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major writers, biographical notes, and literary criticism

major writers, biographical notes, and literary criticism

The Torch in My Ear

July 2, 2012 by Roy Johnson

Frankfurt – Vienna – Berlin

The first volume of Elias Canetti’s remarkable memoirs ended in early 1920 when his mother plucked him out of what she regarded as his self-indulgent intellectual reveries in Zurich, and dragged him into inflation-torn Germany to face ‘real life’. That’s where the story is taken up here – in a Frankfurt boarding house in 1921. The Torch in My Ear continues the very Oedipal relationship with his widowed mother and reaches the point where he must decide on a career. He shifts again to Vienna and begins to study Chemistry, quite clearly without any genuine appetite for the subject.

The Torch in My EarIn all his activities there’s a remarkable degree of similarity with the life which Franz Kafka was leading in nearby Prague – restless moving from one temporary home to another, outdoor swimming and walking, psychological struggles with a dominant parent, and aesthetic aspirations as an antidote to the tedium of daily life.

These similarities are intensified in one or two completely bizarre scenes where Canetti stumbles upon an elderly woman flogging a housemaid who is stripped to the waist in a kitchen, and then later encounters his landlady late at night licking the backs of paintings of her late husband. Later in the memoir he makes friends with a young man who is completely paralysed, but with whom he has conversations about philosophy. These scenes might have come straight from a work by Kafka.

A major influence on his life in Vienna was Karl Kraus, author of the one-man newspaper Die Fackel (The Torch) which gives this volume its title in German – Die Fackel im Ohr – though he does not give an account of Kraus’s ideas, so much as his charisma as a public speaker.

Canetti’s personal life is dominated by a deeply literary friendship with a young woman called Veza, but it is characteristic of his approach to autobiography that his account of the relationship is completely intellectualized. He reveals absolutely nothing about the state of his feelings for the girl, and she disappears from the narrative without trace, as does even his mother.

You would never guess from this volume of the memoirs that Veza developed a literary career of her own, and eventually became his wife. Neither would you guess that she also had a relationship with his younger brother Georges – or that she only had one arm.

On the 15 July 1927 in Vienna (known as Black Friday) the police shot dead eighty-four protesters in a demonstration against the government. The Palace of Justice was set alight, and there were riots in the streets – in all of which Canetti was caught up. This he depicts as one of his life-forming experiences, and he devoted the next thirty years or more to the study of mass psychology that resulted in his book Crowds and Power (1960).

Given that he wrote these memoirs fifty years and more after the events described, he has an astonishing memory for names, places, and the fine details of everyday life. Characters are brought into being on the page almost as if they were people he had encountered the day before. The downside of this approach is that the memoir becomes predominantly a series of anecdotal sketches – a boastful dwarf; a one-legged Mormon; a beautiful Russian girl who lives via Dostoyevski. But he doesn’t bother to relate any of these characters to any larger social or artistic issues.

When he does escape from describing characters to presenting general reflections on life, he often drifts into a sort of rambling which seems to combine narrative via metaphor with a form of German metaphysics:

Far more important was the fact that you were simultaneously learning how to hear. Everything that was spoken, anywhere, at any time, by anyone at all, was offered to your hearing, a dimension of the world that I had never had any inkling of. And since the issue was the combination—in all variants—of language and person, this was perhaps the most important dimension, or at least the richest. This kind of hearing was impossible unless you excluded your own feelings. As soon as you had put into motion what was to be heard, you stepped back and only absorbed and could not be hindered by any judgement on your part, any indignation, any delight. The important thing was the pure unadulterated shape: none of these acoustic masks (as I subsequently named them) could blend with the others For a long time you weren’t aware of how great a supply you were gathering.

His account moves up a gear when he visits Berlin in 1928 at the invitation of poetess Ibby Gordon. He meets most of the major artistic figures of the period – the montage artist John Heartfield (real name Helmut Herzfeld) his brother Wieland, the playwright Bethold Brecht, artist George Groz, and his favourite character the Russian writer Isaac Babel.

Some chapters are based on small incidents described in a puzzling degree of detail. At one point a conversation in a tavern with a group of criminals is expanded for several pages into minute descriptions of a burglar’s face and longwinded accounts of Canetti’s thoughts and feelings during the conversation. He has a personal theory of memory to explain this unusual approach – but it’s hard to know if this is just an excuse to cover his tracks:

I had seen many things in Berlin that stunned and confused me. These experiences have been transformed, transported to other locales, and, recognisable only by me, have passed into my later writings It goes against my grain to reduce something that now exists in its own right and to trace it back to its origin. This is why I prefer to cull out only a few things from those three months in Berlin—especially things that have kept their recognisable shape and have not vanished altogether into the secret labyrinth from which I would have to extricate them and clothe them anew. Contrary to many people, particularly those who have surrendered to a loquacious psychology, I am not convinced that one should plague, pester, and pressure memory or expose it to the effects of well-calculated lures; I bow to memory, every person’s memory

This seems to be a convoluted way of saying that he is only going to write about things that suit him, and there is certainly no attempt here to create a continuous picture of either his own intellectual development, or the artistic current of the times through which he lived. Indeed, as Clive James has argued in his own excellent review of this volume, Canetti’s ego was so overwhelming that it actually prevented him empathising with other people.

The Torch in My Ear Buy the book at Amazon UK

The Torch in My Ear Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2012


Elias Canetti, The Torch in my Ear, London: Granta Publications, 2011, pp.384, ISBN: 1847083579


The Tongue Set Free Volume One of the memoirs — The Tongue Set Free

The Torch in My Ear Volume Two of the memoirs — The Torch in My Ear

The Play of the Eyes Volume Three of the memoirs — The Play of the Eyes

Party in the Blitz Volume Four of the memoirs — Party in the Blitz


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Filed Under: Biography, Elias Canetti Tagged With: Biography, Cultural history, Elias Canetti, Modernism, The Torch in my Ear

The Total Library

February 11, 2011 by Roy Johnson

criticism, journalism, film reviews, and essays

Jorge Luis Borges is one of the few writers to establish an international reputation on the strength of only having written short stories: (Katherine Mansfield is another). In fact because he never wrote any long works, it is often assumed that he didn’t write very much. The truth is the exact opposite: he never stopped writing, and The Total Library, this huge collection of his non-fiction works is only a sample of his vast output.

The Total LibraryFrom his earliest years he produced book reviews, essays, lectures, film reviews, prologues, and translations in addition to his now-famous fictions. He even invented literary genres – the essay which is part philosophic reflection and part fiction; studies of imaginary works; and biographies of people who did not exist. This in addition to spoofs, mind games, and metaphysical writings of a kind that seem to transcend national boundaries – which is partly why he managed to establish his international reputation.

Borges’ attitude to the lecture illustrates both his personality and his versatility. In his earlier years he gave ‘lectures’ by sitting on the stage and letting somebody else read out a prepared text to the audience. After he went blind he didn’t write out a text at all, but sat in front of the audience and improvised monologues on his chosen topic. He is an immensely sophisticated playboy of the literary world

This volume is a very wide collection in chronological terms – from his earliest pieces written in the 1920s to fragments written shortly before his death in 1986. It even includes early work he later disowned, but which here has wisely been included. This allows us to follow (in excellent translation) the development of his approach to writing.

It has to be said that his early work is marked by an inflated and pretentious literary style – for instance his habit of trying to impress with paradoxical statements “all the film’s characters are recklessly normal”. He also seems to have adopted a great deal of whimsy from the English authors who were the favourite reading of his earlier years. But this affectation drops away from the early 1930s onwards.

At their most lightweight, some of these pieces are no more than paragraph long observations, but at their best they offer amazingly perceptive analyses based on his encyclopaedic knowledge and love of literature. For instance in the middle of discussing Melville’s Bartelby the Scrivener he persuasively argues that the text prefigures the work of Kafka in its rigorous logic and black humour. This is a perception he elaborated into a full length essay seven years later – ‘Kafka and his Precursors’ (1951) in which he wittily argues that great writers create not only their own works, but also their readers and even their precursors. He illustrates what we now call Kafkaesque elements in the work of Kierkegaard and Robert Browning, then observes:

Kafka’s idiosyncracy is present in each of these writings, to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had not written, we would not perceive it; that is to say, it would not exist. The poem ‘Fears and Scruples’ by Robert Browning prophesies the work of Kafka, but our reading of Kafka noticeably refines and diverts our reading of the poem. Browning did not read it as we read it now. .. The fact is that each writer creates his precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

There are surprises on nearly every page. Borges repeatedly asserts that whilst James Joyce is a great twentieth century writer, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are ‘unreadable’. In his film criticism, he pours scorn on King Kong and Now, Voyager (‘Across the screens of the most remote movie houses, the film spreads its bold thesis: A disfigured Miss Davis is less beautiful‘). He defends Rudyard Kipling against his political detractors. And his celebration of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass will make you want to dash out and buy a copy, if you don’t already have one.

There would be a good argument for reading this collection backwards – starting with pieces such as the magnificent essay on ‘The Detective Story’ (1951) or on ‘Blindness'(1977) which is a poetic meditation on the advantages he has gained from losing his own sight – which turn out to be his learning Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian languages. Work your way in reverse chronological order through his essays on anti-Semitism and the second world war, via the sketches he produced for Hogar (the Argentinean equivalent of Ladies’ Home Journal) until you reach the material he (understandably) disowned. For those who have read his celebrated short stories in Ficciones, Labyrinths, and The Book of Imaginary Beings, this collection is a welcome addition to understanding a fascinating writer.

The Total Library Buy the book at Amazon UK

The Total Library Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2011


Jorge Luis Borges, The Total Library, London: Penguin Books, 2001, pp.560, ISBN: 0141183020


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The Trial

August 6, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Kafka’s one completed novel masterpiece

The Trial was the only novel Kafka ever more-or-less completed during his own lifetime. Most of his other work is renowned for being fragmentary and incomplete. But even so, its chapters were kept in separate folders and he gave no indication of the order in which they were to appear. The parts were assembled and published by his friend Max Brod in 1925, the year after Kafka’s death. It is a novel which seems to give an amazingly premonitory account of the horrors in the modern totalitarian world.

The TrialIt deals with the arbitrary nature of power threatening the freedom of the individual and the crushing of every attempt to understand its workings. The novel opens with a sentence which has become famous – heralding the nightmare to come: “Somebody must have been telling lies about Joseph K, for one morning without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.” This is the ‘knock on the door’ which was to become an everyday experience for millions in the years that followed in the totalitarian worlds of Stalin’s Russia and the Nazi period of German’s history. Needless to say, it has also become commonplace throughout the world ever since – from Franco’s Spain and Pinochet’s Chile to China, North Korea, and today’s middle-East.

Joseph K’s offense is never explained to him, and the illogical nature of his helplessly vulnerable condition is pursued relentlessly throughout the narrative. Indeed, it gets worse with each of his efforts to understand or do anything about it. He appeals to all forms of bureaucratic authority for help and clarification, but gets nowhere.

Of course, no trial in the ordinary sense of that word takes place. He never discovers the precise charge which is made against him. Once he is arrested, an examining magistrate inquires into the case against him – and the process [Der Prozess is the German title of the novel] gradually merges into the verdict.

Joseph K visits a number of people and even the court itself in pursuit of his self defense. Every venue seems more bizarre than the last. A courtroom which is more like a madhouse; a lawyer’s office which seems more like a derelict cathedral; and a painter’s studio which is packed with lubricious young girls.

Many possible interpretations of the story have been discussed at length in the critical writing on Kafka. First there were the religious and existential approaches to explain why Joseph K feels guilty, even when he doesn’t seem to have done anything wrong. Then the psychoanalytic and biographical theories, based on guilt about his family or his fiancee Felice Bauer to whom he was twice engaged. Western Europeans favoured the existential approach, whereas the old Eastern bloc countries understandably read Kafka as expressing the fate of the individual denied freedom by bureaucratic tyrannies. Both approaches can be equally convincing, and more are possible.

These new editions of Kafka’s main works from Oxford University Press offer fresh translations, and they come with extended introductory essays, full explanatory notes, a bibliography, and both a biographical preface on Kafka and a chronology of his life. They also explain the very complex provenance of the text, and included as a bonus are fragments from the novel discovered amongst Kafka’s papers after his death. Generations of scholars have been unable to decide exactly where they belong in the novel, so they are offered as appendices.

This is one of the key texts in early twentieth century modernism. Kafka was unlike any other writer before or since (even though he has many pale imitators). If you have not read Kafka before, it’s probably better to start with some of his short stories – such as Metamorphosis. When you’re ready, this novel will be waiting for you – like a nightmare ready to happen.

1962 film version – directed by Orson Wells

The Trial Buy the book at Amazon UK

The Trial Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2009


Franz Kafka, The Trial, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp.191, ISBN: 0199238294


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The Trial

January 27, 2010 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, characters, video, resource materials

The Trial is Kafka’s one indisputably successful novel – a haunting and original study in existential anxiety, paranoia, and persecution. Joseph K is accused one day of being guilty – but not told what crime he has committed. He wrestles hopelessly with legal officials and a nightmare-like court which acts on arbitrary rules, striving to find justice. In the end he fails, only to be killed ‘like a dog’. Kafka gave expression to modern anxiety three decades before most people even started feeling it. This is a novel which stands outside literary norms – a superb achievement of literary modernism. Be prepared for black humour as well as mind-bending contradictions and deeply etched literary expressionism.

Franz Kafka - portrait

Franz Kafka


The Trial – plot summary

Joseph K is a senior bank clerk who lives in lodgings. On his thirtieth birthday he is unexpectedly arrested by two unidentified agents for an unspecified crime. The agents do not name the authority for which they are acting. He is not taken away, however, but left at home to await instructions from the Committee of Affairs.

K goes to visit the magistrate, but instead is forced to have a meeting with an attendant’s wife. Looking at the Magistrate’s books, he discovers a cache of pornography.

He returns home to find Fräulein Montag, a lodger from another room, moving in with Fräulein Bürstner. He suspects that this is to prevent him from pursuing his affair with the latter woman. Yet another lodger, Captain Lanz, appears to be in league with Montag.

Later, in a store room at his own bank, K discovers the two agents who arrested him being whipped by a flogger for asking K. for bribes, as a result of complaints K. previously made about them to the Magistrate. K. tries to argue with the flogger, saying that the men need not be whipped, but the flogger cannot be swayed. The next day he returns to the store room and is shocked to find everything as he had found it the day before, including the Whipper and the two agents.

The TrialK is visited by his uncle, who is a friend of a lawyer. The uncle seems distressed by K’s predicament. At first sympathetic, he becomes concerned K is underestimating the seriousness of the case. The uncle introduces K to an advocate, who is attended by Leni, a nurse, who K’s uncle suspects is the advocate’s mistress. K. has a sexual encounter with Leni, whilst his uncle is talking with the Advocate and the Chief Clerk of the Court, much to his uncle’s anger, and to the detriment of his case.

K visits the advocate and finds him to be a capricious and unhelpful character. He returns to his bank but finds that his colleagues are trying to undermine him.

K is advised by one of his bank clients to visit Titorelli, a court painter, for advice. Titorelli has no official connections, yet seems to have a deep understanding of the process. K learns that, to Titorelli’s knowledge, not a single defendant has ever been acquitted. He sets out what K’s options are, but they all consist merely of delaying tactics to stretch out his case as long as possible before the inevitable ‘Guilty’ verdict.

K decides to take control of his own life and visits his advocate with the intention of dismissing him. At the advocate’s office he meets a downtrodden individual, Block, a client who offers K some insight from a client’s perspective. Block’s case has continued for five years and he appears to have been virtually enslaved by his dependence on the advocate’s meaningless and circular advice. The advocate mocks Block in front of K for his dog-like subservience.

The TrialK is asked to tour an Italian client around local places of cultural interest, but the Italian client short of time asks K. to tour him around only the cathedral, setting a time to meet there. When the client doesn’t show up, K explores the cathedral which is empty except for an old woman and a church official. K decides to leave as a priest K notices seems to be preparing to give a sermon from a small second pulpit, lest it begin and K be compelled to stay for its entirety. Instead of giving a sermon, the priest calls out K’s name, although K has never known the priest. The priest works for the court, and tells K a fable, (which has been published separately as ‘Before the Law’) that is meant to explain his situation, but instead causes confusion, and implies that K’s fate is hopeless.

Over the course of the year, the stress of the case weighs on K He begins a gradual decline from confident to a nervous state similar to that of the client Block, and those of other broken defendants he meets in the explosively hot law offices. At the bank, he is humiliated by his inability to handle an important client as he is constantly exhausted from worry.

On the last day of K’s thirtieth year, two men arrive to execute him. He offers little resistance, suggesting that he has realised this as being inevitable for some time. They lead him to a quarry where he is expected to kill himself, but he cannot. The two men then execute him by plunging a knife into his heart.


Study resources

Red button The Trial – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

Red button The Trial – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

Red button The Trial – Penguin Modern Classics – Amazon UK

Red button The Trial – Penguin Modern Classics – Amazon US

Red button The Trial – Dover Thrift – Amazon UK

Red button The Trial – Dover Thrift – Amazon US

Red button The Trial – Everyman’s Library Classics – Amazon UK

Red button The Trial – Everyman’s Library Classics – Amazon US

Red button The Trial – eBook formats at Project Gutenburg

Red button The Trial – Orson Welles’ 1967 film version – Amazon UK

Red button The Trial – Cliffs Notes – Amazon UK

Red button The Trial – audioBook at Project Gutenberg

Red button The Trial – book review

Red button The Trial – as a graphic novel

Red button Kafka: A Short Introduction – book review

Red button The Trial – 1992 film version by Harold Pinter

Henry James The Cambridge Companion to Kafka – Amazon UK


Principal characters
Joseph K a senior bank clerk
Fraulein Burstner a boarder in the same house as K
Fraulein Montag a friend of Fraulein Burstner
Frau Grubach proprietress of the house where K lives
Uncle Karl K’s uncle and former guardian
Herr Huld a pompous and pretentious lawyer
Leni Herr Huld’s seductive nurse
Vice-President K’s rival at the bank
President the manager of the bank
Rudi Block an accused man, former grain-dealer
Titorelli a court painter

Kafka’s writing

Franz Kafka - manuscript page

a page of Kafka’s manuscript


Franz Kafka: An Illustrated LifeFranz Kafka: Illustrated Life This is a photographic biography that offers an intimate portrait in an attractive format. A lively text is accompanied by over 100 evocative images, many in colour and some previously unpublished. They depict the author’s world – family, friends, and artistic circle in old Prague – together with original book jackets, letters, and other ephemera. This is an excellent starting point for beginners which captures fin de siecle Europe beautifully.

Franz Kafka greatest works Buy the book at Amazon UK
Franz Kafka greatest works Buy the book at Amazon US


The Trial – film version

Orson Welles wrote and directed (and acted in) a magnificent film version of The Trial in 1962. It’s a faithful dramatisation of the novel which captures perfectly the brooding, nightmarish world of the original. Much of it was filmed in the old French government buildings of the Quai d’Orsay before it was transformed into the present museum.

A young Anthony Perkins gives a superb, haunting performance as the angst-ridden protagonist, Joseph K. The rest of the cast features female icons from the 1960s including Jeanne Moreau, Elsa Martinelli, and Romy Schneider. Welles’ favourite actor Akim Tamiroff is also on hand, and Welles himself plays the Advocate. This is a film which is very faithful to the original novel. It begins with Orson Wells providing voice-over to a comic-book version of the parable ‘Before the Law’.


Film version cast list
Anthony Perkins Joseph K
Jeanne Moreau Fraulein Burstner
Romy Schneider Leni
Elsa Martinelli Hilda
Orson Welles The Advocate
Akim Tamiroff Bloch
Madeleine Robinson Frau Grubach

Red button See reviews of the film at the Internet Movie Database


Photomontage

Kafka, family photos, and old Prague


Further reading

Red button Jeremy Adler, Franz Kafka (Overlook Illustrated Lives), Gerald Duckworth, 2004.

Red button Mark Anderson. Kafka’s Clothes: Ornament and Aestheticism in the Habsburg Fin de Siecle, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992

Red button Louis Begley, The Tremendous Words I have Inside my Head: Franz Kafka: A Biographical Essay, Atlas Illustrated editions, 2008.

Red button Harold Bloom, Franz Kafka: Modern Critical Essays, New York: Chelsea House, 1986.

Red button Harold Bloom, Franz Kafka (Bloom’s Major Novelists), Chelsea House Publishers, 2003.

Red button Elizabeth Boa, Kafka: Gender, Class, and Race in the Letters and Fictions, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.

Red button Max Brod, Franz Kafka: A Biography, Da Capo Press, 1995.

Red button Max Brod (ed), The Diaries of Franz Kafka, Schoken Books, 1988.

Red button Elias Canetti, Kafka’s Other Trial: The Letters to Felice, Schocken Books, 1989.

Red button Stanley Corngold, Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka, Princeton University Press, 2006.

Red button W.J. Dodd (ed), Kafka: The Metamorphosis, The Trial, and The Castle, London: Longman, 1995.

Red button Carolin Duttlinger, Kafka and Photography, Oxford: Oxford Universit Press, 2007.

Red button Angel Flores (ed), The Kafka Debate, New York: Gordian Press, 1977.

Red button Sander Gilman, Franz Kafka (Critical Lives), Reaktion Books, 2007.

Red button Sander Gilman, Franz Kafka: The Jewish Patient, London: Routledge, 1995.

Red button Ronald Gray, Kafka: A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice Hall, 1962.

Red button Ronald Hayman, A Biography of Kafka, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001.

Red button Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks, Exact Change, 1998.

Red button Franz Kafka, The Trial (Complete Audiobooks), Naxos Audiobooks, 2007.

Red button David Zane Mairowitz, Introducing Kafka, Icon Books, 2007.

Red button Julian Preece (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Kafka, Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Red button Ronald Spiers, and Beatrice Sandberg, Franz Kafka, London: Macmillan, 1997.

Red button Walter H. Sokel, The Myth of Power and the Self: Essays on Franz Kafka, Wayne State University Press, 2001.

Red button Ritchie Robertson, Kafka: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2004.

Red button Ritchie Robertson, Kafka: Judaism, Politics, and Literature, Clarendon Press, 1987.

Red button James Rolleston (ed), A Companion to the Works of Franz Kafka, Camden House, 2006.

Red button Michael Wood, Franz Kafka (Writers and Their Work), Northcote House, 1998.

 


Mont Blanc pen - Kafka edition

Mont Blanc – special Franz Kafka edition


Other works by Franz Kafka

MetamorphosisMetamorphosis (1915) is truly one of Kafka’s masterpieces – a stunning parable which lends itself to psychological, sociological, or existential interpretations. It’s the tale of a man who wakes up one morning and finds himself transformed into a giant insect. His family are horrified, gradually disown him, and he dies of neglect, with a rotting apple lodged in his side. Franz Kafka is one of the most important and influential fiction writers of the early twentieth century. He was a novelist and writer of short stories whose works came to be regarded as one of the major achievements of twentieth century literature.

Franz Kafka Metamorphosis Buy the book at Amazon UK
Franz Kafka Metamorphosis Buy the book at Amazon US

 

The Man who DisappearedAmerika (also known as The Man who Disappeared) is Kafka’s first attempt at a novel. He is renowned for documenting the horrors of modern life, but Kafka also had a lighter and amusing side. This is incomplete, like so much else he wrote. It’s the story of Karl Rossmann who after an embarrassing sexual misadventure is expelled from his European home and goes to live in an imaginary United States (which of course Kafka had never visited). In fact it’s a reverse ‘Rags to Riches’ story, because Karl starts his engagement with the American Dream quite successfully – but by the end of the novel he is destitute. The story is deeply symbolic – as usual – and an interesting supplement to the central texts. The first chapter is frequently anthologised as ‘The Stoker’.
Franz Kafka The Man who Disappeared Buy the book at Amazon UK
Franz Kafka The Man who Disappeared Buy the book at Amazon US


Franz Kafka – web links

Kafka Franz Kafka at Mantex
Biographical notes, book reviews and study guides on the major works, video presentations and documentaries, adaptations for cinema and television, and links to Kafka archives.

Franz Kafka web links Franz Kafka at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts in a variety of formats – in both English and German.

Franz Kafka web links Franz Kafka at Wikipedia
Biographical notes, social background, survey of the stories and novels, publishing history, translations, critical interpretation, and extensive bibliographies.

Franz Kafka web links Franz Kafka at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors, actors, production features, box office, film reviews, and even quizzes.

Franz Kafka video Kafka in Love
Video photomontage featuring portraits of Kafka, his friends and family, and locations in Prague – with a rather schmaltzy soundtrack in Yiddish and English.

Franz Kafka web links Kafka-Metamorphosis
A public Wiki dedicated to Kafka and his work, featuring the short stories, interpretations, and further web links.

Franz Kafka web links Kafka Society of America
Academic group with annual meetings and publications. Also features links to other Kafka-related sites

Franz Kafka web links Oxford Kafka Research Centre
Academic group based at Oxford University that tracks current research and meetings. [Doesn’t seem to have been updated since 2012.]

Franz Kafka web links The Kafka Project
Critical editions and translations of Kafka’s work in several languages, plus articles, literary criticism, bibliographies.

Franz Kafka Tribute to Franz Kafka
Individual fan site (created by ‘Herzogbr’) featuring a collection of texts, reviews, and enthusiast essays. Badly in need of updating, but contains some interesting gems.

Kafka photos Finding Kafka in Prague
Quirky compilation of photos locating Kafka in his home town – with surrealist additions and weird sound track.

Red button Who Owns Kafka?
Essay by Judith Butler from the London Review of Books on the contentious issues of ownership of Kafka’s manuscripts where they are currently held in Israel – complete with podcast.

Red button The Kafka Archive – latest news
Guardian newspaper report on the suitcase full of Kafka and Max Brod’s papers released by Israeli library.

Red button Franz Kafka: an illustrated life
Book review of a charming short biography with some unusual period photos of Kafka and Prague.

© Roy Johnson 2010


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The Voyage a close reading

September 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

how to analyse prose fiction

Close reading is the most important skill you need for any form of literary studies. It means paying especially close attention to what is printed on the page. It is a much more subtle and complex process than the term might suggest. Close reading means not only reading and understanding the meanings of the individual printed words; it also involves being sensitive to all the subtle uses of language in the hands of skilled writers.

This can mean anything from a work’s particular vocabulary, sentence construction, and imagery, to the themes that are being explored. It also includes the way in which the story is being told, and the view of the world that it offers. It involves almost everything from the smallest linguistic items to the largest issues of literary understanding and judgement.

One of the first things you need to acquire for serious literary study is a knowledge of the vocabulary, the technical language, indeed the jargon in which literature is discussed. You need to acquaint yourself with the technical vocabulary of the discipline and then go on to study how its parts work.

What follows is a short list of features you might keep in mind whilst reading. They should give you ideas of what to look for. It is just a prompt to help you get under way.

Close reading – Checklist

Vocabulary
The author’s choice of individual words – which might vary from plain and simple to complex and ‘literary’.

Syntax
The arrangement of words in sentences. Often used for emphasis or dramatic effect.

Figures of speech
The rhetorical devices used to give decoration and imaginative expression to literature, such as simile, metaphor, puns, alliteration, and irony.

Literary devices
The devices commonly used in literature to give added depth to the work, such as imagery or symbolism.

Rhythm
The cadence or flow of words and phrases – including stress and repetition.

Narrator
Ask yourself, who is telling the story.

Narrative mode
First or third person narrator. (‘I am going to tell you …’ or ‘He left the room in a hurry’)

Point of view
The perspective from which the events of the story are related.

Characterisation
How a character is created or depicted.

Dramatisation
How any dramatic elements of a piece of work are created and arranged.

Plot
How the elements of the story are arranged.

Tone
The author’s attitude to the subject as revealed in the manner of the writing

Structure
The shape of the piece of work, or the connection between its parts.

Theme
The underlying topic or issue, as distinct from the overt story.

How to read closely

Close reading can be seen as a form of special attention which we bring to a piece of writing. It involves thinking more deeply than usual about the implications of the words on the page. Most normal people do this automatically, without being specially conscious of the fact. The academic study of literature brings the process more to the surface and makes it explicit. There are four levels or types of reading which become progressively more complex.

Language – You pay especially close attention to the surface elements of the text – that is, to aspects of vocabulary, grammar, and syntax. You might also note such things as figures of speech or any other features which contribute to the writer’s individual style.

Meaning – You take account at a deeper level of what the words mean – that is, what information they contain, plus any further meanings they might suggest.

Structural – You note the possible relationships between words within the text – and this might include items from either the language or the meanings.

Cultural – You note the relationship of any elements of the text to things outside it. These might be other pieces of writing by the same author,
or other writings of the same type by different writers. They might be items of social or cultural history, or even other academic disciplines which might seem relevant, such as philosophy or psychology.

Close reading is not a skill which can be developed to a sophisticated extent overnight. It requires a lot of practice in the various linguistic and literary disciplines involved – and it requires that you do a lot of reading.

The good news is that most people already possess the basic skills required. They have acquired them automatically through being able to read – even though they haven’t been conscious of doing so. This is rather like many other things which we learn unconsciously. After all, you don’t need to know the names of your leg muscles in order to walk down the street.


The Voyage a close readingStudying Fiction is an introduction to the basic concepts and the language you will need for studying prose fiction. It explains the elements of literary analysis one at a time, then shows you how to apply them. The guidance starts off with simple issues of language, then progresses to more complex literary criticism.The volume contains stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, Katherine Mansfield, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, and Charles Dickens. All of them are excellent tales in their own right. The guidance on this site was written by the same author.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US


Now here’s an example of close reading in action. The short passage which follows comes from Katherine Mansfield’s short story The Voyage. This concerns the journey made by a young girl at night on a ferry with her grandma. If you wish to read the complete story in conjunction with these tutorial notes, it is available free at Project Gutenberg.

redbtn The Voyage

If you would like to treat this as an interactive exercise, read the passage through a number of times. Make notes, and write down all you can say about what goes to make up its literary ‘quality’. That is, you should scrutinise the passage as closely as possible, name its parts, and say what devices the author is using. Don’t be afraid to list even the most obvious points.

Don’t worry if you are not sure what name to give to any feature you notice. You will see the technical vocabulary being used in the discussion notes which follow, and this should help you pick up this skill as we go along.

Fenella’s father pushed on with quick, nervous strides. Beside him her grandma bustled along in her crackling black ulster; they went so fast she had now and again to give an undignified little skip to keep up with them. As well as her luggage strapped into a neat sausage, Fenella carried clasped to her grandma’s umbrella, and the handle, which was a swan’s head, kept giving her shoulder a sharp little peck as if it too wanted her to hurry. … Men, their caps pulled down, their collars turned up, swung by; a few women all muffled scurried along; and one tiny boy, only his little black arms and legs showing out of a white wooly shawl, was jerked along angrily between his father and mother; he looked like a baby fly that had fallen into the cream.

Here are some comments, using the checklist as a guide. The objective is not to be totally exhaustive, mulling over every single word and punctuation mark in the paragraph. Rather, it’s to develop the skill of being sensitive to language, and to notice special effects when they are offered.

It’s also true that a really in depth close reading is much easier if you know the author’s work well – so that you can see regular patterns of language use and recurrent effects and themes.

Vocabulary
The language of the passage is fairly plain and simple. Apart from the term ulster (an overcoat) which might not be familiar to readers today, most of the terms used would be known even to a reasonably well-educated child. And this is entirely appropriate since Mansfield is relating the story to us largely from a child’s point of view. Her use of terms such as ‘>little skip’, ‘ neat sausage’, ‘tiny boy’, and baby fly reinforce this effect.

Syntax
The word order and grammar is that of normal written English. The only feature I can observe here under this heading is that in some clauses she separates the subject from its verb by interposing dependent clauses – ‘Men, their caps pulled down, their collars turned up, swung by’. But this is just giving variety to her construction of sentences.

Rhythm
She creates a briskness and liveliness in her prose to match the business of what is going on in the scene. This is done by the variation of sentence length. The first is quite short, the second is longer, but it is split into two which have a similar construction to the first.

It’s also done by her use of a form of repetition called parallelism. Notice how ‘quick, nervous strides’ is echoed by ‘crackling black ulster’: the construction is ‘adjective + adjective + noun’.

Figures of Speech
Under figures of speech you might have noticed the simile – ‘like a baby fly that had fallen into the cream’. That is, the small baby boy is directly compared to a fly. Then there is an example of onomatopoeia in the phrase ‘crackling black Ulster‘ – because the words themselves sound like the thing they are describing.

There is also an example of anthropomorphism in the swan’s-head-handled umbrella giving Fenella a ‘sharp little peck’ on the shoulder. That is, the inanimate object is spoken of as if it were alive – and once again this is entirely appropriate given that the story is being told from the child’s point of view.

Mansfield also uses alliteration more than once. In ‘crackling black Ulster’ there is repetition of the ‘a’, ‘ck’, and ‘l’ sounds; and in ‘white wooly shawl’ there is repetition of the ‘w’ and the ‘l’ sounds.

Tone
This can be quite a difficult feature to pin down accurately, but I think in this passage you could say that there was a light, brisk and somewhat playful attitude to what is going on. That’s the safest way of defining tone – describing the author’s attitude to the subject as briefly as possible. The tone here is entirely appropriate – because we are being invited to see the world from a child’s point of view.

Narrative mode
This is the traditional manner of story-telling using the third person and omniscient narrator. That is, Fenella is referred to as ‘she’ and Katherine Mansfield, as the person telling the story, does not intrude as an ‘I’ speaking directly to the reader. Moreover, as narrator, she knows what is going on in her characters’ heads and their feelings. She is ‘all-knowing’, which is what ‘omniscient’ means.

Narrator
This must be Katherine Mansfield, because she does not invent another person who stands between herself and the reader, telling the story. This might seem rather obvious, but some authors invent a fictional narrator who tells the story, and might even be a character in it.

Characterisation
It’s not easy to say a lot, based on such a short extract. But you might observe that ‘grandma bustled along’, which gives the impression of a lively older woman. (This is confirmed by events later in the story). And the observations about the umbrella and the little boy, as well as the ‘little skip’ Fenella is forced to make, help to establish her as a young girl.

Notice that Mansfield as narrator does not tell us that Fenella is a young girl: we work this out from the few details we have been given. Notice too that this information about the characters is being given piecemeal as the story progresses. We are being left to put together these pieces ourselves.

Point of view
Many of these small details – the peck from the swan’s head umbrella, the little boy looking like a fly – help to establish that the story is being told from Fenella’s point of view. That is, the events of the story are being shown as she would experience and see them. This is quite an important feature of prose fiction.

Drama
It’s not easy to say much about this based on such a short extract – or if we were reading the story for the first time. But most of the tension in the story is created by the fact that we are not quite sure what is going on. But returning with more knowledge of the story, we might note that the father is ‘nervous’ because he is due to be separated from his mother and his daughter. The grandmother ‘bustles’ along because she has the task of conveying Fenella to her new life.

Meanwhile Fenella is busy observing the world around her. Notice a small (and dramatic) detail of the world she sees. The little boy is being ‘jerked along angrily between his father and mother’ [my emphasis]: that is, the way some adults treat their children is not so pleasant.

 


We’ll stop at this point. It’s not really possible to say anything about plot, structure, or theme unless you’ve read the whole story. But almost everything listed was accessible even if you were reading the passage for the first time.

Literary studies are not conducted in such detail all the time, but it is very important that you try to develop the skill of reading as closely as possible. It really is the foundation on which everything else is based.

The next point to make about such close reading is that it becomes easier if you get used to the idea of reading and re-reading a piece of work. The Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov (famous for Lolita) once observed that “Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only re-read it”.

What he meant by this apparently contradictory remark is that the first time we read a book we are busy absorbing information, and we cannot appreciate all the subtle connections there may be between its parts – because we don’t yet have the complete picture before us. Only when we read it for a second time (or even better, a third or fourth) are we in a position to assemble and compare the nuances of meaning and the significance of its details in relation to each other.

That’s why the activity is called ‘close reading’. You should try to get used to the notion of reading and re-reading very carefully, scrupulously, and in great detail.

Finally, let’s try to dispel a common misconception. Many people ask, when they first come into contact with close reading: “Doesn’t analysing a piece of work in such detail spoil your enjoyment of it?” The answer to this question is “No – on the contrary – it should enhance it.” The simple fact is that we get more out of a piece of writing if we can appreciate all the subtleties and the intricacies which exist within it. Nabokov also suggested that “In reading, one should notice and fondle the details”.

© Roy Johnson 2004


More on Katherine Mansfield
Twentieth century literature
More on the Bloomsbury Group
More on short stories


Filed Under: Katherine Mansfield, Study Skills Tagged With: Academic writing, Bloomsbury Group, Close reading, Katherine Mansfield, Literary studies, Study skills

The Voyage Out

May 30, 2015 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Voyage Out was Virginia Woolf’s first full length novel. It was written and re-written many times between (probably) 1907 and its eventual publication by Duckworth in 1915 (the publishing house run by her step-brother Gerald Duckworth). It was originally called Melymbrosia, and an earlier version was completed in 1912. This alternative version was published with that title in 1962. But when her own publishing house the Hogarth Press produced a Uniform Edition of Woolf’s works in 1929, it was the later 1915 version that was used as the definitive text.

The Voyage out

first edition 1915


The Voyage Out – critical comment

The principal theme

Virginia Woolf was to devote a great deal of her career as a novelist and essayist to issues of women’s education and their position in society – from her earliest story Phyllis and Rosamond (1906) to her epoch-making attack on patriarchy Three Guineas (1938). Her first novel is no exception – as an exploration of a young woman who has received no formal education and who has been brought up at home in a manner which does not prepare her for any sort of independent adult life.

there was no subject in the world which she knew accurately. Her mind was in the state of an intelligent man’s in the beginning of the reign of Queen Elizabeth; she would believe practically anything she was told. invent reasons for anything she said. The shape of the earth, the history of the world, how trains worked, or money was invested, what laws were in force, which people wanted what, and why they wanted it, the most elementary idea of a system in modern life—none of this had been imparted to her by any of her professors or mistresses

Rachel is intensely conscious of her lack of formal education, her powerlessness in society, and her exclusion from the male-dominated world of governance and decision-making. Her one consolation is that she has been left undisturbed to develop her artistic flair for piano-playing.

The experimental novel

Virginia Woolf is rightly celebrated as one of the most talented innovators of the modernist period for the work she produced between Jacob’s Room in 1922 and The Waves in 1932. For that reason her earlier first novel The Voyage Out (1915) is often classified as ‘traditional’ or ‘conventional’. That is partly because its main subject is a young woman’s ‘coming of age’, partly because the narrative follows a linear chronology, and partly because the book contains a substantial proportion of well-observed middle-class social life which could have come from any number of nineteenth century novels – from Jane Austen to George Meredith.

But the novel is far from conventional – for a number of reasons. First, it does not have a ‘plot’ as such. A group of people go on a cruise from London to Latin America. Whilst there, they organise an expedition into the interior, and when they get back one of them dies of fever. There is no mystery to be solved; there are no surprising coincidences or revelations; the one serious romance between the characters is abruptly terminated by Rachel’s death; and the narrative is even denied any structural closure. There is no return journey to the starting point:.

Instead we are presented with what Rachel Vinrace calls for during the events of the novel – “Why don’t people write about the things they do feel?” . Despite all the symbolism of a first journey away from home, a first love affair, and the dawning of mature consciousness which Rachel experiences, the bulk of the novel is taken up with what people say and think about each other. This was a bold alternative to the plot-driven novels of the late Victorian era.

[In fact Woolf’s next novel, Night and Day (1919) is far more conventional. Another young middle-class woman, Katharine Hilbery, is facing the limited social choices offered to her in life – but the novel is grounded in a family saga and a rather complex love quadrangle.]

Point of view

The other major innovation Woolf developed in this novel is what might be called the floating or roaming point of view. Novelists very often choose to relay their narratives from the point of view of a single character or a narrator who might be a character or a surrogate for the author. Woolf uses a combination of a reasonably objective third person narrative mode with passages in which the point of view switches from one character to another. She does this in order to explore three separate issues which she developed even further in her later novels.

The first of these issues is what might be called the relativity of human perception – how one person perceives another, and how this perception might change from one moment to the next. The second is to explore the distance which separates human beings, even when they feel that they closely understand each other. The third is to explore the differences between what a person does and what is said – or to point directly at internal contradictions in the human psyche. Very often people say things they do not mean, or they make statements about themselves which are contradicted by their behaviour.

Setting

The novel begins in London, then moves via a very convincing storm at sea to Portugal, where the Dalloways join the ship. This part of the narrative is quite credible, and is possibly based on a journey at sea Virginia Woolf made to Portugal with her younger brother Adrian in 1905. But after the Dalloways are dropped off (almost parenthetically) in North Africa the location switches with virtually no transition to the fictitious Santa Marina.

The implication is that this is located somewhere near the mouth of a ‘great river’ – presumably the Amazon. But despite adding historical background details of European colonialism in the region, and a sprinkling of exotic vegetation which Woolf adds to the narrative, the topography of the story never becomes really convincing.

It is significant that one feature of the indigenous vegetation that she mentions repeatedly is cypress trees – ‘at intervals cypresses striped the hill with black bars’ – which are characteristic of the Mediterranean but certainly not of tropical Latin-American vegetation. This might be ignored were it not for the fact that she was to do something very similar in later novels.

The background events of Jacob’s Room (1922) concerning Betty Flanders are supposed to be set in Scarborough, on the East coast of Yorkshire, but these scenes are never as convincing as the others set in Cambridge and London. And nobody in their right mind can read To the Lighthouse (1927) without visualising its setting as St Ives and the Godrevy Lighthouse where Woolf spent many summer holidays in her childhood. Yet the novel is supposed to be set in the Hebrides. This remains completely unconvincing throughout the whole of the novel.

Weaknesses

There are a number of minor characters who are written into the story line of The Voyage Out, but who then disappear from the text as if they have been forgotten. Mrs Chairley the Cockney housekeeper; Mr Grice the self-educated steward; the briefly identified Hughling Elliot; and even a major figure such as Willoughby Vinrace, captain of the Euphrosyne, owner of the shipping line, and Rachel’s own father who disappears half way through the narrative, never to reappear.

It is not clear from the structure or the logic of the novel why Rachel has to die. There are no practical or thematic links to what has gone on before in the events of the narrative; nobody else is affected by the ‘fever’; and the conclusion of the novel (‘woman dies suddenly’) is not related to any of the previous events.

It is true that Woolf was surrounded by many unexpected deaths amongst her own friends and relatives (her mother, her brother, her friend Lytton Strachey) but this biographical connection does not provide a justification for the lack of a satisfactory resolution to the narrative.


The Voyage Out – study resources

The Voyage Out The Voyage Out – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

The Voyage Out The Voyage Out – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

The Voyage Out The Voyage Out – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

The Voyage Out The Voyage Out – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

The Voyage Out The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle edition

The Voyage Out The Voyage Out – Collins Classics – Amazon UK

The Voyage Out The Voyage Out – Collins Classics – Amazon US

The Voyage Out The Voyage Out – Vintage Classics – Amazon UK

The Voyage Out The Voyage Out – Vintage Classics – Amazon US

The Voyage Out The Voyage Out – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

The Voyage Out The Voyage Out – Kindle edition

The Voyage Out Virginia Woolf – biographical notes

The Voyage Out The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

The Voyage Out The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

The Voyage Out Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

The Voyage Out Virginia Woolf at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

The Voyage Out Virginia Woolf at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study resources


The Voyage Out

Mont Blanc pen – the Virginia Woolf special edition


The Voyage Out – plot summary

Chapter I. Ridley Ambrose and his wife Helen are leaving London to join their ship, the Euphrosyne which is due to take them on a cruise to South America. They join their niece, Rachel Vinrace, whose father owns the ship. A fellow traveller, Mr Pepper reminisces critically with Ambrose about their contemporaries at Cambridge. They are then joined by the captain Willoughby Vinrace.

Chapter II. The story switches between Helen’s reflections on Rachel, Mr Pepper’s bachelor interests and habits, and Mrs Chairley’s rage against the ship’s linens. It then covers Rachel’s lack of formal education, her talent for music, and her upbringing by aunts. She searches for coherence and meaning whilst she is critical of the adults who surround her.

Chapter III. In Portugal, Richard and Clarissa Dalloway are taken on board as extra passengers. At dinner there is conversation on the arts and politics, after which Clarissa writes a satirical letter criticising the other guests. Her husband joins her, and they both feel superior but sympathetic towards their fellow travellers.

Chapter IV. Clarissa meets Mr Grice, the self-educated steward, and then shares confidences with Rachel after breakfast. They read Jane Austen on deck, and Rachel discusses political philosophy with Richard Dalloway, who reveals his traditional and deep-seated male chauvinism.

Chapter V. The ship encounters a stormy passage at sea, which lays everybody low for two days. Helen comforts Mrs Dalloway with champagne. Meanwhile Richard Dalloway follows Rachel into her cabin and kisses her impulsively. That night Rachel has disturbing dreams.

Chapter VI. The Dalloways leave the ship. Rachel confides her mixed feelings about the incident to Helen, who advises her about Men and The Facts of Life. The two women agree to be friends, and Helen invites Rachel to stay at their villa whilst the captain sails up the Amazon, to which her father agrees for slightly selfish reasons.

Chapter VII. The ship reaches Santa Marina. Its colonial history is described. The Ambrose villa San Gervasio is dilapidated. After a week Mr Pepper decamps to a local hotel because he thinks the vegetables are not properly cooked at dinner.

Chapter VIII. Three months pass. Helen reflects on the inadequate education of young women. Helen and Rachel post letters then walk through the town to the hotel where they encounter guests playing cards. They are observed by Hirst and Hewet.

Chapter IX. In the hotel, people are preparing for the night. Hirst and Hewet discuss the possibility of organising a party excursion. Next day there is desultory chat over tea until Ridley Ambrose joins with Hirst and Hewet.

Chapter X. Rachel is reading modern literature and reflecting philosophically about the nature of life. She and Helen receive an invitation to Hewet’s expedition. The outing presents the radical young figure of Evelyn Murgatroyd, and Helen meets Terence Hewet,

Chapter XI. The party splits up at the top of the climb. Arthur declares his love to Susan. Their embraces are observed by Hewet and Rachel: she recoils ambivalently from the spectacle. They are joined by Hirst and Helen, whereupon they all agree to tell each other about themselves. The party then returns to town amidst a display of fireworks.

Chapter XII. A dance is held to celebrate Susan’s engagement to Arthur. Rachel is patronised then insulted by Hirst, whereupon Hewet makes excuses for him. Hirst then goes on to unburden himself to a sympathetic Helen. At dawn Hirst and Hewet walk back to the villa with Helen and Rachel.

Chapter XIII. Next day Rachel takes books by Balzac and Gibbon into the countryside to read, her mind full of impressions from the dance. She feels strangely moved by reading Gibbon, as if on the verge of some exciting discovery, and she thinks a lot about Hirst and Hewet.

Chapter XIV. Guests at the hotel read letters from friends and relatives back home. Susan is obsessed with the subject of marriage. Hewet can’t stop thinking about Rachel, and he goes up to the villa where he overhears her talking to Helen about her dead mother. He goes back to the hotel in a state of excitement, and is then quizzed by Evelyn about her flirtatious entanglements. Last thing at night he sees a woman coming out of someone’s bedroom.

Chapter XV. Some days later Helen and Ridley are visited by Mrs Flushing who is on a ‘collecting’ trip with her nouveau riche husband. They are joined by Hirst, Hewet, and Rachel who has tired of reading Gibbon. When Rachel and Hewet go for a walk, it leaves Hirst free to engage Helen in an intimate conversation, during which he reveals his fears and weaknesses, as well as expressing his admiration for her.

Chapter XVI. On their excursion Rachel and Hewet discuss the life of the typical unmarried middle-class girl (and its limitations) plus the issues raised by women’s suffrage. As he tells her about his literary ambitions she feels romantically attracted to him. He is excited yet dissatisfied by their intimacy and the tension between them.

Chapter XVII. Rachel is powerfully disturbed by her feelings for Hewet, and a distance grows between her and Helen. One Sunday there is a service in the hotel chapel. Rachel is distressed by the absence of any genuine religious belief, and she objects to the spirit in which the service is held. When Mrs Flushing invites her to lunch, she erupts into a criticism of the sermon. Mrs Flushing proposes a river trip to visit a traditional native village. Hirst and Hewet argue over religion, literature, and Rachel.

Chapter XVIII. Hewet realises that he is in love with Rachel, but he is in doubt about the idea of marriage. He wonders what her feelings are and cannot make up his mind about what to do.

Chapter XIX. Evelyn complains to Rachel about two men with whom she is romantically involved. Then she becomes enthusiastic about social reform – including the rescue of prostitutes. Rachel feels oppressed by her appeal to intimacy. She then meets Mrs Allan who invites her to her room and asks her to help her get dressed for tea. Rachel feels oppressed by this appeal too, and escapes into the garden, but she is irritated by the chatter and the discussion of plans for the excursion, and she then quarrells with Helen.

Chapter XX. The Flushings, along with Hewet and Hirst plus Rachel and Helen go on the expedition. They sail upstream in a small ship. Hewet is very conscious of Rachel’s presence. They go on a walk together in to the forest – to declare their love for each other. When they return to the ship they feel detached from their companions.

Chapter XXI. The expedition continues. Hewet and Rachel try to discuss the consequences of their love – which seem to lead inevitably towards marriage, about which neither of them is sure. The expedition reaches the native village. Hewet and Rachel are completely absorbed in each other. At night, back on the ship, they ask Helen for advice. She reassures them that they will be happy.

Chapter XXII. Hewet and Rachel become engaged. Whilst she plays the piano, he writes notes for his novel – on women, which reveal his traditional chauvinism. They plan their future and get to know about each other’s past lives. They become very nostalgic for England – both the countryside and London.

Chapter XXIII. Rachel is annoyed by people’s inquisitiveness now that she is engaged. A message from home brings news of the suicide of a housemaid. A ‘prostitute’ is expelled from the hotel. Hirst admits to himself that he is unhappy, but he brings himself to congratulate Hewet and Rachel.

Chapter XXIV. Sitting in the hotel, Rachel comes to an appreciation of her independent identity, even though she is joining herself to Hewet for the rest of her life. Miss Allan finishes her book on the English poets. Evelyn envies Susan and Rachel for being engaged, but she herself dreams of becoming a revolutionary.

Chapter XXV. Rachel develops a headache and is confined to her room. The headache gets worse and she becomes delirious. ‘Dr’ Rodriguez reassures them it is nothing serious, but Rachel gets steadily worse. Hirst is despatched in search of another doctor and returns with Dr Lesage. He confirms that Rachel is seriously ill – probably with fever. Hewet, Helen, and Hirst wait anxiously for days. Rachel starts to hallucinate, then eventually she dies.

Chapter XXVI. News of Rachel’s death quickly reaches the hotel. It is thought she was unwise to go on the expedition where she has caught the fever. Mr Perrot makes a final appeal to Evelyn, but she turns him down,, as she is leaving for Moscow.

Chapter XXVII. Life returns to normal at the hotel. There is a tropical thunderstorm, and people prepare to return home.


The Voyage Out

OUP World Classics edition


The Voyage Out – characters
Mr Ridley Ambrose a classics scholar, translating Pindar
Helen Ambrose his wife (40)
Rachel Vinrace their niece (24)
Willoughby Vinrace a shipping line owner – Rachel’s father
Mr William Pepper a dogmatic Cambridge friend of Ambrose
Mrs Emma Chairley the Vinrace housekeeper (50)
Richard Dalloway a former member of parliament (42)
Clarissa Dalloway the daughter of a peer – his wife
Mr Grice the self-educated steward
St John Hirst a clever but boorish Cambridge don (24)
Terence Hewet former student at Winchester and Cambridge
Evelyn Murgatroyd a strong-willed feminist
Arthur Venning a romantic young man
Susan Warrington a romantic young woman
Wilfred Flushing a nouveau riche art collector
Alice Flushing his wife, an artist
Miss Allan an elderly teacher of English
Mrs Thornbury a wise old woman (72)
Dr Rodriguez the (dubious) town doctor
Dr Lesage the replacement doctor

Virginia Woolf’s writing

Virginia Woolf's handwriting

“I feel certain that I am going mad again.”


Other works by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf To the LighthouseTo the Lighthouse (1927) is the second of the twin jewels in the crown of her late experimental phase. It is concerned with the passage of time, the nature of human consciousness, and the process of artistic creativity. Woolf substitutes symbolism and poetic prose for any notion of plot, and the novel is composed as a tryptich of three almost static scenes – during the second of which the principal character Mrs Ramsay dies – literally within a parenthesis. The writing is lyrical and philosophical at the same time. Many critics see this as her greatest achievement, and Woolf herself realised that with this book she was taking the novel form into hitherto unknown territory.
Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse Buy the book at Amazon US

 

Woolf - OrlandoOrlando (1928) is one of her lesser-known novels, although it’s critical reputation has risen in recent years. It’s a delightful fantasy which features a character who changes sex part-way through the book – and lives from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Using this device (which turns out to be strangely credible) Woolf explores issues of gender and identity as her hero-heroine moves through a variety of lives and personal adventures. Orlando starts out as an emissary to the Court of St James, lives through friendships with Swift and Alexander Pope, and ends up motoring through the west end of London on a shopping expedition in the 1920s. The character is loosely based on Vita Sackville-West, who at one time was Woolf’s lover. The novel itself was described by Nigel Nicolson (Sackville-West’s son) as ‘the longest and most charming love-letter in literature’.
Virginia Woolf - Orlando Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf - Orlando Buy the book at Amazon US

Kew GardensKew Gardens is a collection of experimental short stories in which Woolf tested out ideas and techniques which she then later incorporated into her novels. After Chekhov, they represent the most important development in the modern short story as a literary form. Incident and narrative are replaced by evocations of mood, poetic imagery, philosophic reflection, and subtleties of composition and structure. The shortest piece, ‘Monday or Tuesday’, is a one-page wonder of compression. This collection is a cornerstone of literary modernism. No other writer – with the possible exception of Nadine Gordimer, has taken the short story as a literary genre as far as this.
Virginia Woolf - Kew Gardens Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf - Kew Gardens Buy the book at Amazon US


Virginia Woolf: BiographyVirginia Woolf is a readable and well illustrated biography by John Lehmann, who at one point worked as her assistant and business partner at the Hogarth Press. It is described by the blurb as ‘A critical biography of Virginia Woolf containing illustrations that are a record of the Bloomsbury Group and the literary and artistic world that surrounded a writer who is immensely popular today’. This is an attractive and very accessible introduction to the subject which has been very popular with readers ever since it was first published..
Virginia Woolf - A Biography Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf - A Biography Buy the book at Amazon US


Virginia Woolf – web links

Red button Virginia Woolf at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major works, book reviews, studies of the short stories, bibliographies, web links, study resources.

Virginia Woolf web links Blogging Woolf
Book reviews, Bloomsbury related issues, links, study resources, news of conferences, exhibitions, and events, regularly updated.

Virginia Woolf web links Virginia Woolf at Wikipedia
Full biography, social background, interpretation of her work, fiction and non-fiction publications, photograph albumns, list of biographies, and external web links

Virginia Woolf web links Virginia Woolf at Gutenberg
Selected eTexts of the novels The Voyage Out, Night and Day, Jacob’s Room, and the collection of stories Monday or Tuesday in a variety of digital formats.

Virginia Woolf web links Woolf Online
An electronic edition and commentary on To the Lighthouse with notes on its composition, revisions, and printing – plus relevant extracts from the diaries, essays, and letters.

Virginia Woolf web links Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search texts of all the major novels and essays, word by word – locate quotations, references, and individual terms

Red button Virginia Woolf – a timeline in phtographs
A collection of well and lesser-known photographs documenting Woolf’s life from early childhood, through youth, marriage, and fame – plus some first edition book jackets – to a soundtrack by Philip Glass. They capture her elegant appearance, the big hats, and her obsessive smoking. No captions or dates, but well worth watching.

Virginia Woolf web links Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury – including Gordon Square, Gower Street, Bedford Square, Tavistock Square, plus links to women’s history web sites.

Virginia Woolf web links Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
Bulletins of events, annual lectures, society publications, and extensive links to Woolf and Bloomsbury related web sites

Virginia Woolf web links BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
Charming sound recording of radio talk given by Virginia Woolf in 1937 – a podcast accompanied by a slideshow of photographs.

Virginia Woolf web links A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephen compiled a photograph album and wrote an epistolary memoir, known as the “Mausoleum Book,” to mourn the death of his wife, Julia, in 1895 – an archive at Smith College – Massachusetts

Virginia Woolf web links Virginia Woolf first editions
Hogarth Press book jacket covers of the first editions of Woolf’s novels, essays, and stories – largely designed by her sister, Vanessa Bell.

Virginia Woolf web links Virginia Woolf – on video
Biographical studies and documentary videos with comments on Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group and the social background of their times.

Virginia Woolf web links Virginia Woolf Miscellany
An archive of academic journal essays 2003—2014, featuring news items, book reviews, and full length studies.

© Roy Johnson 2015


More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
More on the Bloomsbury Group


Filed Under: Virginia Woolf Tagged With: English literature, Literary studies, The novel, Virginia Woolf

The Wind Blows

January 29, 2015 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, comment, study resources, and plot summary

The Wind Blows was first published on 27 August 1920 in the Athenaeum (edited by Katherine Mansfield’s husband John Middleton Murry) and later reprinted in Bliss and Other Stories (1920).

The Wind Blows


The Wind Blows – critical commentary

The story is a wonderfully subtle, restrained, and even understated evocation of the emotional turmoil in the maturation process of a young teenage girl. The portrait is composed of her reactions to the people in her life and the atmosphere of her surroundings. To these are added a number of suggestive symbols and metaphors that Mansfield selects to suggest her sexualisation and emotional growth.

These suggestions begin with the phenomenon that gives the story its title – the wind. As every teacher knows, young people are enlivened and even excited by windy weather – and Matilda is no exception. She is woken up by the wind and thinks ‘something dreadful has happened’. But it hasn’t – the disruption is merely a relection of her febrile transitory feelings. She is part way between being a girl and a woman.

Next she thinks that life is ‘hideous and simply revolting’ and she ‘hates’ her mother for trying to control her appearance – particularly her hair. This is clearly a portrait of adolescent unrest, or ‘growing pains’ as they are sometimes known.

She also feels a sense of competition with the girl next door – Marie Swainson – seeing her as reckless and possibly a sexual rival: ‘Her skirt flies up about her waist … she doesn’t mind what she does’. Matilda is also irritated that Marie turns up for her piano lesson ‘hours before her time’, thus breaking the spell of Matilda’s contact with the teacher Robert Bullen.

For when she arrives at the home of her teacher the story takes a distinctly erotic turn. Matilda feels comforted by Mr Bullen’s enviornment and engaged by his manner – his ‘very nice hand’ and the fact that he speaks ‘so kindly’. Her own fingers ‘tremble’ and ‘her heart beats so hard she feels it might lift her blouse up and down’. She is so affected by his presence and the romance of playing Beethoven that she starts to cry.

Mr Bullen uses the language and gestures of seduction. He takes hold of her hands, allows her to rest her head against him, and resorts to a flattering cliché – ‘that rare thing, a woman’. Fortunately for Matilda, the spell of this moment is broken by the arrival of her rival Marie Swainson.

When she goes to the harbour with her brother Bogey she takes her hat off and allows her hair to fall free – defying her mother’s injunction. The height and force of the stormy sea is a clear reflection of the disturbed feelings and potential for liberation that she feels inside herself.

This liberation is confirmed and underscored in the visionary moment of imagining her older self on board the ship, looking back as it leaves the island and sailing out to sea. Matilda then sees her younger self as the girl who cried that day at her music lesson ‘many years ago’. Two separate periods of time are telescoped into one before the story ends on the same note as it began – with the wind.


The Wind Blows – study resources

Katherine Mansfield’s Collected Works
Three published collections of stories – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Collected Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Wordsworth Classics paperback edition – Amazon UK

The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Penguin Classics paperback edition – Amazon UK

Katherine Mansfield Megapack
The complete stories and poems in Kindle edition – Amazon UK

Katherine Mansfield’s Collected Works
Three published collections of stories – Kindle edition – Amazon US

The Collected Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Wordsworth Classics paperback edition – Amazon US

The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Penguin Classics paperback edition – Amazon US

Katherine Mansfield Megapack
The complete stories and poems in Kindle edition – Amazon US


The Wind Blows – plot summary

Matilda is a young teenage girl living in south New Zealand with her mother and her brother Bogey. On a particularly windy autumn day she feels somewhat irritated by life and is at odds with the world, partucularly her mother’s fuss over her appearance and clothing.

She goes to a piano lesson with her teacher Mr Bullen, where she feels soothed by his avuncular manner and the atmosphere of his drawing room. He seems to her a protective and slightly romantic presence, to which she is in the process of yielding when they are interrupted by the arrival of his next pupil, Matilda’s neighbour Marie Swainson.

Back home she continues to feel an existential resentment regarding her home life. When her bother suggests a walk on the esplanade she feels it as a liberation. They go down to the harbour where they see a steamer putting out to sea. She has a vision of herself and Bogey on board the ship as older people, leaving the island and looking back on their youthful past.


The Wind Blows


Katherine Mansfield – web links

Katherine Mansfield at Mantex
Life and works, biography, a close reading, and critical essays

Katherine Mansfield at Wikipedia
Biography, legacy, works, biographies, films and adaptations

Not Under Forty
A charming collection of literary essays by Willa Cather, which includes a discussion of Katherine Mansfield.

Katherine Mansfield at Gutenberg
Free downloadable versions of her stories in a variety of digital formats

Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, including Mansfield’s ‘Prelude’

Katherine Mansfield’s Modernist Aesthetic
An academic essay by Annie Pfeifer at Yale University’s Modernism Lab

The Katherine Mansfield Society
Newsletter, events, essay prize, resources, yearbook

Katherine Mansfield Birthplace
Biography, birthplace, links to essays, exhibitions

Katherine Mansfield Website
New biography, relationships, photographs, uncollected stories

© Roy Johnson 2015


More on Katherine Mansfield
Twentieth century literature
More on the Bloomsbury Group
More on short stories


Filed Under: Katherine Mansfield Tagged With: English literature, Katherine Mansfield, Literary studies, The Short Story

The Years

December 6, 2013 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

The Years (1937) was the largest of Virginia Woolf’s novels. Its focus is the passage of time as it traces the Pargiter family history from 1880 up to the ‘Present Day’. The novel met with high praise when it was first published. David Garnett said the book “marks her as the greatest master of English” and is “the finest novel she has ever written” (New Statesman & Nation). Subsequent critical assessments have been more mixed. The novel sold very well in England and America making its way on to American best-seller lists.

Elizabeth Willson Gordon, Woolf’s-head Publishing: The Highlights and New Lights of the Hogarth Press

The Years

central London


The Years – critical commentary

In 1922 Virginia Woolf broke with the conventions of traditional prose fiction in her experimental novel Jacob’s Room. This involved abandoning plot and suspense; adopting a shifting point of view; and creating a discontinuous narrative which switched from one character and location to another, with few marks of transition or causality in between.

The same techniques are at work in The Years, but the sense of fragmentation and the lack of unity is exacerbated by the fact that Woolf cut whole swathes out of her original composition – leaving enormous gaps between the ‘chapters’ or ‘sections’ of the novel in which events are left unrecorded and unexplained.

We know from Woolf’s original manuscript of the novel (when it was called The Pargiters: A Novel-Essay) that this is the most heavily edited and revised of all her novels. As Mitchell Leaska points out in his introduction to the published manuscript version:

many parts of the novel are highly ambiguous. Throughout the published text of The Years we come across splinters of memory, fragments of speech, titles of quoted passages left un-named or forgotten, lines of poetry or remnants of nursery rhymes left dangling in mid-air, understanding between characters incomplete, and utterances missing the mark and misunderstood. In one sense the novel eloquently communicates the failure of communication.

The reader is able to reassemble some sense of what has happened in those gaps by piecing together hints that are dropped in the remaining sections – but it has to be said that one of the weaknesses of The Years is that the narrative offers very little incentive for this effort to be made.

There is quite a bewildering array of characters, and keeping track of them is not made any easier by the fact that many of them are known by their pet names or nicknames. Magdalena is known as Maggie, Sally as Sara, and Nicholas Pomjalovsky is called Brown. It is interesting to note that the only character who appears all the way through the novel and provides some sense of continuity is Eleanor, who is not given a nickname.

There are also characters who appear in the narrative, assume a certain importance in the events of the section (or chapter) in which they appear – only to disappear and never be mentioned again. This might well reflect the facts of social life as we experience it, but it does not make for a very compelling work of literary art.

There are other problems too. We know that uppermost in Woolf’s mind during the composition of the novel were issues of women’s roles in society – materials for which she wisely cut out of the novel and eventually found their way into Three Guineas. But having cut them out, the novel is curiously denuded of political content.

The section entitled 1914 ends with a rhapsodic scene of Kitty wallowing in her sense of ownership on her family estate ‘in the North’ – with absolutely no mention of the catastrophe about to engulf Europe – which we know to have been an active concern for society at the time.

It might be argued that the character’s lack of awareness is a criticism of upper-class complacency in the face of international power-politics – but unfortunately the same thing is true of the final section of the novel Present Day in which the whole family assembles for a party in 1937 without any mention of the second catastrophe into which Europe was sliding. This is at best curious and at worst a serious flaw – especially when we know that Woolf herself lived in a milieu in which international politics was an active and regular subject of debate.

Authors are not obliged to use their own lives for the material of their fictions of course, and it could be argued that Woof is showing a typical upper-class family in all its privilege and neglect – but there is very little sense of criticism within the text.


The Years – study resources

The Years The Years – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon UK

The Years The Years – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon US

The Years The Years – Wordsworth Classics edition – Amazon UK

The Years The Years – Wordsworth Classics edition – Amazon US

The Years The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Years The Years – Vintage Classics edition – Amazon UK

The Years The Years – Vintage Classics edition – Amazon US

The Years Virginia Woolf – biographical notes

The Years The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

The Years Selected Essays – by Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

The Years The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

The Years Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

The Years Virginia Woolf at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

The Years Virginia Woolf at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study resources

The Years


The Years – plot summary

1880.   Colonel Pargiter leaves his club in Piccadilly and visits his mistress in Westminster. Then he goes home and joins his children for afternoon tea. His daughter Delia goes upstairs to visit her mother who is an invalid, whilst another daughter Rose defies house rules and goes out to the shops. Later, whilst the family are having dinner, Mrs Pargiter has a fainting fit, and there is a general feeling that she is dying. That evening Rose is frightened by the image of a man she has seen exposing himself in the street.

At Oxford University Edward Pargiter is cramming for an examination in Greek. He share a gift of port with two fellow undergraduates Hugh Gibbs and Ashley. Kitty Malone (a relative of the Pargiters) goes to a history lesson with Lucy Craddock, then has tea with the poorer Robsons, which she enjoys compared with the stiffness of college life. News arrives of Mrs Pargiter’s death, and both branches of the family take part in the funeral service, which is viewed sceptically by Delia.

1891.   Eleven years later Milly Pargiter has married Hugh Gibbs. Eleanor is running the family home for her ageing father and supervising repair works on the lodgings of the poor. She has lunch with her father then goes to the law courts to watch her brother Morris try a case, but she leaves feeling oppressed by the atmosphere in court. In the busy London streets, learning that Parnell has died, she visits her sister Delia in a poor rooming house – but she is not at home.

Colonel Partiger is in town on the same day, having ended his relationship with Maria. He visits the home of his brother Digby and sister-in-law Eugenie, feeling envious of Digby’s domestic comforts.

1907.   Sir Digby and Lady Eugenia Pargiter are on their way to a summer evening party with their daughter Magdalena (Maggie). Whilst they are out their very imaginative younger daughter Sara (Sally) lies in bed listening to the sounds of a dance in a house nearby, turning over philosophic concepts of being and reading Edward Pargiter’s translation of Antigone.

Her sister and mother return late at night and the young girls pester their mother for romantic anecdotes about her younger life.

1908.   A year later Sir Digby and Lady Eugenia Pargiter have both died. Martin Pargiter, back from India and Africa, visits their house, which has been closed and sold. He then visits Eleanor and his father, who has had a stroke. Rose visits from her suffragette work in the North. The siblings resurrect memories of childhood.

1910.   Rose, now forty, visits her cousins Maggie and Sara who live in poor ‘rooms’ in a working class area south of the river. They compare memories of childhood and their respective families. After lunch, Rose takes Sara to a political meeting in Holborn where Eleanor is the secretary. It is also attended by Kitty (Lady Lasswade) who afterwards is driven to the opera (Siegfried) where she is joined by her cousin Edward, who is still a bachelor.

Maggie and Sara finish their dinner, after which Sara gives a slightly dotty but accurate account of the meeting. Their neighbourhood is full of noise and drunks, and the section ends with the announcement that Edward VII has died.

1911.   Old Colonel Pargiter has died. Eleanor, now fifty-five, returns from a trip to Mediterranean countries to visit Morris at his mother-in-law’s house in Dorset, where she meets an old friend Sir William Whatney. She wonders what to do with her life now that she has no more domestic responsibilities.

1913.   Eleanor sells the family house, and Crosby the housekeeper retires to Richmond. However, she still looks after Martin’s laundry. He lives in Ebury Street, Belgravia and is still not married.

1914.   Martin leaves home and walks towards the city where he is due to see his stockbrokers, wondering what he might have been had he not been in the army. At St Paul’s he meets Sally and takes her for lunch to a very crowded chop house. She gets tipsy, then rather cryptic and mystical in her conversation. Afterwards they take a bus, then walk through Hyde Park into Kensington Gardens where she is due to meet Maggie. Martin confides in Maggie about a woman with whom he is unhappily in love.

In the evening he goes to a formal dinner party given by Kitty in Grosvenor Square. He is bored by the extremely stiff and lifeless conventions of upper-class society, but he does what is expected of him. He and Kitty both claim to be interested in each other, but do nothing about it.

After the guests leave Kitty changes and is driven to the station where she catches the night train for the family estate in the ‘North’. She arrives in the very early morning, and after breakfast goes for a walk on the estate, feeling an ecstatic bond with the countryside and a sense of continuity and ownership, even though she knows that the estate will pass into the hands of her eldest son.

1917.   Eleanor goes to dinner with Maggie and Renny in Westminster where she meets the gay Pole, Nicholas. They are joined by Sara who rapidly becomes tipsy. When an air raid starts, they move down into the cellar and continue dinner there. Various responses to the war are expressed in fragments of unfinished conversation. After the raid is over the visitors leave and rejoin the almost empty streets where traffic is beginning to circulate again

1918.   An ageing and ailing Crosby is shopping in Richmond, clinging on to the last domestic position that separates her from poverty.

Present Day.   Eleanor, now in her seventies, has been to India. Her nephew North returns from sheep farming in Africa to visit Sara, having been impressed by Nicholas . They discuss their previous correspondence and have a low class dinner where she boards. Eleanor and Peggy (who is now a doctor) travel to Delia’s house to a party, their fragments of conversation reflecting links to the past and differences in generations within the family.

North and Sara exchange their enthusiasm for poetry and anti-Semitism whilst waiting to go to the party. They are joined by Renny and Maggie. At the party Peggy has to politely endure boring stories from her uncle, whilst she is quietly reflecting on what we can know about other people. The younger Pargiters (now in their sixties and seventies) meet and tease each other about incidents in their shared childhood.

North feels an outsider’s rage against the stiff social conventions and views the party as degenerate animals which ought to be destroyed. Eleanor meanwhile tries to make sense of the long life she has lived, but in the end she falls asleep.

Eleanor eventually feels that she finds happiness simply being amongst younger living people. Peggy on the other hand is painfully conscious of the hardships and misery in life. She criticises North in an unprovoked attack. North feels himself completely alienated, and sees the guests as a middle and upper-class club to which he does not belong.

North meets his uncle Edward and admires him for what seems to be his attitude of being above the mediocre mass, and he wishes to find some new way of being for himself. Nicholas tries to make a speech of thanks to the hostess, but he cannot command attention. Finally, as dawn breaks over the square, the party comes to an end and the guests begin to go home.


The Years – principal characters
Colonel Abel Pargiter head of the family, with two fingers missing
Rose Pargiter his invalid wife, who dies
Eleanor Pargiter the eldest daughter (‘no beauty’) who does charity work
Milly Pargiter daughter
Rose daughter, imaginative suffragette and spinster
Martin son, who joins the army
Morris son, apprentice at law, who becomes a barrister
Edward Oxford university classics scholar
Dr Malone an Oxford Don
Rose Malone his wife, Rose Pargiter’s cousin
Kitty his large daughter, later Lady Lasswade
Lucy Craddock Kitty’s private history tutor
Celia Morris’s wife, Eleanor’s sister-in-law
Sir Digby Pargiter Colonel Pargiter’s younger brother
Eugenie his wife
Magdalena (Maggie) his daughter
Sally (Sara) his daughter
René (Renny) a Frenchman
Nicholas Pomjalovsky (Brown) a gay Pole
North Morris’s son, Eleanor’s nephew
Crosby the Pargiter’s housekeeper
Mira Colonel Pargiter’s mistress

The Years – further reading

Charles Hoffmann, ‘Virginia Woolf’s Manuscript Revisions of The Years‘, PMLA 84 (1969), 78-89.

Mitchell A. Leaska, ‘Virginia Woolf, the Parteger: A Reading of The Years‘, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 80/2 (1977), 172-210.

Mitchell A. Leaska (ed.) The Partigers by Virginia Woolf: The Novel-Essay Portion of ‘The Years’ (London: Hogarth Press, 1978).

Jane Marcus, ‘The Years as Greek Drama, Domestic Novel and Gotterdamerung’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 80/2 (1977), 176-301.

Victoria Middleton, ‘The Years: “A Deliberate Failure”‘ Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 80/2 (1977), 158-71.

Madeline Moore, ‘The Years and Years of Adverse Male Reviewers’, Women’s Studies 4 (1977), 247-63.

Grace Radin, ‘I am not a hero: Virginia Woolf and the First Version of The Years‘, Massachussetts Review, 16 (1975), 195-208.

Grace Radin, Virginia Woolf’s The Years: The Evolution of a Novel (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981).

Eric Warner, ‘Reconsidering The Years‘, North Dakota Quarterly, 48/2 (1980), 16-30.


The Years - first edition

First edition – cover design by Vanessa Bell


The Years – textual history

The novel we now know as The Years has an extremely complicated genesis – both in conception and execution. The first glimmerings of its birth appeared in 1931 when Virginia Woolf delivered a speech to the London branch of the National Society for Women’s Service, an organisation which dealt with employment for women. It was entitled ‘Professions for Women’ and dealt with her own experiences as a writer. She contrasts the comparative ease of her own entry into the world of letters with the heroic efforts of Ethel Smyth the composer:

She is of the race of the pioneers: She is among the ice-breakers, the window-smashers, the indomitable and the irresistible armoured tanks who climbed the rough ground; went first; drew the enemy’s fire; and left a pathway for those who came after her.

During the two years that followed, Woolf was doing the reading and research for what would eventually become both The Years and Three Guineas, but at first these formed one work in her mind. In October 1932 she began work on The Partigers: A Novel-Essay. Her plan was to alternate ‘extracts’ from the novel with essays offering critical commentary on the fictional narratives. The subject of the novel was to be what we now call a ‘family saga’ covering the lives of the Partiger family between 1880 and 2023.

By January 1933 she had completed the first part of the book, which deals with the year 1880 – and it is interesting to note that the essay portions come before the fictional chapters. But a month later, having decided that this formal construction made the work too much like propaganda, she decided to leave out the intervening essays. This material was not lost however: it was to form the basis of what eventually became Three Guineas.

For the next two years she produced 200,000 words of a novel for which she didn’t even have a title. It was at various stages called Here and Now, Music, Dawn, Sons and Daughters, Daughters and Sons, Ordinary People, The Caravan, and Other People’s Houses, before she eventually settled on The Years.

Next came the task of editing down this mass of material into what would be a single publishable volume. She did this by a process of ruthless pruning and simply leaving out explanatory passages, so that the narrative jumps from one character and scene to another with no smooth transitions. Even so, the typescript still came to 740 pages. She did all this editing and re-typing work herself, and the book put a great strain on her fragile mental and physical health. She described it as the novel which almost killed her.

But there was more work to be done. She wanted the work printed in galley proofs before she allowed her final judge, husband Leonard, to read the novel: these proofs amounted to 600 sheets. The strain of all this, the indecision, and the fact that she had been paid in advance by her American publishers, put an enormous strain on her fragile state, and led to a severe illness which lasted three months. Leonard gave his guarded approval to the results, knowing that any censure from him would lead to her complete breakdown.

When she returned to editing the proofs she cut out what she described as ‘two enormous chunks’ (fifty pages of the current OUP text). When the final proofs appeared, one set was edited for the American market and the other for the Woolf’s own Hogarth Press. There are even differences between these two sets of revisions – but relatively minor.

After all this indecision, anguish, and revision, The Years was quite successful on publication, and in America even became a best seller. By the end of 1938 the novel had earned her £4,000, which in contemporary terms is worth between £300,000 and £400,000.


Virginia Woolf’s writing

Virginia Woolf's handwriting

“I feel certain that I am going mad again.”


Other works by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf To the LighthouseTo the Lighthouse (1927) is the second of the twin jewels in the crown of her late experimental phase. It is concerned with the passage of time, the nature of human consciousness, and the process of artistic creativity. Woolf substitutes symbolism and poetic prose for any notion of plot, and the novel is composed as a tryptich of three almost static scenes – during the second of which the principal character Mrs Ramsay dies – literally within a parenthesis. The writing is lyrical and philosophical at the same time. Many critics see this as her greatest achievement, and Woolf herself realised that with this book she was taking the novel form into hitherto unknown territory.
Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse Buy the book at Amazon US

Vita Sackville-West - portraitOrlando (1928) is one of her lesser-known novels, although it’s critical reputation has risen in recent years. It’s a delightful fantasy which features a character who changes sex part-way through the book – and lives from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Using this device (which turns out to be strangely credible) Woolf explores issues of gender and identity as her hero-heroine moves through a variety of lives and personal adventures. Orlando starts out as an emissary to the Court of St James, lives through friendships with Swift and Alexander Pope, and ends up motoring through the west end of London on a shopping expedition in the 1920s. The character is loosely based on Vita Sackville-West, who at one time was Woolf’s lover. The novel itself was described by Nigel Nicolson (Sackville-West’s son) as ‘the longest and most charming love-letter in literature’.
Virginia Woolf - Orlando Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf - Orlando Buy the book at Amazon US

Kew GardensKew Gardens is a collection of experimental short stories in which Woolf tested out ideas and techniques which she then later incorporated into her novels. After Chekhov, they represent the most important development in the modern short story as a literary form. Incident and narrative are replaced by evocations of mood, poetic imagery, philosophic reflection, and subtleties of composition and structure. The shortest piece, ‘Monday or Tuesday’, is a one-page wonder of compression. This collection is a cornerstone of literary modernism. No other writer – with the possible exception of Nadine Gordimer, has taken the short story as a literary genre as far as this.
Virginia Woolf - Kew Gardens Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf - Kew Gardens Buy the book at Amazon US


Virginia Woolf: BiographyVirginia Woolf is a readable and well illustrated biography by John Lehmann, who at one point worked as her assistant and business partner at the Hogarth Press. It is described by the blurb as ‘A critical biography of Virginia Woolf containing illustrations that are a record of the Bloomsbury Group and the literary and artistic world that surrounded a writer who is immensely popular today’. This is an attractive and very accessible introduction to the subject which has been very popular with readers ever since it was first published..
Virginia Woolf - A Biography Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf - A Biography Buy the book at Amazon US


Virginia Woolf – web links

Virginia Woolf at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major works, book reviews, studies of the short stories, bibliographies, web links, study resources.

Blogging Woolf
Book reviews, Bloomsbury related issues, links, study resources, news of conferences, exhibitions, and events, regularly updated.

Virginia Woolf at Wikipedia
Full biography, social background, interpretation of her work, fiction and non-fiction publications, photograph albumns, list of biographies, and external web links

Virginia Woolf at Gutenberg
Selected eTexts of the novels The Voyage Out, Night and Day, Jacob’s Room, and the collection of stories Monday or Tuesday in a variety of digital formats.

Woolf Online
An electronic edition and commentary on To the Lighthouse with notes on its composition, revisions, and printing – plus relevant extracts from the diaries, essays, and letters.

Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search texts of all the major novels and essays, word by word – locate quotations, references, and individual terms

Virginia Woolf – a timeline in phtographs
A collection of well and lesser-known photographs documenting Woolf’s life from early childhood, through youth, marriage, and fame – plus some first edition book jackets – to a soundtrack by Philip Glass. They capture her elegant appearance, the big hats, and her obsessive smoking. No captions or dates, but well worth watching.

Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury – including Gordon Square, Gower Street, Bedford Square, Tavistock Square, plus links to women’s history web sites.

Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
Bulletins of events, annual lectures, society publications, and extensive links to Woolf and Bloomsbury related web sites

BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
Charming sound recording of radio talk given by Virginia Woolf in 1937 – a podcast accompanied by a slideshow of photographs.

A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephen compiled a photograph album and wrote an epistolary memoir, known as the “Mausoleum Book,” to mourn the death of his wife, Julia, in 1895 – an archive at Smith College – Massachusetts

Virginia Woolf first editions
Hogarth Press book jacket covers of the first editions of Woolf’s novels, essays, and stories – largely designed by her sister, Vanessa Bell.

Virginia Woolf – on video
Biographical studies and documentary videos with comments on Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group and the social background of their times.

Virginia Woolf Miscellany
An archive of academic journal essays 2003—2014, featuring news items, book reviews, and full length studies.

© Roy Johnson 2014


More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
More on the Bloomsbury Group


Filed Under: Virginia Woolf Tagged With: English literature, Literary studies, The novel, Virginia Woolf

Thomas Mann greatest works

September 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

stories, novellas, novels

Thomas Mann greatest works - small portraitThomas Mann’s work spans the first half of the twentieth century. He started out writing in the tradition style of the nineteenth centry, but very quickly sought out themes and motifs which place him amongst modernists. His political views went through a similar transformation, from arch conservative before and during the first world war, to a very sceptical liberal democracy after the second. Many of his works are long and dense, and his style includes such typically Germanic features of writing in huge paragraphs, with lots of philosophic meditation embedded in his narratives. Beginners are best advised to sart with his earlier work – particularly novellas such as Death in Venice and Tonio Kroger

 

Thomas Mann greatest works BuddenbrooksBuddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family
This lengthy saga of a prosperous Hanseatic commercial family and their gradual disintegration is also a portrayal of the transition from the stable bourgeois life of the nineteenth century to a modern uncertainty. It was Thomas Mann’s first novel – published when he was only twenty-five – and it announces themes he was to pursue for the rest of his life. The technique of leitmotif which Mann borrowed from Wagner is most apparent, as is his love of Schopenhauer, and the novel overall reads as a deeply philosophical epic. It brought Mann instant fame on its first publication.
Thomas Mann greatest works Buddenbrooks Buy the book at Amazon UK
Thomas Mann greatest works Buddenbrooks Buy the book at Amazon US

 

Thomas Mann greatest works Death in VeniceDeath in Venice
The title story of this collection is a classic novella – half way between a long story and a short novel. It’s a wonderfully condensed tale of the relationship between art and life, love and death. Venice provides the background for the story of a famous writer Gustav Von Aschenbach who departs from his usual strict routines, falls in love with a beautiful young boy, and gets caught up in a subtle downward spiral of self-indulgence – all set against a backdrop of the beautiful city of Venice, but which is in the grip of a plague. The unity of themes, form, and motifs are superbly realised – even though Mann wrote this when he was quite young.
Thomas Mann greatest works Death in Venice Buy the book at Amazon UK
Thomas Mann greatest works Death in Venice Buy the book at Amazon US

 

Thomas Mann greatest works Death in VeniceDeath in Venice – video film adaptation
Luchiano Visconti produced a visually glamorous version of Mann’s novella which captures the original very faithfully. Shimmering scenes of the Venice lido are interspersed with menacing glimpses of the impending plague. The film is famous for two features – the spectacular use of the slowed-down version of the adagietto from Mahler’s fifth symphony as a sound track, and the outstanding performance of Dirk Bogard as the ageing Gustav von Aschenbach – one of his last and greatest screen performances. This is a visually spectacular piece of filming.
Thomas Mann greatest works Death in Venice Buy the DVD at Amazon UK
Thomas Mann greatest works Death in Venice Buy the DVD at Amazon US

 

Thomas Mann greatest works The Magic MountainThe Magic Mountain
This is a curious but impressive novel, written on either side of the First World War. The setting is a sanatorium in the Alps – a community organized with exclusive reference to ill-health. There the characters discuss love, politics, and philosophy. Much of the novels ‘activity’ is intellectual debate between characters such as Settembrini and Naphta (who are said to represent Mann’s brother Heinrich and the Hungarian Marxist critic Georg Lukacs respectively). It’s an intellectual drama of the forces which play upon modern man. Don’t expect tension or plot in the conventional sense. The novel also marks a transition in Mann’s political philosophy – from a conservative to a more liberal ideology.
Thomas Mann greatest works The Magic Mountain Buy the book at Amazon UK
Thomas Mann greatest works The Magic Mountain Buy the book at Amazon US

 

Thomas Mann greatest works Doktor FaustusDoktor Faustus
Full title – Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn as Told by a Friend. This is widely regarded as Thomas Mann’s masterpiece – a dense, intellectual, and metaphysical novel which is the biography of a famous composer Adrian Leverkuhn – a thinly disguised portrait of Arnold Schoenberg. His extraordinary career is loosely based on the Faust legend, and charted from his precocious childhood to his tragic death. His revelation of the horrifying price he had to pay for his achievement highlights Mann’s vast theme: the discord between genius and sanity. The story combines Mann’s serious concern for music with his political view of German society, which is shown sliding towards its own self-generated collapse in 1945.
Thomas Mann greatest works Dr Faustus Buy the book at Amazon UK
Thomas Mann greatest works Dr Faustus Buy the book at Amazon US

 

Thomas Mann greatest works Mario and the MagicianMario and the Magician
Using settings as varied as Germany, Italy, the Holy Land and the Far East, these stories explore a theme which always preoccupied Thomas Mann – “the two faces of things”. Written between 1918 and 1953, they offer an insight the development of his thought. The title story concerns a German family on holiday in Italy who fall under the hypnotic spell of a brutal magician. It is often seen as a warning against the seductive power of fascism.

Thomas Mann greatest works Mario and the Magician Buy the book at Amazon UK
Thomas Mann greatest works Mario and the Magician Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2004


Filed Under: Thomas Mann Tagged With: Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice, Doktor Faustus, German literature, Literary studies, Mario and the Magician, The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann life and works

September 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Thomas Mann life and works - small portrait1875. Thomas Mann born in Lübeck, northern Germany. His father was from a prosperous merchant family – head of the company and twice Mayor of Lübeck. His mother was artistic, with foreign blood. Five brothers and sisters. Rivalry with elder bother Heinrich, who was also a novelist. Two sisters commit suicide. Mann dislikes school, study, and discipline.

1891. Death of father. Family moves to Munich, south Germany. [North/South = Business/Pleasure]. Brief spell working in insurance office. Mann dislikes work. One year of classes at university studying journalism.

1896. Moves to Rome and Palestrina for one year with brother Heinrich – ‘biding time’ on financial allowance.

1898. Moves back to Munich. Spends one year as editor of satirical magazine Simplicissimus. German philosophers Nietzsche and Schopenhauer early influences. Records in his diary that he is ‘close to suicide’. First stories published – Little Herr Friedmann.

1900. Starts military service, but invalided out with psycho-somatic illness after three months.

1901. Publishes Buddenbrooks, his first novel, at twenty-five. This long saga of ‘the decline of a family’ brings him instant fame.

1903. Publishes ‘Tonio Kröger’.

1905. Marries Katia, daughter of well-to-do middle-class family. They have six children. Mann has very conservative political views. Begins a novel Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man (based on memories of Manolescu) which he abandons. (He picked it up forty years later, and continued writing, exactly where he left off.)

1913. Publishes Death in Venice, a novella. Records in his diary ‘nothing is invented in Death in Venice‘.

1912. Spends three weeks in a sanatorium in Davos with his wife. Begins The Magic Mountain as a short story.

1914. Outbreak of First World War. Mann takes very conservative political line, supporting Germany. Writes essays, Reflections of an Unpolitical Man, and almost in spite of himself, his political views change. Unable to write Magic Mountain during the war.

1922. Mann’s political views become more radical in the face of rising fascism.

1924. Finishes writing The Magic Mountain.

1925. Begins a series of foreign lecture tours.

1929. Awarded Nobel prize for literature. records in his diary – ‘It lay, I suppose, upon my path in life’. Starts work on Joseph and His Brothers

1930. Mario and the Magician – short novel symbolising the rise of fascism. begins lecture tours in America.

1933. Hitler seizes power in Germany. Mann moves to Zurich. Begins political debates with fellow emigrées on how best to combat fascism and maintain the humane basis of traditional German culture.

1936. Mann’s son Klaus, a writer and theatre critic, publishes Mephisto, a novel dealing with the relationship between art and politics, the dangers of compromising with evil, and which uses the Faust theme – all of which prefigure Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus.

1938. Moves to Princeton (USA) – then to California, joining fellow emigrés Bertolt Brecht, Arnold Schoenberg, Walter Adorno, Bruno Walter, and Igor Stravinski.

1943. Begins writing Doktor Faustus.

1944. Becomes a US citizen.

1947. Doktor Faustus

1949. Suicide of Mann’s son Klaus from drug overdose.

1952. Mann returns to Europe, but refuses to choose between the divided Germanies. Settles in Zurich

1955. Dies, leaving Felix Krull unfinished.


Thomas Mann life and works A LifeThomas Mann: a life This exploration of Thomas Mann’s life by Donald Prater describes his relationship of intense rivalry with his brother Heinrich, who was also a novelist, his (much-concealed) homosexuality, his career as a prolific essayist, and the vast achievement of his novels. Particular attention is paid to Mann’s opposition to Nazism, and his role in the rise and fall of Hitlerism. It traces Mann’s political development from the nationalistic conservatism of his younger days, to the humanistic anti-Nazim of his maturity.   Buy the book here

© Roy Johnson 2004


Filed Under: Thomas Mann Tagged With: Biography, German literature, Literary studies, Thomas Mann

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