Cold Cold Modernity

‘Beneath its film-school framework and Joycean approach to plot, Silence with Subtitles is essentially a sentimental epic, with brief moments of melodrama belying the supposed modernity of its form’ (Jinpes Terenk, on Oa Aayorta’s first film/novel)

Republishing Terenk’s review of Aayorta’s second novel has raised a lot of questions, not least Terenk’s attitude to technology and/or modernity, which he treats as if they were interchangeable. Modernity and melodrama, as seen above, are cast as opposites; so too modernity and sentimentality. To be modern, in Terenk’s book, is to be swift and heartless, cold and mechanistic: essentially soulless. Using ‘technology’ can only be, it seems, a distancing device. Or is this really what he is saying? It is hard to tell what Terenk means by ‘technology’ exactly. Aayorta’s first two novels use film: this, certainly, is technology – but it doesn’t necessarily mean that Aayorta is either technological, truly, or even especially ‘modern’. Terenk uses the phrase ‘twenty-first century’ – but there is nothing twenty-first century about film, or even DVDs (which were invented at the end of the twentieth century).

All in all, this is a somewhat confused review, as I’ve probably pointed out before. But it covers the basics relatively well, providing a fair summary of Aayorta’s previous work, and a vaguely clever interrogation of the novel in question. Terenk is at least honest about what he thinks of Aayorta’s approach, which clearly frustrates him – and I respect him both for admitting this, and for trying to root out the cause of his frustration (even if he fails, ultimately, to do this).

Divine Mysteries for Kids

If you should waltz over to Hooting Yard, once again, you will see Frank Key doing what we all should have been doing for a long time now – i.e. exploring the fascinating links between a Belgian television programme, ‘ostensibly designed for children’, and the sixteen Revelations Of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich.

According to Key (and I bow to his authority on this case) the programme allowed its creator, Gus van der Vim, ‘to express his frankly hysterical response to the First Divine Revelation in the form of a weird, knockabout, psychedelic, baffling, and occasionally creepy children’s television programme, in which pursuit of a hazelnut is the starting point of each show’.

This reminds me (the show as a whole, not the hazelnut) of the Dutch ‘Van’ series, most particularly Van Eel’s Underwater Transportation – a short novel written, again, ‘ostensibly’ for children, which nevertheless contains more than a handful of complex theological ponderings beyond the comprehension of your average adult.

In reference to a now-famous episode in the book, in which Hari achieves semi-spiritual transportation whilst diving for treasure in an Amsterdam canal, Jinpes Terenk has written: ‘it is impossible, surely, to ignore the palpable parallels between this passage and the various episodes in the holy diaries of St Gregor of Samsat’. In fact, the book is swimming in parallels of this kind, as Van Eel, like Gus van der Vim before him, makes absolutely no attempt to pander to his youthful audience.

You may read the rest of Terenk’s review here.