Signifying Nothing …
Or, take the second left at the aorta
Over my packed lunch at the BL, I listened to a podcast of a recent radio arts programme during which a celebrated author read from her latest work. There was something about a young woman who knew the skyline of her (medieval) city ‘as well as she knew the rhythms of her own heart.’
This sort of washed over me - I was concentrating on something else - I like to get the right amount of crisp and sandwich in my mouth at the same time, in a way I admit is slightly OCD…
Then a few minutes later it began to irritate me. You can sort of see what the author was trying to achieve. She wanted a way of saying that the character knew the city really well, but was striving to avoid the obvious clichés (like the back of her hand, etc). And ‘the rhythms of her own heart ‘ had a vaguely poetic feel to it.
But what on earth could it actually mean?
Did the character mean that she knew the city as well as she knew her own heartbeat? Is that something we actually know well? I checked my pulse on my Apple Watch. I guessed it would be about 70. It was actually 88. Maybe I’m just bad at guessing my pulse. Maybe the girl in the story is very good at it. Perhaps she had an early medieval heart rate monitor to help her check.
Or was she using the phrase in a more metaphorical way? Did she mean that she knew the skyline as well as she knew her emotional state? But, again, is that something we ever know in precise detail, the way you know the secret byways of a town you’ve always lived in?
‘How are you feeling?’
‘Well, if you take the second left at the aorta, I’m feeling …’
Anyway, the answer, of course is that it’s just some words that don’t actually connect with anything in the real world at all. These words signify nothing about the characters in the novel. Their function is to say, ‘Me, yes, I’m that kind of author, the sort of author who writes vaguely poetic, but ultimately empty phrases of the kind that people who know nothing about writing take to be ‘beautifully written’.
I met her a few years ago. She's really very nice.
An amusing facet of the literati today who know how to talk about books in programmatic ways is they reduce nuance to a cliche . Because everything is mediated through language even experience becomes a function of language. So vapid poetic conceits that sound profound but mean little are unsurprising, just as novels claiming to be ''state of the nation'' while dealing with complex socio historic, economic realities in very narrow tropes. I don't think the city as a space is navigable that easily unless one has traversed its many nooks and crannies , including a kind of pulse for its underbelly.