As every critic who writes about him is compelled to observe, the work of the Austrian writer Joseph Roth does not have the reputation it merits. It took some time for him to be recognized even in German-speaking countries; it has taken still longer for his major works to be translated and acknowledged abroad. Compare him to two figures who are better known - Franz Kafka and Thomas Mann - and one can perhaps work out what his image lacked. Roth was neither an established cultural authority like Mann (who even went so far as to claim, during his American exile, that he was German culture), nor a radical literary experimentalist like Kafka. He was too conservative to be an out-and-out modernist, and too disorganized, too bitter, sceptical and oblique to become a defender of tradition. And yet I'm convinced that the best of his work not only can but ought to be mentioned in the same breath as the giants of twentieth-century European literature. I can't assess his work in the round - for that, look at Jon Hughes' website, with its links to numerous reviews and articles charting Roth's reception in the last few decades. Here I'm just concerned to put down a few observations.
The first thing that struck me about Roth's prose was its perceptiveness, its receptivity to the smallest detail. The photographer Brassai once described Proust's masterwork In Search of Lost Time as a "single gigantic photograph", as if its writing were the development of latent images recorded in the film of a lifetime's experience. Roth's achievement is less slow and complete - but photographic it surely is. His instinct and keenness of eye was that of a Cartier-Bresson, lightning-sharp. He was, after all, a journalist before being a novelist, writing in a vein between reportage and personal column that would be hard to place in a modern paper. Aptly, the translator Michael Hofmann entitled his selection of Roth's journalism "What I Saw", and placed at its head the 1921 piece "Going for a Walk". Beginning with a stroke-by-stroke picture of a street scene - a cab-horse, a boy playing with marbles on the pavement, a girl in a window - he prepares a statement of his ultimate priorities as a writer: for Roth, "it is only the minutiae of life that are important". Big "stories", whether journalistic or fictional, have lost their pull: "Strolling around on a May morning, what do I care about the vast issues of world history as expressed in newspaper editorials? Or even the fate of some individual, a potential tragic hero...? Confronted with the truly microscopic, all loftiness is hopeless, competely meaningless. I no longer have any use for the sweeping gestures of heroes...I'm going for a walk." (pp. 24-5) Assuming Roth did not simply abandon this opinion when he came to write fiction, how can it possibly be reconciled with the novelist's task? Can one write about great personal and historical events and not take them seriously?
Roth in fact does just that. Even in his familial saga The Radetzky March the feeling that "all loftiness is hopeless" remains. Everything grand is played down, undercut, or made absurd. The heroic deed at the beginning of The Radetzky March is immediately ridiculed by parodying it as a set text for primary-school children; the announcement of the outbreak of the First World War arrives at the height of a grotesquely chaotic country-house party which carries on regardless. Death is ignominious or anti-dramatic: Lieutenant Trotta is shot not storming the enemy position but while carrying pails of water from a nearby well; Anselm Eibenschutz in Weights and Measures is murdered "and as they say, no one cared two hoots about it". I imagine that Roth secretly felt the artistic problem with such events to be that nothing can be "done with" them, because they are in a sense indescribable. The reality of death or war cannot be adequately perceived. The only "proper" response is to piously switch one's camera off, and this Roth was never prepared to do. Even in such scenes he ends up describing - not the event but something else, the birdsong, the rising dust, how the dying man's "white teeth shone against the blue autumn sky". Like W. H. Auden, Roth understood very well how suffering "takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along". Above all it is nature which in Roth's universe dwarfs the individual event. The objective pathos of natural beauty reduces man to an unreal substance, his history a mere "airy exchange" of vaporous illusions, vanishing like the steam from a bowl of food, in Rilke's metaphor. Roth's own image is more eloquent and antique: "a farmer walks across the soil in spring - and later, in summer, the traces of his steps are obscured by the billowing richness of the wheat he once sowed".
We can sow riches, then. Roth clearly believes that human traditions and cultures - for him above all that of the Austro-Hungarian empire - can take on some of the stable dignity and simple, unknowing wealth of nature. But this belief has two distinguishing marks: it is impersonal, supra-individual first of all - contrast Goethe's ideal of the natural growth of the individual personality; and it is involuntary. (Roth was nostalgic for the pre-war world not because it had ordered itself in some kind of perfect natural balance, but because it left space, because it was tolerant toward the older, smaller worlds of the farm and the shtetl. The end of empire meant the end of tolerance.) And these sympathies with community perhaps explain what has been criticised as a fault in Roth's style - the weakness or flatness of his characters. If they are flat it is once more only in the sense that a photograph is - a characteristic of the medium, merely. But they are weak because they have to be in an artistic sense: it is an integral part of Roth's anti-heroic world that individuals qua individuals should be flawed and unreliable, their wills subordinate to desire, habit and social custom. (There is the obvious similarity to Roth himself, too: weak, drunk, and indisciplined in everything except his art.)
A great part of Roth's brilliance is in his analysis of personal weakness. His treatment of Paul Bernheim in Right and Left is understanding, sympathetic to a degree, but communicating throughout a sense of Paul's feebleness, his complete inability to act with decision and instinct. Lieutenant Trotta and Anselm Eibenschutz are characters of the same cast. Their counterfoils - Roth's answer to the question, what does strength look like? - are more forces of nature than human beings: the inscrutable, shape-shifting Nikolai Brandeis and the opportunistically violent Leibusch Jadlowker. (Jadlowker and his smuggler's tavern appear in several of the novels - he is part of the landscape, like the swamps, the trees and the wolves.) The few genuinely good men - rabbis, servants, farmers - are distant, and as far as possible uninvolved in events. They too have an almost geological permanence to them. But the traditional centre of the story - the "hero", imperfect but an active and potent force for good - cannot hold. He cannot even achieve enough stature to make tragedy possible.
To conclude that because Roth observes so much and so pessimistically he must be a "realist" would be misguided. His world is cruel but also magical, almost dreamlike, owing in the later novellas an obvious debt to the fairy story. The key is not in introducing unreal apparitions or impossible events but in the way the real is presented. Certain symbolic details, such as the tinkling of Euphemia's earrings in Weights and Measures, are shaped almost like magic charms. The eponymous alcoholic in The Legend of the Holy Drinker encounters his improbable - but not impossible - beneficiaries exactly in the manner of the traditional quest narrative (as famously analysed by Vladimir Propp). From all this emerges a peculiar atmosphere that is a key achievement of Roth's later work, and I'm tempted to speculate that, as well as relating back to the German Romantics (Hoffmann, Brentano, Eichendorff), it looks forward to the "magic realism" and imaginative fantasy of post-WWII literature. One Hundred Years of Solitude paradoxically reads more like late Roth than like anything else in early twentieth-century fiction I've come across (excepting Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita). But there is less playfulness in Roth's work than in Marquez or Borges - and more sheer, concentrated poetic beauty, crafted from the pure truth of observation. The "minutiae of life" seemed to him to demand no less.
Monday 16 June 2008
Wednesday 13 February 2008
The friendliness of packaging
Now this may seem like a strange and insignificant subject for a blog post, but I have to confess it has been preying on my mind for a while...
Advertising and marketing are not normally subjects we want to give much thought to. The most common, perhaps one could say the "correct" attitude to take to them is to ignore them; we would prefer others to think we are not watching or, at least not responding to ad breaks on TV, for instance. Where we break this rule it tends to be in the direction of certain responses - ridicule, for something pretentious; mild amusement, where a joke is permitted to work; light nostalgia for past advertising (remembered jingles, or quaint old Edwardian posters for chocolate recycled as postcards or fridge magnets). On rare occasions an ad is actually impressive (as some of the Guinness or Honda ones are). Otherwise, advertising seems - rarely enough for an area of popular culture - to fall below our critical response-threshold: we compare favourite TV shows, we argue about bands, we berate footballers, we adore or (more usually) deplore celebrities, we even talk about ringtones (well, kids do) - but we couldn't give the proverbial monkeys about the enormous amount of commercially designed material we are involuntarily exposed to every day.
This is because we tend to think all of this stuff is, without any particular distinction, "manipulative": it's designed with our tastes and responses in mind, but its real purpose is commercial, to get us to that point of handing over our cash for the product, after which the advertiser could not care less what happened to the product or us. True enough: but the tools of manipulation do make a difference. The sorts of ideas and references advertisers use are not purely commercial or confined to claims about the product (one often thinks: if only they were!), but play off all sorts of complex trends in popular culture as a whole. This was true even for old-fashioned, 50s-style adverts, as Roland Barthes showed in his Mythologies. How much truer it must be for the bewildering complexity of modern advertising, in which the "brand" has become a kind of subcultural unit in itself, is something we need to analyse. It is also something we need to discuss critically, just as we would any social trend, without jumping straight away to the Marxist conclusion that anything "co-opted" by the capitalists must be a bad thing. (Is it so awful if companies are keen to display their green credentials, for instance?)
In fact, the tendency I'm going to examine here is something I haven't fully made my mind up about yet, although I won't be able to hide how intensely annoying I find it in most cases. It's what I detect as a growing familiarity in the "tone of voice" adopted by certain companies, not only in their adverts but on their packaging, in their stores (if they have them), and as part of their general brand concept. The best examples I've found so far are in coffee shops and food and drink manufacturing. Of these by far the most irritating is the coffee chain Puccino's. Their website ("Hi, how's it hanging...Puccino's - yeah, really special...all delivered to the customer with a massive smile (not fake)" gives only a hint of how fabulously satisfied they are with this wink-wink, familiar-ironic style they've just adopted. It goes all the way down to the signs they hang in their shops. The one on the door reads "completely open/shut happens"; over the till there are explanations of how to order a drink ("1. place your order 2. loiter 3. pick up your order 4. waddle off self-consciously"); and one saying "no knee-bobbing" over the counter where you perch to drink your coffee.
A slightly better-known case is Pret A Manger. I don't know whether they've always had the brand style they have now, but it's an unmistakeable part of the same trend. According to their customer enquiries page, which invites you to hassle their MD because he "hasn't got much to do" (like hell he hasn't), they hand out a solid silver Tiffany star to every employee who gets positive feedback from the public. They are positively bending over backwards to tell you what a wonderful happy company they are. (One little feature I can't forebear comment on: the use of inverted commas everywhere, as in 'Just Made' sandwiches. Have they just been made or haven't they?! Or is "just" the kind of word you can stretch a bit? I think that's the implication - "you won't mind us saying this if we put it in quotation marks, will you - we're nice people really!". In academic prose one refers to "scare quotes" to mean phrases the writer uses unwillingly. I suppose these must be "friendly quotes".) Ditto with Innocent smoothies: it must be their innovation to have put fake ingredients on their packaging for a joke (...one banana, 6 grapes, and one family-size hatchback). All the links on their web-page dance up and down going "look at me, aren't I cute", and they can't stop organising events, competitions, and "village fetes" in the middle of Regent's Park. Ben and Jerry's have a similar aesthetic - punning product names and Holstein cows in hammocks with speech bubbles. Another random example: I ate at a sandwich joint on Charlotte Street the other day that went by the charming name Squat and Gobble: on the receipt every item was listed as "Grub" and at the bottom was the motto "Keep gobbling!". The next day I went to one of my usual non-branded places to escape the whole business, only to accidentally pick up an "exquisitely trivial" cake made by Mr Bunbury, whose "secret life" I was encouraged to discover on his eponymous website.
There genuinely is no getting away from this "cute" kind of branding. Is it really a bad thing? After all, it's all creative, some of it is quite funny, and a lot of it seems to come from young companies that want to be a positive and ethically responsible force in the marketplace, not just a faceless money-making machine. Anyone of the Naomi Klein generation, however, with the cry No Logo! still echoing somewhere in the back of their minds, is bound to be suspicious of the whole brand phenomenon from the start; and even if Innocent are clearly not subcontracting their smoothies to Vietnamese sweatshops, you still wonder why this new branding strategy has become so popular. It's not just someone's bright idea: it means something in social terms. I've wondered whether it might be connected to the enormous popularity of comedy in the media, or to greater familiarity in public life (Europeans are more aware of this than Brits, as they watch the old formal modes of address - vous, Lei, and Sie - gradually give way to an automatic, familiar du or tu).
But one thing that can't be overlooked is that this tone makes no real communicative sense: packaging cannot actually be friendly in the way that people can be. And if you say that it isn't the packaging but the company/brand that's being friendly, I'm not sure that's a logical improvement, since - as with personally-addressed junk mail, which is another branch of the same marketing strategy - there isn't any interaction going on here. (It's the same in the public sector with recorded apologies at train stations: you can only say sorry - and mean it - "live".) If there were, then for all the homogenous cheeriness that Pret (e.g.) imposes on its staff, such interaction would still (again) be with people. A company can be friendly in the sense of providing a nice working environment for its employees, but - however much they might want to make us feel included in that environment, and it's significant that they desperately do want to give us that sense - we aren't any part of it: we're customers, and we stand outside.
And is there anything wrong with that? Is there anything wrong with distance, formality, and anonymity when they're what's appropriate? I'm probably being hopelessly British, but I don't think there is. It can be dull, but at least it's not fake: it reflects the real, that is to say impersonal, relationship between a company or any public organisation and those it serves. That does not mean that every individual interaction between that organisation's representatives and the public has to be impersonal, of course. But the delight when it isn't - when spontaneous care, humour, or vivaciousness spring up - is because that person acts out of their expected role, using a commercial encounter as a simply human opportunity. That requires us to recognise in the first place that "roles" or personae have a role of their own in social behaviour, both when we inhabit them and, just as importantly, when we exchange or abandon them - a point eloquently made by Erving Goffmann in his classic The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. We can't function in modern urban society in a constantly friendly mode (like Paul Hogan in Crocodile Dundee, arriving in New York and trying to introduce himself to everyone on the street). Of course, it can be wonderful to see people try, but there's no hypocrisy in using several behavioural styles depending on what is appropriate. The hypocrisy here is that of marketeers pretending that a brand can act out any style it likes. They can feign it, of course, but I hope they don't expect us to believe that they've just made a new set of friends. They'll have to get a real life for that.
Advertising and marketing are not normally subjects we want to give much thought to. The most common, perhaps one could say the "correct" attitude to take to them is to ignore them; we would prefer others to think we are not watching or, at least not responding to ad breaks on TV, for instance. Where we break this rule it tends to be in the direction of certain responses - ridicule, for something pretentious; mild amusement, where a joke is permitted to work; light nostalgia for past advertising (remembered jingles, or quaint old Edwardian posters for chocolate recycled as postcards or fridge magnets). On rare occasions an ad is actually impressive (as some of the Guinness or Honda ones are). Otherwise, advertising seems - rarely enough for an area of popular culture - to fall below our critical response-threshold: we compare favourite TV shows, we argue about bands, we berate footballers, we adore or (more usually) deplore celebrities, we even talk about ringtones (well, kids do) - but we couldn't give the proverbial monkeys about the enormous amount of commercially designed material we are involuntarily exposed to every day.
This is because we tend to think all of this stuff is, without any particular distinction, "manipulative": it's designed with our tastes and responses in mind, but its real purpose is commercial, to get us to that point of handing over our cash for the product, after which the advertiser could not care less what happened to the product or us. True enough: but the tools of manipulation do make a difference. The sorts of ideas and references advertisers use are not purely commercial or confined to claims about the product (one often thinks: if only they were!), but play off all sorts of complex trends in popular culture as a whole. This was true even for old-fashioned, 50s-style adverts, as Roland Barthes showed in his Mythologies. How much truer it must be for the bewildering complexity of modern advertising, in which the "brand" has become a kind of subcultural unit in itself, is something we need to analyse. It is also something we need to discuss critically, just as we would any social trend, without jumping straight away to the Marxist conclusion that anything "co-opted" by the capitalists must be a bad thing. (Is it so awful if companies are keen to display their green credentials, for instance?)
In fact, the tendency I'm going to examine here is something I haven't fully made my mind up about yet, although I won't be able to hide how intensely annoying I find it in most cases. It's what I detect as a growing familiarity in the "tone of voice" adopted by certain companies, not only in their adverts but on their packaging, in their stores (if they have them), and as part of their general brand concept. The best examples I've found so far are in coffee shops and food and drink manufacturing. Of these by far the most irritating is the coffee chain Puccino's. Their website ("Hi, how's it hanging...Puccino's - yeah, really special...all delivered to the customer with a massive smile (not fake)" gives only a hint of how fabulously satisfied they are with this wink-wink, familiar-ironic style they've just adopted. It goes all the way down to the signs they hang in their shops. The one on the door reads "completely open/shut happens"; over the till there are explanations of how to order a drink ("1. place your order 2. loiter 3. pick up your order 4. waddle off self-consciously"); and one saying "no knee-bobbing" over the counter where you perch to drink your coffee.
A slightly better-known case is Pret A Manger. I don't know whether they've always had the brand style they have now, but it's an unmistakeable part of the same trend. According to their customer enquiries page, which invites you to hassle their MD because he "hasn't got much to do" (like hell he hasn't), they hand out a solid silver Tiffany star to every employee who gets positive feedback from the public. They are positively bending over backwards to tell you what a wonderful happy company they are. (One little feature I can't forebear comment on: the use of inverted commas everywhere, as in 'Just Made' sandwiches. Have they just been made or haven't they?! Or is "just" the kind of word you can stretch a bit? I think that's the implication - "you won't mind us saying this if we put it in quotation marks, will you - we're nice people really!". In academic prose one refers to "scare quotes" to mean phrases the writer uses unwillingly. I suppose these must be "friendly quotes".) Ditto with Innocent smoothies: it must be their innovation to have put fake ingredients on their packaging for a joke (...one banana, 6 grapes, and one family-size hatchback). All the links on their web-page dance up and down going "look at me, aren't I cute", and they can't stop organising events, competitions, and "village fetes" in the middle of Regent's Park. Ben and Jerry's have a similar aesthetic - punning product names and Holstein cows in hammocks with speech bubbles. Another random example: I ate at a sandwich joint on Charlotte Street the other day that went by the charming name Squat and Gobble: on the receipt every item was listed as "Grub" and at the bottom was the motto "Keep gobbling!". The next day I went to one of my usual non-branded places to escape the whole business, only to accidentally pick up an "exquisitely trivial" cake made by Mr Bunbury, whose "secret life" I was encouraged to discover on his eponymous website.
There genuinely is no getting away from this "cute" kind of branding. Is it really a bad thing? After all, it's all creative, some of it is quite funny, and a lot of it seems to come from young companies that want to be a positive and ethically responsible force in the marketplace, not just a faceless money-making machine. Anyone of the Naomi Klein generation, however, with the cry No Logo! still echoing somewhere in the back of their minds, is bound to be suspicious of the whole brand phenomenon from the start; and even if Innocent are clearly not subcontracting their smoothies to Vietnamese sweatshops, you still wonder why this new branding strategy has become so popular. It's not just someone's bright idea: it means something in social terms. I've wondered whether it might be connected to the enormous popularity of comedy in the media, or to greater familiarity in public life (Europeans are more aware of this than Brits, as they watch the old formal modes of address - vous, Lei, and Sie - gradually give way to an automatic, familiar du or tu).
But one thing that can't be overlooked is that this tone makes no real communicative sense: packaging cannot actually be friendly in the way that people can be. And if you say that it isn't the packaging but the company/brand that's being friendly, I'm not sure that's a logical improvement, since - as with personally-addressed junk mail, which is another branch of the same marketing strategy - there isn't any interaction going on here. (It's the same in the public sector with recorded apologies at train stations: you can only say sorry - and mean it - "live".) If there were, then for all the homogenous cheeriness that Pret (e.g.) imposes on its staff, such interaction would still (again) be with people. A company can be friendly in the sense of providing a nice working environment for its employees, but - however much they might want to make us feel included in that environment, and it's significant that they desperately do want to give us that sense - we aren't any part of it: we're customers, and we stand outside.
And is there anything wrong with that? Is there anything wrong with distance, formality, and anonymity when they're what's appropriate? I'm probably being hopelessly British, but I don't think there is. It can be dull, but at least it's not fake: it reflects the real, that is to say impersonal, relationship between a company or any public organisation and those it serves. That does not mean that every individual interaction between that organisation's representatives and the public has to be impersonal, of course. But the delight when it isn't - when spontaneous care, humour, or vivaciousness spring up - is because that person acts out of their expected role, using a commercial encounter as a simply human opportunity. That requires us to recognise in the first place that "roles" or personae have a role of their own in social behaviour, both when we inhabit them and, just as importantly, when we exchange or abandon them - a point eloquently made by Erving Goffmann in his classic The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. We can't function in modern urban society in a constantly friendly mode (like Paul Hogan in Crocodile Dundee, arriving in New York and trying to introduce himself to everyone on the street). Of course, it can be wonderful to see people try, but there's no hypocrisy in using several behavioural styles depending on what is appropriate. The hypocrisy here is that of marketeers pretending that a brand can act out any style it likes. They can feign it, of course, but I hope they don't expect us to believe that they've just made a new set of friends. They'll have to get a real life for that.
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