Unanswered questions about Byron the Blurb...

[Paul Nightingale]

>From David Kipen:

<<It strikes me that all the inklings offered us in the Amazon blurb fall
into roughly three categories ...>>

I like the tripartite division made here; it is a structural feature of the
blurb. However, I'm wary of trying to second-guess the novel by delving into
specifics. And this being the p-list who knows where it would end? You say
Princip, I say Czolgosz, and before we know what's happened we've come to
virtual blows.

My aim thus far has been to think of the blurb in relation to the Young
Willis extract.

The extract wasn't, I think, chosen at random; either way, the juxtaposition
of one text to the other is now a part of the published novel's
(pre-)history. The blurb offers an overview ("Spanning the period between
..."); the extract an account of a single, brief incident. Each of the
references in the blurb is complete insofar as we can locate the World Fair
and silent-era Hollywood and so on. Obviously we want to know more; but as
David indicates 'more' here refers to the relationship between such moments.
How, then, will the novel get from Colorado to Hollywood, via London? These
are questions to do with writing that cannot be answered as yet.

The extract plays microcosm to the blurb's macrocosm; the task of the novel
will be to relate one microcosm to another.

For example, the case of Oscar Micheaux, a black novelist and film-maker: he
wrote autobiographical novels about homesteading in South Dakota, then gave
up and left for Hollywood in the late-teens, exchanging one medium for
another, one frontier for another.

See: Dan Moos (2002) "Reclaiming the Frontier: Oscar Micheaux as Black
Turnerian" in African American Review, Vol. 36, no pagination available.

One of the (possibly relevant) London events at the turn of the century is
Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1987; lots of opportunities for
history-as-theatre there, as tacky as anything William Cody can think of.
The so-called Relief of Mafeking is celebrated at the turn of the century,
bringing crowds to the streets of London; Baden-Powell is an actor in that
little South African drama and, a few years later, publishes Scouting for
Boys (1908).

Historians have noted that the Diamond Jubilee seems to signal 'the end of
an era'; and the old bat finally falls off her perch in 1901, the year in
which Czolgosz assassinates McKinley. Conrad publishes The Secret Agent in
1907; the Young Willis extract has already offered us pastiche, so perhaps
there is more to come ...