Colin Burrow

A general rule about rules is that one rule breeds another rule developed to catch an exception to the first rule, and so (potentially) ad infinitum, until there are so many darn rules that nobody can be bothered to grasp or obey most of them.

Roald Dahl’s style – Hemingway for kids with added wrinkles and twinkles and lashings of chocolate, a splash of Belloc here and a glug of Lewis Carroll there, with the odd word like ‘fizzwangle’ or ‘goonswaggle’ to make the mixture effervesce – often seems to be pushing out of view very nasty things that it doesn’t want fully to acknowledge. The way his tales for adults can underlie the children’s books is one aspect of this ability to keep the nasty stuff just out of sight. But Dahl himself was just as weird a mixture of plain truths and dark secrets.

The most bizarre aspect of the ‘quotation’ as we now understand it is that words uttered by King Lear when he’s mad are ascribed to Shakespeare, and that words attributed with some irony to a character in a novel can be ascribed to ‘Mrs Gaskell’. Do quotations inform the mind, improve the morals, develop the style, provide us with an instant dose of culture, remind us of that which is already ‘familiar’, and whatever else we’ve been told they do?

Stanley Cavell doesn’t say we’re just misusing the word ‘know’ when we use it of the world or of other minds; rather, he tries to work out a way of describing our engagement with these unknowables that does justice to their complexity, and which recognises that human beings sometimes don’t want to acknowledge what they know to be true about things outside or even inside their own heads.