Authors: Malcolm Bradbury
We see this, in fact, right from the start of the book as, waiting at Heathrow while watching ‘those special exotic airport women one may always see but never have’, he orders
another Scotch ‘and finds himself caught by nameless fear – the fear of being trapped here, for eternity, in the unassigned, stateless space between all the countries, condemned to live
forever in a cosmopolitan nowhere, on clingfilm-wrapped sandwiches, duty-free whisky, Tiptree’s jam’.
This stateless space, this ‘non-place’ with its draining deficit of significance, infused the film
Lost in Translation
(2003), which shares with
Rates of Exchange
themes of loneliness, insomnia and alienation. At first Slaka promises escape from the significance deficit. In translation himself, mid-flight, as Petworth begins to exchange British airspace for
European and then Slakan airspace (‘somehow his being is shifting: a Petworth life and a Petworth wife, a Petworth day and a Petworth way, are strangely slipping and disintegrating’),
there is a transfer of significance. The Slakans on the flight are ‘peoply sort of people’; they remind Petworth of ‘the people of his childhood, a time when the world appeared
remarkably solid, persons massive, individuals whole and complete, reality really real, buildings permanently in place’.
The Western postmodern condition which he has left behind reduces individuals to fictions; to mere signs in a marketplace. What are you doing, the narrator asks the fashionably clothed,
trend-obsessed young, ‘but bartering your mind and your body, your youth and your opinions, on the economic frontier, in an attempt to find a meaning, invent a value, find your highest price,
trade at the best possible rate of exchange?’
But as Petworth soon discovers in Slaka, exchanges are also taking place there, as individuals work together to game the system, extracting value where they can:
‘So I hope you now understand something,’ says Lubijova. ‘Why always we see them together. Of course it is a very good exchange. He likes her charms, and
recommends everywhere her work; think how nice for him to be seen with a person who is beautiful and respected, and has a great talent and a little courage. And for her, well, she is safe,
you should please. It is not so strange, such things happen in all countries.’
The ‘her’ under discussion is Katya Princip, who earlier has tried to warn Petworth of the exchange-value of everything, regardless of whether one is living under communism or
capitalism:
Oh, we made the bad world go away for a minute, that really is what love is for, but when it comes back, we have of course to live in it. Make all the loves you like and
you still do not escape. Most lives are a prison, here in my country of course, you know, but I know also in yours . . . And all the lovings in the world, they do not make these things go
away. The black car that waits outside, did you see it? The water that dries here on your skin that is like me going away. Oh, yes, my dear we have made our nice secret, all so natural. But
of course it is not so natural. As my grey father Marx tells, it is also cultural and ideological, economical and sexual. It is part of all the systems, and each time you choose or you do,
you enter one of them.
One aspect of this systemic matrix is language itself (the ‘prison-house of language’ as the postmodern theorist Frederic Jameson has it), and it is here that Bradbury has his
greatest fun, with brilliant lexical and grammatical play reminiscent of Anthony Burgess and Martin Amis.
They were both writers with whom Bradbury was critically entangled. In his review of
Rates of Exchange
in the
Observer
in 1983, Amis complained of Bradbury’s slowness of
output and ‘ravenous drollery’, finding the novel itself ‘uneconomical – prohibitively so’. In his 1993
Times
obituary of Burgess, Bradbury drew attention to
Burgess’s prolixity of output and his narrative inventiveness:
The books which came, almost unremittingly, from 1956 on make a vast record of the second half of the twentieth century, a collective pulling together of what a deeply
engaged literary and linguistic mind might draw from what had already been written, what it was now time to write. Burgess is the great postmodern storehouse of British writing, maker not
just of contemporary stories, but of innumerable new narrative codes. He is a popular writer, but also an important experimentalist; an encyclopaedic amasser, but also a maker of form; a
playful comic, with a dark gloom.
With the benefit of another decade or so of hindsight, the novels of all these three writers seem closer together than ever. While Bradbury probably never would have matched Burgess’s
extraordinary output, certainly as a hyperbolic stylist in this book he begins to match Amis, and perhaps that was one reason for the Oedipal spikiness of the review. Moreover, there are clear
lines of continuity to be drawn between
Rates of Exchange
and
Money: A Suicide Note
, Amis’s most famous novel, published the following year. Their concerns around exchanges of
value and meaning (and lack thereof) mesh and contend; both seem echt-80s novels; both use Bakhtinian ‘heteroglossia’ for satiric purpose, building up an interplay of discourses and
dialects; both depend for their comedy on a misapprehension on the part of the hero. But the most important comparison is that both Angus Petworth and John Self are caught in toils of language and
desire. Here’s Petworth:
In a dream, there is despair: he is looking for a word for a thing, but he does not know what the thing is, because the word will not come. There is a desire to
incorporate, to make what is outside inside; and it seems that a body is there, a body that presses itself against him, puts something to his mouth. But when he wakes in the darkness, he is
alone, with the water running outside, in the tight narrow bed.
And here is Self:
Lying in that slipped zone where there is neither sleep nor wakefulness, where all thoughts and words are crosspurposed, and yet the mind is forever solving, solving,
Selina came at me in queries of pink smoke. I saw her performing flesh in fantastic eddies and convulsions . . . I woke babbling in the night – yes, I heard myself say it, solve it,
through the dream mumble . . .
And both novels, too, share a concern with those other zones of slippage, airports. At the end of
Rates of Exchange
,
slubob
has returned to
slibob
, and Petworth himself is
waiting again for his flight, caught in the strange ‘grammar of airports’ once more. But now he is able to converse fluently with the armed men in the immigration booth. And that is a
victory of sorts.
F
OR MY BROTHER
B
ASIL
WITH ALL MY LOVE
Author’s Note
This is a book, and what it says is not true. You will not find Slaka, Glit, or Nogod on any map, and so you will probably never make the trip there. The Heathrow air traffic
controllers’ strike of 1981 never took place, but was held in a quite different year. There is no resemblance at all between the imaginary figures here and any person who chooses to believe
that he or she actually exists. So there is no Petworth, no dark Lottie, no Marisja Lubijova and no brilliant Katya Princip. Rum, Plitplov and the Steadimans have never existed, and probably never
will: except insofar as you and I conspire to bring them into existence, with, as usual, me doing most of the work. Or, as the literary critics say, I’ll be your implied author, if
you’ll be my implied reader; and, as they also say, it is our duty to lie together, in the cause, of course, of truth.
So, like money, this book is a paper fiction, offered for exchange. But, as with money, one contracts with it various debts. I must express mine to many helpful friends: Chris Bigsby, Anthony
Thwaite, George Hyde, and others. But I especially thank those members of the British Council English Studies seminar who, over several summers, in various long rooms in Cambridge colleges, helped
me in more than one sense to invent a language.
MB,
1982
Narrative: Legal tender
– Roland Barthes
‘You have a quarrel on hand, I see,’ said I, ‘with some of the algebraists of Paris; but proceed.’
– Edgar Allan Poe,
The Purloined Letter
The language of this country being always upon the flux, the Struldbruggs of one age do not understand those of another, neither are they able after two hundred years to hold
any conversation (farther than by a few general words) with their neighbours the mortals, and thus they lie under the disadvantage of living like foreigners in their own country.
– Jonathan Swift,
Gulliver’s Travels
It seems to me the further east you go the more unpunctual are the trains.
– Bram Stoker,
Dracula
Contents
Visiting Slaka: A Few Brief Hints
Visiting Slaka: A Few Brief Hints
If you should ever happen to make the trip to Slaka, that fine flower of middle European cities, capital of commerce and art, wide streets and gipsy music, then, whatever else
you plan to do there, do not, as the travel texts say, neglect to visit the Cathedral of Saint Valdopin: a little outside the town, at the end of the tramway-route, near to the power station, down
by the slow, marshy, mosquito-breeding waters of the great River Niyt.
A city infinitely rich in this, and no less lacking in that, Slaka is, you will remember, the historic capital and quite the largest metropolis of that small dark nation of plain and marsh,
mountain and factory known in all the history books as the bloody battlefield (
tulsto’ii uncard’ninu
) of central eastern Europe. Located by an at once kind and cruel geography at
the confluence of many trade routes, going north and east, south and west, its high mountains not too high to cut it off, its broad rivers not too broad to obstruct passage, it is a land that has
frequently flourished, prospered, been a centre of trade and barter, art and culture, but has yet more frequently been pummelled, fought over, raped, pillaged, conquered and oppressed by the
endless invaders who, from every direction, have swept and jostled through this all too accessible landscape. Swedes and Medes, Prussians and Russians, Asians and Thracians, Tartars and Cossacks,
Mortars and Turds, indeed almost every tribe or race specialist in pillage and rape, have been here, as to some necessary destination, and left behind their imprint, their customs, their faiths,
their architecture, their genes. This is a country that has been now big, now small, now virtually non-existent. Its inhabitants have seen its borders expand, contract and on occasion disappear
from sight, and so confused is its past that the country could now be in a place quite different from that in which it started. And so its culture is a melting pot, its language a
pot-pourri
, its people a salad; at different times, these folk have worshipped nearly every well-known god, consumed almost every possible food (from the milk and eggs of the north to the
spices and fruits of the south and east), spoken in numerous tongues, and traded in all the coins and currencies, stamped or embossed with the ever-fleeting heads of the uncountable emperors and
princelings, thains and margraves, bishop-krakators and mamelukes who have mysteriously appeared, ruled for a time, and then as mysteriously disappeared again, into the obscure and contorted
passages of history.
As a result, in Slaka history is a mystery, and it is not surprising that the nation’s past has been very variously recorded and the facts much disputed, for everyone has a story to tell.
Perplexities abound, accounts contradict, and accurate details are wanting. But there is no doubt that that history goes back into the deepest mists of ancient Europe, back into the dark and virgin
forest, where all history is supposed to begin, all stories to start. A certain reputable encyclopedia, consulted in an old edition, authoritatively observes (if I have read it accurately, and if
my hastily scribbled notes, gathered amid the distractions of the great round Reading Room of the British Museum, where white-eyed Italian girls shout hotly for company around tea-time, tempting
serious scholars, of whom I am not one anyway, into folly, are correctly transcribed):
No certain historical data exists for the period prior to the Xth. An obscure passage in a chronicle by Nostrum, Monk of Kiev, suggests a possible origin for these people
somewhere in the region of the Bosphorus, but even this much is disputed. The people are generally finely built, dark in the southern part of the country, fair in the northern, inclined to
spectacular deeds of heroism, but somewhat deficient in energy and industry. Long periods of outside occupation depressed the people, until the national awakening of the XIXth., led by Prince
Bohumil the Shy, and celebrated by the poet Hrovdat, killed on his horse in 1848 as he declaimed epic verse in battle. The earliest specimen of the language occurs in a psalter of the XIth.,
but some seventeen different, regional languages presently exist in the country. Salt, gypsum and iron ore are mined. Principal cities are Slaka, the ancient capital; Glit, a seat of
learning; and Provd, an industrial centre.