Moon Tiger
Once in a while, I’ll come across a video of an over-the-top church service. The latest is a pastor making his “stage entrance” via makeshift rollercoaster. Okaaay! Welcome to the commodification of something sacred. “Commodifying” something is maybe just another way of saying “treating as a finite good” or perhaps “cheapening something into a more digestible state.”
Take book cover art. Moon Tiger — the 1987 Booker winner by Penelope Lively — is pictured here, and if I were simply browsing the stacks without the benefit of having had Ann Patchett recommend this book, it would have been a hard pass. (What in the ethereal pyramids is going on here?!) The interior of the novel is never going to change, but would different window dressing — the cover art — compel contemporary readers more? Perhaps unfair, but a book’s packaging can commodify — or make more palatable — its contents.
Moon Tiger details the life of writer/historian Claudia as she remembers it from a London hospital bed. Taking a less erudite approach to writing history, Claudia “always thought a kaleidoscope view might be interesting heresy. Shake the tube and see what comes out.” Sparkly instead of staid. The commodification of history? When Claudia recalls a trip to Plimoth Plantation and its hokey reenactors, she remembers “Car parks, reception centres, lavatories and restaurants,” and having been a war correspondent in Egypt during WWII, she also says, “The Pyramids are [now] doing good business; they preside over a humming centre of commerce — you can buy postcards, flywhisks, a ride on a donkey called Telephone, Chocolate or Whisky-Soda, a guided climb to the top of the Great Pyramid, which is studded all over with striving figures.”
Most interestingly, though, is that in some sense, Claudia views her only child as a commodity as well, wishing that her daughter Lisa lined up more easily with her own expectations. I think this impulse is a common one, yet Claudia has led an exceedingly *uncommon* life. Which I guess means that humans just can’t help themselves, huh? Is the act of making something more digestible simply our way of circumventing inevitable discomfort?
originally published on instagram