This is going to have to be a personal post rather than purporting to be a more abstract lit crit or review of said novel. I want to start more generally. A-levels seemed to be structured in an interesting way from an external perspective, that at some point they would confront the student or pupil with a particularly challenging, testing incident which almost seemed designed to force them to make a decision regarding their possible future or otherwise in that field. This may of course be paranoia, but if it is, it might still make a lot of sense to do this. For me, both English Literature and Biology seemed to do this, actually at the same time, although RE didn’t so far as I can tell, unless there’s something about my approach to such a subject, which after all has similarities with Philosophy, which meant that I breezed through whatever it was supposed to be. It may have been Biblical criticism. Alternatively, maybe it’s just that exposing oneself to a rigorous, wide-ranging and relatively advanced area of study just will tend to test one and is simply more likely to provide such hurdles. I’ve mentioned in passing that my experience at Pegwell Bay was nasty enough to persuade me that marine biology was not my future, but I won’t dwell on that because I want to focus more on what was happening at the same time and my response to it.
The Pegwell Bay experience was in fact linked to the ‘Moby Dick’ one. Since I was busy away trying to do fieldwork in a muddy patch of beach over in Thanet, I didn’t get informed of the summer reading for A-level English Literature. It wasn’t all bad by the way: there were cuttlefish eggs washed up on the beach containing fetuses which changed colour according to their background, and it may also have borne in certain facts about me to one of my biology teachers which were helpful when he became year head for writing my reference for UCCA. However, a couple of things came together, one of which was that I totally failed to read the set novel for the summer, Herman Melville’s ‘Moby Dick’. I also failed to read James Joyce’s ‘Dubliners’, but that was easier to remedy because it’s an anthology. ‘Homage To Catalonia’ was also involved now I come to think of it, and I managed to bluff my way through that quite effectively. The same was unfeasible for Melville’s brick of a novel. I haven’t re-read it for the purposes of this blog, but I have listened to Melvyn Bragg and guests going on about it and other things, and one comment made on it is ironically probably true of my life. The reviewer said that reading that novel was likely to completely change one’s life and attitude towards literature. Ironically, that’s entirely true of me because what it did was persuade me not to want to have anything at all to do with mainstream literature ever again, and this has been a major theme in my life ever since, with one exception in the form of considering writing my MA dissertation on the pauses in Samuel Beckett’s plays, which I didn’t follow through, and thereby hangs another unrelated tale too boring to relate here.
I first heard of ‘Moby Dick’, probably in November 1975 when David Attenborough mentioned it on ‘Fabulous Animals’ as a story where a white sperm whale is pursued by the one-legged Captain Ahab who dies holding on to the harpoon impaled in their side. It seemed to be some kind of sea story, something on which I was quite keen on at the time – Flannan Isle comes to mind, and the mysterious fate of the Waratah. There was nothing in my experience which should’ve put me off it, although I never considered reading it back then. And of course I unfortunately never considered reading it when I was supposed to either. It’s a dramatic life change to shift from being so enthusiastic and engrossed in mainstream novels to being utterly hostile and disillusioned about them. Some of this is undoubtedly due to the sheer length of ‘Moby Dick’ and the circumstances surrounding my failure to read it, but it was also observed by my O-level English teacher that whereas the earlier course did a good job of encouraging love of literature, the later one tended to kill it stone dead, such that even decades later someone exposed to it is happily using the cliché “stone dead” rather than using my imagination a bit more.
I still don’t really know what to make of the novel. It’s been observed that it has strong homoerotic overtones and that it probably isn’t post hoc eisegesis to read that into it. “Ishmael” shares a bed with Queequeg early on in the story and the man’s world described almost throughout lends itself to that too. Queequeg’s tattoos are also significant masculine adornment, and his unused coffin being decorated with them and later saving “Ishmael’s” life after the shipwreck, where he hugs the empty coffin until rescued. This seriously suggests that the references to “seamen” and “sperm” are absolutely meant as doubles entendres, and this is not a retroactive projection by bored schoolboys, but the actual “Moby Dick” title just seems to be a happy accident as the word “dick” wasn’t used that way back then. It seems strange that something so puerile-seeming could be incorporated into a popular mainstream novel of the nineteenth century without any comment, but maybe it was hidden in plain sight, as so many things are. It probably goes without saying that the whale in this is easily interpreted as a phallic symbol, and in fact just as many phalluses are unwanted and intrusive, the presence of this book in my life was also like that. It’s a massive erection, basically.
There used to be a whale fetus in a large jar in one of the biology labs. I always used to feel equally sad and fascinated about it. I expected that some unfortunate event had occurred to the mother, possibly in the Faroes, which had led to it falling into the school’s hands. The human skeletons which used to be present in state schools often also had dodgy origins and the one at mine was apparently eventually repatriated to its next of kin, which was actually two separate families as it was made up of two separate sets of human remains. I don’t know what happened to the whale, but I wonder if it might have been used by the English department in connection with the novel.
I’d long been fascinated by whales, and in fact cetaceans in general. The only ones I’d actually seen in the flesh except for the pilot whale were bottlenose dolphins, but there had been a lot of emphasis over the ’70s and ’80s that they were both magnificent and endangered, and in Britain they are of course the property of the Crown, like swans. It was what everyone used to associate with Greenpeace. Beyond that, as I’ve said before I used to be really into reading stories centred on other species such as ‘Watership Down’, ‘Ring Of Bright Water’, ‘Tarka The Otter’ and many others. These don’t sanitise the lives of the animals concerned and there’s plenty of death and suffering in them. Anthropomorphism also varies. ‘Tarka the Otter’ probably does it the least out of these examples. I’ve talked about my “preganism” before on here. I wasn’t to go vegan for three years after reading the novel and at that point wasn’t even vegetarian although I’d considered it. However, I had already long since begun to adopt what I might call a biocentric attitude: that humans are members of the animal kingdom and not set apart in a manner which is different than the individual traits of any other species.
I read ‘Moby Dick’ with that mindset, and having that attitude makes it a really difficult read on top of the difficulty the book presents more generally. Whales are charismatic organisms associated with characteristics such as majesty, grace and beauty. Melville does attempt to acknowledge that in his writing, but when it comes down to it, ‘Moby Dick’ is basically about a group of men who go out and murder numerous beings for their livelihood. They’re basically contract killers, but their victims are also generally arbitrary, with the exception of Ahab and the White Whale. It isn’t even expedient that these individuals need to be gotten out of the way as it might be in war, espionage or organised crime. They’re not even on the level of drive-by shootings, which seem to be about demonstrating loyalty and how far a gang member is prepared to go. These murders are arbitrary and solely motivated by profit, and okay it may be a tough life and manly, dangerous work but it reflects an obliviously genocidal attitude towards the biosphere. All that said, there is some mitigation in that in a sense going out and murdering whales is more humane from a utilitarian perspective than killing buffalo, a comparison Melville doesn’t make because the big massacre didn’t happen until a couple of decades later, because a whale can have a mass of more than a hundred buffalo and only one of them dies to provide all that mass of material for food and industrial purposes. By contrast, murdering the nameless beasts exploited for their milk, or sheep and pigs requires a lot more deaths to produce the same amount of materials, so in a sense whaling is much less unethical than “livestock” farming, and this is reflected in the murder of pilot whales in the Faroes – it’s just the same as what happens in a slaughterhouse except that it takes place in the open for all to see rather than being hidden away as if we’re ashamed of it as a society. But I felt like I was being expected to empathise with characters carrying out genocide. Now that can happen of course, and I’m sure that there are plenty of works of art that attempt to force their audiences to throw their lot in emotionally with the “baddies”, as ’twere, but when this is done as far as I know this is more to give the readers pause for thought about humanising evildoers. I wouldn’t say there’s no element of this at all in the story but I still feel that Melville cannot bring himself to condemn the practice of whaling completely, and it’s hardly worth observing that this is because he’s a man of his times and culture. Likewise, I can’t step out of my life and times in considering this book, which raises the frequent question of universality.
Melville does not, however, portray whaling as a morally neutral or positive activity. In chapter 105, ‘Does The Whale’s Magnitude Diminish? – Will He Perish?’, he does contemplate the possibility of whales becoming extinct at a remarkably early stage for that mindset. He compares the blood-soaked lower decks and crew as the corpse’s flesh is rendered to being in Hell, in Chapter 96, ‘The Try-Works’. This, however, also draws a parallel between this industrialised work and the “dark Satanic mills”, so it isn’t that the rendering toil is particularly infernal just because of what they’re essentially doing so much as it being infernal along with, say, working down a coal mine or in a steelworks. Hence industrial labour itself is a form of damnation, and certainly those who work in slaughterhouses are doing “proper” work and also the dirty work for a carnist population who seem to prefer to be oblivious, and the existence of factory ships out in the ocean carrying out the same dirty work is similar. But I don’t know whether Melville shows them in the same light.
I suspect that the White Whale is supposed to be a tabula rasa. I think it’s possible that the whiteness is supposed to be like a screen onto which diverse things can be projected. Chapter 42 is called ‘The Whiteness Of The Whale’. Without reading it, the concept of White fragility, though highly anachronistic, comes to mind, as does Han Kang’s ‘White Book’. Melville himself seems to portray whiteness as blankness and makes it horrifying, evoking the polar bear, the paleness of death and going on to connect it to cosmic indifference, and this might actually be the key to the whole book. Captain Ahab sees a rival in the White Whale, but none of the other captains or any of the crew think that way. He’s trying to make the whale personal when in fact the sheer vastness and whiteness make the true nature of the animal beyond comprehension, like the Universe. One gets the impression that “Ishmael” and Melville are both wrestling to make sense of the whale as a concept, and that the sheer length of the book is an attempt to render his narrative incomprehensible in the same way as the whale, and by extension the Universe, are. To the White Whale, Ahab is at most a tiny figure standing on a ship at the top of the world, dimensionally marginal and maybe not even that. Maybe to the White Whale, Ahab doesn’t even exist and there’s just the threat of the harpoon. The whiteness also acts as a mirror on which the characters see reflected their dominant attitude: anger, fear and awe. It’s also like the glare of the whiteness obliterates distinctions between good and evil, humanity and nature and sanity and madness.
One frustrating element of my English course’s, and in fact the more popular, approach to the novel is that the long quasi-encyclopaedic sections on “cetology”, as Melville puts it, are padding and can be skipped, because to my mind at the time, and possibly still, they’re the best bit of the novel. All the protagonists, human ones at least, emotional realism, interaction and dialogue mercifully take a back seat and finally we get to read something interesting and engaging. Even so, I think they’re there for two reasons. One is to ensure the novel is whale-sized and the other is to show a different way of attempting to encompass the cetacean and metaphorically the newly scientifically analysed natural world. This also fails. I may find it superficially comforting through systematisation, as I often do, but it’s not deep in the way Melville wishes it to be, and he acknowledges his failure as something common to us all.
Then there’s the issue of Starbuck, which nowadays is more shocking to me than it was then. Starbuck is the Pequod’s first mate and a Quaker, the first to recognise that Ahab is insane. He says of Ahab’s monomanic quest, “Vengeance on a dumb brute, [. . .] that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.”. Starbuck is the voice of reason, supposedly, and the moral compass. However, considering they’re out there murdering countless whales, it seems to me that the entire enterprise is operating in a moral vacuum. I don’t understand how a Quaker can be involved in something like this. I presume it isn’t supposed to be realistic but I do believe they were involved in whaling. They also owned slaves, and while I’m aware that the past is not like the present, I would also hope that there are certain values which would persist and the fact that this actually happened is almost enough to make me give up hope for humanity. Quakers, although I’m sure they acknowledge their failings, are supposed to be examples to others and carry the torch of progress. I also seem to recall that the ship is owned by Quakers: it’s a Quaker business. That’s enough to make me want to puke to be honest. Quakers as mass murderers, and that’s probably entirely realistic for the mid-nineteenth century CE.
I have to say that in spite of all this I found the names “Pequod” and “Queequeg” tantalising because they seem to betray a pattern of sound from the same language, possibly one spoken in Nantucket, and I wanted to know what that language was. It’s quite distinct from languages spoken elsewhere on the continent, unsurprisingly, which does at least show some respect for the distinct ethnicities the White people genocided and oppressed. Queequeg represents non-Western spiritual completeness, which is a bit like the noble savage myth but you can’t really expect English language literature from getting on for two centuries ago not to be racist, so unlike the rest I can look past that. Entertaining it, there is the well-known difference between the White men killing the buffalo and removing only small parts of their bodies and the more reverent and ecologically sound approach taken by their previous killers. It might be worth mentioning that Queequeg may be from a less homophobic culture than “Ishmael”, and therefore that the homoerotic overtones in their relationship might be less repressed for him, and there’s also the contrast between their friendship and Ahab’s animosity with the whale.
One notable feature of the book is that it purports to be the Great American Novel and is not set in America but on the ocean. It begins in North America but quickly leaves it, and there may be something about the idea that America actually is the world or aims to dominate it in that approach. The ocean is also the Wild West in a sense, unbounded, vast and full of potential. Twentieth century SF author Barry M Longyear also extended the notion of Manifest Destiny, this time into the cosmos, though in a manner conscious of colonialism, and in a way this novel is a precursor to that, although that potential is still quite nebulous at this point, perhaps reflecting the tabula rasa and projections made upon the whale. It makes the US feel like an infant nation looking forward to growing up and achieving great things.
As you can see, I haven’t got a lot to say about ‘Moby Dick’ and what I have said is highly contaminated by my own views and doesn’t seem germane to the novel. To me its role is probably as a whiteboard on which to discern what went wrong with my literary appreciation. I find that I can’t read it without being overcome with a kind of moral repulsion at its acceptance of the outrage against cetaceans as a backdrop to the story. This is partly admitted by Melville, but it also says something about me. You’d fail to appreciate Shakespeare if you couldn’t look past the fact that he wrote in an early modern Western society where Christianity was dominant, patriarchy and the monarchy were unquestioned and democracy was a minor detail of ancient Greek history. I do know someone who is in fact unable to appreciate him for these exact reasons, but I do enjoy his work. I encounter two basic problems with mainstream literary novels. One is that I tend to make too many associations and am unable to give them different weights, which is similar to my inability to recognise my own strengths and weaknesses. The other, though, is illustrated by my response to ‘Moby Dick’, namely that I can’t see past my moral outrage and am dominated by my immediate impressions of a piece of writing. Maybe in the end I am myself like Ahab and I can’t see past the white whale that is mainstream literary fiction. Maybe it’s a tabula rasa to me on which I end up projecting anything arbitrarily, or maybe it mirrors myself.
There you go: don’t say I don’t listen to my readers! I don’t want this to seem self-indulgent, so before I start I want to point out that this is a response to a comment, that someone would like me to do something like this, so that’s what I’m doing.
Without tinkering with HTML, it seems difficult to provide links within a document in WordPress, so for now I’ll just give you a table of contents in order to prevent you being overwhelmed with the length of this post:
1. The Eternal Present
2. The Never-Ending. . .December?
3. George Orwell Is Better Than War-Warwell
4. My Secret Diary, Aged 16¾
5. A Collision With The Great White Whale
6. Armageddon
7. The Stereophonic Present
8. Harvest For The World
9. The Ending Story
10. Life Off The Fast Lane
11. Green Shoots
The Eternal Present
To me, the year 1984 CE is a kind of eternal present. I sometimes joke about this, saying that all the years after that one were clearly made up, and someone pointed out to me that that was highly Orwellian, but in fact it really is the case that all years are made up and we just have this arbitrary numbering scheme based on someone’s incorrect guess about the birthdate of Jesus, and yes, here I’m assuming there was an historical Jesus, which considering I’m Christian is hardly surprising.
2. The Never-Ending. . .December?
There is a fairly easy if absurd way to make it 1984 still, which is just to have a never-ending December. It’s currently Hallowe’en 2025, in which case it’s the 14945th December 1984. This wouldn’t be a completely useless dating system and I sometimes think we can conceive of time (in the waking sense: see last entry) differently according to how we choose to parcel it up. Another way of making it 1984 would be to date years from forty years later, and no that’s not a mistake as there was no year zero in the Julian or Gregorian calendars. There was one in a certain Cambodian calendar of course, from 17th April 1975, where it was inspired by the French revolutionary Year One, the idea being that history started on that date because everything that happened before that was irrelevant, being part of capitalism and imperialism I presume. My insistence that it’s always 1984 is the opposite of that, as I’m affectedly sceptical about anything happening afterwards. Coincidentally, I use a day-based dating system starting on 17th July 1975 in my diary, and I don’t actually know why I do this, but it’s only ninety-one days after the start of Year Zero (there are other things to be said about Pol Pot which would reveal the over-simplification of this apparent myth). It’s based on the first dated entry in any notebook and my mother’s suggestion that I keep a diary which I didn’t follow. It’s actually the second dated entry, as the first one is of a series of measurements of a staircase, which isn’t really about anything personal. I’ve also toyed with the idea of Earth’s orbit being a couple of metres wider, which would make the year very slightly longer but which would add up over 4.6 aeons (Earth’s age) to quite a difference, but if that were so, asteroid impacts and mass extinctions wouldn’t’ve happened which did and other ones which didn’t might’ve, so it totally changes the history of the world if you do that. If the year was a week longer, it would now be 1988 dated from the same point, but a lot of other things would also be different such as the calendar. It’s quite remarkable how finely-tuned some things are.
3. George Orwell Is Better Than War-Warwell
Although I could go on in this vein, I sense it might irritate some people, so the rest of this is going to be about my feeling of the eternal present, how 1984 actually was to me and thoughts about George Orwell. I’m just telling you this if you feel like giving up at this point.
I have habitually said that “George Orwell is better than War-Warwell” as a reference to Harold MacMillan’s paraphrase of Winston Churchill, and I wonder if Churchill is one of those figures who is always having quotes misattributed to him, like Albert Einstein. The trouble is, of course, that this is a practically meaningless phrase which I can’t do anything with, although Sarada has published a story with that title. I’ve read a lot of Orwell, although unlike most people who have that doesn’t include ‘Animal Farm’. It’s been suggested that if he’d lived longer, he would’ve gone to the Right and become a rather embarrassing figure like David Bellamy or Lord Kelvin, but of course we don’t know and I don’t know what that’s based on. He was known to be quite keen on the idea of patriotism though, so maybe it’s that.
Within the universe of his novel ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, we don’t actually know that it is that year. It does seem to be about that time, because Winston Smith was a small boy just after the end of World War II. The Party is constantly revising history and is now claiming that Big Brother invented the steam engine, so it seems easily possible that it isn’t exactly 1984 and that either new years have been written into history or removed from it, and just maybe it’s always 1984 and has been for many years by that point. Maybe they just want to save on printing new calendars or are trying to perfect the year by repeating it over and over again, for example. Maybe ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ is like ‘Groundhog Day’, and what we read is merely one iteration among many of that story. I’ve heard, although appropriately maybe this can’t be trusted, that Orwell simply came up with it by transposing the last two digits of the year he wrote it. Whereas it’s possible to play with this, the truth is probably simply that he needed to give Winston enough time to grow up and reach his forties so he could tell the story.
It interests me that there was a somewhat jocular, artsy attempt to claim that a period called the 19A0s existed between the late ’70s and early ’80s which has been edited out of history, which is similar to the Phantom Time Hypothesis. Just to cover these, I’ve written about this before, and the Phantom Time Hypothesis, so if you want you can read about it there.
A slightly puzzling aspect of ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ is why its title is spelt out rather than written as figures, but it seems that this was common practice at the time. It’s one thing that everyone gets wrong about the book, as it’s almost always referred to as ‘1984’. I should point out that one reason I didn’t get any further than A-level with English Literature is that I experience an impenetrable thicket of associations whenever I consider mainstream creative works which make it difficult to respond meaningfully to them. In the case of Orwell’s novel though, since it’s arguably science fiction it might be more appropriate than usual to do so, since that’s also how I respond to that genre but find it more in keeping with that kind of imagination. I’m not alone in this it seems: Orwell’s novel is analysed in such a manner by the YouTube channel ‘1984 Lore’. I myself used Newspeak to write a short story about a kibbutz-like community on another planet where everyone actually spoke Esperanto to explore whether language restricts thought, portraying it in terms of the idea that it does.
4. My Secret Diary, Aged 16¾
My personal experience in the year 1984 represents a peak in my life. Note that it’s just one peak, neither the biggest nor the only one. It doesn’t overshadow the year of my wedding or the births of our children, grandchildren or anything like that. ’82 and ’83 are also significant in their own ways. ’82 I thought of as the “endless summer” characterised by the nice pictures of young people in yellow T-shirts and long blond hair on the envelopes you got back from the chemists with the photos in them, and ’83 had been particularly poignant, but the year after those had been highly focussed on for a long time in various circles by many people. 1984 opened for me hiding under a table in a suburban living room in Canterbury whispering to my friend about when midnight came. I was wearing a navy blue M&S sweatshirt whose inner flock was worn on the inside of the left elbow, a blue and white striped shirt with a button-down collar which I was only wearing because she liked it, and jeans which annoyed me by not having any bum pockets, and she was wearing jeans which did have bum pockets and a white blouse with yellow check-line lines on it, but it was completely dark so neither of us could see anything. I was sixteen and had had a lot to drink considering my age, naughtily, as had she. We eventually conjectured that midnight must have passed and I rang my dad, who came to pick me up and whom I immediately told I’d had some alcohol (Martini, Cinzano and a Snowball) which my friend saw as not only typical of my impulsiveness and indiscreetness but also liable to get me in trouble but it didn’t. The street lights looked rather blurry on the way home. Thus opened my 1984. A few days later I was back in the sixth form and my friend Mark Watts, who was later to go on to found an investigative journalism agency and uncover a number of cases of child sexual abuse, informed me that it was vital that we didn’t fall for whatever spin the media were likely to put on it being the year named after that novel and that whenever he referred to George Orwell it would be under the name Lionel Wise (Eric Blair – Lionel Blair; Eric Blair – Eric Morecambe – Ernie Wise), which was quite clever if also rather adolescent, which is what we were. We were all very conscious that it was 1984 at last. Anne Nightingale played David Bowie’s ‘1984’ and Van Halen’s ‘1984’ on her request show on the evening of New Year’s Day. I didn’t have a hangover, because I don’t get them. I asked my brother to record something off Anne Nightingale because I was about to go out again to see my friends, and it happened that the next track was Steve Winwood’s ‘While You See A Chance, Take It’, which I’d wanted to get on tape for years but he cut it off halfway through the first verse. The machine on which that was recorded was a rapidly failing mono Sanyo radio cassette recorder which my mum was annoyed was deteriorating so fast seeing as it was less than four years old and I’d got it for my thirteenth birthday. Incidentally, I’m writing all this without reference to diaries or any other kind of record. I just remember it, plainly, clearly, in great detail, and I don’t know how this compares to others’ memories. My memories of much of the ’80s are as clear as flashbulb memories because they occur within my reminiscence bump. There are errors, such as the exact name of the Steve Winwood record, but also a lot of clarity. Anyway, later that year on my seventeenth birthday, 30th July, I got a stereo boom box possibly from Sony which I first recorded on on 8th August, namely Tracey Ullman’s ‘Sunglasses’, followed by ‘Smalltown Boy’. In September, I got my first job, as a cashier at the new Safeway, which looked enormous to me at the time but on returning to the Waitrose which it now is seems really tiny nowadays, and lost it after eleven weeks due to being too slow on the till, not assertive enough to turn people away from the “Nine Items Or Less” (now “fewer” apparently) queue, and £2 out on the cashing up on two occasions. Apparently this was a lot stricter than other places, such as Lipton’s where my sister worked and who was much further out than I on many occasions when she first worked there. I could say more about her situation there but probably shouldn’t. Anyway, I got £1.41 an hour from Safeway which I saved up to buy the first big item I’d ever got for myself, which was a Jupiter Ace microcomputer. Which brings me to computers.
I was very into computers in the early to mid-’80s, but also deeply ambivalent about them. At the start of the year, the family had owned a ZX81 for a year and a bit. I found this annoying because it was such a low-spec machine, but restrictions fuel creativity so it was in fact not a bad thing. I was spending a lot of my time reading computer magazines and wishing I had a better computer, which I resolved late in that year, and also writing software, mainly graphically-oriented, which was difficult considering that our computer only had a resolution of 64×48, although I was later able to increase this to 192 on the Y-axis by pointing the I register on the Z80A somewhere else than the character set, so I could make bar graphs which looked quite good. I did also write a computerised version of Ramon Llull’s ‘Machine That Explains Everything’, a couple of primitive computer viruses and an adventure game. Later on, after I got the Jupiter Ace, I got it to display runes and produce screeds of nonsense words in Finnish. As I said though, I was ambivalent. I’ve never been comfortable with my interest in IT for several reasons, and for more reasons at this point. One reason was that at the time I was communist, and also kind of Stalinist, and felt that the use of IT and automation as fuelled by the microchip boom would create massive unemployment and reduce the power of the workers to withdraw their labour. However, it isn’t clear to me now why me not having a ZX81 would’ve made any difference to that. In the middle of the year, I decided that communism was over-optimistic and there was a brief period during which people were very eager for me to adopt their views, but I quickly opted for Green politics. I was not yet anarchist and believed in a Hobbesian state of nature. Besides this perspective, I was also uncomfortable about my interest in computers because it seemed nerdy, something very negative at the time, and unbalanced – obsessive and not “humanities” enough to my taste. It felt too much like my comfort zone and not challenging enough. It did, however, become apparent that I had spent so much time studying computers, with text books as well as mags and experimentation, that I could’ve easily aced the O-level, which was another example of how my formal educational focus was outside educational institutions at the time, and it was also suggested that my aforementioned friend with whom I hid under the table and was trying to learn BASIC at the technical college, would’ve welcomed me teaching her. This got to the point where I helped her with her homework. On another occasion, an acquaintance was trying to write a FORTH programming language interpreter in Z80 assembler and I had a look through it with interest. One of my other friends later went on to write parts of the major GNU text editor “religion” Emacs, already almost a decade old by ’84, which I still use today. However, I found my interest in computers made me feel embarrassed and self-conscious and I felt somewhat ashamed of it. I think I found a lot of my interests at the time to be very personal and not something I felt comfortable sharing with others.
It was also the year of my perhaps most significant cultural shift. I entered the year enthusiastic about mainstream literature and poetry. I had been warned, though, by my O-level English teacher, that A-level English Lit was likely to spoil my appreciation of reading, and this did in fact happen. Early in the year my enthusiasm continued and I came to enjoy reading poetry and literature. I planned to continue my writing on the works of Samuel Beckett as part of my A-level and the fact we were studying Joyce gave me optimism in that regard. We had a fair bit of freedom to do that kind of thing. In the summer exams, my practical criticism of a particular poem was chosen as a model answer for others to emulate and I was able, for example, to uncover themes in poetry which my teacher hadn’t noticed, which was mainly due to my insistence on maintaining a wide education. I was applying to university in the later part of the year, having researched them in the earlier part, and having opted for degrees in English and Psychology or Philosophy and Psychology, I was clearly sufficiently committed to English at the time to consider it as a first degree. However, all of that was about to go to shit.
5. A Collision With The Great White Whale
It may be worth analysing what went wrong in some depth, but the simple facts of how it happened were as follows. My A-levels were in English, RE and Biology, which I want to stress is a very popular combination. At the end of the first year, around June, there was a marine biology field trip which was in itself quite formative for me because I didn’t relish getting stuck in the stinky, sticky black tarry mud encouraged by the anaerobic respiration in Pegwell Bay, an estuary on the edge of Thanet. It was cold and wet, and the water was of course salty, and I thought I’d ruined that sweatshirt I’d mentioned earlier which I was once again wearing. My dissatisfaction was palpable. Anyway, it was assumed by the English department that those who were off on the field trip would, possibly from their friends, learn their summer reading assignments, which were to read James Joyce’s ‘Dubliners’ anthology and Herman Melville’s ‘Moby Dick’. I didn’t get that information, didn’t talk about the assignments with my friends because it wasn’t a priority for us and consequently was confronted with reading an absolute doorstep of a book plus much of the Joyce one, which was less problematic because being short stories it was easy to catch up with that one. I was then confronted, on reading Melville’s novel, with a load of American men murdering whales for a living. Right then, I wasn’t even vegetarian but I did, like a lot of other people, believe in saving the whale. Over my childhood, I’d read a lot of story books about animals, like ‘Ring Of Bright Water’, ‘All Creatures Great And Small’, ‘Incredible Journey’, ‘Bambi’, ‘Watership Down’ and ‘A Skunk In The Family’. Of course there was peril in these and also horrible deaths on occasion, not to mention sad endings, but the focus was on the otter, the bovines, dogs, cats, deer, rabbit and skunk. There is no problem with depicting them being treated badly, suffering and so forth. But in ‘Moby Dick’, there is never any sympathy or focus on the experience of the whales or acknowledgement of them as victims, in a similar manner to the people who had lived in North America before White colonisers turned up. It was all about something else, and there wasn’t just an elephant in the room but a whale. I was unable to bring myself to step into Ishmael’s or anyone else’s shoes. The only bits I could tolerate were the encyclopaedic sections. I could go into more depth here. I think Melville was probably trying to make a whale-sized book, was using the whale as a metaphor for the intractable and incomprehensible nature of, well, nature and the world in general and as a tabula rasa, them being white like a piece of paper, and there’s the angle that the whale is in some way a phallic symbol. Ahab also anthropomorphises the whale, seeing them as a rival in a battle with him when in the end the whale is just the whale and doesn’t even realise the tiny figures above lobbing harpoons at them are even conscious beings. From the novel’s perspective, the whale probably isn’t even a conscious being. Hence I was confronted with what I read as a hostile, nasty and animal-hating, actually animal-indifferent story where I couldn’t work out whether any of the characters were supposed to be sympathetic and,moreover, the only chapters I could actually garner any interest in were dismissed as mere padding by my teachers. I also found, for some reason, that the same approach I’d been taking to poetry up until the summer no longer seemed to work. It probably didn’t help that one of my teachers was a frustrated Classics teacher who later left and taught that at the King’s School, although I was interested in the classics she managed to shoehorn into the lessons such as Oedipus Tyrannus, the Oresteia and Antigone. I would say, though, that I really didn’t get on with the Oresteia because I felt very much that it lacked universalism. None of that was in the exams of course, but I wasn’t ever very oriented towards those. I was more just interested or not.
The autumn of the year was marked mainly by anxious procrastination about submitting my UCCA form, which I handed in a month later than I was supposed to due to indecision about what to put in my personal statement, which wasn’t up to much partly because of not wanting to admit what I was interested in, and partly because of not pursuing it in a public way due to the shame I felt about admitting it. I also got annoyed with universities insisting on being put first, so rather than selecting places I actually wanted to go to, although my first choice, Keele, I was very keen on due to the balanced and eclectic nature of their educational approach, I deliberately listed Nottingham, Reading and Exeter, followed by Sheffield in which I was in fact fairly interested in. I got rejected by all of them except Keele and Sheffield, Exeter apparently by return of post. Among the polys I applied for Hatfield, Oxford and NELP, and would’ve got into NELP in fact. I liked the modular nature of the course at Oxford, which appealed to me for the same reason as Keele did.
6. Armageddon
Another association which arrived in 1984 and which has been with me ever since is the idea of “proper Britain”. I may have mentioned this before, but the notorious nuclear holocaust drama ‘Threads’ was broadcast on 23rd September 1984, notable for being the first depiction of nuclear winter in the mass media, and I remember being edgelordy about it by saying to my friends that it was over-optimistic. I was ostentatiously and performatively depressive at the time. I did not in fact feel this, but my takeaway from it was probably unusual. There’s a scene at the start where Ruth and Jimmy are canoodling on Curbar Edge above Hope Valley which really struck me. It was grey, drizzly and clearly quite cold, even though I think the action begins in May. There’s also the heavily built up large city of Sheffield, where I might be going in a year or so, and it suddenly crystallised my image of what Britain was really like. Not the South with its many villages and small towns densely dotted about with relatively dry and sunny weather, which I was used to, but the larger block of large post-industrial cities with redbrick terraced houses, back-to-backs, towerblocks and brutalist municipal architecture set against a background of rain, wind and greyness. I relished that prospect, and it felt like real Britain. This is how the bulk of the British population lives, and it becomes increasingly like that the further north you get, hence my repeated attempts to move to Scotland, which in a way I feel is more British than England because of many of those features. By contrast, if you go from Kent to France it’s basically the same landscape and climate with different furniture. Maybe a strange reaction to a depiction of a nuclear war, but there you go.
I did, however, also feel very much that it would be strange and foreign to move away to an area dominated by Victorian redbrick terraced houses. I couldn’t imagine that they’d ever feel like home to me and I couldn’t envisage settling down there. I was still very much a Southerner at that time. I was also, however, fully aware of the privileged bubble I was living in and it made me feel very awkward.
Nor am I ignoring the actual content of the film. The Cold War and the threat of nuclear destruction was very high in many people’s minds at the time and it almost seemed inevitable. This made even bothering to make plans for the future seem rather pointless and almost like busy work. We all “knew” we were going to die horribly, as was everyone around us, so doing the stuff I’ve mentioned, like applying to university, seemed more like something I did as a distraction from that worry than something with an actual aim sometimes, depending on my mood. This had a number of consequences. One is that I wonder if a lot of Gen-Xers underachieve because they missed out on pushing themselves into things in their youth, expecting the world to end at any time. Another is that as the ’80s wore on, pop music and other aspects of popular culture began to reflect that anxiety. Ultimately even Squeeze (basically) ended up producing an eerie and haunting post-nuclear song in the shape of ‘Apple Tree’. Alphaville’s ‘Forever Young’ particularly captures the attitude and is widely misunderstood. The reason we’d be forever young is that we’d never get a chance to grow up and live out full lives. That single was released a mere four days after ‘Threads’ was broadcast.
7. The Stereophonic Present
Speaking of music, there were something like four bands in the Sixth Form at that point, the most prominent being The Cosmic Mushroom, clearly influenced by the Canterbury Scene even in the mid-’80s. My own attitude to music was to concentrate on cassettes because I didn’t trust myself to take care of vinyl properly. The advent of proper stereo in my life was on my birthday at the end of July, and there’s something vivid and recent-sounding about all stereo music I own for that reason. This is in fact one factor in my feeling that 1984 is current rather than in the past. The present is characterised by clear, stereophonic music, the past by lo-fi mono, and that switch occurred for me in summer that year. This is actually more vivid than the earlier shift between black and white and colour TV. Incidentally, CDs were out there for sure, but only for the rich, having been first released two years previously. Like mobile ‘phones, they were a “yuppie” thing, like jug kettles. Back to music. Effectively the charts and my perception of them that year were dominated by ‘Relax’, by Frankie Goes To Hollywood. This was released in November the previous year and entered the charts in early January. This got banned as it climbed the charts, which boosted its popularity enormously and got it to number 1. It stayed in the Top 100 until April the next year. We played it at the school discos, the other standard being ‘Hi-Ho Silver Lining’, which we all used to sing along and dance to. My personal preferences included The The, Bauhaus and The Damned at the time, although the ongoing appreciation of the likes of Kate Bush continued.
8. Harvest For The World
On 24th October, the famous Michael Buerk report on the famine in Ethiopia was broadcast. This led in the next couple of years to Live Aid and Run The World, but from that year’s perspective it only just began. There’s been a lot of justified criticism of media framing of the famine, but as a naive teenager I didn’t have much awareness of that and simply saw it as a disaster which required a response from me, which was initially in the form of a sponsored silence for the whole school in the sports hall, then later a sponsored 24- or 36-hour fast supervised by one of my biology teachers in which I also participated. Although I can’t really mention this without pointing out that the whole thing was dodgy, it did start a ball rolling which continued in much later political activism on my part and a passionate youthful idealism to make the world a better place, which I felt confident had to come soon and meant action from me. ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ was a further effort in that campaign, satirised by Chumbawumba as ‘Pictures Of Starving Children Sell Records’ and roundly criticised by the World Development Movement, but at the time I knew nothing of this. By the way, it’s remarkable how the unpopular Chumbawumba cynicism managed to get from the political fringe into the mainstream in just a few years with the Simpsons parody ‘We’re Sending Our Love Down The Well’ only eight years later, although that was also linked to a Gulf War song it seems, which however is in that tradition, which I first became aware of, superficially, that year. In fact I can’t overestimate the importance of this sequence of events, even with its grubby and cynical connotations, and my support of it has a simplicity and innocence which I wish in a way I still had. I want the world to be one in which something like that works straightforwardly and simply. As I’ve said before, nobody is Whiter or more middle class than I am.
A rather different aspect of this is that I and someone called Louise almost got the giggles during the sponsored silence and we both spent most of our time doing it, which was I think a whole hour, trying not to laugh. A while after that the same thing happened with the two of us in an English class, though on that occasion we gave into it and there was actually nothing provoking it at all. It then spread through the whole class. Once again, in an English class shortly after that, the teacher, discussing Moby Dick of course, took out a model of a sperm whale on wheels unexpectedly and rolled it up and down the desk, which again led to uncontrollable laughter. This was Thatcher’s Britain, yes, and most of us hated her, but it wasn’t grim or joyless, at least for seventeen year olds, and I actually managed to get some pleasure out of Herman Melville’s writing!
CND was very active at the time. I, however, was not, for a couple of reasons. I was slightly uncomfortable with the idea of unilateral disarmament, and in fact that was the last of the standard lefty/Green causes I committed to, but I had a feeling they were right and wanted to go on the demos but never actually did. This is by contrast with the Miners’ Strike. Kent, like Northern France, was a coalmining area and the strike was very close to us because several of my friends were in coal miners’ families. I asked what I could do but nothing really came to mind. I was also aware of hunt sabbing but was unable to work out how to find out about it. Had I got involved in that, I might’ve gone vegan years earlier than I did.
9. The Ending Story
Then there was cinema. My aforementioned friend under the table rang me up one day and just said we should go and watch ‘Champion’ at the ABC. That cinema, incidentally, was managed by someone I later got to know when he and I both coincidentally moved to Leicester. I was surprised my friend just spontaneously bet on the horses when I’d never dreamt of doing that, at the time because it was gambling. The film, in case you didn’t know as it may be quite obscure, was based on a true story about a famous jockey who has cancer and survives. One impression I got from it was that he looked like Lionel Blair, which is the second time I’ve mentioned him today. At this time it was still possible to sit in the cinema for as long as you wanted while the same films, yes, films plural, played over and over again. This was actually the last year it was possible. The year after, I’d just finished watching ‘Letter To Brezhnev’ and the ushers chucked us all out. It was a real shock, and you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. It meant that parents could use cinemas as babysitting services, though this may have been somewhat reckless by today’s standards. They did the same with swimming pools: Kingsmead had this going on, although specifically in ’84 I didn’t exercise much apart from walking eight miles, to school and back, every day. This lazy year ended immediately with my New Years’ resolution to go running every morning from 1st January 1985.
‘Ghostbusters’ was also quite memorable. I took my younger brother to see it and I wasn’t expecting the whole audience to shout the song when it came on. It’s a good film, with a memorable scene involving a fridge and an unforgettable line which is usually cut towards the end. It also mentions selenium for no apparent reason, and has Zener cards at the start. At the time, rather surprisingly, it seemed to be generally accepted even in academia that some people were psychic. I often wonder whether it’s really good-quality research which has led to received opinion on this changing or whether it’s just a reputational thing that psi is now widely rejected by academic researchers. The other major film I remember watching was ‘Star Trek III’, which is also very good, and at the time there was no plan to bring Star Trek back. It was considered a sequel too far by one of my friends, so at the time it looked like the show was completely defunct and they were trying to revive it beyond all reason. I also saw ‘2010’, which I liked for incorporating the new findings about Europa, but it definitely lacks the appeal of the original. Incidentally, the long gap between Voyager visits to Saturn and Uranus was underway and the remaining probe wouldn’t get there for another two years. The original ‘Dune’ also came out this year, and although I wanted to see it, I don’t think it came to Canterbury. I wouldn’t’ve liked it at the time, having seen it since, and oddly I had the impression it was in a completely different directing style and that it was also a 3-D film. It may also have been the most expensive feature film ever made at the time. ‘1984’, of course, also came out then, but that deserves its own treatment. As other people I’ve since got to know of my age have commented, ‘Neverending Story’ marked the first time I perceived a film as definitely too young for me, and in a way that realisation reflected the twilight before the dawn of adulthood to me.
10. Life Off The Fast Lane
Speaking of marks of adulthood, many of my peers were learning to drive and passing their tests at this point. Although I got a provisional licence that year and my parents strongly suggested I learn, I refused to do so for environmental and anti-materialistic reasons. Although I’ve had lessons since, I’ve never in fact got there and I’ve also heard that an ADHD diagnosis can bar one from driving in any case, if it affects one’s driving ability. I’m not sure mine would but I do think my dyspraxia is a serious issue there. 1984 is in fact the only year I’ve independently driven any motorised vehicle, namely one friend’s scooter and other’s motorbike. Like the underage drinking, it’s apparent that we didn’t take certain laws particularly seriously at the time and I’m wondering if that was just us, our age or whether that’s changed since. I was dead set against learning to drive, and this was probably the first thing which marked me as not destined to live a “normal” adult life. It has on two occasions prevented me from getting paid work.
Television didn’t form a major part of my life at the time. We couldn’t get Channel 4 yet, so the groundbreaking work done there was a closed book to me. ‘Alas Smith And Jones’ started in January and incredibly continued to run for fourteen years. I’d stopped watching ‘Doctor Who’ two years previously when ‘Time Flight’ was so awful that I decided it was a kid’s show and put it away. Tommy Cooper died on stage. The second and final series of ‘The Young Ones’ broadcast. ‘Crimewatch UK’, which would eventually become compulsive but guilty viewing for Sarada and me, started. In a somewhat similar vein, ‘The Bill’ started in October, which I used to enjoy watching years later due to the handheld camera work, which made it seem very immediate and “real” somehow. NYPD Blue is like that for other reasons incidentally. ‘Casualty’ was still two years in the future and ‘Angels’ had just ended, so I was in a wilderness of no medical dramas.
11. Green Shoots
Also, of course, the Brighton hotel bombing took place, and many of my friends felt very conflicted because on the one hand there was the general sympathy and empathy for people being attacked, injured and killed, but on the other they were very much hated for what they were doing. I’m sure this was a widespread feeling, and there is of course the band Tebbit Under Rubble, which very much expresses one side of that sentiment. Greenham Common was in progress and a major eviction took place in March. Although I was later to become heavily involved in the peace movement, at the time I was still very much on the sidelines although some of the people I knew were connected, and I do remember thinking that computer and human error were major and unavoidable risks which meant that the very existence of nuclear arsenals was too dangerous to be allowed to continue.
Then there was the Bishop of Durham, and since I was doing an A-level in RE at the time, his stance was highly relevant. The Sea Of Faith Movement was in full swing, which promoted a kind of secularised Christianity which was largely non-theistic or even atheist in nature, and the foundations were being laid in my mind which I’d later extend but allow the high-control group I became involved in to demolish, almost inexplicably. Over that whole period, I was expected to read a newspaper of my choice and take cuttings from it on relevant religious and moral issues to put in a scrapbook, so my long-term readership of ‘The Guardian’ began a few months before this and persisted through the year. It was either 25p or 30p at the time, and this was before colour newspapers had come to be. I had also been an avid Radio 4 listener since 1980, but unlike later I also listened to Radio 3 a bit, never really managing to appreciate classical music to the full.
This was also the year I finally decided I wanted to become an academic philosopher, and I still think I could’ve followed that through though it didn’t happen. This is the end of a kind of winnowing process probably connected to my dyspraxia, where I became increasingly aware of practical things which I simply couldn’t do, I’d been put off biology by the griminess and unpleasantness of field work and therefore philosophy was the way forward. That said, like many other people I was also very motivated to study psychology in an attempt to understand myself, and as you probably know a lot of psychology undergraduates begin their degrees by being concerned about major issues in their own personalities, so in that respect I’m not unusual. I also presented two assemblies, one on existentialism and the other on the sex life of elephants as a parable of romantic love.
I feel like this could go on and on, so I’m going to finish off this reminiscence in a similar way to how I started. My emotional world revolved around the friend I was hiding under the table with at the beginning of the year and our significance to each other was important to both of us. About halfway through it, having just visited her she became concerned that she and I were going to be found together alone in the house by her parents who were coming back unexpectedly, so I left the house by the back door and crept surreptitiously over the front garden, only to be stopped and “citizen’s arrested” by their next door neighbour. This turned out to make the situation more embarrassing for her and me than it would’ve been if I’d just left when they came back. I don’t know if anything can be made or a picture can be drawn of who she or I was at the time by putting those two incidents together.
I’m aware that I haven’t talked about Orwell’s book and its adaptations as much as I’d like, so that’s something I’ll need to come back to, and there are huge things I’ve missed out, but I hope I’ve managed to paint a portrait of my 1984 and possibly also yours. I may also have portrayed someone who peaked in high school, but I do also think tremendous things happened afterwards. 1984 is, though, the first foothill of my life, which makes it significant. It’s sometimes said that the reminiscence bump is only there because fifteen to twenty-five is the most eventful period of one’s time here, but maybe not. It’s hard to say.
A Box Of Chocolates 