Welcome. Ahaa, or should I say Yee-haa!, because I, Alan Partridge, am broadcasting live from Las Vegas, US of A, stateside. I promise you tonight we’ll have a real half-pound cheeseburger of a show for you. And it’s a cheeseburger that contains lots of meaty chat, a salad of wit and a flap of amusing cheese.
One of Alan Partridge’s trademark mannerisms was to overextend his metaphors, stretching them to their elastic limit and beyond until they snapped and he was left with a useless, sagging coil of words, a vehicle wholly detached from its tenor. And that appears to be what’s happened here: the cheese in his analogical burger stands only for itself. But then, Knowing Me, Knowing You was – knowingly, amusingly – a very cheesy show. ‘Cheese’ is a loaded symbol: big cheese, hard cheese, the moon is made of green cheese. And there’s something innately funny about the word ‘cheese’, especially if you say it often enough. I don’t know if it sits on an equivalent shelf of the cultural larder in the Netherlands – do Dutch photographers ask their subjects to say ‘kaas’? – but suspect it might, if only on the basis of Willem Elsschot’s comic masterpiece, Kaas, now available for the first time in English, in a translation by Paul Vincent (Granta, £10).
on top of them were Cheshires, Goudas, Edams and numerous varieties of cheese that were entirely unknown to me, some of the largest with bellies slit open and innards exposed. The Roqueforts and Gorgonzolas lewdly flaunted their mould, and a squadron of Camemberts let their pus ooze out freely. An odour of decay wafted from the shop.
The book jacket describes Cheese as ‘a delightful period piece’. (The period details are not always delightful: in a desperate attempt to shift the cheese, Laarmans advertises for sub-agents to sell it for him; the response is huge, and an army of the hungry and unemployed traipses through his office – he hires some and takes pity on others, giving away free cheese and even a pair of shoes. The bulk of the merchandise stays in the warehouse.) But it’s also as ‘relevant’ now as it ever was, not to the modern cheese trade,[*] but to our ‘age of dot.com failures’. And let’s not forget Enron.
Many years after it was published, Elsschot ghost-wrote an essay on Kaas for his grandson, who was studying the book at school. In it, Vincent tells us, he suggested that the ‘malodorous cheese was a metaphor in the novel for the distasteful advertising business in which both the author and (in other books) his character Laarmans are involved.’ In 1991, Guido Lauwaert proposed an alternative reading: the unsold Edam calls to mind the remaindered copies of Elsschot’s previous, unsuccessful novel, Soft Soap. But it’s always possible, of course, that the cheese stands only for itself.
[*] The scene in which Laarmans heads a delegation of cheese traders importuning a minister to reduce import tariffs is decidedly pre-EU, unless you substitute Mauritania for Holland: the International Herald Tribune last year told the story of Nancy Abeid Arahamane, who hasn’t been able to sell pasteurised camel cheese in Europe because the EU doesn’t have any specific regulations covering camels.