20C Literature

cultural history, literary criticism and theory, guidance notes

cultural history, literary criticism and theory, guidance notes

Literature and the Internet

November 1, 2009 by Roy Johnson

resources, techniques, and issues for literary studies

In the field of literary studies, people have been creating digitized texts and making concordances for quite some time now. But until the advent of the Web it was difficult to get an overview of criticism and scholarship which was easily available. In fact it’s still not easy. As the authors of this excellent guide Literature and the Internet point out, it remains common for the latest work to be made available only in the form of conventionally printed books and the dinosaur publishing methods of scholarly journals.

But at last the Internet is now making ever more material easily available to us, and it is the purpose of this guide to advise students, teachers, and scholars how to make the most of the opportunity to retrieve it. They start with a general survey of the pros and cons of the Internet for literary studies, quite rightly pointing out that despite all its obvious advantages, there are still many shortcomings:

It has large and obvious gaps, it cannot cover the literary ground as even a moderately well-stocked library can, and it cannot equal the contemporary appeal of a good bookstore.

In fact the differences between books in libraries and texts on the Net are intelligently explored, before we get down to some practical advice on usability. This centres logically enough on using search engines, and they offer an explanation of the different techniques which can be deployed, as well as alerting users to the differences in kind amongst the sources which might be located.

The centre of the book is an extensive list of resources. These are arranged as web site address – in categories ranging from libraries, journals, literary periods, literary criticism, discussion groups and email distribution lists, to individual authors – from Achebe to Zola – and their home pages.

Mercifully, these lists are annotated with useful evaluative comments, making clear distinctions between sites which are commercial, fan pages, and the results of scholarly research. It’s interesting to note how many of the award-winning sites are the work of dedicated individuals (such as Jack Lynch at Pennsylvania and Mitsuharu Matsuoka in Japan) and departments in little-known colleges in the back of nowhere. Major institutions are noticeably thin on the ground.

I felt reassured that the authors had done their homework, had visited the sites they discuss – and were not frightened of levelling criticism at some quite well known names in the literary establishment. They point out the need for more qualitative evaluation of online resources and web site reviews.

This is followed by advice on the evaluation of sites, including a series of basic questions we can ask on arrival. Is the information accurate? Is it complete? And is there any acknowledgement of the sources being used?

There is also a section for teachers, discussing how computers and the Internet can be used in literary studies, with suggestions (for instance) for hypertext assignments and web essays – though I hope their term Webliographies doesn’t catch on.

They consider the nature of electronic texts – from plain ASCII, through the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) and HyperText Markup Language (HTML), and even as far as the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and Extensible Markup Language (XML).

These are only touched on lightly, with their differences briefly explained, but this is a valuable topic to raise in the consciousness of students and teachers, especially in the light of controversies surrounding the form in which commercial electronic books are being issued.

The guide ends with considerations of the theoretical and political connections between literary studies in an era of digitized text – exploring some of the notions raised in recent years by Jay Bolter, George Landow, and J. Hillis Miller.

They even have some interesting comments to make on the likely impact of Information Technology on academic careers – including the vexed issue of academic publishing, which must surely be due for major convulsions in the next few years.

Many people have argued that it’s now rather pointless issuing printed resource guides which will be quickly outdated. But there is a reason for such publications. The fact is that it’s often quicker to locate information in a book, rather than searching through files or favourites using a browser.

Certainly, I’m very pleased that this book is on my desk, and I look forward to exploring its suggestions and passing on any gems to my own students – who are currently learning how to write, link, zip, and upload their first web essays.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Stephanie Browner, Stephen Pulsford, and Richard Sears, Literature and the Internet: A Guide for Students, Teachers, and Scholars, London/New York: Garland, 2000, pp.191, ISBN: 0815334532

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Malte Laurids Brigge

May 25, 2017 by Roy Johnson

tutorials, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) is a ‘work’ in prose written by the Czech poet Rainer Maria Rilke. It is commonly regarded as a novel, but as a work of radical modernism it breaks all the rules commonly underpinning a sustained work of fiction. It pre-dates other major works of modernism by more than a decade, but has never become as well known as novels such as James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) or D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1924). The reasons for this may become apparent from the critical comments that follow.

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge – commentary

Modernism

The most striking feature of Malte Laurids Brigge is that it marks a radical departure in terms of the presentation of fictional narrative. It also embraces just about every characteristic of what became known as literary modernism. The dates of the book’s composition (1906-1910) coincide with the development of modernism in general.

Although the subject is largely a young man’s recollections of his childhood, there is a complete fragmentation of the narrative, with no attempt at chronological progression. There is very little indication of a sequence of events or any indication of the relationship of one notebook entry to another. The result is a mosaic of episodes, held together only by the personality of the narrator.

The same radical departure is true of the other main feature of traditional fiction – characterisation. There are thumbnail sketches of characters known to Malte – his relatives or people who feature in his anecdotes. But none of them are developed, and people he sees in the street (or doesn’t see in the next room) are given just as much importance as close relatives

There is no sense of dramatic tension in the narrative at all – no story, plot, or psychological development to engage a reader’s interest in the manner of conventional fiction.

The subject matter and the form of the individual notebook entries are radically heterogeneous. They begin with anguished accounts of living in reduced circumstances in Paris. They pass on to childhood memories of life in Denmark. They include quasi-philosophic reflections on sometimes bizarre topics – such as feeding pigeons and the noise made by the lid from a tin can. There are impressionistic accounts of paintings and some tapestries. And one entry is a critical essay on the works of Henrik Ibsen.

The main themes

Despite the varied nature of the notebook entries, there is a general theme that emerges from them. They have in common the decline of the aristocracy, the collapse of an empire, and the narrator’s regret for the passing of a grand way of life. Malte’s first-person account of his childhood reveals a family background of a rich, land-owning aristocracy.

His memories revolve around two grand estates at Ulsgaard and Urnekloster, the family seats of the Brigges and Brahes in Denmark. He takes a lofty pride in describing his ancestral homes, with their portrait galleries, the number and size of their rooms, and the long and distinguished history of their land-owning families.

His re-telling of historical events and the details of his personal reading all feature aristocratic dignitaries, plus their levels of rank and social status. He deals with kings, knights and people who died either in battle or in gruesome circumstances. His anecdotes are littered with images of crowns, swords, flags, and the paraphernalia of the ruling class – all presented sympathetically, with profound regret for the passing of their influence.

It is significant that in the narrative present of the notebook entries, the protagonist Malte’s inherited furniture is in storage, and he is living in temporary accommodation in Paris. He is clearly unable to cope psychologically with the change in his circumstances.

The book is rather like Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks (1901) in plotting the decline of a way of life which was to be swept away forever by the events of the first world war which took place only a few years later. The whole of the Hapsburg empire which then encompassed Austro-Hungary and beyond was in a morbid bureaucratic decline which 1914-18 put an end to forever.

Kafka and Wittgenstein

There are amazing similarities between Rilke and two other writers with Hapsburg origins. Like Rilke, Franz Kafka was born in Prague in 1883, wrote in German, and died within two years of his fellow countryman. Although Kafka is known as a novelist, the vast majority of his work consists of fragmentary writings in notebooks and diaries – very similar to Malte’s notebook entries. His subject matter, like Rilke’s, is expressed in the study of very unusual states of being, psychological tension, and neurotic attention to the trivial detail of everyday life.

There is very little dramatic tension in Kafka’s writings, which are sometimes philosophic meditations on everyday topics, sometimes elaborate metaphors spun out of a startling image, and often quasi-mystic or semi-religious beliefs stated in gnomic aphorisms or ambiguous mantras.

The other writer with whom Rilke has distinct similarities is Ludwig Wittgenstein – who was also a product of the fin-de-siecle Hapsburg Empire. Wittgenstein was from Vienna, and was born into a rich aristocratic family in 1889. He too was riven by self doubt (like Malte and all Kafka’s protagonists) and like Rilke he wrote his ideas in the form of numbered paragraphs in notebooks. He also expressed himself in the form of philosophic reflections and quasi-religious meditations.

Is it a novel?

Rilke himself never referred to Malte Laurids Brigge as a novel: he used the terms ‘book’ or ‘work’ – and the bulk of Rilke’s writing was poetry. Nevertheless, the book is commonly discussed as if it were a novel, and in the one hundred years since its publication readers have become accustomed to all sorts of experimental prose fictions.

But it certainly does not tell a story, and it does not have memorable characters or show anybody’s psychological development. Its parts or episodes are not coherently linked; there is no dramatic tension at all; and the un-coordinated switching from one topic to another makes it very difficult to read. The critic and novelist A.N. Wilson captured some of this problem in his review of the book – which he admits took him a month to read:

It is, in fact, barely 200 pages long, but it is, among other things, an autobiography, a travelogue (Russia, Venice, Paris, Denmark), a fantasy about the twilight of the old European aristocracy, a series of historical sketches, with vignettes as various as those of Charles the Bold of Burgundy, Ivan the Terrible and Eleanora Duse, and a poet’s notebook, attempting to come to grips with such everlasting questions as the nature of consciousness, our need for love, and whether or not we could ever love God.

Rilke delivers re-imagined historical scenes from the lives of fourteenth and fifteenth century French kings – but does not identify who they are. These passages would be incomprehensible without the addition of explanatory footnotes and endnotes supplied by the editor. And even with the glossary material it is very difficult to see their relevance to the rest of the narrative – except to reinforce the impression that Malte is obsessed with royalty, aristocratic status, inheritance, and death – either by disease, regicide, or battlefield slaughter.

He also recounts in minute detail the lives of people he has never met or even seen. There is a lengthy account of a poor news vendor in Paris during which Malte speculates about the man’s state of mind from his shabby appearance. Having done that he then confesses that his account is invalid:

I knew at once that my mental image of him was worthless. The abjectness of his misery, not mitigated by any wariness or pretence, was beyond anything I might be able to convey. I had grasped neither the angle of his posture nor the horror with which the inside of his eyelids seemed continually to imbue him.

It is bad enough that two pages of detailed description are suddenly declared ‘worthless’. If that is the case, why retain them as part of the narrative? But to then pretend knowledge of the psychological effect produced by the inside of a stranger’s eyelids is nothing short of ridiculous. The only possible justification for such statements is that they reveal Malte’s deranged state of mind – a topic which is not consistently addressed.

In the first of the notebook entries, when Malte describes his life in Paris, he is mentally unhinged and paranoid. But as further entries are added, this presentation of madness recedes, and there is every reason to believe that the content of the memoirs and anecdotes should be taken seriously, at face value.

There is therefore a difficulty presented to the reader – reconciling these disparate states of mind and perception within one consciousness. But this fracturing of subject and point of view is all part of what makes the Notebooks an essentially modernist work. It is rather like a prose equivalent of Eliot’s The Waste Land, though it should be noted that it precedes it by more than a decade.

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge – resources

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge – OUP – Amazon UK

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge – OUP – Amazon US

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge – Penguin – Amazon UK

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge – Penguin – Amazon US

Malte Lurids Brigge

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge – synopsis

Following the death of his parents a Danish aristocrat Malte Laurids Brigge is living in reduced circumstances in Paris. He is in a neurotic state of mind and appears to be suffering from paranoia. In a series of fragmentary notebook entries he recaptures his past and makes observations on life.

Metaphysical reflections on dying and death – including the idea that people have ‘ownership ‘ of their own death.

Childhood memories of living in a castle amongst eccentric and aristocratic relatives.

A detailed account of a visit in the dining room from the beautiful Cristina Brigge – who has been dead for some time.

Malte hides from his poverty by reading poetry in the Biblioteque Nationale – but is still possessed by paranoid fears.

He pays a visit to a psychiatric hospital, but his neurotic childhood fears return to haunt him.

He describes in great detail his attempts to help a man suffering from St Vitus’ Dance, then writes an oblique appreciation of the works of Henrick Ibsen

Childhood memories of illness and isolation, including the uncanny incident of meeting a disembodied hand under a table.

He becomes seriously ill with a fever, and is nursed by his mother, with whom he has an especially close bond.

Exploring the castle as a child, he dresses up in carnival costume, feels that he loses his own identity, and faints with fear.

He inspects the portraits of aristocratic relatives in the castle, then recalls the cold and remote behaviour of his relatives, even at the family dinner table.

He finds his aunt Abelone very attractive and describes to her in detail a series of heraldic tapestries.

He visits a neighbouring estate where the grand house has burned down and family are forced to live in in a few remaining rooms.

He recalls the death of his father and the medical ritual of piercing the heart as a precaution against premature burial.

Following the death of his father, he prepares to leave Copenhagen. He contemplates various examples of dying, then the story of a neighbour who thinks he can accumulate saved time like money deposited in a bank account.

He describes the activity of his next-door neighbour in Paris – without any evidence that what he is saying is true. This is followed by philosophic reflections on the ‘life’ of material objects, including the lid from a tin can.

He recalls books he has read and treasured, and goes on to re-tell the story of the death of Dmitry I, the false Tsar.

He presents his theory of the Duke of Burgundy’s blood and a detailed account of his death in battle.

He describes the genesis of his attitudes to reading, and then delivers a psychological critique of Goethe’s letters to young Bettina von Arnim.

He gives a detailed account of a news vendor in Paris, including the inside of his eyelids – and then reveals that his account is flawed.

He re-tells the personal history of a nineteenth-century French king who went mad, and describes yet another scene of slaughter on a battlefield.

Trivial episodes from his own childhood suddenly become further episodes in the lives of French kings and the Pope at Avignon.

A visit to the Roman amphitheatre in Orange leads to a meditation on drama and the acting career of Eleanora Duse.

He posits an elderly man reading poetry alone late at night. He believes that because the work is ancient it can express a state of completeness.

In Venice he encounters an attractive Danish girl who sings very beautifully.

He offers a meditation on the parable of the prodigal son, and wonders how it might be possible to draw nearer to God.

Manhattan Transfer

February 8, 2016 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, critical commentary, plot, and study resources

Manhattan Transfer was first published in 1925. It was the sixth literary work by John Dos Passos. Although he belonged to the same ‘lost generation’ as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, he established a reputation as a literary modernist who incorporated documentary material into his fictions. He presented a vision of American society which was rich in sociological and political significance, and he was also radically expressive in delivering narratives that were dense with literary experimentation.

Manhattan Transfer – critical commentary

The novel has as its principal focus the city of New York and its development in the early years of the twentieth century, running from the period pre-1910 to the early 1920s (the ‘jazz age’) with its flappers and prohibition. Its characters are what D.H.Lawrence described as “the vast loose gang of strivers and winners and losers which seems to be the very pep of New York.”

New York is an American state (like Texas, California, or Nebraska) whose capital city is Albany – hence the term New York City, which distinguishes the city from the state. New York City is also located on Manhattan Island in the Hudson River, and has always been the gateway for immigration to the United States. Manhattan Transfer reflects the rich cultural and linguistic mix of this population influx, and Dos Passos reproduces speech, patois, and accents from French, Italian, Yiddish, English, and Irish to reflect the cosmopolitan nature of the city and its culture.

The radical novelist

John Dos Passos was a novelist, a painter, and a political activist. As a young man he was a social revolutionary, with sympathies for both anarchist and communist points of view. It is quite clear in Manhattan Transfer that the radicalism expressed by characters such as Emile and Congo Jack has his sympathy; that the shady dealings in local government are being exposed as political corruption; and that his presentation of American capitalism is as a viciously competitive system that has a dehumanising effect on its citizens.

Joe Harland is a former ‘Wizard of Wall Street’ who has lost everything in one of the many stock market crashes. It’s significant that he is related by family to the relatively secure Jimmy Hersh. But he is now out of money and out of work. And work is not easy to find – partly because times are hard, and partly because of protectionism amongst trade unions (which in America were notoriously associated with organised crime).

Dos Passos’s achievement in this novel (as in U.S.A.) is to incorporate these political elements without sliding into propaganda or overt bias. He sees good qualities in his rich and successful characters, and weaknesses in his down-and-out failures. He presents a wide perspective on American society and its immigrant composition, but neither its working Joe Does or its rich playboys are neglected, and neither are its marginal characters – such as the foreign barmen, occasional sailors and building workers, and even hobos, dropouts, and tragic victims of poverty level existence.

The modern city

It is interesting to note that Manhattan Transfer was written and published in a period within two decades at the beginning of the twentieth century which saw the production of a number of novels that featured the capital city as the symbol of modern industrial and commercial life. Andrei Biely’s Petersburg had appeared in 1916, set in what was then the capital of pre-revolutionary Russia. In 1922 James Joyce’s Ulysses featured the Irish capital Dublin as it was in 1904. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, published in 1925 is set exclusively in London, and Alfred Doblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) is a portrait of the capital of the Wiemar republic of the 1920s.

All of these novels feature a fragmented literary style, varying points of view, and the use of montage effects which were probably influenced by the cinema, which had become a popular entertainment medium around the same time. In the cases of Joyce, Doblin, and Dos Passos there was also the inclusion of advertising, newspaper reports, and documentary material related to the events of their narratives.

Literary style

The dominant strain in American fiction during the period preceding Dos Passos was naturalism. This was an approach which took its subjects from the lower orders of society and put emphasis on the Darwinian struggle for survival. Influenced by French writers such as Zola and Maupassant, the naturalist school of novelists took a sociological approach to their rendering of social reality, and included topics which had hitherto been largely excluded from serious fiction (with the exception of Dickens) – topics such as crime, poverty, alcoholism, prostitution, disease, racism, violence, and political corruption.

Stephen Crane, Sinclair Lewis, Jack London, and Theodore Dreiser had been the popular exponents of this tendency in the period 1890-1920, and there are many elements of literary naturalism in Manhattan Transfer. Many of the characters are unemployed, there is no shortage of drunkenness, sexual promiscuity is rife, corruption exists in local politics, and there are deaths by fire, suicide, and motor accident.

But unlike the naturalist school, Dos Passos uses a huge variety of literary styles to create the sense of social multiplicity, cosmopolitanism, and urban development that pervades the world of Manhattan Transfer. This means that there is more emphasis on the novel as a work of art, rather than simply as a social manifesto.

Each chapter is prefaced by a paragraph of what can only be described as a prose poem, which signals the theme of the chapter. The sections and chapters that follow are delivered using a combination of conventional third person narrative mode, interior monologues, shifting points of view, fragments of newspaper reports, snatches of song, encyclopaedia entries, unattributed conversation, and sometimes an absence of conventional punctuation:

She stopped a second to look at the Plaza that gleamed white as motherofpearl … Yes this is Elaine Oglethorpe’s apartment … She climbed up onto a Washington Square bus. Sunday afternoon Fifth Avenue filed by rosily dustily jerkily. On the shady side there was an occasional man in a top hat and frock coat. Sunshades, summer dresses, straw hats were bright in the sun that glinted in squares on the upper windows of houses, lay in bright slivers on the hard paint of limousines and taxicabs.

Montage

The most radical and striking feature of Dos Passos’s literary style is his use of montage – cutting very rapidly from one character or scene to another. No sooner has one mini-drama got under way than the reader is whisked along to a different location and a different set of participants. This technique has a disorienting effect which emphasises the simulteneity of actions in various strata of society and the vibrancy of life in a modern cosmopolitan city.

This disorientation settles down as the text gradually reveals subtle connections between characters and events. But it has to be said that there is a price to be paid for the use of montage. Many of the characters are established as examples of individuals grappling with the problems of modern city life – but they simply do not reappear, so we are not given any account of their destinies.

There is only one character who is present from the beginning to the end of the narrative. That is Jimmy Herf – the artistic and visionary young boy who loses his mother, becomes a newspaper reporter, marries unsuccessfully, and ends by giving up his family and job to become a drifter.

U.S.A.

Manhattan Transfer is the forerunner to what is widely regarded as Dos Passos’s masterpiece, the trilogy U.S.A.. This comprises three separate but interlocking works – The 42nd Parallel published in 1930, Nineteen Nineteen which appeared in 1932, and The Big Money which completed the tryptich in 1936. This later work was even broader in scope, and took in American society at every level – from railroad hobos to Wall Street financiers and politicians.

Dos Passos is a neglected but important figure in the development of American modernism, and U.S.A. is a powerfully insightful representation of western capitalism. The novel also includes a rare depiction of those ideologies – socialism, communism, and anarchism – that offered an alternative to the dehumanising effects of naked market competition.

Manhattan Transfer – study resources

Manhattan Transfer – Amazon UK
Manhattan Transfer – Amazon US

Dos Passos – Early Novels – Amazon UK
Dos Passos – Early Novels – Amazon US

The U.S.A. Trilogy – Amazon UK
The U.S.A. Trilogy – Amazon US

John Dos Passos

Manhattan Transfer – chapter summaries

FIRST SECTION

1. Ferryslip – Young farm worker Bud Korpenning arrives in New York City, a virtual hobo, hoping to find employment. Ed Tatcher is an accountant who dotes on his young daughter Ellie. His wife Susie however is a self-pitying invalid.

2. Metropolis – Emile is a French waiter who serves a group of rich, drunk, and vulgar business people late into the night. In the early morning he discusses social injustices with Mario, an Italian anarchist sympathiser. Bud gets a job washing dishes. Susie leaves Ellie on her own all night. Irish milkman Gus McNeil wants to travel out West for a better life, but is run over in a street accident.

3. Dollars – Lawyer George Baldwin pursues Nellie McNeil regarding her husband’s accident and is struck by her good looks. They begin an affair whilst Gus is still in hospital. Emile is courting widowed shopkeeper Mme Rigaud. Jimmy Herf and his mother arrive by boat on the fourth of July. Baldwin wins Gus McNeil’s compensation claim, but tires of Nellie.

4. Tracks – Jimmy Herf and his invalid mother have dinner in their hotel rooms. She complains of her ailments: he lives in a teenage dreamworld of fantasies. Emile continues his unsuccessful courtship of Mme Rigaud. Nellie ends the affair with George Baldwin. Bud is in the Sailor’s Mission. Jimmy’s mother has a stroke. He visits his well-to-do aunt’s house where casual racism is the norm. Ed Thatcher resists the temptation of an allegedly surefire investment.

5. Steamroller – Jimmy’s mother dies, whereupon his uncle suggests that he start work in the family business, but Jimmy is not keen on the idea. Bud reveals to a fellow hobo that he has killed his stepfather, who was beating him. He feels he is being pursued and has nowhere to go – so he commits suicide by jumping off Brooklyn Bridge.

SECOND SECTION

1. Great Lady on a White Horse – Jimmy collects his girlfriend Ruth Prynne for Sunday lunch. He is now a cub reporter, she is an aspiring theatrical. Ellen meets George Baldwin for afternoon tea and flirts with Stan Emery and even her own husband Jojo.

2. Longlegged Jack of the Isthmus – Joe Harland is out of work, but he spends his last money on drinks whilst bragging about his previous success and his ‘bad luck’. Nicky Schatz is caught in a burglary by Stan and Ellie, but he has only stolen stage money. Ellen is in love with Stan but married to Jojo. Meanwhile Joe Harland is pursued by his landlady for unpaid rent. He cadges money from an old colleague. Casie is courted by Maurice McAvoy who is broke. Ellen leaves Jojo early one morning and takes a taxi to a hotel.

3. Nine Day’s Wonder – Paul Sandbourne looks at a girl on Fifth Avenue and gets run over by a passing truck. Jimmy Herf drinks away the afternoon with his rich college friends. They meet Ellen and her husband Jojo. Meanwhile Joe Harland spends his time in low bars. Ellen is a momentary theatrical success. It is 1914 and George Baldwin’s marriage is on the rocks because of his adultery with Ellen and others. Ellen is decorating her new flat when Casie arrives to announce that she is pregnant. Joe Harland is working as a night watchman on a building site. The workforce is threatened with a lockout. Stan brings Ellen to Jimmy’s flat on a secret date, but they are confronted by her husband in a farcical scene. Ellen Thatcher announces to her father that she and Joe Oglethorpe are divorcing.

4. Fire Engine – Impressario Harry Goldweiser is trying to seduce Elaine. Baldwin and Gus McNeil discuss some shady political doings, and Joe O’Keefe encounters Joe Harland again. Elaine puts a drunk Stanwood in her bath at the theatre. She then smuggles him out and takes him back to her flat in a taxi.

5. Went to the Animals’ Fair – George Baldwin takes Ellen out to a night club and tries to persuade her to take him on as her ‘protector’. Jimmy Herf and friends at a nearby table talk about a recent murder and the war. Jimmy and Ellen then discuss politics and the war with the anarchist barman Congo Jack. A drunken Baldwin threatens her with a gun. Jimmy walks home with Tony Hunter, who reveals that he is a homosexual who wants to kill himself.

6. Five Statutory Questions – Joe Harland and Joe O’Keef discuss the war and politics over drinks. Ellen is getting divorced and is pursued by Harry Goldweiser. She meets Stan, who reveals that he has married a young girl. Jimmy Herf meets his family relation Joe Harland, who wants to go to fight in the war.

7. Rollercoaster – Stan attends a political event. He is completely drunk, and when he gets home the apartment is on fire. He is overcome by smoke and killed in the fire.

8. One More River to Jordan – George Baldwin and Phil Sandbourne compare political notes. Ellen is still waiting for her divorce, and is besieged by oppressive well-wishers. She is pregnant with Stan’s baby. When Jimmy Herf walks her home she claims she is going to give up the stage and raise the child, but in fact she goes for an abortion.

THIRD SECTION

1. Rejoicing City That Dwelt Carelessly – James Merrivale arrives back in New York City after the war. Jimmy Herf is married to Ellen who he has met serving in the Red Cross overseas. They arrive back with a baby into the prohibition era. Joe O’Keefe helps to organise workers for a union wage claim, then visits the doctor for treatment for syphilis. George Baldwin is being groomed for a political position..

2. Nickleodeon – Ruth Prynne has possible throat cancer. She is down on her luck and meets an old suitor. Dutch Robertson is out of work and money, and so is his girlfriend Francie. Jimmy and Ellie are also out of work, but drown their sorrows in cocktails with Congo Jack, who is now a bootlegger.

3. Revolving Doors – Jake Silverman and his girl Rosie are posing as rich business people in a fraudulent deal. The Merrivales have breakfast before leaving for the bank. Nevada Jones is dancing with Tony Hunter, who has been to a psychiatrist. She is visited by Baldwin and McNeil. Anna Cohen gets fired from the sandwich bar. Gus McNeil curries political favours ahead of local elections. Jimmy visits Congo Jack doing bootleg business, but there is an attempted hijacking of the consignment of Champagne. James Merrivale discovers that his daughter Masie is about to marry John Cunningham, who is already married. Businessmen are approached for donations towards the local elections. Jimmy is living in cramped conditions with Ellie and their baby Martin. George Baldwin calls on Nevada Jones but catches her with Tony Hunter and ditches her. Ellen is at a bohemian party that is raided by detectives, but a phone call to the district attorney calls off the raid. Jimmy is living separately from Ellen. Jake Silverman is arrested for fraud.

4. Skyscraper – Jimmy gives up his job as a reporter and wanders around in a delirium of jumbled thoughts. Anna Cohen is involved in a strike at the sewing factory, and her mother reproaches her. Jimmy gets drunk with his out of work friends. Dutch Robertson holds up a cigar store. Mr Densch’s business is hit by the slump. A reporter takes the cigar store holdup story, and a few days later Jimmy reads an account of Dutch’s arrest.

5. The Burthen of Nineveh – Baldwin’s divorce is due to come through. He proposes to Ellen, but she delays making a decision. Buck squeezes money out of Alice, who cashes a cheque in her husband’s name. Jimmy meets Congo Jack who is now Armand Duval and rich (but might go to jail) and has married Nevada Jones. Mr Densch escapes from the USA, ten million dollars in debt. Jack Cunningham gets an Illegal divorce and marries Masie Merrivale. Dutch Robertson and Francie get twenty years for their crimes. Ellen collects a new dress from Mme Soubrine, where Anna is scabbing as a seamstress. There is a fire in the workshop and a girl is badly burned. Jimmy leaves friends at a party and sets off with no money and no objective.

Manhattan Transfer – principal characters

Bud Korpenning	a 23 year old farmhand
Ed Thatcher	an ambitious accountant
Susie Thatcher	his wife, an invalid
Ellie Thatcher	their daughter
Emile Loustec	radical hotel worker
Marco	an Italian anarchist
Congo Jack	bartender, later a bootlegger
Gus McNeil	an Irish milkman
Nellie McNeil	his pretty wife
George Baldwin	an attorney, later a politician
Phil Sandbourne	his friend, an anarchist
Mme Ernestine Rigaud	a widowed shopkeeper
Jimmy Herf	a romantic dreamer, later a journalist
Mrs Lily Herf	his mother, an invalid who dies
Mrs Emily Merrivale	Lily’s sister, Jimmy’s aunt
Jeff Merrivale	Jimmy’s uncle, who becomes his guardian
Ruth Prynne	unemployed dancer, Jimmy’s girlfriend
#Jojo Oglethorpe	a gay theatrical mountebank
Elaine Thatcher Oglethorpe	his wife
Casandra Wilkins	would-be theatrical
Stanwood Emery	rich friend of George Baldwin
Joe Harland	former bond trader, down on his luck
Harry Goldweiser	lecherous theatrical impressario
Tony Hunter	a young gay actor friend of Ruth
Nevada Jones	Tony’s admirer, later married to Congo Jack
Dutch Robertson	an out-of-work who turns to crime

Modern English Writing

July 9, 2009 by Roy Johnson

General survey of literature in English 1960-2003

Modern English Writing is an introduction to contemporary literature, and a survey of ‘British and Irish’ writing from 1963 to the early 2000s. John McRae and Ronald Carter introduce the social and political background to the period – which will be useful for those people who haven’t lived through it. They give a brief account of the writer’s major works, discuss the themes that emerge, and highlight links and differences with their contemporaries. These expositions are punctuated by mini-essays outlining special themes which emerged during the period, and commenting on developments in language, culture.

In the theatre they single out as major figures Stoppard, Orton, Beckett, and Pinter. Then coming more up to date, they make a strongly argued case for the importance of Sarah Kane, who committed suicide in 2000. However, it’s the novel which gets the lion’s share of their attention. The names go racing past with few surprises: Durrell, Golding, Murdoch, Amis (pere et fils). What’s interesting here is their mention of names who seemed important at the time but who are now largely unread or on their way to becoming forgotten: Anthony Powell, D.M.Thomas, Muriel Spark, Angus Wilson.

There is a group whose value is in the balance, but whose stock (I predict) seems likely to sink. Malcolm Bradbury, David Lodge, Doris Lessing, Margaret Drabble, and her sister A.S.Byatt

Of course it is difficult to see who if anyone from the recent crop will last. Formerly ‘big’ names from the 1960-1980s are already beginning to disappear, and if you look back further than that into the review pages of literary newspapers and magazines at who was being touted as important or the next big thing, your reaction is likely to be “Who he?”

The main novelty to emerge from the last half century or so has been the emergence of writers from other cultures (often former colonies) who have chosen to write in English. The most recent are all represented here: Timothy Mo, Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, Anita Desai, and Vikram Seth, whose novel in sonnet form, The Golden Gate, is undoubtedly a masterpiece.

As we move closer to the present, it’s more difficult to say who is worth listing and who not. The younger but now middle-aged generation of writers such as Ian McEwan are given as much space and attention as Nobel prizewinner V.S.Naipaul. But the authors pack in as many names from the world of contemporary fiction as possible, giving fair space to Irish and Scottish writers, as well as English. They also include mention of sub-genres such as detective fiction and children’s literature.

They finish off with a survey of poetry. Few surprises here: Larkin, Hughes, Heaney, and Harrison. But they manage to come smack up to date with a very appreciative piece on Simon Armitage.

Anyone could quibble about who is included or excluded, or argue about the amount of space devoted to a particular writer; but anybody looking for guidance or suggestions on literature in UK English in the last fifty years will find this useful.

There are also some useful appendices – lists of literary prizewinners, a late 20th century literary timeline, and a bibliography of further reading. It’s an excellent source if you need suggestions for further reading, or you are studying modern British literature.

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John McRae and Ronald Carter, The Routledge Guide to Modern English Writing, London: Routledge, 2nd edn, 2004, pp.216, ISBN: 0415286379

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Nadine Gordimer – a guide to her writing

November 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Nadine Gordimer (1923—2014) was born into a privileged white middle-class family in the Transvaal, South Africa. She began reading at an early age, and published her first story in a magazine when she was only fifteen. Her wide reading informed her about the world on the other side of apartheid – the official South African policy of racial segregation – and that discovery in time developed into strong political opposition to apartheid. She attended the University of Witwatersrand for one year. Her first book was a collection of short stories, The Soft Voice of the Serpent (1952). In addition to writing, she lectured and taught at various schools in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. She was awarded the Nobel prize for Literature in 1991.

Nadine Gordimer was a writer who started by picking up the modernist baton from authors such as Virginia Woolf, and she is one of the few writers who has taken the techniques of modernism a few steps further. She does this particularly in her short stories, where like Woolf she uses the genre as an experimental kitchen for her longer prose works such as her novellas and full length novels. In fact some of her shorter fiction is more interesting in terms of formal experimentation than her novels, many of which are often rather long and formless – although this is a purely personal opinion.

Her writing is always interesting politically – and she never shirked the difficult issues raised by the legacy of white European domination in South Africa. She’s also an excellent observer of what might be called the politics of gender or sexuality. She writes about the physical relationships between women and men in a way which is honest, frank, revealing, and unsparingly unsentimental.

Some passages in her work render the sexual tensions between men and women more accurately than any writer since D.H.Lawrence – and they have the novelty of often being presented from a woman’s point of view, though she is perfectly capable of writing from a male perspective too. She’s also very good at dealing with issues of sex at the level of furtive assignations and sweaty armpits – something often ignored by serious writers.

Her most experimental work is in some of the short stories; the longer stories and novellas such as July’s Children are nearly as successful, but her novels have not seemed so tightly controlled – with one magnificent exception. The Conservationist which lays bare the whole issue of the white European in black Africa.

The Conservationist (1974) concerns a white industrialist who farms his land (with native help) at the weekend and genuinely wants to make his presence a positive contribution. But most of all he wants to preserve his power and his privileged way of life – despite being surrounded by poverty and suffering. He just doesn’t understand that the indigenous population are the natural owners of the land, and the result is disastrous – for him.

It’s a marvellous novel which summarises the situation in South Africa in the 1980s – but in a way which casts a shadow right up to the present day. The other issue which this magnificent book conveys is the sense of place which is so important to life in South Africa. The native Africans are dispossessed – yet they are at one with the land. Immigrant landowners might try their best to ‘own’ and ‘cultivate’ the land, but they are never ‘at home’ on it.
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Jump Her development as a writer of short stories is wonderful. She starts off in modern post-Checkhovian mode presenting situations which have little drama but which invite the reader to contemplate states of being or moods which illustrate the ideologies of South Africa. Technically, Nadine Gordimer experiments heavily with point of view, narrative perspective, unexplained incidents, switches between internal monologue and third person narrative (rather like Virginia Woolf) and a heavy use of ‘as if’ prose where narrator-author boundaries become very blurred.
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Selected Stories As her work matured, her style and methods underwent a similar development to those of Virginia Woolf. Some of her stories became more lyrical, more compacted and symbolic, abandoning any semblance of conventional story or plot in favour of a poetic meditation on a theme. There are some stories which make enormous demands upon the reader. Sometimes on first reading it’s even hard to know what is going on. But gradually a densely concentrated image or an idea will emerge – the equivalent of a Joycean ‘epiphany’ – and everything falls into place. Her own collection of Selected Stories are UK National Curriculum recommended reading.
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The following extract from The Conservationist gives some idea of her robust prose style, composed of dense, powerful imagery, rich vocabularly, gnarled syntax, and sinuous prose rhythms.

The weather came from the Mozambique Channel.

Space is conceived as trackless but there are beats about the world frequented by cyclones given female names. One of these beats crosses the Indian Ocean by way of the islands of the Seychelles, Madagascar, and the Mascarenes. The great island of Madagascar forms one side of the Channel and shields a long stretch of the east coast of Africa, which forms the other, from the open Indian Ocean. A cyclone paused somewhere miles out to sea, miles up in the atmosphere, its vast hesitation raising a draught of tidal waves, wavering first towards one side of the island then over the mountains to the other, darkening the thousand up-turned mirrors of the rice paddies and finally taking off again with a sweep that shed, monstrous cosmic peacock, gross pailletes of hail, a dross of battering rain, and all the smashed flying detritus of uprooted trees, tin roofs, and dead beasts caught up in it.

Never Let Me Go

December 17, 2014 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and plot summary,

Never Let Me Go (2005) is the sixth novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, the Anglo-Japanese writer, who was shortlisted for the Booker Prize which he had won previously in 1989 for The Remains of the Day. The novel was adapted for the cinema in 2010 by Mark Romanek for a film with the same title starring Keira Knightly.

Kazuo Ishiguro

Never Let Me Go – critical comment

Biography

Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki in Japan in 1954. His father was an oceanographer who moved to live in Britain in 1960. Kazuo attended grammar school in Surrey, then studied English and Philosophy at the University of Kent in Canterbury. After a gap year touring America and Canada, he entered the creative writing programme at the University of East Anglia, where his tutors included Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter. He graduated with an MA in 1980 and became a British citizen in 1982. He has written novels, screenplays, stories, and the lyrics to songs for the Anglo-American jazz singer Stacey Kent. He has won several literary awards, including the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize for his first novel A Pale View of Hills (1982), the Whitbread Prize for An Artist of the Floating World (1986), and the Booker Prize for The Remains of the Day (1989). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2017.

Dystopia

A dystopia is the opposite of a utopian view of the world. Utopian narratives imagine successful, harmonious, and happy worlds, whereas a dystopian world emphasises all its worst elements and even exaggerates them as a form of warning about what we might become if these elements are not held in check.

Because these dysfunctional worlds do not exist but are creations of the imagination, there is a great deal of overlap with the imaginary worlds of science-fiction.

Utopias in literature include Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), Sir Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627), and H.G.Wells’ A Modern Utopia (1905). Examples of dystopias include Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1927), George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1947 – which was based on Zamyatin’s novel), and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932).

Some novels may even combine elements of both Utopia and Dystopia to create satires of society – such as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872).

Narrative voice

One of the main problems in a novel of this length is the quality of the narrative voice. Ishiguro takes the naturalistic rendering of his protagonist’s first person account to almost unbearable lengths of tedium. Her narrative is packed with repetition, cliché, dated teenage slang, and manufactured uncertainties.

She talks in what one reviewer called “a sort of social worker’s drone, all professional cant and washed-out idiom (‘When it came down to it … Anyway, I’m not making any big claims for myself.’)

“While we’re on the subject … Looking back now … And then there was the time that … But that’s not really what I want to talk about just now … When it came down to it … I don’t know how it was where you were … Anyway … Now to be fair … As it happened … What with one thing and another … “

There are too many events and incidents that have little structural significance, and that are inflated beyond any sense of their intrinsic interest. In the later part of the book for instance there is a protracted excursion to Cromer in Norfolk which promises to reveal something significant about the ‘possibles’ – people from whom the characters might have been cloned – but this comes to nothing when they decide they have made a mistake.

Much is made of a cassette tape containing Kathy’s favourite song which gives the novel its title – Never Let Me Go – then its unexplained disappearance, followed by a search for its replacement. But none of this, including the title, is linked in any significant way to the central issues of the novel.

Similarly, there is an outing to visit an abandoned boat on the marshes, the type of incident which in most stories would be at least metaphoric, if not symbolic of something important within the meaning of the novel as a whole. But the tediously extended episode adds nothing to what we already know.

Conversely, there is an attempt to give significance to what are no more than teenage arguments, changes in allegiance, and feelings of isolation. But these fail to be convincing, because they remain no more than adolescent trivia which contribute nothing to any narrative interest. But this issue does raise another point.

It’s possible that Never Let Me Go was produced quite deliberately as a genre novel for the teenage market, but Ishiguro has done himself no favours by presenting his story in such a banal and repetitive narrative voice, and packing the story with largely inconsequential behaviour – without exploring any of the ramifications of the scientific conceit on which the novel is based.

Science-fiction?

We now know that advances in microbiology and DNA manipulation now permit animal matter to be cloned. In this sense the novel is not very ‘futuristic’. But the idea of cloning human beings specifically (and at risk of their own death) to provide body parts to keep other people alive – is a sinister form of modern human sacrifice.

The problem is that Ishiguro simply does not examine the social or scientific rationale for this practice. Nor does he explain how individual humans can be clone-created to have normally functioning body parts (apart from reproductive organs) yet be so singularly lacking in will, imagination, and resistance.

The main problem is that whilst it is possible to suspend disbelief and accept the authoritarianism behind cloning and genetic engineering. there is no plausible reason offered why the characters should be so totally passive and accepting of their planned destinies.

These are characters who watch television, drive cars, have lots of sex, and read Daniel Deronda, yet who show no enterprise when they are free to walk away at any time from their planned organ donations. The organisation that has created them has even gone out of business by the end of the novel, but at no point do any of them think to regard themselves as autonomous beings.

Never Let Me Go – study resources

Never Let Me Go – Faber paperback – Amazon UK

Never Let Me Go – Faber paperback – Amazon US

The Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro – paperback – Amazon UK

Kazuo Ishiguro: A Routledge Guide – paperback – Amazon UK

Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro – paperback – Amazon UK

GCSE Revision Notes – page by page analysis – Amazon UK

Never Let Me Go – plot summary

Chapter 1. Kathy H introduces herself as a ‘carer’, and recounts her early years at what seems to be an authoritarian boarding school called Hailsham and her concern for an outsider youth Tommy.

Chapter 2. She describes daily life at the school and further instances of teasing and bullying on Tommy, who retreats into a childlike state.

Chapter 3. Tommy tells Kathy about a conversation with sporty and butch ‘guardian’ Miss Lucy who sympathises with his lack of creative ability. Kathy recounts how the controller of the school, called Madame, is frightened of contact with the students, even though she appropriates their artworks for her private ‘gallery’.

Chapter 4. The students are given tokens in exchange for their work which they can exchange at occasional ‘Sales’. They all appear to have problems with missing memories. Kathy’s friend Ruth makes her into a ‘secret guard’ of Miss Geraldine, a favourite guardian.

Chapter 5. Surrounded by menacing woods at the school, the secret guards plot to kidnap Miss Geraldine. There is rivalry between Kathy and Ruth about favouritism.

Chapter 6. Rivalries and ‘secret knowledge’ continue to cause tensions. Norfolk is regarded as a ‘lost corner’ of Britain. Smoking is forbidden at the school because the students must preserve their ‘special’ natures. Kathy plays her tape of Never Let Me Go. She knows that she and all the other students are infertile. The tape goes missing, but Ruth presents her with an alternative.

Chapter 7. Miss Lucy reveals to them that they have been bred as DNA clones and organ donors. It appears that their body parts are detachable.

Chapter 8. Kathy reports on sexual activity amongst the students, including her friends Tommy and Ruth, and her own preparations to have sex with Harry.

Chapter 9. Miss Lucy retracts what she has previously told Tommy about creativity not being important – and then suddenly disappears when she is expelled from the school.

Part Two

Chapter 10. After leaving Hailsham, Kathy transfers to the Cottages with Tommy, Ruth and others. They imitate each other’s gestures, then Kathy and Ruth quarrel.

Chapter 11. Kathy looks back on and revises her memories of conversations with Ruth. She then starts having casual sex; Ruth gets rid of her collection of memorabilia; and Tommy catches Kathy looking at porn magazines.

Chapter 12. Veterans at the Cottages, Chrissie and Rodney report back from a trip to Cromer where they have seen a possible original for Ruth, who then begins to fantasise about her ‘dream future’ working in a modern office.

Chapter 13. A month later five of them go on an excursion to Cromer where the two veterans Chrissie and Rodney ask the rest about the rules for requesting a ‘deferral’ of two or three years before they become organ donors. Nobody knows the rules.

Chapter 14. They locate Ruth’s ‘possible’ in an office on the High Street, then see her again later. When they follow her to an art gallery they all realise she is not a possible, then argue about going to visit Martin, another ex-veteran.

Chapter 15. Tommy and Kathy go in search of her lost tape and find a copy. He tells her his theory that the Madame’s gallery is a repository of the students’ souls which will enable the guardians to make choices for deferrals. He also thinks Kathy might have been looking at the porn magazines in search of her ‘possible’ – which she thinks could explain her uncontrollable sexual urges.

Chapter 16. Tommy shows Kathy his miniature drawings of imaginary animals, then discusses his gallery theory with Ruth and Kathy. Ruth claims that they find his drawings laughable, which creates unpleasant tensions in relations between the three friends.

Chapter 17. Kathy tries to resolve these tensions by talking to Ruth. During the conversation Ruth suggests that Tommy disapproves of Kathy’s sexual promiscuity. Shortly afterwards Kathy decides to leave the Cottages and start her training.

Part Three

Chapter 18. Some time later Kathy is working independently as a carer. She bumps into Laura, an old friend from the Cottages. They discuss Ruth, and Laura suggests that Kathy become Ruth’s carer. It transpires that Hailsham has closed, which makes Kathy feel cut off from her former fellow students. She does become Ruth’s carer, but there are still tensions between them. Ruth persuades Kathy to take her to see a boat – which is an opportunity or an excuse to see Tommy.

Chapter 19. Ruth and Kathy visit Tommy at the Kingsfield centre and take him to see the boat. They discuss their donors, some of whom have ‘completed’ (died) during the operation. They see an advertising poster which recalls the trip to Norfolk, then Ruth reveals that she has had sex with others besides Tommy. She wants Kathy and Tommy to be a couple and apply for a deferral, and also suggests that Kathy become Tommy’s carer. She dies shortly afterwards during her second donation.

Chapter 20. Kathy becomes Tommy’s carer and starts having sex with him. He starts drawing his animal pictures again, but not so successfully. Kathy has located the Madame, whom they plan to visit to request a deferral.

Chapter 21. They visit the Madame where Tommy explains his theory of the gallery. The Madame understands but does not admit to its validity. However, she produces Miss Emily, the head guardian, in a wheelchair.

Chapter 22. Miss Emily reveals to them that the idea of deferrals is merely a false rumour she has been unable to extinguish. She claims that the art works were taken to prove to doubters that the students did have souls, and were being well educated. She explains the post-war history of the ‘movement’ which has now been brought to a halt because of a scandal which has resulted in a lack of sponsors. The Madame explains her sympathies for their plight as donors. On their way back, Tommy gets out of the car and goes into a rage in a field.

Chapter 23. Tommy is preparing for his fourth donation when he suggests to Kathy that she should no longer be his carer – and he dies shortly afterwards, leaving her to face an uncertain future.

Kazuo Ishiguro – other novels

A Pale View of Hills – Amazon UK

When We Were Orphans – Amazon UK

An Artist of the Floating World – Amazon UK

The Unconsoled – Amazon UK

The Buried Giant – Amazon UK

Nightwood

November 20, 2012 by Roy Johnson

an experimental poetic-imagist novel

Nightwood was first published in 1936 when Djuna Barnes was at the height of her short-lived fame as a doyenne of the literary modernists. She was published by Faber and Faber, and the book was personally endorsed by its editor in chief at that time, her fellow American T.S.Eliot The novel has been kept alive and in print ever since on the strength of his enthusiastic preface, whilst Barnes herself sunk rapidly after its publication into an unproductive alcoholism for more or less the rest of her life, living on an allowance supplied by her rich patroness, Peggy Guggenheim.

It’s easy to see why Eliot was a supporter. Barnes uses the same techniques of literary collage, fragmentation, and striking if unrelated images as he had made famous in The Waste Land. And she’s also much given to the sort of semi-mystical abstract generalisation that characterise The Four Quartets.

The narrative such as it is, comprises a series of interlocking character sketches. A portrait of the garrulous transvestite Doctor O’Connor is followed by ‘Baron’ Felix Volkbein and his failed marriage to Robin Vote, who then forms a lesbian relationship with Nora Flood (a thinly disguised portrait of Barnes herself). When Robin meets the rich and much married Jenny Petherbridge they run away together, taking with them Sylvia, a young English girl, who is herself in love with Robin. Nora spends long periods in acute anguish, pining after the elusive Robin. She appeals to the doctor for sympathy, to which he responds with lengthy inconsequential monologues which stretch on for several pages at a time:

The almost fossilized state of our recollection is attested to by our murderers and those who read every detail of crime with a passionate and hot interest … It is only by such extreme measures that the average man can remember something long ago, truly, not that he remembers, but that crime itself is the door to an accumulation, a way to lay hands on the shoulder of a past that is still vibrating.

Barnes’s prose style is characterised by long convoluted sentences in which the subject switches from one topic to another without any apparent reason. She also uses extravagant similes and metaphors that are over-elaborated in a way which takes attention away from any perceptible story:

As the altar of a church would present but a barren stylisation but for the uncalculated offerings of the confused and humble; as the courage of a woman is made suddenly made martial and sorrowful by the rose thrust among the more decorous blooms by the hand of a lover suffering the violence of the overlapping of the permission to bestow a last embrace, and its withdrawal making a vanishing and infinitesimal bull’s eye of that which had a moment before been a bouyant and showy bosom, by dragging time out of his bowels (for a lover knows two times, that which he is given, and that which he must make – so Felix was astonished to find that the most touching flowers laid on the altar he had raised to his imagination were placed there by the people of the underworld, and that the reddest was to be the rose of the doctor.

The nearest equivalents to this sort of literary mannerism that come to mind are William Faulkner and Gertrude Stein (both her contemporaries). The novel was considered scandalous at the time of its appearance, largely because of the lesbian theme. But behind the anguish suffered by Nora about her relationship with the promiscuous Robin, there is nothing remotely explicitly sexual between them. In fact none of the characters have any meaningful connection with each other at all. They seem to exist merely as verhicles for Barnes’s gothic imagination and her penchant for poetic image-making.

It is not a book which suggests that subsequent readings will yield up further coherence or meaning, but maybe like The Well of Loneliness which was published only a few years earlier (1928) it is a book of its time which helped to throw off the shackles of Edwardianism after the horrors of the first world war, and opened up the era of modern personal liberty which we now all take for granted.

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Djuna Barnes, Nightwood, London: Faber, 2007, pp.192, ISBN: 057123528X

Novelists and the Theatre

May 10, 2016 by Roy Johnson

a tutorial essay with study resources

Novelists and the theatre have often formed an ambiguous relationship. Some of the earliest novelists such as Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett produced both novels and dramas (as well as non-fiction works) though they are currently regarded primarily as novelists and their writing for the theatre is more or less forgotten.

The same is true for Walter Scott, and even Jane Austen has a play (Sir Charles Grandison) amongst her lesser, that is almost completely unknown works. Charles Dickens was also a great lover of amateur theatricals, participating in them as an actor and a stage manager. He wrote a play The Frozen Deep (1856) in conjunction with his friend Wilkie Collins, based on Sir John Franklin’s search for the Northwest Passage. But despite rave reviews this work is now a museum piece, whilst his novels are as popular as ever.

It is difficult to pinpoint a cause for this phenomenon of failed theatrical works, except to say that as the novel rose as a medium of both popular and highbrow cultural values, the theatre was in a period of relative decline. From the eighteenth into the nineteenth centuries more and more people were literate. Newspapers and magazines (in which many novels first appeared) grew in popularity, whereas the number of theatres remained relatively static. Circulating libraries grew in popularity, as did the sales of novels in both serial and volume form.

In the twentieth century works of a theatrical nature came to be transmitted first via cinema, then radio, and finally by television, which is now established as the most popular medium for the expression of imaginative drama. The crossover from the dominance of one medium over another is nowhere more neatly illustrated than in the case of James Joyce – one of the most experimental of modern novelists – who was the first person to open a cinema in Dublin, Ireland in 1909.

Here are a few examples of novelists and their attempts to diversify in terms of their medium. Perhaps their lack of theatrical success can also be attributed to the enormous shift in artistic practice that the switch from page to stage inherently demands.

Henry James is a very famous case of the ambivalent results of a novelist’s dalliance with the theatre. His novels are packed with dramatic incident, sparkling dialogue, and well-orchestrated plots – so he had every reason to believe that he would succeed in writing staged dramas. From 1890 onwards he wrote half a dozen plays, but only one of them – a dramatization of his novel The American (1876) – was produced with any degree of success.

Then in 1895 he put all his energy into the long drama Guy Domville which he wrote especially for the opening of the St James’s Theatre in the West End of London. This proved to be a disaster, and James the playwright was booed off stage on the first night. He was seriously depressed by this response, and was forced to return to the novel genre as the principal outlet for his creative imagination.

However, the story does have a positive ending, because he recycled the content of these dramas into the plots of some of his later novels such as The Other House (1896) and The Outcry (1911). Interestingly enough, James converted The Other House back into play form in 1909, but once again it failed to reach production.

Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle – Amazon UK

Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle – Amazon US

Thomas Hardy gave up writing novels because of the public outcries of indecency over Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1894). Afterwards he turned his attention to the ‘theatre’ and spent six years writing his epic verse drama The Dynasts. This huge panorama of the Napoleonic War was published in three parts, nineteen acts, and one hundred and thirty scenes in 1904, 1906, and 1908. It is written in verse, and is more or less impossible to present on stage because of its complex battle scenes and its sheer length.

It is worth noting that many other nineteenth century poets and writers had written verse dramas which are now confined to the of literary history – from Shelley’s The Cenci (1819), to Browning’s series more than half a dozen verse dramas published under the collective title of Bells and Pomegranates which were published but hardly ever produced on stage

Hardy’s The Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall is a one act play published in 1923 and first performed by the Hardy Players, an amateur theatrical group for whom Hardy wrote the drama. The full title reflects his desire to have the play performed: The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall at Tintagel in Lyonnesse. A New Version of an Old Story Arranged as a Play for Mummers, in One Act Requiring No Theatre or Scenery.

Complete Works of Thomas Hardy – Kindle – Amazon UK

Complete Works of Thomas Hardy – Kindle – Amazon US

Joseph Conrad had established his reputation as the author of technically challenging and morally complex novels when he first felt drawn to the world of theatre. He might have known that the result would be problematic, because he immediately ran into the issue of censorship. At that time all works written for the stage had to be submitted to the Lord Chamberlain’s office for approval by the Censor of Plays. This is a power which was not repealed until the Theatres Act of 1968.

In 1905 he wrote One Day More a one-act play which was an adaptation of his story To-Morrow (1902). The play was actually a modest success, but Conrad felt the experiment was a disappointment. However, he was outraged by the arbitrary legal requirement and he railed against the public censorship of dramatic productions by the Lord Chamberlain in his very scathing essay The Censor of Plays – An Appreciation (1907), speaking of

th[is] monstrous and outlandish figure, the magot chinois whom I believed to be but a memorial of our forefathers’ mental aberration, that grotesque potiche

However, despite this unsatisfactory experience, he embarked on further theatrical ventures, none of which were particularly successful. In 1920 he was persuaded to adapt his story Gaspar Ruiz for the cinema and produced a film script with the title Gaspar the Strong Man, but the cinematic version was never produced.

He adapted his novel The Secret Agent (1904) for the theatre – a play staged with reasonable success at the Ambassadors Theatre in 1922, but which he felt to be a failure:

The disagreeable part of this business is to see wasted the hard work of people who depend upon it for their livelihood [the actors], and for whom success would mean assured employment and ease of mind. One feels guilty somehow.

Then in 1922 he wrote a play Laughing Anne which was criticised by his friend John Galsworthy as being technically naive and ‘threatening to present an unbearable spectacle’. This was because the original story, Because of the Dollars (1914) features a man with no hands who bludgeons a woman to death. It proved to be his last attempt at writing for the theatre.

A comparison of the play script and the story reveals the weaknesses of the theatrical version. The play reaches its dramatic climax with a fight sequence in which Laughing Anne is killed by the man without hands (MWH). All the action takes place in semi-darkness.

DAVIDSON (To SERANG on board) : Send four men ashore. There is a dead body there which we are going to take out to sea, (He moves, carrying the lantern low, followed by four Malays in blue dungaree suits, dark faces. Stands the lantern on the ground by the body and looking down at it apostrophizes the corpse.) Poor Anne! You are on my conscience, but your boy shall have his chance.
(As the kalashes stoop to lift up the body CURTAIN falls.)

Quite apart from all the superfluous scene description, this version omits some of the key events and the ironic aftermath to the story. In the prose narrative Because of the Dollars Davidson buries Anne at sea and gives the child to his wife to look after. However, his wife suspects that the child is actually his by Anne, and she turns against both of them. Eventually she leaves him and goes back to her parents. The boy is sent to a church school in Malacca, where he eventually does well and plans to become a missionary. Davidson is left alone with nobody.

In 1924, as a fellow novelist and author of plays, Galsworthy accurately summed up Conrad’s relationship to the theatre:

his nature recoiled too definitely from the limitations which the stage imposes on word painting and the subtler efforts of a psychologist. The novel suited his nature better than the play, and he instinctively kept to it.

Complete Works of Joseph Conrad – Kindle – Amazon UK

Complete Works of Joseph Conrad – Kindle – Amazon US

D.H. Lawrence is well known as a novelist, a writer of short stories, and even as a poet; but the amazing thing is that he wrote eight plays, only a couple of which were staged during his own lifetime. The full list is as follows: The Daughter-in-Law (1912); The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd (1914); Touch and Go (1920); David (1926); The Fight for Barbara (1933); A Collier’s Friday Night (1934); The Married Man (1940); The Merry-Go-Round (1941).

Many of these works anticipate the ‘kitchen sink’ phase of British drama which emerged later in the 1950s and 1960s. They dealt in a fully realistic manner with powerful conflicts of class, gender, and individual liberty set in working class milieux. A number of these works have been successfully staged and turned into television dramas in the twentieth century – but they have had little impact on his critical reputation, which remains firmly based on his work as a novelist and writer of short stories.

Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence – Kindle – Amazon UK

Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence – Kindle – Amazon US

James Joyce had only published a short selection of poems (Chamber Music 1907) a collection of short stories (Dubliners 1914) and his first novel (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 1916) when he produced his only play Exiles in 1918. He had been heavily influenced by the work of the Norwegian dramatist Ibsen whose powerful dramas had challenged many of the suppositions that lay behind public and private morality in the late nineteenth century.

Exiles was rejected by W.B. Yeats for production at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, and it had to wait until 1970 for a major London performance when it was directed by Harold Pinter at the Mermaid Theatre.

Complete Works of James Joyce – Kindle – Amazon UK

Complete Works of James Joyce – Kindle – Amazon US

Virginia Woolf had no serious intention to be considered a playwright, but she did take part in amateur theatrical productions mounted by members of the Bloomsbury Group for their own amusement, and she did eventually write the play Freshwater. This is a satire of the bohemian world of her aunt, the Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. But Woolf took the play seriously enough to produce two versions – a one act version in 1923, and then a longer three act version in 1935.

Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle – Amazon UK

Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle – Amazon US

Peggy Guggenheim

October 15, 2009 by Roy Johnson

poor little rich girl

Peggy Guggenheim came from a family of rich Jewish business people who had made fortunes as immigrants in the nineteenth century from trade, mining, and eventually banking. Her father was a womaniser who died aboard the Titanic in 1913 – putting on his dinner clothes to go down in style. When she was nineteen she inherited five million dollars, though as Mary Dearborn points out in this fairly even-handed biography, everybody assumed that she had even more, and couldn’t understand that by Guggenheim standards she came from a ‘poor’ side of the family.

The first thing she spent the money on was an operation to reduce the size of her nose. The procedure went badly wrong and had to be aborted, leaving her worse off than before. In 1921 she married Franco-American Laurence Vail, who introduced her to Bohemian life in the Latin Quarter and in Montmartre. She also met two of his ex-lovers who were to become lifelong friends – Mary Reynolds and Djuna Barnes. Her marriage (the first of many) was a mixture of restless Bohemianism and physical abuse from her husband.

They settled in a house near Toulouse, she had two children, and she sent $10,000 to support the 1926 General Strike in the UK. With Vail she mixed in a fast and arty set: the pages are littered with the names of the now famous – Jean Cocteau, Man Ray, Isodora Duncan, Marcel Duchamp, and Ernest Hemingway – all of whom were happy to share her largesse. She managed to extricate herself from the abusive marriage with the help of her friend and neighbour, Emma Goldmann, the feminist and anarchist. No sooner was this accomplished than she paired off with the Englishman John Holmes who Mary Dearborn describes as “one of the most singularly unproductive men of letters that England may have every known”

There are interesting revelations of the sheer dilettantism which underpins the arty bohemianism of these people. At one point Peggy Guggenheim was trailing across the Atlantic trying to sell decorative lampshades made by her friend Mina Loy.

It’s a life of living in rented houses – in France, England, Switzerland – wherever is fashionable – making visits to America, endless parties, oceans of Champagne, violent rows, fights in restaurants, sexual infidelities – and nobody in sight engaging anything remotely like paid employment.

When John Holmes died unexpectedly (largely of alcohol poisoning) she replaced him with Douglas Garman, another would-be writer, and under his left-wing influence she even joined the Communist Party. A further succession of weekend (and week long) house parties ensued. And rather like the Bloomsbury Group they combined their promiscuity with a curious form of ‘keeping up appearances’ in a bid to preserve social respectability. In common with aristocratic practices, the children produced in these alliances were billeted in outhouses, sent off to boarding schools, raised by paid help, and put unaccompanied on trains to travel half way across Europe at holiday times.

When she got rid of her third abusive husband she began, at forty, what was to become her life vocation. Advised by Marcel Duchamp, she opened a gallery on London devoted to modern art – and surrealism in particular. She began serious collecting, and quickly ammassed a large collection of works by its foremost practicioners, most of whom she knew personally.

In fact many of them either had been or would become her lovers, because free of marriage, she began a mid-life career of sexual emancipation which few would be able to match. Her list of conquests is almost endless: Giorgio Joyce (son of James), Yves Tanguay, Roland Penrose, E.L.T.Mesens, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, and even Samuel Beckett.

By 1940, living in France, she was under serious threat from the Nazis, even though they didn’t seem to realise that she was Jewish. So like many other people she moved to the south then emigrated to America – cleverly arranging for her collection of art works to be sent as ‘household effects’ to avoid tax. Having assembled the collection as a work of love, she wished to put it on show, and despite all the odds she did so in 1942 in New York.

Her concept was novel: it was not just a museum type exhibition, but a living gallery which promoted the work of new young American artists alongside her examples of European art. The gallery was designed to be interactive, and it was a huge success. New York life suited her: she continued to bed men at a prodigious rate, and at one time she lived with a homosexual man with whom she went out on fishing expeditions to pick up sexual partners who they shared.

She exhibited and established the reputations of Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, and Jackson Pollock. This was the period in which abstract expressionism swept American modernism into the limelight, propelled by influential critics such as Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. [See Tom Woolf’s The Painted Word for a sceptical view of the same period.]

And yet almost immediately after the war ended, having established this influential presence in the USA, she closed up shop and decamped to Venice, where she opened the museum that now bears her name. Despite attempts from friends and family alike to deflect her from her purpose, she kept the collection intact, and it now stands as a testament to her personal vision.

In fact last time I visited the gallery it struck me how it encompassed quite a short period of art and a part of the modernist movement which now seems rather tacky – with all the mumbo-jumbo of ‘the unconscious’, the empty posturing of ‘manifestos’, and jejune works by second-rate painters. So the collection is quite an accurate reflection of her life, the later years of which were spent as the grand old lady of the international art scene. But behind the public front of naked sunbathing on the roof of her Grand Canal Palazzo, her gay assistants, and being punted around in the last private gondola in Venice, her real concerns were those of many other elderly ladies the world over – her pet dogs (Lhazo apsos) her wayward children (daughter dead from drugs) and the loneliness of old age.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Mary Dearborn, Peggy Guggenheim: Mistress of Modernism, London: Virago, 2004, pp.448, ISBN 1844080609

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Print Culture bibliography

October 1, 2009 by Roy Johnson

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Reproduced with the permission of the author –

Thomas J. Farrell, Associate Professor, Department of Composition, University of Minnesota at Duluth; Duluth, MN 55812

20C Literature

cultural history, literary criticism and theory, guidance notes

resources, techniques, and issues for literary studies

tutorials, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge – commentary

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge – resources

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge – synopsis

tutorial, critical commentary, plot, and study resources

Manhattan Transfer – critical commentary

Manhattan Transfer – study resources

Manhattan Transfer – chapter summaries

Manhattan Transfer – principal characters

General survey of literature in English 1960-2003

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and plot summary,

Never Let Me Go – critical comment

Never Let Me Go – study resources

Never Let Me Go – plot summary

Kazuo Ishiguro – other novels

an experimental poetic-imagist novel

a tutorial essay with study resources

poor little rich girl

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