon. And after the fumbling wannabes and the fiendish figureheads come the merely greedy and selfish, who are legion. Gone are the days of the hero acquiring a great treasure as part of his happy ending. And who do we have on the other side? Ayn Rand.


It's a curious situation, because much as we'd all like to deny it, latter-day literary publishing is as capitalist as it gets; the selling of the unreal as something important. Writing, which truly believes in its own importance but also in the importance of its being spread freely, dislikes the taste of being sold. (Obviously I'm not talking about the book that's written with a 'target market' in mind, as well as sold with one. This is an appalling book, and that woman who wrote the novel about teenage angels romancing each other should be ashamed of yourself) I will always remember reading, many, many moons ago when I was back in school, romantic novelist Michael Legat's The Nuts and Bolts of Writing, in which he hit upon the love-hate relationship an author has with libraries. As lovers of literature, we adore books. As thoughtful and fair-minded people, as well as readers who'd always like to get something for nothing, we adore the idea of a vault of free books. But as business-people - or business-property, perhaps - every book of ours that's in a library is another one that makes us almost nothing. Not a big deal to one of the titans (they can just shrug), but to a struggling author trying to shift a few hundred copies...it's a bit of a blow.


This is, of course, not to say anything against libraries. It's an issue with writers, and how we have to deal with the paradox of our own place in a capitalist society. The truly big-shots can get away with handing out free stories or even free e-books as a sort of meaninglessly charitable gesture towards their fans who've already bought their unreal texts for 'real' currency. It's very nice, in the sense that they don't have to do that. In the sense that, sure, Bill Gates and his wife don't have to give away their money. But they can afford to. And, at the same time, putting your work out there for free as a first-time novelist can (sadly) imply that you're desperate and not very good rather than an artistic rebel who refuses to play by the system's dictats. Because there is (again, sadly) too much writing out there, and too little of it has unreal worth.


And, I guess, you could always set up a site where you try to publish e-chapbooks from awesome writers and add enough daily blatherings of your own that weary Internet travellers might actually head in your direction. But there's a corollary to Nietszche's statement that "where three men gather, a fourth must die," and it goes - "where three men gather, they'll form a corporation, dominate the market, and the fourth will go unemployed." Let's gaze down our spectacles at McSweeney's here, and the statement Dave Egger's now best-selling, industry-award-winning, 'Oh, look, aren't we outsiders'-insiders publishing house makes about itself,


McSweeney’s began in 1998 as a literary journal, edited by Dave Eggers, that published only works rejected by other magazines. But after the first issue, the journal began to publish pieces primarily written with McSweeney’s in mind. Since then, McSweeney’s has attracted works from some of the finest writers in the country, including blah big impressive names...


That is perhaps the strangest example of a company admitting very proudly to having abandoned their original vision and gone full commercial-savvy that I've ever read. But let me allay your fears - here at Silkworms, we're entirely immune to the paradoxical tug of capitalism; we can remain outsiders as publishers, as well as writers. For one thing, we're not big or well-known or important or swimming in yes-men/cocaine/groupies enough to truly sell out. What we do need to do for the future of this site is figure out a way to survive...without profiting too much.


Jon Ware


Fiction Editor, Ponderer Of Life's Great Dark Whispering Mysteries
And You Can Find Out These Mysteries Yourself For Less $$$$!!!! Simply Email fiction@silkwormsink.com To Discover The Secrets Those Fat Cats Don't Want You To Know!!!


P.S. It occurred to me while writing this article that the only thing the vast majority of the Coen Brothers' films, so apparently, self-consciously disparate, have in common, is the following: a theft or attempted theft which becomes irrelevant or forgotten by the end of the movie - usually because the characters' greed has led them to their own destruction. They're anti-materialist fables.  True Grit made $110 million at the box office.

P.P.S. I believe it was on the pilot episode of poetry editor Phil Brown's favourite new show, 10 O'Clock Live, that comedian Jimmy Carr made an interesting slip - as the other hosts took lazy swipes at bankers, he said that 'all they (the wide variety of organisations whose unwise decisions and personal greed led, in a large part, to the financial crisis of recent years) were doing was what everyone does - trying to make as much money as possible.' I don't think that's quite true, or fair on 'everyone'. But do we live in a society that has encouraged this attitude in all of us extremely heavily for a long time now, and which even now has only turned against that vague group known as 'bankers'? Do we need to make a stand against greed as a whole, rather than just against greed that specifically makes us poorer? Yup, sure, certainly, oui, Premiership footballers, of course.