The Untold Story of the Highway Code

The British Highway Code – ‘…a guide to the proper use of the highway and a code of good manners…’ – celebrates the 90^th anniversary of its first publication in 2021.

Here we look back at the evolution of the Code which tells the story of the development of road safety, driving and British roads over the decades.

The early years of driving

Cover of the first Highway Code, published by the Ministry of Transport, 1931. Image courtesy of Nicky Hughes.

The first Highway Code cost one old penny and contained 21 pages of advice and information. It carried adverts for the RAC (founded 1897), AA (founded 1905), Castrol Motor Oil, BP Plus petrol, motor insurance and journals such as ‘Autocar’.

Pages 18 and 19 of the 1931 Highway Code illustrating examples of hand signals to be used by drivers of pre-indicator motor cars and horse-drawn vehicles. Image courtesy of Nicky Hughes.

The late 19th century saw the first motorcars in Britain – a country whose roads had evolved for horse-drawn traffic.

Two Vauxhall cars photographed in London in 1931. The lead vehicle dates from 1895; the one behind from 1930. Image via Creative Commons

In the early years of the 20th century anyone could drive a vehicle – the minimum driving age of 17 was not introduced until 1930.

When the Highway Code was first launched in 1931, there were 2.3 million motor vehicles on British roads, along with tens of thousands of horse-drawn vehicles.

To be on the road was glamorous. Drivers put their foot down. Pedestrians were often considered in the way; at fault if they became a casualty. In this dangerous heady world, around 7,000 people lost their lives in accidents every year. (By comparison, in 2019, there were over 40 million vehicles on British roads and 1,870 deaths).

The Highway Code, 1931, listing the contents. Image courtesy of Nicky Hughes.

Little had been done in terms of control or legislation. The Highway Code of 1931 was a first attempt to educate early motorists about driving carefully and responsibly.

Speed limits, driving tests and pedestrian crossings

An image for W.D & H.O. Wills ‘SAFETY FIRST’ cigarette card album, published in 1934 around the same time as the second edition of the Highway Code and the new 1934 Road Traffic Act. The cover states that the album contains ‘…a series of Cigarette Cards of National Importance…’ The forward was written by the then Minister of Transport, Leslie Hore-Belisha. Image courtesy of Nicky Hughes.

Leslie Hore-Belisha’s 1934 Road Traffic Act introduced a 30mph speed limit in built-up areas (the speed limit of 20mph had been controversially removed by the 1930 Road Traffic Act after it was universally flouted and court cases built up). There were also stronger penalties for reckless driving and cyclists were required to have rear reflectors.

In addition, the Act instituted a compulsory driving test that came into force in 1935, but only for new drivers. Around one quarter of a million candidates applied.

The first driver to pass the half hour test of basic driving abilities and knowledge of the Highway Code was a Mr R. Beare of Kensington, 16 March 1935. Tests were suspended four years later for the duration of the Second World War (1939-1945), not resuming until 1946.

Minister of Transport, Leslie Hore-Belisha, who rewrote the Highway Code (second edition, 1934), and introduced pedestrian crossings as part of the Act. Image in the Public Domain.

9,000 pedestrian crossings, with their distinctive flashing yellow globes (‘Belisha’ beacons), were erected in London in 1934, with the scheme extended to the provinces in the November. Initially crossings were marked with steel studs; zebra markings not appearing until 1949.

Abbey Road zebra crossing, London, made famous on the cover of the Beatles’ final album: ‘Abbey Road’ (26 September 1969), with the band walking across it. Listed Grade II. Public Domain

Early traffic light which only displayed red and green lights, Castle Hill, Newport, Isle of Wight © Historic England DP068811

Other early road developments included white lines, which came into widespread use in the 1920s, prototype roundabouts and traffic lights dating from around the mid to late 1920s (the red/amber/green traffic light system began to be more widely adopted from 1933), and ‘catseyes’, patented in 1934, which came into their own during the blackouts of the Second World War and have been a common feature of roads ever since.

Early Road Signs

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Early road signs were standardised under the 1930 Road Traffic Act. Left: School warning sign (the torch symbolising knowledge), Kersey, Suffolk. Later similar signs said ‘School’ rather than ‘Children’ and showed two children walking along. Right: Junction warning sign with reflective studs, also in Kersey. The red triangle indicated danger as it still does today. Both 1930s © Historic England DP146114 DP146109

The second edition (1934) of the Highway Code also carried diagrams of road signs for the first time – just 10 in all – along with a warning about the dangers of driving when affected by alcohol or fatigue.

‘What Does That Road Sign Mean?’ – an illustration in a vintage journal of all the official Ministry of Transport road signs in the late 1930s. Image courtesy of Nicky Hughes.

Stopping distances – broadly similar to today’s, despite huge advances in braking technology – made their first appearance in the third edition, published just post-war in 1946, along with new sections giving advice on driving and cycling.

The 1954 Highway Code carried brand new colour illustrations. There was an expanded traffic sign section which included an extended section on road signs, while the back cover gave instructions about first aid.

The first motorway

Cover of the official Preston bypass launch brochure, 5 December 1958. Image courtesy of Lancashire County Council.

England’s first completed motorway, a revolutionary development in British roads – the 8 mile Preston bypass, later part of the M6 – was opened by the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan in 1958.

Filling up at a service station on the newly opened M1. Image © Historic England/John Laing Photographic Collection, JLP01/08/055782

The first 50 mile stretch of the M1 – from St Albans to Rugby – opened a year later in 1959, constructed by world-renowned contractors John Laing & Sons, who built much of post-Second World War Britain’s pioneering infrastructure, including housing, nuclear power stations, hospitals, factories and London’s Westway.

Cover of a vintage copy of the 1961 Highway Code illustrating a motorway scene at the bottom. Image courtesy of Nicky Hughes

To reflect how motorways would radically affect motorists, the 1961 Highway Code was updated in its fifth edition with a section on motorway driving, including how to avoid drowsiness.

Minister of Transport Ernest Marples’s plea to drivers on Page 1 of the 1961 Highway Code. Image courtesy of Nicky Hughes.

It also included a sombre, hand-written and signed introduction from Ernest Marples: ‘Casualties killed and injured (on the roads) are as high as for a major war’, ending with: ‘DO keep to the Code – and keep alive.’

An illustration in the motorway section of the 1961 Highway Code showing a three-lane motorway and a central reservation. There were no hard shoulders, only unpaved ones, and no crash barriers – these first appeared in the 1970s. Image courtesy of Nicky Hughes.

There was no speed limit on motorways. Drivers were free to go as fast as they wanted. ‘Doing the ton’ (100mph) was a badge of honour, especially for motorcyclists. Marples was shocked by the speed of driving and introduced a national speed limit of 70mph in December 1965.

The striking Forton Service Station (formerly Pennine Tower and now known as Lancaster Service Area), M6, between J32-33, Forton, Lancashire. Listed Grade II. Image © Historic England/AA99 04845.

Built in 1964-1965, Forton evoked the glamour of early motorway driving – its Tower Restaurant offered waitress service and a vantage point with spectacular views. The restaurant closed in 1989.

Graphic designers Margaret Calvert (1936-) and Jock Kinneir (1917-1994) were commissioned by the government, in the late 1950s, to design new motorway signs. Crown Copyright

Calvert and Kinneir’s motorway signs were modern, simple and easy to read when driving fast. The government became concerned that these signs made other British road signs – a chaotic mix of different words, styles and fonts – seem inadequate and outdated and asked them to redesign and rationalise the whole national road sign system.

The new signs came into force 1 January 1965 and the designs are still in use today on Britain’s roads and motorways.

The evolution of the highway code

The Highway Code’s sixth edition, published in 1968, had a Calvert and Kinneir road sign on the cover. The Code has been regularly revised and updated since 1931 in response to developments in society, the evolution of vehicles and advances in road design. Image courtesy of Nicky Hughes

The completely modernised 1968 version was the first to use photographs and 3D illustrations. It also introduced the ‘mirror – signal – manoeuvre’ routine when overtaking.

The 1978 Highway Code, now 70 pages long. Image courtesy of Nicky Hughes

With mounting pedestrian casualties, the 1978 edition introduced the Green Cross Code to educate pedestrians about road safety (children were taught it in school, helped by superhero the ‘Green Cross Man’). The safety mantra was: ‘Think, Stop, Use Your Eyes and Ears, Wait Until It Is Safe to Cross, Look and Listen, Arrive Alive.’

The new disabled badges illustrated in the 1978 Highway Code. Image courtesy of Nicky Hughes

This edition also launched new orange badges for people of disability, as well as having a section on vehicle security in response to rising car thefts.

Aerial view of the Gravelly Hill intersection, popularly known as ‘Spaghetti Junction’ – the five-level intersection of the M6 motorway (Junction 6), A38(M) motorway, A38 and A5127 above two railway lines, three canals and two rivers in Birmingham, West Midlands. Image © Historic England/26491/035

As vehicles became more sophisticated, and roads busier and more complex, the Highway Code – most of whose rules are legal requirements – responded over the years with new instructions and advice in ever-growing sections.

Among them the use of seats belts, using mobile phones while driving, in-vehicle distractions such as Sat Nav, driving with illegal drugs in the system, remote control parking, smoking in vehicles, using mobility scooters, and the Theory Test – introduced in 1996 and replacing questions about the Highway Code that were originally posed during the driving test itself.

Today’s Highway Code is now 189 pages long and sells around 1 million copies annually. It is always listed in the annual best-seller list.

Header image: Motoring just outside Ludlow in Shropshire in the mid-1930s.  The car is an Austin 7 (‘Baby Austin’) © Historic England BB70/09719.

Written by Nicky Hughes

• Posted by
  Historic England
  12 February 2021

© Copyright 2021.

Middlemarch 2021

The Hidden Narrative in Middlemarch That 2021 Readers Will Spot

Diana Rose Newby on George Eliot's Approach to Contagion

By Diana Rose Newby

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February 12, 2021

 

When Taylor Swift first released the track list for her latest cottagecore album, a certain corner of literary Twitter lit up over the title of its eighth song. A little sadly for us, the lyrics of “Dorothea” don’t support the connection we quickly drew to Dorothea Brooke, fictional heroine of George Eliot’s Victorian novel Middlemarch. But regardless of whether Taylor had Eliot’s provincial character on her mind when she named the track, our reaction to it encapsulated the novel’s uncanny ubiquity in recent months. Since the start of the pandemic, it’s felt to me as though everyone has been reading Middlemarch.

On the face of it, this surge of interest in Eliot’s best-known work might seem unremarkable. But there’s a not-so-obvious reason that the 19th-century novel may have felt newly relevant for 2020 readers. Eliot probably conceived Middlemarch as a story about contagion—a plot with epidemic written into its core. And if we read it closely, the finished product is still “about” contagion. Middlemarch, in other words, is a pandemic novel without the pandemic.

You won’t have come across Middlemarch in the pandemic lit listicles that have proliferated this year. On its surface, this isn’t a contagion narrative—it’s a Victorian marriage plot. Eliot follows the lives of two protagonists, Dorothea Brooke and Tertius Lydgate, as each makes an unfortunate match: Dorothea to the mediocre and moody academic Edward Casaubon; Lydgate to town beauty Rosamond Vincy, who turns out to be scheming and spoiled. It’s through Lydgate, a young physician, that the novel veers most closely toward an explicit concern with contagious disease. When he moves to Middlemarch, Lydgate aspires to work at a fever hospital, with plans to open “a new ward in case of the cholera coming to us.”

Cholera never does come to Middlemarch in the way that Lydgate anticipates, yet Eliot’s notes for the novel indicate that she initially had different plans. In her Quarry for Middlemarch, the notebook where Eliot worked out the details and the order of the draft novel’s plot, she also recorded her extensive research into the highly contagious disease. In particular, she documents the progress of the Asiatic cholera pandemic of 1826-37, which reached Britain, where it would claim thousands of lives, in 1831. Published in 1871-72, Middlemarch spans the years between 1829 and 1832; as Mary Wilson Carpenter, for one, has pointed out, this historical setting exactly overlaps with cholera’s arrival on English soil.

 

While this conjuncture finds only oblique expression in the completed text—“cholera” appears all of nine times across the novel’s 86 chapters—the epidemic occupies a more prominent place in the pages of Eliot’s Quarry. She scrupulously charts the timeline of its appearance in Britain: “Quarantine to guard against it in England June 13, 1831. First cases occur at Sunderland Nov. 4. [A]ppears at Rotherham, Feb. 10, 1832 …” These notes also register the British government’s initial failure to prepare for the epidemic’s arrival, even as cholera made its way through Scotland and the northern regions of England. “Hitherto the legislature had been silent,” she writes, until “[a]ll at once, without apparently having lighted in any intermediate place, the disease appeared in London,” finally prompting a series of bills to be “hurried through Parliament”: political negligence that, for many contemporary readers, will strike a familiar chord.

For Eliot, the figure of contagion takes on more metaphoric weight, structuring her pervasive focus on the risks and obligations of sociality.

Even where the Quarry turns from this historical documentation to plans for Middlemarch, cholera maintains an evident foothold in the writer’s mind. Eliot folds the epidemic into her schema for the novel’s plot at one of its most pivotal intervals. On a folio with the header “Will Ladislaw and Dorothea,” she outlines the series of events that unite Dorothea with Casaubon’s cousin Will, whom Dorothea eventually marries after her husband’s untimely death, and despite Will’s unseemly intimacy with the wedded Rosamond:

Will, going on as Editor of the Pioneer, comes to Lowick to see the Farebrothers, has an interview with Dorothea. They part with a sense of being divided by destiny. Dorothea has projects about filling her life: tells Sir James & Celia that she will never be married again—Celia’s boy will have everything. She will go on some heroic errand of carrying away emigrants, etc. Meanwhile, the cholera. Will does not go away & gets more intimate with Mrs. Lydgate.

Meanwhile, the cholera. On the one hand, this tiny sentence tells us nothing new about cholera in Middlemarch; it relegates epidemic to a fleeting, background blip, the white noise of the novel’s larger world. On the other, it illuminates contagion as the interstitial force that shaped Eliot’s vision for the book, and which lingers in Middlemarch despite the fact that cholera was mostly excised by the final draft. The probability of epidemic remains “meanwhile”—ever-present, perhaps inevitable, yet easily overlooked. And I don’t just mean epidemic in a literal sense: for Eliot, the figure of contagion takes on more metaphoric weight, structuring her pervasive focus on the risks and obligations of sociality.

 

At its etymological roots, “contagion” distills the precarious possibilities that inhere in communal life. Combining the Latin prefix con- (together) with the basis tangere (to touch), the word indexes the necessary hazards of contact, the anxious threat of connectedness. These perils are central to Middlemarch, even and especially where actual contagious disease recedes into invisibility. Other forms of contagion gain purchase instead: infectious emotions, the transmission of gossip, the exposure of toxic truths. Spouses make each other sick, are drawn to other people helplessly, dangerously. Professional relationships cause cross-contamination when reputations are wounded by allies’ mistakes. In myriad ways, Middlemarch illustrates the ease with which we get tangled in the infectious web of our neighbors’ lives.

The metaphorical “logic of contagion” that Tina Young Choi has also observed in Middlemarch is arguably nowhere more powerful than in the downturn of Lydgate’s luck. A brilliant doctor with a promising career before him, Lydgate suffers not only from Rosamond’s selfishly manipulative influence, but also from his relationship with the sanctimonious evangelical banker Nicholas Bulstrode, who wants to fund the fever hospital. When multiple skeletons emerge from the closet of Bulstrode’s seedy past, the fallout hurts Lydgate almost as much as it destroys Bulstrode’s standing in Middlemarch. It’s not that Lydgate has committed any crime which can be proven on legal grounds; rather, he’s deemed guilty by association—“blighted,” as he puts it, “like a damaged ear of corn.” This is no throwaway metaphor: variations of the phrase “blight on Bulstrode & Lydgate” appear repeatedly throughout Eliot’s notes. As the Quarry attests, Eliot long planned to frame this turn of events in terms of infectious disease, the kind of contagion that might consume entire communities.

Moreover, and beyond the story of any single character, contagion’s organizing logic informs the whole of Middlemarch’s plot. Over the novel’s course, Eliot traces the links that bind all of her characters in a network of physical and emotional exchange. Here again the Quarry is telling: as represented in her notes, Eliot’s careful sequencing of points of contact between characters bears more than a passing resemblance to the way she plots and replots the cholera epidemic’s chronology. First recounting cholera’s geographic movements throughout England, she later revisits the epidemic in order to situate it within a more scaled-back sociopolitical history; on a list simply titled “Dates,” cholera appears right in the middle, between the 1830 “Opening of Liverpool & Manch[ester] Railway, April” and 1833’s “Reformed Parliament, Election Jan[uary].” Likewise, she fills the Quarry’s pages with various formulations of the social “conditions” and “elements” that are context for character relationships, and that alternately make these relationships blossom or rot.

In both cases, what seems to interest Eliot are the subtle forces of causality that interlink seemingly unrelated people and events. The finished novel gives sprawling shape to the scope of these links; among the most-discussed features of Middlemarch is the vision it evokes of social entanglement in all its depth and reach. In so doing, the novel also expresses a view of interconnection as potentially poisonous—an impression that mere proximity to other people will propagate shared harm. At the level of sheer form, Middlemarch’s multiplot structure is a contact-tracing map.

For those familiar with 19th-century fiction, Eliot’s treatment of epidemic might not seem to distinguish her from other novelists of her time. Whole books have been written about the prominence of contagion in the Victorian literary imaginary; a marker for the physical body’s very real vulnerabilities, contagion also harbored symbolic potential for writers of the period. It was a favored device in the novels of Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell, who used communicable illness to sentimental ends, often to critique the social inequities that made certain groups of people more susceptible than others to disease. Conversely, metaphors of contagion were also made the vehicle for racist and xenophobic rhetorics. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, for example, links its eponymous vampire with the idea of transmissible disease, and is commonly read as representing Victorian anxieties about colonial relations and miscegenation.

Eliot makes the case for a mode of social consciousness in which all actions are measured by their effects on the community.

In Middlemarch, however, Eliot’s political and moral investments don’t take their fullest emotional force from pity or fear toward the potentially infectious other. Instead, it’s the potentially infectious self to which she draws her readers’ gaze. Again and again, Middlemarch stresses how readily we ourselves can hurt our neighbors by becoming conduits for contagion, both literally and otherwise. By virtue of the closely networked nature of social life, Eliot’s characters regularly transmit harm to the other people crowded in their sphere, often without knowing or intending it. “You don’t mean your horse to tread on a dog when you’re backing out of the way,” as the benevolent surveyor Caleb Garth explains; “but it goes through you, when it’s done.”

For Eliot, this way of thinking works in service of an ethics that we might understand as contingent accountability. In her didactic way, she makes the case for a mode of social consciousness in which all actions are measured by their effects on the community, and in which the responsibility for these effects is understood as collective. Through the logic of contagion, Middlemarch coaxes readers toward a sense of self as embedded in a meshwork of relations with people whom our choices intimately affect, however removed from us those people may seem. As Eliot’s storytelling maintains, we have an obligation to these connections; they require us to cultivate practices of ongoing harm reduction and care.

If many of us found ourselves turning to Middlemarch with new or renewed attention last year, perhaps it’s because the novel offers a framework for grappling with the existential dilemmas forced on us by COVID-19. Eliot shows us one way of reconceiving the self in a time of pandemic: a radical decentering that shifts our perspective from individual life to the interdependent health of the web. In both content and form, Middlemarch enacts the collectivist mindset required to reckon with contagion across multiple scales—from the local, neighborly level of wearing a mask and staying home, to the greater abstraction of locating the self in a contact-tracing sprawl. All in all, the novel serves as a relevant guide for navigating the unfamiliar vantage points that our present crisis opens up.

 

At the same time, however, crisis isn’t the point of Middlemarch. Because Eliot buries contagion beneath the finished novel’s surface, she tenders its collective ethics not as an urgent response to emergency, but as a necessary precept of social membership in a more general, everyday sense. Eliot treats contagion, or things like contagion, as a latent condition of communal being: a sometimes hidden yet continuous context underpinning public life. This approach becomes all the more essential for contemporary readers on the other side of 2020, with the pandemic continuing to drag on and crisis burnout setting in. What Middlemarch gives us is a sustainable model for attuning ourselves to contagion’s probability—a more careful, patient way of living with and for others, even after disaster subsides.

Screenshots taken from the Harvard Library’s Digital Collections, which are open for sharing and adapting under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

 

 

Diana Rose Newby

Diana Rose Newby is a PhD candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Her writing has been featured or is forthcoming in Politics/Letters, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, an edited volume on the health humanities, and a pedagogy handbook for early-career college instructors. A native of California, she currently lives in Harlem with her partner and their cat.

https://lithub.com/the-hidden-narrative-in-middlemarch-that-2021-readers-will-spot/

Julien Gracq – Noeuds de vie

 

En présence de Julien Gracq – Noeuds de vie

Disparu il y a maintenant plus de dix ans, Julien Gracq demeure néanmoins notre contemporain. Tout se passe, en effet, comme s’il n’avait pas cessé d’écrire, de nous écrire. Cette douce illusion, nous la devons à Bernhild Boie – éditrice et amie de l’écrivain – qui ces dernières années a exhumé et rassemblé plusieurs manuscrits qui sommeillaient dans les fonds de la Bibliothèque Nationale de France où reposent les archives de Julien Gracq.  Nœuds de vie, le nouvel inédit qui vient de paraître, décevra ceux qui espéraient découvrir la face cachée de l’œuvre gracquienne.  On (re)trouvera donc un Julien Gracq tel qu’en lui-même : son regard lumineux et lucide sur le monde et ses paysages dans les deux premiers chapitres, puis ses réflexions sensibles sur la lecture et l’écriture dans les deux chapitres restants. 

Grâce au concours de Bernhild Boie, ont d’abord paru en 2011 les Manuscrits de guerre que Gracq ne désirait pas faire connaître de son vivant. Trois ans plus tard, ce fut autour de Les Terres du couchant. Un roman sur le point d’être achevé que l’auteur avait malgré tout délaissé au profit de l’écriture d’Un balcon en forêt qu’il publiera en 1958 chez José Corti, maison d’édition à laquelle il restera fidèle. À l’image des précédents, Nœuds de vie, le nouvel inédit qui vient de paraître, décevra ceux qui espéraient découvrir la face cachée de l’œuvre gracquienne. Nulle originalité ici, mais la poursuite d’une entreprise qui, la page des formes romanesques définitivement tournée en 1961 avec Préférences, avait privilégié l’écriture critique, autobiographique ou peu s’en faut, résolument fragmentaire en tout cas, nous délivrant désormais des proses finement ciselées qu’elles découpent une portion de paysage ou qu’elles éclairent l’œuvre d’un de ses pairs. On (re)trouvera donc un Julien Gracq tel qu’en lui-même : son regard lumineux et lucide sur le monde et ses paysages dans les deux premiers chapitres, puis ses réflexions sensibles sur la lecture et l’écriture dans les deux chapitres restants.

Gracq, le voyageur intranquille

Du reste, cette compartimentation de façade n’entame pas l’unité du livre auquel Bernhild Boie a choisi de donner le beau titre de « Nœuds de vie », formule dont fait usage Gracq afin de désigner ce après quoi court sa plume, ici comme ailleurs, son projet si l’on veut. L’expression possède l’avantage de condenser à merveille la poétique de ce nouvel opus sans cesse à la recherche d’« une sorte d’enlacement intime et isolé, autour duquel flotte le sentiment de plénitude de l’être-ensemble ». Plus exactement, elle concentre le désir ardent de renouer avec le monde, d’accroitre « chez tout être, l’étendue de la surface de contact qu’il développe avec le monde et la vie ». Telle est bien l’expérience depuis laquelle tout s’organise, depuis laquelle au fond tout converge chez Gracq, si bien qu’au-delà de la disparité des notations et de la diversité des sujets traités dans Nœuds de vie une forme de continuité apparaît.

Gracq maitrise suffisamment l’art du coloriste et les techniques de l’enchanteur pour nous donner à percevoir leurs charmes et à éprouver leurs beautés

Ainsi, les superbes descriptions des paysages hexagonaux ne sont pas celles d’un géomètre. Ce sont celles du peintre qui dans la rudesse et l’esseulement de la vallée de la Loire « ouvre entre fleuve et jardins une promenade couverte, un bout du monde à la fois scintillant et fleuri », celles du voyageur intranquille qui écoute et donne à écouter la vibration des végétaux et des animaux de la forêt de Blois à la nuit tombée. De la sorte, qu’importe de connaître ou non les contrées et les bourgades traversées dont les seuls noms suffisent à provoquer la rêverie (Neuillé-Pont Pierre, Saint-Laurent en Gâtines ou Saint-Florent). Gracq maitrise suffisamment l’art du coloriste et les techniques de l’enchanteur pour nous donner à percevoir leurs charmes et à éprouver leurs beautés, comme lorsqu’il convie à pénétrer par tous les sens dans les hauteurs du village d’Écouves : « La montée est une plongée dans un silence acide et vivant comme l’odeur de la neige, un corail d’étoiles vertes où l’arôme des pins grésilles au ras d’un gravier blanc d’atoll, dans une légèreté ocellée et criblée de vitrail que promène le vent avec une douceur plumeuse d’algue sur le sable. » Ce qui préside à la venue de l’émotion pour Gracq, ce n’est donc pas tant la cartographie de l’itinéraire que les « affinités électives » qu’un esprit tisse librement – à la manière des surréalistes – avec les signes que lui offre le monde qu’il arpente. Mais un esprit attentif qu’abrite un corps toujours à l’affût de l’embrasure par laquelle tout l’espace redevient vivant, un corps noué à la vie sensible du monde.

En ce sens, Gracq ne peut que déplorer le rapport techniciste que l’homme entretient à présent avec son milieu au détriment précisément de cette liaison affective avec le monde, du « pacte, conclu et gardé avec les puissances chtoniennes brutes ». Férocement critique à l’endroit du tourisme de masse qui sévit en Suisse, désolée au-devant de lotissements surpeuplés et asphaltés, il en va à chaque fois des mêmes inquiétudes : l’abandon de la nature, l’exil de sa beauté et de son règne auquel mit fin le progrès humain dont les excès ont permis, par endroit, l’émergence d’« un monde entièrement refait de sa main à son idée [de l’être humain] ». Cette peur, l’écrivain français ne l’avait sans doute jamais exprimée aussi clairement. Peut-être lui fallait-il attendre de connaître la vieillesse sur laquelle il s’attarde à plusieurs reprises sans illusion aucune. Car si le grand âge implique un « raccourcissement de perspective », il invite du même coup à se concentrer sur l’essentiel – en l’occurrence sur les conditions dans lesquelles la vie demeure vivante et le monde habitable. Toutefois, la vieillesse ne conduit pas à l’aigreur ou à la nostalgie, même dans les beaux passages où Gracq songe avec tendresse à son enfance passée dans le village de Saint-Florent-le-Vieil. Elle l’incite à apprécier la valeur d’un contact direct avec la nature, à reconsidérer les actions les plus simples telles que l’écriture et la lecture dont sa pratique est devenue plus lente, plus savoureuse également, à mille lieux des précipitations adolescentes.

En lisant, en écrivant

Le grand âge l’incite à reconsidérer les actions les plus simples telles que l’écriture et la lecture dont sa pratique est devenue plus lente, plus savoureuse également, à mille lieux des précipitations adolescentes.

Deux actes pour Gracq sans lesquels il n’est pas d’épanouissement possible dans ce monde. Quelle joie, rappelle-t-il, que de déambuler dans les livres, de palper les volumes savamment rangés dans les bibliothèques, de les saisir comme l’on cueille son raisin, ravi déjà des délices qu’ils nous promettent. Quel plaisir ensuite que d’ouvrir le volume, de suivre aussi près qu’il est possible le mouvement des mots et de partager leur scintillement, notamment en poésie dont la « tâche essentielle est donc de mettre en contact immédiat les séries matérielles et mentales les plus éloignés, de préférence les plus incompatibles ». Il convient encore de nouer, vaille que vaille, de rapprocher les choses et d’expérimenter ce rapprochement dans le voyage, le paysage, la lecture ou l’écriture.

C’est à « la lumière réfléchie de [cette] dure expérience vitale » que Gracq écrit et qu’il consigne ses enthousiasmes et ses déceptions de lecteur comme il l’avait déjà fait dans En lisant, en écrivant (1980). S’il ne tarit pas d’éloges avec Colette, ce « merveilleux écrivain », ni avec Proust qu’il lui « arrive plus souvent que les autres écrivains, de rouvrir », il est cependant plus mitigé sur Montherlant dont l’agaçant moralisme ne peut faire oublier « la splendeur de la langue », partagé au sujet de Valéry dont le talent poétique « crève les yeux » sans pour autant qu’il n’ait jamais produit de grand œuvre. Plein d’affection pour Stendhal, enthousiaste à propos de Tolkien, il se révèle en revanche sans concession avec Cocteau – « cet emmuré de Paris » – et injuste avec Éluard lorsqu’il écrit : « Beaucoup de ces poèmes ne valent pas un clou, c’est trop évident pour qu’on insiste. »  Qu’il célèbre ou qu’il fustige, toujours est-il que Gracq ne cède jamais aux facilités de la « lecture arrêtée » par laquelle, note-il, la critique manque généralement l’énergie propre à une œuvre. Il est vrai que l’activité critique ne consiste pas pour lui à s’arrêter sur les textes, ni à les arrêter pour les convertir en « champ d’investigations », mais à ressaisir leur coulée ou leur mouvement, à relater au fond « le voyage » d’un lecteur.  Écrire dans « le courant de la plume », presque « à sauts et à gambade » comme chez Montaigne, s’est en définitive appartenir à ce que Gracq appelle « l’école buissonnière de l’écriture » qui, davantage qu’un groupe littéraire constitué, incarne une manière d’être et d’écrire, d’animer et de réanimer les textes comme les paysages, d’en chérir l’inarêtable vitalité.

L’« absence de plan » qu’implique un tel voyage lassera certains que ni l’expérience immédiate du monde ni la beauté de la langue qui la fait naître ne convaincront. Pourtant, « Il n’y a pas dans la fiction d’autre ‘‘vérité’’ que la justesse du rapport des parties à l’ensemble », d’autre vérité que le nœud entre une existence et un monde qu’un phrasé organise et transmet. Au reste, 29 cahiers intitulés Notules dorment encore dans le fonds Julien Gracq de la BNF nous prévient Bernhild Boie dans son Avant-propos. À la demande de l’écrivain, ceux-ci ne paraîtront que 20 ans après sa disparition. Nous voilà assurés de renouer avec la prose gracquienne dont l’éclat des descriptions paysagères et la souveraineté des développements sur la littérature laissent augurer quelques bonheurs de lecture. Patience, donc.

• Julien Gracq, Nœuds de vie, Avant-propos de Bernhild Boie, Paris, José Corti, coll. « Domaine français », 2021

 

Sylvain Teil Salanova

 

 

 

Posted by Admin on vendredi, février 12, 2021 · Leave a Comment 

Copyright © 2013 Zone Critique. Tous droits réservés. ISSN 2430-3097

 

ZONE CRITIQUE

How Flannery O’Connor Fought Racism

 

1. by Jessica Hooten Wilson 6 . 24 . 20
2. 
   

In a recent New Yorker essay, Paul Elie asks, “How Racist Was Flannery O’Connor?” His headline aims to be incendiary, to rile people up, to give us a scapegoat for our rage against racism. Racism is obviously a serious sin. But Elie’s portrait of the author is incomplete. Because he misreads much of O’Connor’s writing, he concludes that she was unrepentantly racist. But O’Connor did not embrace bigotry. Like all of us, she was a sinner who struggled to purge herself of prejudices she knew were immoral. And she boldly fought racism—in both others and in herself—the best way she knew how: by writing stories.

Elie notes that in private correspondence, O’Connor used inexcusable racial slurs, and confessed to friends that she struggled between the Christian in her, who believed that all are God’s children, and the Southern white lady in her, who was trained to see black people as inferior. Elie declares O’Connor a racist because of these letters, and suggests that O’Connor scholars are unwilling to see or speak of them. Never mind that scholars have wrestled for years with the letters Elie quotes. (Elie draws his provocative quotations from Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s Radical Ambivalence, which I review in the forthcoming August/September issue of First Things.) Elie does not show us the other side of O'Connor: the O’Connor who was an integrationist, if a gradualist one; who had black friends in Iowa and New York; who was close with activists such as Father McCown and Tom and Louise Gossett, and twice invited John Howard Griffin to visit her home; who kept a portrait of Louise Hill, her mother’s African American housemaid, in her room; who reviewed a biography of the African American minister Richard Allen and declared it would transform readers. Elie omits all these details.  

Most important, Elie does not sufficiently examine O’Connor's fiction, much of which condemns racism. To fully understand O’Connor, we must study her novels and short stories. That is where we find her ultimate commitments, both religious and moral. Through her fiction, O’Connor exorcised the demons that possessed her.

Rather than preach to the choir, O’Connor tried to change those who thought differently; in her fiction, she often moved racist characters from sin to redemption. For the past five years, I have been editing O’Connor's third novel, which she was working on when she died. It is called Why Do the Heathen Rage? The plot centers on a white man who writes letters to a white woman, a civil rights activist in New York. In his correspondence with her, this man pretends to be black. He is testing whether she loves people as much as she claims she does. O’Connor planned for the novel to end with his conversion, his comeuppance. The story takes a close look at Koinonia, the integrationist farm in Americus, Georgia, established by the Baptist radical Clarence Jordan. Why Do the Heathen Rage? shows that O’Connor did not shy away from difficult conversations, but used her fiction to call for Southerners to repent of racist attitudes.

African American writers have often lauded O’Connor’s work as contending with racism. Hilton Als notes that O’Connor started writing “less than a hundred years after Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and just a decade after Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind.” Unlike those writers, he says, O’Connor did not treat her black characters with “patronizing sentimentality.” She wrote with courage as she pointed a finger at racial bigots—and at the bigotry she saw in herself.

Elie’s most egregious error is his misreading of “Revelation.” O’Connor wrote this story from her hospital bed as she struggled against lupus in the winter of 1963, months before she died. It concerns a racist Southern woman, Ruby Turpin, who is humiliated in a doctor’s office by a sophisticated Wellesley student named Mary Grace. Mrs. Turpin has been expressing her disdain for the “white trash” she considers as worthless as black people, much to the silent disdain of sour-faced Mary Grace. Inwardly, Mrs. Turpin thanks Jesus for not making her black, white trash, or ugly. She suddenly shouts aloud, “Thank you, Jesus, for making everything the way it is!” Mary Grace responds by hurling a book at Turpin, striking her in the eye, knocking her down, and attempting to strangle her. With eyes of accusation burning, Mary Grace whispers, “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog!”

The moment scandalizes Mrs. Turpin, and at the end of the story, she stands atop a fence by her pig pen and yells at God for allowing her to be thus disgraced. Although the insult came from a stranger’s lips, it is as though God has called her out. She shouts at the Lord, “How am I a hog and me both? How am I saved and from hell too?” O’Connor could just as well be aiming the question at herself: How can I be a sinner and a believer at the same time? How can I be racist and write stories against racism? When Mrs. Turpin rages and roars one final time, “Who do you think you are?,” the question echoes back to her from the tree line, as though God were speaking the words. O’Connor suggests that the proud woman must be knocked down to her rightful place, humbled before the Lord.

As the sun sets, Mrs. Turpin receives a vision at her pig pen. She beholds a bridge extending from the earth “through a field of living fire.” She sees a congregation of souls dancing and leaping in a great heavenward procession—both “white trash” and black people in white robes. Mrs. Turpin observes that those like herself and her husband Claud trail at the end of the line. Elie interprets this as a vision of segregation—people separated by race and class even while processing to heaven. But O’Connor is actually alluding to the biblical teaching that the first will be made last and the last first. The vision puts Ruby Turpin in her place, so to speak, as she watches small-minded “virtues”—her “dignity” and “common sense and respectable behavior”—being “burned away” in the purgatorial fires. After this revelation, Mrs. Turpin literally steps “down” from where she stands and descends the “slow way” back home.

In the final summer of her life, when she was about to receive treatment for lupus, O’Connor jokingly wrote to her friendly antagonist Maryat Lee that she would sign her name as “Mrs. Turpin” when she was checked into the hospital. Elie interprets this as yet another sign of racism: O’Connor, he says, is identifying with her racist character. But this is another misreading. “Revelation” does not lift up Mrs. Turpin as a model, but calls for her and those like her to repent. By referring to herself as “Mrs. Turpin,” then, O’Connor was repenting of her own serious faults. No wonder that O’Connor writes in her essays that it is the Christian novelist’s duty to unmask the devils that possess us. “Revelation” holds a mirror up to the author herself. In this reflection, O’Connor sees herself possessed by racist prejudices and in need of purgation.

If we cast out all writers who ever struggled with sin, we will be left without a single one. If we start scapegoating O’Connor, we will end by rejecting many eminent writers who fought racism in their work—Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Fyodor Dostoevsky. It is unfair to lambast O’Connor without recognizing how her work has helped us combat racist attitudes. As we make strides to uproot bigotry from our nation and seek justice on behalf of those who have suffered unjustly, we should see Flannery O’Connor not as a hindrance but as someone who helped us come a long way. 

Jessica Hooten Wilson is the Louise Cowan Scholar in Residence at the University of Dallas.

Photo by Will via Creative Commons. Image cropped. 

FIRST THINGS

PASSING TIME

Passing Time

About fifteen years ago I started reading a 1950s French novel by someone I’d only just heard of, right at the start of my part-time undergraduate degree studies. Nothing remarkable there, except that I’m still reading it.

It drew me in, intrigued by the idea of a young French novelist writing about Manchester, and by the first few pages with their blend of ‘grim up north’ dry humour, poetry and dark foreboding. And then things got more confusing, and more intriguing. It’s an account of mundane events (dreadful weather and even worse food) – and of murder, betrayal and revenge. Bleston, which stands in for Manchester (specifically and as the archetypal northern industrial city) in the novel, is both recognisable and realistically described (street names and bus timetables) and also a fantastical place, a monster, a labyrinth.

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People who know I’ve been studying this book for such a long time often ask me what it’s about. I still don’t have a definitive answer for that. It’s not that kind of a book – and I can’t imagine I’d have spent all these years obsessing about it, reading about it, researching it, and writing about it, if it had been. Every time I open it I see something I hadn’t seen before. It’s almost as if it’s shapeshifting, it grows and alters as I read.

Michel Butor is often labelled as part of the nouveau roman group, which was never actually a group and of which he never felt he was a part. He has a lot more in common with Proust than with any of the writers associated with the nouveau roman, and this novel in particular is a quest for lost time, as Revel, the diarist/narrator, feeling himself overwhelmed by the city and its fogs, tries to set down on paper everything that has happened since his arrival in the town eight months previously. He feels that he’s in a labyrinth, disorientating and tricksy, a trap from which he might never escape – but he ends up creating a labyrinth with his diary entries, as the time line starts to loop back on itself, the present day intruding on the attempt to chronologically record the past, and he finds he has to revisit earlier events to explain what’s happening now.

If Passing Time looks back to Proust, it also looks forward, to the work of W G Sebald. Sebald read the novel when he arrived in Manchester, fifteen years after Butor and it resonated through his writing, from the early poem, ‘Bleston: A Mancunian Cantical’, through to his final work, Austerlitz. He picked up on the dark undercurrents in Butor’s work, the hauntedness, the theme of exile and displacement, and the sense that wherever we are in Bleston, we are not just in Bleston.

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I’ve been not only reading Butor but writing about Butor, and about the connections between this novel and W G Sebald, for a very long time now. The title of this blog is obviously a reference to Butor – if I’ve posted less Butor stuff over recent years its because all of that is going into my PhD thesis, but there’s still plenty here, if you search for Butor or Sebald, and on a range of themes, from music to maps to Manchester, and to the labyrinth, which is the unifying motif in my thesis, one that recurs throughout Passing Time, and Sebald’s oeuvre.

When Butor died in 2016, I posted a tribute here, and said at the end:

It is sad that Jean Stewart’s English translation is currently only available at prices that would deter all but the most dedicated readers. Perhaps, when the British press gets around to noticing Butor’s passing and commemorating it appropriately, some enterprising publisher will take a punt on reissuing it, and giving a new generation of readers the chance to explore those rainy streets and lose themselves in Bleston.

https://cathannabel.blog/2016/08/29/butor-in-manchester/

And that is, pretty much, exactly what happened. Manchester-based Pariah Press are publishing a new edition of Jean Stewart’s excellent translation, in paperback, in May. It is a thing of beauty and I’d urge anyone who is interested in twentieth-century postwar fiction, in Manchester and/or the mythology of the northern city, in displacement and exile, in the detective novel, in labyrinths, in time and memory, in non-linear narratives and unreliable narrators, to pre-order it now…

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Michel Butor, Passing Time, trans. Jean Stewart (Pariah Press, 2021). Cover design © Steven Cherry

Suddenly there were a lot of lights. … I gradually struggled free of drowsiness, sitting there alone in the corner of the compartment, facing the engine, beside the dark window-pane covered on the outside with raindrops, a myriad tiny mirrors each reflecting a quivering particle of the feeble light that drizzled down from the grimy ceiling.

Michel Butor, Passing Time, trans. Jean Stewart

Go on. You can thank me (and Pariah Press) later…

PASSING TIME

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