Literatura Engleza Anul III Sem I - Tutore L[1]. Hamzea

Ministerul Educaţiei şi Cercetării Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

LIMBA ŞI LITERATURA ENGLEZĂ The nineteenth and twentieth century british novel

Dana Janeta BĂDULESCU

2005

© 2005

Ministerul Educaţiei şi Cercetării Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural Nici o parte a acestei lucrări nu poate fi reprodusă fără acordul scris al Ministerului Educaţiei şi Cercetării

The author’s warmest thanks go to Dean Hufstetler, whose most competent advice improved the quality of this course, and to Anca Cehan, without whose patience, support and help, work would have been a lot more hesitant and dull.

ISBN 973-0-04265-9

Contents

CONTENTS

1 1.1 1.2 1.2.1 1.3 1.3.1 1.3.2 1.4 1.4.1 1.4.2 1.5 1.5.1 1.5.2 1.5.3 1.6 1.6.1 1.6.2 1.6.3

2 2.1 2.1.1 2.1.2 2.1.3 2.2 2.2.1 2.2.2 2.2.3 2.2.4 2.2.5 2.2.6

INTRODUCTION

1

UNIT 1 What is Victorianism? Victorianism between Utilitarianism and Idealism The Victorian Novel Novel Writing and Novel Reading from Charles Dickens (Early Victorianism) to Thomas Hardy (Late Victorianism) Charles Dickens’s Contribution to the Victorian Novel Plot in Dickens’s Novel Great Expectations Pattern in Great Expectations The Brontë Sisters’ Contribution to the Victorian Novel Charlotte Brontë’s Novel Jane Eyre, a Feminine Version of the Story of Initiation and Development Point of View in Jane Eyre Emily Brontë’s Gothic in Wuthering Heights Wuthering Heights: A Shocking Novel Wuthering Heights: A Novel of Multiple Points of View Plot in Wuthering Heights Thomas Hardy’s “Wessex” Novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles Tess of the d’Urbervilles – A Novel of Character and Environment, Pessimism and Fate Plot in Tess of the d’Urbervilles A Tragic Ending and a Symbolic Setting Summary Key Terms Glossary of Terms and Comments Gallery of Personalities SAA No. 1 Answers to SAQs Bibliography

4 4 5 6 6

UNIT 2 Unit Objectives Joseph Conrad and Henry James, Two Forerunners of Modernism Joseph Conrad’s Tale Heart of Darkness: the Importance of Exotic Setting Imperialism in Heart of Darkness Plot in Heart of Darkness The Difficulty of the Text Henry James’s Ghost Story The Turn of the Screw Plot in The Turn of the Screw Can the Governess Be Trusted? Is the Governess a Heroine or a Villain? Who / What Are Miles and Flora? What Are the Ghosts? How Does the Phrase “the Turn of the Screw” Apply to the

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

7 7 10 10 10 13 14 14 14 16 18 19 19 20 21 21 22 22 23 24 26 27 28 28 29 30 30 33 35 35 38 28 39 40 41 i

Contents

Governess’s Tale? Summary Key Terms Glossary of Terms and Comments SAA No. 2 Answers to SAQs Bibliography

3 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.4.1 3.4.2 3.4.3 3.4.4 3.4.5 3.4.6

4 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4

5 5.1 5.2 5.3 ii

41 42 42 43 43 46

UNIT 3 Unit Objectives Modernist Principles and Aesthetics Virginia Woolf’s Essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”: A Modernist Manifesto Free Expression and Novelty: the Basic Principles of Modernism Internationalism Modernist Aesthetics Iconoclasm Impressionism Post-Impressionism Genre-Boundary Breaking “The Death of the Author” and the Birth of the Reader Collage / Montage Summary Key Terms Glossary of Terms and Comments Gallery of Personalities SAA No. 3 Answers to SAQs Bibliography

47 48 48 48 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 58 59 59 60 60 62 62 64 65 66 66

UNIT 4 Unit Objectives Stream of Consciousness One-day City Novels: Virginia Woolf’ Mrs. Dalloway and James Joyce’s Ulysses Experiments with Time: One-day Novels Cinematic Devices: Space and Time Montage City Novels: Dublin and London Stream of Consciousness and Subjectivity Summary Key Terms Glossary of Terms and Comments Gallery of Personalities SAA No. 4 Answers to SAQs Bibliography

66 69 70 73 77 78 78 80 80 81 84

UNIT 5 Unit Objectives Modernist Art Novels Virginia Woolf’s Art Novel To the Lighthouse Virginia Woolf’s Art Novel The Waves James Joyce’s Art Novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

85 86 86 86 90 93

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Contents

6 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4

7 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 7.7

8 8.1 8.2 8.2.1 8.2.2 8.3 8.3.1 8.3.2 8.3.3

Summary Key Terms Glossary of Terms and Comments Gallery of Personalities SAA No. 5 Answers to SAQs Bibliography

94 95 95 96 98 99 101

UNIT 6 Unit Objectives D. H. Lawrence’s Novel of Sensibility Taboo Breaking Free Indirect Style Antagonism and Oneness in The Rainbow Symbolism in The Rainbow Summary Key Terms Glossary of Terms and Comments SAA No. 6 Answers to SAQs Bibliography

102 103 103 104 106 108 112 114 115 115 116 116 119

UNIT 7 Unit Objectives Aldous Huxley – A Lover of Science, Literature and the Arts Huxley’s Characters Satire and European Models Continuing a Line of Tradition Mark Rampion’s Point in Point Counter Point Philip Quarles, the Novelist In the Novel The Musicalisation of Fiction A Novelist’s Novel of Ideas; The Pure Novel Summary Key Terms Glossary and Comments Gallery of Personalities SAA No. 7 Answers to SAQs Bibliography

120 121 121 121 122 124 124 125 126 129 130 131 131 132 133 134 135

UNIT 8 From Modern to Postmodern Unit Objectives Postmodernism in Literature and the Arts Postmodernist Aesthetics Image, Copy, Surface, Spectacle Collage / Montage The Postmodernism of Play Intertextuality, Intertext Metafiction Alternative Worlds; Heterotopia

136 137 137 138 139 139 140 142 143 143 143

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

iii

Contents

8.4 8.4.1 8.4.2 8.4.3 8.4.4 8.4.5 8.4.6 8.5 8.5.1 8.5.2 8.5.3

iv

The Postmodernism of Play in John Fowles’s Novels “Godgames” in The Magus Intertextuality in The Magus Metafiction in John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman Narrative Double Voice and Double Vision in The French Lieutenant’s Woman Authorial Intrusions in The French Lieutenant’s Woman Multiple Endings in The French Lieutenant’s Woman David Lodge’s Campus Novel Campus Plot and Considerate Humour in the Psychological Novel Nice Work Alternative Worlds and Intertextuality in Nice Work Writing as Communication; Art as Delight Summary Key Concepts Glossary of Terms and Comments Gallery of Personalities SAA No. 8 Answers to SAQs Bibliography

144 144 147 147 148

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

159

148 150 151 151 152 153 153 153 154 155 155 155 158

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Introduction

INTRODUCTION This module aims to familiarize long distance learners with Victorianism, modernism and postmodernism as paradigms of innovation. By focusing on three distinct literary periods the module addresses teachers in the rural area, pointing out two novel modes: a) the Victorian realist novel and b) the modernist novel of the early 20th century as a reaction to the realist Victorian novel. Postmodernism (c) will be debated as a new paradigm shift and in its complex relation to modernism. At the same time, the module introduces distance learners to the theoretical and critical terms and concepts applicable to their understanding of these periods, paradigms and keys, enabling them to pass this knowledge on to their students. Last but not least, distance learners are introduced to the most outstanding personalities of these periods since novelty in culture is not a faceless and identityless phenomenon. It certainly has its origins in personalities who responded to the challenge of their time in order to make a difference. Module units The module falls into eight units. Unit 1 ”Victorianism: an Age of Extremes” explains Victorianism as an age torn between Utilitarianism and Idealism, identifies the main aspects of novel writing and novel reading, and illustrates the major contributions to the Victorian novel from an early Victorian writer Charles Dickens, through two outstanding women writers Charlotte and Emily Brontë, to a late Victorian novelist Thomas Hardy. Unit 2 ”The Dawn of a New Age: Joseph Conrad and Henry James” explains how two late Victorian novelists Joseph Conrad and Henry James marked the transition from Victorianism to modernism in their dark stories Heart of Darkness and The Turn of the Screw. Unit 3 “Modernist Principles and Aesthetics” introduces long distance learners to modernism as a paradigm shift, explains Virginia Woolf’s argument in her modernist manifesto “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” and identifies the essential principles and features and the new aesthetics of modernism. Unit 4 “Major Contributions to Modernist British Fiction: Experimental Novels” looks into the innovative character of the experimental novel, identifying its main elements of novelty and describing its principal features of style and technique in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and James Joyce’s Ulysses. Unit 5 ”Modernist Art Novels” identifies the main aspects of modernist aesthetics and explains the role of the modernist artist in the three most remarkable art novels of the early 20th century: Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and The Waves and James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Unit 6 ”Free Indirect Style and Taboo Breaking” assesses D. H. Lawrence’s contribution to the modernist novel in terms of ”novel of sensibility”, explains the notions of ”free indirect style” and ”taboo”, identifies the main themes and points out the importance of symbolism in Lawrence’s novel The Rainbow. Unit 7 “The Musicalisation of Fiction, the Novel of Ideas” Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

1

Introduction

looks into Aldous Huxley’s novel Point Counter Point in terms of the musicalisation of fiction, novel of ideas and ”pure novel”. Unit 8 ”From Modernism to Postmodernism” identifies postmodernism as a new paradigm shift, looks into the main aspects of postmodernist aesthetics and illustrates them with John Fowles’s novels The Magus and The French Lieutenant’s Woman and David Lodge’s campus novel Nice Work. Learning tasks Each of these eight units contains a certain number of learning tasks marked as Stop and Think, Self-Assessed Questions (SAQs) and one Send-Away Assignment (SAA). The Stop and Think assignments elicit the students' own opinions with regards to certain ideas in the unit. Each Stop and Think assignment is provided with a blank space to be filled out. Where there is no clue leading to an answer, the Stop and Think tasks ask students to devise a portfolio to be discussed in the tutorials. The Self Assessed Questions (SAQs) occur at approximately every two pages in each unit and anticipate the students' need to build on the ideas presented. They pose questions which refer the students to essential aspects treated in the respective unit. The students' answers, written in the blank spaces of the SAQ boxes, may be confronted to those given in the Answers to SAQs section at the end of each unit. There is also a note following each SAQ, pairs or groups of SAQs, which ask students to revise certain sections in the unit in case they fail to give proper answers. The Send Away Assignments (SAAs) elicit the learners’ global understanding and acquisition of the essential aspects treated in each of the units. The completed SAAs will be sent to the tutor, at times set in agreement with the tutor, by regular mail or e-mail. Appendices To facilitate the distance learners’ acquisition of the subjects tackled, a series of appendices have been added to each unit: Summary, which encapsulates topical ideas; Key Concepts, a list of the basic concepts; Glossary of Terms and Comments, with entries to terms, idiomatic expressions and mythological characters and places; Gallery of Personalities, with entries that sketch the portraits of the personalities referred to in the unit. Terms, concepts and names listed in the Key Concepts section or explained in the Glossary of Terms and Comments and Gallery of Personalities sections are marked using the ‫ ٭‬symbol. The assessment methods and instruments consist in essayprojects for each of the three sections of the module, which is the equivalent in the distance learning system of continuous assessment (three projects for 40 % of the final grade). The final test will be an oral exam counting for 60 % of the final grade. On a 0 to 10 points yardstick, the evaluation criteria will be the following: 1 base point, theoretical approach of the topic – 4 points, richness and relevance of the examples given – 3 points, focused argument of the specificity of each of the three periods studied – 2 points. 2

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Introduction

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

3

Victorianism

UNIT 1 VICTORIANISM: AN AGE OF EXTREMES Unit Outline 1 1.1 1.2 1.2.1 1.3 1.3.1 1.3.2 1.4 1.4.1 1.4.2 1.5 1.5.1 1.5.2 1.5.3 1.6 1.6.1 1.6.2 1.6.3

4

4 4 5 6 6

Unit Objectives What is Victorianism? Victorianism between Utilitarianism and Idealism The Victorian Novel Novel Writing and Novel Reading from Charles Dickens (Early Victorianism) to Thomas Hardy (Late Victorianism) Charles Dickens’s Contribution to the Victorian Novel Plot in Dickens’s Novel Great Expectations Pattern in Great Expectations The Brontë Sisters’ Contribution to the Victorian Novel Charlotte Brontë’s Novel Jane Eyre, a Feminine Version of the Story of Initiation and Development Point of View in Jane Eyre Emily Brontë’s Gothic in Wuthering Heights Wuthering Heights: A Shocking Novel Wuthering Heights: A Novel of Multiple Points of View Plot in Wuthering Heights Thomas Hardy’s “Wessex” Novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles Tess of the d’Urbervilles – A Novel of Character and Environment, Pessimism and Fate Plot in Tess of the d’Urbervilles A Tragic Ending and a Symbolic Setting

19 20

Summary Key Terms Glossary of Terms and Comments Gallery of Personalities SAA No. 1 Answers to SAQs Bibliography

21 21 22 22 23 24 26

7 7 10 10 10 13 14 14 14 16 18 19

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Victorianism

Unit objectives

By the end of this unit you should be able to: • Explain what Victorianism is • Explain Victorianism as an age of extremes between Utilitarianism and Idealism • Identify the main aspects of novel writing and novel reading in the Victorian age • Explain Charles Dickens’s contribution to the Victorian novel in terms of plot, pattern and open ending • Explain Charlotte Brontë’s contribution to the Victorian novel in terms of feminine writing: first person point of view, autobiographical novel, self-analysis and happy ending (a woman’s fulfillment) • Explain Emily Brontë’s contribution to the Victorian novel in terms of feminine Gothic, multiple points of view, bifurcated (ambiguous) ending • Explain Thomas Hardy’s contribution to the Victorian novel • Explain Hardy’s novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles as: a Wessex novel a modern tragedy a novel of character and environment, pessimism and fate, condemning Victorian hypocrisy

1. What is Victorianism? For historians, the term “Victorian” is used to describe a period in history from 1837 to 1901, marked by the reign of Queen Victoria of England. Queen Victoria had a great influence not only on her country but also on the world. This time interval (1837 – 1901) encompasses great changes in society. The invention of petroleum-powered engines in the 1840s, along with innovations in steam and coal-powered technologies, led to the replacement of human labour (assisted by animals) with machines. Society changed under the influence and along with this rapid A time of change process of industrialization. The bourgeoisie, a fresh class full of and progress energy, came to power. This class was busy investing, working, and creating their own institutions and rules, which were essentially modern. Victorianism was also a time of world travel, exporting and exploration, and an age of Imperialism. When historians think of the age, therefore, they think of a time of change and “progress”.

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

5

Victorianism

1.1. Victorianism between Utilitarianism and Idealism

Things or values?

In 1840 British philosopher John Stuart Mill declared that “every Englishman of the present day is by implication either a Benthamite or a Coleridgean”. By the “Benthamite” part he referred to Jeremy Bentham’s‫ ٭‬bringing light, order and system in various fields that had been formally “chaotic” with his utilitarian doctrines. By the “Coleridgean” part he referred to the English poet Coleridge‫٭‬ and his romantic idealism. Mill’s statement expresses the division of the age. His statement also anticipates what philosopher Carl Gustav Jung‫٭‬ calls the “split consciousness” of the modern individual. The point these philosophers made is that the modern individual is self divided between faith and knowledge, between religious and scientific or rational truth, between thought and feeling, and ultimately between nature and civilization. Victorianism was an age when many felt that the problem, or even the evil, came from the fact that the modern world devoted too much energy to things, as opposed to values, attributing this distortion of emphasis in large part to the materialistic basis of science. However it is seen, the split is fundamental. It is the essential meaning of the word modern. Stop and think! How much of this division is still characteristic of the contemporary world? Use your personal experience of the contemporary world and create a portfolio of such answers to be discussed in the tutorials. Give your answer in the space provided below.

6

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Victorianism

Thus Victorianism and the Victorians were caught between Bentham’s utilitarianism and Coleridge’s idealism. A son of the age of reason (the 18th century), Bentham sought to discover good and unchangeable laws, while Coleridge, the romantic idealist, expressed the revolt of the human mind against the philosophy of the 18th century. It may be argued that while Benthamite philosophy and attitude to life was the prosaic, Coleridgean philosophy and attitude was poetic and metaphoric.

1.2. The Victorian Novel In the Victorian age, the novel‫ ٭‬flourished increasingly with the rise of the middle classes in power and importance. Of course, novels had to be written for readers of that class. On the one hand, the Victorian novel-readers wanted to be entertained, and on the other they wanted to escape their ever-day world. However, they mainly wanted to be entertained with a minimum aesthetic distance. The best Victorian novels went far beyond the confined horizon of expectations of the Victorian public. Thus, most of the best Victorian novels pleased and irritated their readers at the same time and challenged them by infusing their textures with a symbolism that reached far deeper than the superficial pattern of social action then casual readers were prepared to find in them.

1.2.1 Novel Writing and Novel Reading from Charles Dickens (Early Victorianism) to Thomas Hardy (Late Victorianism) New fiction was expensive!

Until the end of the 19th century, the majority of the Victorians did not purchase their “serious” fiction brand new when it came out in volume form, but borrowed it from circulating libraries. That must have been one of the reasons why not all novels appeared first in volume form: some initially emerged as serials. The self-publishing writer Charles Dickens brought out most of his fictions in monthly parts, famously creating an urgent demand for each new number. This explains why Charles Dickens believed that “a storyteller and a story-reader should establish a mutual understanding as soon as possible”. Charles Dickens was symptomatic as a fiction publisher in still another way. Editing two magazines in which he and other contemporary writers published their fiction, Dickens influenced fiction in two ways: one was that he facilitated a mode of publication which implicitly encouraged the reading of novels alongside other forms of writing, while another was that serialization affected fiction writing from many points of view. Thus, novelists had to cope with some pressures: they had to extend their stories in order to fill several volumes, or they had to cut and compress in order to meet the space constraints of a magazine column, or they had to create suspense in order to pace serial publication and encourage the

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

7

Victorianism

purchase of a subsequent issue. In any case, they could never allow characters to fade too long from sight.

Novels were models

Authors‫ ٭‬entered into various types of dialogue with their readers, attending to their desires in various ways and trying to ensure that their potential purposes chose them. This dictated fiction authors the demand for a happy ending, particularly one based on romance, which endured throughout the 19th century. Novels could certainly provide guidance, consolation, wisdom and patterns to follow. Some commentators encouraged precisely this mode of reading, suggesting that one should continually be matching oneself against fictional models. There certainly was a taste for moral certitude that can be traced across much Victorian fiction. This can be seen in relation to the intricate yet always resolved plots that one encounters in all the novels discussed in this unit. What Victorian readers found in reading novels was an assertion of one’s claim to be modern.

1.3. Charles Dickens’s Contribution to the Victorian Novel With Charles Dickens (1812 - 1870), journalism and melodrama were gathered into the novel to give it new life and a new and important place in middle-class entertainment.

1.3.1. Plot in Dickens’s Novel Great Expectations

Search for a beginning

An existence without plot

8

Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (serialized in 18601861) is exemplary for an analysis of plot‫ ٭‬in many respects, not least of all for its beginning. This is so because what the novel chooses to present at its outset is precisely the search for a beginning (see quote 1 in the Reader). As in many novels written by Dickens and as in many 19th century novels, the hero is an orphan. The only thing he knows about himself in the first passages of the novel is his name, Pip. However, not even that name is a full name, since Pip is what his “infant tongue” could make of Philip Pirrip. In those passages, Pip is shown in front of his parents’ tombs, trying to make sense of his origins. Lying beyond the grave, those origins are misty and uncertain. Thus, loss of origin, misreading, and the troubles of identity will be the themes governing the plot and explored later on. This beginning establishes Pip’s existence as an existence without a plot. The opening passages also provide the reader with an element that will actually grow into the plot: Pip encounters a convict, whose name is Magwitch. The convict asks Pip for a file to cut his chains and the loaf of bread in his pocket. From that moment on, Pip’s life will be intertwined with the convict’s, since Magwitch will be his benefactor. The orphan’s fellowship with the convict will remain with him all his life but in a state of repression on Pip’s part, because he will have “great expectations”. Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Victorianism

His “great expectations” are for him to be a “gentleman”, but in his attempts to be that, he will misread virtually everybody’s intentions and relations to himself. This is suggested, also in the opening passages, by Magwitch’s gesture of turning Pip upside down: Turning Pip upside down

“After darkly looking at his leg and me several times, he came closer to my tombstone, took me by both arms, and tilted me back as far as he could hold me; so that his eyes looked most powerfully down into mine, and mine looked most helplessly up into his”.

SAQ 1 What is the significance of this scene in the development of the plot?

Compare your answers to those in the “Answers” section at the end of the unit.

The rest of the plot focuses on Pip growing up in the house of his elder sister and her husband Joe Gargery, out of which he is taken occasionally to pay visits to Satis House, whose owner, a strange old spinster Miss Havisham, raises an attractive girl Estella. It is because he falls in love with Estella, who constantly humiliates him, that Pip wants to become a “gentleman”. Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

9

Victorianism

Pip’s return

Satis House is Pip’s daydream in which he pleases himself with the fantasy of social ascension and gentility. Satis House, the daydream, is the opposite of Joe Gargery’s forge, a place which Pip feels stifling. Pip’s repeated visits to Satis House are suggestive of a plot based on repetitions. As Magwitch appeared out of the blue, Jaggers, the man of law also appears out of the blue to tell Pip that there are “great expectations” in store for him. On the false presumption that his benefactor is Miss Havisham, Pip goes to London to fulfill his expectations. As time goes by, he thinks he has become a “gentleman”, but his notions of gentility prove wrong when his apparently “gentlemanly” universe is turned upside down again by Magwitch’s return. He finds out that Magwitch is his benefactor. At this point, both Pip and the reader surely feel that the wheel has come full circle: this is another turning point in Dickens’s carefully knit plot. By his return, Magwitch lifts the mist from Pip’s eyes. Now Pip realizes the falseness of his pretense. He helps Magwitch, who is being pursued by the authorities, to escape. Since they fail to escape, he attends to Magwitch to his last minute. Then he returns to Joe, who has always been not only his sister’s husband, but also his best friend. The last scene of the book shows Pip’s encounter with Estella after those many years of trouble and confusion: “I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so, the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her”.

SAQ 2 What is the significance of the ending of Great Expectations?

Compare your answers to those in the “Answers” section at the end of the unit. 10

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Victorianism

1.3.2 Pattern in Great Expectations Great Expectations is the story of a young man’s development, a story of initiation. Pip’s development is traced from the moment of his first self-awareness to that of his mature acceptance of the human condition. So natural and universal a theme imposes a carefully handled but simple pattern‫ ٭‬on the novel. This pattern is defined by the process of growth, which falls into three stages that clearly display a dialectic progression. The first stage shows us the boy in his natural condition in the country, responding and acting instinctively and therefore virtuously. The second stage of Pip’s development involves a negation of his previous simplicity and naturalness. Pip acquires his “expectations”, renounces his poor rural origins and moves to the city. It is here that the split begins, although Pip is not aware of it: he rises in society, acting through calculation rather than through instinctive charity, but his moral values deteriorate as his social graces improve. This middle phase of his development culminates in a sudden fall, the beginning of a suffering, dramatically concluded by an attack of brain fever leading to a long coma. In the last stage of his growth, Pip returns to his birthplace, abandons his false expectations, accepts the limitations of his condition and achieves a partial synthesis of the virtue of his innocent youth and the melancholy insight of his later experience.

1.4. The Brontë Sisters’ Contribution to the Victorian Novel Drawing their inspiration from the bleak moors near their home, Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë left a remarkable literary legacy of powerful novels, poems and short stories.

1.4.1. Charlotte Brontë’s Novel Jane Eyre, A Feminine Version of the Story‫ ٭‬of Initiation and Development Jane Eyre was first published under the pen name of Currer Bell in October 1847. The mid-nineteenth century Victorians did not expect women to manifest their artistic potential outside of the domestic sphere and therefore did not encourage women to fulfill their talents. When the twenty-year old Charlotte wrote to Robert Southey, the poet laureate‫٭‬, for his opinion about writing, his response was that “literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be”. Given this view of women, it is not surprising that the three sisters adopted pseudonyms to hide their sex when they published their poems and novels.

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

11

Victorianism Charlotte Brontë

Locked in the red room

Published under pseudonym, Jane Eyre enjoyed success when it came out. Like Dickens’s Great Expectations, Jane Eyre is a story whose protagonist is an orphan. Like Great Expectations, Charlotte’s novel traces the development of her heroine from childhood to maturity. The novel opens with ten-year old Jane Eyre, who lives unhappily with her wealthy, cruel cousins and aunt at Gateshead. Jane finds comfort in books, but she is bullied by her cousin John, who interrupts her reading and says that, since she is orphaned and thus dependent on his family, she has no right to read their books. John strikes her with the book and they fight, but because Jane scares him off, she is punished by being locked in “the red room”, a “chill”, “silent”, “solemn” room, the room where her aunt’s husband died. The “red room” gives Jane the shivers because she sees in it both a tomb and a “jail”. Locked in the red room, Jane feels “like nobody”. She feels unloved and “useless”. Then Jane grows “by degrees cold as a stone”. Her courage sinks. She starts to think of death, all the deaths in her family and her own. The red-room becomes a hallucinatory place, projecting horrible visions from its “dimly gleaming mirror”. Tormented by these visions, Jane falls unconscious.

SAQ 3 Read quote 2 in the Reader. What is the importance of the red room episode in the progression of the plot?

Compare your answers to those in the “Answers” section at the end of the unit. 12

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Victorianism

Lowood

Thornfield

Moor House

Happy ending

Jane is spared further mistreatment from her aunt’s family when she is sent off to school at Lowood, but there she suffers further privations in the austere environment. Despite that, Jane excels as a student for six years and as a teacher for two. Advertising for a job, Jane finds employment as a governess at the estate of Thornfield for a little girl, Adèle. After much waiting, she finally meets her employer Edward Rochester, who seems to be a rather moody and strange man. Mister Rochester is far from being the only oddity at Thornfield. Jane occasionally hears demonic piles of laughter coming from the third-story attic. This mystery remains unresolved while Jane and Mister Rochester feel more and more attracted to each other. Eventually, Jane accepts his proposal, and they are engaged to be married. On their wedding day, a visitor who proves to be Rochester’s brother-in-law, interrupts the ceremony by revealing that Rochester already has a wife: Bertha Mason, a lunatic who is kept in the attic in Thornfield. This event brings Rochester to confess all his past misdeeds to Jane: in his youth his family had him marry Bertha for money, but he was unaware of her family’s history of madness. Over time, his wife became a dangerous part of his life which only imprisonment could solve. Despite his protests that he loves Jane, she cannot accept to marry him because of his previous marriage and leaves Thornfield. Wandering without food and money and having nowhere to go, Jane arrives at the desolate crossroads of Whitcross. Fortunately, the Rivers siblings (St. John, Diana and Mary), who turn out to be her cousins, take her into their home at Moor House. Jane grows very attached to Diana and Mary and learns a lot from St. John. Eventually, she is happy to be a teacher at his school. Inheriting a vast fortune from her uncle, Jane divides it among her new family. St. John prepares to do missionary work in India and repeatedly proposes to Jane. Each time he does it, Jane refuses. She is increasingly drawn to thoughts of Rochester and, one day, after she hears him calling from a distance, she seeks him out at Thornfield. She finds out that the estate was burned down by Bertha. Rochester, who was blinded by the incident, lives nearby. He is overwhelmed with joy to see her again and tells her that he did call her one night. The epilogue‫ ٭‬is a happy ending of deep love triumphing. Both Jane and Rochester are now ready for each other, having been purified by suffering. They marry and enjoy their life together, love working wonders on Rochester, who regains sight in one eye.

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

13

Victorianism

1.4.2 Point of View in Jane Eyre Jane Eyre is a first person narrative told from Jane’s point of view‫٭‬. This is another aspect that associates Charlotte Brontë’s novel with Dickens’s Great Expectations. First person point of view gives authenticity and also urgency to these two novels of formation. Both Jane and Pip communicate with the reader, but Jane seems more inclined than Pip to analyze herself and justify her reactions to both herself and her readers. Jane Eyre is also an autobiography‫ ٭‬based on Charlotte A woman’s story Brontë’s own life. However, it is the fictionalized autobiography of a woman endowed with a very keen sense of observation. In the opening lines of Chapter 10, Jane makes it explicit when she says that “this is not to be a regular autobiography” but an account based on selective memory, which recalls only those moments, periods and scenes that “will possess some degree of interest” to the fiction she writes. The novel abounds in side speeches marked by “I thought” and in frequent and long passages in which Jane communicates to the reader her own feelings, moods and motivations, analyzing them, or her observations of situations and characters. In the opening lines of chapter 11, for instance, she confesses, directly addressing the reader.

SAQ 4 Read quote 3 in the Reader. What is the importance of first person point of view in Jane Eyre? Relate it to the fact that this is a woman’s story.

Compare your answers to those in the “Answers” section at the end of the unit. 14

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Victorianism

The novel is about a woman’s search for her kindred spirits, for a sense of belonging and love. Her search is constantly urged by her need for independence and equality with men. This need is communicated to the reader through the development of plot, but also frequently reinforced, explained and analyzed (read quote 4 in the Reader).

1.5. Emily Brontë’s Gothic in Wuthering Heights The Gothic in literature refers to a genre characterized by gloom and darkness, often with a supernatural plot unfolding in a strange location such as a ruined castle, mansion or house. Wuthering‫ ٭‬Heights is Emily Brontë’s only novel, considered to be the fullest expression of her deeply individual poetic vision. It obviously contains many romantic elements that can be summarized as the passionate consuming love of two characters who are deeply attached to the natural world. At the same time, the novel expresses deep criticisms of social conventions, particularly those surrounding gender issues, in the sense that the author distributes feminine and masculine characteristics without regard to sex.

1.5.1. Wuthering Heights: A Shocking Novel

Emily Brontë

Almost any reader of Wuthering Heights, even today, feels Emily’s writing profoundly unconventional, disturbing and shocking. To the conventional Victorian reader, Wuthering Heights must have come as an unprecedented shock. The Victorian reader surely saw in Wuthering Heights a novel that no gently-bred Victorian writer (male or female) could even dream of writing! Although Emily sent it to publishers under the masculine name of Ellis Bell, it took many tries before it was finally accepted in 1847. The reviews of the book were almost entirely negative: reviewers implied that the author of such a novel must be insane, obsessed with cruelty and barbaric! Emily died soon after the novel’s publication, and Charlotte, her sister, had to disclose the identity of its author, which had been so far a mystery. Charlotte also wrote a preface for the novel, defending her sister’s character. The problem is that Charlotte herself was uncomfortable with the more disturbing aspects of her sister’s masterpiece.

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

15

Victorianism

1.5.2. Wuthering Heights: A Novel of Multiple Points of View

Intertwined destinies

Wuthering Heights is a novel told in a series of narratives, which are themselves told to the narrator, a gentleman named Lockwood. Lockwood rents a fine house and park called Thrushcross Grange in Yorkshire and gradually learns more and more about the histories of two local families from Ellen (Nelly) Dean, who has been with one of the two families, the Earnshaws, for all her life. However, the destinies of the two families are intertwined. Lockwood’s role as a narrator is only to frame the story told by Nelly Dean. Being a civilized man with little intuition and even less experience of the strange world he is about to encounter, Lockwood is unprepared and unequipped to understand strangeness. However, he finds strangeness on his first night in the form of a nightmare.

SAQ 5 Read quote 5 in the Reader. Why is Lockwood’s experience strange in the scene quoted? Is the strangeness of the scene relevant to Lockwood’s status as a narrator? (Bear in mind that the reader’s comprehension depends on his point of view!)

Compare your answers to those in the “Answers” section at the end of the unit. 16

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Victorianism

1.5.3. Plot in Wuthering Heights The story begins with the gentleman-farmer Earnshaw going on a trip to Liverpool and bringing with him a child, whose name is Heathcliff. Earnshaw’s daughter Catherine falls in love with Heathcliff, although he is a strange and silent boy, who seems not to mind the blows he receives from Hindley, Catherine’s brother. Catherine and Heathcliff enjoy taking long trips in the surroundings. Both are deeply attached to nature, and one day they run down to Thrushcross Grange, a more civilized house where the Lintons live with their children Edgar and Isabella. Because Catherine is caught by a bulldog and injured, she is brought inside and stays for five weeks at the Grange to recover. When she comes back to Wuthering Heights, she is visibly changed in the sense that she is dressed and acts as a lady, to the delight of Hindley and his wife, but to Heathcliff’s sorrow. In the next few years, Catherine struggles to strike a balance between maintaining her relationship with Heathcliff and socializing with the elegant and civilized Linton children. Hindley’s wife Frances gives birth to a son, Hareton but dies soon after of tuberculosis. Hindley gives into wild despair and alcoholism, and the household falls into chaos. Heathcliff is very harshly treated and grows to hate Hindley more and more. In the meantime, Edgar Linton falls in love with Catherine, who is attracted by the civilization he stands for, although she loves Heathcliff much more deeply. She explains this to Nelly and as she does so, she refers to Heathcliff’s coarseness. Heathcliff overhears their discussion and runs away. However, he runs before hearing Catherine’s confession ‘I am Heathcliff’, which expresses her sense of identification with him. Catherine falls ill after looking for Heathcliff all night in a storm, the storm outside echoing her inner storm. She goes to the Grange to get better, and she marries Edgar. Catherine and Edgar live harmoniously together for almost a year, when Heathcliff returns. He has mysteriously acquired gentlemanly manners, education and some money. Catherine is overjoyed to see him, while Edgar somehow feels the danger he represents. Finally there is a violent quarrel, and Heathcliff leaves the Grange to avoid being thrown out by Edgar’s servants. Catherine is angry with both men and shuts herself in her room for several days. Meanwhile, Heathcliff seduces Edgar’s sister Isabella and elopes with her. Edgar cannot forgive his sister’s betrayal of him but does not try to stop the marriage. Catherine becomes extremely ill, feverish, delirious and nearly dies, although she is carefully looked after by Edgar. A few months later, Catherine is still feeble and besides, she is pregnant. Heathcliff and Isabella have returned to Wuthering Heights, and Isabella writes to Nelly Dean about how cruel her savage husband Heathcliff is to her and how much she regrets the marriage. Nelly goes to Wuthering Heights to visit them and to see if she could improve Isabella’s situation. She also tells them about Cathy’s condition. Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

17

Victorianism

A few days later, Heathcliff goes to the Grange while Edgar is at church. He has a passionate reunion with Catherine, in which they forgive each other for their mutual betrayals. Catherine faints under the weight of this intensely felt reunion. Edgar comes back and Heathcliff leaves. Catherine dies that night after giving birth to a daughter. Edgar is terribly grieved, while Heathcliff goes wild, begging Catherine’s ghost to haunt him. Isabella manages to escape from Wuthering Heights and goes to live close to London, where she gives birth to a son, Linton. Hindley dies a few months after his sister Catherine. Catherine and Edgar’s daughter, Catherine, grows to be a beloved and charming child. She lives a peaceful life at the Grange, completely unaware of the existence of Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff, or her cousin Hareton, whom Heathcliff treats brutally. Once, she finds the farmhouse while exploring the moors, and is upset to think that an ignorant rustic such as Hareton could be related to her. Nelly tells her that she cannot return there. Isabella dies when Linton is about 12 years old, and Edgar goes to fetch him at the Grange. That day, however, Heathcliff arranges for his son to be fetched to Wuthering Heights. On her sixteenth birthday, Catherine and Nelly stray onto Heathcliff’s land, and he invites them into Wuthering Heights to see Linton. Heathcliff is eager to encourage a romance between the two cousins so as to ensure himself of Edgar’s land when Edgar dies. Since Edgar forbids Catherine to ever visit Wuthering Heights again, Catherine begins an exchange of love letters with her cousin Linton. Nelly finds out and puts an end to it. Edgar falls ill, and Heathcliff asks Catherine to come back to Wuthering Heights because Linton is breaking his heart for her. Catherine agrees and finds Linton a malicious invalid, but not without charm. Since Nelly is ill as well, she cannot prevent Catherine from visiting Linton whenever she likes. Catherine feels obliged to help Linton and despises Hareton for being clumsy and illiterate. Edgar dies, and after his funeral, Heathcliff fetches Catherine to Wuthering Heights to take care of Linton, who is dying, and to free up the Grange so he can rent it out (to Lockwood, in fact). He tells Nelly that he is still obsessed with his beloved Catherine and that he went to gaze at her long-dead body when her coffin was uncovered by the digging of Edgar’s grave. Catherine has to take care of Linton alone, and after he dies, she maintains an unfriendly attitude toward the household. As time passes by, however, she becomes lonely enough to seek Hareton’s company and begins teaching him to read. This is around Lockwood’s time at the Grange. Lockwood leaves the area for several months, and when he returns, he finds out that while he was gone Heathcliff began to act more and more strangely and became incapable of concentrating on the world around him, as though Catherine’s ghost would not let him. He stopped eating and sleeping, and Nelly finds him dead one morning, with a queer and savage smile on his face. Heathcliff is buried next to Catherine, as he wished, and so they are reunited in death. Hareton mourns him, but he is too happy with the younger Catherine to be inconsolable. When the novel ends, they plan to marry and move to the Grange. 18

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Victorianism

SAQ 6 What is the significance of this bifurcated ending (Heathcliff’s reunion with Catherine in death at Wuthering Heights, and Catherine’s planned reunion with Hareton at the Grange)?

Compare your answers to those in the “Answers” section at the end of the unit.

1.6. Thomas Hardy’s “Wessex” Novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles is a network of comings and goings. In this respect, it reminds us of Jane Eyre’s travels. But although every step the heroine takes is along roads, to or from houses, villages and towns identifiable on the map, the names these bear are imaginary. Hardy called the region “Wessex” and used it as a location for other novels, too.

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

19

Victorianism

1.6.1. Tess of the d’Urbervilles – A Novel of Character and Environment, Pessimism and Fate Tess of the d’Urbervilles, published in 1891, tells the tragic story of a character that is powerless to fight her adverse fate. All of Hardy’s fiction reflects his deep pessimism. In the world he creates, the individual cannot fight against a malign‫ ٭‬fate which corrupts any possibility of happiness and leads him / her towards tragedy‫٭‬. Tess, whom Hardy describes as a ‘pure woman’ in the full title of the novel, is subjected to endless indignities, assaults and defeats, which get out of her control, until she finally surrenders to her destiny and dies for her ‘sins’. Hardy’s tragic vision springs from his conviction that Victorian society was stuck in hypocrisy. This is especially true for Hardy’s female characters, whose bleak lives and loveless marriages are masterfully exposed. The setting of these novels is “Wessex”, the southwestern region of England, where Hardy spent most of his life. His descriptions of the English countryside are far removed from the idealized version offered by the Romantics. They suggest the impoverished condition of the English peasants and country gentry (upper social classes) in an age of ruthless mechanization. The hard labour of the farmers, their endless and often unrewarded toil‫ ٭‬is depicted with grim‫ ٭‬realism. The rural settings are generally described in great detail and often used to help the reader interpret the characters’ moods and feelings (Read quote 6 in the Reader to see an example of Hardy’s descriptions). Hardy’s settings may also be symbolic, charged with historical and cultural associations, reinforcing themes, echoing the characters’ moods and feelings and their tragic condition.

1.6.2. Plot in Tess of the d’Urbervilles “She was a fine and handsome girl.”

20

Tess Durbeyfield, a poor country girl from the village of Marlott, learns that she is descended from a noble family, the d’Urbervilles. Her family pushes her to visit her rich relatives, and when she goes to find them, she is seduced by Alec d’Urbervilles and has a baby who dies in infancy. Going to work on a dairy farm (Talbothays), she falls in love with Angel Clare. Talbothays and the season are just the setting for pure love and fruition. Tess and Angel are engaged to be married. Although she means to tell Angel about her ‘sinful’ past before the wedding, Tess always misses the chance. On their wedding night she eventually reveals the secret of her relationship with Alec. Being a man of principles and failing to match the ‘image’ of Tess he has in his mind with this new ‘image’ he gets, Angel cannot forgive her. He reacts angrily, abandons her and goes to Brazil.

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Victorianism

“I could not bear the loss of you any longer.”

Left alone, without any support, and having to help her family out, she finds work at Flintcombe Ash. The place is dreary, the season winter, and the work very hard. Although Tess writes to Angel, telling him about her miserable condition and her unaltered love for him, her letters fail to reach him. Alec traces Tess and insists that they should be together again. Out of despair and feeling hopeless and helpless, Tess eventually accepts Alec’s offer. When she hears that Angel has returned to England and realizes he has forgiven her, she kills Alec in a fit of anger. Tess and Angel run away to escape from human justice, and they have a few days when they desperately cling to each other.

1.6.3. A Tragic Ending in a Symbolic Setting On the run from the police, who want to arrest Tess for the murder of Alec d’Urbervilles, Tess and Angel arrive at a strange place: Stonehenge‫٭‬.

SAQ 7 Read quote 7 in the Reader. What is the relation between this tragic ending and the symbolic setting?

Compare your answers to those in the “Answers” section at the end of the unit.

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

21

Victorianism

Summary This unit introduces you to Victorian literature and to the notion of Victorianism. The evolution of the Victorian novel from its early to its late stages is illustrated with the most representative novels written by the most outstanding writers of the period. The first section of this unit is dedicated to Charles Dickens’s accomplished novel Great Expectations as a novel of the protagonist’s formation and development with a well knit plot and balanced structure. The second and third sections deal with the contribution of two women writers to the Victorian novel: Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and her sister Emily’s Wuthering Heights. Jane Eyre is presented as a feminine version of the novel of development, focusing on the protagonist’s keen sense of self-analysis. Wuthering Heights is treated as a shocking Victorian novel of consuming passion and also as a feminine Gothic. The fourth section treats Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles as a modern tragedy, a novel of character and setting. Unit 2 will introduce you to late Victorianism, whose main representatives are Joseph Conrad and Henry James. These two novelists are also the forerunners of modernism.

Key Terms • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

22

Victorianism Utilitarianism and Idealism Novel Serialization Author Plot Pattern Story Epilogue Autobiography Point of view Self-analysis Gothic Wessex Tragedy

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Victorianism

Glossary of Terms and Comments •

Author is somebody who writes a book or other text, for example, a literary work or a report • Autobiography is an account of somebody’s life written by that person • Epilogue is a short chapter or section at the end of a literary work, sometimes detailing the fate of its characters • Grim means depressing • Laureate means somebody who has been awarded a prize or is recognized for outstanding achievement in the arts or sciences • Malign means harmful or evil in nature, effect or intention • Menace means possible source of danger • Novel is an epic genre (See also Unit 5, Glossary of Terms and Comments). Any fiction in prose over 50,000 words can be considered a novel. • Pattern is a plan or model used as a guide for making something • Plot is story-line in a novel focusing on causality (relation between cause and effect) • Point of view refers to the angle of the narrator (the voice telling the story). It is the perspective on events of the narrator or a particular character in the story. Usually narrators are characters at the same time (See Unit 2, Glossary of Terms and Comments for a definition of “narrator”) • With regards to Stonehenge, R. J. C. Atkinson, archaeologist from University College of Cardiff, stated that most of what has been written about it is nonsense or speculation. The most shocking part of the archaeologist’s statement is that “no one will ever have a clue what its significance was”. If scientists are clueless about Stonehenge, Hardy does not even seem to need clues: he deepens the mystery and associates it with the human condition, which, in his vision, is essentially tragic • Story is a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. Please note that any novel tells a story • Toil means hard work Tragedy is a literary work that deals with a tragic theme, often • involving a heroic struggle and the downfall of the main character • Wuthering is a word used to describe a wind that blows strongly and makes a loud roaring sound

Gallery of Personalities • Bentham, Jeremy (1748 - 1832) was a British philosopher, economist, and jurist, who founded the doctrine of utilitarianism. In 1789 he became well known for his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. In his Introduction, Bentham claimed that the principle of utility governs what is morally justifiable. According to this principle, actions are right if they tend to produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. Happiness is equivalent to pleasure. Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

23

Victorianism

Bentham’s ideas had great influence on the reforms of the latter part of the 19th century in the administration of the British government, on criminal law and on procedure in both criminal and civil law. • Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772 – 1834) was an English poet, critic, philosopher and leader of the romantic movement. Coleridge was interested in German philosophy, especially 19th century idealism. In opposition to Bentham, Coleridge considered that we can never be made happy by compulsion. • Jung, Carl Gustav (1875 – 1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist, who founded the analytical school of psychology. Jung broadened Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical approach. He interpreted mental and emotional disturbances as an attempt to find personal and spiritual wholeness.

SAA No. 1 Explain the main aspects of the Victorian novel in terms of: character, plot, story of initiation, formation and development, point of view (first person, multiple, third person), Gothic elements, tragic vision. Note that the protagonists in Great Expectations, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights are orphans, while Tess in Hardy’s novel is a poor country girl. The plot of all these novels is focused on the initiation and development of the protagonist. Great Expectations and Jane Eyre are first person narratives, and these give more immediacy to their stories. Wuthering Heights uses multiple points of view, and this, together with the tragic aura and sense of strangeness, makes the novel unique in Victorian fiction. Although Tess of the d’Urbervilles is written in the third person, it is a character-focused novel which deals with the condition of a 19th century woman in a most sensitive way. Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights use Gothic elements: the red room episode and the character of Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre; Wuthering Heights as a setting, the characters of Heathcliff and Catherine, their consuming impossible love and their reunion after death at Wuthering Heights. Wuthering Heights and Tess of the d’Urbervilles articulate a tragic vision. This justified many critics to call them “modern tragedies”. Please send your answers to your tutor. Your paper should not be longer than four pages. Please note that the quality of your ideas and the coherence of the essay will be 70 % of your grade, while the accuracy of your language will count for 30 %. 24

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Victorianism

Answers to SAQs SAQ 1 The opening passages of Great Expectations set the scene and atmosphere, announce the main themes and the mood of the whole novel. This first scene with the boy Pip in the graveyard is one of the best beginnings in almost all of Dickens’s mature novels and in the Victorian novel. In less than one page the reader is given a character, his background and his setting. With a few more paragraphs, the reader is immersed in a decisive action, which is already outlined: Pip is an orphan in search for a father and for his own condition. His sense of identity is vague and confused, and the encounter with the convict Magwitch in the graveyard is the germinal scene of the novel. While he is held by the convict, Pip sees the world upside down, and in the course of Dickens’s novel the reader is invited to try the same view. This particular change of point of view is an ancient device of irony, but an excellent one. Irony essentially points to an incongruity between appearance and essence. A number of ironic reversals and ambiguous situations develop out of this first scene and the point of view it proposes. SAQ 2 The ending of Great Expectations shows Pip out of the confusion he has been in, but it is ambiguous enough not to give readers a clue as to what his future might be like. Indeed, the mists rise at this point in Pip’s life, but they might fall again, although Pip sounds optimistic about Estella not parting from him. It is possible that readers find in Great Expectations a modernity of attitude which expects the narrative to be open ended. This implies that readers are supposed to construct their own sense of how to take it, that the text resists single meaning. The ambiguity of the ending also comes from the fact that the readers have only Pip’s text (a form of autobiography) to work upon, and this is certainly not final or necessarily authoritative. Please revise section 1.3.1 in case you have failed to give answers comparable to those given to SAQ 1 and SAQ 2 in this section. SAQ 3 The red room has deathly associations (red as the colour of blood, the room possibly being “haunted” by Jane’s dead uncle, and Jane has the impression that she sees a ghost in it). The red room is also a symbol of imprisonment. Playing on strong notes of strangeness, the scene is Gothic, dramatizing a dark side that will re-emerge in the story under the form of the mad woman in the attic (Bertha Mason). Jane will always fight this dark side. The scene has an anticipatory function as a metaphor of the prison, because throughout the novel Jane will be “imprisoned” in many ways, particularly relating to class, gender, and religion. It is out of this manifold imprisonment that Jane will try to escape. Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

25

Victorianism

Please revise section 1.4.1 in case you have failed to give an answer comparable to the one given to SAQ 3 in this section. SAQ 4 First-person point of view is the best perspective Charlotte Brontë could employ in this novel. Jane is a woman whose intellect and character make her an equal of any Victorian man endowed with the same qualities. Indeed, Jane proves to be the equal of both Rochester and St. John Rivers. This is actually the point the book makes: Jane Eyre is a first person narrative from a woman of remarkable character and intelligence, who takes the narrative in her own hands. Thus the narrative of Jane Eyre can be read as a testimony that if a woman of that caliber tells a story, she will do it in a style that will be lucid, self-explorative and entertaining. Please revise section 1.4.2 in case you have failed to give an answer comparable to the one given to SAQ 4 in this section. SAQ 5 In this scene, we are taken to the centre of the novel’s ‘problem’. The ‘problem’ is too strange for a civilized gentleman like Lockwood to cope with. It is obvious that Lockwood is a confused observer of the strange things going on. This scene, which concerns events that happened many years before, forces itself upon his confused mind. Lockwood’s problem is also that he is one of the narrators of this strange story. At this point, the restrained menace‫٭‬ which he could feel floating in the air before, changes into an atmosphere of unreality and horror. Please revise section 1.5.2 in case you have failed to give an answer comparable to the one given to SAQ 5 in this section. SAQ 6 An essential question Wuthering Heights leaves open is whether it ends happily or not and why: is the novel on the side of Thrushcross Grange and civilization since Catherine and Hareton are about to move there and Heathcliff dies? It is true that Heathcliff dies, but can we miss the intensity of the passion associated with Wuthering Heights, its stormy moors and Heathcliff’s triumph in death? Can we miss the two lovers’ reunion on the other side of the grave? It may seem that the Grange wins, but Heathcliff’s version of reunion is strong and lingering. This troubling question posed by the ending, brings to the reader’s memory the first line of the book: Lockwood’s first impression that Heathcliff is “the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with”. Lockwood’s troubles with Heathcliff are also the characters’ and the reader’s troubles. One may then wonder: did Emily add the epilogue of the young couple Catherine and Hareton moving to Thrushcross Grange because Victorian society would have refused to accept the book to end with Heathcliff’s reunion with his Catherine? 26

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Victorianism

Whatever the speculations about this may be, the reader cannot miss an important aspect of the book: balance. The first Catherine wished to strike a balance between the Grange and Wuthering Heights, civilization and nature, but she failed. The “civilized” ending of the love story between the second Catherine and Hareton may suggest a final and necessary conclusion to two generations of unrest. Catherine and Hareton’s love may thus be interpreted as a successful version of the marriage that never took place between the first Catherine and Heathcliff. The balance is struck in this ending, possibly meaning that in a happy marriage, consuming love enters, sometimes in the form of generations echoing it. Please revise section 1.5.3 in case you have failed to give an answer comparable to the one given to SAQ 6 in this section. SAQ 7 Tess of the d’Urbervilles ends tragically with the heroine brought to the prehistoric temple of Stonehenge. Of course, this setting contributes to the sense of tragedy Hardy had in mind for the fate of his heroine. Being a mysterious place, “older than the centuries”, Stonehenge must have been the setting of many rituals and sacrifices, and now Tess is driven and drawn to it. She throws herself on one of its sacrificial stones. This suggests that Tess is one of the victims of cruel fate brought to the very place that can lift her to the status of a tragic victim. As a symbolic setting, Stonehenge is charged with very old cultural significances. The fact is that Stonehenge is still a mystery: why it was built is unknown, although it probably was constructed as a place of worship of some kind. Angel Clare feels and maybe he also has some clues that it was so. Please revise section 1.6.3 in case you have failed to give an answer comparable to the one given to SAQ 7 in this section.

Bibliography Brontë, Charlotte, (1847)1994), Jane Eyre, Penguin Books, A Penguin / Godfrey Cave Edition Brontë, Emily, (1847)2003), Wuthering Heights, Penguin Books, Revised Edition Dickens, Charles, Great Expectations, (1861)2000), Cliffs Notes, New edition Hardy, Thomas, (1891)1998), Tess of the d’Urbervilles, edited by John Paul Riquelme, Boston: Bedford Books / Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism Series.

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

27

The dawn of a new age

UNIT 2 THE DAWN OF A NEW AGE: JOSEPH CONRAD AND HENRY JAMES Unit Outline 2 2.1 2.1.1 2.1.2 2.1.3 2.2 2.2.1 2.2.2 2.2.3 2.2.4 2.2.5 2.2.6

Unit Objectives Joseph Conrad and Henry James, Two Forerunners of Modernism Joseph Conrad’s Tale Heart of Darkness: the Importance of Exotic Setting Imperialism in Heart of Darkness Plot in Heart of Darkness The Difficulty of the Text Henry James’s Ghost Story The Turn of the Screw Plot in The Turn of the Screw Can the Governess Be Trusted? Is the Governess a Heroine or a Villain? Who / What Are Miles and Flora? What Are the Ghosts? How Does the Phrase “the Turn of the Screw” Apply to the Governess’s Tale? Summary Key Terms Glossary of Terms and Comments SAA No. 2 Answers to SAQs Bibliography

28

28 28 29 30 30 33 35 35 38 28 39 40 41 41 42 42 43 43 46

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

The dawn of a new age

Unit objectives

By the end of this unit you should be able to: • Explain how Joseph Conrad and Henry James marked the transition from Victorianism to early 20th century literature • Identify the dark vision in their tales Heart of Darkness and The Turn of the Screw • Explain the point of dark vision in the two tales • Explain the importance of exotic setting in Heart of Darkness • Approach Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in terms of imperialism • Approach the plot of Conrad’s tale in terms of journey • Explain why Heart of Darkness is a difficult text • Explain why Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw is a Gothic tale • Identify the main stages of plot in James’s tale • Explain why the narrator of The Turn of the Screw cannot be trusted • Explain why the governess in The Turn of the Screw can be seen either as a heroine or as a villain and the implications of this dilemma • Explain who / what are the two children in James’s tale • Explain what the ghosts are in James’s tale • Explain the title of James’s tale The Turn of the Screw

2. Joseph Conrad and Henry James, Two Forerunners of Modernism Joseph Conrad (an English writer of Polish origin) and Henry James (an American writer who wrote for both sides of the Atlantic and who became a British citizen in 1915) are late Victorian writers. However, their lives and careers spanned the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Joseph Conrad’s career as a seaman brought him to such exotic places as the West Indies, Malaysia and the Congo. The journey to the Congo was extremely difficult: marked by a severe illness, Conrad was haunted by its “dark” significances and turned it into the subject of his nightmarish tale Heart of Darkness. In all his works, Conrad made extensive use of symbolism and striking visual imagery. He tried to convey the complexity of experience by experimenting with narrative technique. He created an intermediate narrator – Marlow in Youth (1902), Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim and Chance (1914). This narrator, who, although involved in the action, sticks to the facts in his storytelling, anticipates the narrative technique of modernist novels where the narrator totally disappears (see unit 4). Henry James travelled to Europe and visited England, Switzerland, Italy and France. Lacking strong American roots, he decided in 1875 that his future belonged in Europe. Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

29

The dawn of a new age

James’s interest in the ‘consciousness’ of his characters and his innovative use of limited point of view (which heightens the suspense in The Turn of the Screw) has made him one of the forerunners of the stream of consciousness technique, later developed by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf (see unit 4).

2.1. Joseph Conrad’s Tale Heart of Darkness: The Importance of Exotic Setting Heart of Darkness is set in Africa towards the end of the 19th century, when European countries divided up the continent with the aims of increasing national prestige and of having access to cheap natural resources. Of all of Conrad’s works, Heart of Darkness in particular provides a bridge between Victorian values and the ideas of modernism. Like its Victorian predecessors, this tale relies on traditional ideas of heroism, which are nevertheless under constant attack in a changing world and in places far from England.

Stop and think! The exotic‫ ٭‬suggests distant countries and unfamiliar cultures. How do you expect white Europeans to be affected by this? (Refer to their capacities of understanding the new and unknown environment and to their chances to adapt to it). Starting from this, use your intuition to explain the significance of the title. Give your answers to these questions in the space provided below. Please add these answers to the portfolio to be discussed in the tutorials.

30

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

The dawn of a new age

2.1.1 Imperialism in Heart of Darkness Like much of the best modernist literature produced in the early decades of the 20th century, Heart of Darkness is as much about alienation, confusion, and profound doubt, as it is about imperialism. Imperialism‫ ٭‬is at the centre of Heart of Darkness. By the 1890s, most of the world’s “dark places” (unknown to the Europeans before) had been placed under European control. Thus the European powers made efforts to administer and protect massive empires. Cracks soon appeared in the system, which gave rise to a sense that things were falling apart. Heart of Darkness suggests that this is the natural result when men are allowed to operate outside a social system of checks and balances: power inevitably corrupts. Besides making this point, Heart of Darkness raises a question: is it possible to call an individual insane or wrong when he is part of a system that is thoroughly corrupted and corrupting? To what extent is the individual to blame, in this case? Thus, Heart of Darkness is a narrative about the difficulty of understanding the world beyond the self and about the ability of one man to judge another.

2.1.2 Plot in Heart of Darkness

A journey

Heart of Darkness was serialized in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1899 and published in 1902 in the volume Youth: A Narrative; and Two Other Stories. The tale‫ ٭‬centers around Marlow, a sailor endowed with a keen sense of observation and his journey up the Congo River to meet Kurtz, reputed to be an idealistic man of great abilities. Marlow is hired by a Company, a Belgian concern organized to trade in the Congo. He takes command of a ship and goes there to collect a cargo of ivory from the colonial stations in the interior. As Marlow travels deeper and deeper into the jungle, he is increasingly sickened by the corruption of the colonial traders and the ruthless exploitation of the natives. The cruelty of imperial enterprise contrasts sharply with the impassive and majestic jungle that surrounds the white men’s settlements, making them appear to be tiny islands amidst a vast darkness: “The word ‘ivory’ rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse. By Jove‫ !٭‬I’ve never seen anything so unreal in my life. And outside, the silent wilderness surrounding this cleared speck on the earth struck me as something great and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic invasion.”

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

31

The dawn of a new age

SAQ 1 This quote is taken from the fourth section of Part I. It records Marlow’s initial impression of the Central Station. What is the contrast used by Marlow here? To what effects is this contrast used?

Compare your answers to those given in the “Answers” section at the end of the unit.

When he arrives at the Central Station, Marlow meets a general manager, who is a dubious character. He discovers that his steamship has been sunk and spends several months waiting for parts to be repaired. His interest in Kurtz grows during this period. The manager and his favourite, the brickmaker, seem to fear Kurtz as a threat to their position. Kurtz is rumored to be ill, making the delays in mending the ship all the more costly. Marlow eventually gets the parts he needs to repair his ship, and he and the manager set out with a few agents and a crew of cannibals on a long, difficult voyage up the river. On this adventurous voyage, Marlow meets a half-crazed Russian trader, who claims that Kurtz has enlarged his mind and cannot be subjected to the same moral judgments as normal people. Apparently, Kurtz has established himself as a god with the natives and has gone on brutal raids in the surrounding territory in search of ivory. The collection of cut off heads adorning the fence posts around the station attests to his “methods”. Kurtz is brought out of the station-house on a stretcher, and a large group of native warriors pour out of the forest and surround them. Kurtz speaks to them, and the natives disappear into the woods.

32

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

The dawn of a new age

Indeed, Kurtz is ill, and despite his resistance and attempt to escape, Marlow persuades him to join them on the steamer. They set off down the river the next morning, but Kurtz’s health is failing fast. Marlow listens to Kurtz talk, at the same time piloting the ship. “The horror! The Kurtz entrusts Marlow with a packet of personal documents, including an eloquent pamphlet on civilizing the savages which ends with a horror!” scrawled message that says, “Exterminate all the brutes!” The steamer breaks down, and they have to stop for repairs. Kurtz dies, uttering his last words – “The horror! The horror!” – in the presence of the confused Marlow.

SAQ 2 What could Kurtz mean by these words? Do they affect our understanding of the plot?

Compare your answers to those given in the “Answers” section at the end of the unit. Marlow falls ill soon after and barely survives. Eventually he returns to Europe and goes to see Kurtz’s fiancée. She is still in mourning, even though it has been over a year since Kurtz’s death, and she praises him as a paragon‫ ٭‬of virtue and achievement. She asks him what his last words were, but Marlow cannot bring himself to shatter her illusions with the truth. Instead, he tells her that his last word was her name. Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

33

The dawn of a new age

2.1.3 The Difficulty of the Text

“Do you see him? Do you see the story?

Marlow is a complicated man who anticipates the figures of modernism while also reflecting his Victorian predecessors. In many ways, Marlow is a traditional hero: tough, honest, an independent thinker and a capable man. Yet he is also “broken” or “damaged”, like characters in modernist literature. His late Victorian experiences, which involve him in the harsh imperial system, make him weary, skeptical and cynical. In other words, Marlow develops features that bring him very close to the modernist figure of the individual who is defeated by a system which confronts him with “signs” he cannot understand and interpret. As both a character and a narrator‫ ٭‬of this text, Marlow has problems with reading and interpreting. The jungle he explores is both a literal and a metaphorical one: the “heart of darkness” is the colony which refuses to make sense to the European white man, and this difficulty of making sense of it falls on Marlow. Marlow’s story is a narrative that exposes the difficulty of making sense of the Congo jungle. His journey is literally a dangerous enterprise, in which Marlow faces threats at every step. Metaphorically, it is also an insecure journey, which asks of Marlow to interpret its meanings. The character of Kurtz adds to this maze. Marlow refers to Kurtz as “hollow” more than once. This may be taken as a negative remark, implying that Kurtz is not worthy of admiration. He may not be the “hero” many say he is. However, the remark may also imply that in his essential “hollowness”, Kurtz is an enigma. Indeed, Kurtz is not so much a fully realized individual as a series of images constructed by others. There are versions of Kurtz but no true Kurtz: to his cousin, Kurtz was a great musician; to a journalist, a brilliant politician and a leader; to his fiancée, a great humanitarian and genius. However, his deeds and enterprises seem to be driven by vanity and a desire to increase his power, and his last words are vague. How can Marlow make sense of these contradictions, before and after he meets Kurtz? In one of the passages of the story, he wonders: “He [Kurtz] was just a word for me. I did not see the man in the name any more than you do. Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream – making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams…”

34

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

The dawn of a new age

SAQ 3 Marlow is confused about Kurtz. Does his confusion (as a narrator) have any effects upon the reader?

Compare your answers to those given in the “Answers” section at the end of the unit.

Darkness

Fog

The whole story is an exploration of hypocrisy, ambiguity, moral confusion and absurdity. At one station, for instance, Marlow sees a man trying to carry water in a bucket with a large hole in it. At the Outer Station, he watches how native labourers keep shooting at a hillside with no particular goal in mind. Absurdity is rendered symbolically as contrasting exteriors and surfaces (the jungle, the river banks, the “images” of Kurtz) and interiors (the stations, the steamer cabins, the “real” Kurtz). However, Marlow’s problem is that there is no fixed meaning to anything, and beyond surfaces and exteriors there may be nothing. Darkness and fog are also symbolic of this confusion. Darkness envelops everything in the book, and Marlow’s condition is to be always “in the dark” (that is not to know anything for sure). Africa, England and Brussels (Belgium) are all described as gloomy and somehow dark, even if the sun is shining brightly. Metaphorically, darkness is the inability to see and understand (see again the passage quoted above). Fog is also a sort of corollary to darkness. Fog not only obscures but distorts. Marlow’s steamer is literally caught in the fog, and this means that literally Marlow has no idea where he is going and no idea whether danger or just open water lies ahead. Of course, this symbol reinforces the metaphor of Marlow’s condition as a late Victorian stepping into the 20th century: a condition of utter confusion (Read quote 8 in the Reader).

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

35

The dawn of a new age

2.2. Henry James’s Ghost Story The Turn of the Screw The ghost‫ ٭‬story was a popular form, especially in England, where, as the prologue (that is the prefacing story) of The Turn of the Screw suggests, gathering for the purpose of telling ghost stories was something of a Christmastide tradition. According to James’s notebooks and his preface to the 1908 edition, the germ of the story had been a half-remembered anecdote told to him by the archbishop of Canterbury: a story of small children haunted by the ghosts of a pair of servants who wish them ill. The story abounds in Gothic elements: an old mansion, strange atmosphere, ghosts, mystery and death.

2.2.1 Plot in The Turn of the Screw “The story’s written. It’s in a locked drawer – it has not been out for years.”

“It was as if all the rest of the scene had been stricken with death.”

36

The Turn of the Screw appeared in Collier’s Weekly in twelve installments in 1898. An anonymous narrator recalls a Christmas Eve gathering at an old house, where guests compete, telling ghost stories to one another. A guest named Douglas introduces a story involving two children, Miles and Flora, and a governess, whose name will never be disclosed. After sending for the governess’s written record of events from his home, Douglas provides a few introductory details. A bachelor persuaded the young woman to take a position as governess for his niece and nephew in an isolated country home after the previous governess died. Douglas begins to read from the written record. At this point the frame‫ ٭‬closes, and the story shifts to the governess’s point of view as she narrates her strange experience. Taking her new job at Bly, a country home in Essex, England, the governess meets the housekeeper Mrs. Grose and Flora, whom she finds a charming girl. The next day the governess receives a letter from her employer, with whom she made arrangements that she should take the whole responsibility for the children, without bothering him. According to this agreement, she finds a letter from Miles’s headmaster enclosed in her employer’s letter. The letter says that Miles has been expelled but does not explain why. Turning to Mrs. Grose for possible reasons, she only gets assurance that Miles might be naughty now and then but not more than any boy of his age should be. The governess is reassured by this as she meets Miles, who charms her. The plot thickens with strange events as the governess sees a strange man on a tower of the mansion and exchanges an intense stare with him. Telling Mrs. Grose about it, the governess finds out that the man of her vision is Peter Quint, a former valet who is now dead. Being more and more convinced that the ghost of Quint seeks Miles, the governess is scrupulous in her supervision of the children. Soon after these suspicions, the plot thickens again. One day, as the governess is at the lake with Flora, she sees a woman dressed in black and senses that the woman is the ghost of Miss Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

The dawn of a new age

Jessel, her predecessor. The governess becomes sure that Flora is aware of the ghost’s presence but deliberately keeps silent. Questioning Mrs. Grose about it again, the governess finds out that Quint was “too free” with Miles and Miss Jessel with Flora. This makes her suspicious of a plot between the two children and the two ghosts and more assured in her mission of protecting the children. After the governess’s repeated encounters with the ghosts, which are paralleled by an affectionate behaviour of the children alternating with nasty tricks on their part, Mrs. Grose urges the governess to appeal to her employer, but the governess declines, reminding her that the children’s uncle does not want to be bothered. However, seeing that the situation worsens, the governess writes a letter to her employer. In the meantime, the governess finds that Flora is missing and proceeds to look for her by the lake, together with Mrs. Grose. Arriving there, the governess finds Flora and sees Miss Jessel’s ghost across the lake, but Mrs. Grose declares she sees nothing of the sort. At that point, Flora complains that the governess is too cruel and that she wants to get away from her. The next day, Mrs. Grose informs the governess that Flora is sick. They decide that Mrs. Grose should take Flora away, and the governess remains alone with Miles at Bly. It is also discovered that the letter the governess wrote to the children’s uncle has disappeared. With Flora and Mrs. Grose gone, the governess and Miles talk after dinner. The governess starts by inquiring about the missing letter: “’So what have you done with it?’ ‘I’ve burnt it.’ ‘Burnt it?’ It was now or never. ‘Is it what you did at school?’ /…/ ‘Did I steal?’ ‘Was it for that you mightn’t go back?’ ‘Did you know I mightn’t go back?’ ‘I know everything.’ /…/ ‘Everything?’ ‘Everything. Therefore did you - ? But I couldn’t say it again. Miles could, very simply. ‘No, I didn’t steal.’ /…/ I seemed to float not into clearness, but into a darker obscure, and within a minute there had come to me out of my very pity the appalling alarm of his being perhaps innocent. It was for the instant confounding and bottomless, for if he were innocent, what then on earth was I?”

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

37

The dawn of a new age

Stop and think! The plot is now approaching a conclusion. It is obvious that the governess does not “know” more now than she has known so far, and Miles refuses to give her explanations. She has reached a point when she doubts everything, and it is very significant that she questions her own self and her own position. Before you learn how the story ends, give your own version of the ending in the space provided below. Please add this version to the portfolio to be discussed in the tutorials.

As they continue to talk, the governess sees Quint outside. She watches Quint in horror and presses Miles to see and identify him. Miles asks where Quint is, and the governess presses him harder: ‘There, there!’, but Miles falls into her arms, dead.

38

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

The dawn of a new age

2.2.2 Can the Governess be Trusted?

“How can I retrace today the strange steps of my obsession?”

The governess narrates virtually the whole tale in retrospect, writing it down in a manuscript. She speaks in the first person, as she puts into writing her account of the strange occurrences she experienced at Bly. She often invokes her “imagination”, “invention”, but also her “memory” and “inductions”. She also confesses, repeatedly, that “whatever I had seen, Miles and Flora saw more – things terrible and unguessable”, and that by trying to find out more, she takes plunges “into the hideous obscure”. The strange sense she has is that the more she learns, the more she is in the dark. At some point she writes: “I scarce know how to put my story into words that shall be a credible picture of my state of mind /…/”, which points to her awareness of the difficulty of her task of writing a credible story. As a matter of fact, the reader has no other source of information but the governess. The problem with that is that the governess turns out to be a rather dubious source: she is the only person at Bly who sees the ghosts, while everybody else (Miles, Flora and Mrs. Grose) cannot see them, no matter how hard they are pressed. Given this serious suspicion raised by the governess, how can the reader trust her on the strange behaviour of the children? Is it not rather the other way round: that her behaviour is strange?

2.2.3 Is the Governess a Heroine or a Villain?

“if he were innocent, what then on earth was I?”

The governess thinks that her task of protecting the children is heroic: “I was in these days literally able to find a joy in the extraordinary flight of heroism the occasion demanded of me.” At the same time, with her suspicions of the children, who are virtually innocent, but whom she accuses of being bad to the point of being “diabolic”, the governess may pass for a villain‫( ٭‬an evil character). She suspects herself of being something she cannot name in the closing scene of the tale, but this suspicion does not alter her heroism. And is it the governess’s heroism that kills Miles, who cannot let himself go from the grip of the evil, or is it her essentially evil inclination to project her insane visions onto Miles that kills him? The readers are offered these two radically different options. Which one shall they choose? James let the readers become suspended between these two options, maybe implying that “the heart of darkness” here is the governess herself.

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

39

The dawn of a new age

2.2.4 Who / What Are Miles and Flora? Miles might be either a cunning plaything of the two ghosts or just an innocent, unusually well-mannered but sometimes tricky boy. The governess leaves Miles’s true character in question. The strangest impression of Miles the reader gets, however, is his disturbing emptiness, his impersonality and lack of history, as though he were less than real. Like Miles, Flora might be either angelic or diabolic. In this case, the question might be what Miles and Flora are, and not who they are!

SAQ 4 Try to explain what Miles and Flora are starting from the possibility that the governess’s state of mind is confused and maybe she hallucinates.

Compare your answers to those given in the “Answers” section at the end of the unit.

40

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

The dawn of a new age

2.2.5 What Are the Ghosts? There are many clues in the text that the governess may actually be in love with her employer, the children’s uncle. Maybe that is why she wants to push her task of taking care of them beyond the limit, turning it into an act of heroism that might prove her exceptional qualities! She might be seduced, wishing to respond to the spell her employer cast on her by inventing another spell. In this case, might not Peter Quint be an imaginary “ghostly” replacement of the children’s uncle? This hypothesis is supported by the clues the governess gives when she writes about her first encounter with Quint’s ghost: “What arrested me on the spot – and with a shock much greater than any vision had allowed for – was the sense that my imagination had, in a flash, turned real. He did stand there!”

‘She was a lady.’ ‘And he so dreadfully below,’ said Mrs. Grose.

Why is she invoking her “imagination” and turning “real”? Is it possible that she was dreaming of her employer, expecting to see him in fancy, and was “arrested on the spot” because the object of that fancy became “real”? Maybe that is why she is suspicious of it: she knows that imagination cannot turn “real”. She insists that the figure she sees is “as little anyone else I knew as it was the image that had been in my mind.” Whose image had been in her mind? The next sentence reads: ”I had not seen it in Harley Street – I had not seen it anywhere.” Harley Street is her employer’s domicile, and what the reader guesses is that she was thinking of him, wishing he were there. Who is Miss Jessel and what would be the point of the governess’s inventing her? The possibility that Quint might be an imaginary projection of her employer suggests that the governess projects herself as the late Miss Jessel, also a governess.

SAQ 5 Explain this hypothesis. Why does the governess need to continue her game of imagination and involve the children in it?

Compare your answers to those given in the “Answers” section at the end of the unit. Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

41

The dawn of a new age

2.2.6 How Does the Phrase “the Turn of the Screw” Apply to the Governess’s Tale? By titling his tale The Turn of the Screw, James implies that this phrase is a fitting representation of the tale. The phrase is a metaphor suggesting that a tale’s effect on its readers is comparable to a screw boring into a hole. With each turn of the screw, the story’s point drives readers further and on a deeper level. James gives “a turn of the screw” with each chapter of the tale to amplify its ability to penetrate. He also frames the tale told by the governess in the first person. The frame is an intriguing but “It is all obscure ambiguous prologue that foreshadows “delicious” dread. and imperfect, Douglas is the first to turn the screw when he says: “I quite the picture, the agree – in regard to Griffin’s ghost, or whatever it was – that its story, but there appearing first to the little boy, at so tender an age, adds a particular is a suggestion touch. But it’s not the first occurrence of its charming kind that I know of a strangely to have involved a child. If the child gives the effect another turn of gruesome‫٭‬ the screw, what do you say to two children - ?” effect in it.” The screw turns again when we understand that the children of the governess’s tale are not merely victims but participants in the ghosts’ evil plot. The screw bores into the planks of reason until those planks crack and threaten to plunge us into explorations of insanity. As we go along reading, we grow more and more suspicious of the governess’s judgments, in fact so suspicious as to consider her the villain.

Summary This unit introduces you to the dark stories of two writers of the end of the 19th century: Joseph Conrad and Henry James. It makes a point of the fact that the two writers discussed here are two late Victorians looking anxiously back into a disintegrating world and forward to an uncertain future. This unit insists on the two writers’ darkness of vision in order to demonstrate that this marks a transition from a world in dissolution (Victorianism) to an age which thoroughly questions the values of that world (early 20th century). It is significant that Joseph Conrad and Henry James explored two major territories: Heart of Darkness takes us into the threatening colonial possessions of the Empire, while The Turn of the Screw plunges us into the darkest regions of the mind. These explorations pose troubling questions about the impossibility of constructing meaning, leaving the explorers (readers) in a confused state of mind. The next units will deal with this troubling legacy of Victorianism, which gave the early 20th century writers a sense that they should do away with it and create new modes of writing.

42

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

The dawn of a new age

Key Terms • • • • • •

Exotic Imperialism Ghost story Tale Narrator Ambiguity

Glossary of Terms and Comments • Ambiguity means doubt about meaning • Exotic means strikingly unusual, and often very colourful and exciting. It suggests different countries and unfamiliar cultures • Frame means a structure that surrounds or encloses a particular space. Here it is used to refer to the story that frames the governess’s story in The Turn of the Screw. Another term used to refer to a framing story is “prologue” (that is opening story) • Ghost is the spirit of somebody who has died, supposed to appear as a shadowy form or to cause sounds, the movement of objects or a frightening atmosphere in a place • Gruesome means horrifying • Imperialism refers to the political, military, or economic domination of one country over the other • Jove is a literary form of “Jupiter”, who was the king of the gods in Roman mythology. The expression “by Jove” is used to express surprise or to emphasize a conviction • Narrator is anyone who recounts a narrative. The narrator may be in various relations to the events described, ranging from being their center (the main character / protagonist) through various degrees of importance (a minor character) to being merely a witness. A narrator is always present, at least by implication, in any work of fiction. A narrator may be reliable (credible, trustworthy) or unreliable (cannot be trusted). If the narrator is reliable, the reader accepts his / her statements of facts and judgement without serious question. If the narrator is unreliable, the reader questions or seeks to qualify his / her statements • Paragon means an example of excellence: somebody or something that is the best example of a quality • Tale is a term that applies to both Heart of Darkness and The Turn of the Screw. It means a short piece of fiction, usually longer than a short story but shorter than a novel • Villain means an evil character

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

43

The dawn of a new age

SAA No. 2 Comment upon the significance and implications of the two writers’ darkness of vision in Heart of Darkness and The Turn of the Screw. Take into account the main aspects that inform their vision: - the imperial system (Heart of Darkness) - moral and psychological ambiguity‫( ٭‬Heart of Darkness and The Turn of the Screw) - class issues (the governess and her socially unacceptable fondness of the master in The Turn of the Screw) Send your essay to your tutor. Do not take more than three pages. Please note that the quality of your ideas and the coherence of the essay will be 70 % of your grade, while the accuracy of your language will count for 30 %.

Answers to SAQs SAQ 1 The word ‘ivory’ has taken on a life of its own for the men who work with the Company. It is very significant that the white colour of ivory can be associated with the white European colonizers and their greed. Thus, ivory to them is no longer the tusk of an elephant (a natural thing), but a guarantee of economic prosperity (dead matter turned into an object of trade). Marlow’s reference to a decaying corpse is both literal and figurative: both elephants and native Africans die as a result of the white man’s pursuit of ivory, and the entire enterprise is rotten to the core. The strangest thing is that the word ‘ivory’ has lost all connection to any physical reality and has itself become an object of worship: the worship of dead matter turned into profit. In contrast to this rotten ‘language’ of commerce, the jungle is dark and silent. Marlow is at a loss for meanings here: he does not know how to take it. Is it evil, or is it truth? His dilemma is suggestive of the white man’s incapacity to understand the meaning of a world which threatens him by being unfamiliar and which he in his turn has threatened by his “fantastic invasion”.

44

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

The dawn of a new age

SAQ 2 Kurtz’s words “Exterminate all the brutes” is ambiguous in the sense that “brutes” may refer to the elephants, to the natives or to both. His words “The horror! The horror!” are even more ambiguous. “The horror” could be almost anything. The most confusing possibility is, however, that it may mean nothing, in the sense that what it means may never be known to Marlow, who will thus never be able to express it in words. Marlow will ponder Kurtz’s last words and Kurtz’s memory for the rest of his life. Maybe Kurtz was deliberately ambiguous and calculated the effects of this ambiguity. It is obvious that he wanted power and grandeur all his life. His act of leaving ambiguous messages behind for Marlow to ponder may be indicative of his desire to turn himself into an enigma and thus ensure his own immortality. Of course, this affects the readers’ understanding of plot and character in this text. Please revise section 2.1.2 in case you have failed to give answers comparable to those given to SAQ 1 and SAQ 2 in this section. SAQ 3 Kurtz has explored the fascination of horror, and Marlow’s task, as a man who met him, is to make sense of Kurtz’s character and Kurtz’s life. It is obvious that Marlow is fascinated by Kurtz’s fascinations. The difficulty of Marlow’s task, however, is that he does not know how to accommodate the different aspects of Kurtz into a story. Marlow expresses these problems by saying that “he [Kurtz] was just a word for me”, implying that he cannot go beyond the surface of the word to the essence of the man. This device of exploring a character, represented by two or more different aspects of itself, brings us to the threshold of a time when character is seen as so complex that no single pair of eyes (Marlow’s), no single story (Marlow’s) and no single plot can reveal him completely. Thus, the narrator’s confusion (Marlow’s) becomes the reader’s: how can we read the story of a man when the teller of that story cannot pull the strings of the story together? What is the “reality” and the “truth” beyond the character whose story we are reading? This is why Marlow gives us the “dream” alternative: dream has no logic. Dream is vague and ambiguous, and dream is not real! Please revise section 2.1.3 in case you have failed to give an answer comparable to the one given to SAQ 3 in this section.

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

45

The dawn of a new age

SAQ 4 Like Heart of Darkness, with its suggestions of dream, The Turn of the Screw may read as a nightmare. The governess is presumably attracted by the children’s tutor, who has hired her for the job. It is very likely that this should be the reason why she feels bad. She knows it is not proper for a woman of her condition to fall in love with her employer, and she starts to unfold her memories by confessing: “After rising, in town, to meet his appeal, I had at all events a couple of very bad days – found myself doubtful again, felt indeed sure I had made a mistake. In this state of mind I spent the long hours of bumping, swinging coach that carried me to the stoppingplace at which I was to be met by a vehicle from the house.” The whole story may be the governess’s bad dream of going to Bly “in this state of mind”. Everything goes wrong there, of course, because everything is a projection of this bad state of mind: the ghosts she encounters are her projections and so is everybody and everything else. The children are, very strangely, mirrored projections of the two ghosts: they are evil, scheming and corrupted, just like the ghosts. The strangeness is amplified by the near and far “design”. The two ghosts are “seen only across, as it were, and beyond – in strange places and on high places, the top of houses, the outside of windows, the further edge of pools”, but the governess makes out a “deep design” (she implies intention) on their part “to shorten the distance and overcome the obstacle”. Is not the distance “shortened” by the presence of the two children, who are in the near sphere, always around? Even when they seem to step across, the governess finds them in the room and not outside, on her side of the lake, and not on the other. Therefore Miles and Flora, who are so elusive, so hard to pin down, may be the governess’s projections. They are on the near side, making the “design” complete and the grip of horror tight. The strange thing is, however, that in a sense, the children are more “ghostly” than the ghosts: they are now here, now gone, now good, now bad, now loving and now hateful. They change “faces” in a manner that may be more dangerous and more horrifying than the ghosts’, which are always the same. Please revise section 2.2.4 in case you have failed to give an answer comparable to the one given to SAQ 4 in this section. SAQ 5 The governess may have a nightmare, or she may even hallucinate. She sleeps very little, and it is scientifically demonstrated that too little sleep or no sleep at all over a longer period of time has this effect on people: they start to hallucinate. That Quint is a replacement of the master, which the governess’s mind projects, is suggested by a piece of information provided by Mrs. Grose. Listening to the governess’s description of 46

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

The dawn of a new age

the ghost, Mrs. Grose identifies it as Quint’s and tells the governess that the clothes he wears are the masters’. It seems that when he was alive, he wore the master’s clothes, taking the master’s prerogatives together with them. He was no gentleman, though. However, Miss Jessel was, according to Mrs. Grose, a lady. Supposedly she and Peter Quint were in love. That was a love society could not approve, and this may be the reason of Miss Jessel’s death. Projecting herself as Miss Jessel, the governess thus identifies with her as a lady. Is this scenario a nightmare only because it casts two ghosts in the main parts? This is only a partial answer. The reason is, in the first place, that the governess cannot have a nice dream of a relation which is not sanctioned by social norms. That is why she feels so bad about taking the job: she takes it from the “wrong” position of a governess seduced by the master. In her nightmare, she reverses the ranks, but the nightmare worsens. Why are the children needed in this scenario? In any nightmare images proliferate, overlap and change forms. Situations get out of control, nasty incidents occur again and again, getting worse and worse. The two children in The Turn of the Screw actually increase the horror effects: they are presumably innocent, but the governess hesitates between their innocence and their wickedness. Worse than that, she grows more and more convinced that they are corrupted and wicked rather than innocent. Miles and Flora are needed to complete the design of the nightmare and to increase its effects. However, the children are also needed for a reason which relates their presence in the design to language and communication. Any text needs language to be a text. Any text is also a form of communication. The governess’s story is fantastic, ambiguous, and therefore strange to the point of being incommunicable. It is also threatened by the silence and absence of the two ghosts. If the two ghosts are silent and strange manifestations of “present absences”, always appearing across or beyond, the two children are the palpable presences in the “near” sphere, which the design needs. Very importantly, they are also the governess’s interlocutors, persons with whom she can communicate. It is true that their communication is made difficult by the children’s (especially Miles’s) silence, but it still is a form of (problematic) communication that allows the text to be a text. In this respect, Mrs. Grose is an unsatisfactory interlocutor for a different reason: she cannot understand what the children seem to “know”. Please revise section 2.2.5 in case you have failed to give an answer comparable to the one given to SAQ 5 in this section.

Bibliography Conrad, Joseph, (1902)1994) Heart of Darkness, Penguin Books, A Penguin / Godfrey Cave Edition James, Henry, (1898)1994) The Turn of the Screw, Penguin Books, A Penguin / Godfrey Cave Edition Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

47

Modernist principles and aesthetics

UNIT 3 MODERNIST PRINCIPLES AND AESTHETICS Unit Outline 3 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.4.1 3.4.2 3.4.3 3.4.4 3.4.5 3.4.6

48

48 48 48

Unit Objectives Modernist Principles and Aesthetics Virginia Woolf’s Essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”: A Modernist Manifesto Free Expression and Novelty: the Basic Principles of Modernism Internationalism Modernist Aesthetics Iconoclasm Impressionism Post-Impressionism Genre-Boundary Breaking “The Death of the Author” and the Birth of the Reader Collage / Montage

52 53 54 55 56 57 58 58

Summary Key Terms Glossary of Terms and Comments Gallery of Personalities SAA No. 3 Answers to SAQs Bibliography

59 59 60 60 62 62 64

51

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Modernist principles and aesthetics

Unit objectives

After you have read through this chapter, you should be able to: • Identify Modernism as a paradigm of novelty • Explain Virginia Woolf’s argument in the essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” – a manifesto of literary modernism • Identify the essential principles and features of modernism and explain them in terms of: - free expression - novelty - internationalism • Identify the new aesthetics of modernism and explain them in terms of: - iconoclasm - Impressionism - Post-Impressionism - genre-boundary breaking - collage / montage - a new emphasis on the reader’s / viewer’s perception

3. Modernist Principles and Aesthetics 3.1. Virginia Woolf’s “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”: A Modernist Manifesto Virginia Woolf, who was both a writer and a critic, pleaded for novelty – the main feature of modernism. In her essay “Modern Fiction” (1919), followed by the essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1924), Woolf firmly delineated the priorities of her generation and her own priorities as a writer. “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” can be considered one of the most influential manifestos of literary modernism. In this essay Virginia Woolf proclaims that: “…in or about December 1910 the human character changed.”

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

49

Modernist principles and aesthetics

Stop and think! Stop and take a few minutes to think of Woolf’s statement. How can “human character change”? What could be the causes and factors of change? Give your answers in the space provided below. Please note that you will find keys to your answers in the following passages.

Woolf’s essay argues with a tradition deemed to be obsolete and ossified. She identifies the representatives of that ossified tradition in her immediate predecessors, “the most prominent and successful novelists in the year 1910… Mr. Wells‫٭‬, Mr. Bennett‫٭‬, and Mr. Galsworthy‫”٭‬, whom she puts in what she calls “the Edwardian camp”. She calls these novelists “Edwardian” because they wrote their novels in the first decade of the 20th century (1901 1910) during the reign of King Edward VII. Edward was the son of Queen Victoria, and her successor to the throne of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

50

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Modernist principles and aesthetics

What is reality?

The philosophical underpinning of Woolf’s point is the nature of “reality”. Thus, in the same essay she writes: “But now I must recall what Mr. Arnold Bennett says. He says that it is only if the characters are real that the novel has any chance of surviving. Otherwise, die it must. But, I ask myself, what is reality? And who are the judges of reality? A character may be real to Mr. Bennett and quite unreal to me.”

SAQ 1 What can Woolf mean by the question “what is reality”? How can Woolf’s “reality” make a difference from Bennett’s?

Compare your answers to those given in the “Answers” section at the end of the unit. The militant, revolutionary and prophetic tone of the whole essay makes it clear who the more entitled judges of “reality” are: they are, of course, “the Georgians”, the new wave of writers. These writers are far better equipped to perceive the “reality” of “that overwhelming and peculiar impression” given by a character, or rather the “myriads of irrelevant and incongruous ideas” crowding “into one’s head” on every occasion when character needs to be captured. By “the Georgians”, Woolf means the new wave of British writers who started to make their voices heard in 1910. Woolf calls them “Georgians” because 1910 was the year when King George V came to the throne. He ruled from 1910 to 1936. It is obvious that Woolf’s quarrel with the Edwardian novelists focuses upon their realist method, which she considers to be faithful to the perceived, objective world at the expense of the process of perception itself and the perceiver engaged in it. Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

51

Modernist principles and aesthetics

The “Edwardians” were “materialists”

The “Georgian” age was “a season of failures and fragments”

To Woolf’s mind, these realists are pitiable “materialists” engaged in an “enormous labour of proving the solidity, the likeness of life, of the story.” Woolf also argues that the Edwardians ”have laid an enormous stress upon the fabric of things”, that is the palpable, solid nature of reality. In an argument typical of the quarrel between tradition and modernity, using a rhetoric which makes the territory of the text a metaphoric battlefield, Woolf opposes “the Edwardian camp” of Bennett, Wells and Galsworthy to what she calls “the Georgian camp”. She mentions, among others, D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce as “warriors” of the Georgian camp. If the date of the “change” looks curiously exact, one has to consider historical facts: King Edward VII had died in May 1910, being succeeded by King George V. But Woolf also implies the importance of a major cultural event: the opening of the first PostImpressionist exhibition in London in November 1910. According to Woolf in this essay, the prevailing sound of the Georgian age is “breaking and falling, crashing and destruction”. Signs of these are everywhere apparent in literature, where “grammar is violated; syntax disintegrated”. In her account, the Georgian age is also “a season of failures and fragments”. What Woolf calls the “spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary, the failure” are inevitably part of this revolutionary change encapsulated by the prophetic statement which concludes the essay: “We are trembling on the verge of one of the great ages of English literature.”

3.2 Free Expression and Novelty: the Basic Principles of Modernism

Exile

52

The artists’ struggle for freer expression and their commitment to it was what modernism held most at stake. Free expression was a principle which had to operate on various levels, often simultaneously: to various degrees, all the modernists were taboo‫ ٭‬breakers in sexual, social, political, aesthetic and stylistic matters. Being committed to innovation and emancipation, modernist artists found themselves pursuing one form or another of exile‫٭‬. In short they acted out one of the impulses of modernism. James Joyce, an Irishman with a cosmopolitan‫ ٭‬spirit, and D. H. Lawrence, the only indisputably major English writer of the early 20th century who came from the working class, actually lived in exile. To Virginia Woolf, one of “the daughters of educated men” and even to Aldous Huxley, a “noncongenital”‫ ٭‬novelist, exile translated as a sense of confinement within the boundaries of their society and culture. Irrespective of the form of exile they embraced, all these writers – without any exception - opened themselves up to Continental values, ideas and ideologies. All of them were spirits who looked for accomplishment in a free world without frontiers. Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Modernist principles and aesthetics

3.3 Internationalism

Stream of consciousness

Bohemia

The early 20th century British artists were highly responsive to various Continental influences. The novelists looked up at Russian writers like Chekhov‫ ٭‬and Tolstoy‫٭‬. In fact, the Russians were seen as models by Virginia Woolf in her essay “Modern Novels” (also known under the title “Modern Fiction”) because “they see further than we [the British] do and without our gross impediments of vision”. Virginia Woolf and James Joyce’s tendency to mix the various strands of memory, anticipation and present thought into a fluid stream of consciousness‫ ٭‬can be – and has been - seen in association with similar innovations undertaken by their French contemporary writer Marcel Proust‫٭‬. Aldous Huxley’s idea of having a novelist within the novel comment about the problems Huxley himself had to sort out when he wrote Point Counterpoint has often been discussed in connection with another French novel, André Gide’s‫ ٭‬The Counterfeiters. This newly found ideal of artistic internationalism is another “symptom” of the profound change undergone by the British arts in the early 20th century. Trans-culturalism, internationalism or even cosmopolitanism‫ ٭‬is another aspect typifying the paradigm of modernism. It marked a shift from the politicized geography of the glorious British Empire of the Victorian age, through its dissolution in the Edwardian period, to the de-centralized cultural re-mapping “from one bohemia‫ ٭‬to another” in a world losing its frontiers and permeated by a new spirit. Contemporary British writer and critic Malcolm Bradbury made a very clear point of it when he argued that “the Modern movement was in essence an international affair, founded on exile, the movement of the arts, ideas and forms from one bohemia to another.” By “bohemia”, Bradbury meant a new type of metropolis characteristic of the early decades of the 20th century. He meant cities like Paris, Zurich, Vienna, London, where artists on both sides of the Atlantic (Europe and the U.S.) came and found their spiritual freedom.

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

53

Modernist principles and aesthetics

SAQ 2 Why did internationalism animate the writers discussed above? Look at it as one of the fundamental principles of modernism. Relate this principle to their pursuit of novelty and free expression and to their impulse to cross borders and live in exile both literally and figuratively.

Compare your answers to those given in the “Answers” section at the end of the unit.

3.4 Modernist Aesthetics Read the definition of Modernism in the Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought: • “Modernism (or “the modern movement”) has by now acquired stability as the comprehensive term for an international tendency, arising in the poetry, fiction, drama, music, painting, architecture and other arts of the West in the last years of the 19th century and subsequently affecting the character of most 20th century art. • The tendency is usually held to have reached its peak just before or soon after World War I, and there is some uncertainty about whether it still persists or a subsequent age of style has begun… • As a stylistic term, modernism contains and conceals a wide variety of different smaller movements… A number of these movements contain large theoretical differences among themselves but certain stylistic similarities… • Modernism had a high aesthetic value and can be seen as a movement attempting to preserve the aesthetic realm against intellectual, social and historical forces threatening it… 54

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Modernist principles and aesthetics

•

Its forms, with their elements of fragmentation, introversion, and crisis, have sometimes been held to register the collapse of the entire tradition of the arts in human history… • The modernist arts require, for their comprehension, criteria different from those appropriate to earlier art.” (Quoted by Douglas Hewitt, Introduction to English Fiction of the Early Modern Period 1890-1940, Longman, London and New York, 1992, p. 136)

3.4.1. Iconoclasm Iconoclasm implies a challenge to tradition, namely a challenge to and the overturning of traditional beliefs, customs and values. Woolf’s argument in “Modern Fiction” and “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” accounted for the new techniques of capturing “reality” in a subjective way. Writers shifted their focus from objectivity to subjectivity through stream of consciousness, interior monologue and free indirect style. Thus, it may be stated that iconoclasm was an essential attitude embraced by the early 20th century writers. Early 20th century writers (the modernists) rejected the traditional mode of realism and experimented with new modes. SAQ 3 Read Woolf’s argument in the essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (3.1) in terms of iconoclasm. You have found a couple of ideas related to the modernists’ iconoclastic approaches in the subchapters above.

Compare your answers to those given in the “Answers” section at the end of the unit. Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

55

Modernist principles and aesthetics

3.4.2 Impressionism

Claude Monet‫٭‬ “Rouen Cathedral” Musicalisation of the canvas

Impressionism is an essentially modernist style and mode which started to be practised in France in the latter half of the 19th century. Impressionism focuses on recording impressions. Its main characteristic is the effacement of contours into vibrating atmosphere. In music, Impressionism expresses feelings and impressions. This style of music, of late 19th and early 20th century France, is characterized by the use of rich harmonies and tones rather than a form to express scenes or emotions. Impressionism flourished mainly in the visual arts, although the painters’ techniques of relying on vibration were borrowed from music. Thus it may be argued that the novelty brought about by Impressionism was the “musicalisation” of the canvas‫٭‬. This “musicalised” style in painting also influenced literature. In her essay “Modern Fiction”, Virginia Woolf makes the point that “the chief task of the novelist” is “to convey the incessantly varying spirit” of the reality invading the brain from all sides with “as little admixture of the alien and external as possible”. The novelist who serves her as the best example of this impressionistic way of capturing reality is James Joyce. With this example in mind, she urges her contemporaries:

Claude Monet “Rouen Cathedral”

“Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.”

SAQ 4 How does Woolf’s argument here relate to Impressionism in painting and music?

Compare your answers to those given in the “Answers” section at the end of the unit. 56

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Modernist principles and aesthetics

Along with Virginia Woolf, James Joyce was one of the novelists who looked within in order to “record the atoms as they fall upon the mind”. In Stephen Hero, an unfinished manuscript which lies at the basis of his first published novel A Portrait of the artist as a Young Man, Joyce took pains to develop a theory of epiphanies‫٭‬.

SAQ 5 Read quote 9 in the Reader. Identify some impressionistic elements and aspects in that passage.

Compare your answers to those given in the “Answers” section at the end of the unit.

3.4.3 Post-Impressionism Inevitably the dissatisfaction with their own work that all the Impressionist painters felt in the 1880s was reflected in the next generation. The main characteristic of Post-Impressionism is a newly found abstractionism which the artists sought in symbolism. PostImpressionist designs are angular and abstract. Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

57

Modernist principles and aesthetics

Abstract symbolism

Vincent Van Gogh‫٭‬ “Still Life: Japanese Vase with Roses and Anemones”

In modernist literature, like in modernist painting, the evanescent‫٭‬, impressionistic modes came to be replaced by a style characterized by a higher degree of abstract symbolism. Thus, Virginia Woolf’s first novel of her most experimental period Mrs. Dalloway (published in 1925) can be considered an essentially impressionistic novel. It is stream of consciousness fluid narrative, which flows from its first lines to the last without any chapter divisions in a style that translates impressionistic techniques into the medium of language. However, Woolf’s next novels To the Lighthouse (published in 1927) and The Waves (1931) are based on abstract design and rich symbolism. As Woolf grew more and more determined to experiment, To the Lighthouse dawned on her as “an angular shape” and The Waves carried her experimental project further into the abstract pattern of a “play-poem”. Likewise, Joyce’s volume of short stories Dubliners (published in 1914) is basically written in a realist-naturalist mode, while his subsequent novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Ulysses (1922) are experiments with Impressionism and PostImpressionism, narratives which blow up the notions of stable meaning, deconstructing it in a manner anticipating postmodernism (see unit 4, which treats the experiments undertaken by Woolf and Joyce, and unit 8, which deals with postmodernism in the British novel).

3.4.4. Genre-Boundary Breaking

Bored by narrative

58

The impressionist method is related to the breaking of genre boundaries because both have to do with the effacement of borders and contours and the breaking of frames. The modernist writers started to experiment because they had grown uneasy with the realist novel. Despite the etymology of the word, the “novel” was no longer perceived as something new. In “Modern Fiction” and “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”, Virginia Woolf argued that in the novels of Bennett, Wells and Galsworthy literature had reached a dead end where it was stuck in old modes that failed to capture “reality”. While writing her most experimental “novels”, Woolf reinforced that she was “bored by narrative”. Therefore she wanted to write “something new” that was not a novel. Indeed, Woolf’s most experimental books are not exactly novels; a more accurate term to describe them may be “poetic, musical and pictorial prose”. In his symbolic-epiphanic “prose”, which borrowed many techniques from music, painting, poetry and drama, James Joyce also marked a departure from the novel as a genre. In the same line of argument, Aldous Huxley’s ambition was to “musicalise” fiction and thus write a “pure novel” in Point Counterpoint. The problems all these writers had with the novel were linearity, chronology, clock-time, reason and logic. Under the influence of Freud‫٭‬, Bergson‫٭‬, Einstein‫٭‬, and other scientists, Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Modernist principles and aesthetics

these novelists sought to shift focus from clock-time to subjective time, from linear narrative to circularity and reiterative‫ ٭‬patterns, from history to mythology, from logic and knowledge by reason to knowledge by intuition and the illogical flow of subconscious thoughts in dreams. The modernist writers broke genre boundaries and borrowed devices from various arts because realism could not provide them with the “tools” to capture the “unseen” reality lying deep in the self, while other genres like poetry and drama and other arts like painting and music could bring prose closer to what they wanted to capture and express.

3.4.5 “The Death of the Author” and the Birth of the Reader The daring experiments undertaken by Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley in the early 20th century were underpinned and supported by modernist aesthetics, which they embraced at the risk of the fragmentary and failure. One may as well say that these writers’ achievements lie in their courage to face, challenge and even risk failure. And perhaps their greatest achievement is the birth of the reader at the expense of “the death of the author”, whose death was actually a dissipation‫٭‬ into the text. Readers are the Since the author “disappears”, readers become important in last destination the sense that they are the last destination of the text. of the text Modernist texts are difficult because they challenge tradition and experiment new techniques that ask readers to re-adjust themselves to novelty. The authors of these texts knew how difficult re-adjustment was, but they were determined to take this risk.

3.4.6 Collage / Montage It is because modernist art is the conflictual space of so many trends, discourses, voices, strands, techniques, styles, devices, languages and cultures, that its artistic products look fragmentary, illogical, incomplete and sometimes unfocused. Much of it relies on the technique of collage / montage. Woolf’s polyphonic‫ ٭‬effects of the “gigantic conversation” (the soliloquies‫ )٭‬and the alternation of interludes and episodes in The Waves, Joyce’s alternation of styles, discourses, voices and languages, his use of quotations, allusions and references in Ulysses, all are instances of the use of the technique of collage / montage in the early 20th century literature. Collage / montage means to lift “a certain number of elements from works, objects, preexisting messages, and to integrate them in a new creation in order to produce an original totality manifesting ruptures of diverse sorts.” Thus, after she had finished The Waves, Virginia Woolf wrote, in a letter to her brother-in-law Clive Bell, that the novel was “too difficult: too jerky: too inchoate‫ ٭‬altogether”, and to a friend, Ethel Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

59

Modernist principles and aesthetics

Smith she wrote that it was “fundamentally unreadable”. Joyce is also said to have affirmed of Ulysses that “I have written something to keep the professors busy for the next hundred years”. Who is responsible for reading these pieces of collage / montage? Who is supposed to put all the pieces together and to make sense of these collage / montages of modernist art? The only answer can be this: the reader (or else beholder / listener) is the destination of any artistic product. Therefore, the last note in this chapter insists on the importance of the act of reading, which is the only means of doing justice to these writers’ art. Their texts were designedly conceived to be fragmentary, inchoate, puzzling to the point of unreadability: they were meant to be so in order to make readers participate in the process of making sense of their worlds and the worlds beyond them.

Summary This unit introduces you to modernist principles and aesthetics. The first section looks into Virginia Woolf’s essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” as a manifesto of modernism. The second section dwells on principles of modernism: freedom, novelty, and internationalism, which mapped out a bohemian Europe. The last section looks into the modernist aesthetics of iconoclasm, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, genre-boundary breaking, the new role of the reader as a participant in meaning construction and collage / montage. The next units will show you how these principles work in some major modernist novels.

Key Terms • • • • • • • • • • •

60

Edwardian Georgian Internationalism Free expression Modernism Iconoclasm Impressionism Post-Impressionism Genre-boundary breaking “The death of the author” and the birth of the reader Collage / montage

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Modernist principles and aesthetics

Glossary of Terms and Comments • Bohemia is a community of artists and other people who live unconventional lives Canvas is a piece of fabric on which a painting is done, • especially in oils Cosmopolitanism usually refers to metropolises, which are big • cities composed of or containing people from different countries, cultural backgrounds, etc. Dissipation means disappearance through being scattered or • dispersed • Evanescent is something that disappears after only a short time • Inchoate refers to something lacking structure, order or organization • Polyphonic is a term borrowed from music. It means two or more independent melodic lines, parts, or voices that sound simultaneously. The term is also used to refer to a similar effect in the novel, when two or more independent “voices” sound simultaneously. • Reiterative is an adjective. It comes from the noun “reiteration”, which means something said and done again and again. “Reiteration” can be seen as an element that adds to the circularity and fluidity of the modernist subjective novel. • Soliloquy (plural “soliloquies”) refers to the act of speaking while alone, especially when used as a theatrical device that allows a character’s thoughts and ideas to be conveyed to the audience. (See Unit 4, 1.4 “Stream of Consciousness and Subjectivity” for a discussion of Woolf’s use of “dramatic soliloquies” in The Waves). • The term “stream of consciousness” was first used in psychology to convey what was taken to be the flow of conscious experience. The term was introduced in William James’s The Principles of Psychology (1890) to denote the continuous flow of thoughts, feelings and impressions, which, to his mind, is what makes up our inner lives. Gallery of Personalities •

Bennett, Arnold (1867 – 1931) was a British novelist, playwright and essayist. He is best known for his novels, which are straightforward yet sympathetic reports on lives of commonplace people. Wells, H. G. (1866 – 1946) was a British author and political • philosopher, most famous for his science-fantasy novels with their descriptions of the triumph of technology. Wells also wrote novels devoted to character delineation. Those novels depict members of the lower middle- class and their aspirations. Galsworthy, John (1867 – 1933) was one of the most popular • British novelists and dramatists of the early 20th century. His fiction is concerned mainly with the English upper middle-class life and questions of social justice. Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

61

Modernist principles and aesthetics

• Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich (1860 - 1904) was a Russian writer, who brought both the short story and the drama to new prominence in Russia and eventually in the Western world. Chekhov conveyed the inner lives and feelings of his characters indirectly, by suggestion rather than statement. His plots are usually simple, and the endings of his short stories and plays tend toward openness rather than finality. Woolf must have been most impressed that Chekhov’s works create the effect of profound experience taking place beneath the surface in the ordinary lives of people. • Tolstoy, Leo Nikolayevich (1828 - 1910) was a Russian writer, author of War and Peace, a novel which reveals both the inner and the outer lives of his characters through a combination of sharp physical detail and psychological analysis. He is also the author of Anna Karenina, a novel posing troubling questions about the meaning of life, and ending darkly with the protagonist committing suicide. • Proust, Marcel (1871 - 1922) was a French writer, creator of the 16-volume Remembrance of Things Past (1913 - 1927) regarded as one of the greatest achievements in world literature. The importance of Proust’s novel lies in the psychological development of characters and in his philosophical preoccupation with time. Time is in constant flux, moments of the past and present having equal reality. Proust also explored the depths of the human psyche, subconscious motivations and the irrationality of human behaviour. • Gide, André (1899 - 1951) was a French writer who explored the theme of moral responsibility. This theme, together with his experiments with the technique of putting a novelist (Edouard) inside his novel, The Counterfeiters inspired Huxley to deal with similar topics and undertake his own experiments in the same line in his novel Point Counter Point (See Unit 7). • Freud, Sigmund (1856 - 1939) was an Austrian physician and founder of psychoanalysis (method of understanding mental life). He developed many theories central to psychoanalysis, the psychology of human sexuality and dream interpretation. His works include The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) and Totem and Taboo (1913). Characters in modernist novels written by Woolf, Joyce, Lawrence and in Huxley’s Point Counter Point can be analysed in Freudian terms (see the treatment of Spandrell in Unit 7). • Bergson, Henri Louis (1859 - 1941) was a French philosopher. One of his most influential ideas was that creative energy plays a central role in human development. Bergson’s notion of subjective time can be applied to the treatment of time in Woolf’s and Joyce’s novels. His notion of creative energy can be applied to Mark Rampion and Philip Quarles in Huxley’s Point Counter Point (See Unit 7). • Einstein, Albert (1879 - 1955) was a German-born U.S. physicist. His theory of general relativity revolutionized scientific thought and served as a theoretical foundation for later exploitation of atomic energy. Einstein’s theory of relativity is a scientific support of all the modernists’ distrust in any system of ideas and the fixity of ideas in general. 62

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Modernist principles and aesthetics

• Monet, Claude Oscar (1840 – 1926) was a French painter and a leading figure in the late 19th century movement called “Impressionism”. Monet’s paintings captured the changing qualities of sunlight in nature. • Gogh, Vincent Willem van (1853 - 1890) was a Dutch postimpressionist painter. He made his paintings subjective through the expressive use of colour and line. SAA No. 3 Explain the main ways in which modernism broke with tradition and how Virginia Woolf saw this break in her essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”. Send your answers to your tutor. Do not take more than three pages. Please note that the quality of your ideas and the coherence of the essay will be 70 % of your grade, while the accuracy of your language will count for 30 %.

Answers to SAQs SAQ 1 To the realists, “reality” was the totality of real things in the world, independent of people’s knowledge or perception of them. Therefore, reality was “objective” in the sense that it consisted of facts. “Objectivity” is an attitude free of any bias caused by personal feelings or impressions. Contrary to this, in the early 20th century, philosophers and scientists developed an interest in “subjectivity”, that is in the impression “reality” makes upon the mind. Subjective idealism also played a large role in the development of this new attitude. Pushing subjectivity to the extreme, it argues that the external world only exists because it is perceived to exist and does not have an existence of its own. This interest in subjectivity underpins Romantic poetry, Henry James’s psychological Gothic in The Turn of the Screw, Impressionist painting, the techniques of stream of consciousness, interior monologue and free indirect style in modernist fiction (the novels of Woolf, Joyce, Lawrence). Please revise section 3.1 in case you have failed to give an answer comparable to the one given to SAQ 1 in this section.

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

63

Modernist principles and aesthetics

SAQ 2 While the Victorian age had created a centre-located and centre-oriented culture, a paradigm which was maintained in the Edwardian period, the Georgian period marked a departure from that model. Victorian culture (1837-1901) had grown into a model centred round the British Empire and Edwardian culture (1901-1910). This only hardened that model. To the Georgians (1910-1936), who saw the signs of the Empire already tearing apart and the threats of global catastrophes ahead, this centre and the model it had created could no longer hold. To that geographically and culturally located centrality, the modernist artists preferred a freedom of expression often associated with border crossing and exile. Internationalism was this new geographical and cultural remapping of the world, another form by which the “solidity” and “materialism” of the Empire broke to pieces, while a “spiritual” model took its place. Please revise section 3.3 in case you have failed to give an answer comparable to the one given to SAQ 2 in this section. SAQ 3 Pointing to the difference “contemporary books” (that is early 20 century novels) make from the realist novel in their approach to character, Woolf states that “there is nothing that people differ about more than the reality of characters”. To Woolf’s mind, the Edwardians’ books were “of great value, and indeed of great necessity”, but “the Edwardians were never interested in character in itself; or in the book in itself. They were interested in something outside [i.e. objective reality]”. According to Woolf, the problem is that the Edwardian writers “have looked very powerfully, searchingly, and sympathetically out of the window; at factories, at Utopias, even at the decoration and upholstery of the carriage; but never at her [i.e. Mrs. Brown, the prototype of character], never at life, never at human nature.” Woolf’s attitude to this line of tradition, the realist novel, is essentially iconoclastic. Therefore, she meant to pull down the idols of that tradition: interest in objective reality, in the world outside, in its solidity and boring details. Thus she continues her argument with the realists to make her point of the necessity that the novel should find new “tools”: “And so they [the Edwardians] have developed a technique of novel-writing which suits their purpose; they have made tools and established conventions which do their business. But those tools are not our tools, and that business is not our business. For us those conventions are ruin, those tools are death.” th

Please revise section 3.4.1 in case you have failed to give an answer comparable to the one given to SAQ 3 in this section.

64

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Modernist principles and aesthetics

SAQ 4 To the Impressionist painters and musicians, the essence of “life” and “reality” was the way in which it was perceived through the various impressions coming “from all sides”. Impressionism conveyed perceptions as “luminous vibration”, a phrase which borrows the important notion of “vibration” from music. In those passages of “Modern Fiction” in which she describes the mind receiving “a myriad impressions”, the “incessant shower of innumerable atoms”, “the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall”, Woolf extrapolates the techniques of Impressionism in painting to the medium of literature. In the novels written by Woolf and Joyce, “luminous vibration” is “translated” as “stream of consciousness” and “epiphany”. SAQ 5 This passage and the whole discussion on aesthetics in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is worth reading in conjunction with Virginia Woolf’s well-known essays on modern fiction and worth considering too in relation to the aims and achievements of their contemporary French painting. What both Joyce and Woolf had in common with French painting is the impressionistic mode. The essential characteristic of impressionism is its change of emphasis from the thing perceived to the process of perception. James Joyce sought a desolidification of the ‘fabric of things’ through the ‘translation’ of various techniques of painting and music in the new evanescent ‘fabric’ of his texts. Since early in his literary career, he theorized epiphany, a radical departure from the solidity and objectivity which had been the principles of realist fiction. Please revise section 3.4.2 in case you have failed to give answers comparable to those given to SAQ 4 and SAQ 5 in this section.

Bibliography Bradbury, Malcolm (1993) The Modern British Novel, Secker and Warburg, London (the chapters dedicated to the early 20th century novel) Dowling, David (1985) Bloomsbury Aesthetics and the Novels of Forster and Woolf, St. Martin’s Press, New York (chapter 6 “Woolf and Painting”) Woolf, Virginia (1967) “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” in Collected Essays, Volume I, New York: Brace & World, Inc.

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

65

Major contributions to modernisst british fiction

UNIT 4 MAJOR CONTRIBUTIONS TO MODERNIST BRITISH FICTION EXPERIMENTAL NOVELS Unit Outline 4 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4

66

66 66

Unit Objectives Stream of Consciousness One-day City Novels: Virginia W Mrs. Dalloway and James Joyce’s Ulysses Experiments with Time: One-day Novels Cinematic Devices: Space and Time Montage City Novels: Dublin and London Stream of Consciousness and Subjectivity

66 69 70 73

Summary Key Terms Glossary of Terms and Comments Gallery of Personalities SAA No. 4 Answers to SAQs Bibliography

77 78 78 80 80 81 84

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Major contributions to modernisst british fiction

Although the modernists on both sides of the Atlantic never really saw themselves as a school, they all attempted to ‘invent a new literature’ different in style and technique from the work of their predecessors. This ‘new literature’ had to capture the sense of confusion, loss, despair, anxiety, loneliness and alienation caused by so many elements of modernity. Thus, these writers’ main purpose was to experiment with new forms, styles and techniques. This made the readers and critics of these novels call them ‘experimental’. After you have read through this unit, you should be able to: ● explain the innovative character of the experimental novel ● identify the main elements of novelty in the modernist novel ● describe the main features of style and technique in these novels in terms of: - stream of consciousness - interior monologue - flashbacks, space and time montage - experiments with time - subjectivity

Unit objectives

4 Stream of Consciousness One-day City Novels: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and James Joyce’s Ulysses 4.1

Billingsgate Market, London

Experiments with Time: One-day Novels

The point of the one-day novels is that time rests within a person’s consciousness, and as such, it varies from person to person. Both Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (published in 1925) and James Joyce’s Ulysses (published in 1922) provide their readers with polyphonic orchestrations of thinking minds. The characters of these novels articulate their thoughts and impressions triggered by the same stimuli and re-play their memories of the past evoked by present impressions. Both Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Joyce’s Ulysses are novels recording their characters’ life impressions occasioned by one day: one June day in the lives of Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith, the key characters in Mrs. Dalloway and one June day in the lives of Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and Molly, his wife, in Ulysses. Clarissa ponders that “it is very, very dangerous to live even one day”.

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

67

Major contributions to modernisst british fiction

SAQ 1 What could Clarissa mean by the remark quoted above? What does “this moment of June” mean to her? You may wish to read another passage in order to answer this question. Read quote 10 in the Reader.

Compare your answers to those given in the “Answers” section at the end of the unit.

“The clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.”

68

In order to show how relative time is and how much it is a matter of personal perception, the clock time measurement of one day is deliberately challenged and blurred, losing its “substance”. Consequently, clock-time substance is replaced by the invisible, relative and unmeasurable “substance” of inner duration (i.e. time, as it is perceived by a character’s conscience). Memories are not forgotten. They are only stored and subject to the whims of perception and recall. Thus, Woolf opens her novel Mrs. Dalloway with a scene in which Clarissa Dalloway, the main character, plunges into her past because she receives combined sensory impressions. In her mind, past and present are mingled.

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Major contributions to modernisst british fiction

Stop and think! To make your understanding of this time perception easier, think of yourself on the train, for instance, remembering scenes of your childhood past when you see a house that looks like your grandmother’s. Are past and present perceived as separate and linear, or do they merge? Describe your experience in the space provided below. Please add this task to your portfolio to be discussed in the tutorials.

Likewise, James Joyce had Molly Bloom, one of the key figures in Ulysses explode into a series of vital “yeses” while remembering her past, in a stream of thoughts and impressions unobstructed by any punctuation marks in the last approximately 30 pages of the book. In those 30 pages, Molly’s present impressions plunge her into the past. Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural 69

Major contributions to modernisst british fiction

SAQ 2 Read quote 11 in the Reader. The passage is the opening of Mrs. Dalloway. Pay attention to the words in bold. What do they indicate?

Compare your answers to those given in the “Answers” section at the end of the unit.

4.2 Cinematic Devices: Space and Time Montage It is beyond any doubt that Woolf and Joyce aimed to “translate” cinematic‫ ٭‬devices and effects into the “language” of their novels. This explains their frequent use of flashbacks‫٭‬, space and time montage in these one-day novels. Both Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway rely on an extensive use of cinematic devices in the way in which their scenes unfold as if they were frames taken by a camera. These techniques have the effect of suggesting: a) the simultaneity of existence in one place, and b) the complexity and richness of existence at any given moment. Big Ben Oil by Jim Dodd

70

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Major contributions to modernisst british fiction

SAQ 3 Read quote 12 in the Reader. What are the effects of space and time montage in this (and other) passage(s) of Mrs. Dalloway?

Compare your answers to those given in the “Answers” section at the end of the unit.

4.3 City novels: Dublin and London

Westminster Bridge 1909 A tram and horse traffic. Big Ben in the distance

Mrs. Dalloway and Ulysses are – very significantly – city novels: Woolf’s one-day novel is set in the London of 1923, while Joyce’s setting in Ulysses is the Dublin of 1904. Joyce claimed that although Dublin had been a capital for thousands of years and was said to be the second city of the British Empire, no writer had yet ‘presented Dublin to the world’. Furthermore, Joyce declared that ‘the expression “Dubliner” seems to me to have some meaning and I doubt that the same can be said for such words as “Londoner” and “Parisian”’. Perhaps Joyce was the first writer to represent Dublin. Indeed, the London and Dublin of those times are “charted” in these novels. However, they also provide their characters with “unchartable”, rather unreadable marks of modernity. Given the sense of unreadability these two metropolises suggest, perhaps Woolf was the first to imply that places cannot really be grasped, and Joyce was the first to show that Dublin is not actually representable.

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

71

Major contributions to modernisst british fiction

Nassau Street, Dublin, circa 1900

72

The plane writing undecipherable letters on the sky in Mrs. Dalloway (see quotes 10, 12 and 13 in the Reader) is an excellent example of the unreadability of the modern city. What makes it so is technology. Technology assaults the characters’ brains with loads of messages hurtled onto them, suggesting that their minds can neither understand nor retain them. Assaulted by the noise, hustle and bustle and fast tempo of life in the modern city, the characters of these one-day novels bracket-off public space and plunge into the inner “space” of their own minds instead. It may be argued that what Woolf and Joyce managed to do in their one-day city novels was to focus lenses onto these cities, their streets, buildings and alleys, only to eventually zoom out‫ ٭‬and blur their objective “reality” (See quote 13 in the Reader). Therefore, the characters’ minds map these novels out. The space of Mrs. Dalloway is taken by Clarissa’s virtual journeys backwards and forwards from Bourton to London, Septimus’s imaginary flights from France and Italy to London, from present to past and from Clarissa’s mind to the mind of the shell shocked war veteran Septimus Warren Smith, another key figure of the novel. Both time and space are circular, and their circles expand to include the invisible connections between the two key characters (Clarissa and Septimus). Clarissa and Septimus share the same fears and anxieties, the same lines they quote in their heads, the same images and the same streets they pace. Woolf’s novel also points to the more visible connections between each of these characters and their family, friends and acquaintances. Similarly, the space of Ulysses is taken by Stephen Dedalus (the son looking for a father) and Leopold Bloom (the father figure) pacing the same streets of Dublin. They are connected by the invisible threads of Stephen’s need for a father and Bloom’s need for a son. Joyce’s Dublin is also shaped by the key characters of Leopold, Stephen and Molly, who think their thoughts in stream of consciousness‫( ٭‬see Unit 3, “Glossary of Terms and Comments”) passages and who are connected by the same geographical and cultural space they inhabit.

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Major contributions to modernisst british fiction

SAQ 4 Read quote 14 in the Reader. What is the connection between the setting (modern Dublin) and the topics debated by Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus? How can the characters and their relations be shaped by the same space (modern Dublin) which they inhabit?

Yes. Carry me along, taddy.. Watercolour by the contemporary Irish artist Roger Cummiskey

Compare your answers to those given in the “Answers” section at the end of the unit.

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

73

Major contributions to modernisst british fiction

4.4 Stream of Consciousness and Subjectivity The term “stream of consciousness” was first used in psychology to convey what was taken to be the flow of conscious experience. The term was introduced in William James’s The Principles of Psychology (1890) to denote the continuous flow of thoughts, feelings and impressions, which, to his mind, is what makes up our inner lives. William James was aware of the complexity of this “stream”, which does not consist of a single stream of consecutive items, but of many items that may coexist. At any given moment, the stream is divided into: a) things that receive the focus of attention and b) those which are part of the field of consciousness, although they are not consciously attended to.

Mr. Bloom Watercolour by the Contemporary Irish artist Roger Cummiskey. Painting from James Joyce’s caricature of Leopold Bloom, drawn in Myron Nutting’s studio in the 1920’s.

SAQ 5 Read quote 15 in the Reader. Explain how Bloom’s mind operates on more than one level at the same time. You may start from considering the way in which dialogue (the level of communication between the two characters, which is a form they choose to exchange impressions and thoughts) alternates with Bloom’s private thoughts, which he keeps to himself.

Compare your answers to those given in the “Answers” section at the end of the unit. 74

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Major contributions to modernisst british fiction

Whether Woolf actually deployed stream of consciousness in Mrs. Dalloway or in any of her most experimental novels, has been a matter of debate. There are critics who argue that Woolf refrained herself from going as deep into the human psyche as Joyce ventured. Critic David Lodge argues that in Mrs. Dalloway, she used free indirect style. Lodge states that free indirect style is a technique that “renders thought as reported speech (in the third person, past tense) but keeps to the kind of vocabulary that is appropriate to the character, and deletes some of the tags, like “she thought”, “she wondered”, “she asked herself” etc. that a more formal narrative style would require”. Lodge’s argument implies that this technique could be a form of stream of consciousness. The opening of Mrs. Dalloway (see quote 11 in the Reader) is an example of how the reader is plunged “into the middle of an ongoing life”, which “typifies the representation of consciousness as a “stream”. In The British Novel Since the Thirties, critic Randall Stevenson makes a point of the difference between Woolf and Joyce’s technique in these terms: “Whereas Joyce often presents the thoughts of his characters ‘without formal obstructions’ or any intrusion of his own voice, Woolf constantly interpolates phrases such as ‘she said’, or ‘she thought to herself’”. However, Stevenson is ready to admit that the distinction between what he calls Woolf’s interior monologue and Joyce’s stream of consciousness “is a fairly slight one”.

The Mountain Flower Watercolour by artist Roger Cummiskey

The form of what some critics call “quoted stream of consciousness” or “interior monologue” was extensively used by Joyce in Ulysses. This form employs direct quotation in the first person of the character’s own thoughts, sometimes without this being overtly indicated by the use of speech marks. This form represents a character’s inner life as a flow of inner speech quoted in the first person, a monologue. Woolf also used this form, which she called “dramatic soliloquies”‫٭‬, in The Waves, though, to Lodge’s mind, her deployment of this technique “suffers from artificiality”. Lodge also considers that “James Joyce was a more resourceful exponent of that way of rendering stream of consciousness”. The feeling the readers have while running through such passages of stream of consciousness is that they can actually hear the trains of thoughts – often organized by associative memory‫– ٭‬ as they pass through the characters’ minds. The most celebrated passages of quoted stream of consciousness are Molly Bloom’s trains of thoughts in the “Penelope”‫ ٭‬section of Ulysses. The passages are in fact an uninterrupted flow of 30 pages, running without any indentations‫ ٭‬to mark a logical sequence of ideas, any punctuation marks and indeed any overt‫ ٭‬narrative mediation. There is no third person narrative intervention at all. However, it would be impossible to make sense of such passages of narrative fluidity if it were not for the broader context of Ulysses, where Joyce alternates the interior monologue with third person narrative point of view.

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

75

Major contributions to modernisst british fiction

SAQ 6 Read quote 16 in the Reader. What are the stylistic effects of Joyce’s “violation of grammar” and “disintegration of syntax” in those stream of consciousness passages? Note that V. Woolf made a point of these new stylistic effects in her essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”.

Gibraltar Remembered Watercolour by Roger Cummiskey, inspired by the last lines in Ulysses

See Unit 3 for reference and possible connections, and compare your answers to the “Answers” section at the end of the unit for some ideas. These experiments with time, as it is stored, played and replayed in the human mind invited the readers to interpret texts which looked, even to their authors, as a form of dispersed and often illogical textuality. The most difficult task for both the authors and readers of these experiments in fiction was that often non-verbalised sensations, images and feelings had to be “translated” into words and rendered in the form of texts.

76

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Major contributions to modernisst british fiction

SAQ 7 Read quote 17 in the Reader. What is peculiar about this passage? What kind of experience does it evoke? What would you call Joyce’s style here? What are the effects of this style?

Compare your answers to those given in the “Answers” section at the end of the unit. Therefore, the readers’ interpretive – indeed “re-creative” – efforts have to rise to a challenge that the authors themselves found difficult to cope with. The problem with stream of consciousness (which is circular and often illogical) was that it had to be rendered in the form of texts. Another problem was, of course, that the various characters’ streams had to be joined together, and this meant that a narrator or implied author had to do it. There are no clues whatsoever in Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway as to who reports and joins everything together. This is further complicated by the fact that sometimes the point of view shifts from one voice to another, and the narrator or implied author refrains from indicating the source of the voice. This is to say that readers have to cope with a very difficult task, namely that of sorting out the puzzle and joining its pieces together. It is often the case that a voice can be attached to the character that owns it because it is the image of the respective character’s frame of mind. Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

77

Major contributions to modernisst british fiction

SAQ 8 Read quote 18 in the Reader. Starting from that quoted passage, characterize Septimus Warren Smith. What is his frame of mind? What are his problems? Can he cope with them? If he cannot, why do you think it is so?

Compare your answers to those given in the “Answers” section at the end of the unit.

Summary This unit presents the experimental novel. This innovation in the British fiction of the early 20th century is illustrated by Woolf and Joyce’s experiments with time in their one-day novels Mrs. Dalloway and Ulysses. The first section looks into the way in which Woolf and Joyce experimented with time by focusing on one day of their characters’ lives in Mrs. Dalloway and Ulysses. The second section dwells on Woolf and Joyce’s use of cinematic devices (flashbacks, time and space montage) in these novels, relating this aspect to time and setting. 78

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Major contributions to modernisst british fiction

The third section treats Mrs. Dalloway and Ulysses as city novels, questioning the readability of their settings. It deals with the two novels in terms of stream of consciousness and subjectivity. Note that these are the essential aspects of the experimental novel. The next section will look into Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and The Waves and Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as art novels.

Key Terms • • • • •

•

Time and space montage Flashback Stream of consciousness Associative memory Subconscious Soliloquy

Glossary of Terms and Comments • Andalusia is an autonomous region of southern Spain bordered by the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. It contains the historic cities of Seville, Granada and Cadiz and many examples of Moorish architecture (with ornate curved decoration) • Associative memory means memory organization in which stored information is accessed by its content rather than by memory address. The main characteristic of associative memory is that it defies logic. The mind recalls scenes, events and situations, which are triggered by present sensory impressions or thoughts • Big Ben is the large clock above the Houses of Parliament in London, or the tower on which it stands • Celibacy means a state of sexual abstinence for religious reasons or as a personal choice • Cinematic is something typical of the style in which films are made • Delusion means a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence, especially as a symptom of a psychiatric disorder • Double (noun) refers to somebody (Septimus) that looks very much like another (Clarissa) in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway • Duumvirate means either of two people who share a position of authority equally between them • Ecclesiastical means “of a church, belonging or involving the Christian church or clergy” • Flashback is a scene or event from the past that appears in a narrative out of chronological order, to fill in information or explain something in the present

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

79

Major contributions to modernisst british fiction

• Freemason, also called “Mason”, is a member of a worldwide society of men, the Free and Accepted Masons, which is known particularly for its charitable work and for its secret rites • Gibraltar is a British dependency on a narrow promontory that is near the southernmost point of the Iberian Peninsula. It occupies a strategic position at the western entrance of the Mediterranean Sea • Hades is the Greek underworld. In Greek mythology, it is the underworld kingdom inhabited by the souls of the dead. This episode, like the other chapters of Joyce’s Ulysses, parallels a chapter in Homer’s Odyssey • Heliotropism means growth towards sunlight by a plant • “I am the resurrection and the life” are Jesus Christ’s words, recorded in John’s gospel. They were uttered by Jesus as a reply to Martha’s belief in the resurrection of the dead. Martha, Lazarus’s sister, expressed this belief after Jesus had resurrected her brother Lazarus, who had already been dead and buried • Indentation refers to the space left between the margin and the beginning of a line. Note that indentations facilitate reading, since they indicate the places where new passages begin • “In the same boat” refers to two or more persons who are in the same situation • Ithaca is an island in western Greece, the traditional site of the legendary kingdom of Odysseus, also called Ulysses In Greek mythology, Odysseus is the king of Ithaca and one of the senior Greeks in the Trojan war. He is the main character in Homer’s epic poem the Odyssey. The “Ithaca” chapter in Joyce’s Ulysses is meant to parallel Odysseus’ return to Ithaca after a long period of absence and adventures at sea. In Joyce’s novel, Ithaca is Leopold Bloom’s home place in Dublin, and Odysseus’ adventures at sea are paralleled by Leopold Bloom’s adventures in Dublin Jesuit means member of the Roman Catholic religious order: a • member of the society of Jesus, a religious order engaged in missionary and educational work worldwide. The order was founded by Saint Ignatius of Loyola in 1534 with the aim of defending Catholicism against the Reformation • Maleficent means “harmful” or “evil”; causing harm or doing evil intentionally, or being capable of such acts • Ominously refers to something (a sign, a sound, etc.) suggesting or indicating that something bad is going to happen or be revealed • “(To turn) one’s toes to the daisies” is an expression used to imply that the respective person is dead • Overt (about meaning) means intended and expressed without any ambiguities • Penelope is the wife of Odysseus, who waited for his return from the Trojan War. She was the mother of his son Telemachus. If in Joyce’s novel, Leopold Bloom is a modern Odysseus, then Molly Bloom, his wife, is a modern Penelope. Although Stephen Dedalus is not their biological son, he plays the role of the son looking for a father, and he eventually meets Leopold Bloom, identifying him as the father figure. Therefore, Stephen Dedalus is a modern Telemachus 80

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Major contributions to modernisst british fiction

• Presabbath means “the day before Sabbath”. Sabbath means Sunday, observed by most Christians as the day of worship and rest from work • In Greek mythology, Proteus is a prophetic sea god who could change his shape at will. The allusion to Proteus in this chapter implies that Stephen is subject to changing impressions, moods and states of mind • Scapegoat refers to somebody who is made to take the blame for others (see the case of Septimus Warren Smith in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway) • Subconscious refers to something present in one’s mind without that person being aware of it • Subtend (geometry) means to extend from one side to the other, opposite an angle or side of a geometric figure • Zoom out means to make an object appear smaller or further away or to increase the area in view by use of a zoom lens or a graphic imaging device

Gallery of Personalities • Homer was an 8th century B. C. Greek poet. He is credited as the author of the great epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey • Haroun al Raschid, Caliph of Baghdad (786-809) was noted for the participation in the Muslim holy war against the Byzantines and for the splendour of his court. He is a half-legendary figure and also a character in the Arabian Nights SAA No. 4 What are (some of) the difficulties you may encounter when you read Virginia Woolf and James Joyce’s one-day novels? Before answering this question, you may wish to read “The Death of the Author and Birth of the Reader” section in Unit 3 again and relate it to your argument. Your paper should not be longer than three pages. Send your answer to this question to your tutor. Please note that the quality of your ideas and the coherence of the essay will be 70 % of your grade, while the accuracy of your language will count for 30 %.

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

81

Major contributions to modernisst british fiction

Answers to SAQs SAQ 1 Think of one day in your life. A lot of things may happen to you. Some are routine: you wake up, have breakfast or fail to have it (as usual!!! and you start to worry about your health, thinking that something bad may happen to you one day). You are on time or you are late for work (as usual!!!). You cross streets. You avoid places you don’t like, look for places you like, teach your classes, cross streets again and come back home tired, sometimes exhausted, etc., etc. But… some unusual things may happen, from the most trivial to the most unbelievable, from the most pleasant to the nastiest surprises: you look for your keys and on this very day, when you have to be there earlier, you cannot find them. You quarrel with your neighbour. Your cat is run down by a car. A friend whom you haven’t seen for years pays you a visit. You’re giving a party in the evening, but… you burn the cake! This one day is the present to you, of course, like to everybody else, but your friend’s visit plunges you into the past, and the burnt cake reminds you of your absent-mindedness a couple of years ago, when you forgot you were having a party in the evening! This is what Clarissa means by “it is very, very dangerous to live even one day”. She also means that “this moment” (this one day) is very much like a lot of other days and at the same time different, unrepeatable in the combination of events that makes it this one day (and not another). What Clarissa means is that one’s life is this one day, and this one day is one’s life. SAQ 2 This passage suggests Clarissa’s “plunge” into the past, when she was 18 and lived at Bourton. Now she is in her fifties and lives in London. The “squeak of the hinges”, which she hears now, is a noise she anticipates: the doors of her house in London will be taken off their hinges because she will give a party in the evening. However, the squeak, which she anticipates, reminds her of the “little squeak” of the French doors at Bourton about 30 years before! In this passage, Mrs. Dalloway has a flashback‫٭‬. Please revise section 4.1 in case you have failed to give answers comparable to those given to SAQ 1 and SAQ 2 in this section. SAQ 3 This passage is one of the most symbolic key episodes in Mrs. Dalloway. It illustrates a device that brought literature very close to cinematography. The device is called “space montage”, and it relies on the characters’ spatial perceptions of the same external event (such as the prime minister’s car, the sky-writing plane, the pattern of the clouds in Mrs. Dalloway).

82

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Major contributions to modernisst british fiction

The point of this episode is that although “outer reality” (what lies outside of the individual, like objects, even persons, situations, etc.) is the same (a car is a car and not something else), the individuals’ perceptions of it differ. In Mrs. Dalloway Clarissa, Septimus and many other passers-by see a car, but nobody really knows who is in the car, so each person there makes speculations: “But now mystery had brushed them with her wing; they had heard the voice of authority; the spirit of religion was abroad with her eyes bandaged tight and her lips gaping wide. But nobody knew whose face had been seen. Was it the Prince of Wales’s, the Queen’s, the Prime Minister’s? Whose face was it? Nobody knew.” When they see the plane writing letters on the sky, nobody can really make out the letters, and there are no two persons to see the same letters or make out the same words. Please revise section 4.2 in case you have failed to give an answer comparable to the one given to SAQ 3 in this section. SAQ 4 These passages suggest that Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus have been drawn together by the geography of Dublin, which is carefully charted. It is also significant that Dublin’s streets, squares and churches provide the two characters with a set of experiences, which they share. Ulysses is the novel in which Joyce intended to make a point of modern Dublin. Indeed, the two key figures Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus are shaped by Dublin. They are what they are because they are Dubliners. Their problems, their dissatisfactions, their frustrations and their interests are with them because they live in early 20th century Dublin. Most of the topics of their discussions are related to Ireland, Irishness, Dublin and modernity. That they are Dubliners is also what brings them together, and, to a very large extent, it also justifies the solidity of their bond. Please revise section 4.3 in case you have failed to give an answer comparable to the one given to SAQ 4 in this section. SAQ 5 In this chapter, Leopold Bloom attends the funeral of one of his friends. This explains the association Joyce intended his readers to make with the Greek Hades‫٭‬. At the funeral, Bloom meets friends and acquaintances, Mr Kernan being one of them. Imagine you meet a friend or an acquaintance. Doesn’t the occasion bring back memories of your past relation with the respective person, although you may have thought that those memories are (almost) forgotten? Besides bringing memories back, this discussion stirs a lot of associations in your head: you think of a character in a book which reminds you of your friend, but the association is not flattering to the friend, so you cannot share it with him / her. Therefore, you let only those ideas and thoughts you know (or think) he / she will understand or accept out through your lips. Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

83

Major contributions to modernisst british fiction

Your friend responds to them, and that is a dialogue. At the same time, you keep the unflattering association to yourself because you know (or think) that you may upset your friend, or that he / she cannot take a joke. That is your private thought, and your friend will never know it. Our lives are full of such occasions. This is what Leopold Bloom does here, being aware that “the language was another thing”. By “language” he means a system of signs that allows people to communicate. He distinguishes “language” from the rather disorderly manner in which thoughts run through his head. You may note that dialogue is neat and logical, following a pattern of question and answer, while Bloom’s unuttered thoughts are fragmented and unobservant of neat grammar in this passage. SAQ 6 This is actually the last passage in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Molly Bloom, Leopold Bloom’s wife, is in bed, half asleep, and unfolds memories of her past. These lines are the last of the 30 pages recording her stream of consciousness. Molly Bloom’s “stream of consciousness” in the “Penelope”‫٭‬ section is extremely fluid. As a matter of fact, it is an outpouring of impressions triggered by associative memory‫٭‬, constantly intertwining the past and the present. Its most characteristic effect is the proliferation of pronouns combined with a joyous recurrence of “yeses”. The reader’s task is to make sense of this apparently random organization of thought, which seems to defy logic. The point is that the reader can make sense of it, and the sense that the whole “stream” invites, is essentially achieved by the reader’s identification with Molly’s mind. This identification, if successfully achieved, provides one of the most exuberant regressive pleasures the book has to offer: a plunge into memory time, which is a chronological distortion also achieved by Virginia Woolf. This is also a transgressive pleasure, since one may see it as the option of a man (Joyce) to give a woman (Molly) the last word, which is his / her word. SAQ 7 This passage is taken from the “Proteus”‫ ٭‬chapter in Ulysses. “Proteus” focuses on Stephen’s mind, recording his thoughts, meditations and memories, past and present impressions. The passage is a sample of “quoted stream of consciousness”. Stephen Dedalus plunges into his “subconscious”‫ ٭‬and records the visions in his dreams. From the point of view of language and style, this may be called a dream dialect, i.e. a language and a style that differs essentially from the language and style we use in order to communicate the experiences of our wakeful conscience. If you compare this passage with Bloom’s thoughts in “Hades”‫( ٭‬quote 15 in the Reader), you will notice that grammar here is even more fragmented and disruptive. Logic, coherence and a sense of completeness given by the presence of all elements in a sentence are replaced by a disrupted and fragmented syntax. 84

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Major contributions to modernisst british fiction

SAQ 8 This passage grants access to the mind of Septimus Warren Smith. All the elements connecting Septimus and Clarissa in the novel suggest that Septimus Warren Smith is Clarissa Dalloway’s “double”‫٭‬. If she is a woman nearing death and fearing it, he is a shell-shocked veteran who experienced death and now fears it. Although they fear the same thing and have visions that are strikingly similar, there is a world of difference between their voices and their minds. The devastating effect of the war is a poignant theme in Woolf’s fiction. Septimus Warren Smith is treated as a symbol of the shell-shocked veteran suffering from delusions‫ ٭‬and developing an inescapable sense of guilt about crimes he is not responsible for. He stands for the thousands of war victims of his own kind. Septimus expresses a sense of futility and alienation when he thinks to himself that “the world itself is without meaning” or that Shakespeare, the writer who used to inspire him in his early youth, actually “loathed humanity.” Septimus has been changed for ever by his war experience, and it is significant that now the whole European cultural tradition and literary heritage are to him as spiteful as modern everyday life. He thinks to himself that “the secret signal which one generation passes, under disguise, to the next is loathing, hatred, despair.” He finds no meaning and no consolation in anything, so he creates his own inner world to withdraw into (the world of his thoughts). Septimus, who is marked by the most terrible scar of modernity (the war), may also be seen as the symbol of the modern individual whose self has fallen to pieces. In the novel he is ”the eternal scapegoat‫٭‬, the eternal sufferer.” Please revise section 4.4 in case you have failed to give answers comparable to those given to SAQ 5, SAQ 6, SAQ 7 and SAQ8 in this section.

Bibliography Joyce, James (1922)1946) Ulysses, Random House, New York Lodge, David (1992) The Art of Fiction, Penguin Books (chapter 9 “The Stream of Consciousness” and chapter 10 ”Interior Monologue”) Stevenson, Randall (1993) The British Novel Since the Thirties, Institutul European, Iaşi (chapter 1 “The Novel 1900-1930) Woolf, Virginia (1925)1996) Mrs. Dalloway, Penguin Books

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

85

Modernist art novels

UNIT 5 MODERNIST ART NOVELS

Unit Outline 5 5.1 5.2 5.3

86

Unit Objectives Modernist Art Novels Virginia Woolf’s Art Novel To the Lighthouse Virginia Woolf’s Art Novel The Waves James Joyce’s Art Novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

86 86 86 90 93

Summary Key Terms Glossary of Terms and Comments Gallery of Personalities SAA No. 5 Answers to SAQs Bibliography

94 95 95 96 98 99 101

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Modernist art novels

Unit objectives

After you have read through this unit you should be able to: • Identify the main aspects of modernist aesthetics in Virginia Woolf’s art novels To the Lighthouse and The Waves • Explain the role of the artist in To the Lighthouse and The Waves • Explain why To the Lighthouse and The Waves are modernist art novels • Identify the main aspects of modernist aesthetics in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • Explain the significance of Stephen Dedalus’s name in James Joyce’s novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • Explain the role of the artist’s formation in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • Identify “mythopoetic” elements in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

5 Modernist Art Novels 5.1 Virginia Woolf’s Art Novel To the Lighthouse

Cornwall Godrevy Lighthouse

As she was writing To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf was aware that her experiments with form in previous novels had led her a considerable distance from the genre’s conventions. She wondered whether the book could really be called a “novel”: “I will invent a new name for my books to supplant ‘novel’”, she wrote, “A new – by V. W., but what? Elegy‫ ”?٭‬Leonard Woolf, Virginia’s husband, read the draft and declared the book a masterpiece, calling it “entirely new”, “a psychological poem”. Critic David Dowling sees To the Lighthouse as confirming Woolf’s success in translating the spatial concerns of painters into the temporal world of print. In To the Lighthouse, Woolf pushed her experiments with point of view to the extreme: in Part I “The Window” and Part III “The Lighthouse” the reader is bounced from one point of view to another in a way that may look disconcerting to readers. Part II “Time Passes” is told by an anonymous narrator, who tells the story of the ravages of time upon the Ramsays’ house, garden, and their surroundings, while the human element is bracketed off (actually mentioned in brackets). The shifting point of view used by Woolf in To the Lighthouse can be associated with similar techniques in painting and music. While combining techniques borrowed from other arts, To the Lighthouse is also highly poetic and dramatic. The shape of the book was apparent from early in its development and did not change. In her notebook, Woolf drew “two blocks joined by a corridor”, a powerfully suggestive figure that holds together in one image the main themes of the book. This diagram seems to contain, in one abstract geometry, the varieties of connection and separation that the novel explores.

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

87

Modernist art novels

Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (published in 1927) is probably the novel in which the writer cared most for design. This is one of the reasons why it has been considered an ‘art novel’. The novel falls into three parts (“two blocks joined by a corridor”). The “she began precariously “two blocks” are: the first part of the novel titled “The Window” and dipping among the blues the last part titled “The Lighthouse”. The “corridor”, titled “Time and umbers, moving her Passes” is the second part of the book. Part III “The Lighthouse” is the last block in Woolf’s design. It brush hither and thither, but it was now heavier is also a focus, a piece which puts the other two pieces into and slower, as if it had perspective to eventually reach the vision Lily Briscoe (the artist in the novel) so desperately searched for. fallen in with some Indeed, all the images and symbols converge to this last piece rhythm which was (Part III), in which Lily-the-artist’s point of view prevails. It is in this dictated to her” piece that Lily realizes that Mrs. Ramsay (the focus of Part I “The Window”) was an artist of life, and it is now that she becomes aware of the value and force of Mrs. Ramsay’s spirit. It is also in this piece that Lily Briscoe tries to find an answer to the puzzling question “What is the meaning of life?”, and the answer is: “miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark”: “What is the meaning of life? That was all – a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one. This, that, and the other; herself and Charles Tansley and the breaking wave; Mrs. Ramsay bringing them together; Mrs. Ramsay saying, “Life stand still here”; Mrs. Ramsay making of the moment something permanent (as in another sphere Lily herself tried to make of the moment something permanent) – this was of the nature of a revelation. In the midst of chaos there was shape; this eternal passing and flowing (she looked at the clouds going and the leaves shaking) was struck into stability. Life stand still here, Mrs. Ramsay said. “Mrs. Ramsay! Mrs. Ramsay!” she repeated. She owed it all to her.” The passage quoted above is taken from Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, Part III. In Part I “The Window” Lily Briscoe, a painter, spent her holidays with friends and acquaintances at the Ramsays’ house in St. Ives. Part I “The Window” portrays the Ramsays as a typically Victorian couple. Mrs. Ramsay is the perfect hostess, her role being to bring people together. Mrs. Ramsay’s death is mentioned in Part II. At this point in the novel (Part III) Mrs. Ramsay, though dead, inspires Lily Briscoe with her spiritual presence.

88

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Modernist art novels

SAQ 1 Why does Lily Briscoe relate her art (painting) to Mrs. Ramsay? What is the spirit of art?

Compare your answers to those in the “Answers” section at the end of the unit. See also the passages below for some ideas. This answer to “the meaning of life” points to the epiphanic nature of what Woolf called “moments of being” (see Unit 3, subchapter 3.4.2 “Impressionism”). Like Joyce, Woolf believed in those moments when one’s mind catches the glowing quality of essential things. In To the Lighthouse, Lily has an essential revelation: Mrs. Ramsay’s wonderful simplicity. Another thing Lily needs to do is to reconcile Mrs. Ramsay’s generous femininity with Mr. Ramsay’s selfish masculinity, striking a balance, and thus completing her painting and achieving her vision.

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

89

Modernist art novels

SAQ 2 Read quote 19 in the Reader. Why is it so important that Lily should reconcile her perceptions of and relations with Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, the two opposites?

Compare your answers to those in the “Answers” section at the end of the unit. Indeed, it seems that Lily is the embodiment of Woolf’s ideal artist, equipped with an androgynous‫ ٭‬mind, a fusion of male and female elements, which she theorized in her essay A Room of One’s Own. Woolf argued that it is only this mind that can reintegrate human experience within an aesthetic shape. Thus, the closing line of the novel, Lily’s words “I have had my vision”, is a line of simultaneous separation and union. This last statement contains in a nutshell the design of the whole book (the two blocks joined by a corridor).

90

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Modernist art novels

5.2 Virginia Woolf’s Art Novel The Waves Of all the six voices‫ ٭‬in The Waves (published in 1931) it is surely Bernard’s that expresses Woolf’s own problems with orchestrating everything in the novel. Like Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse, Bernard may read as an embodiment of the fusion of male and female principles, the androgynous‫ ٭‬mind envisaged by Woolf in A Room of One’s Own.

SAQ 3 Read quote 20 in the Reader. What is the relevance of that passage to the theme of the artist and his / her art? What is the role of the artist and his / her art here?

Compare your answers to those in the “Answers” section at the end of the unit. For many readers and critics, Bernard is Woolf’s alter ego‫٭‬. As a matter of fact, in the final episode, Bernard becomes Woolf with as little disguise as possible. His perceptions of and struggles with the nature of his obviously modernist writing may read as a fictionalized extension of Woolf’s argument about the nature of “reality” in fiction and what the art of writing should be (see Unit 3, subchapter 1.1 “Virginia Woolf’s Essay ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’: A Modernist Manifesto”). It is obvious that, like Woolf herself, Bernard struggles with words, phrases, and style. He, like Woolf, wants to write “something new” that should capture the sense of flux and change, the sense that everything is old and new at the same time. Bernard, like Woolf, tries to find new techniques of description, which are in fact the techniques used in the interludes‫٭‬. Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

91

Modernist art novels

SAQ 4 Read quote 21 in the Reader. Why is Bernard, Woolf’s mouthpiece‫ ٭‬in this novel so dissatisfied with his words and phrases? What kind of art is he trying to achieve? See also unit 3, subchapter 3.1 for possible connections between Bernard’s problems and Woolf’s “quarrel” with the realists in her essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”.

Compare your answers to those in the “Answers” section at the end of the unit. The nine interludes may also read as Bernard’s most accomplished passages. They stand out in italics and provide an impressive background against which all the other voices just “break” like the waves on the shore. The interludes probably are the kind of writing Bernard (and Woolf) always strove to achieve. “The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the gray cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually.” 92

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Modernist art novels

SAQ 5 This descriptive passage is actually the opening of The Waves. You may also wish to read quote 22 in the Reader. Such descriptive passages (the so-called “interludes”) alternate with the episodes‫٭‬. What are the stylistic features of this passage? (Is it narrative or descriptive? Can you find enumerations, repetitions?) How can you relate it to other literary genres (poetry) and other art forms (painting, music)? Besides being descriptive of the first phase of the cycle of the day, does this passage suggest the same phase of any other cycles?

Compare your answers to those in the “Answers” section at the end of the unit.

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

93

Modernist art novels

5.3 James Joyce’s Art Novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

James Joyce Watercolour by Roger Cummiskey

The name Stephen Dedalus joins together the first Christian martyr, St Stephen, stoned to death outside Jerusalem in 34 AD and the great pagan artificer-artist‫ ٭‬hero, Daedalus‫٭‬. The recurrent allusions and references to pagan and Christian mythology make of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (published in 1916) a book that justified Joyce to leave Ireland and flee to Europe in a gesture which symbolically suggests the flight of Daedalus, the archetype of the classical artist, from an incarcerating place (also an island!). A statement of Stephen’s determination to leave the incarcerating Ireland and find his freedom in Europe occurs in Stephen’s discussion with Davin, an Irish nationalist. There Stephen alludes again to Daedalus and his flight from Crete when he says that: “When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.”

SAQ 6 Read the passage above carefully. How can you relate the stress laid by Stephen upon “the soul of a man” (actually his own soul) to the title? What kind of “portrait” did Joyce intend to draw in this book?

Compare your answers to those in the “Answers” section at the end of the unit. Joyce’s A Portrait is not just a novel that foregrounds the painful process of a young artist’s formation, but also the kind of art this young artist strives to create. 94

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Modernist art novels

By insisting on the epiphanic nature of momentary insight and on the intensity achieved through transforming experience at the end of each chapter, Joyce created a new kind of modernist art. However, Joyce’s strategy of countering each of these epiphanies and their charged symbolism with constant switches to realistic style and realistic details, suggests a neck and neck‫ ٭‬battle between old and new modes of writing in A Portrait. In the essay “Stephen Hero, Dubliners, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Styles of Realism and Fantasy”, critic John Paul Riquelme argues that Joyce relies on the frequent use of “patterns of contrasts” in A Portrait. Thus, A Portrait contains the basic ingredients of what was to become Joyce’s mature art in Ulysses, while at the same time looking back at his earlier works Stephen Hero and Dubliners. None of these works abandons realism, and the question is why Joyce was so keen on this mode of tradition. The fact is that Joyce valued tradition. Evidence of this is that he developed a modernist style coloured by an often ironical and parodic‫ ٭‬use of mythology‫٭‬, a mode of writing which has been called mythopoetic‫٭‬. He also revived one of the oldest epics‫ ٭‬in European literature, Homer’s Odyssey, in Ulysses, making that epic appealing to a modern audience (See Unit 4 for the approaches to Ulysses). As much as he valued tradition, however, Joyce rejected conventionalism and its manifestations in the realist novel. By using realism, he constantly undermined it and highlighted the novelty of his art at the same time.

Summary This unit presents three modernist art novels: Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and The Waves and James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The first section looks into Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, treating it in terms of modernist aesthetics and focusing upon the artist figure Lily Briscoe and her “androgynous mind”. The argument also insists upon Woolf’s interest in shape, pattern and design as essential aspects of modernist art in this book. The second section deals with Woolf’s The Waves, continuing the argument of the “androgynous mind”, which is embodied in the figure of Bernard, the artist in this novel, and also Woolf’s alter ego. The Waves is also treated as a departure from the novel as a genre, a “play-poem” in prose rather than a novel. The third section dwells on James Joyce’s novel of the artist’s formation A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It also makes a point of the stylistic peculiarities of this art novel, which mingles realism, symbolism, the epiphanic, poetry, music and prose in its “mythopoetic” formula. The next section will present D. H. Lawrence’s taboo breaking novel of free indirect style The Rainbow.

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

95

Modernist art novels

Key Terms • • • •

Androgynous Interlude Episode Mythopoeia

Glossary of Terms and Comments • Alter ego is borrowed from Latin and means a second side to an individual’s personality, different from the one that most people know • Androgynous means blending masculine and feminine. It refers to somebody who is neither male nor female in appearance but having both conventional masculine and feminine traits and giving an impression of ambiguous sexual identity • Artificer is somebody who invents or devises things, an inventor or skilled worker • Assegais (plural of “assegai”) are slender hardwood spears with iron tips, used especially by the Zulu peoples of Southern Africa • Daedalus, father of Icarus, fashioned wings for himself and his son to escape from the Cretan labyrinth he had created to house the Minotaur, the half-bull, half-man offspring of Queen Pasiphae and an artificial bull • “Darkplumaged” means having dark feathers • Distraught means extremely upset and distressed • “Dovetailed” means having the shape of a dove tail • Elegy is a mournful or reflective poem. That Woolf thought of poetry when she wrote To the Lighthouse tells a lot about her intentions to bring the novel as close as she could to poetry • Epic is a lengthy narrative poem in elevated language celebrating the adventures and achievements of a legendary or traditional hero, for example, Homer’s Odyssey • Episode is an incident, description or series of events in a narrative that is part of the whole but may digress from the main plot. Woolf’s “episodes” in The Waves consist in the soliloquies of the six “voices”, which reflect on the stages of their lives from infancy to ripe maturity and old age • Interlude is a term borrowed from music. It means a short play, piece of music or other entertainment performed during the break in the performance of a long work • Mouthpiece refers here to a character (Bernard) that expresses the views of the author (Virginia Woolf) • Mythology may mean: a) a group of myths that belong to a particular people or culture and tell about their ancestors, heroes, gods and other supernatural beings and history b) a body of stories, ideas or beliefs that are not necessarily true about a particular place or individual. Joyce implied both meanings in his treatment of myth 96

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Modernist art novels

• Mythopoeia means making of myths • “Neck and neck” means level in a competition and with an equal chance of winning • Parodic refers to a piece of writing or music that deliberately imitates another work in a comic or satirical way • “Slate blue” means of a dark bluish-gray colour • St. Ives is a town and fishing port in Cornwall, southwestern England. Virginia Woolf and her family used to spend their holidays in St. Ives, and the writer meant to evoke her memories related to that place in her novel To the Lighthouse, which is largely autobiographical • The six “voices” in The Waves are: * Bernard, the “phrase maker”, i.e. the novelist * Neville, the poet * Louis, the banker with a peculiar Australian accent, which makes him feel like an outcast * Jinny, the coquette, the city girl, who takes pleasure in dancing and flirting with men * Susan, the country girl, who feels attached to nature and fulfilled in her maternity * Rhoda, the embodiment of femininity in danger; she feels “faceless”, and, like Louis, she feels she cannot fit. There is also a seventh “character”, Percival, who never speaks. He is only in the minds of his six friends, somehow uniting them. Many critics preferred to see these six “characters” as “voices”, because they lack the solidity of characters in fiction. Instead of acting, they think, reflect, perceive and let themselves become invaded by impressions.

Gallery of Personalities • Roger Cummiskey is a contemporary Irish artist (a painter, and more recently, a poet). The artist declares that he specializes “in watercolour paintings, which take their names and titles from the wanderings and writings of James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and other Literary and Historical personalities.” Roger Cummiskey has had paintings representing Ireland in London, Stockholm, New York and Florence. (http://www.rogercummiskey.com/about/poetry.htm)

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

97

Modernist art novels

She Weeps Over Rahoon Watercolour and ink on paper by Roger Cummiskey

Rain on Rahoon falls softly, softly falling, Where my dark lover lies. Sad is his voice that calls me, sadly calling, At grey moonrise. Love, hear thou How soft, how sad his voice is ever calling, Ever unanswered in the dark rain falling, Then and now. Dark too our hearts, O love, shall lie and cold As his sad heart has lain Under the moongrey nettles, the black mould And muttering rain. Poem by James Joyce Trieste 1913

98

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Modernist art novels

SAA No. 5 Read the passage below: “A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful sea-bird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane’s and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and softhued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips where the white fringes of her drawers were like featherings of soft white down. Her slateblue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a bird’s soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some darkplumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face.” This passage is taken from Chapter IV of A Portrait. To many readers, this and the passages following it may be the most beautiful ones in the whole book. Stephen’s vision as he stands by the rivulet in the strand is an epiphany. You may wish to give the lines of the passage the layout of a poem. Even if you keep it as it is, you may read it as a poem. What are the qualities of Joyce’s style here? Would they justify the association of his prose with poetry? Do those qualities invite associations with other art forms (music, painting)? You may wish to use Joyce’s poem “She Weeps Over Rahoon” illustrated by Roger Cummiskey (above) to support your argument. Motivate your answer in an essay. Send the essay (not longer than three pages) to your tutor. Please note that the quality of your ideas and the coherence of the essay will be 70 % of your grade, while the accuracy of your language will count for 30 %.

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

99

Modernist art novels

Answers to SAQs SAQ 1 The artist Lily Briscoe needs to give shape to shapelessness because art means order. Everyday life is chaotic: experiences, feelings and impressions are often contradictory. Masculinity and femininity are also contradictory: while masculinity is abstract and cold, femininity is warm, simple and concrete. However, art needs to embrace contradictions and to render chaos in an orderly way. Art needs pattern, form and design. Art needs to be both abstract and concrete. Lily feels that Mrs. Ramsay stands for this spirit of harmony and reconciliation that her art needs. SAQ 2 The contrast between selfish masculinity (embodied by Mr. Ramsay) and generous kind femininity (embodied by his wife, Mrs. Ramsay) is obvious in this passage. While Mr. Ramsay takes, Mrs. Ramsay gives; while Mr. Ramsay is always moody, Mrs. Ramsay is always blissful; while Mr. Ramsay brings chaos into their universe, Mrs. Ramsay brings order, harmony and gives shape to formlessness. However, it is also obvious that Lily has to reconcile this contrast if she wants to fulfill her creative potential and materialize it in her painting. If she fails to reconcile the two Opposites, she will not finish her painting, and she will not have her “vision”. Please revise section 5.1 in case you have failed to give answers comparable to those given to SAQ 1 and SAQ 2 in this section. SAQ 3 Bernard, the novelist in The Waves, feels that he is not exactly himself, but in a way a self that unites the selves of his friends (Percival, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny, Susan and Louis). In the last 50 pages of the book, Bernard “sums up”, that is he unfolds his own life, which is intertwined with the lives of his friends. He also tries to find words and phrases that might capture their lives. Like Lily, who is an artist in painting, Bernard, who is an artist in words and phrases (that is literature), has to give meaning and shape to the meaninglessness and shapelessness of life. Like Lily, who is inspired by Mrs. Ramsay (the artist of life), Bernard is aware that art and his artistic self need to make connections, to join people and things together, to achieve harmony, and to turn mortality into eternity through art. In this passage, Bernard thinks of his own identity, but he finds himself unable to tell it from the identities of his friends, three of whom are females and three other males. He feels that he is both male and female, both himself and the others.

100

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Modernist art novels

SAQ 4 Woolf projected her own wish to write “something new” onto the novelist Bernard in The Waves. Bernard stands for the artist who struggles with novelty. His words and phrases follow no tradition in literature, and he feels unsafe when he handles them. The art he wishes to create is in fact the book we read: The Waves. The nine interludes, and also the alternation of interludes and episodes follow Woolf’s design, which she put in Bernard’s hands. His problems with style, technique and design echo Woolf’s problems with these aspects of novelty in the novel. SAQ 5 An obvious innovative formal feature of The Waves is the series of nine interludes in italics. Reading them through, one realizes the parallelism of form and the effect of gradation in the pursuit of the cycle of the sun from crack to sunrise, then through midday and sunset to darkness in their openings. The interludes may also be seen as a huge canvas, an abstract landscape, against which the drama of human existence unfolds, which is probably why Woolf visualized her “characters” as “statues against the sky”. Being highly descriptive, pictorial, but also musical and poetic, the interludes are a background radiating many connotations: while they may read as descriptive of the progression of one day from dawn until dark, they may also suggest other possible associations between this cycle, the cycle of seasons and also the stages of human life, which implies the connection between macro- and microcosmos, especially since the nine poetic landscapes of the interludes counterpoint the nine episodes. However, the interludes may be suggestive of a much larger span from genesis until apocalypse. Please revise section 5.2 in case you have failed to give answers comparable to those given to SAQ 3, SAQ 4 and SAQ 5 in this section. SAQ 6 Joyce’s intention was to draw a spiritual portrait of his young artist. Thus, the aspects of Stephen Dedalus’ profile focus upon his soul. His solitude, his “silence, exile, and cunning” are characteristic features of the modernist artist as marginalized by society, less understood but a lot more sensitive, even more heroic, than the average person. Stephen’s interest in sensory experiences and received impressions, complemented by a very strong interest in words and their meanings, complete his artistic profile. When Stephen takes flight (i.e. when he leaves Ireland), he leaves behind not only his country but also the nineteenth-century novel and its realist mode. Please revise section 5.3 in case you have failed to give an answer comparable to the one given to SAQ 6 in this section.

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

101

Modernist art novels

Bibliography Attridge, Derek (ed.) (1999) The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce, CUP (Chapter 5 ”Stephen Hero, Dubliners , and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Styles of Realism and Fantasy” by John Paul Riquelme) Dowling, David (1985) Bloomsbury Aesthetics and the Novels of Forster and Woolf, St. Martin’s Press, New York (Chapter 6 ”Woolf and Painting” and Chapter 7 ”Woolf’s Novels” see subchapters Mrs. Dalloway and The Waves) Joyce, James (1916)1993) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Seamus Deane, Penguin Books Woolf, Virginia (1927)1955) To the Lighthouse, Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., New York Woolf, Virginia (1931)1950) The Waves, Harvest Books, Harvest Edition

102

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Free indirect style and taboo breaking

UNIT 6 FREE INDIRECT STYLE AND TABOO BREAKING Unit Outline 6 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4

Unit Objectives D. H. Lawrence’s Novel of Sensibility Taboo Breaking Free Indirect Style Antagonism and Oneness in The Rainbow Symbolism in The Rainbow

103 103 104 106 108 112

Summary Key Terms Glossary of Terms and Comments SAA No. 6 Answers to SAQs Bibliography

114 115 115 116 116 119

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

103

Free indirect style and taboo breaking

Unit objectives

By the end of this unit you should be able to: • Explain Lawrence’s contribution to the modernist novel in terms of “novel of sensibility” • Identify and explain the notions of “free indirect style” and “taboo” • Explain the relevance of these notions to any discussion of Lawrence’s novel • Explain the importance of “battle of the sexes”, “antagonism and oneness” in Lawrence’s novel The Rainbow • Relate Lawrence’s symbolism to these aspects • Explain Lawrence’s theme of the “battle of the sexes” in relation to “free indirect style” and symbolism • Identify Lawrence’s place alongside James Joyce and Virginia Woolf and acknowledge Lawrence’s contribution to the modernist subjective novel

6. D. H. Lawrence’s Novel of Sensibility

D. H. Lawrence

D. H. Lawrence has been ranked among the most influential and controversial writers of the 20th century. In his more than 40 books he celebrated his vision of the natural, whole human being, thus opposing the artificiality of modern industrial society with its dehumanization of life and love. However, Lawrence’s novels came as a shock to his contemporaries, who misunderstood, attacked, and even suppressed them because of their frank treatment of sexual matters.

Stop and think! What is the significance of Lawrence’s poetic definition of books? (See the quote on the left hand side). What is your metaphor of a book? Give your answer in the space provided below. Please add this answer to your portfolio to be discussed in the tutorials. “To every man who struggles with his own soul in mystery, a book that is a book flowers once, and seeds, and is gone.” D. H. Lawrence

104

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Free indirect style and taboo breaking

D. H. Lawrence expressed an acute sense of his need for a return from the confusion, over-intellectualism and cold materialism of modern life to the primitive, unconscious springs of vitality of the race. Indeed, it can be argued that Lawrence was an essentially pagan‫ ٭‬spirit that valued what pre-Christian (especially old AngloSaxon‫ )٭‬cultures had offered humanity in terms of unspoiled vitality and passion. This strong urge to go back to the old pagan roots of the race placed him in a line opened by the late Victorian novelist Thomas Hardy. Lawrence saw Hardy as his chief forerunner in trying to transpose tragedy from drama to fiction. He described the subject of Hardy’s novels as “the tragedy of those who, more or less pioneers, have died in the wilderness whither they had escaped for free action, after having left the walled security, and the comparative imprisonment, of the established convention”. Lawrence’s own contribution to the English novel is the breaking of established conventions. His numerous novels and short stories, among which some of the best known are Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love (1921), The Plumed Serpent (1926), Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) are for most part and to a large extent experimental, though not so daringly innovative from a technical point of view as Woolf’s or Joyce’s. The obvious symbolism of Lawrence’s plots and the forceful straightforward preaching of his message broke the bonds of realism. Lawrence has unanimously been regarded as a late romantic spirit, endowed with heaps of vitality and sensitivity, which urged him to articulate a freer, more natural, and more direct expression of the writer’s perceptions. As a matter of fact, he transmitted this vitality to his characters, whom he allowed the same freedom of unrestrained and unconventional expression. For all these reasons his novels are known as novels of sensibility.

6.1 Taboo Breaking Taboo is related to prohibition. The term can be defined as “a prohibition or rejection of particular types of behaviour or language because they are considered socially unacceptable”. Lawrence, the son of a coal miner, born and brought up in the small mining village of Eastwood, Nottingamshire, contributed to English culture and literature from a marginalized social and cultural position, which gave him the go-ahead to challenge the establishment‫٭‬. Therefore, Lawrence’s standpoint as a writer was to challenge, shake and eventually break the taboos imposed by the establishment. The taboo that mattered most to Lawrence was sex. In his essay “Sex, Creativity and Biography: The Young D. H. Lawrence”, critic David Lodge states that “in no modern writer are sexuality and creativity more deeply and intricately connected than in D. H. Lawrence”.

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

105

Free indirect style and taboo breaking

However, besides creativity and sex, there is class. The issue of class incompatibility gave rise to another taboo breaking theme running through Lawernce’s fiction: classlessness. Lawrence liked to give the impression that while his father was working-class, his mother was middle-class. This alleged class clash in his own family led Lawrence to what he saw as an ideal of classlessness, which also animated his characters in an ardent desire to be both sexually and socially free. Lawrence made a strong point of this ideal freedom in “Derelict”‫٭‬, the last chapter of his novel Sons and Lovers. This sense of freedom may feel like devastating pain because the character is left “naked of everything”. In the closing lines of the novel Paul Morel, a painter and also the key figure feels that: “The town, as he sat upon the car, stretched away, over the bay of railway, a level fume of lights. Beyond the town the country, little smouldering spots for more towns – the sea – the night – on and on! And he had no place in it. Whatever spot he stood on, there he stood alone. /…/ The people hurrying along the streets offered no obstruction to the void in which he found himself. They were small shadows whose footsteps and voices could be heard, but in each of them, the same night, the same silence. /…/ There was no Time, only Space. /…/ Night, in which everything was lost, went reaching out, beyond stars and sun. Stars and sun, a few bright grains, went spinning round for terror and holding each other in embrace, there in a darkness that outpassed them all and left them tiny and daunted. So much, and himself, infinitesimal, at the core a nothingness, and yet not nothing.”

SAQ 1 Read the passage above carefully. What are Paul’s feelings? How can you relate them to taboo breaking?

Compare your answers to those given in the “Answers” section at the end of the unit. 106

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Free indirect style and taboo breaking

6.2 Free Indirect Style “You mustn’t look in my novel for the old stable ego of the character.”

In his greatest novels The Rainbow and Women in Love Lawrence increasingly turned away from the diminished possibilities of the wider world, which had provided the realists with its material, to examine the potential of fulfillment through personal relationships. Envisaging sex as an integral and essential part of such relationships, Lawrence presented his characters’ sexuality with a frankness, urgency and explicitness that was largely new to the novel. No wonder that his contemporary readers, used to the notions of propriety imposed by the establishment, found Lawrence’s treatment of sex shocking! The readers’ reaction led Lawrence, like Joyce, into trouble with censorship. In terms of plot and narrative structure, Lawrence’s novels may seem conventional. What makes them look disturbingly unconventional is Lawrence’s choice of subject matter. However, this impression fails to do justice to Lawrence’s technical and stylistic innovations. It can be argued that if sex is an essentially intimate matter, Lawrence’s manner of handling it also suggests a plunge into the characters’ intimacy. Thus, there are critics ready to acknowledge that Lawrence’s style was as innovative as his subject matter. Critic Randall Stevenson states that “the intensity of Lawrence’s interest in ‘the psychology of the free human individual’, and in the effect upon his characters of the ebb and flow, wonder and disillusion of powerful emotions released in their relationships, also led him to develop new fictional styles for presenting subjectivity”. Indeed, Lawrence developed a strategy of directing his readers’ attention upon individual consciousness and a style that went with it. This may be seen, for instance, in the following passage from The Rainbow, which traces the thoughts of Lawrence’s heroine Ursula Brangwen as she walks out one spring morning: “Again she felt Jesus in the countryside. Ah, he would lift up the lambs in his arms! Ah, and she was the lamb. Again, in the morning, going down the lane, she heard the ewe call, and the lambs came running… stooping, nuzzling, groping to the udder… Oh and the bliss, the bliss! She could scarcely tear herself away to go to school.”

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

107

Free indirect style and taboo breaking

SAQ 2 Read the passage above carefully. Can you draw a “portrait” of Ursula’s soul starting from this passage? How deep into the character’s intimacy did Lawrence go in such passages?

Compare your answers with those given in the “Answers” section at the end of the unit. Actual experiences and dialogues in Lawrence’s novels are often followed by several paragraphs or even pages focusing upon a minute examination of his characters’ reflections and emotions (see the passage above). The intimacy, depth and intensity with which Lawrence sought to present this inner experience often led him to a distinctive intermingling of characters’ inner voices with his own more objective authorial tone. This technique of presenting a character’s thoughts, feelings, emotions articulated in words that are never uttered aloud and partly mediated through the voice of the author is called “free indirect style or discourse”. This technique is not Lawrence’s discovery, but it certainly was so largely used by him that it became a mark of his style. Randall Stevenson argued that a free indirect style “is a distinctive extension of the novelist’s means of ‘looking within’ and examining the mind”. Although Lawrence refrained himself from employing more direct entries into the mental experience of his characters offered by stream of consciousness, his formula of free indirect discourse clearly associates him with modernist writers such as Woolf and Joyce. 108

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Free indirect style and taboo breaking

6.3 Antagonism and Oneness in The Rainbow With Lydia and Tom Brangwen, the parental couple in The Rainbow, the antagonism of the sexes unfolds a story that – through its fierce re-enactment in the couple of Anna and Will Brangwen – reaches the New Woman Ursula. With Lydia and Tom, the inevitable antagonism is tempered and eventually toned down – to become a relatively “happy” marriage – by Lydia’s foreignness. Her foreignness has very large and ambivalent connotations in the novel. Lydia’s rather mysterious Polishness both attracts and repels Tom. It attracts him as a sign of complementariness, and it repels him as a sign of cultural, sexual and even class incongruity. However, the couple Lydia and Tom Brangwen manage to achieve a relative equilibrium that supports Lawrence’s motif of oneness: “They did not take much notice of each other, consciously. ‘I’m betimes,’ he said. ‘Yes,’ she answered. He turned to the dogs, or to the child if she were there. The little Anna played about the farm, flitting constantly in to call something to her mother, to fling her arms round her mother’s skirts, to be noticed, perhaps caressed, then, forgetting, to slip out again. Then Brangewn, talking to the child, or to the dog between his knees, would be aware of his wife, as, in her tight, dark bodice and her lace fichu, she was reaching up to the corner cupboard. He realized that he lived by her. Did he own her? Was she here for ever? Or might she go away? She was not really his, it was not a real marriage, this marriage between them. She might go away. He did not feel like a master, husband, father of her children. She belonged elsewhere. Any moment, she might be gone. And he was ever drawn to her, drawn after her, with ever-raging, ever-unsatisfied desire. He must always turn home, wherever his steps were taking him, always to her, and he could never quite reach her, he could never quite be satisfied, never be at peace, because she might go away.”

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

109

Free indirect style and taboo breaking

SAQ 3 Read the passage above carefully. How can you relate this relation between husband and wife to the themes of antagonism/ difference - oneness and attraction - repulsion?

Compare your answers to those given in the “Answers” section at the end of the unit.

Anna Brangwen, Lydia’s daughter by her (now dead) Polish husband, replays this antagonistic game with her husband Will. The point is that the game becomes more and more dangerous since old rules of mastership can no longer apply to the modern couple. Like Gertrude, the mother in Sons and Lovers, like Winifred in the short story “England, My England”, Anna imposes her power and domination after a “battle”. Will’s problem is that he runs “after his dark-souled desires” and does the most foolish thing: he claims “the old position of master of the house”.

110

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Free indirect style and taboo breaking

SAQ 4 Read quote 23 in the Reader. How and why do couple relationships deteriorate in this new Brangwen generation?

Compare your answers to those given in the “Answers” section at the end of the unit. Eventually victory is on Anna’s side because she is the embodiment of feminine fertility. She embarks on an apparently ceaseless child-bearing mission in which she revels with an unstoppable joy. However, with Anna we still have to do with a feminine “power” of a very old matriarchal order. So Lawrence’s novel urges the readers on to her daughter Ursula. The daughter, Ursula, who inherits her father’s “darkness” and her mother’s strength, is Lawrence’s New Woman. Her antagonistic attitude to the opposite sex, which makes her relationship with Anton so sexually intense and yet so impossible, is no longer accountable on social or cultural background incompatibility. It is now a matter of Ursula, the New Woman, being aware of her new femininity. Ursula asserts her economic independence when she takes a teaching job in “the men’s world”. Then she manages to make her way through it by adopting typically masculine belligerent methods of herding the pupils into a soulless mechanical system. With a half-sense of failure and half-sense of success, she goes to a further education college, which bitterly disappoints her again. The relationship with Anton Skrebensky, which she feels as “a truce” concluded by two “enemies” in “The Bitterness of Ecstasy” chapter, proves to be an utter failure. The failure is grounded in the difference between the male’s view and commitments on the one the hand, and the female’s view and commitments, on the other, which sum up Ursula and Anton’s antagonistic souls. It is precisely in the light of Ursula’s New Woman standpoint that we are supposed to make sense of her intriguing anti-democratic convictions, articulated with so much force, bitterness and passion in “The Bitterness of Ecstasy”: Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

111

Free indirect style and taboo breaking

“I shall be glad to leave England. Everything is so meagre and paltry, it is so unspiritual – I hate democracy.” /…/ /…/ It was as if she were attacking him. “What do you mean?” he asked her, hostile. “Why do you hate democracy?” “/…/ Only degenerate races are democratic.” “What do you want then – an aristocracy?” /.../ “I do want an aristocracy.” She cried. “And I’d far rather have an aristocracy of birth than of money. Who are the aristocrats now – who are chosen as the best to rule? Those who have money and the brains for money. It doesn’t matter what else they have: but they must have money-brains, because they are ruling in the name of money”.

SAQ 5 Read the passage above carefully. Why is the antagonism between Ursula and Anton so fierce?

Compare your answers with those given in the “Answers” section at the end of the unit. Anton will leave for India to marry there, while Ursula will remain in England to build a spiritual rainbow, “the earth’s new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the overarching heaven.” Accustomed to so many antagonistic couples who eventually concluded a “truce” of lasting marriage, the reader finds something radical in the conflict between Ursula and Anton, an antagonism which can by no means be solved by a “truce”. It is Ursula-the New Woman that makes the antagonism so unbridgeable by marriage. The bridge promised by the title is the image-symbol of the rainbow that concludes the novel transcendentally: it unites the generations in the novel and elsewhere, and it mystically unites the earth (society, culture and civilization, so broken and fragmented by a sense of crisis, tension, changes and shifts) with heaven; it also unites body and spirit, “arched” as it is “in their blood” and “quivering to life” (Read quote 24 in the Reader). 112

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Free indirect style and taboo breaking

6.4. Symbolism in The Rainbow Lawrence’s use of a very rich texture of symbols is another aspect which compensates for what the modernist novel loses in terms of realist conventions. Thus in his treatment of the degradation of relationships in the modern couple from Lydia and Tom through Anna and Will to Ursula and Anton in The Rainbow, Lawrence deployed a tone and imagery that compels the readers to find analogies to the Biblical Fall. Lawrence’s point in focusing upon this symbolism of the Fall implies that this is the course taken by humanity since the moment when the first couple was forced to depart from the Garden of Eden. This course is one of repeated falls, each new fall worsening the situation and deepening the antagonism. However, Lawrence also made a point of the couple’s longing for the lost unity with a highly dramatic force, often touching pathetic and even prophetic notes. For Anna and Will, their honeymoon feels blissful as the couple rejoices on their sense of oneness: “As they lay close together, complete and beyond the touch of time or change, it was as if they were at the very centre of all the slow wheeling of space and the rapid agitation of life, deep, deep inside them all, at the centre where there is utter radiance, and eternal being, and the silence absorbed in praise: the steady core of all movements, the unawakened sleep of all wakefulness. They found themselves there, and they lay still, in each other’s arms; for their moment they were at the heart of eternity, whilst time roared far off, forever far off, towards the rim. Then gradually they were passed away from the supreme centre, down the circles of praise and joy and gladness, further and further out, towards the noise and the friction. But their hearts had burned and were tempered by the inner reality, they were unalterably glad.”

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

113

Free indirect style and taboo breaking

SAQ 6 Read the passage above carefully. How can you relate it to the motif of the original bliss and the Fall?

Compare your answers with those given in the “Answers” section at the end of the unit. It is worth noticing that Lawrence’s antagonistic couples find themselves drawn (and sometimes ironically and symbolically drowned) in floods with mythological implications, like Tom in The Rainbow, into a dangerous war of the sexes. Tom Brangwen finds himself tugged between a strong desire to be satisfied and an equally strong sense that he will always be dissatisfied. The war is waged within himself in the first place, and this is agony. Of course, this split, which always feels like devastating pain, is also a condition of the fallen nature of man. Tom dies, drunk as Noah‫ ٭‬to forget the wearying puzzles of his middle age, drowned in the flood of rain, and his women mourn for him: “They cleared and washed the body, and laid it on the bed. There, it looked still and grand. He was perfectly calm in death, and, now he was laid in line, inviolable, unapproachable. To Anna, he was the majesty of the inaccessible male, the majesty of death. It made her still and awe-stricken, almost glad. 114

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Free indirect style and taboo breaking

Lydia Brangwen, the mother, also came and saw the impressive, inviolable body of the dead man. She went pale, seeing death. He was beyond change or knowledge, absolute, laid in line with the infinite. What had she to do with him? He was a majestic Abstraction, made visible now for a moment, inviolate, absolute. And who could lay claim to him, who could speak of him, of the him who was revealed in the stripped moment of transit from life into death? Neither the living nor the dead could claim him, he was both the one and the other, inviolable, inaccessibly himself.”

SAQ 7 Read the passage above carefully. How can you relate this description of Tom’s dead body to the biblical symbol of the Flood?

Compare your answers with those given in the “Answers” section at the end of the unit.

Summary This unit presents D. H. Lawrence’s contribution to the modernist English novel in relation to both a forerunner such as Thomas Hardy and to his contemporary writers Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, who opted for apparently more daring techniques of capturing subjectivity in their stream of consciousness experimental novels. However, Lawrence’s innovations concern both subject matter and techniques. In terms of subject matter, his novels are daring, even shocking explorations of sex, and the techniques deployed can be regarded as a version of the subjective novel, a formula also developed by Woolf and Joyce. Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

115

Free indirect style and taboo breaking

Thus, Lawrence’s taboo breaking topic of sex has to be seen in close connection to the major themes of the battle of the sexes, antagonism and oneness, and also with the deployment of free indirect style / discourse and charged symbolism. All these aspects led Lawrence miles away from the realist novel and came together in a unique formula of the subjective novel. The next unit will deal with Aldous Huxley’s novel of ideas Point Counter Point, in which D. H. Lawrence is fictionalized as Mark Rampion.

Key Terms • • • • • •

Novel of sensibility Subjective novel Taboo and taboo breaking Free indirect style or discourse Antagonism and oneness Symbols: - the rainbow - the Garden of Eden - the Fall - the Flood

Glossary of Terms and Comments • Anglo-Saxon refers to the West Germanic peoples who settled in Britain from the fifth century AD and were dominant until 1066 • Archetype is a typical, ideal or classic example of something or somebody • Derelict means somebody who has no home, employment or family care • Establishment means a class or group of people who hold power in a society and dominate its institutions • Everyman refers to somebody, usually a man, considered to be typical or representative of all human beings • Noah was a biblical patriarch. At God’s command, Noah built an ark and saved himself and a pair of every kind of animal from the Flood • Pagan means a follower of an ancient, pre-Christian religion • Paterfamilias (from Latin) means father of a family, a man in the role of father and head of a household • Patriarch is, in the Bible, a figure considered as the ancestor of the whole human race, for example, Adam or Noah • Phallocentrism means a system centered on men, or showing a preference for traditionally masculine qualities

116

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Free indirect style and taboo breaking

SAA 6 Explain the couples’ explorations of love, hate, sex, life and death along the three Brangwen generations in The Rainbow. What are the main elements and aspects of modernity that make these explorations so dramatic in the novel? Send the answers to these questions to your tutor. Do not take longer than three pages. Please note that the quality of your ideas and the coherence of the essay will be 70 % of your grade, while the accuracy of your language will count for 30 %.

Answers to SAQs SAQ 1 Sons and Lovers ends with Paul a derelict in the “drift toward death”, which Lawrence thought of in more general terms as the disease syndrome of his time and of the Europe of his time. But the death drift and death worship are for Lawrence hideous distortions of the natural relationship of death to life. The whole passage is dominated by the dramatic tension between light and darkness, which is symbolic of the tension between life and death internalized by Paul. Eventually Paul decides to head towards the lights of the city, overcoming his “death drift”. It is very significant that he does it from this position of a person who is now, at the end and in the end, free of and from everything and everybody: he has no religion, no class to fit in, no family, no ties, no country, no prejudices and no firm holds. This “nakedness of everything” and this homelessness are symbolic of the character’s freedom from all conventions and constrictions, which can no longer affect him. Paul’s mood and final decision imply that he has transgressed all conventions and norms, breaking all the taboos imposed by the system. Please revise section 6.1 in case you have failed to give an answer comparable to the one given to SAQ 1 in this section. SAQ 2 It is clear that the voice which says ‘ah’ and ‘Oh… the bliss!’ is not wholly Lawrence’s or the narrator’s own, but really a partial transcription of Ursula’s, though this is not conventionally marked for the reader by such phrases as ‘she said’ or ‘she thought’. What these very intimate thoughts and feelings suggest is that Ursula’s is of a Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

117

Free indirect style and taboo breaking

highly sensitive nature. She craves for purity, which she sees everywhere around her in nature. The problem is that this craving is too intimate and too unconventional to be communicated aloud to a world governed by conventions. The passage makes it very clear in the last line, which sets the contrast between the genuineness of Ursula’s unconventional nature and the obligations imposed by social conventions: “She could scarcely tear herself away to go to school.” Please revise section 6.2 in case you have failed to give an answer comparable to the one given to SAQ 2 in this section. SAQ 3 Tom Brangwen’s apprehensions are not, after all, just the timeless worries of husbands but unprecedented seismic shocks brought about by the “modernization” of his world. Throughout his life, from all points of view, Tom is forced to live with the radical changes of modernity brought about by the pressures of industrialization upon the natural life on the farm. Thomas Hardy had thematized this devastating effect of an increasingly mechanized society upon the individual before Lawrence. Lawrence was born later only to see that those effects were turning the farmers’ life into hell (Tom’s restlessness is a translation of hell). The point Lawrence made is that these changes also affect the life of the couple. Husbands feel marriage turn into a relationship on the edge, dominated by contradictory feelings of attraction and repulsion. Tom feels it to be so and relates it to the fact that nature is less and less part of the couple’s life. That is why he constantly looks for comfort by talking “to the child, or to the dog between his knees” (unspoiled creatures). However, pressures never release him. He feels the pressures of antagonism in his wife’s foreignness, which represents the distance between all people and especially between the sexes. Tom’s apprehensions are, in other words, that distance and foreignness may grow so sharp as to become unbridgeable antagonism, radical estrangement and irrecoverable separation: “She belonged elsewhere. Any moment, she might be gone.” SAQ 4 To many readers and critics Anna and Will epitomize the first modern couple. They seem to lose all ties with nature and tradition that Tom and Lydia (the first couple in the book) still managed to preserve. The tensions in this couple become so fierce that no equilibrium can eventually be restored. In their couple antagonism prevails. The man, having lost his inherited mastery, comes to depend on satisfactions of sexuality as on a drug, while the woman comes to resent what she will eventually regard as his infantile male weakness. Anna and Will can never reclaim their honeymoon fulfillment of passion, nor can they reconcile passion and sensuality. So their lives dwindle away in disorganization and in minor consummations and complaints. As the passage suggests, Will is a fool, while Anna is his fierce opponent in the name of a newly gained womanly power, which is a consequence of his loss of inherited manly mastery. 118

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

Free indirect style and taboo breaking

SAQ 5 This fiery attack engenders an approach to the crisis of the age, which had its roots (as Woolf pointed out in her essays and also implied in her novels) in Victorian phallocentrism‫ ٭‬and Edwardian “materialism”. The markedly feminine note brought about in the English fiction of the early 20th century by Woolf is struck here by Lawrence’s character Ursula. It is not that Anton would not be anaristocrat. We are reminded in the same passage that “he always felt that by rights he belonged to the ruling aristocracy”. The fact is that he is nonetheless committed to the system attacked so vehemently by Ursula. He is committed to “the equality of dirt”, that is money and moreover to Rule Britannia (the British Empire and its domination). It is this patriarchal‫ ٭‬imperial domination and arrogance that Ursula so irrevocably rejects, flinging her embittered disapproval of it in Anton’s stunned face. Please revise section 6.3 in case you have failed to give answers comparable to those given to SAQ 3, SAQ 4 and SAQ 5 in this section. SAQ 6 In this passage, Anna and Will are “complete and beyond the touch of time or change”, which is a state of atemporal and aspatial perfection. Indeed, they look as if they were the first couple. To them this moment feels like eternity, a timelessness enjoyed by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. However, the subsequent passages plunge them “gradually” into time, change, exterior space and friction. SAQ 7 In these passages, Tom Brangwen is essentially an archetype‫٭‬: in death he is no longer the turn of the century-early 20th century troubled man, but Everyman‫٭‬, not at all the conventional individualist hero of English fiction. In death he has reached a state of beyondness. He has transcended his own physicality and all the torments that go with it. Tom is the patriarch‫٭‬, paterfamilias‫ ٭‬of the novel, like Noah‫٭‬. The generations that follow Tom: Anna (his daughter), Will (Anna’s husband and Tom’s nephew), and Ursula (Tom’s granddaughter) have their origin in him. Dying in the Flood, he gives them the chance to people the earth after his death. This, and also the fact that he has transcended sufferance, must be what makes Anna “almost glad”. Please revise section 6.4 in case you have failed to give answers comparable to those given to SAQ 6 and SAQ 7 in this section.

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

119

Free indirect style and taboo breaking

Bibliography Lawrence, D. H. (1915)1971) The Rainbow (1915); rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin Lodge, David (1996) The Practice of Writing. Essays, Lectures, Reviews and a Diary, Secker and Warburg, London (Chapter ”Sex and Creativity in the Young D. H. Lawrence”) Spilka, Mark (ed.) (1963) D. H. Lawrence, A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, N. J. (”The Originality of The Rainbow” by Marvin Mudrick) Stevenson, Randall (1993) The British Novel Since the Thirties, Institutul European , Iaşi (Chapter 1 ”The Novel, 19001930”)

120

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

The musicalisation of fiction

Unit 7 THE MUSICALISATION OF FICTION, THE NOVEL OF IDEAS

Unit Outline 7 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 7.7

121 121

Unit objectives Aldous Huxley – A Lover of Science, Literature and the Arts Huxley’s Characters Satire and European Models Continuing a Line of Tradition Mark Rampion’s Point in Point Counter Point Philip Quarles, the Novelist In the Novel The Musicalisation of Fiction A Novelist’s Novel of Ideas; The Pure Novel

121 122 124 124 125 126 129

Summary Key Terms Glossary and Comments Gallery of Personalities SAA No. 7 Answers to SAQs Bibliography

130 131 131 132 133 134 135

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

121

The musicalisation of fiction

Unit objectives

By the end of this unit you should be able to: • explain the unique place held by Aldous Huxley in English literature • identify the category in which Huxley’s characters belong • explain the relevance of Huxley’s focus on this particular category • identify the formula of Huxley’s novel • identify the main ingredients and influences in Huxley’s novel • explain Huxley’s point of putting a novelist in the novel and of having him comment on his problems with writing it • explain Huxley’s point of the “congenital” versus “noncongenital” novelist • explain Point Counter Point in terms of: - musicalisation of fiction - novel of ideas - “pure novel”

7. Aldous Huxley - A Lover of Science, Literature and the Arts

Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley’s place in English literature is, according to T. S. Eliot, “unique and certainly established”. Huxley’s keen interest in science, scientific theories and ideas was doubled by his effort to penetrate the intimate essence of phenomena in order to give them artistic form in his novels. Indeed, Huxley was one of the few writers of the 20th century who realized the overwhelming importance of science. He became, like his contemporary Marcel Proust, highly knowledgeable of theoretical sciences, assimilating them and putting them to use in his novels. Of course, Huxley’s cultural background also heavily relied on literature and the arts: he had an intimate knowledge of the English classics and romantics, and a strong inclination to the French symbolists, the Italian Renaissance and Spanish painting. All these influences came together in what one may call the formula of a vast humanism, which was nevertheless coloured by notes of skepticism‫٭‬, biting irony or even Luciferic‫ ٭‬appetites.

7.1 Huxley’s Characters Even in his early pieces of writing, Huxley focused on the social and professional category of the intellectuals, as he himself was one of them. In one of his attempts to define this category, Huxley stated that “an intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex”.

122

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

The musicalisation of fiction

Stop and think! Take a few minutes to think of Huxleys's statement. Give your own definition of an intellectual in the space provided below. Please add your answer to the portfolio to be discussed in the tutorials.

However, he examined this category from all possible angles, almost through a microscopic lens. Huxley was keen on noticing and observing a world of appearance and pretence, tormented by the fever of vanity, by passions, vices and ambitions. This world attracted him like an absurd show, in which human beings (his characters) lost their real features, replacing them with the fashions and fetishes‫ ٭‬of modern civilization. If Huxley may be accused, as he has often been, of lack of variety in terms of the social investigation implied in his novels, this drawback can be seen in relation to an obvious gain, which is the quality and depth of his observations. The point is that Huxley meant to be honest with himself when he applied his creative skills to this particular social and professional group: the intellectuals. Thus, he took pains to render, as honestly as he could, in a realistic, grotesque or fantastic key, his own group.

7.2. Satire and European Models Many critics have seen in Huxley’s fiction the formula of the satiric‫ ٭‬novel, with its subtle, exciting and unpredictable dialogues, which enabled the writer to debate important topics of his own time. Huxley’s dialogues are polemics‫ ٭‬informed by irony‫٭‬, lucidity, sarcasm‫ ٭‬and cynicism‫٭‬. This is the case of the polemics between various characters in his novel Point Counter Point (published in 1928).

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

123

The musicalisation of fiction

Sometimes the characters’ discussions in Point Counter Point are just disclosures of their frames of mind, since they do not show any desire to let themselves influenced by their interlocutors’ points of view.

SAQ 1 Read quote 15 in the Reader. This is an argument made by Mark Rampion, one of the characters in Point Counter Point. Does Rampion’s argument bear any relevance to the world you live in?

Compare your answers with those in the “Answers” section at the end of the unit. New and complex influences of the most recent scientific theories of his time from Freud‫ ٭‬to Bergson‫٭‬, from Pavlov‫ ٭‬to Einstein‫٭‬, the innovations in philosophy and literature from Nietzsche‫ ٭‬to Anatole France‫٭‬, André Gide‫ ٭‬or Luigi Pirandello‫٭‬, and also the avant-gardes in painting or drama inspired Huxley, who used them in the dialogues of his books. (See Unit 3, Gallery of Personalities for Sigmund Freud, Henri Bergson, Albert Einstein and André Gide). A lot of these dialogues are debates pro and against those theories and ideas. Indeed, Huxley’s satire is directed mainly towards the ideologies of his time, be those communist or capitalist, or ideas that revolutionized biology, psychology and philosophy. It is precisely this polemic note that gives Huxley’s novels that cynical and highbrow‫ ٭‬air.

124

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

The musicalisation of fiction

7.3. Continuing a Line of Tradition However, despite their novelty and modern spirit, the tone of these novels can be traced in a line of tradition, which Huxley continued. There are notes in Huxley’s novels which remind us of Oscar Wilde‫ ٭‬or G. B. Shaw’s‫ ٭‬irony‫ ٭‬and witticism‫٭‬. Their satiric note continues a line in the English novel which goes as far back as Richardson‫٭‬, Fielding‫٭‬, Jane Austen‫ ٭‬and Victorian writers such as George Eliot‫ ٭‬and Charles Dickens. It can be argued that Huxley’s intentions when he conceived his characters and devised some patterns of their behaviour were also didactic. Didacticism, rather than being some alien, indigestible element imported by Huxley into the novel, becomes an important feature which he borrowed from the greatest of his predecessors.

7.4. Mark Rampion’s Point in Point Counter Point Point Counter Point belongs to a period in Huxley’s creation when the writer met and made friends with D. H. Lawrence. The reallife Lawrence becomes the fictitious Mark Rampion in Point Counter Point. Although Huxley and Lawrence were fundamentally different in terms of temperament, preoccupations, philosophical convictions, literary tastes, etc., what drew them together was this very contrast. Since opposites attract, Huxley grew fascinated by the overwhelming and rather unusual personality of his friend, by the lyrical exuberance, spontaneity and messianic‫ ٭‬spirit of his rebellious, nonconformist nature, which was sometimes so absurd and obstinate that it looked bizarre. However, what recommended Lawrence to Huxley’s tastes was that he could never be but authentic, sincere and honest. Having his early background in the infernal coal pits, being a self-taught person, suffering from tuberculosis, though never really caring about it, Lawrence (alias Mark Rampion in Point Counter Point) was the advocate of human nature against sexual hypocrisy, Puritan conceptions, or any other forms of tyranny which would stop or hinder the free development of the individual. Mark Rampion is, indeed, the only character in Point Counter Point giving substance to the book, in the sense that he seems to be the only one who makes sense in a senseless world, a world which, in his own words, is “an asylum of perverts”. Rampion is practically the only character in Huxley’s novel whose life can be seen as the product of balance between mind and instinct, between intellect and emotion. Amid all the partial, unbalanced, incomplete lives of the people who surround him, he stands for wholeness and harmony, for living the whole life to the full, not part of it to excess. (Read quote 16 in the Reader to get an image of what sort of character Mark Rampion is).

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

125

The musicalisation of fiction

SAQ 2 Read quote 17 in the Reader. That is a discussion between Mark Rampion and Philip Quarles, the novelist in the novel. Does Rampion actually mean what he says? Compare his point in this discussion with his notion of “balance”. If he does not mean it, how can you explain the contradiction of these two points made by the same character?

Compare your answers with those in the “Answers” section at the end of the unit.

7.5. Philip Quarles, the Novelist in the Novel If Rampion is the advocate of equilibrium in Point Counter Point, Philip Quarles is there not only as one of Rampion’s opposites and opponents, but also as the novelist’s own mouthpiece. Philip Quarles is Mark Rampion’s opposite because he represents the extreme of cold intellectualism: he lacks human warmth, and lacking it, he can neither give it nor respond to it. His frame of mind is bent on abstractions, and the image the reader is likely to get of this character is that of the modern abstract writer. Philip’s glosses on art, the modern novel, and the novelist’s experiments with new techniques and devices echo Huxley’s own struggles with the book we read: Point Counter Point. An essential issue in Philip’s notebook is the technique of putting a novelist into the novel, which is exactly what Huxley did in Point Counter Point: “Put a novelist into a novel. He justifies the aesthetic generalizations, which may be interesting – at least to me. He also justifies experiment. Specimens of his work may illustrate other possible or impossible ways of telling a story. And if you have him telling parts of the same story, you can make a variation on the theme. But why draw a line at one novelist inside your novel? Why not a second inside his? And a third inside the second novel? And so on to infinity, like those advertisements of Quaker Oats where there’s a Quaker holding a box of oats on which is a picture of another Quaker holding another box of oats, etc., etc. At about the tenth remove you might have a novelist telling your story in algebraic symbols or in terms of variation in blood pressure, pulse, secretion of ductless glands, and reaction time.” 126

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

The musicalisation of fiction

SAQ 3 What is Philip Quarles’s point of “putting a novelist into a novel” and the effects of multiplying the novelists inside the novel?

Compare your answers with those in the “Answers” section at the end of the unit.

7.6. Musicalisation of Fiction Point Counterpoint is the novel in which Huxley best expressed the sense of disillusionment and hopelessness of the period after World War I. This novel is composed in such a way that the events of the plot form a contrapuntal pattern, which is a radical departure from the straightforward storytelling technique of the realistic novel. All the major aspects of the novel are based on the technique of counterpoint, a term borrowed from music, which is suggestively reflected in its title. Contrast is the key principle of counterpoint‫٭‬. Thus, in Huxley’s novel themes and characters are counter-pointed, i.e. they are set in sharp contrast with one another. For instance, in the couple Elinor and Philip Quarles, the emotional Elinor is contrasted with the cerebral Philip. In the circle of the intellectuals depicted in the novel, the scientific Lord Edward is contrasted with the impulsive and political Webley, the heartless modern Lucy with the romantic Walter, the cockney Illidge with the upper-class group at Tantamount House, the religious hypocrite Burlap with the essentially honest Mark Rampion. The list of such contrasts in Point Counter Point can be expanded.

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

127

The musicalisation of fiction

Viking Eggeling “DiagonalSymphonie”

128

The guiding hypothesis of Point Counter Point is counterpoint on all levels. As a matter of fact, this is what justifies Huxley to use the technique of counterpoint, thus implying that the modern world is governed by grinding contrasts. This novel sets idea against idea, head against heart, body against mind, spirit against matter, art against life, husband against wife, parent against child. Counterpoint is Huxley’s structural technique. Point Counter Point is governed, thematically and structurally, by it. Counterpoint gives musical dimension to philosophical dilemmas arising from the modern era’s foremost scientific theory: relativity and the consequent accumulation of contradictory, diverse truths. The thoughts of the atypical minority with ideas to express (the intellectuals) resist rewarding synthesis by a would-be orchestrating intelligence. Quarles’s narrative techniques fail to produce a triumphant positive overview yet prove satirically appropriate to reveal the constantly proliferating diversity of modern life. Point Counter Point is a novel in which strategically placed discussion scenes support the counterpoint technique. One of the most illustrative contrapuntal confrontations is the discussion between Mark Rampion and Spandrell. The grinding opposition between Rampion and Spandrell lies in their respective temperaments, frames of mind and attitudes to life in the first place. Spandrell, a “pervert” in Rampion’s sense of the word and in the every-day sense, a Satanist, a death-worshipper, is the only character in the book who can effectively stand up to Rampion. This is so because Spandrell essentially stands for evil and destruction, while Rampion’s ideal is harmony in life. Spandrell’s last argument with Rampion is occasioned by a demonstration he wants to make of Beethoven’s A Minor Quartet. Spandrell’s point is to demonstrate God’s existence by playing the Quartet to Rampion. To Spandrell, who fights for his very life in this scene, God’s abstract existence and the rather abstract purity of music can bring no equilibrium: he can neither find God in his heart, nor reconcile the abstract art of music with any human warmth. Rampion, who is a pagan spirit, asks: “Where’s the famous proof of God’s existence and the superiority of Jesus’s morality?” Spandrell responds by continuing to play his record. Rampion’s reply is that music is the “art of a man who’s lost his body”. By continuing to play the record, Spandrell makes his point, and Rampion admits: “It is heaven, it is the life of the soul”, but he insists that this life of the soul is diseased, a cancerous growth consuming the life of the body. Spandrell makes Rampion listen to the last and best part of the piece, and Rampion confesses: “Almost thou persuadest me”. Spandrell is literally finished, he commits suicide soon after this, but Rampion and his point are not triumphant in this scene either. On the contrary, Rampion has been diminished in the process.

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

The musicalisation of fiction

SAQ 4 What is the counterpoint technique used by Huxley in this discussion? What is the meaning of Rampion’s comments?

Compare your answers with those in the “Answers” section at the end of the unit.

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

129

The musicalisation of fiction

7.7. A Novelist’s Novel of Ideas; The Pure Novel In his notebook Philip Quarles writes: “Novel of ideas. The character of each personage must be implied, as far as possible, in the ideas of which he is the mouthpiece. In so far as theories are rationalizations of sentiments, instincts, dispositions of soul, this is feasible. The chief defect of the novel of ideas is that you must write about people who have ideas to express – which excludes all but about .01 per cent of the human race. Hence the real, the congenital‫ ٭‬novelists don’t write such books. But then I never pretended to be a congenital novelist.”

SAQ 5 How are characters conceived in the novel of ideas?

Compare your answers with those in the “Answers” section at the end of the unit. The irony in this passage actually invites the keen reader to read between the lines Philip’s (and Huxley’s) conviction that the novelist of ideas is the mind of his age. His mission is to keep the world safe for intelligence. Philip also implies that he is a “noncongenital” novelist, that is a rather atypical specimen. Unlike the congenital novelist, the “noncongenital” one uses aspects of the novel such as character, story and plot to make a point of ideas. In other words, his characters are embodiments of ideas.

130

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

The musicalisation of fiction

Filomena de Andrade Booth “Counterpoint”

However, characters in Quarles’s projected novel and Huxley’s completed one are tormented by feelings or lack of feelings and long for relationships. The problem is that their author is skeptical both of feelings, relationships and of the viability of ideas. In a soulless world it is hard, if not impossible, to grow a soul. Without a soul, it is hard, if not impossible, to have relationships. In an age of proliferating ideas, it is hard, if not impossible, to prove the viability of the sciences generating those ideas, or to prove the validity of any idea. Even Rampion’s attractive philosophy of life fails to offer a solution to this skeptical mood and frame of mind which turns the rest of the characters into “perverts”. Huxley’s point in Point Counter Point is to question both tradition and novelty, both the formula of the traditional novel and the formula of his own novel of ideas. Thus, Huxley’s novel of ideas deliberately fails to resolve itself. It remains stuck in inextricability‫٭‬. Point Counter Point thrusts the reader into modernity, a world of mutually exclusive choices, none of which seems totally satisfying. Huxley discredits everybody and everybody’s point. Thus the only “balance” lies in the “counterpoint”, which is a rather precarious equilibrium anyway. Point Counterpoint renders Huxley’s conception of “symphonic literature”, i.e. a narrative work based on a plurality of themes and planes, a “pure novel”. It is “pure” in the sense that it aspires to the abstract purity of ideas. Its purity also lies in its musical effects, the novel being Huxley’s “translation” of counterpoint in music into counterpoint in the novel. Thus, music lends its abstract purity to an art (literature), whose medium is language, and to a genre (the novel), whose worn-out traditional aspects needed to be refined. Instead of being a narrative based on plot, Point Counter Point is a vast orchestration of counter-pointed points which remain unresolved in paradox‫٭‬. It is significant that even Rampion, the only character in whose uncorrupted wisdom the reader feels tempted to find a foothold, voices a paradox. “Nobody asks you to be anything else but a man”, he says, “neither angel nor daemon”, and the only absolute thing that the human being will ever know is the absolute of the perfect equilibrium, the absolute of the perfect relativity, which, intellectually speaking, is a contradiction of terms, a paradox. What Huxley gives us in Point Counter Point is, in fact, a sense and a taste of this paradox in a pure novel, whose message lies in between optimism and pessimism.

Summary This unit presents Aldous Huxley’s contribution to the modernist English novel. This contribution is the novel of ideas, which Huxley saw as a formula enabling him to experiment with the musicalisation of fiction. The formula Huxley envisaged was “symphonic literature”, a “pure novel”. This unit introduces you to Huxley’s background, which relied on sciences, literature and the arts. As he himself was a refined intellectual, his characters belong to this category. Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

131

The musicalisation of fiction

Huxley’s novel of ideas is also a satire, continuing a line of tradition and containing modernist innovative elements. Huxley’s novel Point Counter Point relies on the technique of the counterpoint. Thus, a balanced character like Mark Rampion is counter-pointed by a cold intellectual like Philip Quarles or by the diabolic Spandrell. Point Counter Point puts a novelist, Philip Quarles inside the novel. His role is to explain Huxley’s own ideas about the novel of ideas, the musicalisation of fiction and about the “noncongenital” novelist. Huxley’s novel is a contribution to modernism looking forward to techniques and devices used by postmodernist writers such as John Fowles and David Lodge (see unit 8).

Key Terms • • • • • • •

Satire Irony Counterpoint: Musicalisation of fiction Noncongenital novelist Novel of ideas Paradox

Glossary of Terms and Comments • Congenital means here firmly established as part of somebody’s character or beliefs • Counterpoint: 1. In music, counterpoint means the sounding together of two or more melodic lines, each of which displays an individual and differentiated melodic contour and rhythmic profile 2. In any of the other arts, counterpoint refers to a theme or element that forms a contrast with another • Cynicism is a synonym of “sarcasm” • Don Juanesque is an adjective which derives from Don Juan Tenorio, a legendary Spanish nobleman known for his seduction of women. The name itself has expanded its meaning, so it refers to a man casually sexual with many women • Fetish means something artificial and false • Highbrow means dealing with serious, especially cultural subjects, in an intellectual way • Inextricability is the impossibility to get free from something • Irony is a type of humour based on using words to suggest the opposite of their literal meaning. Irony also points to an incongruity between what actually happens and what might be expected to happen, especially when this incongruity seems absurd or laughable • Luciferic is an adjective which comes from Lucifer, a rebellious archangel who is held to be the same as Satan. 132

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

The musicalisation of fiction

• Messianic means here showing great enthusiasm and devotion • Oedipus complex: according to the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud, feelings or desires originating when a child, especially a son, unconsciously seeks sexual fulfillment with the parent of the opposite sex • Paradox is a statement, proposition or situation that seems to be absurd or contradictory but in fact is or may be true • Polemic is a passionate, and often controversial argument against or, less often, in favour of something or somebody • Sarcasm is cutting language. It uses remarks that mean the opposite of what they seem to say and are intended to mock. Sarcasm is closely related to irony • Satire attacks the vices and follies of humankind • Skepticism is an attitude marked by a tendency to doubt what others accept to be true In philosophy it is a doctrine that holds that true knowledge is not possible. • Witticism means clever remark

Gallery of Personalities • Pavlov, Ivan Petrovich (1849-1936) was a Russian physiologist. He became famous for his studies on conditioned reflexes with dogs. The implications of his studies were extrapolated to humans. Huxley was anxiously concerned with the implications of Pavlov’s findings, worrying that they may be applied to humans with disastrous effects leading to their transformation into obedient subjects. • Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm (1844-1900) was a German philosopher, author of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-1885) and one of the most influential thinkers of the 19th, 20th centuries and ever. He founded his philosophy on the will-to-power and rejected religion. Nietzsche’s attitude and inflamed tone, and also the spirit of his philosophy are highly relevant to any approach to Mark Rampion in Point Counter Point. • France, Anatole (1844-1924) was a French writer who produced a large body of writings, including novels, drama, verse, critical and philosophical essays, and historical works. The humanist spirit of Anatole France was a European formula which Huxley found most worth adapting to the context of British culture in the early decades of the 20th century. • Pirandello, Luigi (1867-1936) was an Italian playwright. His works, such as Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), which explore the human condition with grim humour, were models for Huxley. • Wilde, Oscar (1854-1900) was an Irish writer. His legendary wit made him a leading figure in society and an inspiring spirit for the literati (writers, critics, etc.) of the late 19th and early 20th century. • Shaw, George Bernard (1856-1950) was an Irish playwright. His witty and often cynical style was another model for Huxley, who developed an affinity to such spirits. Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

133

The musicalisation of fiction

• Richardson, Samuel (1689-1761) was a British writer whose novels Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747-1748), and other novels in epistolary (letter) form, had a major influence on the development of the English novel. • Fielding, Henry (1707-1754) was a British novelist and dramatist. He is considered to be a founder of the English novel, with Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749). • Austen, Jane (1775-1817) was a British novelist, writer of elegant, satirical fiction, including Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Emma (1816). • Eliot, George (1819-1880) was one of the greatest British novelists, whose naturalistic and humanistic books include Adam Bede (1859) and Middlemarch (1871-1872). • Eggeling, Viking (1880-1925) was a painter who made an international career. Since 1897 he worked as a book dealer in Germany, later as an independent artist in Paris. During World War I he taught drawing and sports in Zurich, where he was introduced to a circle of avant-garde artists and created his first sketches for image rolls and musical painting. The interest taken by Eggeling and avantgarde artists in adapting musical techniques to the visual arts can be seen in relation to the interest modernist experimental writers such as Joyce, Huxley and Woolf took in achieving this new form of art dialogue and inter-connection in literature. Indeed, it may be argued that the early 20th century arts developed this very strong tendency of musicalisation. • Booth, Filomena de Andrade is a contemporary American painter. She describes herself as “primarily an abstract expressionist artist” although from time to time she “may paint in a more realistic or impressionistic style”. Her “Counterpoint” may be a good illustration of Huxley’s technique of fractured reflections in Point Counter Point. This technique is what Huxley applies throughout the book by having his characters partially or relatively reflect on the same “reality”. The effect suggested both by Huxley in his novel and by Filomena de Andrade Booth in her painting is that reflections look like images in a mirror, which varies its focus. Thus, some reflections look smaller or bigger if compared to one another, while at the same time their partial and relative status is suggested by cracks in the mirror. SAA 7 What is Huxley’s major contribution to modernism? In your opinion, is it also an essential contribution to English fiction? Send the answers to these questions to your tutor. Do not take more than three pages. Please note that the quality of your ideas and the coherence of the essay will be 70 % of your grade, while the accuracy of your language will count for 30 %. 134

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

The musicalisation of fiction

Answers to SAQs SAQ 1 Rampion finds himself surrounded by people who are less than fully human. To his mind, those who deny their humanity are “perverts”. In the context of Point Counter Point, Rampion’s remark is justifiable, all the more so as the audience to whom he makes his point are Burlap, Quarles, and Spandrell, who are perverts. At the same time, Rampion’s point here can be seen as a critique of the novel of ideas, related as it is to the sterility of modernity and of modern ideas in particular. Please revise section 7.2 in case you have failed to give an answer comparable to the one given to SAQ 1 in this section. SAQ 2 Rampion’s point here leads to the novel Brave New World. There is an incongruity between his remark of living “dualistically” as robots at work, on the one hand, and as human beings for the rest of the time, on the other. This point actually expresses the opposite of Rampion’s ideal of the perfect harmony the individuals should achieve within and without in order to maintain their human status. Why does Rampion make this point to Quarles? The answer may be that Rampion objects to any form of dehumanization, and that he considers Quarles’s cold and abstract intellectualism to be one of these forms leading to “robotism”. Please revise section 7.4 in case you have failed to give an answer comparable to the one given to SAQ 2 in this section. SAQ 3 Philip’s point of putting a novelist into a novel reflects on Huxley’s own technique of doing the same thing in Point Counter Point. He puts Philip into Point Counter Point, just as Philip (the novelist inside the novel) plans to do in his projected novel. The fact is that Philip’s point is to multiply the novelists he puts into his projected novel, which creates a special effect. This implies going as deep and as far as possible until you create an effect of the so-called Chinese boxes (box within box within box within box within box, etc., with virtually no end or limits). The implications are manifold: just one novelist (that is one reflective mind) cannot do justice to the complexity of reality; subjectivities and scientific backgrounds differ, but at the same time subjectivities are limited to one field, and findings are partial. “Truths” cannot be fixed. That is why the novel needs many points of view (novelists) which can multiply the approaches and perspectives. Philip’s point of multiplying the novelists inside his novel is also self-ironical and critical in that it exposes the relativity of truth and the fragility of story-telling with which the novel so painfully struggles. Please revise section 7.5 in case you have failed to give an answer comparable to the one given to SAQ 3 in this section. Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural 135

The musicalisation of fiction

SAQ 4 Spandrell is a distinctly Freudian conception. First, plainly, there is his Oedipus complex‫٭‬. Very significantly, he is also driven by death instincts. According to Freud, death instincts further the most universal endeavour of all living substance – namely to return to a state of inactivity. In this confrontation between Spandrell and Rampion, music provides Spandrell with an abstraction. On the other hand, Rampion is a pagan, natural spirit, a worshipper of life. To him, abstraction (here the non-physical abstraction of music) is dangerous. It is obvious that Mark Rampion and Spandrell are the opposite of each other. So are their ideas and attitudes to life. The argument between the two is the dramatization of a debate within Huxley himself. A part of the author that desires life (Rampion’s point) is checked by another part that aspires to a heaven of inactivity (Spandrell’s point supported by Beethoven’s Quartet). Thus Point Counter Point represents Huxley’s own crisis. Please revise section 7.6 in case you have failed to give an answer comparable to the one given to SAQ 4 in this section. SAQ 5 The chief characteristic of the novel of ideas is that its characters are embodiments of ideas. Indeed, throughout Point Counter Point the reader gets the feeling that characters are validated by their ideas. However, since the ideas of all characters clash, it is impossible to locate the novelist’s own philosophy in a single character. To fail to be “a born novelist” does not mean to fail to be a novelist at all. The difference is that while the born or congenital novelist is an incessant spinner of tales largely for their own sake, the noncongenital novelist or modern satirical novelist of ideas is an intellectually superior being. The noncongenital novelist successfully simulates the behaviour of a novelist to dramatize his themes and thus gain an audience. Anyway, the audience targeted by this kind of novel can only be an intellectual elite. Please revise section 7.7 in case you have failed to give an answer comparable to the one given to SAQ 5 in this section.

Bibliography Ferns, C.S. (1980) Aldous Huxley: Novelist, The Athlone Press, London (Chapter 4 ”Point Counter Point and Eyeless in Gaza) Huxley, Aldous (1994) Point Counter Point, Penguin Books Meckier, Jerome (ed.) (1995) Critical Essays on Aldous Huxley, E. G. K. Hall & Co., New York (Introduction: Aldous Huxley and the Congenital Novelists: New Ideas about the Novel of Ideas by Jerome Meckier and ”Accepting the Universe: The Rampion Hypothesis in Point Counter Point and Island” by Keith May) 136

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

From modernism to postmodernism

UNIT 8 FROM MODERNISM TO POSTMODERNISM Unit Outline 8 8.1 8.2 8.2.1 8.2.2 8.3 8.3.1 8.3.2 8.3.3 8.4 8.4.1 8.4.2 8.4.3 8.4.4 8.4.5 8.4.6 8.5 8.5.1 8.5.2 8.5.3

From Modern to Postmodern Unit Objectives Postmodernism in Literature and the Arts Postmodernist Aesthetics Image, Copy, Surface, Spectacle Collage / Montage The Postmodernism of Play Intertextuality, Intertext Metafiction Alternative Worlds; Heterotopia The Postmodernism of Play in John Fowles’s Novels “Godgames” in The Magus Intertextuality in The Magus Metafiction in John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman Narrative Double Voice and Double Vision in The French Lieutenant’s Woman Authorial Intrusions in The French Lieutenant’s Woman Multiple Endings in The French Lieutenant’s Woman David Lodge’s Campus Novel Campus Plot and Considerate Humour in the Psychological Novel Nice Work Alternative Worlds and Intertextuality in Nice Work Writing as Communication; Art as Delight

137 137 138 139 139 140 142 143 143 143 144

Summary Key Concepts Glossary of Terms and Comments Gallery of Personalities SAA No. 8 Answers to SAQs Bibliography

153 153 154 155 155 155 157

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

144 147 147 148 148 150 151 151 152 153

137

From modernism to postmodernism

Unit objectives

After you have completed the study of this unit you should be able to: • Identify postmodernism as a change and a new mode • Identify the main aspects of postmodernist aesthetics: - image, copy, surface, spectacle - collage / montage • Explain the notion of postmodernism of play • Identify intertext, metafiction, alternative worlds and heterotopia as main aspects of postmodernism of play • Explain how these aspects work in John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, The Magus and in David Lodge’s Nice Work • Identify “godgames” and indefinite ending in John Foweles’s novel The Magus • Explain the effects of these strategies in The Magus • Identify authorial tricks and multiple endings in The French Lieutenant’s Woman • Explain the effects of these strategies • Explain why David Lodge’s Nice Work can be considered a “campus novel” • Identify the refined intelligent humour and irony in David Lodge’s Nice Work • Explain Lodge’s point of “writing as essentially communication” and “art as delight”

8. From Modern to Postmodern In “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1924), the most important manifesto of British literary modernism, Virginia Woolf stated that “We are trembling on the verge of one of the great ages of English literature.” That age was, of course, modernism, and Woolf sensed it as a change. Approximately sixty years later, the theorist David Harvey was wrestling with the concept of postmodernism, arguing that “the culture of the advanced capitalist societies has undergone a profound shift in the structure of feeling”. It is interesting to notice that the tone of Woolf’s discourse, when she argued the change brought about by the Georgians (see unit 3 for “Georgians”) in 1924, strikingly resembles the tone of the theorists of postmodernism. What these discourses have in common is an awareness of the fact that the respective changes are obvious and undeniable, on the one hand, yet hard to pin down and disputable, on the other. The dominant mode of literature between 1960 and 1990 was postmodernist writing. A few events have been considered to underpin the period: basically, the beginning of the postmodern as a period was marked by the assassination of John F. Kennedy; its historic landmarks are the erection and demolition of the Berlin Wall. At some point in the late 1970s, postmodernism, which seems to 138

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

From modernism to postmodernism

have originated in America, migrated to Europe via Paris and Frankfurt. As the dates and locations suggest, postmodernism is a phenomenon with deep roots in the U.S. However, the connections with Europe cannot be denied. Since the contemporary world can no longer be seen as a network of distinct geopolitical and cultural locations, postmodernism is an international phenomenon.

8.1. Postmodernism in Literature and the Arts Harvey argues that postmodernism is not simply a version of modernism, although its name may suggest either that it is, or that the two modes are different or rather both alternatives. In order to sort out this complicated and complex issue, Harvey argues that “real revolutions in sensibility can occur when latent and dominant ideas in one period become explicit and dominant in another”.

Stop and Think! What does Harvey mean by the remark quoted above? Do you agree to it? Make your point in the space provided below. You will find some keys to this answer in the paragraphs below.

‘Postmodernism’ was first used emphatically in the 1960s by literary critics who held divergent views of what a postmodern literature was. It was only during the early and mid – 70s that the term gained a much wider currency, encompassing first architecture, then dance, theatre, painting, film and music. While the postmodern break with a “classical” modernism (also called “high modernism”) was fairly visible in architecture and the visual arts, the notion of a postmodern rupture in literature was much harder to ascertain. Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

139

From modernism to postmodernism

By the early 1980s, postmodernity in social theory and postmodernism in the arts was firmly opposed to modernity in social theory and modernism in the arts. Around that date, this opposition had become one of the most debated issues in the intellectual life of Western societies.

8.2. Postmodernist Aesthetics Most theorists of postmodernism agree that its most startling characteristic is its total acceptance of the ephemerality‫٭‬, fragmentation, discontinuity, and the chaotic that formed one half of Baudelaire’s‫ ٭‬conception of modernity. While it is true that this is essentially what modernism and postmodernism have in common, it is also true that postmodernism assumes and responds to those aspects in a very particular way. Unlike modernism, which did its best to give shape and neat design to chaos, postmodernism does not try to go beyond or counteract it. On the contrary, as Harvey shows in The Condition of Postmodernity, “postmodernism swims, even wallows, in the fragmentary and the chaotic currents of change, as if that is all there is”.

8.2.1. Image, Copy, Surface, Spectacle Postmodernism and its theories and aesthetics imply that the image, the appearance and the spectacle can be experienced only as pure and unrelated presents in time. History is no longer a series of events. The postmodern has developed strategies of flattening history. TV makes it possible for the viewer to consume images of ancient, modern and contemporary history (very often in a jumbled “order”) while watching a programme, film or show that lasts from half an hour to two hours and a half, the longest. What the TV viewer experiences is, therefore, a journey through history, which is no longer a gradual accumulation of events. History becomes, in a TV feature, a flat surface. It loses its depth and threatens to become a rush of images without density. History also becomes a spectacle.

140

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

From modernism to postmodernism

Stop and think! Think of your most recent and / or most challenging experience when you watched a feature on “Discovery” channel or “Tele Enciclopedia”. Could you relate the notions of image, “flattened history”, spectacle and spectatorship to this experience? Describe your experience of “flattened history”, image and spectacle in the space provided below. Please add your answer to the portfolio to be discussed in the tutorials.

Such a breakdown of the temporal order of things gives rise to a particular treatment of the past. Thus postmodernism abandons all sense of historical continuity in a way which differs both from the traditional perception of time and from modernist strategies of handling time. Through the media technologies, postmodernism develops an incredible ability to flatten history and absorb whatever it finds there as some aspect of the present. It turns everything into a spectacle to be consumed here and now. The development of the media and such technologies as copy machines has influenced the arts and their aesthetics. Thus postmodernist visual artists and writers simply reproduce images. The modernist ‘aura’ of the artist as creator disappears. The postmodernist arts resort to frank confiscation, quotation, excerption‫٭‬, accumulation and repetition of already existing images.

8.2.2. Collage / Montage Postmodernism draws on modernist collage / montage techniques. Obviously modernism deployed them as a means of figuring fragmentariness, bits and pieces of various materials and sources, discourses and voices, which only art could piece together (See Unit 3, section 3.4.6 for the use of collage / montage in modernist art and literature).

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

141

From modernism to postmodernism

Postmodernism picked on the collage / montage technique out of a desire to figure this inherited fragmentariness, without going beyond it. What postmodernists found appealing in the collage / montage technique was also its own principle of frank confiscation, which was alien to modernism. The effect of postmodernist collage / montage is to break or else deconstruct the power of the author to suggest meanings or offer a continuous narrative. What postmodernist collage / montage stimulates in both “producers” and “consumers” is a sense of popular participation. The authority of the cultural producers is reduced to a minimum because images and icons are not their own. This justifies the notion of “frank confiscation”. As the phrase “frank confiscation” suggests, existing images, icons, messages are used by the postmodernists just to create new effects with old bits and pieces. In their turn, consumers are given the opportunity to democratically participate in the production of signification, since they are supposed to put the bits and pieces together and make sense of the whole.

David Salle “Tight as Houses”

142

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

From modernism to postmodernism

SAQ 1 Examine David Salle’s “Tight as Houses” (1980), which is an illustration of collage (see picture above). What elements of collage can you distinguish there?

Compare your answers to those in the “Answers” section at the end of the unit.

8.3 The Postmodernism of Play Theorists of postmodernism oppose the use of play, a characteristic of postmodernism, to purpose, a characteristic of modernism. Indeed, since purpose and fixity are not relevant for postmodernists, play is the name of the game with writers such as John Fowles or David Lodge. Of course, the term play is closely related to process‫ ٭‬/ performance‫ ٭‬/ happening‫ ٭‬and participation‫٭‬. The postmodernists see history as a story. This is why postmodernism is intertextual. We are invited to contemplate not what the past was or seems to be like, but how it has been represented by other texts. We have the impression that there is no world outside the text / stage: Shakespeare’s metaphor of the world as a stage and every one of us as actors is pushed beyond the limit. Theatricality seems to be the only certainty offered by the work of art.

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

143

From modernism to postmodernism

8.3.1. Intertextuality; Intertext Intertextuality is a much broader term than influence (the direct effect, conscious or unconscious, of one author on another). Intertextuality is the general condition by which it is possible for a text to be a text: the whole network of relations, conventions and expectations by which the text is defined. Many recent theorists and critics argue that all texts are necessarily related by language, and that there is no such thing as an absolute text. Intertextuality and intertext are terms used to refer to the relationship between the text under discussion and other texts, which may be literary or non-literary works. In other words, the notion of intertextuality lays emphasis on the fact that any given text is a connection or link of other literary and non-literary texts related by language.

8.3.2. Metafiction Metafiction is a mode of writing that comments on its own activities. This implies that metafiction is a self-reflexive mode. Literature is said to be self-reflexive when the author deliberately draws attention to the fictional nature of the work. This mode is by no means new. It was used by Shakespeare in his play Hamlet, when Prince Hamlet comments upon the actors’ tendency to overact in the play within a play he has arranged. Metafictional techniques were less frequently employed in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but have returned to be self-consciously and insistently used in many recent novels. John Fowles’s The Magus, The French Lieutenant’s Woman and David Lodge’s Nice Work, to be discussed in the next subchapters, are examples of the metafictional mode in contemporary British fiction.

8.3.3. Alternative Worlds; Heterotopia Being so pluralistic and indeterminate, postmodernism also “plays” with the idea of alternative worlds. This is precisely what the concept of heterotopia means: the coexistence of a large number of fragmentary possible worlds. Since they are caught in this heterotopic space, characters no longer contemplate how they can unmask a central mystery. Instead they are forced to ask, ‘Which world is this? Where am I? What is to be done in the world I inhabit now?’

144

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

From modernism to postmodernism

8.4. The Postmodernism of Play in John Fowles’s Novels John Fowles is a contemporary English novelist and essayist, a master of layered story-telling, illusionism and ambiguous endings. Among Fowles’s best novels are The Magus, originally published in 1965 and reissued in a revised version twelve years later and The French Lieutenant’s Woman, published in 1969. Both novels have been adapted into the screen and have gained almost a cult status. Fowles’s protagonists must often confront their past, self delusions‫ ٭‬and illusions, in order to gain their personal freedom or peace of mind.

8.4.1. “Godgames” in The Magus John Fowles’s draft title for this novel was originally “The Godgame”. The Magus is told from the point of view of Nicholas Urfe, a young man bored with life, who decides to take a position as the English teacher at the Lord Byron School in Greece, on the island of Phraxos. The mysteries begin as Nicholas goes swimming, and someone leaves a book of poems on the beach, obviously meant for him to find. As he looks in the woods nearby, he finds a gate to a villa with a sign Salle D’Attente, French for “waiting room”. One of his colleagues at the school explains that the villa is owned by a rich man named Maurice Conchis. When Urfe accepts Conchis’s invitation at the villa, the mysteries begin to proliferate. Conchis starts playing a series of “godgames” with Urfe. From now on, Urfe will never be able to tell which world he inhabits. That night, as Nicholas is going to sleep, he hears voices singing a war song and smells a foul stench. The next day, Conchis encourages Nicholas to read a pamphlet written by a man waiting to be hanged in 1677. Nicholas takes the pamphlet with him on a walk, falls asleep and awakes to see a man in 17th century dress staring at him from across a ravine! The man disappears before Nicholas can reach him.

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

145

From modernism to postmodernism

SAQ 2 Are there alternative worlds in The Magus? Relate this concept to Conchis’s “godgame”.

Compare your answers to those in the “Answers” section at the end of the unit. At dinner that night, Conchis tells of his own wartime pretense to be on leave so that he could return to England to visit Lily, a girl he was in love with. As Nicholas retires, he hears a harpsichord‫٭‬ accompanied by a recorder and investigates, to find Conchis with a beautiful girl in Edwardian clothes, but he refrains himself from interrupting them. The next weekend, “Lily” joins them after dinner and speaks the language of the early 1900s. Their conversation is interrupted when a horn sounds, a spot illuminates a nymph‫ ٭‬who runs by, pursued by a satyr‫٭‬, and another woman seems to shoot the satyr with an arrow. Nicholas is bewildered but decides that Conchis must be recreating masques for his own amusement. Lily refuses to explain, and Conchis talks in parables. 146

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

From modernism to postmodernism

SAQ 3 What are the elements of play, process, performance, happening and participation used by Fowles in The Magus?

Compare your answers to those in the “Answers” section at the end of the unit. The maze‫ ٭‬continues and the plot thickens. With a mixture of bewilderment and horror, curiosity and pleasure, Nicholas gets himself caught in it. Conchis tells him things only to deny them afterwards. At some point, Conchis explains to Nicholas that he is experimenting with a new form of theatre, without audience, in which everyone is an actor. As a matter of fact, readers are invited to make a connection between themselves, their own quest, the maze they are in as readers of this novel and Nicholas’s story of initiation. The ‘theatre’ Conchis talks about is a form of postmodernist performance with happening and participation. After a new series of baffling experiences, which are as many acts in the ‘theatre’ staged by Conchis, Nicholas is still looking for clues, but those clues get him nowhere. In the last part of the book, Nicholas begins to appreciate what has happened and even declines to discuss it with his immediate predecessor at the Lord Byron School. Finally, Alison, the girlfriend he had left in London for this adventure in Greece, appears when he least expects her. They have a confrontation in Regent’s Park, where he at first suspects that they are being watched. Nicholas gives her an ultimatum – “them or me”, since he suspects that Alison plots against him with Conchis and his “actors”. She rejects the ultimatum, and Nicholas walks away from her. When she follows him, he slaps her without understanding why. Then he realizes that they are unobserved and asks forgiveness. The novel ends at that point, with their future relationship uncertain. Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

147

From modernism to postmodernism

SAQ 4 Why does this unresolved ending of The Magus leave readers undecided?

Compare your answers to those in the “Answers” section at the end of the unit.

8.4.2. Intertextuality in The Magus In The Magus Fowles used elements from Shakespeare’s play The Tempest (1623). Prospero, the “make-believer” in The Tempest is “played” by Conchis in The Magus. However, the novel weaves not only the thick maze of the plot but also a thick maze of intertextual allusions and references. Shakespeare’s The Tempest is not the only intertextual model of The Magus. Besides it, Fowles’s novel interweaves in the story Greek myths (see subchapter 2.1 above), psychoanalysis, remote and modern historical references (like Nazis), etc. Fowles himself acknowledged the influence of psychologist Carl Gustav Jung‫( ٭‬see Unit 3, Gallery) and such literary models as Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw and Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. Intertextuality makes Conchis’s “godgame” appealing, culturally dense and challenging.

8.4.3. Metafiction in The French Lieutenant’s Woman The French Lieutenant’s Woman is a novel that grew out of a dream the author had of a woman standing at the edge of a quay, looking out to sea (see quote 28 in the Reader). The novel is set largely in Lyme Regis‫ ٭‬in the 1860s and recreates, indeed revisits the Victorian romance and the world of Thomas Hardy. 148

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

From modernism to postmodernism

Among the metafictional techniques employed by Fowles in The French Liutenant’s Woman are: • examining fictional systems • incorporating elements of both literary theory and criticism in his fiction • using intertextuality Fowles, like many other authors of metafiction, violates narrative levels by: • intruding to comment on writing • involving himself with fictional characters • directly addressing the reader • openly questioning how narrative assumptions and conventions transform and filter reality, trying to ultimately prove that no singular truths or meanings exist Embracing the metafictional mode, Fowles employs unconventional and experimental techniques by: • rejecting conventional plot • refusing the attempt to make the novel “an illusion of reality” • subverting conventions to transform ‘reality’ into a suspect concept • displaying self-reflexivity (a function which enables the readers to understand the process by which they read the world as a text).

8.4.4. Narrative Double Voice and Double Vision in The French Lieutenant’s Woman The first chapter of The French Lieutenant’s Woman describes Lyme Regis, the main setting of the novel, and its Cobb, a harbour quay on which three characters are standing: Charles Smithson, Ernestina Freeman and Sarah Woodruff. The describing narrator has a distinctive voice, all- knowing yet intimate, with a wide-ranging vocabulary and vast knowledge of political and geographical history. The strange effect of this voice is that it knows the 19th century very intimately, while at the same time implies that it belongs to a “present” which is not the 19th century. As a matter of fact, the narrator’s double vision and double voice make this individual as important as the characters in this novel.

8.4.5. Authorial Intrusions in The French Lieutenant’s Woman Charles is a middle-aged bachelor and an amateur scientist engaged to Ernestina, who is portrayed as a pretty but boringly conventional 19th century girl. Realizing Ernestina’s limitations, Charles grows more and more attracted to Sarah, a mysterious outcast with a mysterious past of romance which she seems to have invented for herself. Chapter 12 in the book ends with the questions: “Who is Sarah? Out of what shadows does she come?” Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

149

From modernism to postmodernism

Chapter 13 (a very significant number!) begins “I do not know”, and the narrator proceeds to discuss the difficulty of writing a story when characters behave independently rather than as he would like them to behave. Charles, he complains, did not return to Lyme as the narrator had intended but went down to the Dairy to ask about Sarah. But, the narrator continues, times have changed, and the traditional novel is out of fashion, according to some. It is very significant, in terms of metafictional techniques used in this novel, that there are substantial interventions of what appears to be the author himself in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Thus, In “Notes on an Unfinished Novel”, which is a record of the way in which the novelist grew this novel, Fowles wrote: “…the ‘I’ who will make first person commentaries here and there in my story, and who will finally even enter it, will not be my real ‘I’ in 1967; but much more just another character, though in another category from the purely fictional ones.”

SAQ 5 Now that you have read the “Metafiction” subchapter (8.3.2), answer the following question: which of the metafictional techniques listed there did Fowles use in the passage quoted above? What is the effect of this technique?

Compare your answers to those in the “Answers” section at the end of the unit.

150

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

From modernism to postmodernism

There are two occasions in The French Lieutenant’s Woman when the novelist himself actually enters his own fiction, “massively bearded … a man of forty or so.” For the last two interchangeable endings of the novel to exist, the “author” turns back his watch 15 minutes. For the first ending to be denied, the narrator intervenes in chapter 45 to tell us that the two previous chapters did not “really” happen, but were Charles’s indulgence in a habit we all have of “writing fictional futures for ourselves.” There is much playfulness and freedom here on the part of the author, who wants us to take our own liberty of making what sense we can of these fragmented strains of the book (see quote 29 in the Reader).

8.4.6. Multiple Endings in The French Lieutenant’s Woman This metafictional experimental novel has three different endings: one heart-warming, another shocking, and still another doing justice to the Victorian morals. Thus, the readers are given the freedom to choose which ending suits them or to juggle with possibilities: Charles breaks up with Ernestina and is legally sanctioned for his ungentlemanly behaviour, or Charles breaks up with Ernestina and eventually reunites with Sarah, or he breaks up with Ernestina but he and Sarah will never be together.

SAQ 6 How do the multiple endings in The French Lieutenant’s Woman engage the reader? Relate Fowles’s multiple endings with postmodernist indeterminacy and refusal of fixity.

Compare your answers to those in the “Answers” section at the end of the unit. Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

151

From modernism to postmodernism

8.5. David Lodge’s Campus Novel Nice Work (1988) is the last of the novels in the campus trilogy which began with Changing Places (1975) and was followed by Small World (1984). They are called “campus novels” because they are actually set in academic campuses and deal with academic life. Romanian critic Lidia Vianu interviewed contemporary English writer and critic David Lodge and asked him about the campus theme in his novels: “You are not very fond of the academic world, and use it to create humorous patterns which support your plots. The basic idea is that academics get themselves into situations which are hilarious, and even when you are not directly mocking at them, when the novel is more or less in earnest (see Nice Work), you cannot help creating ironical parallelisms”. Lodge’s answer to this was: “I was a university teacher from 1960 to 1987 (part-time in the last three years), then I took early retirement to write full-time. I enjoyed my work as an academic, especially the first two decades, and took it seriously, as both teacher and scholar. /…/ I never felt any creative or intellectual tension between these two activities: they complemented each other. But on the social-psychological level, it was a kind of schizophrenic existence. I did not operate in the university as a novelist – I did not read my work on campus or discuss it with my students or teach creative writing (at Birmingham – I did elsewhere). I operated as a serious, committed academic. The novels, which often satirised or carnivalised‫ ٭‬the academic world, belonged to a separate compartment of my life”.

8.5.1. Campus Plot and Considerate Humour in Nice Work Being considerate, deep and minutely psychological, Nice Work breaks with the previous comic approach of Changing Places and Small World. It does so without losing the very necessary sense of humour. Nice Work is set in the same Rummidge, “an imaginary city, with imaginary universities and imaginary factories, inhabited by imaginary people, which occupies, for the purposes of fiction, the space where Birmingham is to be found on maps of the so-called real world”. The two protagonists of the novel Vic (Victor) Wilcox (the managing director of an engineering firm) and Robyn Penrose (a feminist leftist academic who teaches English literature, more precisely the English Industrial Novel of the 19th century) are brought together by “The Industry Year Shadow Scheme”, meaning that, on the occasion of 1986 being designated “Industry Year by the Government”, “each faculty should nominate a member of staff to ‘shadow’ some person employed at senior management level in local manufacturing industry /…/ in the course of the winter term”. 152

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

From modernism to postmodernism

In an ironical way, Robyn is faced with the real colours of contemporary industry, and she realizes how deeply disgusted and scared she is by it. What the novel dramatises, thematises and puts in an ironical light is that Vic and Robyn are a whole universe apart, in spite of Robyn’s expertise on the industrial novel.

8.5.2. Alternative Worlds and Intertextuality in Nice Work David Lodge deliberately creates an intersection of alternative worlds (19th century fictions intersecting Lodge’s own 20th century fiction intersecting the reader’s own fictitious (?) “reality”) in the manner stated by John Fowles: “fiction is woven into all”. Thus, the postmodernist fictions of Fowles and Lodge challenge the readers’ assumption that there are clear-cut borderlines between “reality” and “fiction”. In Nice Work, the words of the motto taken from Charlotte Brontë’s Prelude to her novel Shirley “something real, cool and solid lies before you; something unromantic as Monday morning” are a perfect introduction to Vic Wilcox’s 20th century world, which begins with: “Monday January 13th, 1986. Victor Wilcox lies awake, in the dark bedroom, waiting for his quartz alarm clock to bleep.” Each of the six parts of Nice Work is prefaced by a 19th century motto. The 19th century novels, providing Lodge with those mottos, are the subject of lectures held by Robyn Penrose, an “authority” in the field. If a motto from Charlotte Brontë’s Prelude to Shirley prefaced the first part of Lodge’s 20th century novel, another motto from the same 19th century fiction prefaces the last, its meaning perfectly matching Lodge’s point: “The story is told. I think I now see the judicious reader putting on his spectacles to look for the moral. It would be an insult to his sagacity‫ ٭‬to offer directions. I only say, God speed him in the quest!”

SAQ 7 What is the effect of these two framing mottos?

Compare your answers to those in the “Answers” section at the end of the unit. Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

153

From modernism to postmodernism

8.5.3. Writing as Communication; Art as Delight Nice Work insists not only upon the tricky borderline between life /reality and fiction / imagination, making it feel suspect, but also foregrounds the power of imagination / fiction. Two people, Vic and Robyn, unlikely to meet otherwise, are brought together and forced to communicate. The novel also shows that communication between them is not easy: their worlds are fundamentally different. Despite all this, a level of communication still exists: there is communication between Robyn the academic and Vic the managing director, between Robyn’s fictitious “life” and the fictions she teaches, between 19th and 20th century fiction and between the world of the text and the reader’s world. In Nice Work, Lodge was determined to explore this dimension of writing because to him, writing is “essentially communication”. Lodge also believes that “in the highest sense, art must entertain, or give delight”. How can art do it in our (post)postmodern world? It seems that art can “entertain” or “give delight” by being playful and intertextual, by breaking borderlines with its self-conscious and self-reflexive metafictional techniques.

Summary This unit introduces you to postmodernism and its aesthetics, pointing both to what connects postmodernism to modernism and what separates the two modes. The postmodernism of play is a version of postmodernism that uses a lot of elements characteristic of this contemporary mode of writing. Thus, intertextuality and metafiction emphasize the playfulness of postmodernist texts. Postmodernism of play is illustrated by novels acknowledged to be representative of their kind: John Fowles’s The Magus and The French Lieutenant’s Woman and David Lodge’s Nice Work. By exploring the ways in which these contemporary British writers make use of intertextuality and metafiction in their novels, this unit traces the trends in late 20th century fiction, which reshaped this genre and gave it the “looks” it has today.

Key Terms • • • • • • • • 154

Image, copy, surface, spectacle Frank confiscation Spectacle and spectatorship Collage / montage Postmodernism of play Intertextuality Metafiction Self-reflexive and self-conscious fiction Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

From modernism to postmodernism

• • • •

Theatricality and “godgame” Carnival and carnivalesque Alternative worlds and heterotopia Campus novel

Glossary of Terms and Comments • Carnivalise means the use of “carnivalesque” elements. These are borrowed in fiction from “carnival”, a public festive occasion or period, often with street processions, costumes, music and dancing. In fiction, the term “carnivalesque” is used as a means of giving authors, characters and readers the freedom to play • Collage refers to a combination of different things. This technique is used in architecture and the visual arts but also in literature • Ephemerality means lasting for only a short period of time • Fragmentariness is related to excerption, which means a section or passage taken from a longer work, for example, a book, film, musical composition, or document. Excerption can also be related to collage / montage • Happening is an improvised or informal performance or demonstration, often dramatic in form and using the participation of the audience • Harpsichord is a keyboard instrument replaced by the piano in the 19th century • Lyme Regis is a seaside resort in Dorset, Southern England • Maze means puzzle and confusion • Montage is the creation of image from collected pieces • Nymph is a minor goddess or spirit of nature in mythology, traditionally regarded as a beautiful young woman • Palimpsest means a manuscript written over a partly erased older manuscript in such a way that the old words can be read beneath the new • Participation is the act of taking part in an activity • Performance is related to process, theatricality and happening. In the theories of postmodernism, performance is an unconventional presentation of an artistic work in front of an audience that usually participates in it • Process emphasizes the unfinished nature of a series of actions ● Sagacity means wisdom (profound knowledge and understanding) • Satyr is a wood-dwelling creature in Greek mythology, with the head and body of a man and the ears, horns and legs of a goat • Ventriloquism is the art or skill of producing vocal sounds that seem to come from something other than the speaker Note that here the term refers to writing and not to speaking

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

155

From modernism to postmodernism

Gallery of Personalities • Baudelaire, Charles (1821 - 1867) was a French critic and poet. As an art critic, Baudelaire was particularly interested in the artistic productions of the most innovative painters of his time. His remarks are acute. He gave valuable insights and contributions to an analysis of modernity.

SAA No. 8 Comment upon the playfulness of John Fowles’s The Magus, French Lieutenant’s Woman and David Lodge’s Nice Work in the light of the remark given below: “The commentary provided by self-conscious fiction carries the more or less explicit message: ‘this is make-believe’ or ‘this is a play’”. (From Patricia Waugh, Metafiction. The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction) Send your essay (not longer than four pages) to your tutor. Please note that the quality of your ideas and the coherence of the essay will be 70 % of your grade, while the accuracy of your language will count for 30 %.

Answers to SAQs SAQ 1 The technique used by David Salle in this collage is that of colliding and superimposing images. Thus, the viewer’s eyes are invited to trace a pattern out of superimposed and even colliding patterns. What the eyes can discern is not visible at first sight. The eyes need some re-adjustment to this superimposition and collision of a naked woman lying in what seems to be a deliberately darker background and the suggestion of a silhouette in white standing in the foreground. There is actually a web of traces in the foreground that suggests that the “silhouette” may be not just something else but other things as well. Please revise section 8.2.2 in case you have failed to give an answer comparable to the one given to SAQ 1 in this section.

156

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

From modernism to postmodernism

SAQ 2 It is obvious that Conchis plays with Urfe a “godgame” in which he performs the role of “God” (actually a puppeteer and an illusionist), and Urfe the role of a pawn on his chess board or else an “actor” in his “theatre” or even a “puppet” in Conchis’s hands. Conchis is also the director of this “theatre” or “performance”, which is essentially postmodernist in the sense that it plays with Urfe’s need to distinguish between “reality” and “illusion”. Conchis’s “godgame” aims to blur this distinction. The development of the plot in The Magus so far reaches a point at which Urfe, a 20th century man, finds himself in the 17th century without knowing how and when he got there. The shock both he and the readers are given at this point is that nothing is certain or fixed, the world we inhabit even less so. SAQ 3 Conchis continues to play his “godgame” with Urfe. Besides blurring the distinction between “reality” and “illusion”, his “godgame” also blurs the distinction between the actors’ active performance and the spectators’ passive watching. In Conchis’s “godgame”, which seems to be a series of playful improvisations (“happenings”), both actors and spectators are performers. Thus, Conchis’s “godgame” implies a high degree of participation both on the part of his “hired” actors (though Urfe and the readers find out that they are actors only later, and not even that is certain!) and on the part of Urfe and even the readers. Readers “participate” mainly in the sense that they tend to identify with Urfe in this strange “scenario” of initiation. SAQ 4 The ending of The Magus is an excellent example of postmodernist indeterminacy. The indeterminacy of the ending only reinforces the playfulness of the whole text. In other words, a postmodernist like Fowles could not have made a point of indeterminacy if he had provided the readers with a determinate ending. This would have spoiled the whole point of the “godgame” and Urfe’s appreciation of it. Please revise section 8.4.1 in case you have failed to give answers comparable to those given to SAQ 2, SAQ 3 and SAQ 4 in this section. SAQ 5 Authorial intrusion is a metafictional element. Thus, Fowles’s postmodernist novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman implies, reminds us, and then reinforces that “authors” do not simply “invent” novels. “Authors” work through linguistic, artistic and cultural conventions. Therefore, they are themselves “invented” by readers who thus become “authors” working through linguistic, artistic and cultural conventions. Please revise section 8.4.5 in case you have failed to give an answer comparable to the one given to SAQ 5 in this section. Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

157

From modernism to postmodernism

SAQ 6 Metafictional novelists such as Fowles make the readers explicitly aware of their role as players. The reader of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, having to choose an ending, becomes a player in the game. The multiple endings in The French Lieutenant’s Woman also reinforce the postmodernist indeterminacy and refusal of fixity, which opposes the traditional realist view of clear resolution (one ending, which is the “solution” of plot, no matter how intricate plot may be). Please revise section 8.4.6 in case you have failed to give an answer comparable to the one given to SAQ 6 in this section. SAQ 7 Lodge submits himself to a kind of literary ventriloquism‫٭‬, in which he lets Brontë’s pen underwrite his text, provide or fail to provide the clues and give the reader as much liberty to travel through borderless worlds as one may take. The author himself takes the liberty to write his text as an intertext or palimpsest‫ ٭‬of intersecting layers of writing. Intertextuality, an essential aspect of metafiction, reinforces the idea that literary fiction is an intersection of multiple alternative worlds. Literary fiction is, in other words, a game of imagination. Please revise section 8.5.2 in case you have failed to give an answer comparable to the one given to SAQ 7 in this section.

Bibliography Fowles, John (1969) The French Lieutenant’s Woman, London, Cape Fowles, John (1977) The Magus, London, Cape Harvey, David (1990) The Condition of Postmodernity, An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Cambridge MA & Oxford UK: Blackwell Lodge, David (1990) Nice Work, Penguin Books Waugh, Patricia (1984) Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-conscious Fiction, London, Methuen (Chapters ”Worlds of Words: the “Fantastic as an Alternative World”, ”Fictionality and Context: from Role-playing to Language Games”) http://lidiavianu.scriptmania.com/david_lodge.htm

158

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

From modernism to postmodernism

SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. Burlui, Irina, Lectures in 20th Century British Literature, Editura Universităţii “Al. I. Cuza”, Iaşi, 1980 2. Călinescu, Matei, Cele cinci feţe ale modernităţii. Modernism, Avangardă, Decadenţă, Kitsch, Postmodernism, Editura Univers, Bucureşti, 1995 3. Cuţitaru, Codrin Liviu, The Victorian Novel. A Course in the 19 Century English Novel. A Critical Approach, Al. I. Cuza University Press, Iaşi, 2004 th

4. Ford, Boris (ed.), The New Pelican Guide to English Literature, vol. 7, From James to Eliot, Penguin Books, 1990 (see Part I, “The Social and Intellectual Background”, “Virginia Woolf: The Theory and Practice of Fiction”, “E. M. Forster’s Good Influence”, “The Consistency of James Joyce”, “D. H. Lawrence and Women in Love”) 5. Galea, Ileana, Victorianism and Literature, Editura Dacia, Cluj-Napoca, 1996 6. Miroiu, Mihai, Virginia Woolf, Editura Univers, Bucureşti, 1997 7. Vereş, Grigore, Charles Dickens, Editura Albatros, Bucureşti, 1984

Proiectul pentru Învăţământul Rural

159

The Nineteenth and Twentieth Century British Novel. A Reader

The Nineteenth and Twentieth Century British Novel. A Reader

160

Proiectul pentru Învǎţǎmântul Rural

The Nineteenth and Twentieth Century British Novel. A Reader

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY VICTORIAN NOVEL UNIT 1 VICTORIANISM: AN AGE OF EXTREMES Quote 1 “My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip. I give Pirrip as my father’s family name, on the authority of his tombstone and my sister – Mrs. Joe Gargery, who married the blacksmith. As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either of them (for their days were long before the days of photographs), my first fancies regarding what they were like, were unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on my father’s, gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription, “Also Georgiana Wife of the Above”, I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly. To five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long, which were arranged in a neat row beside their grave, and were sacred to the memory of five little brothers of mine – who gave up trying to get a living, exceedingly early in that universal struggle – I am indebted for a belief I religiously entertained that they had all been born on their backs with their hands in their trouser-pockets, and had never taken them out in this state of existence. Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea. My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out for certain that this big place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; and that Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and also Georgiana wife of the above, were dead and buried; and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger, infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead and buried; and that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond, was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing, was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip.” (Charles Dickens, Great Expectations)

Proiectul pentru Învǎţǎmântul Rural

161

The Nineteenth and Twentieth Century British Novel. A Reader

Quote 2 “Daylight began to forsake the red room; it was past four o’clock, and the beclouded afternoon was tending to drear twilight. I heard the rain still beating continuously on the staircase window, and the wind howling in the grove behind the hall; I grew by degrees cold as a stone, and then my courage sank. My habitual mood of humiliation, self-doubt, forlorn depression, fell damp on the embers of my decaying ire. All said I was wicked, and perhaps I might be so: what thought had I been but just conceiving of starving myself to death? That certainly was a crime: and was I fit to die? Or was the vault under the chancel of Gateshead Church an inviting bourne? In such vault I had been told did Mr Reed lie buried; and led by this thought to recall his idea, I dwelt on it with gathering dread. I could not remember him, but I knew that he was my own uncle – my mother’s brother – that he had taken me while a parentless infant to his house; and that in his last moments he had required a promise of Mrs Reed that she would rear and maintain me as one of her own children. Mrs Reed had probably considered that she had kept this promise; and so she had, I dare say, as well as her nature would permit her: but how could she really like an interloper, not of her race, and unconnected with her, after her husband’s death, by any tie? It must have been most irksome to find herself bound by a hardwrung pledge to stand in the stead of a parent to a strange child she could not love, and to see an uncongenial alien permanently intruded on her own family group. A singular notion dawned upon me. I doubted not – never doubted – that if Mr Reed had been alive he would have treated me kindly; and now, as I sat looking at the white bed and overshadowed walls – occasionally also turning a fascinated eye towards the dimly gleaming mirror – I began to recall what I had heard of dead men, troubled in their graves by the violation of their last wishes, revisiting the earth to punish the perjured and avenge the oppressed; and I thought Mr Reed’s spirit, harassed by the wrongs of his sister’s child, might quit its abode – whether in the church vault or in the unknown world of the departed – and rise before me in this chamber. I wiped my tears and hushed my sobs, fearful lest any sign of violent grief might waken a preternatural voice to comfort me, or elicit from the gloom some haloed face, bending over me with strange pity. This idea, consolatory in theory, I felt would be terrible if realized: with all my might I endeavoured to stifle it – I endeavoured to be firm. Shaking my hair from my eyes, I lifted my head and tried to look boldly round the dark room; at this moment a light gleamed on the wall. Was it, I asked myself, a ray from the moon penetrating some aperture in the blind? No; moonlight was still, and this stirred; while I gazed, it glided up to the ceiling and quivered over my head. I can now conjecture readily that this streak of light was, in all likelihood, a gleam from a lantern carried by some one across the lawn; but then, prepared as my mind was for horror, shaken as my nerves were by agitation, I thought the swift-darting beam was a herald of some coming vision from another world. My heart beat thick, my head grew 162

Proiectul pentru Învǎţǎmântul Rural

The Nineteenth and Twentieth Century British Novel. A Reader

hot; a sound filled my ears, which I deemed the rushing of wings; something seemed near me; I was oppressed, suffocated: endurance broke down; I rushed to the door and shook the lock in desperate effort. Steps came running along the outer passage; the key turned, Bessie and Abbot entered.” (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre) Quote 3 “Reader, though I look perfectly accommodated, I am not very tranquil in my mind. I thought when the coach stopped here there would be some one to meet me; I looked anxiously round as I descended the wooden steps the ‘boots’ placed for my convenience, expecting to hear my name pronounced and to see some description of carriage waiting to convey me to Thornfield. Nothing of the sort was visible; and when I asked a waiter if anyone had been to inquire after a Miss Jane Eyre, I was answered in the negative /…/. It is a very strange sensation to unexperienced youth to feel itself quite alone in the world, cut adrift from any connexion, uncertain whether the port to which it is bound can be reached, and prevented by many impediments from returning to that it has quitted.” (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre) Quote 4 “Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellowcreatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, if they seek to do more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.” (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre)

Proiectul pentru Învǎţǎmântul Rural

163

The Nineteenth and Twentieth Century British Novel. A Reader

Quote 5 “This time, I remembered I was lying in the oak closet, and I heard distinctly the gusty wind, and the driving of the snow; I heard, also, the fir bough repeat its teasing sound, and described it to the right cause: but it annoyed me so much, that I resolved to silence it, if possible; and, I thought, I rose and endeavoured to unhasp the casement. The hook was soldered into the staple: a circumstance observed by me when awake, but forgotten. ‘I must stop it, nevertheless!’ I muttered, knocking my knuckles through the glass, and stretching an arm out to seize the importunate branch; instead of which, my fingers closed on the fingers of a little, ice-cold hand! The intense horror of nightmare came over me: I tried to draw back my arm, but the hand clung to it, and a most melancholy voice sobbed, ‘Let me in – let me in!’ ‘Who are you?’ I asked, struggling, meanwhile, to disengage myself. ‘Catherine Linton,’ it replied, shiveringly…” (Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights)

Quote 6 “This fertile and sheltered tract of country, in which the fields are never brown and the springs never dry, is bounded on the south by the bold chalk ridge that embraces the prominences of Hambledon Hill, Bulbarrow, Nettlecombe-Tout, Dogbury, High Stoy, and Bubb Down. The traveller from the coast, who, after plodding northward for a score of miles over calcareous downs and cornlands, suddenly reaches the verge of one of these escarpments, is surprised and delighted to behold, extended like a map beneath him, a country differing absolutely from that which he has passed through. Behind him the hills are open, the sun blazes down upon fields so large as to give an unenclosed character to the landscape, the lanes are white, the hedges low and plashed, the atmosphere colourless. Here, in the valley, the world seems to be constructed upon a smaller and more delicate scale; the fields are mere paddocks, so reduced that from this height their hedgerows appear a network of dark green threads overspreading the paler green of the grass. The atmosphere beneath is languorous, and is so tinged with azure that what artists call the middle distance partakes also of that hue, while the horizon beyond is of the deepest ultramarine. Arable lands are few and limited; with but slight exceptions the prospect is a broad rich mass of grass and trees, mantling minor hills and dales within the major. Such is the Vale of Blackmoor.” (Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles)

164

Proiectul pentru Învǎţǎmântul Rural

The Nineteenth and Twentieth Century British Novel. A Reader

Quote 7 “They had proceeded thus gropingly two or three miles further when on a sudden Clare became conscious of some vast erection close in his front, rising sheer from the grass. They had almost struck themselves against it. ‘What monstrous place is this?’ said Angel. ‘It hums,’ said she.’Hearken!’ He listened. The wind, playing upon the edifice, produced a booming tune, like the note of some gigantic one-stringed harp. No other sound came from it, and lifting his hand and advancing a step or two, Clare felt the vertical surface of the structure. It seemed to be of solid stone, without joint or moulding. Carrying his fingers onward he found that what he had come in contact with was a colossal rectangular pillar; by stretching out his left hand he could feel a similar one adjoining. At an indefinite height overhead something made the black sky blacker, which had the semblance of a vast architrave uniting the pillars horizontally. They carefully entered beneath and between; the surfaces echoed their soft rustle; but they seemed to be still out of doors. The place was roofless. Tess drew her breath fearfully, and Angel, perplexed, said ‘What can it be?’ /…/ ‘It is Stonehenge!’ said Clare. ‘The heathen temple, you mean?’ ‘Yes, older than the centuries; older than the d’Urbervilles! Well, what shall we do, darling? We may find shelter further on.’ But Tess, really tired by this time, flung herself upon a slab that lay close at hand, and was sheltered from the wind by a pillar. /…/ ‘I don’t want to go any further, Angel,’ she said stretching out her hand for his. /…/ In the far north-east sky he could see between the pillars a level streak of light. /…/ ‘Did they sacrifice to God here?’ asked she. ‘No,’ said he. ‘Who to?’ ‘I believe to the sun.’ /…/ In a minute or two her breathing became more regular, her clasp of his hand relaxed, and she fell asleep. /…/ The eastward pillars and their architraves stood up blackly against the light, and the great flame-shaped Sun-stone beyond them; and the stone of sacrifice midway. Presently the night died out, and the quivering little pools in the cup-like hollows of the stones lay still. At the same time something seemed to move on the verge of the dip eastward – a mere dot. It was the head of a man approaching them from the hollow beyond the Sun-stone. Clare wished they had gone onward, but in the circumstances decided to remain quiet. The figure came straight towards the circle of pillars in which they were.

Proiectul pentru Învǎţǎmântul Rural

165

The Nineteenth and Twentieth Century British Novel. A Reader

/…/ The dawn shone full on the front of the man westward, and Clare could discern from this that he was tall, and walked as if trained. They all closed in with evident purpose. Her story then was true! Springing to his feet, he looked around for a weapon, loose stone, means of escape, anything. By this time the nearest man was upon him. ‘It is no use, sir,’ he said. ‘There are sixteen of us on the Plain, and the whole country is reared.’ ‘Let her finish her sleep!’ he implored in a whisper of the men as they gathered round. /…/ ‘What is it, Angel?’ she said, starting up. ‘Have they come for me?’ ‘Yes, dearest,’ he said. ‘They have come.’ ‘It is as it should be,’ she murmured. ’Angel, I am almost glad – yes, glad! This happiness could not have lasted. It was too much. I have had enough; and now I shall not live for you to despise me!’ She stood up, shook herself, and went forward, neither of the men having moved. ’I am ready’, she said quietly.” (Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles)

166

Proiectul pentru Învǎţǎmântul Rural

The Nineteenth and Twentieth Century British Novel. A Reader

UNIT 2 THE DAWN OF A NEW AGE: JOSEPH CONRAD AND HENRY JAMES Quote 8

Misty sea cliffs at sunrise Sao Lourenco (Madeira, Atlantic Ocean)

“About three in the morning some large fish leaped, and the loud splash made me jump as though a gun had been fired. When the sun rose there was a white fog, very warm and clammy, and more blinding than the night. It did not shift or drive; it was just there, standing all round you like something solid. At eight or nine, perhaps, it lifted as a shutter lifts. We had a glimpse of the towering multitude of trees, of the immense matted jungle, with the blazing little ball of the sun hanging over it – all perfectly still – and then the white shutter came down again, smoothly, as if sliding in greased grooves. I ordered the chain, which had begun to heave in, to be paid out again. Before it stopped running with a muffled rattle, a cry, a very loud cry, as if of infinited desolation, soared slowly in the opaque air. It ceased. A complaining clamour, modulated in savage discords, filled our ears. The sheer unexpectedness of it made my hair stir under my cap. It don’t know how it struck the others; to me it seemed as though the mist itself had screamed, so suddenly, and apparently from all sides at once, did this tumultuous and mournful uproar arise. It culminated in a hurried outbreak of almost intolerably excessive shrieking, which stopped short, leaving us stiffened in a variety of silly attitudes, and obstinately listening to the nearly as appalling and excessive silence. “Good God! What is the meaning – “ stammered at my elbow one of the pilgrims, - a little fat man, with sandy hair and red whiskers, who wore side-spring boots, and pink pyjamas tucked into his socks. Two others remained open-mouthed a whole minute, then dashed into the little cabin, to rush out incontinently and stand darting scared glances, with Winchesters at “ready” in their hands. What we could see was just the steamer we were on, her outlines blurred as though she had been on the point of dissolving, and a misty strip of water, perhaps two feet broad, around her – and that was all. The rest of the world was nowhere, as far as our eyes and ears were concerned. Just nowhere. Gone, disappeared; swept off without leaving a whisper or a shadow behind.” (Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness)

Proiectul pentru Învǎţǎmântul Rural

167

The Nineteenth and Twentieth Century British Novel. A Reader

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY MODERNIST NOVEL UNIT 3 MODERNIST PRINCIPLES AND AESTHETICS Quote 9 “By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments. He told Cranly that the clock of the Ballast Office was capable of an epiphany. Cranly questioned the inscrutable dial of the Ballast Office with his no less inscrutable countenance. ‘Yes,’ said Stephen, ‘I will pass it time after time, allude to it, refer to it, catch a glimpse of it. It is only an item in the catalogue of Dublin’s street furniture. Then all at once I see it and I know at once what it is: epiphany.’ ‘What?’ A Flower Given to My ‘Imagine my glimpses at that clock as the gropings of a spiritual eye which seek to adjust its vision to an exact focus. The Daughter Watercolour by Roger moment the focus is reached the object is epiphanised. It is just in Cummiskey this epiphany I find the third, the supreme quality of beauty.’” (James Joyce, Stephen Hero)

168

Proiectul pentru Învǎţǎmântul Rural

The Nineteenth and Twentieth Century British Novel. A Reader

UNIT 4 MAJOR CONTRIBUTIONS TO MODERNIST BRITISH FICTION Quote 10 “In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.” (Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway)

Quote 11 “And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning – fresh as if issued to children on a beach. What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling…” (Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway) Quote 12 “Suddenly Mrs. Coates looked up into the sky. The sound of an aeroplane bored ominously into the ears of the crowd. There it was coming over the trees, letting out white smoke from behind, which curled and twisted, actually writing something! making letters in the sky! Everyone looked up.” (Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway) Proiectul pentru Învǎţǎmântul Rural

169

The Nineteenth and Twentieth Century British Novel. A Reader

Quote 13 “The clouds to which the letters E, G, or L had attached themselves moved freely, as if destined to cross from West to East on a mission of the greatest importance which would never be revealed, and yet certainly so it was – a mission of the greatest importance. Then suddenly, as a train comes out of a tunnel, the aeroplane rushed out of the clouds again, the sound boring into the ears of all people in the Mall, in the Green Park, in Piccadilly, in Regent Street, in Regent’s Park, and the bar of smoke curved behind and it dropped down, and it soared up and wrote one letter after another – but what word was it writing?” (Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway) Quote 14 “What parallel course did Bloom and Stephen follow returning? Staring united both at normal walking pace they followed in the order named Lower and Middle Gardiner streets and Mountjoy square, west: then, at reduced pace, each bearing left, Gardiner’s place by an inadvertence as far as the corner of Temple street, north: then at reduced pace with interruptions of halt, bearing right, Temple street, north, as far as Hardwicke place. Approaching, disparate, at relaxed walking pace they crossed both the circus before George’s church diametrically, the chord in any circle being less than the arc which it subtends. Of what did the duumvirate deliberate during their itinerary? Pot Pourri of Joycean Music, literature, Ireland, Dublin, Paris, friendship, woman, prostitution, diet, the influence of gaslight or the light of arc and Images glowlamps on the growth of adjoining paraheliotropic trees, exposed by Roger corporation emergency dustbuckets, the Roman catholic church, Cummiskey ecclesiastical celibacy, the Irish nation, jesuit education, careers, the study of medicine, the past day, the maleficent influence of presabbath, Stephen’s collapse.” (James Joyce, Ulysses) Quote 15 “- Sad occasions, Mr Kernan began politely. Mr Bloom closed his eyes and sadly twice bowed his head. The others are putting on their hats, Mr Kernan said. I suppose we can do so too. We are the last. This cemetery is a treacherous place. They covered their heads. - The reverend gentleman read the service too quickly, don’t you think? Mr Kernan said with reproof. Mr Bloom nodded gravely, looking in the quick bloodshot eyes. Secret eyes, secret searching eyes. Mason, I think: not sure. Beside him again. We are the last. In the same boat. Hope he’ll say something else.

170

Proiectul pentru Învǎţǎmântul Rural

The Nineteenth and Twentieth Century British Novel. A Reader

Bloomsday Reenacted Watercolour by Roger Cummiskey

Mr Kerman added: - The service of the Irish church, used in Mount Jerome, is simpler, more impressive, I must say. Mr Bloom gave prudent assent. The language of course was another thing. Mr Kernan said with solemnity: I am the resurrection and the life. That touches a man’s inmost heart. - It does, Mr Bloom said. Your heart perhaps but what price the fellow in the six feet by two with his toes to the daisies? No touching that. Seat of the affections. Broken heart. A pump after all, pumping thousands of gallons of blood every day. One fine day it gets bunged up and there you are. Lots of them lying around here: lungs, hearts, livers. Old rusty pumps: damn the thing else. The resurrection and the life. Once you are dead you are dead.” (James Joyce, Ulysses)

Quote 16 “Yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes”

Bella

Watercolour by Roger Cummiskey

“…and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put a rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.” (James Joyce, Ulysses)

Quote 17 “After he woke me up last night same dream or was it? Wait. Open hallway. Street of harlots. Remember. Haroun al Raschid. I am almosting it. That man led me, spoke. I was not afraid. The melon he had he held against my face. Smiled: creamfruit smell. That was the rule, said. In. Come. Red carpet spread. You will see who.” (James Joyce, Ulysses)

Proiectul pentru Învǎţǎmântul Rural

171

The Nineteenth and Twentieth Century British Novel. A Reader

Quote 18 “Men must not cut down trees. There is a God. (He noted such revelations on the backs of envelopes.) Change the world. No one kills from hatred. Make it known (he wrote it down). He waited. He listened. A sparrow perched on the railing opposite chirped Septimus, Septimus, four or five times over and went on, drawing its notes out, to sing freshly and piercingly in Greek words how there is no crime and, joined by another sparrow, they sang in voices prolonged and piercing in Greek words, from trees in the meadow of life beyond a river where the dead walk, how there is no death.”

Wheat Field with Cypresses by Vincent Van Gogh

172

(Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway)

Proiectul pentru Învǎţǎmântul Rural

The Nineteenth and Twentieth Century British Novel. A Reader

UNIT 5 MODERNIST ART NOVELS Quote 19 “But with Mr. Ramsay bearing down on her, she could do nothing. Every time he approached – he was walking up and down the terrace – ruin approached, chaos approached. She could not paint. She stopped, she turned; she took up this rag; she squeezed that tube. But all she did was to ward him off a moment. He made it impossible for her to do anything.” “You shan’t touch your canvas, he seemed to say, bearing down on her, till you’ve given me what I want of you. Here he was, close upon her again, greedy, distraught. Well, thought Lily in despair, letting her right hand fall at her side, it would be simpler then to have it over. Surely, she could imitate from recollection the glow, the rhapsody, the self-surrender, she had seen on so many women’s faces (on Mrs. Ramsay’s, for instance) when on some occasion like this they blazed up – she could remember the look on Mrs. Ramsay’s face – into a rupture of sympathy, of delight in the reward they had, which, though the reason of it escaped her, evidently conferred on them the most supreme bliss of which human nature was capable. Here he was, stopped by her side. She would give him what she could.” (Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse) Quote 20 “And now I ask, “Who am I?” I have been talking of Bernard, Neville, Jinny, Susan, Rhoda and Louis. Am I all of them? Am I one and distinct? I do not know. We sat here together. But now Percival is dead; and Rhoda is dead; we are divided; we are not here. Yet I cannot find any obstacle separating us. There is no division between me and them. As I talked I felt “I am you”. This difference we make so much of, this identity we so feverishly cherish, was overcome. […]Here on my brow is the blow I got when Percival fell. Here on the nape on my neck is the kiss Jinny gave Louis. My eyes fill with Susan’s tears. I see far away, quivering like a gold thread, the pillar Rhoda saw, and feel the rush of the wind of her flight when she leapt.” (Virginia Woolf, The Waves)

Proiectul pentru Învǎţǎmântul Rural

173

The Nineteenth and Twentieth Century British Novel. A Reader

Quote 21 “A phrase. An imperfect phrase. And what are phrases? They have left me very little to lay on the table, beside Susan’s hand; to take from my pocket, with Neville’s credentials. I am not an authority on law, or medicine, or finance. I am wrapped round with phrases, like damp straw; I glow, phosphorescent. And each of you feels when I speak, “I am lit up, I am glowing.” The little boys used to feel “That’s a good one, that’s a good one”, as the phrases bubbled up from my lips under the elm trees in the playing- fields. They too bubbled up; they also escaped with my phrases.”

“The wind rose. The waves drummed on the shore, like turbaned warriors, like turbaned men with poisoned assegais who, whirling their arms on high, advance upon the feeding flocks, the white sheep.” V. Woolf, The Waves

174

“Dullness and doom. And what to explore? The leaves and the wood concealed nothing. If a bird rose I should no longer make a poem – I should repeat what I had seen before. […] The trees, scattered, put on order; the thick green of the leaves thinned itself to a dancing light. I netted them under with a sudden phrase. I retrieved them from formlessness with words.” “But how describe the world seen without a self? There are no words. Blue, red – even they distract, even they hide with thickness instead of letting the light through. How describe or say anything in articulate words again?- save that it fades, save that it undergoes a gradual transformation, becomes, even in the course of one short walk, habitual – this scene also.” (Virginia Woolf, The Waves)

Proiectul pentru Învǎţǎmântul Rural

The Nineteenth and Twentieth Century British Novel. A Reader

UNIT 6 FREE INDIRECT STYLE AND TABOO BREAKING Quote 23 “You’ve a right to do as I want,” he cried. “Fool!” she answered. “Fool!” “I’ll let you know who’s master,” he cried. “Fool!” she answered. “Fool! I’ve known my own father, who could put a dozen of you in his pipe and push them down with his finger-end. Don’t I know what a fool you are!” (D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow) Quote 24 “And I will establish my covenant with you; neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood; neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth. [12] And God said, This is the token of the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations: [13] I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth. [14] And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud: [15] And I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh. [16] And the bow shall be in the cloud; and I will look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth. [17] And God said unto Noah, This is the token of the covenant, which I have established between me and all flesh that is upon the earth.” (Book of Genesis, Chapter 9, King James version) “In everything she saw she grasped and groped to find the creation of the living God, instead of the old, hard barren form of bygone living. Sometimes great terror possessed her. Sometimes she lost touch, she lost her feeling, she could only know the old horror of the husk which bound in her and all mankind. They were all in prison, they were all going mad. She saw the stiffened bodies of the colliers, which seemed already enclosed in a coffin, she saw their unchanging eyes, the eyes of those who are buried alive: she saw the hard, cutting edges of the new houses, which seemed to spread over the hillside in their insentient triumph, the triumphs of horrible, amorphous angles and straight lines, the expression of corruption triumphant and unopposed, corruption so pure that it is hard and brittle: she saw the dun atmosphere over the blackened hills opposite, the dark blotches Proiectul pentru Învǎţǎmântul Rural

175

The Nineteenth and Twentieth Century British Novel. A Reader

Rainbow of Wishes By Yakovlev Alexander

176

of houses, slate roofed and amorphous, brittle, hard edged new houses advancing from Beldover to meet the corrupt new houses from Lethley, the houses of Lethley advancing to mix with the houses of Hainor, a dry, brittle, terrible corruption spreading over the face of the land, and she was sick with a nausea so deep that she perished as she sat. And then, in the blowing clouds, she saw a band of faint iridescence colouring in faint colours a portion of the hill. And forgetting, startled, she looked for the hovering colour and saw a rainbow forming itself. In one place it gleamed fiercely, and, her heart anguished with hope, she sought the shadow of iris where the bow should be. Steadily the colour gathered, mysteriously, from nowhere, it took presence upon itself, there was a faint, vast rainbow. The arc bended and strengthened itself till it arched indomitable, making great architecture of light and colour and the space of heaven, its pedestals luminous in the corruption of new houses on the low hill, its arch the top of heaven. And the rainbow stood on the earth. She knew that the sordid people who crept hard-scaled and separate on the face of the world’s corruption were living still, that the rainbow was arched in their blood and would quiver to life in their spirit, that they would cast off their horny covering of disintegration, that new, clean, naked bodies would issue to a new germination, to a new growth, rising to the light and the wind and the clean rain of heaven. She saw in the rainbow the earth’s new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven.“ (D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow)

Proiectul pentru Învǎţǎmântul Rural

The Nineteenth and Twentieth Century British Novel. A Reader

UNIT 7 THE MUSICALISATION OF FICTION, THE NOVEL OF IDEAS Quote 25 “…And all perverted in the same way – by trying to be nonhuman. Non-humanly religious, non-humanly moral, non-humanly intellectual and scientific, non-humanly specialized and efficient, non-humanly the business man, non-humanly avaricious and property-loving, non-humanly lascivious and Don Juanesque, nonhumanly the conscious individual even in love. All perverts. Perverted towards goodness or badness, towards spirit or flesh but always away from the central norm, always away from humanity. The world’s an asylum of perverts.” (Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point) Quote 26 “…a creature on a tight rope, walking delicately, equilibrated, with mind and consciousness and spirit at one end of the balancing pole, and body and instinct and all that’s unconscious and earthy and mysterious at the other. Balanced.” (Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point) Quote 27 “The root of the evil’s in the individual psychology; so it’s there … you’d have to begin. The first step would be to make people live dualistically, in two compartments. In one compartment as industrialized workers, in the other as human beings. As idiots and machines for eight hours out of every twenty-four and real human beings for the rest.” (Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point)

Proiectul pentru Învǎţǎmântul Rural

177

The Nineteenth and Twentieth Century British Novel. A Reader

THE POSTMODERNIST NOVEL UNIT 8 FROM MODERNISM TO POSTMODERNISM

Quote 28 “It started four or five months ago as a visual image. A woman stands at the end of a deserted quay and stares out to sea. /…/ It was obviously mysterious. It was vaguely romantic. It also seemed, perhaps because of the latter quality, not to belong to today. The woman obstinately refused to stare out of the window of an airport lounge; it had to be this ancient quay /…/. The woman had no face, no particular degree of sexuality. But she was Victorian; since I always saw her in the same static long shot, with her back turned, she represented a reproach on the Victorian Age. An outcast. /…/ I began to fall in love with her. Or with her stance. I didn’t know which.” (John Fowles, “Notes on an Unfinished Novel”, in Malcolm Bradbury, The Novel Today. Contemporary Writers on Modern Fiction, Fontana Press) Quote 29 “There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist. And I must conform to that definition. The novelist is still a god, since he creates /…/; what has changed is that we are no longer the gods of the Victorian image, omniscient and decreeing; but in the new theological image with freedom our first principle, not authority.” (John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman) John Fowles

178

Proiectul pentru Învǎţǎmântul Rural