Death, War, Pestilence and Lockdown:
Some Thoughts on Re-Reading Camus’s The Plague 

By Dr Christine Simon

When the Algerian town of Oran is hit by plague in the late 1940s, it is caught off guard. Its residents, absorbed in the ‘peaceful and unthinking tranquillity’ [1] of their daily routines, are suddenly forced to confront the reality of horrific death, quarantine, curfews, food and electricity shortages, looting and — with the closure of the city gates — separation from friends and family in other parts of the country. The municipal authorities are slow to acknowledge the fact of the plague and are inefficient, if not incompetent, in dealing with it. A black market flourishes. Life is now governed by the constant possibility of catching the disease, which spares no one, not even children.

I first read The Plague (1947) as an undergraduate, long ago when the world was new, and it has been one of my favourite novels ever since, largely because of its philosophical and allegorical aspects. Re-reading it during lockdown, I found it took on new and disturbing resonances; the story of the plague itself — of infection, uncertainty and sudden change — came to the fore, and tapped into the current anxieties surrounding coronavirus. But this underlines both the relevance and the complexity of a novel which works on several interconnected levels. First and foremost it is an objective and clinical account of a plague outbreak; it spares none of the grisly details, from the lancing of ghastly buboes to the excruciating death of a young boy. It is the story of its protagonist-narrator, Doctor Bernard Rieux, and those who work with him, at the risk of their own lives, to combat the plague and alleviate the suffering of the town’s population. But it is also a complex double allegory, both of the German occupation of France during World War II (historical and contingent) and of the human condition (universal and timeless).

The first allegory would be easy to miss now, given that there is no mention of any specific war or occupation. Both allegories are mediated subtly, largely through metaphor and simile. Plague and war are linked from the beginning. When the mystery disease, heralded by the town’s rat population leaving their hiding-places to die by the dozen in the open, is finally identified as a form of bubonic plague, Rieux reflects: ‘There have been as many plagues in the world as there have been wars’ (p. 56). The course of the plague follows a similar pattern to that of the German occupation and is described in similar terms: starting as ‘a brutal attack’ (p. 96; Camus used the word ‘invasion’, which makes the link clearer), the victims of which are repeatedly described as prisoners, it continues as an ‘endless defeat’ (p. 181) and its end is described as a ‘liberation’ (in the French text; the English version has ‘being free’, p. 395). The celebrations which mark the end of the plague and the re-opening of the city gates are reminiscent of those which accompanied the liberation of Paris in 1944.

‘I was already suffering from the plague long before I knew this town and this epidemic. All that means is that I am like everybody else’ (p. 345). So says Jean Tarrou, a somewhat enigmatic political activist recently arrived in Oran who befriends Doctor Rieux and throws himself wholeheartedly into the struggle against the plague. This comment underlines the second allegorical sense of the novel: the plague as a figure of the human condition. This allegory is a carrier for the major themes of Camus’s thought. For Camus there exists a divorce (as he terms it in The Myth of Sisyphus) between human beings and the world around them, between our need for meaning and explanation and the fact that these can only ever be partial and provisional (through science, for example). Although most people, like the people of Oran at the start of the novel, are locked into their daily routines and thus oblivious of this rift, those who do become aware of it come face-to-face with what Camus terms ‘absurdity’. This is not inherent in the physical world, or in human life, but in the mismatch between the two, in the conjunction on the one hand of a human consciousness that needs answers and on the other of an impersonal universe which cannot provide them. Those who develop this awareness become ‘strangers’ or ‘outsiders’, unavoidably exiled in life like Meursault, the protagonist of The Outsider. Exile is a major theme in The Plague; the epidemic brings ‘exile and separation’ (p. 251) from normal life, both through enforced quarantine and the closing of the city. Rieux, walking alone, bereft and bereaved through the end-of-plague celebrations, reflects on the ‘irremediable exile’ (p. 422) that the plague brought with it; but this temporary exile elides with the more general and unavoidable one which makes up the texture of life itself.

Though Camus disliked being described as an existentialist, his world-view has features in common with that philosophy. Its roots can be seen in both Pascal and Kirkegaard, who resolved the problem of existential angst with a leap of faith. For Camus as for Sartre this is not a viable option; there is no possibility of an afterlife which might bring meaning. Death, then, accentuates the absurdity of life. Though in the novel the plague highlights death and in many cases brings it forward, it doesn’t alter its actuality. It is present in many forms, most ironically in the case of Mme Rieux, the narrator’s sick wife, who leaves for a sanatorium in the mountains at the start of the novel and dies there at the end. Tarrou’s life, as well as his sense of justice and social responsibility, which mirrors that of Camus, has been shaped by his hatred of the death penalty; having been taken at the age of sixteen by his father, a public prosecutor, to witness a the passing of a death sentence, he is sickened by the idea of what Camus later called 'the most premeditated of murders’. [2] Tarrou tells Rieux: ‘And this is why I have decided to reject everything that, directly or indirectly, makes people die or justifies others in making them die’ (p. 356).

The Plague goes further than Camus’s earlier works in that it doesn’t simply depict the awareness of absurdity but also dramatises possible responses to it. The characters are interesting in their own right, but they also personify these responses. One of Rieux’s patients in a poor area of the city clearly voices the parallel between the plague and the human condition: ‘But what does it mean, the plague? It’s life, that’s all’ (p. 433). However, though the character is depicted with compassion, his way of life — living in bed, his days measured out by the activity of counting chickpeas from one bowl to another — represents an opting-out of the human condition. At the other end of the spectrum are Rieux and Tarrou, and other like-minded characters, who band together to fight against the plague, setting up voluntary health teams and quarantine camps. ‘When you see the suffering it brings, you have to be mad, blind or a coward to resign yourself to the plague,’ says Rieux (p. 177). Raymond Rambert, a Paris journalist caught in Oran on assignment, initially puts all his efforts into clandestine escape attempts, but after these prove abortive has a change of heart and decides to stay and help in the effort against the plague. This exemplifies the process of what Camus termed ‘revolt’, the development of authentic ways of dealing with both the human condition in general and the specific injustices and afflictions it brings. Importantly, this is a collective endeavour; solidarity was a vital element in Camus’s concept of revolt. ‘The plague became the affair of us all,’ comments Rieux (p. 95).

Cottard is a shady character and the only one for whom the plague is beneficial, as it postpones the arrest he fears for an unspecified crime committed in the past; he flourishes during the outbreak, engaging in black market activities and finding an unaccustomed contentment. In the war allegory, Cottard stands for the collaborator (a fact Simone de Beauvoir seems to have missed when she criticised the book for having failed to take on the problem of Vichy); in Tarrou’s view, he has ‘given approval in his heart to something that kills men, women and children’ (p. 426). At the end of the book he loses his head and starts shooting at passers-by from his window; he is arrested in a dramatic shoot-out with the police.

My favourite character, though, is the paradoxical Joseph Grand, a retired civil servant who never moved up the promotion ladder and whose wife left him because she tired of the monotony of their life. He can’t find the right words for the letter he wants to send her. Nor can he find the right words for the novel he’s been working on for years, and so has never got beyond the first sentence, continually rewriting, juggling adjectives and word order. Grand is a nobody, a failure, but the irony of his name, though deliberate, is not cruelly intended. There is a sense in which Grand is truly great in Camus’s eyes because he has got the point that the only authentic response to the plague, and the adversities of life, is to struggle against them alongside others of like mind and without the need for social status. He comes quietly out of retirement, laying aside his magnum opus, to compile statistics which enable a productive analysis of the course of the plague. In a fit of despair, when he seems to have caught the plague, he gets Rieux to burn the pages of his novel; but he recovers and determines to start it again.

This is not a perfect novel. It has been criticised because it features few women characters; only two, in fact: the wife and the mother of Doctor Rieux. The mother is strong, supportive and courageous, but is not an agent in the way the male protagonists are. There are likewise no Arabs. (The issue of whether novelists are duty-bound to include in their works every aspect of the topic they are dealing with, to be seen to be ticking all the boxes of political correctness, is a separate — if nonetheless a topical — issue.)

Those of my friends who’ve read this novel find it unremittingly grim. Yet I like the fact that Camus encourages us to stare reality in the face, however monstrous. His insistence on truth and objectivity; his emphasis on personal responsibility and social justice; his celebration of friendship and the joys of this life (Rieux and Tarrou, in a rare moment of relaxation, enjoy a dip in the sea); his humanist compassion — all these are heartening. There are touches of gentle humour — the old man counting chickpeas, Grand’s attempts at novel-writing, for example — and the narrative, though not always an easy read, is devoid of sentimentality or melodrama.

Some critics have considered the two allegories to be mismatched, claiming that since plague is a natural phenomenon it is unsatisfactory as an allegory for war, which is a function of human evil, and thus deflects from the concept of personal responsibility. The point, however, is that the allegories here are not totally distinct, either from each other or from the motif of the plague which represents them. The human condition and the German occupation are both figured by the plague, but plague and war are both representative features of the human condition — ‘scourges’ is the term used throughout the book. Some scourges are natural phenomena (as for example death and plague) and some are the result of human activity, such as the death penalty and war. A second line of criticism has concerned the novel’s ahistoricity; yet this lack of specific historical reference, either to World War II or the Occupation, is a component of its perennial relevance. The allegory is flexible enough to be applied to any scourges, any elements of the human condition. It is both specific and general. Wars and plagues, figurative and literal, come and go unremittingly; ‘the plague bacillus never dies or vanishes entirely’ (p. 435). This novel is as relevant in a time of inane politicians, Brexit and coronavirus as it was in 1947.

Endnotes:
[1] Albert Camus, The Plague, trans. Robin Buss (London: Penguin, 2013), Kobo edition, p. 66. All further references will be given in the body of the text.

[2] Albert Camus, ‘Reflections on the Guillotine’ in Resistance, Rebellion and Death, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), p.199,
http://users.clas.ufl.edu/burt/deathsentences/CamusGuillotine.pdf [accessed 17 Aug. 2020].

Citation:
Christine Simon, ‘Death, War, Pestilence and Lockdown: Some Thoughts on Re-Reading Camus’s The Plague’, Notes on Literature: For Readers and Writers, www.notesonliteraturechester.blogspot.co.uk [accessed Day Month Year].

About the Author:
Dr Christine Simon is a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of English, University of Chester.

On BA (Hons) English Literature and Creative Writing, she has taught the following modules: Writing Prose; Writing Poetry; Research Methods for Writers; Writing the Past.

On MA Creative Writing: Writing and Publishing Fiction, she teaches on the modules: Writing Short Fiction for Publication; Writing Novels for Publication; Getting Published.

She has a particular interest in historical fiction, and is a regular reviewer for Flash:The International Short-Short Story Magazine.

 

 

Gillian Walker, The World at the End of the Garden: A Novella-in-Flash, ed. Peter Blair and Ashley Chantler (Flash: The International Short-Short Story Press, 2020)

Review by Liz Milne

What does weaving have to do with maternity? How does an arid arroyo resemble heather-bound Yorkshire moors? Gillian Walker’s 48-page chapbook provides some answers.

Moving to Arizona, to get away from the heartache and mess of fertility treatments which succeed only to fail, her ‘crazy fertility-hormone-induced behaviour’, and the couple’s lack of communication, causes hidden currents to surface in the very first line of the book: a mysterious circle of stones, streaked with semi-precious seams of ‘turquoise, lapis and chalcedony’. The narrator sees them and, without explanation, hides them from her husband.

Secrecy is a feature of their marriage: Matt has not told her that he would be living away during the week, she does not mention her foray into the arroyo with Samuel, nor does she tell him of the cracked patio, or that she is, miraculously, naturally pregnant.

When this baby is – seemingly inevitably – lost, the narrator’s tendency to secrecy continues, with the information being dispensed almost as an aside amid the dramatic landfall caused by the exceptionally heavy rain that has drenched the arid landscape: ‘I’m all shored up’ poignantly indicating that the narrator, unlike the desert, knows what needs to be done for survival – she has been here before.

The story, despite its unyielding tragedy, is nevertheless hopeful. The babies might never arrive: ‘you need to accept I can’t have children’, the marriage might not survive Matt’s working away, the advent of Julia who is, it is hinted, his lover as well as his colleague, and the rounds of treatment, hope, loss and despair, but the narrator, despite all this, finds a core of steel upon which she can build.

And while she cannot ‘incubate’ a child, she can still create. Her textiles have worth and root her to her life, like the quernstone, ‘too entwined’ to be moved, and are full of beauty: ‘dark like night, golden when lit by the sun’. The garden might end – but that, the reader feels, might be where a bigger, better world begins.

Each chapter works as a standalone metaphor-laden piece of flash fiction, a shining bead that, when threaded into this novella, transforms into a complete narrative.

About the Reviewer:

Liz Milne is a writer and PhD student in the Department of English, University of Chester. Her flashes can be found online at Zero Flash, 101 Words, Visual Verse, Aphelion Webzine and Drabblr. Longer pieces have appeared on Storgy and SWAMP Writing, while print credits are with Pandora’s Box and Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine (for which she is also a regular reviewer). Her short story ‘The Swimming Pool’, entered into the 2015 High Sheriff’s Cheshire Prize for Literature, was printed in the anthology Patches of Light, ed. Ian Seed (University of Chester Press, 2016.

Find Liz at:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ElizabethMilne1

Blog: https://lizmilnewriting.wordpress.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LizMilneLtd/

To order a copy of the chapbook, go to: Flash: The International Short-Short Story Press.

Interview with Poet Kim Moore

By third-year BA English Literature and Creative Writing students, Department of English, University of Chester

Kim Moore was born in 1981, and lives and works in Cumbria.

Her first full-length collection, The Art of Falling, was published by Seren in April 2015. She won a New Writing North Award in 2014, an Eric Gregory Award in 2011 and the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2012.

Her first pamphlet, If We Could Speak Like Wolves, was a winner in The Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition, judged by Carol Ann Duffy. If We Could Speak Like Wolves was chosen as an Independent Book of the Year in 2012 and was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Pamphlet Award and the Lakeland Book of the Year Award.

The Art of Falling won the Geoffrey Faber Prize. Previous winners include Seamus Heaney and J. M. Coetzee.

Kim blogs here.
You can read Kim's own account of her starting out and progressing as a poet here.

Kim Moore is a case-study poet for the Literature and Creative Writing module EN6013 Writing Poetry for Publication, Department of English, University of Chester.

INTERVIEW

Q: Where do you find inspiration for your writing? How often do you write?

A: Usually from real life – things that annoy me, or make me laugh, strange things I notice, things people say, things I overhear on public transport. Sometimes (most of the time) in writing them into a poem they get changed/exaggerated/elaborated.

At the moment I’m not writing a lot of poems – mainly because my PhD is due in next week, so I’ve been finishing writing the critical part of the thesis which is about 38 thousand words. I find I can’t write prose and poetry at the same time so I’ve put poetry to one side.

Before I focused on the critical writing for the PhD though, I would probably write at least every other day.

Q: Do you start writing your poems by hand or on a computer?

A: I always write by hand in a notebook first of all and it takes me quite a while to type the poems up. I find that process very difficult – and I’m quite superstitious about getting the ‘right’ time to move the poems from the notebook to the computer.

In my notebook, they are actually just set out as prose, and when I type them up, that’s when I put the line breaks in and find out if they are going to work as poems or not.

Q: Many of your poems are highly personal. Are you always happy to share them with readers?

A: Yes, otherwise I wouldn’t share them! They are personal, but I also think of them as like shields between myself and the audience – there is nothing in the poem that I don’t want to share or give away – in fact the poem keeps me safe in a way – because everything I want to say is in there and I don’t have to say anything else.

What I have found hard is questions from the audience about the poems, particularly the sequence in the middle of the book, particularly because people want to ask about the personal experience behind the poems. Reading the poems out is easy compared to this!

Q: Do you have a poem which you think is the best you’ve ever written?

A: Ha! I think probably ‘In That Year’. It was one of those poems that came as a gift – I wrote it sitting on the floor one December in front of the fire, and I was half asleep, and woke up with my head in the dog basket and the poem was finished. I did hardly any editing – just put the line breaks in later. It is an important poem to me.

Q: How do you pick which poems to submit to a magazine?

A: If I’ve bothered to type the poem up, and work on it, I will send it out somewhere to see what happens. Sending the poem out and it getting rejected or accepted is part of the creative process for me. If I think the poem is good, I will have one go at a competition – just to see if I can win some money! And then I sent it out to a magazine, usually a group of poems actually – 5 or 6.

Q: Are there any particular poetry magazines you would recommend?

A: I really like The North, Poetry Review. I think Modern Poetry in Translation is a fantastic magazine and well worth subscribing to. I like The Dark Horse as well. There are too many! The Rialto as well.

Q: Do you ever get writer’s block? What do you do when that happens?

A: I have periods of time where I don’t write, but I don’t think of it as writer’s block. I am currently not writing poems (although I’m writing prose for my PhD). But I think of it as a gathering time – so usually I would be reading other people’s poetry non-stop and just waiting until I feel like writing again. I try not to worry about it – although it’s easier said than done! I had a baby nine months ago, and I couldn’t write poetry at all afterwards so I started writing short stories…but I mainly read – I didn’t become a poet because of anything I’d written – I wanted to become a poet because of poems I’d read so that is what I always go back to.

9 March 2020

One of My Favourite Poems: William Cowper’s ‘The Colubriad’

By Dr Ashley Chantler

Painting by Lemuel Francis Abbott (1792)

 

The Colubriad

Close by the threshold of a door nail’d fast

Three kittens sat: each kitten look’d aghast.

I, passing swift and inattentive by,

At the three kittens cast a careless eye;

Not much concern’d to know what they did there,

Not deeming kittens worth a poet’s care.

But presently a loud and furious hiss

Caused me to stop and to exclaim – What’s this?

When, lo! upon the threshold met my view,

With head erect, and eyes of fiery hue,

A viper, long as Count de Grasse’s queue.

Forth from his head his forked tongue he throws,

Darting it full against a kitten’s nose;

Who having never seen in field or house

The like, sat still and silent, as a mouse:

Only, projecting with attention due

Her whisker’d face, she ask’d him – Who are you?

On to the hall went I, with pace not slow,

But swift as lightning, for a long Dutch hoe;

With which well arm’d I hasten’d to the spot,

To find the viper. But I found him not;

And, turning up the leaves and shrubs around,

Found only, that he was not to be found.

But still the kittens, sitting as before,

Sat watching close the bottom of the door.

I hope – said I – the villain I would kill

Has slipp’d between the door and the door’s sill;

And if I make despatch and follow hard,

No doubt but I shall find him in the yard –

For long ere now it should have been rehears’d,

’Twas in the garden that I found him first.

E’en there I found him; there the full-grown cat

His head, with velvet paw did gently pat,

As curious as the kittens erst had been

To learn what this phenomenon might mean,

Fill’d with heroic ardour at the sight,

And fearing every moment he would bite,

And rob our household of our only cat

That was of age to combat with a rat,

With outstretch’d hoe I slew him at the door,

And taught him NEVER TO COME THERE NO MORE.

For World Poetry Day (21 March 2020), I’d like to celebrate one of my favourite poems, ‘The Colubriad’, by William Cowper (1731–1800).

In his lifetime, Cowper was one of the most popular poets in Britain, and he was a significant influence on the early Romantics, particularly Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth: Coleridge wrote that Cowper was ‘the best of modern poets’. [2] He was Jane Austen’s ‘favourite poet’, [3] whom she quotes and alludes to in her novels, including Sense and Sensibility (1811), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1815).

Cowper is now little read, but is unknowingly quoted: ‘God moves in a mysterious way / His wonders to perform’ is the opening of his hymn ‘Light Shining Out of Darkness’ (1779). [4]

‘The Colubriad’ (written 1782; published 1806) is based on an actual incident recorded in a letter from Cowper to his friend William Unwin (3 August 1782), but what the poem does that the letter does not do is to create a character of whom the reader is supposed to be critical.

The mock-heroic poem opens with an earnest poet ‘passing swift and inattentive by’ three kittens in a doorway: ‘Not much concern’d to know what they did there, / Not deeming kittens worth a poet’s care’. However, when he sees a ‘viper’ by the kittens, one of which is being licked on the nose by the snake, he is spurred into action:

On to the hall went I, with pace not slow,

But swift as lightning, for a long Dutch hoe;

With which well arm’d I hasten’d to the spot,

To find the viper. But I found him not;

And, turning up the leaves and shrubs around,

Found only, that he was not to be found.

The rush to arm, the hastening to battle, the anti-climatic ‘But I found him not’, the desperate ‘turning up [of] the leaves and shrubs’, and the bathetic (and pathetic) ‘Found only, that he was not to be found’: all undermines the aloof authority of the man. He is brought down to earth, which, in its comicality, increases the reader’s distance from him. Furthermore, the repetition of ‘found’ not only emphasises the loss of the snake but also suggests that the poet is, ironically, lost for words, that he is unable to articulate his fall.

When the poet finally finds the snake, which is now in front of a cat who ‘with velvet paw’ is ‘gently’ patting the snake’s head, the man, ‘Fill’d with heroic ardour at the sight’, ‘slew him at the door, / And taught him NEVER TO COME THERE NO MORE’. The ‘heroic ardour’ and the slaying are, of course, unheroic, and to suggest that the snake has been ‘taught’ a lesson is absurd, not only because the snake is a snake but also because it is dead.

By writing with wit and honesty about a past ‘I’, the speaker implies that the incident taught him various lessons, one being that kittens are actually ‘worth a poet’s care’. But why? The snake was not an aggressor; the poet, the ignorant and unquestioning warrior, was: whilst he is finding his hoe, the snake does not attack the kittens, it leaves them and is befriended by the cat. Perhaps the ‘I’ who is writing in retrospect learned a wrong lesson? A dog might guide us towards a conclusion.

In Cowper’s poem ‘Beau’s Reply’, a dog responds to criticisms levelled against him in a previous poem, ‘On a Spaniel, Called Beau’ (both 1803), subtitled ‘Killing a Young Bird’. After the spaniel has justified his actions, he ends: ‘What think you, Sir, of killing time / With verse address’d to me?’ [5] This conclusion seems to undermine ‘On a Spaniel, Called Beau’, but if does so, it also undermines itself: while writing against writing about a dog, Cowper is simultaneously writing about a dog. Assuming that it is unlikely that Cowper actually believes the poems to be a waste of time, it seems that there is fictional ‘I’ narrating ‘On a Spaniel, Called Beau’, an obviously fictional ‘I’ narrating ‘Beau’s Reply’, and that detached from them both is the evasive Cowper. But why create two fictional speakers?

The conclusion of ‘Beau’s Reply’ invites the reader to consider what type of verse is not a waste of time. The antithesis of ‘On a Spaniel, Called Beau’ and ‘Beau’s Reply’ would be a humourless poem that preaches simplistic dogma to its readers, and as we know, such a poem is likely to alienate more of its readers than convince them of its arguments. By creating two speakers and by rendering images, Cowper can illustrate issues of power, violence, nature, education and ignorance, and deny the reader the use of the naïve categories of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. Beau’s question does not undermine the poems; the poems undermine the question.

In the light of ‘On a Spaniel, Called Beau’ and ‘Beau’s Reply’, it seems that the speaker of ‘The Colubriad’ learned the right lesson, that kittens are ‘worth a poet’s care’ because they can be the stuff of which are made entertaining poems that subtly engage with complex issues. One of these issues is the possible result caused by the judgemental blind ‘I’. The three poems can then perhaps also be read as a satire on God and those who act in His image (Christian or otherwise). In the day we read thereof, our eyes shall be opened to the dangers of dividing the ‘good’ and the ‘evil’, the ‘elect’ and the ‘damned’, and to a different Cowper from that of his earlier hymn, ‘Light Shining Out of Darkness’.

Endnotes:

[1] William Cowper, Selected Poems, ed. Michael Bruce (London: Everyman, 1999), pp. 23-4.

[2] Vincent Newey, Cowper’s Poetry: A Critical Study and Reassessment (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1982), p. 5. For further information about Cowper, go to: Cowper and Newton Museum.

[3] Newey, Cowper’s Poetry, p. 5.

[4] Cowper, Selected Poems, p. 43.

[5] Cowper, Selected Poems, p. 34.

Citation:

Ashley Chantler, ‘One of My Favourite Poems: William Cowper’s “The Colubriad”’, Notes on Literature: For Readers and Writers, www.notesonliteraturechester.blogspot.co.uk [accessed Day Month Year]. A version of this article was first published as ‘Detached Cowper and His Critical Eye’, The Cowper and Newton Bulletin, 1.1 (2002).

About the Author:

Dr Ashley Chantler is Senior Lecturer in English, Department of English, University of Chester. He is programme leader of MA Creative Writing: Writing and Publishing Fiction.

On BA (Hons) English Literature and BA (Hons) Creative Writing, he teaches on the modules: Contemporary Literature; Varieties of Writing; Dissertation; Flash Fiction.

On MA Creative Writing: Writing and Publishing Fiction, he teaches on the modules: Writing Short Fiction for Publication; Getting Published; The Writing Project.

Ashley is co-director of the International Flash Fiction Association (IFFA), and co-editor of Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine and Flash: The International Short-Short Story Press.

Fifteen Things I Learnt About Beppe Fenoglio (1922-63), Italian Resistance Author,
from Donatella C. (Museum Curator) When I Went to Visit Fenoglio’s Old House in Alba
and Which I Didn’t Put into My PhD Thesis

By Dr Ian Seed

1. His father, Amilcare, an atheist, ran the family butcher’s from their house. His mother, Margherita, a Catholic, sold condoms under the counter.

2. As a twelve-year-old, Margherita was sent as a domestic servant to Marseilles, but wept and wept until she was sent back home.

3. Beppe often quarrelled and broke up with Luciana, his fiancée. Sometimes he wouldn’t stop weeping until a mutual friend got them back together.

4. Luciana was faithful to him after he died, but not while he was alive.

5. Beppe was jealous of Cary Grant and tried to imitate him with the overcoat he wore and in the way he held his cigarette.

6. Luciana’s family was much wealthier than Beppe’s. She lived on the other side of the square from Beppe, the posh side. They could see each other from their balconies.

7. After the war, Beppe illegally kept hold of his rifle, pistol and British army belt, ignoring the Allies’ demand that all weapons be handed over. Like many other partisans, he was ready for the call if the Fascists tried it on again.

8. But he also held on to them because he was a romantic who spent the rest of his life reliving the experience of the Resistance, including all its traumas, through his writing.

9. Beppe’s role in the Resistance was a minor one, but he was the only partisan his friend and commander Piero Ghiaccio said he could rely on one hundred percent.

10. ‘Schegge di bronzo’ – bronze shrapnel. Not just one of Beppe’s metaphors: the church bells, almost next door, are made of bronze and are ear-splittingly loud.

11. Contrary to popular opinion, Beppe was not anti-clerical. He had a deep respect for the clergy, and that is precisely why, in spite of the conformity of small‑town 1950s Italy, he refused to get married in church. As a non‑believer, he did not want to insult the local priest by acting hypocritically.

12. In one of the photos, Beppe and Luciana are wearing trousers and skirts made from the same material. ‘Si usava molto in quei giorni.’ That’s what people did in those days. From whence the expression, ‘cut from the same cloth’.

13. Donatella knows the Fenoglios well. When her phone rings, its author’s daughter, Margherita. Giving me a complicit smile, Donatella tells her that she’s with an Englishman who’s come all the way to Alba for his PhD research.

14. Margherita, who works as a lawyer and who was born in the year her father died, doesn’t look her age, Donatella tells me, wondering with envy how Margherita keeps herself looking so young.

15. When it’s time for the museum to close, she invites me outside to smoke a cigarette. Beppe kept smoking right up until his death from lung cancer, she says, even though he wanted to stop. I gave up years ago myself, I say, leaning my face forward so that she can light the cigarette she’s given me. It’s cold, isn’t it? she says. Our cigarettes glow in the oncoming evening.

Citation:

Ian Seed, ‘Fifteen Things I Learnt About Beppe Fenoglio (1922-63), Italian Resistance Author, from Donatella C. (Museum Curator) When I Went to Visit Fenoglio’s Old House in Alba and Which I Didn’t Put into My PhD Thesis’, Notes on Literature: For Readers and Writers, www.notesonliteraturechester.blogspot.co.uk [accessed Day Month Year].

About the Author:

Dr Ian Seed is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, Department of English, University of Chester. He is programme leader of the BA (Hons) Creative Writing, on which he teaches the modules: Life Writing; Poetry: Other Voices, Other Forms; Writing Poetry for Publication; Writing the Past; and The Writing Project.

On the MA Creative Writing: Writing and Publishing Fiction, he teaches on the modules: Writing Novels for Publication; Getting Published; and The Writing Project.

He is editor of the Department of English’s online magazine Pandora’s Inbox and general editor of its sister print magazine, Pandora’s Box.

Ian’s books of flash fiction and prose poetry include New York Hotel (2018), Identity Papers (2016) and Makers of Empty Dreams (2014), all from Shearsman. Distances (2018) was published by Red Ceilings. His short stories include Italian Lessons (LikeThisPress, 2017) and Amore Mio (Flax, 2011). Work has appeared in a number of anthologies, including The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry (Valley Press, 2019), The Best Small Fictions 2017 (Braddock Avenue Books) and The Forward Book of Poetry 2017 (Faber and Faber).

‘Lazarus Rising’ in Supernatural: A Perfect Horror Gem

by Dr Alex Tankard

I have to begin by admitting that my favourite TV show is … hard to justify. When Supernatural reached the UK in 2006, it was advertised with a dreary video and the tagline ‘Scary just got sexy’. This was a lie on both counts. I recently tried to rewatch season 1: in the beginning, Sam and Dean were just two surly brothers fighting ghosts and avenging the deaths of interchangeable blonde women who were incinerated in their underwear by a demon or something … I gave up and rewatched The Americans (2013-18), which, unlike Supernatural, actually is scary and sexy (if you’re into bad wigs).

So why did I become hooked after such a bad start? In season 2, the Supernatural boys went up against a trickster god. True to form, this Loki wasn’t scary or sexy (no wig!), but it was a fun episode, and I think this is when the writers suddenly realised their ridiculous show actually worked better as a comedy. By season 3, Supernatural had found its proper rhythm as a blue-collar bro-dude Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with an endless stream of ridiculous monsters. Actually, in those early days, my favourite aspect of the show was the décor of the motels in which the boys stayed each week – sometimes Western- or fishing-themed, or ‘sexy’ with nasty black satin sheets and vibrating beds. The setting was small-town America, and the weather was drizzle (when do you ever see drizzle on American TV? Well, like many horror shows, Supernatural is filmed in Canada). No glamour, and no real grit – and it’s a surprisingly warm, reassuring show: it’s been there for me during some tough times …

Season 3 ended with Dean being dragged to Hell. This was the kind of ludicrous, gory, and temporary death we’d come to expect from Supernatural (death is never the end; Marvel’s Loki has died three times on screen, but Supernatural’s Loki has died at least five times, and his video-will is a homemade porn film). But then, just as the show accepted it was a hilarious mess of bro-dudes being eaten by invisible hellhounds (because writhing on the floor and screaming is cheaper than actual special effects), something wonderful happened.

The first episode of season 4, ‘Lazarus Rising’, is, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful pieces of television ever made [1]. After disorientating, Hellraiser-style flashes of Dean being tortured in Hell, we see him wake in his coffin and claw his way out of his grave: he stands in a blasted forest, the trees blown flat and radiating out from his grave – the epicentre of some mysterious explosion like the Tunguska meteorite in 1908 [2]. He stumbles through the countryside to a deserted gas station. No human life anywhere. He finds a hand-shaped burn on his shoulder where some invisible being lifted him out of Hell. An old TV-set bursts with static, and a high-pitched whine rises from nowhere, shattering the windows and showering Dean with glass. Is he still in Hell? Has he been resurrected to find the world ended in his absence? I saw 28 Days Later in the cinema and, after almost dying of pure terror, I emerged from the cinema dazed and surprised to discover human life still existed on earth, so I find these dreamlike early scenes of a deserted world deeply unsettling. Supernatural finally got scary.

[STOP NOW AND WATCH IT! SPOILERS FOLLOW …]

In fact, the apocalypse hasn’t happened (yet). Dean finds his way back to civilisation and his brother, but how was he rescued from Hell? What kind of monster would have that power? Nothing they have ever encountered before. The demons they interrogate are even more confused and frightened than they are. Something terrifying has laid its hand upon Dean. The brothers employ a psychic to contact this being in a séance: when she steals a glimpse of it in the ether, her eyes burst into flames and burn out of her head. Supernatural’s bro-dude horseplay is being undermined now by genuine menace. The new monster’s grotesque powers don’t fit with the logic of the show we’ve been following for three seasons: this being seems to exist as pure, ear-splitting sound, or eye-melting light. Dean and his mentor Bobby prepare to summon the monster. A traditional wooden barn, whitewashed inside, is scrawled with mystical sigils: when the monster approaches, it blasts the doors open and the lights explode in fountains of white sparks … and we see a small, bland man in a shabby trench coat. He is Castiel, an Angel of the Lord. The shadows of enormous feathered wings spread across the wall behind him.

Fans of the recent Good Omens TV adaptation should revisit seasons 4 and 5 of Supernatural, which were influenced quite openly by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s 1990 novel [3]. Castiel’s arrival took Supernatural in a new direction, and I often tell my Romanticism students to watch season 5 for its Byronic portrayal of vicious angels, a gentle, polite Lucifer, and an apocalyptic world in which God has abandoned His creation. Introducing biblical mythology to Supernatural was a brilliant, blasphemous move, but it could have been a disaster. Increasingly self-referential, Supernatural jokes about ‘jumping the shark’ (there’s even an episode called ‘Jump the Shark’ in season 5) by introducing ludicrous plot twists in a desperate scramble for ever-greater shocks and drama. The sudden revelation of angels in season 4 was, ostensibly, jumping the shark – a drastic shift in the Supernatural universe from godless vampire-ghost-demon-windego chaos to Divine order. However, ‘Lazarus Rising’ is such an exquisite gem of horror TV that, by the time we are allowed to witness the spectacular outstretched wings, the audience is prepared to accept this revelation. In fact, nothing less would satisfy us.

In ‘Lazarus Rising’, Supernatural’s characteristic combination of the fantastical and the mundane has been stretched to its furthest extreme: the monster is occupying the body of pious, boring man called Jimmy, but its initial manifestations – a hand-shaped burn, a high-pitched tone that shatters glass, or a blazing light – convey a whole new order of existence hidden inside that bland little body. The show’s set designers, whose hideous motel sets displayed their gift for balancing on the very edge of surreal, now turned this delicate balance to far more dramatic effect in the white barn, an ostensibly realistic set that is suddenly illuminated as a temple. The wings that unfurl only as shadows are, undoubtedly, another special-effects economisation, but this cheap trick becomes a tantalising glimpse of another dimension beyond human perception. The casting of Misha Collins as Castiel was a stroke of genius for a horror-comedy show: he can shift in a moment from brutal, dead-eyed celestial automaton to bewildered innocent – or, rather, his angry-kitten face enables him to be both at once, but never human (except when he is). Castiel is one of Supernatural’s rare successes in representing a being that is truly Other.

Above all, in a show devoid of subtlety or real scares, ‘Lazarus Rising’ shows an extraordinary restraint that recalls a masterclass in screen suspense from my childhood: Jurassic Park (1993). It’s easy to forget that the velociraptors remain hidden for most of the film, existing only as flashes of movement in the dark, or the screams of their victims [4].  ‘Lazarus Rising’ begins by setting a tone of eerie menace: the blasted trees, the abandoned store, the inexplicable resurrection, the high-pitched noise from nowhere. Dean’s flashbacks to Hell are disorientating close-up reaction shots, but they serve to misdirect us by keeping us (and him) focused on the infernal. Meanwhile, an empty diner piled with dead demons – their eyes burned out of their heads – warns us that a whole new level of evil is approaching. By the time the scruffy little man announces himself as an Angel of the Lord, the audience is ready to accept something entirely new.

Alex’s Supernatural Facts

§  Season 5 is the best series of any TV show ever made (this is indisputable), and Romanticism students should watch it.

§  In season 6, Sam becomes a soulless sociopath, and it’s a vast improvement.

§  ‘Lazarus Rising’ is beautiful, but my favourite episode is actually ‘Changing Channels’ in season 5, where Loki forces Sam to star in an infomercial about genital herpes.

§  In a season 6 episode called ‘Mannequin 3: the Reckoning’, people are murdered by evil mannequins controlled by a haunted kidney. This episode is Peak Supernatural.

Endnotes:

[1] ‘Lazarus Rising’, Supernatural, 4: 1, dir. by Kim Manners (Wonderland Sound and Vision/ Warner Bros.: aired 8^th September 2008 in US). Details of this episode can be found on the IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1222595/ [27/12/2017]; image is from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castiel_(Supernatural)#/media/File%3ACastiel_(supernatural).jpg [26/9/2019]

[2] See Melissa Hogenboom, ‘In Siberia in 1908, a huge blast came out of nowhere…’,  http://www.bbc.co.uk/earth/story/20160706-in-siberia-in-1908-a-huge-explosion-came-out-of-nowhere [24/12/2017].

[3] See Alexandra Ingham, ‘Good Omens was definitely the inspiration for certain characters in Supernatural’, https://spnhunters.com/2019/06/07/good-omens-inspiration-supernatural/ [26/9/2019]

[4] If you’ve forgotten why that film is so great – and if you’re studying Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) – see Emily Asher-Perrin, ‘What makes Jurassic Park such a damn good movie?’, https://www.tor.com/2015/06/09/what-makes-jurassic-park-such-a-damn-good-movie/ [27/12/2017].

Citation:

Alex Tankard, ‘“Lazarus Rising” in Supernatural: A Perfect Horror Gem’, Notes on Literature: For Readers and Writers, www.notesonliteraturechester.blogspot.co.uk [accessed Day Month Year]

About the Author:

Dr Alex Tankard is a Lecturer in English Literature in the Department of English, University of Chester, and is a member of the Schools Liaison Working Group, delivering lectures and activities for schools.

Alex teaches modules on Gothic literature, Romanticism, critical theory, and Victorian disability, and has started a new research project on queerness and disability in Marvel superhero movies and fanfiction. Unsurprisingly, Alex supervises dissertations on horror, disease, and perversion. You can follow on https://twitter.com/AlexTankard4