I learnt the word 'serendipity' in an English class in my first year at secondary school, on the same day that I learnt the word 'masticate' (as in, to chew). The class itself wasn't particularly memorable but those two words have stayed with me for reasons unknown.
Yesterday, after writing my post, I had a serendipitous encounter with Gabriel Josipovici. Not in the flesh, of course, because that would be weird (and I wouldn't have recognised him anyway), but with his collection of critical essays The Singer on the Shore. It is a book I first read about online some years ago, when Josipovici was interviewed by Mark Thwaite at Ready, Steady, Book. After that I spotted a few reviews of his latest novel, Goldberg Variations (2000), around the blogosphere and managed to mooch myself a copy of his book about the Bible as literature, The Book of God. Although it was The Singer on the Shore that had most piqued my interest, the cost of it was prohibitive at the time and it got shunted to the back of my mind. I remembered it immediately though when I saw it on sale in my local 'book outlet' (you know the kind of place) for £2 yesterday morning. I fear I made one of those squashed mouse noises in bookish excitement. The women next to me reading the back of a Josephine Cox romance certainly scooted one step to the left.
It is not the kind of book that you expect to see remaindered in the Yorkshire Book Outlet's fiction section. I go in there mostly because they sometimes have Doris Lessing paperbacks, and odd numbers of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series in their 3 for £5 section. Nevertheless, there it was, a single copy of the Carcanet edition practially luminous with serendipity: plain buttermilk cover, with just the title marking it as treasure. You can't buy it for under £10 second-hand online. I rabbited off to the till, startling a woman balancing the relative merits of two misery memoirs in my eagerness. Oh, happy day.
But the serendipity didn't end there. Later I sat down and flicked through the book, before settling on the last essay in the volume, 'Writing, Reading and the Study of Literature'. It was Josipovici's inaugural lecture when he was made a Professor at Sussex in 1986 and the broad scope of the title attracted me. It turned out to be about the impossibility of creative writing and, to an extent, the impossibility of creative reading; about how every writer and every reader is at war with themselves, half free to be original and daring, and half trapped in tradition and cultural tropes. Jospivici talks about his own struggle to slough off the Western tradition of mimetic realism, of descriptive prose and linear narrative, when he wrote his first novel in the 1960s. He describes his decision 'not to have to do what I don't want to', not to tell a story but to make a story happen, differently. He contrasts this attempt with the Canonical writers of the Western realist tradition, and especially Tolstoy and George Eliot. He describes them as having 'a closed sealed off quality', that 'locked him out'. They might be 'supremely confident, supremely articulate' but they did not capture the essential quality of his lived experience that the fragmentary and oblique work of Proust or T.S. Eliot did.
It was all very interesting, and definitely worth re-reading, but it was the subject and title of Jospivici's first novel that took the serendipity biscuit. It is called Inventory and attempts to explore a man's life and relationship to his family through the taking of an inventory of his possessions after his death. Why should that come under the heading 'strange coincidences'? It's to do with the archives assignment I'm currently working on. I have to present a 45 minute lecture to my tutor on any subject, so long as it is based on original archival research and foregrounds a particular record type. The subject I have chosen is probate inventories - the lists of moveable goods that were a legal requirement for probate from the sixteenth century onwards - and the insight they can give us into domestic relationships and material culture. Funny how different parts of life can meet and touch like that, without warning. It cheered me up no end, in a moderately freaky kind of way.
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Oh, and these arrived in the post. They cheered me up quite a bit too.
Victoria~~