Intertextuality

One of the many joys of teaching in international schools, as I have for many years now, is the freedom I have to teach whatever literature texts I like. At the moment I’m having a wonderful time teaching my Diploma Literature students Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, which is just the most magnificent novel to teach due to both the beauty and rich texture of its prose, but also the cleverness of its narrative structure. Janina, the very unreliable narrator, is a woman living on the margins of society, both literally and metaphorically - she chooses to live in a hamlet on the Plateau, an isolated, windswept slice of countryside on the border of Poland and the Czech Republic - and lives her life according to what the stars tell her. A passionate believer in astrology, the sacredness of the natural world, and the equality of animals to humans, she rejects the values of the community in which she lives, where hunting and Catholicism are central to people’s lives. Marked as an eccentric oddball by her neighbours, and dismissed as being just a crazy old woman by those she tries to alert to the damage the local male coterie of huntin’ shootin’ fishin’ types are doing to the natural environment around them, Janina decides to take matters into her own hands, and in quite spectacular style! She is a magnificent character, who Tokarczuk uses to question the accepted norms of Western society, and my students have adored being thrown into her world - and I have loved watching as the penny has slowly dropped that she is not all she claims to be! However, what I have enjoyed the most this time round (I’m on my third reading) is thinking about the connections between Janina and William Blake, whose poetry suffuses the text and gives the novel its name.

Blake was a man outside of his time, whose claims of visions and connection with the spiritual realm always marked him as an eccentric. A man of the Enlightenment, he was clear-eyed about the corruption and exploitation that were the pillars of industrialisation, and while rejecting organised religion, still believed in a spiritual realm and a loving God, evidence of which he saw in visions from very early childhood. As my students would say, he spoke truth to power and was unafraid of ruffling feathers, and as he aged, his increasingly idiosyncratic views saw him labelled as a madman by many. His poetry and art never sold well during his lifetime, and he died a pauper - he is buried in the Dissenters burial ground at Bunhill Fields, which was, at the time, on the edges of London - it’s now in the very busy neighbourhood of Old Street, on the edge of the City, and a beautiful new memorial headstone was laid a few years ago. His most famous works, his Songs of Innocence and Experience, had only sold 30 copies at his death - hard to imagine now, when they form the backbone of English literature. He seemed destined to be forgotten until he was revived later in the nineteenth century, largely by the Pre-Raphaelites, and then in the 20th century he was taken up the Modernists and Beat poets who saw him as a counter cultural hero. He is now revered by many as something of a prophet, a man outside of his time, whose radical, strange and often challenging poetry and accompanying illustrations express all that cannot be fully understood and articulated beneath the everyday of our human experience.

I never studied Blake at school or university, and so I’ve been going on quite the journey of discovery over the past few weeks as I’ve been endeavouring to learn as much about him and his world as I can. I have been very much enjoying John Higgs’ fascinating biography, William Blake vs The World, and the catalogue for the William Blake exhibition at the Tate a few years ago is providing me with an excellent insight into his process as an artist. I’ve been exploring the amazing Blake archive online, looking at the commonalities between his illustrations and starting to gain a better overview of how he saw the spiritual world, and I’ve been immersing myself in the strange and wonderful world of his poetry. I don’t read much poetry, as a general rule - it’s never appealed to me all that much - but reading Blake is a very transcendental experience, and the more I read, the more I can let go of the idea that I am reading poetry, and instead just let myself be immersed in his imaginative landscape. The unusual experience of having images to go with the poems, to help you connect the words with the world Blake was trying to recreate for his readers, makes it an even richer process, and I am just in awe of what a visionary genius Blake was.

I love how easy it is these days to become very knowledgeable about something quite quickly, with so much expertise available at your fingertips. I’ve been able to listen to podcasts, recordings from literary festivals and radio shows where experts have discussed Blake, read his poetry, and offered numerous fascinating tidbits it would have taken me ages of scouring multiple sources to find. All of Blake’s work is published on the Blake Archive, making it easy to compare and contrast multiple images at the click of a button. While I imagine the old days of having to dig about in archives was far more exciting (one of the reasons I love A.S.Byatt’s Possession so much is that the plot hinges on a chance discovery in a literary archive), the democratisation of open-access information means all of us can educate ourselves now in a way that wouldn’t have been possible even 20 years ago.

Janina and Blake are peas in a pod, and living in both of their worlds has been a thrilling and intellectually exciting experience. Being able to take my students on this journey with me, allowing them to see how writers gain inspiration from one another and how a wide and deep knowledge of literature allows you as a reader to make more meaningful interpretations of texts, has made it even richer. This week we’re going to make a pilgrimage to Blake’s grave, and pop in to the British Library to see some of the illustrated manuscripts of his poems in the Treasures Gallery, to help bring it even more to life. We have discussed going to visit the Plateau in Poland, too, to really cement the experience, but I’m not quite sure I can convince my Headteacher that’s strictly necessary! We’ll settle for watching the recording of Complicité’s magnificent theatre production of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead instead, which should be going live in the next couple of weeks. If you’re interested in seeing it, do keep an eye on their website.

I hope I’ve inspired you to go on a literary journey in this dark and cold month where staying in and reading feels like the only sensible way to spend one’s time. This year my reading resolution is to read more intentionally, and namely to mop up a few of the major classics I have never got around to reading. I’m tossing up Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea and Dickens’ Bleak House as my next reads…any thoughts welcome!