Close Readings

Imagine a woman setting herself the task of liking her son’s choice of wife. At first she finds her daughter-in-law unbearable, but through the effort of seeing her clearly and justly she comes to accept and even appreciate the younger woman. For Iris Murdoch this is an example of moral labour, the struggle to achieve virtue that is understood intuitively by all of us. In her 1970 book The Sovereignty of Good, a collection of three lectures, Murdoch rejects the unambitious, ‘milk and water’ ethics of her fellow English moralists at Oxford in favour of a Platonic system in which morality has the same objectivity as mathematics. In this episode Jonathan and James discuss Murdoch’s lifelong philosophical project to establish what the rational unity of morality might be like without God. They consider her ideas of ‘unselfing’ and of goodness as a replacement for God, and what she got wrong about Sartre’s distinction between authenticity and sincerity.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrcip⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingscip⁠

Further reading in the LRB:

Alexander Nehamas: John Bayley's 'Iris': https://lrb.me/cipep12murdoch1

James Wood: Existentialists and Mystics: https://lrb.me/cipep12murdoch2

Rosemary Hill on Iris Murdoch: https://lrb.me/cipep12murdoch3

Audiobooks from the LRB

Including Jonathan Rée's 'Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre': https://lrb.me/audiobookscip

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Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped began life serialised in a children’s magazine, but its sophistication and depth won the lifelong admiration of Henry James. Set in the aftermath of the 1745 Jacobite rising, Kidnapped follows young lowlander David Balfour’s flight across the Highlands with the rebel Alan Breck Stewart. In Stevenson’s hands, a straightforward adventure story becomes a vivid exploration of friendship, the body, and social and political division.

In this episode of Novel Approaches, Clare Bucknell is joined by Stevenson fans Andrew O’Hagan and Tom Crewe. They explore Stevenson’s startlingly modern handling of perspective and pacing, his approach to the art of fiction, and the value of being ‘betwixt and between’.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna

Further reading in the LRB:

Andrew O’Hagan on Stevenson’s life:⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v27/n04/andrew-o-hagan/in-his-hot-head⁠

...his circle:⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n10/andrew-o-hagan/bournemouth⁠

...and his home in Edinburgh:⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n01/andrew-o-hagan/diary⁠

P.N. Furbank on R.L.S.’s letters:⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v16/n16/p.n.-furbank/what-sort-of-man⁠

Matthew Bevis on Treasure Island:⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n20/matthew-bevis/kids-gone-rotten⁠

Next episode: The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy.

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When poets elegise other poets, the results are often more about self-scrutiny and analysis of the nature of poetry than about grief. Matthew Arnold commented on his elegy for Arthur Hugh Clough, ‘Thyrsis’ (1865), that ‘one has the feeling that not enough is said about Clough in it.’ In his elegy for W.B. Yeats (1939), Auden insists that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’. Both poems resist idealisation of their subject and use the elegy’s pastoral tradition as a way of distancing themselves from the poetic sensibility of their subject. In this episode, Seamus and Mark discuss the ways in which Arnold and Auden’s visions of what a poet should be aren’t so far apart, and finish with a look at James Schuyler’s similarly unromantic elegy for Auden, in which he finds ‘so little to say’.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrld⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsld⁠⁠

Arnold's 'Thyrsis': ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/ldep11thyrsis⁠⁠⁠⁠

Auden's 'In Memory of W.B. Yeats': ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/ldep11yeats⁠⁠⁠⁠

More in the LRB:

Seamus Perry on Auden: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/ldep11auden⁠⁠⁠⁠

Stefan Collini on Arnold: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/ldep11arnold⁠

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J.G. Ballard and Angela Carter were friends and co-conspirators in their witness to the postwar world and the liberation movements of the 1960s. Both were scathing in their antipathy towards the polite novels of manners and empire that still dominated English readers’ appreciation and expectations. Pioneers in the liminal spaces between literary and ‘genre’ fiction, and science fiction in particular, both of them are haunted by the visions of Swift, Shelley, Kafka and Borges.

Ballard’s ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ and ’The Passion of New Eve‘, considered together here along with Ballard’s short story ’The Drowned Giant‘, are vivid, fearless, still shocking novels of ideas – if ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ can be described as a novel at all. Marina and Chloe discuss that question as they consider Ballard’s catalogue of contemporary violence and pop culture transgression. Then they turn to Carter’s own gleeful transgressions, born out of the ferment of 1970s cultural theory, which she explores and interrogates with inimitable style. But do the excesses of these works still speak to the present, and does their lack of restraint risk collapsing the whole category of the fantastic?

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrff⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsff⁠⁠⁠⁠

Further reading in the LRB:

Susannah Clapp on Angela Carter:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v14/n05/susannah-clapp/diary⁠

Edmund Gordon on J.G. Ballard:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n10/edmund-gordon/his-galactic-centrifuge⁠

Watch ‘If God is a snail...’, a film about Carter’s food writing for the LRB:

⁠https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxqr5O2JFvE⁠

Listen to Edmund Gordon discuss Ballard on the LRB Podcast:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/the-lrb-podcast/on-j.g.-ballard⁠

Next episode: Ursula K. Le Guin.

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Never trust anyone who tries to be ethically pure. This is the message of Albert Camus’s short novel La Chute (The Fall), in which a retired French lawyer tells a stranger in a bar in Amsterdam about a series of incidents that led to a profound personal crisis. The self-described ‘judge-penitent’ had once thought himself to be morally irreproachable, but an encounter with a woman on a bridge and a mysterious laugh left him tormented by a sense of hypocrisy. In this episode, Jonathan and James follow Camus’s slippery hero as he tries and fails to undergo a moral revolution, and look at the ways in which the novel’s lightness of style allows for twisted inversions of conventional morality. They also consider the similarities between Camus’s novels and those of Simone de Beauvoir, and his fractious relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrcip⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingscip⁠⁠

Further reading in the LRB:

Jeremy Harding: Algeria's Camus: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/cip11camus1⁠⁠

Jacqueline Rose: 'The Plague': ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/cip11camus3⁠⁠

Adam Shatz: Camus in the New World: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/cip11camus2⁠⁠

Audiobooks from the LRB

Including Jonathan Rée's 'Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre': ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookscip⁠

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James borrows from Eliot, Austen, folktales and potboilers, but ‘the thing that he took from nowhere was Isabel Archer’. James transformed the 19th-century novel through his evocation of Isabel, a woman who wants and suffers in a profoundly new (and American) way.

Deborah Friedell and Colm Toíbín join Tom to discuss the novel that established Henry James as ‘the Master’. They dissect James’s and his characters’ complicated motivations, the significance of his 1905-6 revisions, and the ways in which a ‘primitive plot’ irrupts in a painstakingly subtle and stylish novel.

Get 50% off a 12-month subscription to Close Readings with the code 'SUMMER50' at checkout when you sign up here:

https://lrb.me/travel26pod

Further reading in the LRB:

Colm Toíbín on Henry James:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v30/n01/colm-toibin/a-man-with-my-trouble⁠

Ruth Bernard Yeazell on Henry James’s life and notebooks:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v10/n01/ruth-bernard-yeazell/the-henry-james-show⁠

James Wood on The Portrait of a Lady:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n19/james-wood/perfuming-the-money-issue⁠

Next time on Novel Approaches: 'Kidnapped!' by Robert Louis Stevenson.

LRB Audiobooks

Discover audiobooks from the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksna

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Jay Bernard’s 'Surge' and Kei Miller’s 'In Nearby Bushes', both published in 2019, address acts of violence whose victims were not directly known to the writers: in Surge, the deaths of thirteen Black teenagers in the New Cross Fire of 1981; in Miller’s poem, a series of rapes and murders in Jamaica. Both can be seen as collective elegies, interleaving newspaper and medical reports, and other archival documents, with more lyrical passages, and both can be read as comments on the state of the nation as well as personal expressions of desolation. While Bernard’s poem opens out into an investigation of radical Black history and the marginalisation of Black communities in London, Miller uses blanked-out newspaper items, among other techniques, to search for the ‘understory’, an experience beyond language, which is in turn connected to colonial, and pre-colonial, Jamaica. In this episode, Mark and Seamus consider the different ways these poets respond to the shocking events they depict, while also incorporating them into a broader poetic landscape.

Watch Jay Bernard reading from 'Surge' at the London Review Bookshop: https://youtu.be/XTZKYEimq2Y

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrld⁠⁠⁠⁠

In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsld

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Leonora Carrington was a prodigious artist closely associated with major surrealists of the 1930s. Though only sporadically in print until recently, her writing has helped cement her cult status, not least The Hearing Trumpet (1974).

Before her family consign her to an old-age facility, nonagenarian Marian Leatherby is gifted a hearing trumpet with almost magical capabilities. Her institutionalisation leads to much eavesdropping, a Grail quest, descent into the underworld and an apocalyptic ice age.

Joyous, disturbing and subversive, The Hearing Trumpet is full of themes and images that populate Carrington’s artwork and other writing. Both Marina and Chloe knew Leonora Carrington, and in this episode they reflect on the ways her personality inflected her work. Their reading of The Hearing Trumpet reveals her humour, her visionary imagination and her attention to the boundaries between inner and outer realities.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrff⁠⁠⁠⁠

In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsff⁠⁠⁠

Further reading in the LRB:

Chloe Aridjis: A Leonora Carrington A to Z

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2017/april/a-leonora-carrington-a-to-z

Alice Spawls: On Leonora Carrington

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n08/alice-spawls/at-tate-liverpool

Edmund Gordon: Save the feet for later

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n21/edmund-gordon/save-the-feet-for-later

Next episode: Marina and Chloe discuss J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition and Angela Carter’s The Passion of the New Eve.

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At the heart of human existence is a tragic ambiguity: the fact that we experience ourselves both as subject and object, internal and external, at the same time, and can never fully inhabit either state. In her 1947 book, Simone de Beauvoir addresses the ethical implications of this uncertainty and the ‘agonising evidence of freedom’ it presents, along with the opportunity it creates for continual self-definition. In this episode Jonathan and James discuss these arguments and Beauvoir’s warnings against trying to evade the responsibilities imposed upon us by this ambiguity. They also look at the ways in which Beauvoir developed these ideas in The Second Sex and her novels, and her remarkable readings of George Eliot, Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrcip⁠⁠⁠

In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingscip

Read more in the LRB:

Joanna Biggs: ⁠https://lrb.me/cipbeauvoir1⁠

Toril Moi: ⁠https://lrb.me/cipbeauvoir2⁠

Elaine Showalter: ⁠https://lrb.me/cipbeauvoir3⁠

Audiobooks from the LRB

Including Jonathan Rée's 'Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre': ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookscip

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Trollope enthusiasts Tom Crewe and Dinah Birch say they could have chosen any one of his 47 novels for this episode, so it’s no wonder Elizabeth Bowen called him ‘the most sheerly able of the Victorian novelists’. They settled on The Last Chronicle of Barset: a model example of Anthony Trollope’s gift for comedy, pathos, social commentary and masterful dialogue.

At the heart of Last Chronicle is a mystery: how did the impoverished Reverend Crawley get his hands on a cheque for £20 that no one can account for, and is he capable of theft? The scandal has dire repercussions not only for Reverend Crawley, but the whole county: his ostracision raises broader questions about inequity in the church; it sparks rifts between his daughter, her would-be husband and his parents; and it gives his young relative Johnny Eames an excuse to flee the entanglements of London high society for the continent, in search of the only man who may be able to solve the puzzle. Although it’s the final book in the Barchester series, Last Chronicle can be read as a standalone novel, and Tom and Dinah join Thomas Jones to explore its sensitivities, ambivalences and sheer readability.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠⁠⁠⁠

In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠⁠

Further reading in the LRB:

John Sutherland: Trollopiad

⁠⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v14/n01/john-sutherland/trollopiad⁠⁠

Richard Altick: Trollope’s Delight

⁠⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v06/n08/richard-altick/trollope-s-delight⁠⁠

Next time on Novel Approaches: 'The Portrait of a Lady' by Henry James.

LRB Audiobooks

Discover audiobooks from the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksna

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