Wider Reading | Great Literary Moments In Microsoft Paint, Volume I

Wider Reading | Fiction | The Unbearable Meaningfulness of Being Overweight (In Fiction)

I mentioned to one of my fellow editors over the weekend that London is a city full of intimidatingly beautiful people. Well, in the summer, it gets worse. All of the models who pass for female inhabitants start wearing astounding dress-things for walks in the park; all of the men slip into white T-shirts that are too small for them, solely for the purpose of oppressing me with the size of their biceps. In London, I feel so ugly I keep thinking a policeman’s going to come up to me and ask me if I have a licence for that face.

Joyce's Bloom.

It was always my plan, this week, to write about ‘wider reading’ by discussing the role of the overweight hero or heroine in fiction. (Phil Brown’s splendid Wikipedia piece has managed to make this interpretation of the theme seem not only flippant and tasteless, but also bland.) But there is, I think, something there. Beth Carswell’s written an interesting piece about how a character can never simply be overweight; there will always be significance in that, usually the implication that the character is greedy or idle. And I think there’s a lot of truth in that, even if it’s used sympathetically. Leopold Bloom’s stoutness, at least in part, represents that he is a man driven by his desires and his appetites, setting him up for his famous day in which he is consistently led astray. Many female readers identified with Bridget Jones’ eternal drive to get her life together, as exemplified by her attempts to lose weight. Even Rumpole of the Bailey’s girth spoke to his jolly sense of mischief and his Falstaffian ebullience. Carswell argues, too, that fat children in fiction are almost always divided into two specific groups; bullies, and victims of bullies, to be hated for their size, or to be pitied for it, which is a good point - the Piggies and the Dursleys, for example.



We discussed this for a while, and couldn’t really come up with any characters in fiction who are overweight without their weight being used in any way to typify them. In TV, however, and in film, there’s quite a few – Charlie Kane being the most famous of all. And that’s got to be partly because of the immense talent of actors like Orson Welles, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and James Gandolfini, to name a few, who have never been willing to play ‘the fat guy’ (as many lazy comedians do). So the visual arts do win out over prose there, I’m afraid, though it isn’t an absolute victory – could an overweight actress really get serious dramatic roles, or would she be more likely to end up in these sorts of films?

But there’s another reason, too, for this sort of thing. In the movies, a cigar can just be a cigar, because there are a great many people working on them, and some of those people are employed to fill in the little set details that don’t actually matter. Prose, the vast majority of the time, isn’t like that. There’s just one person, all by themselves, trying to create a world out of syllables – and, whether they know it/like it or not, every syllable is significant, because you’re using it to show your reader a little more (even if all you’re showing them is that you’re a bland, unimaginative douche). Every detail is a prop in the theatrical sense, not the cinematic – it’s there as a tool to give a sense of a world where there shouldn’t be a world at all.



So I’m issuing a challenge myself, though this is less a call to arms than a tentative cry of,

“Shall we just have a quiet night in, then?” Writers; come up with a story featuring a character with unusual physical qualities. They might be overweight, or have a hunchback, or be very short, or even be entirely disabled. But this characteristic must have no bearing on their personality or the themes of the story whatsoever. Neither may the story be an earnest and signposted attempt to show that obese/disabled/in-any-way-different people are just like ‘us’ ‘normal’ types; that, in my opinion, is cheating (not to mention patronising).



Or, if you prefer, I’ll even widen the field; the challenge is to write a story, a sentence, a word, that has no significance, no meaning to it, no intent behind it, whatsoever. Harder than you think, I think.

Jon Ware
Fiction Editor

Tradition | Fiction | In Defence of the Middlebrow

Pictured: humour.

I was surprised and saddened once again to read the work of John Fowles described as ‘middlebrow’ this week. Partly because I thought we’d done away with that appalling term, a product of a literary generation obsessed with their own cultural superiority, too snobbish to conceive that anything other than experimentation in style could be of benefit to mankind (that is, the ‘highbrow’), a term popularised by a rather terrible snob, Virginia Woolf. Partly because the writer of the article in question didn’t seem to have noticed that this same cultural superiority and snobbishness defined the entire plot of the novel in question, The Collector. Partly because I’ve heard the term used for Agatha Christie’s work as well, which means a true ‘highbrow’ is going to have to be dismissive of everything between Fowles and Hercule Poirot, which is a hell of a lot of interesting literature. Partly because, if post-modernism has achieved nothing else of value (debatable), surely it’s proffered the idea that ‘highbrow’, ‘lowbrow’ and ‘middlebrow’ ideas can also be mashed together in the same piece of art, making nonsense of them all. And partly because it’s confirmed my suspicion that ‘middlebrow’ has now joined ‘middle-class’ in the pantheon of ‘words which are no longer well-defined and rarely relevant, which we use whenever we want to insult someone.’

A quick definition, then; OED says of middlebrow, “Demanding or involving only a moderate degree of intellectual application.” Wikipedia, proving once and for all that it’s capable of more nuance than people give it credit for, defines the term as “a certain type of easily accessible art, often literature, as well as the population that uses art to acquire culture and class that is usually unattainable”. The point of both of these, then, is that ‘middlebrow’ literature simply isn’t hard enough; it gets its ideas across too easily, in a form which less cultured types can understand. Which is, obviously, disgraceful.

The problem all begins with a rambling, ranting letter Woolf wrote in 1932, in which she honours ‘lowbrows’ (as she terms them, people who live through their bodies alone);

“I love lowbrows; I study them; I always sit next the conductor in an omnibus and try to get him to tell me what it is like — being a conductor.” She also hints, in case that doesn’t have you frothing at the mouth enough, that ‘lowbrows’ are lacking in self-consciousness; only the ‘highbrow’ can understand the meaning of the lowbrow life.

Highbrows, meanwhile, are – tellingly – people of “thoroughbred intelligence”. And she goes on to give a list including three or four authors who might, by any vague understanding of the term, be considered ‘middlebrow’. Dickens? How much intellectual application does it take to read Jane Austen, exactly?

Then we get on to the middlebrows, a strangely undefined sort who mixes with both lowbrow and highbrow. Her main grudge against them seems to be, to misquote John to the Laodiceans, that they’re neither hot nor cold. They write ‘entertainments’ that have some thought behind him, or thoughtful books that are entertaining.

‘Typical bloody Modernist,’ I muttered. Then I began to wonder whether Woolf was being serious. I still think she was – mainly because her Bloomsbury pranks weren’t so much filled with self-deprecating irony as they were very slightly dim-witted and self-indulgent. The person who dresses up in blackface is a very different, horsier breed of supervillain from the one who skewers classism by pretending to be an upper-middle-class snob.

Much more inclined to piss about with humanity’s constant need for tribal self-definition was Russell Lynes, who wrote a piece in response to Woolf’s opinions in Harper’s Magazine; you can read a very funny interview with him here, in which he’s asked to define various clothes, board games, furniture, etc., as ‘highbrow’, ‘middlebrow’, or ‘lowbrow’.

Not pictured: clear, accessible story-telling

But to move on from the personal attacks to an actually positive affirmation (boo), I’m reminded of a comparison with the alchemists, who were so concerned with layering their philosophical ideas in hokum, to stop the common man from discovering them, and who are now generally remembered in the West, if at all, as charlatans. The subtlety and inaccessibility Woolf would want to call ‘highbrow’ is all very well, as long as you’re sure you’ll be understood – pace to Joyce and anybody else who savours confusing the reader. But the power of ‘enjoyable’ reading and simple ideas delivered well should, most certainly, not be sneered at; in the hands of one author, it may be equally as powerful as a more apparently complex piece.