1 - 7 February 2001
Issue No.519
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 1 - 7 February 2001 Issue No.519 |
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Under wraps
Never, we are admonished from earliest youth, judge a book by its cover. Which piece of advice might come in useful when visiting the Cairo International Book Fair, where books are reportedly being removed from the shelves regardless of their covers.
It is all, you see, a matter of content: what lies beneath is of far more import. So forget those out of focus, wishy-washy, sub-impressionist scenes of a lady at her toilet, all pastel froth and frilly petticoats that are a favoured image for the covers of subsidised novels. They are merely there as a distraction, a dressing up -- occasionally scanty, it is true, if hand on heart you can find it within yourself to describe Edwardian foundation garments as scanty -- of pornography apparently so dangerous that it merits intervention to protect the public.
Now, while the potentially incendiary effects of passages dealing with sex within a fictional narrative framework are regularly overstated, often hysterically so -- sex happens, it is something we know, that our parents and, yes, our grandparents knew too -- very little attention has been paid to the often damaging impact of the covers themselves. The corruption of taste, it appears, has less headline making potential than the corruption of morals, though in truth to distinguish between the two involves the drawing of a line so fine as to be all but invisible. Were books to be hauled off the shelves on the basis of shoddy production values and ugly covers, the entire subsidised publishing industry would be closed down overnight. Yet it is not written in tablets of stone that simply because something is subsidised, and in the hands of a government agency, it must be ill done. Still, I have yet to hear of anyone resigning on the honourable premise that they were a little ashamed of what had been produced under their direction, and I am not going to hold my breath until that happens.
There was, of course, the startling case three years ago when questions were raised in the People's Assembly concerning a volume, once again produced under the auspices of the Minister of Culture, that boasted a fully-fledged nude on its cover. If I remember correctly, the painting denounced in parliament was a Titian, something of a step up from the usual, ill conceived attempts to lend books an artistic gloss, attempts that all too often end up making the volume in question look like a parody of a Laura Ashley catalogue. At the time the minister of culture made a spirited defence of the book, though probably to no avail. Trawl the shelves as painstakingly as you like and you will not come across the poor Venus of Urbino. She, too, has been banished as a danger to the general public.
Titian's painting, which for several centuries had raised hardly an eyebrow, was at least given a new lease of life. The last time anyone gave her a second glance, so familiar has the image become, so invisible beneath the accretions of time, was when Manet reworked the figure in the early 1860s, and the resulting Olympia was placed on public display. It was the Parisian art scandal of the decade, and the newspapers of the day fought tooth and nail to outdo one another in the virulence of their denunciations. These commentaries, like so much commentary that appears in newspapers, appears ridiculous in hindsight. But at the time it was no holds barred: few, after all, can rise to such occasions with as much fury as the self-righteously indignant.
Only now, it seems, no one is willing to give a second glance at the covers, so keen are they to ineffectually scratch at the surface of this world of appearances. Which might afford a window of opportunity: as the attention of concerned readers is distracted in the careful perusal of texts in search of salacious moments, a chance has arisen to upgrade the packaging. The Venus of Urbino could once more arise from the ashes.
It is a pity, though, this neglect of packaging, of wrapping, if only because in other fields it is something that is done extraordinarily well. Appearances do matter, and it is little more than a conceit to insist otherwise. Judging a book by its cover is a perfectly acceptable way of maintaining at least some standards.
In some instances, of course, removing the covers does produce an unpleasant surprise. A particular case in point are those ambitious, multi-storey packaging jobs -- new buildings completely enveloped in sheets of tarpaulin, or in old sacks carefully stitched together, that billow elegantly in the breeze. In the '70s Cristo built an international reputation almost solely on the back of wrapping buildings in a similar manner. Such sculptural excesses, though, had been a common feature of local building practice for decades before anyone had ever heard of the artist. And truth be told, the wrapping is often infinitely more attractive than what is going on beneath. On more than one occasion I have been profoundly disappointed by the disappearance of these gigantic street side parcels and their replacement by nondescript concrete cubes.
"Brown paper packages tied up with string," Maria -- she of The Sound of Music -- announced famously, were one of her favourite things. It is significant to note that the contents of the brown paper packages do not get a look in. Maria, perhaps the most lovable fictional nun of the last century, knew that the wrapping counts, and it counts for a lot -- hence her convenient and memorable distillation of the modernist insistence on form over and above content. And who would have the gall to argue with a singing nun?
Has the time arrived to resuscitate the art of packaging, to insist that appearances really are important? Attention to surface detail should not, after all, be automatically confused with superficiality.
It is time to place taste back on the public agenda, where it would occupy a far more tenable place than morals. Time too, perhaps, for a campaign to promote better book covers, to canvas for packaging that honestly reflects what lies beneath.
When the dog bites, as dear Maria also sang, when the bee stings, things won't appear quite so bad if at least they are clothed honestly.
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