Charlotte Brontë - Jane Eyre (1847)

I tend to think of my secondary education as having been fairly crap, but on the other hand we had an English teacher who made us read this so it clearly had something going for it. On average I read Jane Eyre roughly every ten years, not as part of some long term schedule but simply because it works out that way. If it's a fairly straightforward, linear story, the level of detail and description is of such complexity as to yield fresh revelations with each reading, and this latest engagement has been no exception.

Jane Eyre, as you should probably know, is the story of Jane, participant in a partially autobiographical existence, who endures childhood misery, harsh schooling, crushing expectations, and the one man she would consider marrying harbouring a deranged wife in the attic of his stately home. It's about female agency, to some extent, as the tale of a woman who resists the expectations of nineteenth century society, forging her own path despite forces which might promise a quiet life at the expense of autonomy. I suppose, by extension, one might almost say it's a novel about the nineteenth century, the age in which truths held previously unassailable began to look a bit crumbly around the edges - notably with the death of God and the notion of progress and change as desirable or even necessary. Jane lives in a world dependent on certain truisms being taken for granted, notably those of sex and class, but her society is illusory - a spectacle in the sense of that which Debord describes in The Society of the Spectacle - demanding that she makes her way by critical means, basing decisions on that which is demonstrably true or at least ethically correct.

This isn't what makes Jane Eyre a great book so much as the poetry of how it undertakes to dissect nineteenth century society and to highlight wrongs in realistic and compassionate terms without the occasionally cloying sentiment of, for one roughly contemporary example, Dickens. With few of the book's demonstrable real world details adding up to a consistent chronology or year, Jane Eyre has been described as a fairy story, and certainly it can't be deemed a realistic novel in the conventional sense despite concerning itself with the real world. Aside from the ubiquitous atmospheric effects continuing the legacy of the Romantic era, it's a book full of implied spirits, spectres, and otherworldly influences - even though the only plausibly supernatural occurrence is a brief moment of long-distance telepathy between Jane and Rochester near the end. The brilliance of the book is, I would say, rooted in the apparent contradiction of what it does, namely that it uses the language and imagery of the haunted, the spooky, and the ethereal in presenting an argument in support of realism, critical thought and not just doing something because that's what everyone else is doing and that's how it's always been innit. Even the fearful mad woman in the attic is never quite reduced to just a symbol of the kind used by authors to hammer some black and white point all the way home.

However, it does much more than just the above, and describing some of the mechanism as I have done, does little to convey the true complexity, elegance, or beauty of this novel. I don't know if it's truly the greatest novel in the English language, but it surely has to be a contender.

Heat Death No. 1

New Juche Heat Death No. 1 (2023)
One of the most inspiring, original and groundbreaking artists writing today, according to Dennis Cooper, and sure enough there's an undeniably spacious wilderness dividing the writing of New Juche from that of almost everyone else I might name off the top of my head. The latest evidence comes in the form of this irregular - but hopefully not too irregular - journal. Heat Death sees our man venturing forth to the island of Phuket where a once fevered tourist economy has been destroyed by the pandemic leaving only the desolation of tropical ghost towns. Given that his words and powerfully stark images document a cultural signal to noise ending in a sea of undifferentiated trash, it's tempting to read the title of the journal as a metaphor, referring as it does to entropy and the eventual extinction of the universe; except this is no metaphor.

More than once I've encountered a sort of running joke, popular amongst the pre-digital generation, about how the first photographs you take when someone - usually employed in further education - hands you a camera will inevitably be of ruined buildings and urban decay. The humorous aspect of this truism is supposedly that it's a cliché amounting to teenagers expressing affected and therefore fashionable alienation. It's therefore a revelation, at least for me, to view the images of ruin reproduced herein - and New Juche is also a superb photographer, for what it may be worth - as pertaining to something truly profound, in turn suggesting all those alienated teenagers were genuinely reaching out for something even if they were ill-equipped to express it in original terms, or even anything more lucid than society innit.

 

I am perplexed as to what taking pictures of modern ruins means, and I'm ambivalent about why they attract me so strongly. I think that for Europeans they are cursed to evoke the Second World War and its photographic legacy which appears so difficult and prurient to people today. Just like photographs of suffering bodies or corpses, one that shows the modern ruins cannot be seen by Europeans as purely didactic tools like memento mori, nor as a subject that can be interpreted with reference to more-or-less-classical aesthetics in isolation from historical and social context. A photograph of a modern ruin, and only a modern ruin, may suggest prurience or exploitation because it shows individual, collective, economic, or ideological failure in a purely aesthetic rather than social context, such that it evokes or appears to nourish schadenfreude. Pornography appeals to specific lustful tastes, provokes sensation, is designed to titillate and arouse, can be the fruit of unequal relations, coerces the individual into the general. I aspire to pornography and often think of myself casually as a pornographer, further still, the precise sexual value of ruined buildings and their penetration is a particular one for me that will be difficult to explain here. But ultimately my attempts at pornography are themselves a failure because I can never seem to render anything in what is called a purely aesthetic context.

 

Nevertheless, Heat Death comes so close as for it to make little difference from where I'm sitting, building something which has the cumulative effect of music with its relentless barrage of hundreds upon hundreds of images of ruin, desolation, abandonment and lives indefinitely postponed. This effect is strongly reinforced during the final thirty or so pages - full colour and double page landscapes of relentless landfill which repetition gradually transforms into something entirely and confusingly natural before it comes to resemble abstract expressionism. It's absolutely overwhelming and hardly the effect you might anticipate from a book in which the author doesn't once get his chopper out; and ultimately New Juche does indeed explain that which will be difficult to explain here.

Darker than dark though his subject matter may occasionally seem, there's something very life-affirming in New Juche's unflinching dedication to mapping even the smelliest, most neglected corners of human experience.