Aldiss, Marx, Lyer and more

[sawyl]

Quite a few worthwhile things in today's Guardian Review. Firstly, Brian Aldiss on art and science fiction, via restaurants and Wagner. Probably best read after listening to the latest episode of Imagining Albion from Radio 4.

Francis Wheen's essay on Marx' Das Kapital — the first of a series of extracts from an anthology called Books that Shook the World — makes for fascinating reading. It opens with a nice story about Marx, on the virge of publishing the first volume of Kapital, recommending to Engels that he read Balzac's The Unknown Masterpiece, a story about an artist who has spent ten years labouring to produce a great painting only to be told that his constant reworkings have obscured the original meaning. The irony? Marx had spent years constantly rewriting bits of Kapital in an attempt to perfect its meaning and literary style, only to be left with vast, sprawling work. I have a vague memory of a moment in a radio play of a few years ago in which one of the characters, upon discovering that her supposedly communist husband is actually a double agent, remarks sardonically, "Whenever I encountered something I didn't understand about the Soviet system, he would say, 'It's all explained in Kapital', and now I discover he hasn't even read it..." Somehow, I feel, Marx would have appreciated the joke.

Finally, Pico Lyer's article on the tendency of interviews to develop into group think was intriguing. My favourite part? The paraphrasing of something Susan Sontag almost said:

How dare you ask me about a stray comment in an interview when you could be talking about the texts I have spent decades labouring to make clear and precise? This occasion is itself, in a certain light, nonsense. I am speaking loosely and thoughtlessly in part to get you to pay attention to books on which I have lavished the best years of my life.

Exactly: writing has, in some cases, become an adjunct to celebrity and not the other way round. It's amusing to think of how Marx would have responded if placed in a similar situation. It's hard to feel that, after spending decades perfecting Kapital, he'd have put up with that sort of behaviour, given his legendarily sharp tongue. No, he'd probably give short shrift to a lazy interviewer who asked him to sum it up in one word so that they could spend the rest of the interview clarifying a throwaway remark about Van Morrison made years before...