University of Craiova
Faculty of Letters
Specialization: Romanian/ English
Distance Education
20th Century British Literature
Course: IIth year/ semester II
Reader: Felicia Burdescu
(Ph. D)
I. Objectives:
- The students will study the most important masters of literature of the 20th century.
- Literary works are introduced by following the literary genres: critical essay,
poetry, fiction, drama.
- The most important ideas and concepts from the fictional works will be introduced
through the Hermeneutic approach.
II. Themes:
THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT
Eliot was descended from a distinguish New England family that had relocated to St.
Louis, Mo. His family allowed him the widest education available in his time, with no
influence from his father to be “practical” and go into business. From Smith Academy in
St. Louis he went to Milton, in Massachusetts; from Milton he entered Harvard in 1906;
he was graduated B.A. in 1909, after three instead of the usual four years. The men who
influenced him at Harvard were George Santayana, the philosopher and the poet, and the
critic Irving Babbitt. From Babbitt he derived an anti-Romantic attitude that amplified by
his later readings of British philosophers F.H. Bradley and T.E. Hulme, lasted through his
life. In the academic year 1909-10 he was an assistant in the philosophy at Harvard.
He spent a year in France, attending Henri Bergson’s lectures in philosophy at the
Sorbonne. His study of the poetry of Dante, of the English writers John Webster and John
Donne, and the French symbolist Jules Laforgue helped him to find his own style. By
1916 he had finished , in Europe, a dissertation entitled Knowledge and Experience in
the Philosophy of F.H. Bradley. But World War I intervened, and he never returned to
Harvard to take the final oral examination for the Ph.D. degree. In 1914 Eliot met and
began a close association with the American poet Ezra Pound.
Eloit was to pursue four careers: editor, dramatist, literary critic, and philosophical
poet. He was probably the most erudite poet of his time in the English language. Eliot
believed that the poet-critic must write “programmatic criticism”- that is, criticism that
expresses the poet’s own interests as a poet, quite different from historical scholarship,
which stops at placing the poet in the background. Eliot’s criticism created an atmosphere
in which his own poetry could be better understood and appreciated.
In the essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, appearing in the first critical
volume, The Sacred Wood (1920) , Eliot asserts that tradition, as used by the poet, is not
a mere repetition of the work of the immediate past (“novelty is better than repetition”, he
said); rather it comprises the whole of the European literature from Homer to the present.
This point of view is “programmatic” in the sense that it disposes the reader to accept the
revolutionary novelty of Eliot’s polyglot quotations and serious parodies of other poets’
styles in the Waste Land. For Eliot poetry is an indirect expression of the emotion or a
series of sensations. All these human feelings can become poetry only filtered through a
catalytic agent that is in fact the poet’s mind. The concept of “pure poetry” is defined as
the one that presents the most commonly shared feelings. This concept is based on
“impersonality”, that is “depersonalization” – the poet does not express his own
individual personality but that of his own community.
This theory shows us that the interest is focus on the poem and not on the poet and in
this way the poem becomes autonomous; it can exist in itself, but is also integrated in the
literary tradition. History is therefore the link between the old and the new on two senses:
chronologically it represents a flow and forms a simultaneous point of view, an
accumulation of values from the continuous flow. Yet, tradition is not motionless, it
changes every moment. Thus the poet’s historic feeling is like a mixture of past and
present consciousness. He sees the two concepts of past and present dialectically, there is
no pure past and no pure present.
In the essay The Music of Poetry Eliot states that technique is bearer of signification.
In a poem, music without meaning cannot exist. A poem implies meaning and rhythm.
Even an ugly word can be poetical because music implies the capacity of the word to
combine with other words in a giving context. Besides words the same system functions
with themes and motifs. The critic’s main occupation is to describe the individual style
through two methods: analysis and analogy. Analysis is connected with the problems of
the way in which the poet makes use of the vocabulary and syntax. Comparison refers to
the reference of the work to tradition. With Eliot the aim of the critique on the text is the
participative reading.
Eliot’s criticism and poetry are so interwoven that it is difficult to discuss them
separately. The Waste Land is Eliot’s most famous poem. It consists of five sections and
proceeds on a principle of “rhetorical discontinuity”. It expresses the hopelessness and
confusion of purpose of life in the secularized city. But The Waste Land is not a simple
contrast of the heroic past with the degraded present; it is rather a timeless, simultaneous
awareness of moral grandeur and moral evil. The recurrence of the theme of the failed
sexual love shows the same despair, sustaining the burden of the poem: the couple in the
hyacinth garden, the chess-playing, middle-class couple, the conversation of Lil and her
friend, the “nymphs” and their friends (…), Sweeney and Mrs. Porter, the typist and the
circle, the three women in London (…) the isolated consciousness who speaks to “my
friend” of “a moment’s surrender” and to an unnamed companion of how “your heart
would have responded”. Secondly, this idea is reinforced by a common and recurring
landscape, the “dead land” of April and the desert of “stony rubbish” in The Burial of
the Dead the “stony places”, rock, sand and mountains, “exhausted wells” and arid plain
of successive moment in What the Thunder Said; and the urban equivalents in “the
brown fog of a winter dawn”, “rat’s alley”, the “brown land” of the Thames’s winter
banks…There are several key words around which the whole is structured. For this poem
the framework is made up of the stories, myths (Christian and pre-Christian) grouped on
the ideas of fertility and sterility, death and rebirth.
In The Burial of the Dead the theme is resurrection. The first character of this part and
the speaker is the blind Tiresias. In this waste land Tiresias is the Fisher King, but he also
stands for the Grail Knight recollecting from his past the story with the hyacinth girl- a
symbol of fertility. A primitive creed states that the hyacinths grow in the place where a
young girl sat. The idea of love that appears here, sustained by the Grail legend, stands
for knowledge in the body but in a spiritual sense. The most important memory of
Tiresias as the Fisher King is his failure with the hyacinth girl. Madame Sosostris, on the
other hand, stresses the contrast because she has a masculine name- Sosostris was a great
king of Egypt in the twelfth dynasty. She partly symbolizes rebirth, but she is also a
caricature of her predecessor the hyacinth girl. In her hands she holds a group of symbols
identical in value with the hyacinths.
The second part entitled A Game of Chess is the exact opposite of the first section.
Smith states that the subject is “sex without love”. Eliot presents here a neurotic woman
of fashion who stands for a symbol of lovelessness. He also reintroduces the term of
blindness that is correlative with silence. Among the symbols of this section , there are
fire- a symbol of dust , and water- of love.
In spite of its title The Fire Sermon is connected with the opposite element – water.
The symbols water and fire represents impurity and purification. Water is presented in the
poem as the Thames in two different periods in order to show the decadence of the
modern period. The Elizabethan Thames implying grandeur, and beauty, and the present
Thames meaning dirt and death.
In the fourth section Death by Water is seen as a moment of rest and calm although it
refers to death. The whole poem implies a longing for death but only this part answers it,
yet according to Martin Scofield there is no suggestion of resurrection.
Eliot considers that What the Thunder Said is the only part that justifies the whole it
opens with vivid scenes of Christ’s agony, but he is only suggesting Christ and
Crucifixion as he is only suggesting the existing water, which is not in fact present. The
whole poem implies a drama of consciousness on the background of a refusal to speak in
the symbol of Hieronymo in the last section, Tiresias or Sybil with her sterile eternity.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, another important Eliot’s poem, is the trip to
the depth of Prufrock’s being. Prufrock also describes the continuous flux of his inner
states. The poem starts with an invitation that seems to be a “momentary dream”: “Let us
go then, you and I”. Although the epigraph sends to Dante’s Inferno and implicitly to
Virgil who accompanied him, the “you” is Prufrock’s alter ego, the image in the mirror.
These can also be the two aspects of the same ego, the sensitive character and the
outward self. This double existence finds its roots in a medieval struggle between the soul
and the body. Prufrock wants to escape. His evasion starts with a description of the
weather, turning his eyes to the street. The obsessive “known them all” makes Prufrock
think of escaping his condition and he realizes that his action would disturb the universe.
The whole poem is a to-and-fro movement5, inside and outside.
Prufrock’s attempt to escape is also suggested by his identification with John the
Baptist, Lazarus, with Hamlet. The line ”No! I am not prince Hamlet, nor was meant to
be- echoes the opening of Hamlet’s soliloquy “To be or not to be”. Hamlet’s words
suggest indecision while Prufrock firmly states his unheroic role in life.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Yeats was born in 1865 in Landymount Avenue in Dublin as a member of a Protestant
Anglo-Irish family. An important person in his life was his father John Butler Yeats, a
painter, who did not receive the recognition he deserved. He attended the Godolphin
School in Hommersmith. Later he attended High School in Dublin and studied art at the
Metropolitan School. During the first period he wrote in the style of William Morris and
the Pre-Raphaelites, he tried to revive the medieval spirit in literature. Some of the best of
his work was included in collected Poems of 1895 and The Wind Among the Reeds
(1899). They included The Celtic Twilight (1898), The Secret Rose (1897), The
Shadowy Waters (1900). Between 1887-1900 Yeats spent a lot of his time in London
where he was in contact with Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw and in touch with
contemporary trends in French literature, taking a great interest in the work of Stephen
Mallarme and Villiers de L’Isle- Adam. For a period of ten years he devoted himself to
drama. Helped by Lady Gregory, he founded the Irish Literary Theatre, but he did not
give up poetry for good. A remarkable change took place and even his first collection
The Green Helmet (1910) marked the break with the influence of the 1880s. His final
style did not crystallize until 1928 when he published The Tower. In 1932 he founded
with Shaw the Irish Academy of Letters, and a year later he published one of the best
anthologies of the time- Oxford Book of Modern Verse.
Yeats is a very complex poet, even a paradoxically one. We can speak of unity although
his work is built upon different, even opposite themes, illustrating “many kinds of
dogma” as Irving Seiden said. His tendency in poetry is a result of his position to make
him a scientist. His interest in religion seems to be born from the “ideological quarrel
father-son”. His themes find their roots in every Irish legend he has read. Among these
the most frequent are the themes of heliolatry, transmigration and ritual murder. Every
theme is connected with spiritual death and rebirth, and the supernatural realm of pure
being.
An important aspect of his work is that he reduces all the times to the time of the work.
”His memory and his vision were past and future destroying time”-Irving Seiden. In an
essay called The Symbolism of Poetry Yeats asserts that the power of poetry comes
from symbols. Among Yeats’s frequent symbols we can mention the Mask, the tree of
life, the bird, and the rose. In the essay The Kabbalah Unveiled he reveals the secret of
the two trees: the tree of life and of knowledge. Another powerful symbol, the Great
Wheel is used to define the Absolute, being a macrocosmic symbol. The symbol of the
Rose is also presented as having multiple meanings. It is not only “eternal beauty” but
also a compound of “Beauty and Peace”, of “Beauty and Wisdom”. As a result of Yeats”s
tendency to unify contraries he explains that he has substituted the rose for the lotus as
the proper flower to blossom on the Tree of Life. The bird is a symbol for enduring work
of art, while Mask can be seen as a process of impersonality which is not a constant
process of depersonalization, of getting away from the ego but on the contrary, it is
embodying as many egos as possible. Thus, Yeats’s purity is multi- coloured and rooted
into complex life, which come from an essential belief in man.
In Sailing to Byzantium Yeats creates Another World- a spiritual one- towards which
the spirit travels. The poem is a journey from the condition of the body in the first stanza
to that of the spirit in the second part of the poem, from the temporal to the eternal. The
body changes, becomes older and finally dies but the soul through a succession of bodies.
Reading the poem we can notice that the song of the birds remains in a world where
everything dies: “those dying generations- at their song”; “Whatever is begotten, born
and dies”.
The speaker is aware of his condition; that is why he wants to travel in Another World.
He paradoxically travels backwards in space and time to Byzantium, the capital of the
Roman Eastern Empire, founded by the Greeks in the seventh century: “the holy city of
Byzantium”. This is a symbol of timeless spiritual world opposed to the natural physical
world.
The third stanza is describing the condition of the artist in contrast with the man. The
first part of the stanza sounds like a calling upon the sages of Byzantium, while the last
lines focus on the creator’s sufferings and pain, the artist lost in his work. The last stanza
envisages himself- as a man- transcended by taking the form of a work of art whose
function is to transmit art: “...to sing / To lords and ladies of Byzantium / Of what is past,
or passing or to come”.
The symbol of the bird that is implicitly present in the whole poem is chosen by the
speaker to be the embodiment of his soul. In fact from that bird- present only in the first
stanza- remains the song or the work of art.
Leda and the Swan is one of Yeats’s most interesting poems. The central idea is the
intersection between the human and divinity. It can be perceive either as a religious
reference to Jesus Christ and his origin- half man, half divine- or as a reference to the
process of creation.
The poem confirms Yeats’s concern with Greek mythology. Leda was a human being,
the wife of the king of Sparta, Tyndareus. Zeus visited her as a swan. She laid down with
him and also laid down with her husband. Leda gave birth to two pairs of twins, one of
which was Pollux and Helen- the children of Tyndareus. Helen in her turn becomes the
wife of the king of Sparta, Menelaus, and caused the destruction of Troy and the death of
Agamemnon. Yeats’s poem refers only to the moment of the legend, when Zeus descends
as a swan and possesses Leda.
Zeus takes the form of a swan that is the symbol of purity, majesty and grace. This
symbol is stressed by the white colour that is connected with the sun, the messenger of
the gods. Leda, on the other hand, is characterized by the word “dark”, suggesting her
earthly origin. Yeats insists on the difference: she is helpless and terrified while Zeus is
powerful and indifferent. Everything is suggested: “her helpless breast”, “those terrified
vague fingers”, “feathered glory”, “her loosening thighs”, “brute blood of the air”.
The third stanza breaks the poem. It is a vision announced by the present moment. The
violence now and here will destroy a civilisation there: “A shudder in the loins engenders
there/ The broken wall…”
DYLAN THOMAS
Dylan Thomas is one of the best-known British poets of the mid-20th century who was
remembered for his highly original, obscure poems, his amusing prose tales and plays,
and his turbulent, well-publicized personal life. He was born on 27 October 1914 in
Swansea, a town in Southern Wales.
The poet attended the grammar School until 1931 and published his first poems and
prose pieces in the school magazine. After school he was a reporter for the South Wales
Evening Post but he left it at the end of 1932. a year later he published his first poem in
London And Death Shall Have No Dominion. His moving to London was fallowed by the
appearance of his first volume, 18 Poems, in December 1934. The second volume
Twenty-Five Poems, appeared in 1936, was less enthusiastically reviewed than the first
one. The next one was called The Map of Love (1939). During the wartime his poetical
creation was reduced to elegies on death but in 1944 he returned to Wales and the sight of
his narrative region increased his creative power. Poems like Poem in October and Fern
Hill are representatives for the later phase of his creation in point of theme and of pastoral
atmosphere. In 1946 Thomas’s fourth volume of poetry, Death and Entrances,
confirmed his reputation.
Dylan did not limit himself to poetry, he also wrote autobiographical short stories
published as Portrait as the Artist as a Dog in 1939, a volume that was later completed
with Adventures in the Skin Trade, a kind of “novel” covering the youth of the poet,
published posthumously. He charmed his audience with a radio play, too, written in
America and read at the Poetry Centre In New York; Under Milk Wood breathes the
Welsh air of Laugharne. Dylan Thomas died in 1953 in America.
Dylan Thomas is considered a very difficult representative of post- modernist poetry.
Most of his poems are inspired from his childhood and youth, his themes being limited
and conventional. The most frequent themes are: love of his childhood and of common
events connected to this period, some pre-natal themes which combine human body with
the universe in a search for similarity and continuity, an interrelation between creation
and destruction; death is seen as a part of a cycle, an obsessive concern with anatomy and
sex, a sacramental feeling of nature.
Thomas’s manipulation of language does not obey the English Syntax, his syntax is
considered difficult, strange or simply different, a “Pseudo-syntax” in the terminology of
the critic Donald Davie. The difficulty of his syntax consists in the fact that although
correct it cannot “mime a movement of the mind”. Starting from Ezra Pound’s definition
of an image as presenting “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time”
and from one of the principles of Imagism, formulated in 1912, which associates the
image to a point of view, Thomas goes further in his poetry which is not a simple
succession of images. With Dylan Thomas life is generally present through its opposite or
complementary elements: pre-natal moments and death.
Fern Hill is a poem that marks the threshold of D. Thomas’s career; it celebrates the
glory and joy of life in spite of the inevitable death. Fern Hill was written in 1945,
therefore included in the larger poems; yet it is a return to the poet’s innocent childhood
nostalgically presented in a familiar frame. A first reading of the poem fills the reader
with a feeling of happiness, liveliness and colour, suggesting a continuous simultaneous
through the frequency of “and”. The poem in all its aspects creates the impression of a
childish game. “The poem is riddle with ‘and’, suggesting a child’s accumulative gusto in
telling you what matters most.”- Walford Davies
Fern Hill is a poem of memory whose writing does not allow the reader to establish a
frontier between the adult and the child. It expresses a merging impression about a
“mixing world”. “Merging impression” refers to the fact that the images and the
sensations perceived by a child are actually presented by an adult, and a second reading
of the poem reveals the alternation of the perception.
The vocabulary used by Thomas is reduced if we take into account the length of the
poem. Words like “happy”, “lovely”, “green”, and “golden light” are repeated at least
three times. However the lines are not as innocent as they seem since short hints to
religion, death, birth and rebirth are scattered less in the first three stanzas, more in the
last part of the poem. “Sabbath”, “holly streams”, “blessed among stables” propose
another perspective. Towards the end the poem changes in tonality, it becomes stern and
melancholic like a song for a lost thing, reminding us of the transience of human being:
“Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.”
If the previous poem proposes time perceived simultaneously by a child and an adult,
Before I Knocked- a poem that illustrates the pre-natal theme- shows us how an
individual being at the same time father and son perceives time. The consubstantiality
father-son leads to the idea that the universal rhythm is that of a cycle never ending, a
repeating experience which expresses the inherent conflict, and the essence of life.
Christian elements are also presented in this poem. The Christian myth tells us that
there is a perfect identity between God and Christ, they are consubstantial. Dylan Thomas
aims at their desecration by identifying man with Christ. When the poet spells Christ in
small letters, he associates him to any human being in order to stress the idea that for
humanity pain on the physical level is increased by pain on the spiritual level.
Dylan Thomas’s poem shows us that the author’s origin is reflected in his work. His
belonging to two cultures, his oscillation between two languages- on “no man’s land”
made his poetry difficult and ambiguous having as central pillar simultaneity.
WYNSTAN HUGH AUDEN
R.G. Cox associates Auden with a well-known and unique representative of the Modern
painting at the beginning of the century- Pablo Picasso. Cox says that Auden is the
Picasso of verse and shows some features of Auden’s poetry that can be suited to
Picasso’s painting: “Auden is mainly a poet of general ideas; Auden is primarily a
satirist; Auden’s poetry is fundamentally romantic; Auden is most successful in light
verse”.
Auden was born in1907 and educated at Gresham’s School and Oxford. He visited
Berlin in 1928-1929, Spain in 1936 and two years later he went to China. During this
period he published Poems in two editions, an English study in verse and prose The
Orators (1932). A year later he published the dramatic poem The Dance of Death and
continued with a play in verse and prose in 1935 The Dog Beneath the Skin, with
Christopher Isherwood, and another one in 1936 The Ascent of F6.
In i937 he was awarded the King’s medal for poetry. His first attempts were influenced
by Romanticism and then he gave them up. As he started Eliot would be his master and
he would be inspired by the social and the political realities. Among the persons he
influenced him there were Marx, Freud and Blake. Auden also reacted against rationalism
seen as alienation on instinct. In 1939 he decided to go to live in America. His activity
here gave public more volumes: Journey to a War- verse and prose, poems- Another
Time, New Year Letter which is a long poem and a sonnet sequence and For the Time
Being. He published Collected Poems, in American Edition only, in 1945. He also
received the Award of the American Academy of Letters.
Auden preferred more general and informal themes like death, wish, neuroses, and the
dialectical struggle. He was also concerned with the sociological theme of
communication that he tried to realize in his poems through association. Auden often
combines abstract ideas with concrete things, so that ideas or qualities are to be found
around us, in visual images. This combination is obvious in his simile, which represents a
peculiarity of his work. The work of the poet is not only to communicate, to transmit but
in Auden’s opinion he is a “parable-maker”. He combines here two important features:
the poet seen as a maker/creator and the poetry connected to mythology.
According to Levi Peter, Auden’s poetry is a poetry of love. L. Peter considers Auden
“the least sentimental and yet warmest-hearted of poets”. The poem Lullaby is considered
one of Auden’s greatest achievements in the genre, especially in the view of the
parallelism proposed in the second stanza, which led to the highest level in the last
stanza. Although Auden states that “soul and body have no bounds” the poem shows that
“Eros can lead to Agape, and on the other that ‘abstract insight’ can induce Eros: the
lover and the desert saint are closer than they might appear”. In the second part of the
poem The Age of Anxiety, he presents the surrealist vision of an adolescent sexual
discovery. The sin becomes finally a gate toward social integration. Auden considers love
the source of all that is lucid and civilized in human society. With Auden the poet
acquires a special position in society and he is necessarily a medium permitting the
passage from transient to transcendent.
Auden claimed that his God was the God of the orthodox and as Peter Levi states his
Christianity is present in his poetry. However there is a point on which he did not agree
with religion, i.e. “the father did not suffer over the sufferings of Christ”. Auden could
not simply conceive it.
Musee des Beaux Arts find its root in the special Breughel alcove in Musee Royaux des
Beaux Arts: “about the suffering they were never wrong, / The old Masters: how well
they understood / Its human position; how it takes place / While someone else is eating or
opening a window or just walking dully along…”
There is an important element projected on the background of a common, fluent,
unchanging life. The Old Masters are placed somewhere in a “corner” of the poem which
represents in fact the life seen by them. The central world is suffering and the Old
Masters are those who understand “its human position”. Therefore suffering is a feature
of the human condition. Christ is present in the poem in the syntagm “the dreadful
martyrdom” placed “anyhow in a corner”; a very significant place contributes to the
desacralised image. This poem about suffering is a ceaseless suffering as it is a
continuous fall. Everything is too down to be saint and to down to be human.
The second part is based on a painting, Breughel’s The Fall of Icarus. Breughel realized
in his painting the image that Auden put in verse. First of all Auden notices that there are
two components of the painting: “everything” and “the disaster”, which seem to be two
separate things accidentally appearing in the same image. Then both ”everything” and
“the disaster” are gradually presented: the ploughman who has not hear the splash, who
has not hear the cry, the “sun shone” and “the white legs”, “the green water”, the ship and
“the boy falling out of the sky”. Every character in the painting does his own work,
fallows his own way. They do not react at Icarus’ fall either because they have no time to
do it “the delicate ship…/ Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on”, they are
caught in their own activities, or because they do not even realize that Icarus bears such a
terrible suffering. In fact the fall is a particular one and only other artists can see it.
Auden, as well as Breughel, tries to bring the myth again in the present time. Christ,
Icarus and the Old Masters are hypotheses of the same myth. Noticing Auden’s interest in
Breughel, Richard Hoggard states that: “the pleasure he took in Breughel’s Icarus noting
that what makes the scene so dramatic is the fact that normal life goes on unconcernedly
whilst the tragedy takes place in its midst- is largely an aesthetic pleasure in pattern,
contrast, gesture”.
PHILIP LARKIN
Philip Larkin is a brilliant representative of the post- modernist poetry, and his
“essential criticism of modernism” refers to the contradiction which exists between its
technique and reality. Larkin was the second child in a middle- class family and had a
normal childhood marked by a propensity for literature, a possible influence of his father.
He continued his studies at St. John’s College at Oxford and he decided to read for a
degree in English Literature and Language. He left Oxford in 1943 and his first try at
home was o work in prose, actually a novel, Jill- a result of his experience in the Oxford
wartime. Meanwhile he was also writing poems gathered in two volumes before his first
novel Jill had been published: Poetry from Oxford in Wartime 1944 and The North
Ship in 1945; the novel would appear a year later, 1946. He did not stop writing novels
and Jill was followed by A Girl in Winter illustrating his life as a librarian.
Unfortunately neither Jill nor A Girl in Winter was a success.
As a poet Larkin did not manage to avoid the influence of other poets on him. The
North Ship is a volume written under the influence of Yeats. The musicality of his verse
impressed Larkin who tried to write like Yeats in a moment of enthusiasm. This volume
is generally associated with “self- conscious lyricism” – Roger Bowen. Larkin’s
movement is an evolution, a development from youth and early Romanticism to a “less
deceived” maturity in The Less Deceived (1955). Beginning with this volume and going
on with The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974) also called “mature
volumes” a certain tension between Larkin’s new irony and his concern for beauty is
evoked. The Whitsun Weddings tries a more optimistic note than the previous work and
it is considered an optimistic volume. The last “mature volume”, High Windows follows
and develops the direction proposed in the previous volume the title is an obvious
reference to light and freedom, limited by the epithet “high” which symbolizes a
particular freedom, actually Larkin’s vision of transcendence and the poet’s struggle to
transcend since “high” also implies difficulty in attaining it.
The first person speaking in Larkin’s poems is and is not identical with Larkin. Levi
Peter states that “the speaker is not really Philip, but related to him at several points”.
Most of Larkin’s poems attest to the existence of a split personality first by his attitude
towards life being at the same time ironic, clever and sensitive. The poem Church Going
aims at the exploration of the self. The word “church” in the title supposes a double
attitude towards it, an aesthetic one or / and a religious one which can unconsciously
exist. The second word implies a slight idea of becoming therefore movement, changing
and “church going” makes of any person more than just an observer of the external
environment but an observer of inner transformation. The first stanza is a glib ironic
presentation in short phrase of a church or “another church”, syntagm which suggests that
all the churches are identical. His first perception is of material aspect, which is a
temporary one as the words “sprawling”, “cut” and “brownish” suggest. Yet, there is
another important unseen presence, which annihilates the first part of the stanza as
insignificant, which is permanent and unchangeable: “a tense, musty, unignorable
silence”.
Larkin’s irony is not always based on ignorance as in the previous poem but it acquires
and educational I forming aim in Born Yesterday. His conspicuous irony veils a very
serious personality that manifests against pomposity and foolish sentimentality stressing
the unavoidable loneliness of life.
Through his poetry Larkin shows us the common things and ordinary life can be poetic
as well as transient, materiality is a good host for a spiritual transcendent silence in
Church Going. Larkin’s aim should be to rescue experience from the passage of time: “I
write about experiences, which somehow acquire some sort of meaning for me.”
Death is the main character in the famous gloomy poem Aubade strangely contrasting
with the title which means a piece sang or play outdoors at dawn, usually as a
compliment to someone. Aubade is a buoyant term connected with dawn which can be
symbol for beginning but Larkin makes us understand that any beginning has an end that
life is a flash on the dark background of death or as he says “soundless dark” means
silence. This kind of absence is an obsessive presence in human being’s mind:
“Walking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.”
With Larkin death means also lack of time and space, it repeals any relativity being an
absolute and endless absence: “Not to be here, / Not to be anywhere”. Actually he fears
this absence and the idea of becoming absence, a permanent absence since being
unchangeable, unpredictable, unknown and unseen it is infinite. He as well as any human
being knows that he “can’t escape” yet he “can’t accept”. In the last stanza light
strengthens, there is a new beginning which has to end in another night, also suggests that
the continuous oscillation between day and night is similar to the alternation between life
and death. There is an ambiguous line in this stanza: “one side will have to go” which
may refer to the separation between material and spiritual noticing that only “one side” is
transient while the other can remain after death- or to the fact that every day means
another step towards death. The “one side” which supposes the experience of the “other
side” makes of the poem a less pessimistic one; even the ending night is not only a
description of a day routine but a slight hope shows up when the “world begins to rouse”
a specific structure based on a lack of equilibrium between positive and negative parts of
the poems characterizes Larkin’s poetry and avoid any radical placement of it to one or
another extremity. A similar example is the poem An Arundel Tomb which closes with
the line “What will survive is love”.
If Audabe defines death as an absence in The Building, a poem referring to the hospitalvery much connected with death- Larkin never names the building as a hospital although
he realize a minute description. The poet avoids the words hospital and ambulances and
their absence stresses “the sense of fear and the unknown”. With Larkin man is giving a
strange, difficult life, which does not allow any knowledge. Life’s sadness, irony,
loneliness make it absurd and unbearable; its only hope seems to be transcendence
through love.
JOSEPH CONRAD
Joseph Conrad’s fiction represents an intermediate stage in the transformation of the
nineteenth century realistic novel into a modernist one. Considered a great novelist,
unique in English literature, he was born Josef Teodor Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski in
1857 in the Russian- occupied Polish Ukraine. His personality developed under two
influences: his father who was a romantic nationalist transmitted him “the melancholy of
defeated aspirations”- Cedric Watts and the propensity for literature; after his father’s
death his uncle led him towards skeptical rationalism and severe realism.
Because of his father’s patriotism and conspirational activities the family was exiled
when Joseph was only four years old. Despite his green age Joseph remained emotionally
attached to his native land: “From this time onward ‘Conrad’ would always remain to
some degree exiled and stateless; so would the fiction he came to write”- Malcolm
Bradbury.
The political turmoil and the violence of life made of Joseph an orphan at the age of
eleven and uncle Thaddeus, his mother ‘s brother raised him. When he grew up Joseph
Conrad chose his second exile, which led him to his first career, that of a seaman. He
started as a sailor in the French Merchant Navy but four years later he “drifted” into the
British Merchant Navy in order to avoid conscription in the Russian army, and in 1886 he
became a British subject. Conrad’s first career which meant long voyages all over the
world marked his personality and made him bring a new perspective to English literature.
“The fiction he started now would always have, in language as well as vision, a touch of
the foreign and the exiled about it.-Malcolm Bradbury; Douglas Brown states that
“Conrad’s art addresses our senses, and then, goes on from there”.
Conrad tries to avoid conventional epic narrative structures in the favour of an
“uncommon narrational technique”. The use of a narrator who is also a character of his
own implies Marlow’s recollection of events; therefore their succession is not a
chronological one. Avoiding the chronological order, the author actually avoids the
artificiality of his work; an order determined by memory, associations and feelings seems
more natural.
In Conrad’s novels events and characters are presented from different points of view: in
Lord Jim, for example, Marlow communicates what he has heard about Jim from other
characters. This structure annihilates the concept of “omniscient author” and suggests a
certain ambiguity since no event or character can be firmly presented. His use of
language also stresses the idea of ambiguity and the impossibility of absolute, unique
knowledge.
Humanity’s struggle with fate is one of the recurring themes in the novels and his
experience offers him rich material. Fate is generally associated with weather and most of
the dangers, of the situations on the edge of life completed with the continuous
threatening of death are metaphorically presented in the descriptions of nature. “Conrad’s
essays and articles illustrate that his interest is always in philosophic issues rather than
mere physical details. He wrote about the sea not simply as a phenomenon he knew, but
because it provided him with a perfect metaphor for humanity’s vulnerability, and for its
struggle against overwhelming forces”- Brian Spittles.
Joseph Conrad starts his literary career with the novel Almayer’s Folly published in
1895 when the author formally dropped his Polish name. The story which is about outcast
Europeans in the Malaya archipelago is followed by a similar one An Outcast of the
Islands, in 1896. Both have as central theme the existence on the edge of life and the
existence as isolation. In 1898 The Nigger of the “Narcissus” marks the beginning of
Conrad’s modern fiction; the novel which is based on a voyage from Madras to Dunkirk
remains for its intensity. The conflict between selfishness and fellowship in The Nigger
of the “Narcissus” is transferred to man’s “fidelity to the general tradition of
civilization” in Heart of Darkness, a novel published in 1899.
The Heart of Darkness is “a cunning allegory or light falling into darkness, a descent
through the heart of Africa into human horror and the black places of the soul”- Malcolm
Bradbury. Marlow’s venture extends from the ocean voyages to the African jungle whose
virginity can be compared to the wilderness of the sea. Marlow, the main character is also
narrator of the story, a kind of medium, which allows the correspondence between the
author and the work, perhaps an alter ego of Joseph Conrad. By using Marlow, Conrad
lets the reader know that the process of creation is not simple transmission of the author’s
experience but it implies an alternation. Marlow’s story deals with a journey from
London to Cango where he, a stranger belonging to European civilization, realizes the
gap between Europeans and the black men.
In Congo Marlow meets two people: the anonymous Manager of the Central Station,
who represent the exploiters, and Kurtz, who represent the “civilised”. These characters
are presented in opposition. Mr. Kurtz seems to be a very interesting character because of
his complexity, because of his evolution in Africa. He is considered a victim of his gift of
speech because his words have an influence on his audience and also on the speaker. He
merely believes in himself and in his speech meant to establish an influence on the blacks
as if his words had an auto reflexive power. Even Kurtz’s personality does not resist to it,
which leads to self- deification. The paradoxical opposition between his terms implies the
coexistence of good and evil. Kurtz builds his life on lies, the “stream of light” becomes a
“flow of darkness”, and this is what Marlow hates. Kurtz is a kind of Marlow’s double,
actually an inverted one since he “is a living incarnation of everything Marlow claims to
hate”. According to Berthoud the essential difference between Kurtz and Marlow is that
in spite of all his gifts, the former “has proved incapable of restraint, and thus of fidelity
to the values he has professed”, he remains a creature in conflict.
One of the most important moments in the story is the scene of Kurtz’s death- a
condition for insight; this is the only moment when Kurtz sees his past as it has been. The
way Marlow presents this moment shows the reader that it puts together all mankind’s
past, present and future.
In 1900 Conrad published a novel, Lord Jim, whose main character- a hero who fails
to be a hero- can be considered another facet of Kurtz’s personality. The whole novel is a
woven round Jim’s abandoning his vessel, the Patna, when he realizes it is sinking; by his
gesture he violates a fundamental law of duty and responsibility. But the ship is rescued
and Jim is seen as a coward. The novel also develops a relation between two persons:
Marlow- who is a subtler narrator than the one in The Heart of Darkness- and Jim, a
young naval officer.
Lord Jim turns out to be a more complex work either from the point of view of its
structure or of the ideas involved. The adventure moves into the field of psychological
and metaphysical investigation. The novel is structured in two parts: the first one deals
with the immediate effects of Jim’s jump from the Patna- which is regarded as a failure
and also as a betrayal. The second part takes into account Jim’s attempts at rehabilitation
in an island province and the consequences of his jump. Conrad uses the technique of the
point of view but he places Marlow’s opinions are organized around Marlow’s. there are
two phrases used by Marlow in order to characterize Jim: Jim is “under a cloud” and Jim
is “one of us”. With respect to his aspect, job and relations Jim is considered by Marlow
as on of them, he respects their code; but because of his deed the narrator places him
under a cloud. For Marlow Jim’s guilt represent a pretext for the story, it makes him think
of the difference between ideal and reality.
Jim’s tragedy is a leap into reality, he is conscious of his deed and of his guilt.
However, his new chance in Patusan shows him that he was not the victim of an accident
but this is his fate. Even in Patusan Jim remained an outsider and an individualist. For
him there is only one way of rehabilitation, his death. Jim’s sacrifice despite his fidelity
to the Patusians allows a parallel with Christ’s sacrifice and at the same time his death
rehabilitates his honor.
Nostromo, published in 1904, treated the same theme of betrayal in an imaginary
country, Costaguana. A later novel Under Western Eyes (1911) is considered by
Bradbury Conrad’s masterpiece and placed it somewhere between Dostoevsky and
Nabokov. Two years later, in 1913, Conrad had his first popular success with Chance,
and he returns to the sea stories in a last group of works: Victory, The Shadow Line,
The Arrow of Gold, The Rescue. Towards his final years he succeeded in becoming one
of the most famous writers in Britain.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
So concerned in her own fiction with disparities between the mind and the world
without, Virginia Woolf is naturally enough one of the clearest of critical commentators
on the division between subjective and objective methods in the writing of her period. As
she stated in her essay “Modern Fiction” (1919), “Examine for a moment an ordinary
mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions – trivial, fantastic,
evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an
incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and, as they fall, as they shape themselves into
the .life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old…. Life is not a
series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged surrounding us from the beginning of
consciousness to the end.
Adeline Virginia Stephen was born on 25 January 1882 at 22 Hyde Park Gate,
Kensington. Her parents, Leslie Stephen and Julia Jackson, had strong associations with
literature while her mother had also aristocratic connections. Julia Jackson was an
associate of the Pre-Raphaelites while her father was a journalist, biographer and
historian of ideas and he founded the Dictionary of National Biography.
Although she was denied a public school and university education. Virginia
enjoyed her father’s library. But her lectures were interrupted by a breakdown on
her mother’s death in 1895 and another one in 1904 when her father died after he had
fallen ill two years before. During her second breakdown Virginia heard the birds singing
in Greek – she had learned this language and acquired some competence. When she
recovered she moved to Gordon Square, Bloomsbury.
To the Lighthouse was published in 1927 and considered Virginia Woolf’s
masterpiece, and also an autobiographical work. She succeeded in harmoniously
combining recollections of her mother, her father and her childhood with her poetic
technique and the final result was a reconciliation between life and art. Frank Bradbrook
stated that the themes of the novel are those of Shakespeare’s sonnets: time, beauty, and
the survival of beauty through the means of art, absence, and death.
The stream of consciousness takes different forms with different writers. For
some of them consciousness revealed the contingency, the chaos, the stress, with Joyce
stream of consciousness is “in both aesthetic (Stephen’s reflections) and subterranean
(Molly’s soliloquy) “, therefore intellectual and intuitive, above all painterlike and
aesthetic – the means by which art can enter the realm of intuition, imaginative pattern,
heightened responsiveness, a reverie of the ego rather than an emancipation of the id.
In her novels consciousness flows, not only backward and forward in time, and spatially,
from this place to that, but among and above the characters, who often share a strange
intuitive relation to some common symbol: the lighthouse, the waves”.
Woolf’s consciousness is that of a writer and writing for her is a kind of refuge or
an “antidote for madness”, though writing she evinces the existence of another
personality and the value of feelings and emotions. In her diary she redefines the concept
of personality in terms of feeling and emotion.
Virginia Woolf’s main characters are women connected in a way or another to the
auctorial process In To the Lighthouse Woolf “points out that the two women. (Mrs.
Ramasay and Lily), each in her own way, are artists and calls attention to the fact that the
realization is important enough to be termed revelation “. His statement is based on
Lily’s memory of the moment when Mrs. Ramsay brought them all together and “making
of the moment something permanent’ as she tries to clothe something in another sphere is
‘of the nature revelation’ “
The lighthouse through the alternation light and darkness evokes the alternation
between life and death. Although this symbol is present in Night and Day, in the novel To
the Lighthouse it acquires the main place since the work follows the succession light –
darkness, life – death. The matches struck in the dark stress the idea of transience. These
short illuminations make consciousness reach “to the edge of eternal revelation, to
moments of vision”. From this point of view the the process of creation which needs such
created starting from these moments, they reader is led towards stimulate the process –
and also stability since they are similar: “there is a coherence in things; a stability;
something, she meant, is immune from change, an shines out (she glanced at the window
with its ripple of reflected lights) in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like
a ruby; so that again tonight she had the feeling she had once today, of peace, of rest. Of
such moments, she thought, the thing is made that endures” (To the Lighthouse). Lily
Briscoe remembers the same vision “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 stands here, Mrs. Ramsay said”
To the Lighthouse is a result of Woolf’s attempt to understand the nature of time and
immortality since she is obsessed with the transience of life and the oblivion of death.
The plot is a very simple and structured on three sections, which correspond to different
moments of light or darkness, life or death consciousness or unconsciousness. The first
chapter entitled The Window suggests light, life, and calmness. Woolf weaves her
monologues round the Ramsays’ dinner on vacation. Mrs. Ramasay is presented as
mother, as hostess and as wife.; Lily Briscoe works at a painting; the children play. The .
author reduces this section to an afternoon and evening. In this section as well as in the
third one Virginia Woolf’s technique relies on the interior monologue which appears as a
form of indirect speech. In her diary the author states that “indirect discourse, the
consciousness of the narrator married to the consciousness of the character and speaking
for it….. To the Lighthouse is a masterwork of the exploration of the consciousness of .
others with the tool of indirect discourse”.
“The first and the third sections of To the Lighthouse concentrate
comprehensively on the subjective life of the mind; the second creates a style not so
much objective as adept in bringing objects themselves to life, dramatising, equally
comprehensively, the domain beyond consciousness which inexorably resists its order
and light.’
The second part is associated with a nightmare, which deepens the reader in
terror, through it life becomes more meaningful as in terror, through it life becomes more
meaningful as in the case of Septimus’s death. The unconscious level, including the war,
can be interpreted as a testament or as a warning, ‘what is left when the human eye is
subtracted from the sum of things; matter drained of spirit, pure as a chair or table or
flower viewed by some Teutonic artist prescient of War and death-camps”.
Although the human eye loses its power being unable to see any more the narrator
keeps vigil the eye of the lighthouse whose twinkle suggests rebirth. However the idea of
rebirth is also suggested by violets and daffodils, which reappear every year. They are
always new but their presence is familiar.
The succession of light and darkness, of life and death implies a linear perception
of the coexistence of life and death. But this temporal perspective which actually
suggests motion is also created at a motionless level, the image of the island surrounded
by water. The sea has the same meaning as darkness and at the same time the waves
which are familiar and expected for this frame suppose a reiterative cycle and, of course,
rebirth.
The whole novel is a reiterative document from facts to language. The characters
Mr. and Mrs. Ramasay – the representatives of male and female are associated, the
former with an analytic rationalist mind and the latter with an ‘intuitive, holistic, creative
imaginative mind”. This difference determines two ways of reaching the lighthouse in the
.
third section Mr. Ramsay who is anchored in contingency goes to the lighthouse
accompanied by his children while Mrs. Ramsay, who is dead, reaches the lighthouse .
from a spiritual point of view – her memory is transcendent and she remains in Lily’s
painting as a sitter and as a form of inspiration. On the other hand some critics relate Mrs.
Ramasay creation of harmony at the dinner table to Lily’s search for the final form of her
creation.
JAMES JOYCE
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (February 2, 1882 – January 13, 1941), Irish
poet, dramatist and novelist was born in Rathgar, a suburb of Dublin, the first
born child of John Stanislaus. A jolly, bibulous, pugnacious fellow, well known in Dublin
for his reckless extravagance, and his biting wit, the father was an impoverished
gentleman who, after having failed in a distillery business, turned to all kinds of
professions, including politics and tax collecting. Like his eldest son – there were
eventually six more children – he had a fine singing voice. Joyce’s mother the former
Mary Jane Murray, ten years younger than Stanislaus, was an accomplished pianist
whose life was dominated by the Roman Catholic Church and her husband (in that order).
Joyce eas educated almost exclusively by Jesuits: at the highly prestigious
boarding school Clongowes Wood College, at Clane (1888-1891), which (he said, he
entered “at the age of half-past six) and then – then for financial reasons – at the cheaper
day – school, Belvedere College in Dublin (1893 – 1897)
The first novel written by Joyce was considered an autobiographical one since
events of Joyce’s life can be found in A. Portrait, but the novelist avoids the personal
impression by using a fictitious narrator who can be identical with the main character.
Impersonality is stresses by the third person narration, which shows that A Portrait is a
point of view.
The definition of art given by Joyce leads the reader towards an approach from
perspective of Thomas Aquinas’s aesthetics, according to which a work of art must have:
(1) ‘integritas” – “wholeness”, the work of art is seen as one thing, (2) “consonantia” –
(2) “harmony”, the work of art is a sum of parts harmoniously combined, and (3)
(3) “claritas” – “radiance” which symbolises the identity if the work of art with itself.
(4) According to Joyce, “this supreme quality is felt by the artist when the aesthetic
(5) image is first conceived in his imagination”.
Another device in Joyce’s symbolism is the use of personal names, generally
taken from mythology. The main character in A. Portrait, Stephen Dedalus, bears the
name of the Athenian architect whom built the labyrinth for Minos and made wings for
himself and his son Icarus to escape from Crete. Present as a character in The Dead and
as an angel in A Portrait, Gabriel is the prince of fire and the angel of death, which is
opposed to the cold atmosphere outside. Sydney Bolt interprets this opposition as living
“death versus life in death” since the characters inside the house are alive at the cost of
their spiritual death.
The actuality of A Portrait consists in his ambiguity, which provokes a series of
antonymous interpretations. Reading the title we are somehow tempted to read it as a
more or less autobiographical novel. It is true that the author weaves its web using events
or his life as subject but the novel does not have an autobiographical purpose. Reading
the novel the reader notices its capacity of being interpreted either as a novel of an artist
about an artist or as a novel about a reader. Richard Brown suggests the possibility of
choosing between Stephen as Dedalus or only as Icarus, as an outcome of this oscillation
between the condition of the father or the son. At the beginning of the novel Stephen is
introduced as a listener to his father’s story and as a reader of the text of the world.
His father told that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy
face.
He was baby tuckoo.
The third paragraph, which should establish the identity of the boy and also of
Stephen’s, is as simple as ambiguous. ”He” can be either the listener or the teller of the
story therefore either the listener or the son, creator or creation endowed with creative
power, too. Brown states that “it does at any rate locate him from the start as a reader in
a world that is already full of texts, who seeks for but does not yet possess a full meaning
\of the signs around him.”
Stephen as Icarus can be considered a prisoner of language; Dedalus was a
prisoner of his maze, too but the difference consists in the fact that Stephen / Icarus has to
discover, penetrate and understand the already existing language. His personal life was a
flight away of his “dear Dublin”, an attempt to escape it materialised in a deliberate exile
to Paris., Trieste and Zurich. This interpretation shows that the main theme is the seeing
of his spiritual father. In Joyce’s symbolism the spiritual father is God of the creation /
Dedalus who created the maze while his main character is either Christ or Lucifer.
Introducing Lucifer as an equivalent of Christ the author leads to rehabilitation of
the profane / evil which is paradoxically ”the lightbringer”. Mahaffey interprets this like
the “way of organising and authorising perception, including what we now call
logocentric or patriarchal logic. In the deeply divided world of literary studies as it is now
constituted, that makes him almost unique. Instead if instigates the monological model of
authority, he instigates a dialogue between the ‘traditional’ or logocentric methods of
interpretation and those that have been excluded; between rational, scholastic logic and
the unschooled apprehension of complex interconnection; between an ethos of
individualism and an ethos of community; between the world defined as ‘male’ and
‘female’ complement; between the referentiality of language and its materiality; between
conscious and unconscious desire’
Vicki Mahaffey establishes the existence of three authorities in Joyce’s work: the
first is patriarchal, transcendental authority; the second is binary and paradoxical; the
third is collective and unconscious. Double authority refers to transcendental and material
authorities, although opposite they cannot exist separated, but they suppose each other so
that the final result is an authority combining both. The third authority is the authority of
an artist, of a creator who in the process of creation embodies two extremes, being at the
same time holy and profane.
In A Portrait these three kinds of authority are expressed by the same character,
Stephen, in different periods of his life from childhood to youth and again to his initial
state of father. Stephen oscillates between obedience and rebellion, between good and
evil, holy and profane. Actually the novel is an initiation of a young man with auctorial
aspirations.
Ulysses continues the previous work but it is more interesting and more complex
than A Portrait. Beyond the fact that it is an encyclopaedic work since it abounds in
references to mythology and history and even biology, Ulysses is also a novel synchronic
with the philosophy contemporaneous with Joyce. The whole work is a fusion if the
stream of consciousness, therefore monologue and the narrator’s voice. The impossible
separation of the two can lead to a possible identification of the narrator with his
characters. The minute description as well as the stream of consciousness technique takes
the reader out from the chronological time which becomes dependent on the character’s
perception. Joyce makes of his time an example of the Bergsonian duration.
If we return to the title of the novel, Ulysses, this one requires a comparison
between Joyce’s and Homer’s works. Having noticed the continuation of the main
character, Stephen, the reader also establishes that he as a modern equivalent of
Telemachus is looking for his father. Although the chapters of the novel are parallel to
those in Homer’s work, an approach from this point of view should be a limitation of its
meanings.
Ulysses proposes a fictional world which, more than the image of one character or
another, creates the very powerful image of its author. “A relation can be established
between the characters and the narrative pattern since the latter contributes to the
achievement of the characters. Ulysses proposes “the adventure of the fictional discourse,
with the multiple forms it can assume, with the various voices are heard in it.”
ALDOUS
HUXLEY
“It was little wonder that Huxley’s novels came to be seen as works of modern
cynicism. His characters appeared powerless to act, their relationships incapable of
taking shape, their ideas circular and pointing to eventual futility. These are novels of
ideas that set no store by the salvation of ideas.
The structure of his novels provides the reader with the possibility of a similar
interpretation since it is characterised by a double quality: the existence of the ideal of
unity and the practical possibility to achieve that ideal. Of unity and the practical
possibility to achieve that ideal. The novel point Counter Point offers the reader an
example of a perfectly logical chaos since paradoxically, innumerable fragments, which
tend towards union, represent wholeness and completeness. The contrapuntal technique
consists of the juxtaposition of the parts, the subdivisions of the chapters, the sentences
and of the points of view of the characters.
It is obvious that Huxley worked a lot to make this noel its theme at the level of
the structure and of the characters, and at the same time to mirror its process of creation.
Point Counter Point it also built on a conflict, this time between members of the opposite
political parties: a fascist – Everard Webley, a character constructed on the base of the
British fascist leader of that period – and a communist – the assistant of the scientist Lord
Edward Tantamount. The conflictual state degenerates in violence and the fascist is
murdered. Yet, evil is not appears as “pure and gratuitous” in the death of Philip Quarles’
child. On the other hand, violence and pessimism occur in sexual relationships based on
physical disgust: the scene in which Burlap takes a bath with his secretary creating a
feeling of sickness and disgust, the young Bidlake has a cruel relation with Lucy
Tantamount whose “coldblooded sensuality sends a shiver down the spine”.
While these characters are a kind of monsters of the body, Lord Tantamount is a monster
of spirit. In spite of his child – like innocence, the impulses of the body have been
stifling. This is suggested during the concert when he is the only one that realises that the
beauty of music consists of the union between material and spiritual.
DAVID HERBERT LAWRENCE
Being, a novelist I consider myself superior to the saint, the scientist, the
philosopher and the poet who are all great masters of different bits of man alone, but
never of the whole hog” – Lawrence stated in Phoenix II. His awareness of being an artist
is related to a feeling, which places the novelist on the most important position from the
point of view of the interrelation between total man – spirit, body and feeling – and the
novelist.
Despite the fact that Lawerence’s name is connected with his least successful
novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, as some critics admit, yet, he is accepted as one of the
greatest novelists. However, he rejected the “well – made novel”, the fluidity of the
characters’ thoughts and modern novelists’ preoccupation with unimportant things: “Did
I feel a twinge in my little toe, or didn’t I? Asks every character of Mr.Joyce or of Miss
Richardson or of Mr. Proust” (Phoenix). Instead of boring characters Lawrence wanted to
create living characters that should be related to nature and other items of
Lawrence’s propensity for morality and emotion at the level of criticism is
extended at the level of his novels. The relation between the novel and morality is
connected with the author’s capacity of reflecting reality: morality is “that delicate, for
ever trembling and changing balance between me and my circumbiant universe” while
“the immorality lies in the novelist’s helpless, unconscious predilection”.
As a novelist Lawrence is considered “a deliberate innovator in his method”, yet
he remains in part traditional despite his interest in sex and the psyche. Lawrence’s
modernism consist in his making use of stream of consciousness as a modern technique.
In the spirit of his contemporary age he directs his interest towards “another center of
consciousness….. beyond thought”, which is darkness, irrationality, senses. His
philosophy is built up on the opposition light – darkness, which becomes the opposition
between order and chaos, law and love, male and female and leads to Freudian
psychology. According to Andrew Sanders, Lawrence’s new philosophy, like Freudian
psychology, is centered male the concept of welling, subterranean male consciousness
and on the libertation of sexuality from inherited social repression”. Lawrence’s work is
woven round the concept of love.
Love is the perfect feeling, which helps the novelist establish a new direction in
his novels starting from instinct to the intellect, trying to cultivate the spirit from the point
of view of the body. The previous oppositions suggest a struggle between male and
female and make love also take the form of a constant opposition since it is annihilating
and self – constructing at the same time; this self annihilation aims at regeneration.
With Lawrence, the concept of love implies three progressive moments beginning
with a total frustration and dissatisfaction in Sons and Lovers which is centred on the
son’s oedipal attachment to his mother. In Women in Love the balance is achieved, yet
without completeness and the last moment in Lady Chatterley’s Lover shows calmness
and reconciliation. Incompleteness and lack of satisfaction suggest a movement without
ending, they represent the elements generating reiteration.
Sons and Lovers is considered an autobiographical novel and Lawrence’s most
popular work; it was published in 1913, the year of his mother’s death. The author
describes the life of a working – class family starting with the marriage of Arthur Morel
who is a miner, with a woman from a higher social class. This incompatibility between
Mr. and Mrs. Morel leads to the breaking off of their relationships. Yet, the novel is
centred on Paul, the middle son of the family, it deals with his growing – up and also
with his struggle to rise out of his father’s social stratum; this struggle is becked by his
mother. Paul is also a representative of his generation “caught in the web of modernity”
.
On another hand the relation between Mrs. Morel and her son steps across the borders of
a common relation mother – son, being especially close in proportion with the increasing
alienation between the parents. From that point of view the novel is suited to psychoanalytical approach, to Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex. According to Freud,
Oedipus “destiny moves us only because it might have been ours – because the oracle
laid the same curse upon us before our birth as upon him. “ Freud states that the main
source of pleasure for the male infant - seen as a mass of impulses, as aggressive – is his
mother. Therefore his father is considered a rival that he wants to remove, but he
identifies with his father in order to repress his development, or which leads to
homosexuality or to impotence, physical or psychological.
In Sons and Lovers Mrs. Morel turns from her husband who is not able to answer
her needs and desires, to her sons who become a kind of substitute lovers. The childern’s
innate Oedipal tendencies are encouraged by their mother who makes them see their
father as a failure. Their father’s brutality causes William and Paul to defend their
mother, estranges them from their father’s influence and kills masculinity bt virtue of the
process of effeminisation. There is an inner struggle between their normal sexual
instinct’s and their actual evolution led by their mother’s needs. It is getting more
dangerous since it is accompanied by the obsession with death materialised in William
case.
Finney states that one of the major themes is the gradual awakening of Paul to the
deadly effects of his oedipal fixation on his mother. The penultimate chapter called The
Release, shows how Paul comes to reverse the oedipal desire to kill the father by
administrating an overdose to his mother. One could say that he has finally learnt to
direct his anger outwards to its source”. His gesture symbolises his wish to return to
normality.
The second part of the novel is built on the contrast between sacred and profane
love embodies by Miriam and Clara and ends with Paul’s split consciousness between
two voices representing “Eros and Thanatos”, between his dependence on women and his
fear of being extinguished by them”. Miriam is the spiritual partner and resembles so
much his mother that the latter accuses Miriam of wanting to take her place. Miriam
Leivers is seen as an intellectualist woman and her virginity is associated to Paul’s
“virginal intellectual” – as Pinkey states. She is also assigned a rapid emotionalism
through epithets like “surcharged”, “intense”, “rhapsodic”, “mystical”.
While Paul appears a victim of his generation and his society, Miriam is a victim of
Paul’s. On the other hand Clara is used by Paul as an escape in one of his overwhelming
moment – his mother’s death – and she promises him an earthly relationship, a
connection with life.
LAWRENCE DURRELL
A prolific writer of prose, Lawrence Durrell proved an interesting and complex
personality reflected in his work, structured in its turn on different levels, thus allowing
different approaches. A traditional one would relate the place pf this place pf his birth –
India, 1912 – to his particular work, a connection between the environment and the
author’s personality that oversteps time and space and any other convention and aiming
at a unique of both time and space in a single creation.
Durrell’s images are paralleled by the relativity of his work which underlines the
focus on the alteration of reality through the process of creation. His well – known The
Alexandria Quartet is a successful outcome of his theory offering different perspectives
of the same story as he states in the Preface to the Quartet : “I’m trying to work out my
form I adopted, as a rough analogy the relativity proposition. The first three were related
in an intercalary fashion, being ‘siblings’ of each other and not ‘sequels’; only the last
novel was intended to be a true sequel and to unleash the time dimension. The whole was
intended as a challenge to the serial form of the conventional novel: the time – saturated
novel of the day’.
Before any reference to Alexandria Quartet the reader should brood on the last
sentence of the quotation. First of all the author warns the reader that he is aware of his
responsibility as a ‘modernist’ writer and considers his gesture a “challenge” – therefore
a progressive step of English literature. From his point of view progress consists of the
discovering of something new, different, opposite to everything that has already been
written. The first three novels so –called ‘siblings’ suggest similarity and difference;
different views of the same story. The concept of “conventional novel” is synonymo
us with the “traditional novel” with its fluent running of the events that assures its
linearity and successiveness. Durrell’s “challenge” proposes an annihilation of the
limitation between spatial arts painting, sculpture – and linear arts – music, literarure.
This huge creation was realised in only four years: Justine (1957), Balthazar
(1958), Mountolive (1958), and Clea (1960). The main character who is seeking the truth
is a writer, Darley, not accidentally reduced to the initials L.D. The first novel relates
L.D.’s love affair to a strange, enigmatic Jewish named Justine, married with an
aristocrat, Nessim, a member of the religious – philosophical Cabal. The second book
offers Darley’s reading of the same “painting “ Balthazar, another member of the cabal,
corrects his vision. According to the version Darley seems to be a tool in Justune’s hands
while the latter was mistress of another writer Pursewarden, who is dead.
Alexandria Quartet can be interpreted as a “panorama pf sexual experience”. “To
the many gradations of heterosexual eroticism – from the romantic – idealistic to the pure
physical – are added rape, incest, male homosexuality, lesbianism, child prostitution and
travesty”. By adding erotic experiences the author widens the horizon of the work
without alternating the idea of formation, education, preparation of a character and also
of building a modern novel.
The constant presence of the pool is like a vivid awareness of the novel itself. By
placing it inside the house the author respects the reality of the muslin world suggesting
that there is an opposition between the house could be a symbol of life, freshness, activity
and it could be considered antonymous with the sun outside associated with heat, sand,
death, therefore the desert.
The depth of the water invites the reader to a more careful interpretation of it
meanings. Its stillness is generally associated with its depth – its calmness with the
coming storm. The surface of the pool resembles a mirror, a reflecting surface that
implies duality: life and death, light and darkness. Therefore an image reflected in the
pool supposes alternation, a change of plan, difference and identity at the same time. The
mirror is a symbol of the coexistence of good and evil in a single person.
The idea of double vision suggested by the pool and the mirror is emphasised by
the double presentation of the characters. Their personalities are complex since they are
the result of both an external presentation – the other characters point of view – and their
confessions. Their inner aspect is offered to the reader through direct confessions,
journals or letters which instead of helping the reader to clarify the character’s image,
make it even more ambiguous and spread. This makes Darley’s journey towards truth
futile since truth cannot be reached by anyone as Durrell himself says: “he was like a man
seeking to marry the twin images in a camera periscope in order to lay his lens in true
focus”.
The characters’ quality of changing. As they are perceived by different eyes is
similar to the “magical landscape”, the frame of their actions, Alexandria itself which is
able to adjust to the onlooker, like the chameleon that transforms itself always hiding
something. From that point of view Alexandria remains a mystery and an inappropriate
town to dwell for an outsider since it influences his behaviour and life.
WILLIAM GOLDING
William Golding (1911 – 1993) is considered a particular novelist since there can
be noticed a certain detachment from his work, which is a very rare situation a more or
less any writer’s personality can be guessed at behind or between the lines of his work.
Golding’s prose is built up round the same themes: the concern with humanity’s fallen
nature – which from a Christian point of view implies the original sin – and his religious
association. Referring to his first novel, Golding stated in his essay Fable: “I decided to
take the literary convention of boys on an island, only make them real boys instead of
paper cut – outs with no life in them: and try to show how the shape of the society they
evolved would be conditioned by their diseased, their fallen nature”.
The Lord of the Flies proposes through its title a puzzle for the reader, as this is a
literal translation of Beelzebub, the Hebrew prince of devils, and because of the
characters chosen to illustrate inexorable fall of humanity. Children are symbols of
innocence and purity yet, with Golding innocence, sin and evil are parts of the same
whole. He also suggests the latent existence of evil in man while childhood should be
considered an Eden stage. The novel offers a mixture of ideas starting with Christian
concepts, references to mythology, Darwinism, and pessimism on a background similar
to R.M. Ballantyne’s adventure story The Coral Island (1857).
The childern,s arrival on the island seems to be the result of an unspecific, maybe
atomic, war. Their arrival can be interpreted either as an attempt at a new beginning, a
return to the Eden stage since only boys are marooned on a virgin island, and they are
supposed to re- establish the world where they have come from; or a fall from civilisation
to wilderness. Even the landscape creates a play between light and darkness: “The shore
was fledge, with palm trees. These stood or leaned or reclined against the light and their
green feathers were a hundred feet up in the air. The ground beneath them was a bank
covered with coarse grass, torn everywhere by the upheavals of fallen trees, scattered
with decaying cocoa- nuts and palm saplings. Behind this was the darkness of the forest
proper and the open space of the scar. (….)
Within the irregular arc of the lagoon was still as a mountain lake – blue of all shades and
shadowy green and purple. The beach between the palm terrace and the water was a thin
bowstave, endless apparently, for to Ralph’s left the perspectives of palm and beach and
water drew to a point at infinity; and always, almost visible, was the heat.”
In this descriptive fragment the author puts together water, earth and air: the palm
trees that grow on the shore have feathers instead of leaves, but these elements suggesting
life and escape are somewhere up, almost impossible to be reached. The situation is
emphasised by the “decaying cocoa – nuts” or “skull – like cocoa – nuts” – a hopeless
image which can be associated with humanity’s fall. By putting together the phrases
“decaying cocoa – nuts” and “palm saplings”. Golding suggests the idea of cycle – those
saplings are just like those children between flight and fall between life and death.
Symbols of death are scattered everywhere: “smoke was rising here and there among the
creepers that festooned the dead or dying trees”.
Golding offers only two images with a single end: “dying “ is only a stage in the way
towards death, here it becomes synonymous with “living”. However, he refers to infinity;
palm, beach and water harmoniously coexist in a continuous alternation between life and
death. The way in which the novel begins can be considered an anticipation of the
following events, the perfect frame for the original sin, the reader can see the novel
mirrored in this description of nature.
Ambiguity, confusion, good and evil reflected in nature confer a predominant
feeling of fear and hopelessness to the story. Actually the children’s feelings and fears
presented through an empathic landscape. The events alternate and interfere with frequent
description of nature which contribute to increase the passing from a seeming harmony to
an unavoidable disorder. The oppressive view is intensified by the “oppressive” silence
and heat and at this hour of the day there was not even the whine of insects”.
By charging these children with such a great responsibility – actually the
responsibility of surviving – the author makes the process look like a play, life is a toy in
the children’s hands which are very frail and vulnerable. In certain circumstances they
become the toys of their own toy – just like the hunters who felt as if they had been
hunted by their game. The reader can notice a kind of minimisation of the process’
towards civilisation and an increase of the outcomes.
There is a boy who does not belong to any group, Simon and his condition helps
him to see things differently, he is more appropriate for an objective observation and
presentation of the things although he also seems to be more sensitive. He foresees the
following events in the aspect of the island; “As if it wasn’t a good island” and realises
that their fears are justified: “As if the beastie, the beastie or the snakething was real”.
The omnipresent beastie, the bad thing that threatens the boys is associated with the
snake – an obvious reference to the Bible and the original sin. The snake represents
Lucifer’s embodiment after his fall and the symbol of temptation. It is at the same time
the cause and the outcome which means that evil and good exist one as a condition of the
other, and this confers a cycling aspect to existence.
Reiteration is another aspect of the novel. Obsessive descriptions are repeated so
often that the character’s presence is made indistinct, they become parts of the
background and their actions and moods “harmonize” with the environment. The idea of
cycle is suggested by the hunter’s feeling of being hunted: “If you are hunting something
you catch yourself feeling as if you’re not hunting, but being hunted; as if something’s
behind you all the time in the jungle”.
Danger and fear actually are deeply rooted inside these children; they can be a result of
the boys’ imagination and associations: “skull like cocoa – nuts”, “green candle – like
buds”. Their inner terror is scattered everywhere round them through strange
associations, even paradoxical ones: ‘green” which is a symbol of youth and suggests
optimism and “candle” which leads the reader to “death”, even “children” which
generally means innocence and “hunters” who finally become murderers.
The situation on the island is getting worse and worse and the boys try to do
something to change it, therefore the head of the sow is a gift for the beast. Their attitude
takes back to the ancestral myths of vegetation. The oblation of the pigs or of the sow, in
some countries, is seen as an act that protects the community against magic and evil. The
hunters offer the head of the sow to the beast hoping that it will let them live in peace,
they try to create a saint place but it turns out to be a bad one just like the whole island.
Instead of worshipping a god, they worship the prince of devils.
IRIS MURDOCH
Beckett`s fiction and Sartre`s philosophy find a positive reception with post-war
writers like Iris Murdoch. Born in Dublin in 1919 and educated at the Froebel Institute in
London and Badminton in Briston, she was initially attracted by traditional fictional
shapes and moral philosophy. Her studies at Oxford and her first reading of Beckett`s
Murphy stimulated her interest in fiction so that after she had published her first book –
a study of the French philosopher – Sartre, Romantic Rationalist ( 1953 ), she
published her first novel Under the Net, in 1954. It opened a series of regularly
published novels among which: The Bell ( 1958 ), An Unofficial Rose ( 1962 ), The
Unicorn ( 1963 ), The Red and the Green ( 1965 ), Bruno`s Dream ( 1969 ), The
Black Prince ( 1973 ).
Her philosophical formation reflects in her work, which attempts to merge
philosophy, and art, therefore intellectual interest derived from a well-told story, leads to
a serious and difficult novelist. She also published philosophical essays collected in 1971
in the Sovereignty of God and articles on the techniques of fiction, like Against
Dryness(1961).
Her literary articles written during 1950`s and 1960`s remain unpublished. They show a
certain similarity with George Eliot and Henry James.
The Black Prince ( 1973 ) is considered Murdoch`s most experimental novel.
Bradley Pearson who is the main character states that “ art is the telling of truth , and it is
the only available method for telling certain truths. Yet how almost impossibly difficult it
is not to let the marvels of the instrument itself interfere with the task to which it is
dedicated “. In this fragment Murdoch refers to the impersonal aspect of the process of
creation and its telling of the “ only truth that matters “; art becomes instrument and aim.
Because of Murdoch`s technique which supposes a lot of detailes and characters
her novels are long and sometimes “ insufficiently nuanced “. It seems that her best work
is her earliest, shorter novels whose relation with philosophy is more evident. Cantu
considers Murdoch`s first novel Under the Net as “ a gay, fast moving, sometimes
humorous, sometimes touching, episodic story of surprise, fantasy and adventure, with
vignettes of very funny narrative and brilliant description of London and Paris scenes.
Underneath the light, frothy surface, however, it is also about the nature of creative art
and most central of all, about the dichotomy between the ‘contingent’ ( the accidental and
the ‘real’ ) and form, myth and fantasy”.
Wrongly identified as an “ angry “ novel when it first appeared, Under the Net
deals with a few weeks in the life of its main character and narrator Jake Donaghue, a
bachelor living a bohemian life in his search for somewhere to live. In spite of the
disorderly succession of complicated episodes and strange coincidences, the novel`s unity
and cohesion find their support in Jake, an innovation of Iris Murdoch`s. Jake Donaghue
is at the same time narrator, central actor and theme of the book.
The novel is related in the first person which means that all the events are
presented through Jake`s eyes, therefore there is only one point of view, and a limited
vision imposed by Jake`s character. But it is important to notice that Jake is the narrator
without being the author and the novel is not an autobiographical one, Jake is also a
fictional creation being a male “ I “.
“ I had begun to feel that this way my home. Sometimes Magdalen ( Madge ) had
boy friends. I didn`t mind and I didn`t enquire. I preferred it when she had, as then I had
more time for work, or rather for the short of dreamy unlucrative reflection which is what
I enjoy more than anything in the world. We had lived there as snug as a pair of walnuts
in their shells. We had also lived there practically rent-free, which was another point.
There`s nothing that irritates me so much as paying rent.”-Yolande Cantu.
This fragment is an example of characterful narrative. It refers to the moment
when Jake and Finn had to leave Madge`s flat, a difficult moment for Jake who started to
look for another flat. The tone is relatively neutral, Jake remembers the good aspects:
freedom and no rent. He expresses the regret of leaving the flat in an easy colloquial one
which characterises Jake as “a dry, amused, lazy self-tolerant “ person. The sentences are
very short which annihilates the idea of melancholy and can suggest an inner anger. The
word “irritates” brings to the surface his mood and shows that he does not have too much
money. From this point of view it is a circular novel since at the end Jake is “materially
back where he started” but “a philosophically wiser man”.- Yolande Cantu.
One of Jake`s important statements is “I hate contingency, I want everything in
my life to have sufficient reason”. With Murdoch “contigency” means the accidental, the
particular, and the individual. This is a key statement for an artist`s life since
“contingency / the accidental is the most important event that generally gives him an
opportunity to create or to change something in his life. Most artists try to find a method
to provoke these moments. Jake is looking for order and form and as a result he tries to
adjust, to arrange, to give pattern to his life action that estranges him from reality; he
even creates artificial universes that become again “a mess”.
Under the Net allows a reference to the article Against Dryness: “Reality is not a
given whole”. The fact that the contingent changes personalities and relationships
astonishes Jake, he is puzzled when he realises that he himself refuses Madge`s offer.
Another shock for Jake is when Finn goes back to Irland; Jake could never
imagine universe without Finn, and he never realises that Finn could have his own
universe: “I count Finn as an inhabitant of my universe, and cannot conceive that he has
one containing me”. Jake realises that he does not know anything about his friends, that
he lives enclosed in his fantasy and all the surprises are results of his blindness. Jake
Donaghue is a kind of “anti-hero” similar to the characters created by the “angry young
men” of the 1959`s.
The title of the novel can be connected with the patterns created by Jake that
reduce the perception of reality; “Jake Donaghue, the male narrator of Under the Net,
both resists and creates theoretical patterns with words which, like nets, entrap and
constrain perceptions of a larger and expanding reality.
Against Dryness – an article in which she presents her philosophical and literary
point of view – invites the reader deeper reading of her work revealing the “marriage” of
emotion and events. It expresses an attitude against “a scientific and anti-metaphysical
age” that is neglectful of human personality.
Against Dryness tries to stop a dangerous evolution of the modern writing which
makes for “dry”, “crystalline” or “journalistic” works, simplified and unreal versions of
life.
The Bell is a novel that suggests the necessity of a change, as the relationship
between the characters must be reordered. Is at the same time comic and romantic and
deals with an Anglican lay community set near to a convent of enclosed nuns. The novel
populated with frivolous wife, homosexuals, Catherine who is on the point of becoming a
nun but attempts suicide, explores ”the emotional, sexual, and moral tensions, which
force community itself to break up and re-form”. The convent bell, which bears a strange
inscription “Vox ego sum Amoris”, gives the title of the novel – “ I am the voice of
Love”. According to Sanders it is “at once aesthetic focus and a disturbing catalyst, an
ideal and a breaker of ideals”.
JOHN FOWLES
John Fowles surprisingly merges past and present in his work, he tries to establish
a bridge between a text and the twentieth century reader. Taking into account the worl
around him and the works / texts already written, Fowles is aware of the complexity of a
modern reader educated in the spirit of the contemporary sciencies and needs, a reader
that also should be offered a new perspective of a nineteenth century literary atmosphere
in the novel The French Lieutenant`s Woman,1969. Together they would share a state
for the patterned novel and for the association of large ideas with those patterns.
A few years before, in 1963, Fowles published The Collector, a strange novel
which allows a Freudian interpretation. This fantasy is narrated by a first person that is
not the author. A first person narrative technique appeared as a reaction to the omniscient
author who provides the novel with artificiality. The distance between the author and the
reader who is passive is annihilated through the first person narrative because of its
confessional tone. This time the reader is a direct participant in the story as an
interlocutor.
The Freudian background is evident in his following novels whose characters are
hunted by psychic or sexual problems and try to find a way to escape them, sometimes in
“self-indulgent erotic fantasy” like in Mantissa, 1982. In his short stories, Fowles
combines the strangeness of his themes with a particular style similar to the mystery
novels. However, Fowles has a larger field of action as his novel The Magus – written in
1966 and revised in 1977 – shows, “it is intricately translated into an omnifarious masque
and proliferating orgy of mythology and literature “. – Martin Dodsworth.
Some critics noticed a certain self-confidence with Fowles as a writer, as Martin
Dodsworth concludes: “he writes always from a position of confident intellectual
superiority feelings with his successful novel The French Lieutenant`s Woman. The
novel published in 1969 refers to events placed a hundred years before, in 1860`s. The
link between those two periods emphasises Fowles`s interest in Victorian novel and his
appreciation of it as a treasure of latent meanings and possibilities. But, he also insists
that our century writer is capable of literary innovations.
Fowles`s novel can be considered a reading of a Victorian novel using a modern
grid of reading. The main characters are Sarah Woodruff, a woman who is supposed to be
abandoned mistress of a French lieutenant, and a palaeontologist, Charles Smithson.
Their love affair develops in a scene – setting specific to the nineteenth century, and
Fowles insists upon details that contribute to create the atmosphere. Both his characters
“seek to break ‘iron certainties’ , the social, moral, and religious conventions of their day,
much as the narrator consistenly endeavours to remind us of his presence and of his very
present power”. Actually, Fowles`s attitude towards the reader is similar to Sarah`s
attitude towards Charles who becomes a toy deceived by Sarah, just as the narrator eludes
his reader. The comparison is not accidental since Sarah is also a teller of a story.
Elusiveness is also suggested by the epigraphs that open each chapter. An
empirical reader would be tempted to consider these epigraphs pillars sustaining the
illusion of a Victorian novel. On the contrary, they were selected because of their latent
meaning, which can be a grill of reading and a mirror of the chapter at the same time. By
placing them at the head of each chapter Fowles intends to guide the reader on his way,
he changes the horizon of expectation. These epigraphs which suppose a continuous
change of grid or point of view make the author overstep the fringes of his stated by
suggesting particular approaches of the text. Fowles, as a creator, places himself “next to
God”.
Although his technique could annihilate the openness and the ambiguity of the
novel, Fowles does not realises a deceptive novel from that point of view. In the final
chapter a ‘rather foppish and Frenchified’ figure, with ‘more than a touch of the
successful impresario about him’ , adjusts his watch and seems to obliterate the second
possible ending. This impresario drives ‘briskly away, supposedly leaving Charles to his
freedom and his doubts, but he remains a God who has declined to stop interfering.”Andrew Sanders.
The novel is provided with a structure that assures its transcendence. The author
actully tricked the reader into directing his reading since he finaly offers three
possibilities. Therefore Fowles only pretends to be building up a system within the
narrative because he always suggests movement, change, double meaning, ambiguity. At
this point, the author rises against the traditional novel, which follows a system that
confers it rigidity and limitation.
Fowles`s intention of modernising the Victorian novel is expressed in the
epigraph to chapter 45: “And ah for a man to arise in me, / That the man I am may cease
to be !”
Fowles proposes the reader a game in which he deconstructs and reconstructs
versions starting from a Victorian novel. According to his statement “writing fictional
futures” is an innate quality.
Referring to “fictional futures” in the plural the author actually takes into account
a text which would allow different approaches, whose articulations would permit a
change of plan and imply variety. Such a text is based on the self-reflexive power of the
word. A word capable of an unlimited reflection in itself enjoys a certain freedom in the
whole context. The openness of a text depends on the freedom of the words – which
become “spectral words”. By creating such a text an author propeses a lot of mirrors
which imply an unlimited number of reflected images. Reflection also means reiteration;
yet, with Fowles every new version means progress. From this point of view “arises” and
“cease” are two words that depend on each other. The old form must disappeare to offer a
room to the new one.
Fowles realised this progress by putting together two moments of the history of
literature. On the one hand he demonstrated that a Victorian novel can transcend its
period, and this method emphasises the value of a work of art reflected in its openness.
On the other hand he gives an example of desconstruction and reconstruction of the novel
observing the rules / principles of modernism and keeping untouched the details specific
to the Victorian period.
Randall Stevenson also considers that each work “is also a postmodernist
paradigm, a prophecy of the self-reflexive fore-grounding of language and fiction-making
that has become one of the central, distinguishing characteristic of postmodernism. There
are now almost too many authors to list who have expanded the self-consciousness of
modernist art, writing stories about storytelling, or intruding into the fiction to comment
on their own practice and preceedings or to discuss other problems in relating language,
fiction and reality. Lawrence Durrell, Doris Lessing, John Fowles, Christine Brooke-Rose
(…) among many others, figure in this postmodernist idiom which has continued to
expand and experiment with the conventions of fiction down to the present day”.
OSCAR WILDE
Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854 and unfortunately for the literary scene
he died soon in 1900 but, although he did not physically overstep the fringe of the
nineteenth century, his works keeps on enjoying the twentieth century reader`s mind and
soul. “Genius lasts longer than beauty” Lord Henry said in Wilde`s novel The Picture of
Dorian Gray, “Beauty” referring to the sitter or the object of inspiration whose
appearance is accidental and short.
Wilde`s education started with classical studies at Trinity College, in Dublin, and
went on with a scolarship to Oxford where he also studies John Ruskin`s Aesthetic
theories. After graduation he moved to London and established himself as a
representative of the school of “Art for Art`s Sake”. According to Yeats, Wilde was
gifted as a spokesman “I never before heard a man talking with perfect sentences , as if
he had written them all overnight with labour and yet all spontaneous”. After he had
gained attention through his conversation, Wilde decided to wear colourful costumes, “a
flamboyant style of dress”, similar to those worn at the beginning of his century. Another
shocking aspect of Wilde`s was his sexual life. Despite of having a wife and two children
he also met with a young poet, Alfred Douglas, whose father accused Wilde of
homosexuality. His trial and the two years of jail affected both his life and work.
There is a strong and unexplainable relation between Wilde`s life and his work.
Critics noticed the coincidence between Wilde`s death and Earnest Worthing`s, his
character in The Imporatnce of Being Earnest ( 1895 ). They both died in a hotel in Paris
attended by the manager. Generally, writers use their experince as a starting point; with
Wilde one can say that “work is reflected in life”, he makes the readers think about the
reversibility of the process.
Oscar Wilde impresses through the variety of his art, he starts with critical essays
written in the form of “Platonic dialogue” suggesting the dialogue of his later comedies.
He focuses on morality and social cliches beig an aesthete and an iconoclast at the same
time: The Decay of Lying ( 1889 ) and The Critic as Artist ( 1890 ). He also concerned
with the relation between nature and art, the latter being “far more than a mere imitation
of nature”. In The Truth of Masks, Wilde deals with the connection between truth and art
“A Truth in Art is whose contradiction is also true”.
The novel The Picture of Dorian Gray ( 1890 ) is his most important work as a
prose writer; in spite of its internal contradictions, the novel is a masterpiece of the time.
In 1891 the author wrote a Preface to the novel which is in contradiction with the novel,
at least with its end, since in the former he states that art and morality are separate while
the work ends as “a moral lesson on the evils of self – regarding hedonism”.
The Preface is focused on the artist and the work of art, on reality seen through
art, on the reality of the work of art. Each and every sentence is an essence; put together
they are shocking like Wilde`s later plays.
Referring to the relation between morality and art he states that “There is no such thing as
a moral or an immoral book. Books are written, or badly written”. Another statement
leads to the modern reader theory as his attacks are directed against the readers: “It is the
spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors”, Wilde writes.
According to Sanders “The narrative that follows ( the novel ) is a melodramatic,
Faustian demonstration of tne notion that art and morality are quie divorced”. Seeing the
picture Dorian Gray said: “How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But
this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of
June. If it were only the other way ! If it were I who was to be always young, and the
picture that was to grow old ! For that - for that – I would give everything! Yes, thare is
nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!” With
Sanders “Dorian Gray is atragedy of sorts with the subtext of a morality play: Its selfdestructive,darkly sinning central character is at once a desperate suicide and a martyr”.
The firs chapter is a very interesting poetic text.
Basil Hallward expounds his ideas about the connection between artist, work of art and
sitter in a conversation with his friend Lord Henry. Initialy Basil stated that he would not
exhibit Dorian Gray`s picture because “there was too much of him in it”, statement that
amused Lord Henry who considered it childish. The truth is that Basil puts the essence of
the process of art in it, that special transformation placing the artist in his creative state:
“every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The
sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is
rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. The reason I will not
exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secreat of my soul”.
First Basil explains that a work of art is based on the reaction of his soul and not
of his mind, it brings into light that hidden incomprehensible part of the artist. The artist
become a medium through which feelings are materialised on canvas. The sitter is the
happy accident, the unpredictable that tortures the artist until he finishes his creation. The
word “accident” used by Wilde will become the starting point for a whole theory
concerning the process of creation and the role of the accidental / hazard that makes the
process start and continue.
When Basil explains how the sitter`s absence makes him even more present the
reader should remember how Lily Briscoe succeeded in finishing Ramsay`s portrait, after
the latter`s death.
The picture is a reflection of the image projected in the artist, when the sitter is not there
the painter gives more of him, he implies more and also alienates the image more. Those
curves and “subtitles of colours” that suggest Dorian are the impulses of the work of art
that imposes itself, that creates itself by influencing the artist.
The Picture of Dorian Gray announces the modern novel and expresses some of
the main ideas that are the base of the litarary theory in the beginning of the twentieth
century. The novel allows an approach from the point of view of the classical Faustian
theme, which in its turn can be led towards interpretations suggesting the process of
creation. But the novel remains a document of Wilde`s social environment.
Two years later, in 1895, Wilde`s masterpiece was staged – The Importance of
Being Earnest. The play was published in 1899 after the playwright had reduced it from
four to three acts.
In Wilde`s plays the striking element is the “ orality” of their dialogue. Despite
the artificiality caused by the frequent paradoxes there is a permanent spontaneity
conferring vividness to the dialogue. Through his language Wilde succeeds in changing
the focus from the situational comedy to the intellectual comedy giving birth to the
theatre of ideas.
Language is the perfect instrument used by Wilde to shock his audience.
The reader should neglect Wilde`s protesting attitude against certain “ugly
aspects” of Victorian culture and society. There is a core of truth in any absurd statement
or situation, which leads the reader towards Beckett and Pinter. This aspects supports
realism as permanent in Wilde`s plays. Wilde`s being concerned about the co-existence
of the opposites becomes obsessive, one can always refer to the interference of the
natural and the supernatural, the good and the bad, the credible and the incredible. The
playwright`s propensity for paradoxes extends to the paradoxes of situation and of
character, Jack is rich while Earnest has no money; because of that Jack as Earnest does
not pay when he eats at the Savoy:
“Algernon:
Why on earth don`t you pay them? You have got heaps of money.
Jack:
Yes, but Earnest hasn`t, and I must keep up Earnest`s reputation”.
Paradoxically Jack turns out to be Lady Bracknell`s nephew and Algernon`s
brother. With Wilde it seems that social settlement is arbitrary and absurd, he criticises
the moral and social conventions. Lady Bracknell`s earnestness is of a different order, yet
she embodies Wilde`s sternest critique. As Ian Clarke states, “the famous scene where
she interviews Jack to test his eligibility as a suitor is primarily richly comic, yet what
can supposedly be passed off as the extravagant logic of an English eccentric or a
comedic parody of theatrical conventions in fact exposes the heart of the power base of
the class she represents. The thematic centre of society drama, the threat of misalliance, is
revealed through Lady Bracknell as a political as well as social and moral issue.
The ending of The Importance of Being Earnest, in keeping with the play`s genre,
re-establishes disrupted social order, that Jack really is earnest and is of acceptable social
possition – his mother a Lady, his father a general. Yet the play equally suggests that the
social settlement is as arbitrary and as absurd as when he was the foundling Jack
Worthing and descended from hand luggage.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
George Bernard Shaw is a playwright considered representative of realistic
drama, and marks the passage from the Victorian period to Modern literature. He was
born in 1856 in Dublin, and he left school when he was 14; six years later he followed his
mother who went to London to improve her prospects as a music teacher. Shaw appears
as a personality split between Mozart and Wagner on the one hand and social and
political personality on the other hand.
The Quintessence of Ibsenism, a study of Ibsen published in 1891, is an obvious
proof of Shaw`s propensity for Ibsen`s kind of drama – social plays – which invites
critics to study the similarities and differences of their works. Ibsen`s plays begin from
the discrepancy between reality and the romantic drama. The realistic drama develops
around the ‘taboo subjects” which implies new directions: with Ibsen the emphasis is on
“a new psychological contest of minds” and little physical action. He wanted his realism
to be reproduced on the stage as he stated in a letter addressed to Lindberg in 1883.
With Shaw the playwrights can be divided into “idealists’ and “realists” which is
a rough, quite radical classification suggesting Shaw`s turning against idealism. Shaw
was not interested in Ibsen`s symbolic and profound plays but in those attacking
conventionality and hypocrisy.
A vivid spirit of his age, Shaw found the necessary resources to involve in a social
movement in 1884 being one of the founders of the Fabian Society – an organisation
promoting socialism. He never became a conventional socialist anyway. His personality
was formed through the interference of different infuences like his training and interest in
music, his study of music and dramatic criticism and his interest in social reform.
Shawian plays answer his studies and interests through their critical implications.
His drama considered more instructive than didactic announces a surprising and
complex literary century where comedy and tragedy combine in an oxymoron.
Shaw`s turning against idealists and from here also against ideals leads to
iconoclasm. Styan notices that “the gospel according to Shaw required that we be ready
to criticize our ideals which was a form of salutary self-criticism. From Shaw`s
iconoclasm derives his theory about his characters: “I must worn my readers that my
attacks are directed against themselves, not against my figures”.
His characters do not obey the already known rule of the conventional hero who is
the villain but everything is changed and the conventional hero is the hero. The point is
that this time the hero does not obey the conventional features, he / she is built up on
paradoxes, good and bad features bound in a single person make the readers look inside
themselves.
As a playwright he remains faithful to old stage traditions. The themes he deals
with in his plays are: slum landlordism in Widowers` Houses – 1892; prostitution in
Mrs. Warren`s Profession – 1902; masculine heroism in Arms and the Man : An
Anti-Romantic Comedy – 1894; his new drama refers to Ireland, the Irish and their
problem in John Bull`s Other Island – 1907; the reconstruction of society by
manipulation in Major Barbara and Pygmalion – 1913. Shaw`s dramatic action feeds
itself from traditions of musical theatre, and especially from Mozart and Wagnerian
opera, for instance Man and Superman ( 1905 ) leading the reader to Don Giovanni by
Mozart.
Shaw`s intention to shock the audience becomes reality with Mrs. Warren`s
Profession published in 1893, a play whose impact on the spectators is accurately
mirrored in the press of the time: it is called “illuminated cangrene” , “morally rotten” , a
limit of indecency; “it defends immorality. It glorifies debauchery. It besmirches the
sacredness of a clergyman`s calling…” Shaw considered the reaction of the critics a
triumph, but unfortunately it led to the ban of the play by the Lord Chamberlain who
could censor stage performances at the time.
The performance of te play in New York in 1905 was immediately followed by
the prohibition of the play while the company that produced it was arrested. However
Shaw tried to demonstrate the morality of Mrs.Warren`s Profession in the preface to
the play. He wanted to “draw attention to the truth that prostitution was caused, not by
female depravity and male licentiousness, but simply by underpaying, undervaluing, and
overworking women so shamefully that the poorest of them are forced to resort to
prostitution to keep body and soul together”. The man who cannot see that starvation ,
overwork, dirt, and disease are as anti-social as prostitution – that they are the vices and
crimes of a nation , and not merely its misfortunes – is a hopelessly Private Person
(which means “idiot”, from the Greek idiotes , a private person ).
The word “prostitution” does not appear in the play, it is never uttered although it
can be felt behind every word, it is the backgroung of the play, the painful silence
supporting and feeding the play. The play is also received as a “moral study of economies
of prostitution”, and from this point of view it is very well understood by women;
however it is not so easy with men since it does not seem to treat their problem.
The main characters of the play are the women Vivie and her mother Mrs. Warren
who seem to be united in their indifferences. They are like two pillars grown up from the
same soil, facing each other, always a chain of brothels; her efforts and immoral activity
are directed towards her daughter who enjoys an expensive education at Cambridge.
Vivie was to become an idependent woman able to earn money as men do. Mrs Warren is
not a villainous character, she wants to protect her daughter.
With Vivie, Shaw creates a new woman, the “unwomanly” woman who behaves
like a man: she smokes, drinks whisky, and reads detective stories. Despite her freedom
she is made to feel guilty of her mother`s profession .
Sanders comments that Mrs. Warren`s Profession “confronts two contemporary
women`s issues: the future professional careers of educated, would be independent
women, and the oldest profession, female prostitution”. The internal tension leads to a
breaking off between mother and daughter, the latter trying to built her future on work
and “sounder principles”.
Shaw couldn`t stop to this kind of plays and created a new group of plays called
“plays pleasant” which bewildered his critics. With these plays he announces the modern
theatre since he uses the “method of the clown and the absurdist”. A play like Arms and
the Man, a comedy using the burlesque and the masculine heroism to deal with its antiwar theme, was very well received by the audience and ran fifty nights which put the
critics in confused position.
Shaw`s contemporary critics seize the meaning of his plays and praise his courage
to face the authorities of the time and bring something new in literature. Among the
features he preserves as a playwright, there is an “unpredictable” feature also sustained
by the impact of his plays on his critics and audience. His status is still debatable since
there are critics who wonder whether he was dealing in realism or some Shawian jokes
about the two sides of the truth.
SAMUEL BECKETT
In his novels and plays alike, Beckett focused on the wretchedness of living in an
attempt to expose the essence of the human condition, which he ultimately reduced to the
solitary self, or to nothingness. He also pared language down to its bare bones in a lean,
disciplined prose seasoned with sardonic wit and relied by vaudevillian patter and
clowning. His influece on subsequent dramatists, particulary those who followed him in
the so-called absurdist tradition, was significant, and the impact of his prose works was
considerable.
Beckett was born in 1906 near Dublin and attented Portora Royal School and
Trinity College – a university in Dublin where he studied French and Italian. The latter
opened his way towards Dante`s work and made him travel to France and Italy.
Between 1928 -1931 he was a teacher of English at Ecole Normale Superieure
and his friendship with James Joyce introduced him to his international circle in Paris
where he met Ezra Pound. He returned to Dublin, then London, but his oscillation
between France and his native country ended with his permanent residence in Paris from
1937.
After he had published Murphy in England in 1938, he returned to France where
he was blocked by the German occupation and he fought in opposition. In 1942 he wrote
another novel Watt in English, too, followed by several works in French: Mercier et
Camier, Le Calmant, Premier Amour.
Although Beckett`s prose works are extremely interesting, but difficult, the
readers do not receive them very well since the author oscillates among different
currents: from the burlesque poem Whoroscope to the propensity for Proustian prose –
the essay Proust – and to the poems Echo`s Bones.
Actually Beckett`s well-known play Waiting for Godot made of him a
playwright of international reputation. It is followed by other plays: Endgame ( 1957 ),
Krapp`s Last Tape ( 1960 ), and Happy Days ( 1962 ). Beckett widened the sphere of
his works by writing for radio. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1969 and
died in 1989.
Peter Griffith comments that Beckett goes beyond temporal and spacial limits:
“Carnival, utternace, dialogue, struggle: these are terms that apply to drama as much as
they do to the analysis of discourse, and it is time to apply them in this way. One of the
resons why Beckett and Pinter have often bracketed together is that they are both
frequently seen as writing hermetically-sealed dramatic texts which deliberately and
willfully bear no relation to the world outside the play; another version of this criticism is
that they create a spurious and a historical picture of The Human Condition which
neglects existing social conditions and processes”.
Any person who is reading Beckett`s prose or watching his plays has a strange
feeling of being nowhere, of living no time. It seems that a certain element is taken from
life and placed in the centre of his work, which recurrently develops around it. The plot
of Beckett`s novels and plays are limited; but his works allow different readings, one
hidden behind the previous one, like a palimpsest. Molloy for example has a very limited
plot, but it can also be read as a thriller or at another level it can acquire the features of a
picaresque novel. Even Waiting for Godot, which is a play where nothing happens
shows us that something changes, it combines permanence – Estragon and Vladimir`s
situation – with transience – Lucky and Pozzo`s different appearances.
His characters are “remains of human beings” living in a lowering world whose
sufferance is accurately followed and described by Samuel Beckett. Beckett`s universe is
degrading; it is dominated by confusion and darkness, like a maze of memories and
dreams.
This chaos and ambiguity make of Beckett a representative of the absurd
literature. The set is very simple and symmetrical: Waiting for Godot requires a tree and
a country road in frant of it; Endgame is placed in a bare interior and the set of Happy
Days is reduced to maximum of simplicitly and symmetry with Winnie in the centre of a
mound of earth. Therefore the audience`s interst is directed towards the dialogue.
Waiting for Godot is Beckett`s most representative play; it was published first
in French in 1952 and two years later in English in New York, but the definitive text
appeared at Faber and Faber in 1956.
The plot is extremely simple and consists in turning nothing into something
since the main characters have nothing else to do but wait for Godot, who will never
come, and play with thoughts. Starting from setting to characters, everything is
symmetrical in the play, everything is separated in couples, the play is structured in two
acts. Beckett indicates only two elements on the stage – a tree and a road, and three paires
of characters – Vladimir and Estragon, Pozzo and Lucky, Mr.Godot and a boy. The
characters in a pair are opposite, complementary and doomed to be together but
sometimes the author creates a certain confusion which makes them change their places,
they are the embodiment of the same situation at different levels.
Estragon and Vladimir are both comic heroes, their first appearance as clowns
speculating on the strangeness of language, of things turns into a couple of tragic
characters whose situation is helpless. They seem to be kept together by the tree which
could be a symbol for hope. In the line of Beckett`s oppositions Vladimir might be
associated with the mind or the spirit, while Estragon might be the body. Their dialogues
deviate into a suggestive game reminding us of the decay of humanity.
Vladimir has a mediative nature showing a great preoccupation with the Bible
and especially with the story about salvation and damnation. Except this obsessive
preoccupation with the Bible, Vladimir is the voice of reason, he is the thinker who tries
to give explanations, “ to bring dark things into the light of day” , to protect Estragon
who is a very sensitive person and the prisoner of his nightmares. Estragon`s
sensitiveness seems to have its roots in the war`s horrors, his reactions hint at traumatic
happenings: “ Don`t touch me! Don`t question me! Don`t speak to me! Stay with me!”
The other characters, Pozzo and Lucky, are really tied but their relationship is
more unpleasant. The contrast between Pozzo and Lucky is more powerful, the split
between mind and body is not very firm since it implies coexistence suggested by the
rope. Lucky, who in the first act is the “good angel” , has an awful aspect, is a miserable
figure and cannot even think without an order. In the second act, he is dumb, he is a
fallen angel but he drives Pozzo by a shorter rope.
Pozzo is a character built up on contradictions, described as “tyrannical,
confident, self-satisfied, he is also childishly dependent, nervous and helpless, unable
even to sit down on occasion without a signal from outside”. Pozzo is an example of
selfishness, always preoccupied with his comforts, he doesn`t even think of sharing his
food with any of the characters.
In the second act, Pozzo changes, becomes a more serious person, because of
his blindness he is supported by Lucky. In spite of this new situation, communication is
still impossible since this time Lucky is dumb.
The boy appears only at the end of each act and as a messenger he should bring
some light in the play. The message is the same and all the Boy has to do is to confirm:
“Vladimir: You have a message from Mr Godot.
Boy: Yes, sir.
Vladimir: He won`t come this evening.
Boy: No,sir.
Vladimir: But he`ll come tomorrow.
Boy: Yes,sir.
Vladimir: Without fail.
Boy: Yes,sir.”
Yet, the main character of the play is also always absent and the awaited Godot
who could be God or future but “Nothing is certain”. However there is a relation between
Godot and the characters` hope sustained by Vladimir`s preoccupation with Crucifixion
and the salvation.
There are some hints at the relation between Christ and Godot in Vladimir`s
words since he believes that if Godot comes they will be saved from hell and death.
In Waiting for Godot the words acquire the most important place because
rhythm, repetition, pauses imply a greater attention on the part of the reader. Certain
deviations of the text by virtue of a musicality are not accidental or meaningless, they can
suggest at least the opposition life – death, light – dark: “leaves” and “ashes”.
It seems that Beckett`s language always leads the reader towards concepts like
repetition, recollection, reconstruction, recurrence, therefore circularity. With Peter
Griffith repetition is a kind of quotation since language itself by its usage supposes
repetition.
HAROLD PINTER
Existential problems like absurdity, power, domination, fear, lack of
communication are reflected in Harold Pinter`s plays, a new theatre of the Absurd. His
works, cryptic and original, have been described as comedies of menace. In a typical
Pinter work, the characters attempt to communicate as they react to an invasion of their
narrow lives. Pinter`s dialogue reflects the difficulties inherent in verbal communication
and explores the layers of meaning produced by pauses and silence.
Harold Pinter was born at Hackney, East London, in 1930, and believed that their
family was of Jewish origin since the name Pinter occurred among Hungarian Jews.
Pinter`s first poems were published as written by Harold Pinter – a name of Spanish
origin, Sephardic Jews. Pinter`s memories about his childhood are connected with a
“working-class area” with Victorian houses and a soap factory “ with a terrible smell”.
Pinter started as an actor; his interest in dramatic art determined him to apply for a
grant to study acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, but he went there for two
terms only, then he left. Although he did not see too much of war, at eighteen he refused
to go into the army and declared himself a conscientious objector.
His literary beginning took place in Poetry London in 1950 with two poems
signed by Harold Pint. He excelled as a playwright starting with his first play The Room
which was very successful and impressed Harold Habson, a drama critic of the Sunday
Times, who wrote about it. The same year he wrote two further plays: The Birthday
Party and The Dumb Waiter. However Pinter`s next play The Caretaker, performed in
1960, succeeded in annihilating the previous bad commentaries, it proclaimed Pinter one
of the best playwrights of the time, comparable to Beckett.
Pinter as well as Beckett is a representative of the Theatre of the Absurd in spite
of the surface naturalism of their plays. Actually Pinter`s plays are always related to
Beckett`s and Ionesco`s. Some critics consider these playwrights and also Kafka as
influences since Pinter himself admits that he likes Beckett and Kafka very much, but he
reads Ionesco after he has already written his first plays. Unlike Beckett and Kafka who
create a world where dream intersects reality, where both coexist, Pinter “remains on the
firm ground of everyday reality”.
Unexpectedly real, Pinter`s work is woven around his experience, it is the
embodiment of something ordinary, a real situation closely observed which allows him to
point out certain elements of setting and language. In his earlier plays sinks and food are
obsessively present. Despite this, Esslin does not consider Pinter a naturalistic playwright
but paradoxically he emphasises the mystery and the ambiguity of Pinter`s work: The firt
deviation from the realistically constructed play lies in the element of uncertainty about
the motivation of the characters, their backgrounds, their very identity.
The ambiguity of the characters lies in the lack of biographical information, we do
not know the names of the characters. For instance, in The Caretaker the old man is
called Davies, but also Jenkins. Pinter claims that his characters are similar to us
“inexpressive, giving little way, unrealible, elusive, evasive, obstructive, unwilling” but
they are a key to the dramatist`s method because they increase the dramatic tension.
The atmosphere of uncertainty, ambiguity, mystery is the outcome of man`s
existential fear, with Pinter menace is outside but it also lurks inside every character
suggesting a phychological approach.
Pinter started as a poet and he is concerned with words and with the relation
between author and words. Sound, meaning and rhythm merge with his pleasure of
writing. But words can make him feel sickness and disgust because of their dead
terminology, repetitiveness which lead them towards meaninglessness, a kind of
paralysis.
The Caretaker is a play which allows a comparison with Beckett`s Waiting for
Godot as Peter Griffth states: the reader can compare “the absence of a stable social
milieu; the characters` havy reliance upon the exercise of memory, coupled with
considerable problems in achieving this feat; the absence of women; even, at a perhaps
trivial level, the recurrent difficulty in matching feet to appropriate footwear”.
The structure of the play is a result of Pinter`s interest in symmetry; it contains
three acts and three characters. The two brothers are different but they complete each
other: Aston is a good person who cares about other human beings in need and tries to
help them but he is slow and clumsy; Mick seems to be a successful businessman who
bought an old house for his brother. The third character, Davies, is the intruder who
comes in Aston`s house and because of his behaviour he has to leave his temporary home
and job.
The problem of identity appears in this play, too: Davies states that his name is
not Davies but Jenkins, yet he returns to Davies: “Mac Davies. That was before I changed
me name”. The confusion created by the two names and the character`s oscillation
between them show the reader a person who oscillates between the two brothers: Aston
who helped him and Mick who seems superior. Davies, a homeless wanderer, tries his
shortcomings exploited by Mick who finally succeeds in making him show his real face.
Davies is unable to resists “the satisfaction of glorying in his superiority over the exinmate of an asylum “ , he also intends to play one brother off against the other.
The paly was received as a simple one; its obscurity is connected with dialogue,
the relation between question and answer, the relation between characters.
While Aston`s gesture can be interpreted as a search of a father, Mick`s rejection
of the father figure is an archetype of the conflict between gererations, between the sons
and the father. Mick`s reaction in the end of the play is violent and ironical and leaves no
possibility of return for the old man: “ Ever since you came into this house there has been
nothing but trouble. Honest. I can take nothing you say at face value. Every word you
speak is open to any number of different interpretations. Most of what you say is lies.
You`re violent, you`re erratic, you`re just completely unpredictable. You`re nothing else
but a wild animal, when you come down to it. You`re a barbarian. And to put the old tin
lid on it, you stink from arse-hole to breakfast time.”
Aston and Mick are similar to Estragon and Vladimir: one of them is a poetic
nature while the other is rational. They can also be seen as different sides of the same
personality, idea sustained by Pinter`s statement that “ every character an author brings to
life can be regarded as an emanation of one aspect of his personality”. Aston is a very
sensitive person with a vivid imagination, therefore an artistic personality which had to
be adjust to reality ( through electric shock treatment ). Mick who is more anchored in
reality tries to protect him.
The Caretaker is considered a tragic-comedy according to Pinter`s statement:
“As far as I`m concerned, The Caretaker is funny, up to a point. Beyond that point it
ceases to be funny, and it was because of that point that I wrote it” ( The Sunday Times,
London, 14 August 1960 ). In spite of some readers` reactions ( in favour of a “laughable
farce” ) the comic and the tragic are interwoven and this makes of it an open play.
III. Assignment questions:
- Comment on the main critical ideas of “Tradition and Individual Talent” And “The
Music of Poetry” by T.S. Eliot.
- Comment on the broad background of “The Waste Land” By T.S. Eliot.
- Comment on the main themes, motifs and symbols from T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste
Land”.
- The idea of history in Yeats’ “Leda and the Swan”.
- Reconciling opposites in Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium”.
- Christian legend used in non- Christian aims in D. Thomas’ poetry.
- The impressionistic technique in J. Conrad’s “Lord Jim”.
- Main symbols of time and fragmentariness in Virginia Woolf’s “To the
Lighthouse”/ “Jacob’s Room”.
- Stream of consciousness technique in “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” by
J. Joyce combined with epiphany and the aesthetic doctrine.
- Elements of the absurd theatre in S. Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” and “Happy
Days”.
Note: The form of the exam will be a written paper and an oral examination.
IV. Selected Bibliography:
1. *** The Norton Anthology, Fifth Edition, vol. 2, New York, 1986.
2. *** The Oxford Anthology of English Literature, vol. II, Oxford University Press,
New York, 1972.
3. Bradbury, Malcolm. The Modern British Novel, Secker & Warburg, London, 1993.
4. Felicia, Burdescu. 20th Century British Literature, Tipografia Universitatii din
Craiova, 2003.
5. Ford, Boris (ed.), The New Pelican Guide to English Literature. The Present, vol.8,
Penguin Book, the second edition, 1990.
6. Frazer, George. Creanga de Aur, Minerva, Bucharest, 1980.
7. Rosenthal, M. L. The Modern Poets, Oxford University Press, London, 1969.
8. Sanders, Andrew. The Oxford History of English Literature, Clarendon Press,
Oxford, 1994.
9. Stevenson, Randall. Modernist Fiction, Harvester Wheatsheaf, London, 1992.
10. Wellek, Rene. A History of Modern Criticism : 1750 – 1950, Jonathan Cape,
London, 1986.