Discover Top Posts Tagged with #dk mould

New feature – Where do I start with…?

The Effluent Lagoon’s principal librarity scooter Kulvinder Virdee presents a reader’s guide to lesser known writers from the past.

This week:

The small but perfectly formed world of D.K. Mould

Hi there, I’m Kulvinder and I’m just fine.

Every day this week I’ve been looking at a different aspect of the work of the novelist and short story writer D.K. Mould.

The writer died in 2012 and was working on what would have been his third novel (published as Fellas, Fellas – A Fragment in 2015).

Today, in the last in the current series, we’ll be going back to look at Mould’s first novel, The Happy Soul Shed (1989).

#Roadswim Collective #The Effluent Lagoon #DK Mould #Festoons - The Complete Short Stories #Slouch of the Sybarites #The Happy Soul Shed #Fellas Fellas - A Fragment #Kulvinder Virdee #Harry Hardesty #public sector #monks #novels #novelists #20th century novelists #post war British fiction #anti-natalism

New feature – Where do I start with…?

The Effluent Lagoon’s principal librarity scooter Kulvinder Virdee presents a reader’s guide to lesser known writers from the past. This week:

The small but perfectly formed world of D.K. Mould

Hi there, I’m Kulvinder and I’m just fine.

Every day this week I’ll be looking at a different aspect of the work of the novelist and short story writer D.K. Mould. The writer died in 2012 and was working on what would have been his third novel (published as Fellas, Fellas – A Fragment in 2015).

Today we’re looking at Mould’s second novel, published in 1997, the perverse and rococo fantasia Slouch of the Sybarites.

Described by its author as “a joke about human time perception”, the book has consistently drawn devotees from very different worlds: Marxist critic Bryan O’Mandey has published several highly influential studies of the novel, comparing it to Brecht; a popular religious interpretation sees it as a scarifying portrait of the world devoid of Christ’s mercy; an extreme right-wing organisation in Paris claimed to have taken their name – Les Sybarites – from Mould’s book, which they describe as a manifesto for violent overthrow of the liberal state.

The stylish but empty 2002 film adaptation – directed by Lesley Judd – drew Mould a new wave of admirers, although the author himself is said to have told fellow novelist Jeanette Winterson: “Pretty movie. Not much to do with the book I wrote, but very pretty.”

The story tells of a single incident in the life of Glenn Fabby, a disappointed artisan pizza chef facing legal proceedings for breaching a court order preventing him from entering the town where his former business partner lives. In the first chapter we follow Glenn to his solicitor’s office for a meeting that goes badly for him.

This incident is narrated by Glenn himself in the simple present tense (the first line of the novel reads, ‘I’ve just woken up and the toothache’s worse’). Chapter 1, which goes from Glenn waking up in the morning to receiving his bad news at the solicitor’s office, takes up but a single page.

In the second chapter, Glenn stops to consider his state of mind when he wrote the first chapter, deconstructing what he wrote then by examining the coded assumptions hiding in his words.

In the third he stops to consider his state of mind when he wrote the second. In the fourth he considers his state of mind when he wrote the third. And so on. Each chapter is twice the length of the one before. As we progress through the book, the plot goes no further but the density of the self-examination bores down through the heart of the novel.

Critic and Buddhist commentator Andre Maurois has said of the book’s unusual narrative structure that it

replicates the realisation evident in self-reflection that the examining self is in some sense separate to the examined self; and on noticing this, there emerges the necessity of a third self – the one that is now in a position to define and describe the other two.

We come to see that if we continue this way we shall be forced to invoke an infinity of selves, ever passing from subject to object, coming and going like mayflies, all natural motion impossible as in the infinitely divisible fractions of Zeno.

Mould was described by Samuel Beckett (in a letter to their mutual friend Tom McGreevy) as ‘one of the damn bloody good ones’, and there is a shared resonance in Slouch of the Sybarites and works like Watt, Malone Dies and Company.

Another thread follows the clue dropped by Mould in his offhand reference to “human time perception”. In a Q&A at Belbury Polytechnic in 2002 an audience member asked if the book had any connection to theories of attention and processing speed in the brain, which happened to be her professional specialism. Mould responded energetically, at one point falling from his chair, shortly after attempting to juggle with paint.

For those of us whose professional specialism doesn’t include human time perception, the bluffer’s version goes something like this: the sensation of time is constructed in the brain, which has a processing speed affected by how much stuff it has to process.

Broadly speaking, the more attention you are paying to something, the more input your brain has to process, which takes it longer, and thus your subjective experience of that time span follows suit. Time seems to slow down.

In the novel, each chapter adds an extra layer of memory and association, with fears and fantasies rising and falling in successive wave of auto-critique.

By this exponentially increasing attention to the same events, the meeting with the solicitor begins to expand in time, distending the focus while also intensifying it – a narrative trick Mould has called ‘the old slo mo routine.’

The pattern is broken in chapter 12 where the first chapter is re-told but in a past tense third-person narrative (‘He had just woken up and his toothache was worse’); and chapter 13, in which the third-person narrative voice confesses, “It’s still just me, I was only pretending it wasn’t.”

The famous final passage of the novel concludes:

Section 12 of the DVCVA 2004 amended section 5 of the Protection from Harassment Act 1997, I know, to allow the court to make a restraining order following a conviction for any criminal offence, I know, where the conviction occurs after 30 September 2009, yes I know. Paragraph 5 of Schedule 12 of the DVCVA 2004 provided that section 12 only applies where the conviction or acquittal occurs after the commencement date, I know all this. It follows that a restraining order can be made, yes yes yes, when the date upon which the offence was committed was prior to 30 September 2009. I knew all that.

Mould began work on Slouch of the Sybarites in 1979, during a camping holiday in the Cynon Valley. It was the year Margaret Thatcher won the General Election by a landslide. A mere 18 years later, in 1997, the book was finally completed and published. It was the year that Tony Blair won the General Election by a landslide, bringing to an end 18 unbroken years of Tory rule. None of these facts has the slightest bearing on the book.

Tomorrow: I’ll be looking at what most readers consider to be Mould’s lightest, most optimistic work, Festoons, a collection of short stories stretching back to the author’s earliest work from 1953.

D.K.Mould in Hirwaun, 1986

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#roadswim collective #the effluent lagoon #dk mould #slouch of the sybarites #festoons #fellas #fellas - a fragment #jeanette winterson #samuel beckett #watt #cynon valley #tom mcgreevy #hirwaun

New feature – Where do I start with…?

The Effluent Lagoon’s principal librarity scooter Kulvinder Virdee presents a reader’s guide to lesser known writers from the past.

This week:

The small but perfectly formed world of D.K. Mould

Hi there, I’m Kulvinder and I’m just fine.

Today, to start us off, I’m going to do a mini-intro to Mould, hopefully giving you a quick sketch of this singular and demanding story-teller’s career.

We’ll have a brief look at the unfinished novel, Fellas Fellas, before heading further back to check out his earlier works as the week progresses.

By the author’s own account, work on his third novel had been almost continuous for 20 years. Shortly before his death Mould estimated that he was “roughly a third of the way through Fellas”.

Most would see that as a long time to work on a single novel. For Mould, it was par for the course.

Despite publishing his first short stories as early as 1953 (in the magazine Branding’s) his debut collection didn’t appear until January 1973.

Publishers were more than willing but the author insisted that ‘publication of any of my stories is NOT among the options I will consider until such a time as I am completely satisfied that I can do no more to improve or at least alleviate the worst inanities and untruths they still contain.’

This ruthless and ascetic approach to his art goes some way to explaining why a writing career spanning 60 years, during which the unmarried, financially secure and supremely self-disciplined Mould rose every day at six, walked his dog, ate breakfast then sat down to write by eight, gave birth to such a small - though perfectly formed - oeuvre.

And significantly all the books Mould did finally consent to be published (one short story collection and two complete novels) were each of around 70,000 words, roughly the length of a Young Adult novel. As critic G.K. Lensherr puts it in his critical, frankly bad-tempered study of Mould:

“When a great author spends 60 years in pursuit of his Muse, writing hundreds of thousands of words that will never be read because they were cut out and thrown away, how do his admirers feel when realising there will be no more refreshment from this beloved spring?

When the artist finally dies in the doomed attempt to catch up with his stern, exacting Muse, when he drops the golden bowl he has been carrying since his youth, and when we his disciples, when we peer inside to make the final account, can we prevent the suspicion forming that the deal made between D.K. Mould and his Muse was most emphatically in Her favour rather than his?”

Around 200,000 words of published fiction, with a further 25,000 comprising the unfinished third novel on which Mould was working when he died – writers have been remembered through the ages on the basis of less substantial canons, of course.

But in many of these cases the writer has an excuse of some kind: poverty, mental illness, physical weakness, substance misuse, early death.

Others might declare themselves disillusioned with all things artistic, reject their vocation, become the artistic equivalent of conscientious objectors, repair to the wilderness, often reverting in time to the first class of excuse - poverty, mental and physical illness, substance misuse, early death.

Consider two who died relatively young, Kafka at 40, for example, or Lovecraft at 46, both of whom left behind well in excess of Mould’s almost 300,000 words, though by no means all the stories that contained these words were published during their authors’ lifetimes.

Neither was fully recognised in his lifetime, and their stories were barely read by anyone, including some of their classics.

What makes Derek Kenneth Mould unusual, perhaps even unique, is that he lived a healthy and productive life, writing constantly, recognised as a great author unceasingly from the publication of his first stories in 1953 to his death in 2012, expending almost endless care in producing works that aspired to the perfection of pure perception, endlessly writing, rewriting, cutting and shaping, until dying suddenly in his sleep at the age of 96, leaving behind the full product of his decades of devotion to the art of writing, a small but infinitely polished diamond with one of its facets forever uncut.

We know of no unpublished writing by Mould, other than the uncompleted final novel provisionally entitled Fellas, Fellas.

So here we have a small, but exquisite, body of work. The question of where to start with D.K. Mould would seem irrelevant. There’s so little of it, start with the first one he did, read through to the last one, you could do the lot in a day and a half, right?

Wrong, apparently.

According to Mould himself (in conversation with Melvyn Bragg):

“Don’t read them in the order in which I wrote them for god’s sake. That’s the way to ruin them. Better a reader read only one of them than do that. I mean, the Dane said life can only be lived forward but understood backward. Same with my stuff. Read them in reverse order of when I wrote them, from the most recent back to the first one. That’s when you’ll get the message. Of course, I’ve got to finish Fellas first. That’ll be my last one. So that’ll be the first one. If you see what I mean.”

So, in that spirt, I’ll give a brief description of each book in reverse order.

Fellas, Fellas (unfinished) – 20 years work went into the 25,000 word fragment published posthumously in 2015 (by Mould’s long time publisher Wattstown and with the permission of Mould’s agent and executor George Dupree).

Approximately a third of the projected novel, the story follows a small cluster of microbes as they scale the face of piece of organic matter, dissolving particles to use for nutrition and to assist adhesion to the surface of the unidentified object.

Refusing to employ either the anthropomorphic approach – none of the microbes has a name, a character or any but the most rudimentary and ambivalent of distinguishing features – or the omniscient perspective, Mould attempts to render the perceptions and sensations of the microbial horde directly with no reference to an outside context.

An overarching narrative tension communicates itself indirectly to the reader, causing us to form a question in our minds which has not and will not ever be asked by the microbes through whom the narrative itself ‘sees’ reality – what is the bit of stuff over which they are all crawling?

Mould’s achievement is to suggest this focus to the reader with the utmost clarity and without any textual authority, for there are neither far-seeing microbes nor a far-seeing omniscient meta-narrative to frame such a question.

Behind this initial trick, as in the case of most of Mould’s inventions, we slowly begin to see its value as a wider, thematically suggestive suggestion concerning suggestibility.

Achieving a sort of hypnotic clarity, a claustrophobic intensity of attention, this is undoubtedly Mould’s funniest book. What critic Macy Gray has called ‘bacterial slapstick’ (in her famous review of Fellas, Fellas for the revived Branding’s online journal) leads to many broadly comic set pieces.

Viewed in Mould’s terms, as the unfinished first novel of the series, these microscopic antics make sense as the loam and the soil from which his earlier works will grow.

The essential Mouldean viewpoint is present here at the most concentrated extent he would ever achieve, forming a microcosm of the author’s key obsessions.

How the tale would have developed if Mould had lived is anyone’s guess. It seems likely that a revelation concerning the nature of the organic speck from this first part may have played a part in the later parts of the novel.

Based on Mould’s work notes, it also seems likely that the resolution would have involved eggs.

Tomorrow: We’ll take a good look at D.K. Mould’s third novel, published in 2003, the notorious and perhaps misunderstood Slouch of the Sybarites. Why not join us?