What a Carve Up!

The theme for the set text for Latin at the European Baccalaureate in 2011 will be Virgil Aeneid 6 and the Descent to the Underworld. My colleagues and I have been looking for passages from European art and literature to accompany the Virgil and to give an idea of the use of this theme in later periods. We came up with the usual suspects: Dante, Milton, Sartre, but a French colleague said she had been reading a novel by an English writer whose title I didn’t recognise. The author, Jonathan Coe, I had read, but this particular work was a puzzle. In the end it turned out that the title is What a Carve Up! which defeated the French translator who had to make do with “Testament à l'anglaise”. The title refers to an old film starring Sid James and Kenneth Connor which is woven into the novel in original ways, that combine comic horror with social satire of Britain in the 1980s. The passage (page 94-5, Penguin edition) which relates to the underworld is a scene where the narrator goes down into the tunnels of the London Tube system for a dreadful journey. (A sort of Descent into the Underground.) There is embedded into the text a line of Latin: perque leves populos simulacraque functa sepulchro (Ovid Metamorphoses 10. 14) which is unusual in a modern English novel, where writers often wish to conceal their learning for fear of putting off readers by a show of perceived elitism. Nothing much more is made of this at the time, but slowly through the book other allusions begin to appear to the myth of Orpheus. The narrator meets a young painter, Phoebe, whose work he unwittingly misunderstands and which she then destroys. These paintings are an interpretation of the Orpheus and Eurydice story and the theme of the search for the past by a descent into Hell becomes clearer step by step as the novel progresses. Though not slavishly following the outline of the mythical story, it becomes clear that Michael (the writer and narrator) bears some resemblance to an Orpheus figure and Phoebe has elements of Eurydice. She repeatedly urges him at the end of the book: “Don’t look back.” As a result the scene of the katabasis earlier on is not a casual classical reference but an integral part of the novel’s structure. A quick trawl through some of the reviews of this novel do not appear to have picked up on this Orpheus reference although one or two did make a connection to Cocteau’s film of the Orpheus tale. The author, Jonathan Coe, makes wide use of film in all his work and may have been thinking of Orpheus through Cocteau, but the inclusion of the line of Ovid seems to indicate a wish to go further back to the original myth. Or at least to Ovid’s version of it. So I was introduced to this accomplished postmodern piece of English literature by a French colleague to include in a collection of Latin texts. The European School is often full of surprises like this. At the same time I found I was introducing, by way of the same process, my German colleagues to the writing of Max Sebald, who wrote in German but is perhaps better known in England. He also has a key passage in Austerlitz featuring a descent into Hades by way of Liverpool Street railway station. There must be something about London train stations that makes writers think of Hell. I can’t imagine what it is.

An Education and Latin A Level

An Education

This film starring Carey Mulligan as the 16 year old schoolgirl who has an affair with an older man in the early 1960s has been receiving a lot of notice with awards, good reviews and Oscar nominations. It is always difficult when you know the period and background to a film through personal experience to avoid criticising the details but in this film there are too many mistakes and misjudgements to ignore, especially when you compare the original brief memoir by Lynn Barber on which it is based. (You can read it here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/jun/07/lynn-barber-virginity-relationships
It is easy to forgive the fact that the film places the concert to which the girl Jenny is taken in St John’s Smith Square. I remember that this church was converted to a concert hall only in 1969, well after the time in which the action takes place. Unimportant perhaps, but shouldn’t somebody have checked? When she finally receives her acceptance from Oxford (the chance of which she initially abandons to marry the unsuitable lover) it is addressed to her by the University of Oxford. Didn’t anyone involved on the script know that admission to Oxford is only through a college? The business with C S Lewis and the supposed visit to him in Oxford is set up to be unmasked as a falsehood, but it is highly unlikely that the girl would have read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe at her age. Though it was published it was never very popular with young readers in the early 1950s when she was growing up. The film is also very vague about the Oxford entrance exams which we had to sit after A levels. In fact Jenny gets her A levels and at first withdraws from the entrance examinations. Only on the intervention of her father is she allowed back to take them. What is really annoying though is the way Latin is set up to the representative symbol of the old fashioned nature of her school. This is not the case in the memoir, where Latin is mentioned only as her weakest subject (not surprising as then Latin A level was a difficult subject). In fact in the memoir Lynn Barber mentions the fact that (mirabile dictu, as she says) she got the top grade in it as well top grades as expected in English and French. Latin was required as entrance to English at Oxford at that time and indeed first year English undergraduates had to take a Latin paper. The fictional persona of Lynn Barber in the film is very unlikely to have scorned Latin at A level, and may well have enjoyed it. She may have found it challenging, we all did, but the memoir shows she is proud of her final result. This default denigration of Latin is all to prevalent in English culture where to succeed at something difficult is seen as being a mark of a lack of sophistication. English is fine, French with all that existentialism is a sign of being cool. Why is reading the classic texts of European literature regarded as being a bit odd by English writers and intellectuals? Can it be that it is a bit too much like hard work?
Complaints aside, An Education is a remarkable piece of work, beautifully acted and painstakingly set in its period (visually, at least, but perhaps others are screaming equally loudly that the model of car being driven went out of production before the film’s setting). It is very thought-provoking about the time, especially for anyone who was at school then. Carey Mulligan deserves her Oscar nomination. But why couldn’t they be more careful over the details?