Guides

Hello. My name is Max Saunders. I'm professor of English at King's College London,

and I'm going to be giving a series of short

lectures on the enforces novel room with a view.

And in this first lecture, I'm going to be talking about the idea of guides.

When Lucy Honeychurch arrives in Florence for the first time with her older cousin,

Charlotte Bartlett, there's a problem.

Charlotte had asked for them each to have a room with a view,

but instead the windows overlooking in a courtyard.

The idea of a room with a view acquires a sort of symbolic value during the novel,

symbolic of their desire to experience Italy in terms of aesthetics,

art and beauty,

but also for the contrast between being open to

experience of the world or closed in on yourself,

trying to keep anything different or disturbing at a safe distance.

But views enforced this novel,

and not just of the landscape or the Renaissance architecture nestling in it.

There is likely to be people's views about those things,

and especially people's views about Italy, about art and about other people.

Lucy is beset with people, offering to guide her,

telling her how to think and how to feel

about art as well as about life.

When Charlotte's friend,

the romantic novelist Eleanor lavish breezes into the story

Lucy feels at last, she's going to encounter the true Italy.

This is in Chapter two.

The clever lady then said

that she was going to spend a long morning in Santa Croce,

and if Lucy would come to, she would be delighted.

I will take you by a deer dirty back way, Miss Honeychurch.

And if you bring me luck, we shall have an adventure.

Lucy said that this was most kind and at once opened the Baedeker

to see where Santa Croce was.

Tut, tut, Miss Lucy. I hope we shall soon emancipate you from Baedeker.

He does but touch the surface of things.

As to the true Italy, he does not even dream of it.

The true Italy is only to be found by patient observation.

Now buy deckers were the standard tourist guidebooks of their day.

They aim to educate the visitor rather as Lucy's aesthete fiance, Cecil Vyse,

tries to educate her about art.

Miss Lavish leads Lucy along the bank of the river Arno that runs through Florence,

keeping up A running commentary.

Ponti Allegretti A particularly interesting mentioned by Dante San Minnie Otto.

Beautiful as well as interesting, the crucifix that kissed a murderer.

Miss Honeychurch would remember that story.

The men on the river were fishing

untrue, but then so is most information, says Foster.

Then Miss Lavish darted under the archway of the white Bullocks,

and she stopped and she cried.

A smell. A true Florentine smell. Every city let me teach you, has its own smell.

Is it a very nice smell?

Said Lucy, who had inherited from her mother a distaste to dirt.

One doesn't come to Italy for niceness was the retort. One Comes for life.

Bongiorno, Bongiorno, bowing right and left. Look at that adorable wine cart.

How the driver stares at us. Dear simple soul.

It's a wonderfully rich passage that with what's going on in it,

but but let's pause on

that parenthesis untrue. But then, so is most information.

The editor of My Penguin Edition of the book does what editors feel

they have to do at this point and tries to correct the information.

Noting about that phrase, the crucifix that kissed a murderer,

that it is a garbled version of a legend about San Giovanni Gualberto,

towards whom a crucifix now in Santa Trinita tie is said to have inclined

in acknowledgement of his having waived an

opportunity to avenge his brother's murder.

Now that's the kind of information you'll get from a Baedeker.

So there was a murderer, but the crucifix didn't kiss him.

It was said to bow and not at the murderer

but the victim's brother for not taking revenge when he had the opportunity.

And that was because it was good Friday, and the murderer begged him to be merciful.

Trouble is, when you look more closely,

it's not so clear whether the bracket about about information being untrue,

is referring to that legend or to the sentence that comes between.

The men on the river were fishing,

but what would it mean to say that that was untrue?

If they weren't fishing, what were they doing? Or weren't they there at all?

Perhaps. And anyway, who says that they were there? Fishing

forces Narrative is very deft here,

Miss Honeychurch would remember. The story

it says,

is that the narrator,

narrating miss lavishes speech in what is called free and direct style turning her

actual words into a narrated equivalent that did miss lavish Say something like,

You'll remember the story, Miss Honeychurch,

because it was familiar in English art and literature.

It was the subject of Bern Jones painting The Merciful Night, for example.

Or is it forced US narrator telling us that Lucy did,

in fact remember the story later?

And if so,

does it mean that she remembered Miss lavishes garbled version of the legend?

Or that she recalled later, having seen or read something about it?

So it's all very indeterminate, hard to decide what is actually being said.

And this all matters for three reasons. I think

first of all,

because information or even misinformation is what guide books or guides give us.

And part of what force is saying

is that even if information is right, it doesn't tell the whole truth.

Information is also what novels give us, though,

but they give it differently.

Fiction gives us untrue information in a different way from

a misleading guidebook or a scatter guide like Miss Lavish.

When Foster says the men on the river were fishing,

it doesn't refer to actual men really fishing,

but his information or pseudo information perhaps

adds to the effect of a fictional walk along a real embankment.

It makes it really gives it the feel of truth for us.

That idea that art, including the art of fiction,

has a different relation to information

from instruction or education is absolutely crucial. Enforced, er

second,

miss lavishes interest in the legend surrounding the crucifix

is an example of how we attach stories,

two things and two places.

How works of art getting crusted with those kinds of stories.

From that point of view,

it may not matter so much that

the guidebooks are giving information that's misleading.

It just means

their arrival form of fiction, perhaps just not so interesting as novels.

And third,

this legend might just seem a bit of local colour or an

example of Ms lavishes tendency to

romanticise to exaggerate the historical record.

And we've fictions around art and architecture.

But it also relates to a key event two chapters later,

when a real murder happens right in front of Lucy's eyes,

and it happens in the Piazza Signoria,

one of the great temples of art in the Western world.

Art or appreciating art forces. Implying isn't about accumulating information,

letting the guides and the guidebooks tell us how to think and how to feel.

It can be a matter of life and death.