Existentialism and the Turf

 Bryony and Rachael got involved is too much of a duel early doors in the King George and spoiled each other's chances which led to a bit of a turn up, if any Irish win in a major UK race these days comes as a surprise. Bravemansgame established himself as top of the UK novice chasers, though, and carries forward a few little doubles and trebles to tomorrow and Wednesday, while Legal Rights was the well-backed good thing at Fontwell to keep us ahead. Niall Houlihan is already a jockey of some note while not yet out of the 'conditional' status.

Artificial, and ultimately meaningless, as horse racing and all sport is, it generates 'engagement' and some relief from the contingency, alienation and rootlessness of existentialist anguish and nothingness. There's much in Sartre I don't personally hold with, like the free will and his politics, such as they were, but Nausea is a tremendous novel. My friend on the train the other day noted how returning to books one thought were good many years ago can reveal them as great disappointments later in life but Nausea has if anything improved. It's as much a treatise on phenomenology and all that follows from Sartre's development from Heidigger as it is a novel but we are better off regarding all writing as 'writing' and worry less about whether it is fiction, poetry, philosophy or rambling internet posting.

Many years ago at a conference I met a post graduate student whose thesis was on Larkin and Existentialism, which had potential even if there might not have been much explicit Sartre in Larkin's poems. Certainly not as much as in Thom Gunn, whose The Sense of Movement was a very vogue-ish 1950's exercise in the fashion. It wasn't obvious that Larkin had read Sartre but it would come as no surprise if he had because despite his insistence on having no interest in continental literature he re-works a few French poets to his own ends. But there it was, as large as life, in Nausea,

Things have broken free from their names,

a very clear pre-echo, about twelve years previous, of, 

                                              they

Have slipped their names,

in At Grass, with reference to the retired racehorses but also chiming unmistakeably with the structuralist idea that the signifier and the signified have nothing but an arbitrary connection. The thing in the world and the word assigned to denote it are only associated with each other through the use of language. Otherwise, the world and language are two systems that are not linked.

Soon after that passage in Sartre, we are treated to the classic passage Six o'clock in the evening with the imposing immanence of the tree and its roots, the feeling of being superfluous,

We were a heap of of existents inconvenienced, embarrassed by ourselves, e hadn't the slightest reason for being here, any of us, each existent, embarrassed, vaguely ill at ease,

and whatever fault one finds with Sartre, one can't deny he's a fine writer. But, having identified such discomfiture, there is only so much of it one can take and so having a few quid on the risk-taking, the adventure, the vicarious races at Kempton and elsewhere makes one somehow released from such torment, exercising the illusion of free will by choosing one's preferred horse and living more vitally through it. With some shrewdness, one likes to think. One is divested of one's rootlessness by temporarily allowing the outcome of the race to be one's own outcome.

I'm sure the Portsmouth library catalogue will have the Roads to Freedom trilogy which I'm sure I haven't read all of even though I may have begun The Age of Reason once. That will begin the new year for me, I reckon.

Meanwhile, The Ship of Swallows is a small boook of short stories by Edward Thomas that had so far passed me by even though I had thought my collection of the poems, prose and the novel was a fair effort. It's gorgeous writing, with Thomas well aware of being of city origins and enjoying nature and the countryside as such, but maybe it's necessary to be like that, as Joyce found writing about Dublin in Trieste. Perhaps country people wouldn't notice their surroundings with the sensitivity he does. One only wants more of this finely-tuned writing and if there is any it's likely to be found out about at the Edward Thomas Study Centre which is conveniently not far away in Petersfield so that will be a nice day out one day soon. 

The Ship of Swallows really ought to be a book to own rather than borrow but so quickly has my attitude changed from buying everything I read to resisting the urge that I'll try not to.

 

I made a right mess of the Racetrack Wiseguy piece below, confusing the Grand National with the Welsh National as the race that Secret Reprieve didn't get into last season. A lot of what one thinks one knows is wrong. A lot of what one reads is also wring because it was written by people who think they know but are wrong. Many of us are more confused than we know. However, we stumble on, at least believing that we are enjoying ourselves in difficult circumstances and, as long as we think we do it's not obvious what role authenticity has.