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  • Reviews for Summers of Discontent by Raymond Tallis
  • Raymond Tallis |  Review |  Summers of Discontent
Reviews for Summers of Discontent by Raymond Tallis
‘Raymond Tallis is what some people may refer to as a Renaissance Man. He is a doctor (specifically, a neurologist), a philosopher, a poet and a cultural critic. Summers of Discontent: The Purpose of the Arts Today is a collection of excerpts from Tallis's numerous other works, extracted and collated by Julian Spalding – curator and Tallis' contemporary. It's a testament to the free-flowing, all-encompassing way in which Tallis writes that these excerpts sit next to each other seamlessly; they feel like one complete discussion, which is an achievement in itself. The summary of Tallis' main argument throughout these excerpts is that humans create art due to the fact that we don't fully experience our experiences. At first glance, that comes across a little like a sound bite - something that sounds punchy but doesn't make a lot of sense when you actually start to dissect it. However, Tallis makes an extraordinary argument to prove that his statement is true. The analogy that I found most helpful in understanding Tallis's theory was one that featured a bat and ball. He theorises that when you step up to hit a ball away from you, the moments preceding the hit are filled with anticipation, while the moments after it are spent watching the ball fade from view. However, the actual impact itself is a split second and is barely experienced. So much time is spent anticipating the experience that it's hard to pinpoint the moment at which you have arrived at it. Art, then, helps take that split second moment and magnify it, immortalise it and make it An Experience. However, the book is about more than just this one theory, with discussion around the arts and freedom, the arts and emotion, and the idea that the arts are considered vital and yet are useless when their value is compared to food, water and shelter. Tallis's writing is intelligent and down-to-earth. There were also plenty of moments throughout reading the book when I thought ‘I know exactly what he's talking about, I've experienced that.' I don't think I would be alone in that either. I think Tallis taps into something universal and does it in a grounded, intelligible way. His description of a family going on holiday and trying to pinpoint the moment at which they have ‘arrived' is one that's seared into my memory. I've talked to everyone about it and it's sparked discussions in my house and at work about the purpose of the arts. That's something I personally think is really important in itself – to generate discussion around things that aren't about death and violence and human unkindness, but about the things that connect us all. From ancient times to now, the arts have done that. And Tallis' collection of very authentic, very practical works looks at why - not how or where -the arts are created. It is near on impossible to adequately summarise the richness of the ideas that Tallis shares in this book. A discussion on the human need for the arts and their ultimate purpose in our everyday lives could easily fill a book five times the size of “Summers of Discontent…” and get nowhere close to being as readable - or as inspiring and thought-provoking - as this fascinating, 190-page discourse on the human experience.' - Bookbag
‘To Waterstones Piccadilly on Wednesday night to hear and join a debate on ‘the purpose of the arts today', based on Raymond Tallis's book Summers of Discontent - essentially a careful selection of his previous writings by writer and gallerist Julian Spalding. This isn't one of those socio-political treatises that tries to explain why we should go on pouring so many millions a year into the Royal Opera House, or why the Arts Council budget should be slashed or increased, but rather a philosophical discussion of what the art encounter, whether it be literature, music or theatre, can give us, as existential, post-religious human beings. Tallis's premise is that we as humans suffer a ‘wound' in the present tense of our consciousness, such that we can never be fully present in our lives, but are always late to our own experiences. Art, he says, can help with this by showing how disparate formal elements can be integrated into one unified work; it offers both a model for how to do the same with our own scattered and disparate memories, thoughts, impulses and anticipations, and also a hypothetical space in which to do that work. It gives us a here and a now to be present in. I was asked, along with philosopher Roger Scruton and classicist Stephen Johnson, to respond to Tallis and Spalding's remarks, before the debate was opened to the floor – my ‘role' being that of novelist, and of novelist about ‘the arts'. My no doubt disjointed comments amounted to some of what follows: that I fully approved of the notion of the wound in the present tense, and of art's ability to – partially, temporarily – heal or alleviate it, and of doing so by modelling and facilitating formal integration (where, as Tallis points out, ‘form' is taken to mean the inside, rather than outside shape of things), but that this is surely an ideal, rather than a usual occurrence. Tallis was starting from a position where he talked about “art when it is at its best and we are at our most connected” – when, to my mind, most of the time neither of those things is true. (In fact there's a lovely description in his book of listening to a Haydn Mass “while the squeaky windscreen wipers are battling with rain adding its own percussion on the car roof” – and that is think is how we experience most art.) As a novelist, I want my writing to be at its best, and my readership at its most connected, always, but as a novelist who writes particularly about the arts (the contemporary art world, in Randall, and the world of pop music in my new book), what I'm interested in is the ordinary failings of poorly connected people responding to less than great art – but who, crucially, are no less committed to that project of arriving at a place of integration and connectedness. I gave the example of seeing Fleetwood Mac at the 02, a pretty good gig in a dismal setting by a band of which I'm not particularly a fan. (I love the album Tusk to bits, but can do without the rest of their stuff.) I responded variously to the music, leaping up at the songs I liked, nodding along to the rest, but what really got me was the response of the other audience members. There were men in the 60s, podgy and balding, as I'll doubtless be at that age, standing there agog on the concrete steps, hundreds of metres away from their idols, faces slack and eyes streaming with tears. This art may not have been at its best, but these people were absolutely connected, to it, and to their own lives – they were 20 again, they had all their hair and fitted into their jeans, they were falling in love with the girl who would go on to be their (first) wife. For me, as novelist, and therefore as someone interested above all in how people interact with the world, how they live, it was this that I found moving. The pathos of the ordinary person brought low by average music. Extraordinary how potent cheap music is: yes, but something more than that. The potency is not in the music, or not only; it is in our desire, in our eagerness to be discombobulated by it. We positively sign up for it. And yet we can't know, when we spend our teenage years listening to the same songs over and over again, of the pay-off that will come later. It does different things at different times. It gives us an experience, and lays down markers for other experiences in the future. The other point that I tried to make, or maybe I didn't, was the question of how, when and where we should do art. Does that healing of the wound in our present tense work best when it comes in small and regular applications of art's medicine, or in single, big surgical operations? Read a little every day? Or save it up and immerse yourself? If that sounds like a glib question, then it's not supposed to be. If you asked me to list my peak art encounters – the ones when I truly felt art working on me, when I felt myself brushed with revelation, and saw that everything made sense – you would get something like this: • Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, especially the final scene, with the two sets of characters dancing around the same stage • the end of Robert Lepage's The Far Side of the Moon, when, I think, he lifts and carries his mother (I remember very little else about the show) • twenty-four hours alone in Cornwall, immersed in the second volume of Knausgaard's My Struggle • that moment near the end of Gatz, the ‘dramatised reading' of The Great Gatsby, when Scott Shepherd as Nick Carraway stops reading the battered copy of Fitzgerald's novel he's been carrying around with him for the last six hours and starts speaking it, the pages riffling through his fingers like the spokes on a car wheel in an advert, when they seem to spin backwards • hearing New Order's ‘Regret' for the first time, on the radio in the kitchen of my parents' house, that guitar hook… • the curtain falling at the end of the first act of Tosca at the Royal Opera House: oh, so this is what opera is all about! • sitting on the window ledge in Clermont Ferrand stuffing my face with sweets and reading The English Patient in a single day • falling asleep on the sofa to Carnival of the Animals as a child • falling asleep to András Schiff playing Mozart piano sonatas in a box at a Late Night Prom in 2006 (brilliant – listening to music while half-asleep is a wonderful experience) • listening to Patti Smith's ‘Birdland' while driving through the Dartford tunnel, my wife and kids unaware of my tears • crying at Douglas Coupland's Microserfs, when the mother uses the computer • getting a cannabis and sugar rush combined during the heady, bass-heavy nightclub scene in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me at the Hyde Park Picture House in Leeds… That will do for the moment. The point being that these examples split quite obviously into grand and domestic experiences. Some we attend (we attend) with heightened expectations, ready to be blown away. They are designed as ‘peak experiences'. Others – the Coupland, the Ondaatje, the New Order and Patti Smith, the Saint-Saëns – form part of our everyday cultural exposure. The novel gets picked up and put down, picked up and put down; the pieces of music, the pop songs, spring out at us from the car, the computer, on the commute. I have particular love for the first act of John Adams' Nixon in China, and though I saw it at the ENO, and again, with Adams conducting, at the Proms, it's mostly done its work on me at home, on the stereo or, now, on the computer. Should our exposure to art be a rare occurrence, set up for maximum meaning, like a pilgrimage, or should it be a daily hygiene, like meditation? Surely daily reading, or listening to music in the car or on your commute, is about something other than ‘healing the wound' – it's about distraction, and entertainment. Art involves these things, after all, and no one would suggest that those elements contain whatever it is that heals us. Or do they? I've written myself into a state of confusion. Art does so many things, and if the most important thing – for us, as humans in the contemporary world – is to do that healing work, then how, practically, can we start to disentangle this function from those others? Should we seek it out? Can we? Or will that ruin it? (Or is it there, all along?) I don't know.' - Jonathan Gibbs-Tiny Camels blog
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