Cytokines and Microglia Activation Lead to Neurotoxicity. Inflammation and NPs. Interplay of Inflammation and Coagulation. Back to top Article Information. PubMed Google Scholar Crossref. Novel neuroimmunologic therapeutics in depression. Viral pathogen-associated molecular patterns regulate blood-brain barrier integrity via competing innate cytokine signals.
Neurotoxic reactive astrocytes are induced by activated microglia. A complement-microglial axis drives synapse loss during virus-induced memory impairment. Altered neuro-inflammatory gene expression in hippocampus in major depressive disorder. Resilience is associated with larger dentate gyrus, while suicide decedents with major depressive disorder have fewer granule neurons. Traumatic brain injury and suicidal behavior. Limit characters. Limit 25 characters.
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Thank You. Your comment submission was successful. Please allow up to 2 business days for review, approval, and posting. We read with interest Dr. However, both ketamine and esketamine cause dissociative effects in a high percentage of patients at therapeutic doses. Esmethadone, the opioid-inactive d-isomer of racemic methadone2 is a low affinity and low potency NMDAR channel blocker effective in murine models of depressive-like behavior3 and with robust, rapid, and sustained therapeutic effects in patients with MDD at once-daily 25 and 50 mg oral doses Fava et al: manuscript submitted.
Esmethadone has similar "trapping" properties at NMDARs compared to ketamine, but lower potency Bettini et al: manuscript in preparation and is devoid of psychotomimetic effects or other cognitive side effects.
Because of the hypothesized mechanism of action, the strong signal for efficacy for patients with MDD, and the favorable safety, tolerability, and pharmacokinetic profile, esmethadone should be tested in controlled trials for prevention and treatment of complications secondary to COVID In parallel, we will explore with the Food and Drug Administration the possibility of meeting the threshold for emergency use authorization EUA in the United States.
References 1. Diversion Control Division. July Prominent features include: 1 Support to distributed queries over a hierarchical data model, supporting incremental queries i. The presented catalog clearinghouse supports both the opaque and translucent pattern for service chaining. In fact, the clearinghouse catalog may be configured either to completely hide the underlying federated services or to provide clients with services information.
In both cases, the clearinghouse solution presents a higher level interface i. In the translucent case, client has the option to directly access the lower level services e.
In the GEOSS context, the solution has been experimented both as a stand-alone user application and as a service framework. The first scenario allows a user to download a multi-platform client software and query a federation of cataloguing systems, that he can customize at will. The second scenario support server-side deployment and can be flexibly adapted to several use-cases, such as intranet proxy, catalog broker, etc.
In an In an Service-Oriented Architecture SOA framework, GI-cat implements a distributed catalog service providing advanced capabilities, such as: caching, brokering and mediation functionalities.
GI-cat applies a distributed. This work was developed in the context of the ESA Heterogeneous Missions Accessibility HMA project, whose main objective is to involve the stakeholders, namely National space agencies, satellite or mission owners and operators, in an This work was developed in the context of the ESA Heterogeneous Missions Accessibility HMA project, whose main objective is to involve the stakeholders, namely National space agencies, satellite or mission owners and operators, in an harmonization and standardization process of their ground segment services and related interfaces.
The RIs are based on the GI-cat framework, an implementation of a distributed catalog service, able to query disparate Earth and Space Science data sources e. We expected that a mapping strategy would suffice for accommodating CIM, but this proved to be unpractical during implementation. This work has provided us with new insights into the different data models for geospatial data, and the technologies for their implementation. The query manager was also improved.
Our contributions resulted in version 0. Enabling conformity to international standards within SeaDataNet more. SeaDataNet objective is to construct a standardized system for managing the large and diverse data sets collected by the oceanographic fleets and the new automatic observation systems. The aim is to network and enhance the currently The aim is to network and enhance the currently existing infrastructures, which are the national oceanographic data centres and satellite data centres of 36 countries, active in data collection.
The networking of these professional data centres, in a unique virtual data management system will provide integrated data sets of standardized quality on-line. In order to develop an interoperable and effective system, the use of international de facto and de jure standards is required. This will enable the sharing of environmental spatial information among public sector organisations and better facilitate public access to spatial information across Europe.
To ensure that the spatial data infrastructures of the European Member States are compatible and usable in a community and transboundary context, the directive requires that common IRs are adopted in a number of specific areas Metadata, Data Specifications, Network Services, Data and Service Sharing and Monitoring and Reporting.
Overtime this was replaced with the present CDI v. GI-cat is a broker service able to mediate from different metadata sources and publish them through a consistent and unified interface.
This abstract model is ready to be implemented both in CDI v. Then a mapping from the CDI v. These type of components play the role of data model mediators within the framework. While a replacement of the CDI v. Discovery, query and access services for imagery, gridded and coverage data a clearinghouse solution more. The development of catalog clearinghouse solutions is a near-term challenge in support of fully functional and useful infrastructures for spatial data. We present an experimental catalog clearinghouse for Imagery, gridded and coverage We present an experimental catalog clearinghouse for Imagery, gridded and coverage data.
The solution supports data discovery, evaluation, query distribution and mediation of several well-known catalog systems. The primary goal of the EU funded project SeaDataNet is to develop a system which provides transparent access to marine data sets and The primary goal of the EU funded project SeaDataNet is to develop a system which provides transparent access to marine data sets and data products from 36 countries in and around Europe. In order to assure the required conformity a GI-cat based solution is proposed.
This first draft mapping pointed out the CDI metadata model differences with respect to ISO , as it was not possible to accommodate all the information contained in CDI v. This included checking of all the metadata elements present in CDI and their cardinality.
A comparison was made with respect to ISO and possible extensions were individuated. The mapping and the profile definition processes were iteratively refined leading up to a complete mapping from the CDI data model to ISO Several issues were faced during the definition process.
Another outcome of this process is the set up of conventions regarding the protocol formats to be used for a useful machine to machine data access. Changes to the original ISO schema were at the maximum extent avoided because of practical reasons within SeaDataNet: additional constraint required by the profile have been defined and will be checked by the use of Schematron or other validation mechanisms.
The achieved mapping was finally ready to be integrated in GI-cat by implementation of a new accessor component for CDI. These type of components play the role of data model mediators within GI-cat framework. The new defined profile and its implementation will also be used within SeaDataNet as a replacement of the current data model implementation CDI v. Harvesting implementation for the GI-cat distributed catalog more.
GI-cat framework implements a distributed catalog service supporting different international standards and interoperability arrangements in use by the geoscientific community. The distribution functionality in conjunction with the The distribution functionality in conjunction with the mediation functionality allows to seamlessly query remote heterogeneous data sources, including OGC Web Services - e.
In the GI-cat modular architecture a distributor component carry out the distribution functionality by query delegation to the mediator components one for each different data source. Each of these mediator components is able to query a specific data source and convert back the results by mapping of the foreign data model to the GI-cat internal one, based on ISO In order to cope with deployment scenarios in which local data is expected, an harvesting approach has been experimented.
The new strategy comes in addition to the consolidated distributed approach, allowing the user to switch between a remote and a local search at will for each federated resource; this extends GI-cat configuration possibilities. The harvesting strategy is designed in GI-cat by the use at the core of a local cache component, implemented as a native XML database and based on eXist.
The different heterogeneous sources are queried for the bulk of available data; this data is then injected into the cache component after being converted to the GI-cat data model.
The query and conversion steps are performed by the mediator components that were are part of the GI-cat framework. Afterward each new query can be exercised against local data that have been stored in the cache component. Considering both advantages and shortcomings that affect harvesting and query distribution approaches, it comes out that a user driven tuning is required to take the best of them.
This is often related to the specific user scenarios to be implemented. GI-cat proved to be a flexible framework to address user need. The GI-cat configurator tool was updated to make such a tuning possible: each data source can be configured to enable either harvesting or query distribution approaches; in the former case an appropriate harvesting interval can be set.
The development of a clearinghouse catalog solution arises from the need of interoperability among different communities. This component, provides search and access capabilities across catalogs, inventory lists and their registered This component, provides search and access capabilities across catalogs, inventory lists and their registered resources. An example of such solution is GI-cat. In this work we describe its architecture. GI-cat implements a distributed approach in order to achieve scalability and accuracy.
Michael Lackey, 1— New York: Bloomsbury, The American Biographical Novel. Leader, Zachary. Zachary Leader, 1—6. Lee, Hermione. Biography: A Very Short Introduction. Lejeune, Philippe. Le Pacte autobiographique. Paris: Seuil, Matthews, Samantha. Middeke, Martin. Martin Middeke, and Werner Huber, 1— Rochester: Camden House, Moore-Gilbert, Bart.
Moss, Stephen. Christian Klein, 21— Stuttart: Metzler, Epstein, — West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, Reulecke, Anne-Kathrin. Ruse, Michael. Saunders, Edward.
Saunders, Max. Berlin: de Gruyter, Schabert, Ina. John Batchelor, 57— Oxford: Clarendon Press, Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, Stanley, Liz. Manchester: Manchester University Press, Stannard, Martin. Dale Salwak, 32— Basingstoke: Macmillan, Versey, Farzana. Vreeland, Susan. White, Hayden. In The History and Narrative Reader, ed. Geoffrey Roberts, — Wolf, Werner. Woolf, Virginia. IV, — London: The Hogarth Press, She has published extensively on biofiction and is currently working on a book project on biographical novels about famous historical women artists.
PART I. Whether in visual art or in writing, he argued, realism assumes that we recognize — or can be coaxed to recognize — an already existing reality. Perspective painting stabilizes the object depicted, places it in such a way that it is intelligible to the spectator from a given point of view, and invests it with a significance that is — or can be made — evident to everyone. The realist novel similarly invites recognition of a world seen as given.
By this means, Lyotard continues, realism encourages the reader to arrive without difficulty at a validation of his or her own identity in the course of experiencing the gratifying confirmation of an understand- ing shared with others. Communication takes place: heads nod. However surprising the events or the characters may be, however desolate the out- come, the perceiving subject and the objects perceived are in their proper places as evidence that the world depicted is possible, plausible, convincing as a replica of reality, the actuality we know as our own.
But the emphasis varies. Modernism, Lyotard proposes, either regrets what is lost or takes advantage of the freedom scepticism confers. Belsey argues from this that The Good Soldier can be seen as postmodern because it not only refuses to deliver consoling certainties but also chal- lenges the rules of representation.
Others, including myself, have suggested that the very qualities which problematise attempts to assimilate Ford to a modernist paradigm might better be seen as characteristics of a postmodernity avant la lettre—espe- cially his playful engagements with fictionality, metafictionality, and pas- tiche as well as his generic and historical hybridity.
Conrad died on 3 August At the time, Ford was based in Paris and editing the modernist little magazine he had launched at the start of that year, the transatlantic review, publishing experimental work by Joyce, Stein, Hemingway, and Jean Rhys among others. He must have started writing his tribute to Conrad almost immediately, as it began appearing as a serial from the September issue the issues normally being set the month before.
The serial ran from September to December, at which point the magazine folded; the four instalments correspond to the first five sections of what became the first part of the book. It is not an enormous book—just under 57, words in total. But given that he was also editing and writ- ing for his review, it is an astonishing feat. Certainly, if readers go to it looking for hard biographical facts about Conrad, they are going to be frustrated.
The book starts by saying that when Ford was about to fight in the First World War he saw Conrad and asked him to be his literary executor and that they ended up talking about biographies:. We hit, as we generally did, very quickly upon a formula, both having a very great aversion to the usual official biography for men of letters whose lives are generally uneventful.
It should then be written by an artist and be a work of art. Of course, Conrad was not born in Beaucaire, or in France at all, but in Berdychiv, in what is now part of the Ukraine, though it had then belonged to Poland.
He was born around Well, Ford is nearly right about the birthdate; only a month out. Conrad was born on 3 December It is not just inaccurate or vague. It wants the inaccuracy and uncertainty to be part of the picture, and it goes out of its way to multiply inaccuracy and uncertainty.
This is a strange strategy for some- thing purporting to be a form of memoir. Why then does Ford do it? For, according to our view of the thing, a novel should be the biography of a man or of an affair, and a biography, whether of a man or an affair, should be a novel, both being, if they are efficiently performed, renderings of such affairs as are our human lives.
However, novels do not all necessarily proceed with this kind of uncer- tainty. In a classic realist novel, we generally know exactly when and where things happen. The other part of the answer is to do with what kind of a novel Ford wants his biography to be. He called his method impressionism, and that is what he presents his Conrad book as exemplifying:. Either way, Fordian impressionism crucially com- bines two things: perceptions and process.
This inclusion of the tempo- ral aspect—this way of including it—is what distinguishes impressionism in literature from that in painting. It will not do to dismiss this as mere subjectivism, though, since what it really is is intersubjectivism: the attempt to get at how one person reveals himself to another. But there is also a much more powerful claim within this particular example: that this is the only way we ever know anybody else, through time, gradually, as we both change, surprise each other, reappraise each other.
Also that what matters in art is not so much trying to project or fix certain human types but to convey what that pro- cess of knowing feels like. There are two possible grounds for objecting that the reading so far offered of Joseph Conrad has not made the case for it as postmodern. One objection would be to argue that all that has been demonstrated is that what Ford is doing is impressionism—as he says—and that my account of the book has not added anything to warrant a redescription.
That too is often described—indeed by me amongst others—as an impressionist work. But it is also seen as exemplary of modernism. What is so striking in that novel is the use of the narrator, John Dowell, who seems, at least to most readers, not to understand, or not to have understood, the story he has been living through.
More sus- picious readers have found further grounds for mistrust, suggesting that Ford calls his truthfulness into question. That is exactly what we have been witnessing in the Conrad memoir: a narrator who keeps mak- ing us doubt what he is telling us. That appears to align the book with classic modernism—as we might expect, coming from the s Paris of Pound, Joyce, Stein, Gide, and Proust.
You may live with another for years and years in a condition of the closest daily inti- macy and never know what, at the bottom of the heart, goes on in your companion. A demonstration that the book is impressionist, or that it is modern- ist, or even that it is impressionist and modernist, does not amount to a demonstration of its postmodernity.
The next section of this chapter will examine how Joseph Conrad might be said to take its techniques and pro- cedures to a different level. First, let us consider the structure. The book is divided into four parts. The collaboration lasted, on and off, for a decade. The two men met in Conrad was also heavily involved in the planning of, and writing for, the literary magazine Ford launched in the English Review.
They met and corresponded occasionally over the next fifteen years, but Conrad kept Ford at a dis- tance. The memoir is thus an attempt to recover the phase of extraor- dinary intimacy, but above all, it is focused on their intertwined lives as writers during that period. After the introductory section, that is what it concentrates on. Part II thus takes up the story of the collaboration. It focuses first on The Inheritors, then begins the discussion of Romance.
Finally, Part IV resumes and concludes the discussion of their collaboration on Romance, closing poignantly with an anecdote Ford heard from a young woman who had interviewed Conrad a few days before his death. That is what the rest of this part does. But that is not the case. The novel more or less gradually, more or less deviously, lets you into the secrets of the characters of the men with whom it deals.
We agreed that the general effect of a novel must be the general effect that life makes on mankind. A novel must therefore not be a narration, a report. Life does not say to you: In my next-door neighbour, Mr. If you think about the matter you will remember, in various unor- dered pictures, how one day Mr. Slack appeared in his garden and con- templated the wall of his house.
You will remember Mr. Slack — then much thinner because it was before he found out where to buy that cheap Burgundy of which he has since drunk an inordinate quantity, though whisky you think would be much better for him!
We in turn, if we wished to produce on you an effect of life, must not narrate but render… impressions. The method is certainly suited to produce that effect: of shimmering complexity. Those observations and associations tell their own stories, and those sto- ries are just as much part of the story. First, because of the way it introduces criticism into biography or novel.
Previous critical biographies by Edmund Gosse, say, or G. Chesterton had regularly provided that, but not in the form in which Ford provides it. In Joseph Conrad, the critical concepts described as the fruits of collaboration are brought to bear on the narrative of the collaboration.
Ford, that is, uses Part III to heighten critical self-consciousness about the procedures of his own narrative. Second, because the effect of having a multiplicity of stories rather than a monolithic story is to draw attention to fictionality.
In a fine essay on The Good Soldier, Frank Kermode argued that it was a book that demanded to be re-read. In The Good Soldier, Dowell tries to tell the story from the points of view of the different characters, and in doing so he keeps changing his mind, or becomes una- ble to decide, what the story means.
He imagines telling it to a sympa- thetic friend; writing it down like a diary; or like a novel or a tragedy. It reads awkwardly now because it is a Jewish joke, of a kind Gentiles tell at their peril. It seems to me though to be more an example of Jewish humour than an instance of anti-Sem- itism and to deserve quotation here for the humour and beauty of the structure of the story:. Do you know the story of Grunbaum who asks Klosterholm: Is it true the story that I hear that Solomons made forty thousand dollars in St.
Louis in the retail clothing trade? Louis but in Chicago. To deal with the question of anti-Semitism first: true, it invokes the stereotype of the association between Jews and money; but it does so in order to ironise it. Solomons is useless at business; and Grunbaum seems gullible rather than stereotypically wily.
Klosterholm whose name sounds more Scandinavian than Jewish 17 is surely the one mak- ing the joke rather than being the object of it. But it is also a self-reflective joke about the method of impressionism. Ford thought you should change the details if it made it a better story. This got him into a lot of trouble when he was telling stories that involved his friends or acquaintances. He had an alle- giance to story which overrode other considerations—which is another way of saying he was a natural novelist, or writer of fiction.
Even when he was writing memoir, he wanted to tell a good story. He was not sim- ply recording the everyday events of his life, like an unimaginative diarist. How can it be the same story if you change all the details? One kind of response is the argument already made above: that we need to be talking not of a single story with a single truth but a world of mul- tiple stories and multiple meanings.
That can sound like a lazy or trivial form of postmodernism, which throws up its hands in the face of truth and meaning, deflecting all such questions by saying that all we have are stories.
That is a counsel for apathy: there would be no point act- ing in the world if we did not know what we were acting for or why we were trying to act. The Fordian method of impressionism—albeit, as I am arguing, a postmodern impressionism—is better than that.
For some- thing does come across strongly in that little anecdote which is different from a scepticism about anything but story.
Also, you get a very clear sense of the world in which he and his associates move, dominated by this kind of unreliable rumour and gossip, perhaps malicious or devious, perhaps just envious.
The joke about financial loss is there in Joseph Conrad for other rea- sons too. But—perhaps more surprisingly—it also suffuses the section dealing with technique. Because what Ford does in Part III is not to give a dry analytic or theo- retical or abstract account of how fiction works. Slack painting his green- house: passages from an imaginary novel; fictional fictions if you like, or, as postmodernists call them, metafictions.
Ford makes great comic play with this, dropping in ever more sensational glimpses of the story of Mr. Mills the vicar talking—oh, very kindly—to Millicent after she has come back from Brighton….
What this scene was about is not yet explained. The fragments of illustration thus take on a life of their own and start turning into a novel within the novel.
As they do so, they give an example of how a story can be built up out of fragmentary and disjunct impres- sions, as the whole of the book about Conrad is built up.
So the Mr. Slack story is a mise en abyme of the book and its method. The story of Mr. Martindale became Mayor of Winchelsea and committed suicide while Ford and Conrad were working on Romance, so presumably felt something had ruined his life.
But more to the point, he has written one in Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance, the biography and autobi- ography written like a novel and like the kind of postmodern novel that continually directs attention to its own procedures—especially the fic- tionalising of reminiscence. If story is always a multiplicity of stories, then that is also true of autobiographical as well as biographical stories.
To the extent that we think of selfhood as nar- rative—as constituted by the stories we tell about ourselves—then sub- jectivity is a multiplicity as well. It brings out the plas- ticity of selfhood: how it is continually cast and recast in different sto- ries.
It is a view of the self that leads to a more postmodern, and per- formative, sense of subjectivity as multiply fictionalised—especially when the people we come to know can be so mercurial, paradoxical, performa- tive, as Conrad and Ford. For, like every inspired raconteur Conrad modified his stories subtly, so as to get in sympathy with his lis- tener.
He did it not so much with modifications of fact as with gestures of the hand, droppings of the voice, droopings of the eyelid and letting fall his monocle — and of course with some modifications of the facts.
Again, the different versions cannot all be equally true, at least in relation to any objective standard of verifiable factual accuracy. But what their method does is ground truth in relation to stories, and to ways of telling them, to books, and to subjective perceptions and memories, rather than to external facts. It is pro- vocative in a different way, making us see the roles Conrad played, his enthusiasms, his slightly caricatured identifications, and especially his lightning switches between such different identifications.
But the person remembered is remembered in the memory of the remembrancer. Ford used to say that genius is memory, and may have intended the quotation to be addressed to memory itself rather than to the remembered person and thus also to stand as a cel- ebration of human memory as a sacred power—that could summon back the dead, make them seem to be sleeping rather than buried.
These ambiguities of reference and address are indicative of another, and very curious, way in which Ford experiments with verbal and tech- nical means to produce a postmodernism within modernism. In the following, penultimate, section, we move from structural to lexical con- siderations to touch briefly on three related tropes the book uses to achieve this. He is writing about Conrad, knowing that most readers will think Conrad the better writer, so he does not want to obtrude himself all the time.
But this book which is an impression of an impressionist is writ- ten about a writer, or rather about two writers. The psychology of that moment is perfectly plain to the writer. Conrad interrupted with a note of relief in his voice. He had found a formula to justify collaboration in general and our collaboration. Until then we had struggled tacitly each for our own note in writing. At intervals during our readings aloud that lasted for years he would say, always as if it were a trouvaille, that that was certainly the writ- ing of a third party.
He had to find at least an artistic justification for going on. We were both extremely unaccepted writers, but we could both write. What was the sense of not writing apart if there were no commercial gain? He found it in the aesthetically comforting thought that the world of letters was enriched by yet a third artist. We had left Lowestoft and passed for master…. We made the voyage in the Judea, Do or Die — actually the Palestine — that you find narrated in Youth.
In the East we passed so and so many years. You find the trace of them in the End of the Tether, to go no further outside the Youth volume. So we have the whole gamut of youth, of fidelity and of human imbecility…. Between Ford and Conrad. All three of these tropes are versions of the combining of two iden- tities into what seems like a third. But that, in the end, is what makes the book so moving: its intense desire to collaborate with him again, to summon up his ghost to produce a new book, a new form.
Toklas together with A. Notes 1. Further references to this edition are given after quotations in the text. I try to give you what I see to be the spirit of an age, of a town, of a movement. Oxford: Oxford University Press, , vol. II, — References Belsey, Catherine. Max Saunders and Sara Haslam, 31— Leiden and Boston: Brill and Rodopi, Brebach, Raymond.
Conrad, Jessie. Letter to the editor. December 4, , Ford, Ford Madox. Ancient Lights. London: Chapman and Hall, Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance.
London: Duckworth, Return to Yesterday. London: Gollancz, The Good Soldier, ed. Max Saunders. Harvey, David D. Princeton: Princeton University Press, Hueffer, Francis. London: Chatto and Windus, Kermode, Frank. Lamberti, Elena. Joseph Wiesenfarth, 99— Poole, Roger. Robert Hampson and Max Saunders, — Strachey, Lytton. Eminent Victorians. Wiesenfarth, Joseph. In his novel Albert Angelo, B. I will argue that Johnson is not merely imitating Beckett in Trawl but rather pushing Beckettian tech- niques to the breaking point in the service of his own autobiographical project.
Such a statement fairly bristles with insuperable problems. For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure.
I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception. Johnson made further comments about his debt to Beckett dur- ing an interview for radio with Christopher Ricks in , the year that Albert Angelo was published. I think personally he is in a cul-de- sac. Johnson used the same expression in his own review of How It Is for the Spectator in the same year.
Johnson and Ricks were the same age, and it seems unlikely, given that Johnson disdained academic literary scholar- ship and was hardly shy in expressing his opinions on literature, that he was trying to hedge his comments so as not to appear overly dismissive of a writer on the verge of canonisation.
In order to move beyond this barest sense of self and not imitate Beckett, Johnson needs to rediscover a different sense of personhood to what Beckett reaches in The Unnamable. If this is the case, then it would seem that Johnson held two contradictory beliefs about Beckett that were nevertheless creatively productive. The first is that Beckett had reached a cul-de-sac in terms of personality and person- hood. The second is that the gradual attrition of narrators in the trilogy revealed the author himself, breaking through the fictional narrative.
Trawl describes a voyage that Johnson took in as a supernumer- ary aboard a fishing trawler, the Northern Jewel. Johnson, still committed to the idea of writing as a working-class novelist, believed that he could find some solidarity with the crew by working alongside them.
He would write, they would haul fish from the ocean. Things did not go quite to plan, however, as Johnson found himself ill suited to life on the water and was struck down by severe seasickness. He spent much of the voy- age lying on his bunk below decks. All these unflattering details are, of course, recorded faith- fully in Trawl: whatever pretensions Johnson had to literary greatness, his commitment to truth ensured that his self-portraits were never less than candid.
He was seven years old when the Blitz began in and was, in , evacuated from his family home in Hammersmith, West London to High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire. A good example of this can be found in a passage where Johnson describes his difficulty in getting dressed on the Northern Jewel:.
Everything takes twice as long, merely putting on trousers, easier than my sweater, though, have to hang on by one hand while trying to drag on my trousers, but at least this is possible, whereas pulling the purple over my head, with one hand on the bunkside, seems for long periods impos- sible, so that I shall soon have to consider sleeping in my sweater, as I now sleep in my pants, and shirt, change them only when the ship is still, which is never, the ship is never still, but when it is still, comparatively, then I change, or when I can stand the stink no longer, which is oftener, change my pants once in three days, perhaps, used to change oftener, every day, on land, ah, when it could be done without thinking.
I shall see. Malone is perhaps the best example of this since he has tasked himself—rather foolishly—with tell- ing stories to pass the time before he dies. Where could it have risen any- way, tell me that. Underground perhaps. In a word a little Paradise for those who like their nature sloven. At least I can do the bloody scenery. At least. There is at least some imitation of Beckett going on here.
There are two passages from Trawl that demonstrate this, beginning with this one that appears fairly early in the novel:. I was six years old when the war started. The first thing I remember of it is connected with a brown haversack of light khaki material with thin brown leather facings.
The exact variety of the fruit filling escapes me. I suspect it was apple. The purpose of the hav- ersack was to contain certain clothes and other things for a journey, and the Individual Fruit Pie was to sustain me on this journey. The obsession with such a trivial detail is funny because it shows the narrator overlooking the bigger picture, namely the fact that there is a war on.
We could also compare this passage in Trawl with a moment in Malone Dies, when Malone spends a few sentences fussing over the exact time he is visited by an orderly and completely loses sight of the fact that these visits are occasions where he receives a severe beating. This is more or less an admission that Johnson was drawing directly from Beckett in Trawl and sought to carry on his comic legacy.
In fact, on the second draft of this passage in the Trawl manuscript, Johnson seems to realise that he has borrowed from his mas- ter. There is significant difference in where this kind of humorous pedantry leads him.
Johnson also experiments with Beckettian disenchantment and cyni- cism in this passage describing his life as an evacuee in High Wycombe:. All I am left with are just things, happenings: things as they are, happenings as they have happened and go on happening through the unreliable filter of my memory. But try. What else is there to do? The pain of being parted from my parents was far greater, and more real, than the danger from bombing, from dying. Once again, the language, tone, and humour here recall Malone Dies.
No, not particularly. Whereas Malone is merely passing the time, Johnson is aiming for something deeper: the exorcism of pain. Or what he does. Or how he lives. Or where he comes from. Or where he is going to. Or what he looks like. What can it possibly matter, to us? So many questions resolved once and for all, as chance directs; the only discretionary power left me is to close the book, which I am careful to do somewhere in the vicinity of the first page.
And the descriptions! The needlessly spe- cific is all that remains as his attempts to rationalise and analyse his situa- tion fail. Conclusion B. Johnson, Albert Angelo London: Picador, , Johnson, Well Done God! Selected Drama and Prose of B. Johnson, ed. Steven Connor London: Faber and Faber, , Ernest Campbell Mossner London: Penguin, , Christopher Janaway, trans.
Johnson London: Picador, , Peter Boxall London: Faber and Faber, , Johnson, Trawl London: Picador, , 26— Shane Weller London: Faber and Faber, , Mays London: Faber and Faber, , Ackerley London: Faber and Faber, , 11— Richard Seaver and Helen R.
References Abbott, H. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, Beckett, Samuel. Malone Dies, ed. Peter Boxall. London: Faber and Faber, Molloy, ed. Shane Weller. Murphy, ed. Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit. London: Calder Publications, The Complete Dramatic Works.
The Unnamable, ed. Steven Connor. Watt, ed. Bloom, Harold. Boulter, Jonathan. Beckett: A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Continuum International Publishing Group, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, Coe, Jonathan. London: Picador, Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Ernest Campbell Mossner. London: Penguin, Johnson, B.
Albert Angelo. Trawl Manuscript. British Library, n.
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