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The Great Gatsby

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tutorial, commentary, plot summary, further reading

The Great Gatsby (1925) was the third novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, following This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and Damned (1922). Though not a great success on first publication, it has since gone on to be regarded as a great modern American classic. It certainly captures the surface glamour of the ‘Roaring Twenties’ and ‘the Jazz Age’ – a term coined by Fitzgerald himself.

The Great Gatsby

first edition 1925

The Great Gatsby – commentary

The American Dream

This dream is a theme which runs through a great deal of American history and culture. It is the idea, born out of political egalitarianism, that all citizens of the USA, no matter what their status at birth, have the freedom to better themselves, make a success of life, and even to become rich and famous. This is summed up in the expression from the United States Declaration of Independence (1776) – that individual citizens have the ‘unalienable right’ to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’.

The idea that everybody can become rich and famous is patently untrue of course, but it is commonly held up as an aspirational model, reinforced by the fact that many immigrants and refugees have arrived in America and gained better standards of living than those they left behind.

Young Gatsby (Jimmy Gatz, to give him his real name) is an example of this phenomenon. He comes from a humble background, but is taken up by the rich yacht-owner Dan Cody, who shows him the lifestyle of a millionaire. Gatsby then re-invents himself. He supresses some elements of his biography, embellishes others, and creates a social smokescreen to hide the fact that he makes his money from the illegal business of bootlegging.

Gatsby also has romantic aspirations to fit this model of upwards social mobility. As a young man he falls for Daisy, who is a southern belle, the daughter of a rich family, a debutante and a socialite. It becomes part of Gatsby’s dream to recapture this youthful lost love by impressing her with his ill-gotten wealth.

But he is not allowed to forget that he is not intrinsically a member of the class to which Daisy belongs. This is what explains the class antagonism that springs into being immediately he meets Tom Buchanan (Daisy’s husband) who correctly spots that there is something ambivalent, incongruous about Gatsby. The two men confront each other in a contest over Daisy.

Following the car accident in which Tom’s mistress Myrtle is killed, Gatsby realises he cannot compete in this class war: ‘because ‘Jay Gatsby’ had broken up like glass against Tom’s hard malice, and the long secret extravaganza was played out’. Buchanan eventually both wins back his wife and brings about the death of Gatsby.

In this sense the novel is a critique of or a corrective to the American Dream. It reveals that Jimmy Gatz cannot enter into the upper echelons of society, even if he has made a lot of money during prohibition, even if a former debutante (and current ‘flapper’) is attracted to him. And merely in thinking it possible he pays for the mistake with his life.

The narrative

The story is presented in first person narrative mode, with Nick Carraway recounting his engagement with the Buchanans and Gatsby at East and West Egg respectively. For the most part this is unproblematic, with Nick reporting on scenes in which he is a participant.

Fitzgerald is forced to bring variations to this approach in dramatising the character of Gatsby – and he does this rather cleverly. We are first given an account of Gatsby that is very ambivalent – that he comes from inherited wealth, has been to Oxford University, and is a war hero. The first claim is untrue, the second misleading, and the third true.

Gatsby’s real biography is only gradually revealed, and we learn via a combination of flashbacks, inference, and his dramatised statements to Nick that he is a complex mixture of arriviste, romantic, opportunist, semi-gangster, and generous man of honour. Fitzgerald handles this character development very well.

But towards the end of the novel he violates the rules of the first person narrative by having Nick relate in detail events where he wasn’t present. In the middle of Chapter VIII, the day after the car accident, Fitzgerald introduces a rather clumsy flashback into Nick’s narrative: ‘Now I want to go back a little and tell what happened at the garage after we left there the night before’.

The scene in the garage involves two people – George Wilson and a neighbour Michaelis. It features two minor plot elements: the revelation of a leash Myrtle bought for the dog Tom gave her, and George’s assumption that Myrtle rushed into the road to speak to her lover. But the events are related from the point of view of Michaelis and George, with closely observed details only available to participants:

The hard brown beetles kept thudding against the dull light, and whenever Michaelis heard a car go tearing along the road outside it sounded to him like the car that hadn’t stopped a few hours before …

Wilson’s glazed eyes turned out to the ashheaps, where small grey clouds took on fantastic shapes and scurried here and there in the faint dawn wind.

Nick Carraway was not present at the scene, and the events can only have been relayed to him later by Michaelis. But these are not the sorts of emotional and atmospheric details of a spoken report. They have the texture of a first-person narrative along with the remainder of Nick’s story.

Fitzgerald is not abiding by the logic of first person narratives, and this is a serious flaw in an otherwise carefully constructed novel. It might be considered a minor blemish, but it was a weakness he carried on even as far as his last novel, The Last Tycoon. That is a story narrated by a young woman Cecilia Brady who is in love with the principal character Monroe Stahr. Her narrative is spirited and amusing, but she presents detailed intimate scenes between Stahr and another woman of which she cannot possibly have any knowledge.

Symbols

In much of the critical comment on The Great Gatsby a great deal is made of the symbolism present in the work. It should be fairly obvious for instance that the ‘single green light’ that burns at the end of the landing stage of the Buchanan garden is a metaphor representing Gatsby’s enduring love for Daisy. He has shown his fidelity to the memory of her throughout his military service and in his post-war efforts to accumulate the wealth he thinks necessary to win her.

He has established himself in his palace directly opposite, on the other side of the Sound, so that he can be as near to her as possible. Even their separation by the waters of the bay is emblematic. She lives in the rich and fashionable suburb of East Egg amongst the traditional families of ‘old money’. Gatsby lives in arriviste West Egg and despite his fabulous wealth and his generosity, he is eventually unable to cross the gap that divides them.

I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him … Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.

This personal, individual disappointment of Gatsby’s failure to win the romantic love of his youthful dreams also serves to reinforce the more general theme of the death of the American Dream.

The other quite striking image which occurs in the story is the giant advertisement for an optician Doctor T.J. Eckleburg which dominates the ‘Valley of Ashes’ in the Queens suburb of New York. A pair of eyes stare out from ‘enormous yellow spectacles’ – ‘blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high’. They look out over the garage where Myrtle lives in her loveless marriage with George and where she is killed by Daisy driving Gatsby’s car.

The images of death and watchful eyes are also brought together in the scene where George recounts to Michaelis that he finally realises that Myrtle has been deceiving him and reproaches her just before she rushes into the roadway:

“God knows what you’ve been doing, everything you’ve been doing. You may fool me, but you can’t fool God!”

Standing behind him Michaelis saw with a shock that he was looking at the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleberg, which had just emerged, pale and enormous, from the dissolving night.

“God sees everything”, repeated Wilson.

The Great Gatsby – study resources

The Great Gatsby – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Great Gatsby – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

The Great Gatsby – York Notes – Amazon UK

The Collected Stories – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Fitzgerald: Letters – Amazon UK

The Great Gatsby – DVD – Amazon UK

The Great Gatsby – plot summary

I.   The narrator Nick Carraway rents a house in West Egg, Long Island, next door to the rich and mysterious Jay Gatsby. Nick visits his cousin Daisy and her husband Tom Buchanan across the bay at East Egg. He meets Daisy’s friend Jordan Baker over a dinner interrupted by a phone call from Tom’s ‘mistress in New York’. Tom is a racist and a bully.

II.   Tom takes Nick to pick up his mistress Myrtle at her husband’s garage in the Valley of Ashes in Queens. They go to an apartment in New York, are joined by neighbours, and all get very drunk. Tom hits Myrtle and makes her nose bleed.

III.   Nick is invited to one of Gatsby’s lavish parties where he meets Jordan and Gatsby, who imparts an ‘amazing thing’ to her. As the summer goes on, Nick becomes closer to Jordan and thinks he might be in love with her – but he believes she is a compulsive liar.

IV.   Gatsby tells Nick his (slightly false) life story of inherited wealth, an Oxford education, and war heroism. They have lunch in New York with a gambler Meyer Wolfsheim. Jordan reveals to Nick the earlier connection between Gatsby and Daisy when he was waiting to go to war.

V.   Gatsby arranges a meeting with Daisy at Nick’s house, at which he is first embarrassed. He offers Nick dubious ‘business opportunities’ which Nick turns down. Then Gatsby shows them over his own house, which demonstrates his immense wealth.

VI.   Nick then reveals more of Gatsby’s true origins. He was a lower-class boy James Gatz who was given an ‘apprenticeship’ by a rich man Dan Cody. Tom and Daisy attend another of Gatsby’s parties, where Tom remains sceptical about Gatsby, who wants to re-establish his past love with Daisy.

VII.   Nick and Gatsby go for lunch at the Buchanans on a hot day. Daisy flaunts her love affair with Gatsby. They all go into New York for the afternoon, calling at the garage, where Wilson is planning to take Myrtle away. In the Plaza hotel, Tom challenges Gatsby, who says that Daisy is going to leave him. Tom reveals more of Gatsby’s shady business dealings. On the way back Myrtle is killed by Gatsby’s car, which Daisy was driving.

VIII.   Next day Nick visits Gatsby, who reveals the true story of his earlier relationship with Daisy. Nick then recounts what happened at the garage the previous night. This culminates in Wilson setting out to locate the car that has killed his wife. Believing that Gatsby is Myrtle’s secret lover, he kills him then turns the gun on himself.

IX.   Nick arranges the funeral. Gatsby’s father arrives and reveals Gatsby’s youthful ambitions and his fidelity as a son. None of Gatsby’s associates attend the funeral. Nick says goodbye to Jordan, then meets Tom, who reveals that he told Wilson the car was Gatsby’s.

The Great Gatsby – characters
Nick Carraway the narrator, a bond dealer, ex-Yale
Tom Buchanan Nick’s rich college friend, a bully and racist
Daisy Buchanan Nick’s cousin, Tom’s self-absorbed wife
Jordan Baker a socialite and professional golfer
George B. Wilson a downtrodden garage owner
Myrtle Wilson George’s wife, Tom’s mistress
Jay Gatsby a super-rich bootlegger (real name Jimmy Gatz)
Meyer Wolfsheim ‘the man who fixed the World Series’

© Roy Johnson 2018

Twentieth century literature
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The Intellectuals and the Masses

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pride and prejudice: literary modernists 1880-1939

This book has been around for a while now. I read it on the strength of having enjoyed John Carey’s more recent What Good Are The Arts? His basic argument is that with the rise of mass democracy and universal education at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, artists and intellectuals reacted with fear to this phenomenon and both denigrated the ordinary person and at the same time deliberately made their art more difficult to understand. It’s a study of literary modernists and their anti-democratic sentiments.

The Intellectuals and the MassesNone of the major figures of literary modernism escapes his charge: D.H. Lawrence, W.B. Yeats, Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, and T.S. Eliot are all quoted making remarks which are undemocratic, elitist, racist, and tainted with a supremacism which Carey traces back to Nietzsche. This basic argument is then extended to the intellectually snobbish dislike of the ‘suburbs’ which were built to house the growing numbers of clerks to service the expanding financial and commercial sectors of the economy.

Here Graham Greene, John Betjemann, G.K. Chesterton, and Evelyn Waugh come in for a similar type of criticism – though they are not accused of putting their writing beyond the reach of the common reader. Returning to Nietzsche’s influence via his ideas about ‘natural aristocrats’ and ‘Beyond Good and Evil’, Carey shows these views of the lofty superman alive and well in the work of Lawrence and Graham Greene – and he punctures their lightweight adoption in the work of art critic Clive Bell with his characteristically mordant humour:

So we find, for example, Clive Bell hymning ‘the austere and thrilling raptures of those who have climbed the cold, white peaks of art’, and contrasting them with the herd who frequent the ‘snug foothills of warm humanity’. Bell’s language figures himself and fellow aesthetes as engaged upon dangerous and energetic pursuits, when in fact they are merely looking at pictures and reading books.

This is not the only time he points to the false metaphors in which art is often discussed: ‘Spatial metaphors of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture are logically meaningless, of course.’ There’s also an interesting reading of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World which, for all its satirical Utopianism, he reveals as a covert defence of Nietzschean or Christian ‘redemptive suffering’.

In the latter part of the book he offers four ‘case studies’ – in-depth readings of the works of George Gissing, H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, and Wyndham Lewis. He uncovers some fairly unhealthy attitudes in Gissing, though I was surprised that he let him off the charge of profound snobbery which made me feel like hurling New Grub Street across the room last time I read it.

It’s not quite as clear why he includes Wells – because his only flaw seems to be a fear of overpopulation coupled with a submerged form of misogyny. But Arnold Bennett turns out to be the book’s hero. Carey describes his writings as ‘a systematic dismemberment of the intellectuals’ case against the masses’ – and he goes on to give a spirited case for his works as a sympathetic insight into the lives of ordinary people, and a defence of suburbia. In fact he takes on Virginia Woolf’s argument against Bennett in ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ and demolishes it completely.

He saves his maximum invective for last – and unleashes it on Wyndham Lewis, whose views he argues are not dissimilar to those of Adolf Hitler. And just in case we misunderstand, he points out that this is not simply crude anti-Semitism and a hatred for jazz music and Negroes, but that Hitler, like the other intellectuals of modernism, believed in an intellectual hierarchy, in great art which was produced by special individuals endowed with quasi-religious insights (rather like God, in fact) and that none of this was accessible to the masses. The implication however was that it was accessible to the people making these judgments – such as Clive Bell up on his cold white peaks.

This is a very spirited polemic, which also serves to remind us that many of the technological advances in the early modern era were often regarded with scepticism bordering on outright rejection by the soi-disant intellectuals. Radio, newspapers, photography, cinema, and rail travel were all vilified at one time or another – and the masses who seemed to enjoy them were both sneered at and condemned as philistines.

If you’re going to look at Carey’s views on art, read this one first, before What Good Are The Arts? – then you will have a clearer notion of where his ideas come from. For anyone interested in literary modernism, the history of ideas, or modern cultural criticism, it’s an exhilarating read.

© Roy Johnson 2000

The Intellectuals and the Masses   Buy the book at Amazon UK

The Intellectuals and the Masses   Buy the book at Amazon US

John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses, London: Faber, 1992, pp.246, ISBN: 0571169260

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The Invention of Morel

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tutorial, commentary, plot summary, and study resources

The Invention of Morel (1940) is a science fiction novella by the Argentinean writer Adolfo Bioy Casares. It was his seventh book, but the publication launched his reputation as a major Latin-American writer. It was awarded the First Municipal Prize for Literature of the City of Buenos Aires in 1941. Bioy wrote many other novels and short stories, some of them in collaboration with his friend, Jorge Luis Borges, whose sister Norah designed the cover of the first edition.

The Invention of Morel

The Invention of Morel – critical commentary

Spoiler alert

The Invention of Morel relies heavily for its dramatic effect upon a plot device which is only revealed to the reader half way through the book. The critical commentary that follows therefore contains plot spoilers which it would be unfair not to announce before you read any further. If you are not already acquainted with the story, but want some idea of what it is about – limit yourself to the first four paragraphs of the plot summary below.

Form

Bioy Casares is best known via the recommendations of his friend and fellow Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges. The Invention of Morel is no exception in carrying his endorsement: “To classify it [the novel] as perfect is neither an imprecision nor a hyperbole”. The Mexican poet Octavio Paz is even more emphatic, calling it “the perfect novel”.

But this is not a novel in the normal sense of the term. It is a short science fiction fantasy; it has only one meaningful character; and the narrative is concerned almost exclusively with the development of his fears and his reactions.

The only other named characters in the story are not developed in any way and they do not interact with each other. In fact they cannot interact – because they are only recorded projections from Morel’s machine, acting out the same scenes over and over again.

But the book does have a legitimate claim to being a successful novella. Its events take place in one location; it has one central character; and it is concerned with one idea – the notion that human life can be recorded and re-transmitted.

The island itself acts as a controlling image or metaphor. It is a curious mixture of pestilence and advanced technological development – which combines the two threats that confront the narrator. – extinction by disease or by Morel’s invention.

It is a short narrative, permeated by the narrator’s fear of being apprehended, and it is ‘open’ at both ends. We are offered no real explanation why he has to be there, and at the conclusion we do not truly know if his attempts to unite himself with Faustine will be successful or not.

At a crude statistical level, the story is less than 100 pages long – approximately 33,000 words. This is the length of a novella, not a novel. Distinctions between. the two genres are often difficult to make. There are busy and crowded novellas, just as there are short and spare novels. But the unities of a single character, location, and dramatic event in this narrative make it a novella rather than a novel.

Strengths

The strongest feature of this work is the central conceit of ‘recording’ human life – the technology involved, and the implications for the fictional characters and their virtual counterparts. Morel’s invention is just about acceptable as science fiction. We know that such a machine is not possible, but we can suspend our disbelief for the sake of a drama in which a ‘real’ human being falls in love with the artificial image of a beautiful woman.

The narrator even becomes jealous of her possible relationships with other artificial images, and he is finally prepared to risk death by merging himself with the recorded world in which she exists.

We do not know what the narrator is escaping from – though there are hints that it is some sort of political problem. But Bioy conjures up very successfully a sense of fear and paranoia as the narrator struggles to adjust to the environment and distinguish reality from hallucination in his fervid state of mind.

The explanation for the mysteries that baffle him (Why do visitors on the island ignore him? Why are there two suns?) are cleverly withheld until half way through the story. After the details of Morel’s invention are revealed, dramatic interest switches to what the narrator can do about his situation. He is in both an existential and a metaphysical trap, and his only solution to the problem puts his own life at risk.

Weaknesses

The first part of the narrative is designed to build mystery and tension as the narrator (and the first-time reader) struggles to understand the events in which he is embedded. He changes his mind about his interpretation of events; he thinks he might be hallucinating; and at one point he even thinks he might already be dead.

The problem with the narrative is that there is very little contextual relationship between these earlier scenes of paranoia and the later revelation of Morel’s invention. At the outset the narrator is suffering from the fear of being captured, and he is beset by the privations of living on a desert island. The first few entries in his diary are almost a re-enactment of Robinson Crusoe, with details of tides, food shortages, and the rotting plant-life of a tropical island.

The other main problem is the status of Morel, about which Bioy seems to be ambivalent, since Morel operates as both a ‘real’ character and as an ‘image’ in one of his own recordings. In order to construct the machine and its wave-powered supply of energy in the first place, Morel must be a ‘real’ (fictional) human being, on the same plane of reality as the narrator. Or to be more accurate, we can say that he must once have been a real human being.

But in the early pages of the story, the narrator realises that Morel and Faustine are repeating the same conversation that they had a week previously. We realise (later) that this is because the narrator is witnessing a ‘recording’ of Morel and Faustine which is being ‘projected’.

Later in the story, Morel explains that he has assembled the visitors for a week’s visit to the island which he has recorded, so that afterwards they can all exist ‘for eternity’. This declaration itself cannot be a recording, and when someone reveals that previous participants have died, Morel takes umbrage and disappears.

Moreover, if previous characters in his recordings have died, we are given no explanation why he has not died himself – since he has recorded himself talking to Faustine and has taken part in earlier experimental recordings.

A similar problem arises in the case of the visiting ship. The narrator records in his diary: “The only ship I have ever seen from this island was Morel’s, and that was only the image of a ship”. Yet Morel has earlier claimed that the only person who knows how to navigate the reefs that protect the island is “our captain, McGregor”. This is the (presumably real) person from whom Morel has rented the ship. So McGregor too seems to exist as part of a projected image at the same time as being a fictionally ‘real’ person. In this story, he cannot inhabit both spheres of being, even consecutively.

Maybe this is demanding rational explanations for what after all is a science fiction fantasy. Perhaps it is like demanding to know how someone could really become an Invisible Man or how Dr Frankenstein successfully assembled the parts of his monster. But it is not Morel’s recording and transmitting devices which are the fictional weaknesses: it is the fact that Bioy seems to lose control of their implications – ironically enough, just like Morel himself. As the author, Bioy appears either not to have thought through the implications of his conceit, or in terms of the logic of the narrative he is in a sense having his fictional cake and eating it as well.

The Invention of Morel

first edition – cover by Norah Borges

The Invention of Morel – plot summary

An un-named narrator and fugitive has escaped to a tropical island somewhere in Polynesia. Although we do not know the nature of his wrong-doing, he has an almost paranoid fear of being recaptured and imprisoned for life. He is keeping an account of his existence on the island, a diary in which he records his intention of writing two books.

From the sound of footsteps, a record player, and voices, it appears there are other people on the island, but the narrator at first hides away from them and accuses them of snobbery for ignoring him. Swamps on the island are fed by erratic tides, and they carry a strange disease which causes human flesh to rot. The tides also generate power which is supplied to a building called a ‘museum’ which he visits to search for food.

Every day at sunset he sees a mysterious gypsy-like woman who sits looking out to sea. He becomes fascinated by her, but is meanwhile consumed by fears of being detected. The woman is called Faustine, and she has conversations in French with a bearded man named Morel. When the narrator decides to approach them, they take no notice of him.

The narrator realises that Morel and Faustine repeat the same conversation that they had the previous week. One day when she does not appear, the narrator searches the whole island, but Faustine and all the others have disappeared. But then they suddenly reappear with new visitors at a dinner in the museum. The narrator sees two suns and two moons, and tries to find an explanation for the mysterious ‘intruders’. He thinks he may be hallucinating, invisible, or already dead?

The island is visited by a large boat, from which the captain and his crew disembark. The narrator fears that Faustine will leave the island. There is a party atmosphere, and the inhabitants are eventually addressed by Morel. He explains that he has invented a machine which can ‘record’ and then ‘replay’ complete human beings. He has recorded the group’s visit to the island, and their existence is being endlessly re-boadcast.

One of the visitors claims that earlier experiments using the machine resulted in death for the participants. Morel is annoyed and leaves the meeting, whereupon the narrator seizes his lecture notes. The narrator moves into the museum and starts to live amongst the images, following Faustine around and even sleeping on the floor in her bedroom.

He thinks Morel might have been deceived by his own invention, and he speculates about other machines which could take Morel’s invention one stage further, giving images an independent life. He begins to enjoy the repetition of the images, and resents the haphazard nature of his own life.

One day when the images fail to appear, he goes into the basement of the museum and re-starts the machines. He records himself for a week, inserting himself into the other recordings so that he and Faustine will be together for eternity. He begins to lose his sight, his body starts to disintegrate, and he ends the diary with an odd patriotic note to Venezuela and the hope that someone else will invent another machine so that he can enter the consciousness of Faustine.

The Invention of Morel – study resources

The Invention of Morel The Invention of Morel – in English – Amazon UK

The Invention of Morel The Invention of Morel – in English – Amazon US

The Invention of Morel La invention de Morel – in Spanish – Amazon UK

The Invention of Morel La invention de Morel – in Spanish – Amazon US

The Invention of Morel – principal characters
— the un-named narrator, a fugitive
Faustine a gypsy-like woman who speaks French
Morel inventor of the machine and owner of the island

© Roy Johnson 2015

Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel, New York: New York Review Books, 2003, pp.120, ISBN: 9781590170571

The Modern Movement

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themes and developments in English Literature 1910-1940

Although writers such as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, and E.M. Forster produced their work almost a hundred years ago, we still class their work as ‘modernism’. That’s because they made such a radical break with the preceding century, and the fact is that some of their experiments have not been surpassed in the literature produced since.

The Modern MovementChris Baldick’s comprehensive study sketches in the social, linguistic, and aesthetic background of the period, then groups his discussion of examples according to literary forms – short stories, drama, poetry, and the novel. He naturally highlights the major figures – Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, Eliot – but his other concern is to show the traditional literary culture out of which the modernist experiment emerged at the beginning of the last century.

This involves consideration of writers such as Arnold Bennett, Somerset Maugham, and now almost-forgotten figures such as Dornford Yates, Aldous Huxley, and Elizabeth Bowen who were very successful in their own time.

The Modern Movement ranges broadly, covering psychological novels, war poems, detective stories, ‘light reading’, essays, biography, satire (Waugh, Huxley, Lewis, Isherwood) children’s books, and other literary forms evolving in response to the new anxieties and exhilarations of twentieth-century life. He also introduces chapters which focus on themes such as Childhood, the Great War, and Sexuality.

He’s particularly well informed on what’s often called ‘the writer and the marketplace’ – that is, the financial realities which lie beneath the occupation of authorship. He knows who earned most (Arnold Bennett) he reveals which writers were subsidised by rich patrons (Joyce of course, as well as others who were subsidised by wealthy spouses). I was amazed to learn that D.H. Lawrence not only made a lot of money out of the privately published Lady Chatterley’s Lover but that he went on to make even more by investing it in stocks and shares on Wall Street.

One small feature comes off nicely. Each chapter is preceded by a list of new words which came into currency at the time, and they always seem to emerge earlier than you would guess – blurb, umpteen, back-pack, and tear-jerker for instance.

He even includes an interesting presentation of theories of the novel – which involves consideration of first and third person narration. This ties in the connections between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and lays out the groundwork for the central chapters on Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, and Forster.

Baldick interprets all the major works of these writers – Howards End, Mrs Dalloway, Ulysses, Women in Love – in a way that makes you feel like immediately reading them again. But en route he takes time to look at the lesser-known works of the period, such as Love on the Dole, Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart, Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, and Aldous Huxley’s Chrome Yellow, and novels by Naomi Mitchison, Robert Graves, and Sylvia Townsend Warner.

I remember reading Walter Allen’s The English Novel and Tradition and Dream many years ago, and this is a similar experience. Authors, novels, books, and ideas jump off every page, and anybody with an appetite for literature will feel a terrific urge to follow up on the suggestions he holds out.

There’s a very good collection of further reading at the back of the book. These entries combine biographical notes on the author, together with available editions of their major works, plus secondary studies and criticism.

This is the fifth volume to be published in the Oxford English Literary History series. It can be read continuously as an in-depth study of the period, or used as a rich source of reference.

© Roy Johnson 2004

The Modern Movement   Buy the book at Amazon UK

The Modern Movement   Buy the book at Amazon US

Chris Baldick, The Modern Movement, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, pp.477, ISBN: 0198183100

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The New Spaniards

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culture and society in post-Franco Spain

It’s easy to forget that only a few decades ago Spain was an under-developed country with a fascist dictator. Tourists were arrested for wearing shorts, and outside major cities many villages didn’t have electricity or street lighting. Today, Spain is one of the biggest, the most democratic, and technologically advanced countries in Europe. John Hooper’s book The New Spaniards is all about the social, political, and cultural consequences of this very rapid development during the last four decades.

The New Spaniards As he observes, it’s possible to see this reflected in a typical family gathering of three generations. The grandparents, reflecting a poorer agricultural past, will be short and dark; their children, beneficiaries of the post-Franco boom, and raised on a Mediterranean diet, will be tall and slim; but the grandchildren, victims of current prosperity, might well be overweight.

The first part of the book is a detailed political history of Spain following the death of Franco. His rule had held Spain in a fossilized state since the end of the Civil War in 1940. The aftermath was, unsurprisingly, a sweeping away of the old, corrupt, and backward-looking practices – to be replaced by an essentially socialist government dominated by one party.

Equally unsurprising was the fact that people who had been excluded from public life for a generation, when they came back in contact with it, feathered their own nests. Post 1980 Spain has a long history of local graft, corruption, kick-backs, and ‘influence’ which make it seem closer to the world of Italian Mafiosi than the rest of Europe. And I have to say that this sort of thing still continues in the part of Andalucia where I live part of the time.

He deals with all the features of Spanish society which outsiders find surprising and puzzling – such as the church, for instance. It’s been disestablished since 1986, yet the state supports it with public funding. Its membership has decreased since the advent of democracy, yet many Spaniards consider themselves Christians, and the slightly dubious Opus Dei organisation has its greatest numbers and influence there.

On sexual mores, the country has passed from being against topless sunbathing in the 1970s to accepting gay marriages thirty years later. The birth rate is declining, more women are working, and adult children are living at home as the family unit, which is seen as the bulwark against unemployment and the harsh economic climate of the 2000s.

John Hooper explains the astonishingly murky finances of the National lottery, and throws in the amazing fact that the Spaniards spend/lose more on gambling each week than they do on fresh milk, fruit, and vegetables.

That’s one of his strengths – bringing sociological data to life with striking examples. Against this, he has a slightly annoying habit of looping back historically into the nineteenth century. The idea is to show how certain political conditions have originated, which is understandable, but it produces the unfortunate effect of a book in which the narrative is going backwards.

He’s much more lively and interesting when he deals with contemporary life, such as why Basques, Catalan, and Galicians feel so keen on independence, why bullfighting is still tolerated in a country with strong support for animal rights (not dissimilar from fox-hunting in the UK) and how the Spaniards feel about the influx of second home owners who bring mixed blessings to the country.

There’s plenty of detail on the Spanish royal family which I could have done without, but his chapters on the press and the extraordinary explosion of modern art and architecture really bring alive the sense of renewal and positive exploration of new ideas which anyone who visits the country regularly cannot fail to register.

© Roy Johnson 2006

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John Hooper, The New Spaniards, London: Penguin, second revised edition, 2006, pp.480, ISBN 0141016094

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The Nobel Prize for Literature

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tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Nobel Prize for Literature was first established in 1901. It is awarded annually to a writer who has produced ‘the most outstanding work in an ideal direction’. This might appear to be a simple formula, but it has led to a number of controversies.

The term ‘ideal’ has often been interpreted politically as meaning work of a naive and idealistic tendency. This has sometimes led to accusations that only works promoting virtuous behaviour were being recognised. It has sometimes been accused of being ‘a Nobel Peace Prize in disguise’.

The prize is awarded in October each year, along with the prizes for Chemistry, Physics, Peace, Economics, and Medicine. It is funded from the legacy of Swedish chemist and engineer Alfred Nobel, who made his fortune from the invention of dynamite. He also owned the Bofors company which manufactured armaments. The idealism of the award and the source of its financing is an irony which has not been lost on commentators ever since.

The award procedure starts with nominations that are canvassed in the early part of each year. These nominations are scrutinised by a committee, and a short list of five names is drawn up and submitted to the Swedish Academy. There is a vote, and anyone receiving more than half the votes is declared winner. The nominations are then kept secret for fifty years before being made public. The prize is awarded for a body of work, rather than for a single publication.

The prize itself consists of a gold medal, a diploma, a cash award, and an invitation to deliver a lecture at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm. The value of the award is determined by percentage returns on the investment made in Nobel’s original will, but is usually in excess of one million US dollars.

The winners

A glance through the historical list of prizewinners will quickly reveal three curious features, which have been the subject of much comment. The list reveals:

  • famous writers who were not awarded the prize
  • prize winners who are now completely unknown
  • winners who were once famous but are now in decline
The Nobel Prize for Literature

Samuel Beckett – winner 1969

The overlooked

The prize must be awarded to a living writer, but the early years of the prize in particular are rich in what can now be seen as missed opportunities. Anton Chekhov was still alive in the first phase of the award, but was not given the prize. The same is true of Henrik Ibsen, who was a powerful influence on other writers and is still widely performed today. Leo Tolstoy did not die until 1910, and had a world wide reputation – but he was never a winner. Henry James was nominated for the prize three times but never given the award.

Joseph Conrad and Thomas Hardy both had reputations which stretched across Europe and American and were both alive until the 1920s – but neither was given the award. Virginia Woolf was publishing mature works now regarded as modern classics for the last two decades of her life until her death in 1941. The same is true of James Joyce, who is now seen as one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. Neither Woolf nor Joyce was awarded the Prize.

There are some borderline cases. Marcel Proust was still working on his masterpiece A la recherche du temps perdues when he died in 1922. Franz Kafka did not die until 1924, but he published very little in his own lifetime. Almost nothing was known of the work of the Russian writers Mikhail Bulgakov and Osip Mandelstam because of their persecution during the Stalinist period. Other notable absentees include Mark Twain, Emile Zola, and Vladimir Nabokov.

The Nobel Prize for Literature

Saul Bellow – winner 1976

The unknown

This is a slightly embarrassing category, because somebody, somewhere, might well have heard of and maybe even have read some of these totally forgotten and unknown writers. But measured against writers of the stature of Thomas Mann, Samuel Beckett, Pablo Neruda, and Saul Bellow, it is extremely difficult to believe that anybody in the twenty-first century is seriously immersed in the works of Bjornstjerne Bjornson, Jose Echegary, Giosue Carducci, and Rudolf Christoph Eucken. Those are the older prizewinners: more recent names include Imre Kertesz, Elfride Jelinek, Herta Muller, and Thomas Transtromer. Hand on heart, have you ever even heard of these writers, let alone read their works?

The fading flowers

Literary reputations of even the highest order are subject to the ravages of time, and not even the imprimatur of the Swedish Academy is a guarantee against the decay of public esteem. Writers who were once regarded as unassailably great may now be deemed passe or outmoded. Does anyone really read the work of Andre Gide any more? He was celebrated in his day – and supported many worthy causes. But now, probably few, with the exception of students of the history of modern French literaturewill bother to read him.

The same is true of other winners such as Sinclair Lewis and William Faulkner. An even more dramatic example is the case of the German novelist Gunter Grass, winner in 1999, whose reputation has gradually declined since the success of his first novel, The Tin Drum (1959). This fading reputation was further diminished when he revealed (after a silence of sixty years) that he had been a member of the Waffen-SS during the Second World War.

The Nobel Prize for Literature

Nadine Gordimer – winner 1991

Controversies

The award sometimes causes controversy. Some cases arise because of the political background to the award, as well as the perceived wisdom of the choice of winner. For instance in 1958 the award went to Boris Pasternak, largely on the strength of his international best-selling novel Dr Zhivago. The Soviet government forced him to publicly reject the honour and he was forbidden to travel to Stockholm to accept the prize. However, the Prize committee does not accept rejections, and the honour still stands.

The same thing happened (under more amicable circumstances) when the Prize was awarded to Jean Paul Sartre in 1964. He made it known that he could not accept the award because he had consistently argued against official honours in the past. However, his name remains on the list of winners.

Other controversial issues arise from what might be called false categorisation. For a prize which is normally awarded to novelists, poets, and dramatists, it is difficult to see why it would be given to a historian (Theodo Mommsen, 1902) a philosopher (Bertrand Russell, 1950) a politician (Winston Churchill, 1953) or a pop singer (Bob Dylan, 2016) . It was claimed that Dylan’s award was for the poetry of his song lyrics – which illustrates the element of controversy still at work. To underscore the point, he did not turn up in Stockholm to deliver the acceptance lecture, but had someone else read it out for him.

The Nobel Prize for Literature

complete list of winners

1901 Sully Prudhomme France
1902 Theodor Mommsen Germany
1903 Bjornstjerne Bjarnsten Norway
1904 Frederick Mistral France
1905 Henryk Sienkiewicz Poland
1906 Giosuè Carducci Italy
1907 Rudyard Kipling United Kingdom
1908 Rudolf Christoph Eucken     Germany
1909 Selma Lagerlöf Sweden
1910 Paul von Heyse Germany
1911 Maurice Maeterlinck France
1912 Gerhart Hauptmann Germany
1913 Rabindranath Tagore India
1914 No prize awarded —
1915 Romain Rolland France
1916 Verner von Heidenstam Sweden
1917 Karl Adolph Gjellerup Denmark
1918 No prize awarded —
1919 Carl Spitteler Switzerland
1920 Knut Hamsun Norway
1921 Anatole France France
1922 Jacinto Benavente Spain
1923 William Butler Yeats Ireland
1924 Wladyslaw Reymont Poland
1925 George Bernard Shaw Ireland
1926 Grazia Deledda Italy
1927 Henri Bergson France
1928 Sigrid Undset Norway
1929 Thomas Mann Germany
1930 Sinclair Lewis United States
1931 Erik Axel Karlfeldt Sweden
1932 John Galsworthy United Kingdom
1933 Ivan Bunin Russia/France
1934 Luigi Pirandello Italy
1935 No prize awarded —
1936 Eugene O’Neill United States
1937 Roger Martin du Gard France
1938 Pearl S. Buck United States
1939 Frans Eemil Sillanpää Finland
1940-43 No prizes awarded —
1944 Johannes Vilhelm Jensen Denmark
1945 Gabriela Mistral Chile
1946 Hermann Hesse Switzerland
1947 André Gide France
1948 T.S. Eliot United Kingdom
1949 William Faulkner United States
1950 Bertrand Russell United Kingdom
1951 Per Largerkvist Sweden
1952 François Mauriac France
1953 Sir Winston Churchill United Kingdom
1954 Ernest Hemingway United States
1955 Halldór Laxness Iceland
1956 Juan Ramón Jiménez Spain
1957 Albert Camus France
1958 Boris Pasternak Soviet Union
1959 Salvatore Quasimodo Italy
1960 Saint-John Perse France
1961 Ivo Andric Yugoslavia
1962 John Steinbeck United States
1963 Giorgos Seferis Greece
1964 Jean-Paul Sartre France
1965 Mikhail Sholokhov Soviet Union
1966 Shmuel Yosef Agnon Israel
1967 Miguel Ángel Asturias Guatemala
1968 Yasunari Kawabata Japan
1969 Samuel Beckett Ireland
1970 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Soviet Union
1971 Pablo Neruda Chile
1972 Heinrich Böll Germany
1973 Patrick White Australia
1974 Eyvind Johnson Sweden
1975 Eugenio Montale Italy
1976 Saul Bellow United States
1977 Vicente Alexandre Spain
1978 Isaac Bashevis Singer United States
1979 Odysseas Elytis Greece
1980 Czeslaw Milosz Poland
1981 Elias Canetti United Kindom
1982 Gabriel García Márquez Colombia
1983 William Golding United Kingdom
1984 Jaroslav Seifert Czechoslovakia
1985 Claude Simon France
1986 Wole Soyinka Nigeria
1987 Joseph Brodsky United States
1988 Naguib Mahfouz Egypt
1989 Camilo José Cela Spain
1990 Octavio Paz Mexico
1991 Nadine Gordimer South Africa
1992 Derek Walcott Saint Lucia
1993 Toni Morrison United States
1994 Kenzaburo Oe Japan
1995 Seamus Heaney Ireland
1996 Wislawa Szymborska Poland
1997 Dario Fo Italy
1998 José Saramago Portugal
1999 Günter Grass Germany
2000 Gao Xingjian China
2001 Sir V. S. Naipaul United Kingdom
2002 Imre Kertész Hungary
2003 J.M.Coetzee South Africa
2004 Elfriede Jelinek Austria
2005 Harold Pinter United Kingdom
2006 Orhan Pamuk Turkey
2007 Doris Lessing United Kingdom
2008 J.M.G Le Clezio France
2009 Herta Mueller Germany
2010 Mario Vargas Llosa Peru
2011 Thomas Transtroemer Sweden
2012 Mo Yan China
2013 Alice Munro Canada
2014 Patrick Modiano France
2015 Svetlana Alexievich Belarus
2016 Bob Dylan United States
2017 Kasuo Ishiguro United Kingdom
2018 No prize awarded —

© Roy Johnson 2017

The Novella

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tutorial and guidances notes

What is a novella?

The novella is a prose fiction which is longer than a long story, but shorter than a short novel. If that seems baffling, you could think of something around 30—40,000 words in length. But in fact, it’s not word count which is the crucial factor. The essence of a novella is that it has a concentrated unity of purpose and design. That is, character, incident, theme, and language are all focussed on contributing to a single issue which will be of a serious nature and universal significance.

Many of the classic novellas are concerned with people learning important lessons or making significant journeys. They might even do both at the same time, as do Gustave von Eschenbach in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s Metamorphosis – both of whom make journeys towards death.

The novella - Death in VeniceThomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912) 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 German writer who departs from his usual routines, falls in love with a young boy, and gets caught up in a subtle downward spiral of indulgence. The novella is constructed on a framework of references to Greek mythology, and the unity of themes, form, and motifs are superbly realised – even though Mann wrote this when he was quite young. Later in life, Mann was to declare – ‘Nothing in Death in Venice was invented’. The story was turned into a superb film by Luchino Visconti and an opera by Benjamin Britten.
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What produces the unity?

The events of the novella normally turn around a single incident, problem, or issue. There will be a limited number of principal characters – and in fact the story will probably be centred on just one or two. There will be no sub-plots or parallel actions. And the events are likely to take place in one location.

A short story may deal with a trivial incident which illustrates a small aspect of human nature, or simply evokes a mood or a sense of place. A novella on the other hand deals with much ‘larger’ and more significant issues – such as the struggle between the forces of innocence and justice, which Herman Melville depicts in Billy Budd, or the morally educating experience of the young sea captain which Joseph Conrad depicts in The Secret Sharer.

Piazza TalesHerman Melville’s novella Billy Budd (1856) deals with a tragic incident at sea, and is based on a true occurence. It is a nautical recasting of the Fall, a parable of good and evil, a meditation on justice and political governance, and a searching portrait of three men caught in a deadly triangle. Billy is the handsome innocent, Claggart his cruel tormentor, and Captain Vere the man who must judge in the conflict between them. The narrative is variously interpreted in Biblical terms, or in terms of representations of male homosexual desire and the mechanisms of prohibition against this desire. His other great novellas Benito Cereno, The Encantadas and Bartelby the Scrivener (all in this collection) show Melville as a master of irony, point-of-view, and tone. These fables ripple out in nearly endless circles of meaning and ambiguities.
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Features of the novella

A novel can have plots and sub-plots, a teeming cast of characters, and take place in a number of locations. But a novella is more likely to be concentrated on one issue, with just one or two central characters, and located in one place.

The novella - The AwakeningArtistically, the novella is often unified by the use of powerful symbols which hold together the events of the story. The novella requires a very strong sense of form – that is, the shape and essence of what makes it distinct as a literary genre. It is difficult to think of a great novella which has not been written by a great novelist (though Kate Chopin’s The Awakening might be considered an exception). Another curious feature of the novella is that it is almost always very serious. It’s equally difficult to think of a great comic novella – though Saul Bellow’s excellent Seize the Day has some lighter moments.
The Awakening – tutorial
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The novella - bellow-sieze - book jacketSeize the Day (1956) focusses on one day in the life of one man, Tommy Wilhelm. A fading charmer who is now separated from his wife and his children, he has reached his day of reckoning and is scared. In his forties, he still retains a boyish impetuousness that has brought him to the brink of havoc. In the course of one climatic day, he reviews his past mistakes and spiritual malaise. Some people might wish to argue that this is a short novel, but it is held together by the sort of concentrated sense of unity which is the hallmark of a novella. It is now generally regarded as the first of Bellow’s great works, even though he went on to write a number of successful and much longer novels – for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1976.
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The Novella - The Turn of the ScrewHenry James’ The Turn of the Screw (1897) is a classic novella, and a ghost story which defies easy interpretation. A governess in a remote country house is in charge of two children who appear to be haunted by former employees who are now supposed to be dead. But are they? The story is drenched in complexities – including the central issue of the reliability of the person who is telling the tale. This can be seen as a subtle, self-conscious exploration of the traditional haunted house theme in Victorian culture, filled with echoes of sexual and social unease. Or is it simply, “the most hopelessly evil story that we have ever read”? This collection also includes James’s other ghost stories – Sir Edmund Orme, Owen Wingrave, and The Friends of the Friends.
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The novella - henry_james_aspernThe Aspern Papers (1888) also by Henry James, is a psychological drama set in Venice which centres on the tussle for control of a great writer’s private correspondence. An elderly lady, ex-lover of the writer seeks a husband for her plain niece, whereas the potential purchaser of the letters she possesses is a dedicated bachelor. Money is also at stake – but of course not discussed overtly. There is a refined battle of wills between them. Who wins out? Henry James keeps readers guessing until the very end. The novella is a masterpiece of subtle narration, with an ironic twist in the outcome. This collection of stories also includes The Private Life, The Middle Years, and The Death of the Lion which is another classic novella.
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The Novella - Heart of DarknessJoseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902) is a tightly controlled novella which has assumed classic status as an account of late nineteenth century imperialism and the colonial process. It documents the search for a mysterious Kurtz, who has ‘gone too far’ in his exploitation of Africans in the ivory trade. The reader is plunged deeper and deeper into the ‘horrors’ of what happened when Europeans invaded the continent. This might well go down in literary history as Conrad’s finest and most insightful achievement. It is certainly regarded as a classic of the novella form, and a high point of twentieth century literature – even though it was written at its beginning. This volume also contains the story An Outpost of Progress – the magnificent study in shabby cowardice which prefigures ‘Heart of Darkness’. The differences between a story and a novella are readily apparent here if you read both texts and compare them.
Heart of Darkness – tutorial
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The novella - MetamorphosisFranz Kafka’s Metamorphosis is the account of a young salesman who wakes up to find he has been transformed into a giant insect. His family are bewildered, find it difficult to deal with him, and despite the good human intentions struggling underneath his insect carapace, they eventually let him die of neglect. He eventually expires with a rotting apple lodged in his side. This particular collection also includes Kafka’s other masterly transformations of the short story form – ‘The Great Wall of China’, ‘Investigations of a Dog’, ‘The Burrow’, and the story in which he predicted the horrors of the concentration camps – ‘In the Penal Colony’.
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© Roy Johnson 2004

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The Short Story – essential works

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tutorial and guide to important texts

The short story is as old as the earliest tale-telling. Many longer narratives such as epics and myths (such as the Bible) contain short episodes which can be extracted as stories. But as a distinct literary genre, the short story came into its own during the early nineteenth century. Many writers have created successful short stories – but those which follow are the prose artists who have had most influence on its development in terms of form. We will be adding more guidance notes and examples as time goes on.

Tales of Mystery & Imagination Edgar Allen Poe is famous for his Tales of Mystery and Imagination. These are tight, beautifully crafted exercises in plot, suspense, psychological drama, and sheer horror. He also invented the detective story. This is the birth of the modern short story. Poe was writing for magazines and journals. He has a spectacularly florid style, and his settings of dungeons and crumbling houses come straight out of the Gothic tradition. He’s most famous for stories such as ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’, ‘The Black Cat’, and ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ which vividly dramatise extreme states of psychological terror, anxiety, and what we would now call existential threat. He also theorised about the story, claiming that every part should be contributing to the whole, and the story should be short enough to read at one sitting. This edition is good because it includes the best of the stories, plus some essays and reviews. An ideal starting point.
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How short is short?

There is no fixed length for a short story. Readers generally expect a character, an event of some kind, and a sense of resolution. But Virginia Woolf got most of this in to one page in her experimental short story Monday or Tuesday. There are also ‘abrupt fictions’ of a paragraph or two – but these tend to be not much more than anecdotes.

There’s an often recounted anecdote regarding a competition for the shortest possible short story. It was won by Ernest Hemingway with an entry of one sentence in six words: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

There are also quite long stories – such as those written by Henry James. If the narrative sticks to one character and one issue or episode, they remain stories. If they stray into greater degrees of complexity and develop expanded themes and dense structure – then they often become novellas. Examples of these include Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice.

Hawthorne stories Nathaniel Hawthorne produced stories that are beautifully crafted studies in symbolism, moral ambiguity, and metaphors of the American psyche. His tales are full of characters oppressed by consciousness of sin, guilt, and retribution. They explore the traditions and the consequences of the Puritanism Europe exported to America. Young Goodman Brown and Other Stories in the Oxford University Press edition presents twenty of Hawthorne’s best tales. It’s the first in paperback to offer his most important short works with full annotation in one volume.
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A Day in the Country Guy de Maupassant brought the subject matter of the story down to an everyday level which shocked readers at the time – and can still do so now. He also began to downgrade the element of plot and suspense in favour of character revelation. He was a relative of Flaubert, a novelist manqué, and bon viveur who died at forty-three of syphilis in a madhouse. Nevertheless he left behind him an oeuvre of more than 300 stories. His tone is objective, detached, and often deeply ironic; and he is celebrated for the exactness and accuracy of his observations, and the balance and precision of his style. Although most of his stories appear at first to be nothing more than brief and rather transparent anecdotes, the best succeed in giving impressionistic but truthful insights into the hidden lives of people caught amidst the trials of everyday existence.
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Short Story Charles E. May, The Short Story: the reality of artifice, London: Routledge, 2002, pp.160, ISBN 041593883X. This is a study of the development of the short story as a literary genre – from its origins to the present day. It takes in most of the major figures – Poe, Hawthorn, James, Conrad, Hemingway, Borges, and Cheever. There’s also a very useful chronology, giving dates of significant publications, full notes and references. and annotated suggestions for further reading. Despite the obvious US weighting here, for anyone who needs an overview of the short story and an insight into how stories are analysed as part of undergraduate studies, this is an excellent place to start.
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Katherine Mansfield short storiesKatherine Mansfield is one of the few major writers who worked entirely within the short story form. Her finest work is available in just one volume. She followed Chekhov in paring down the dramatic element of the short story to a minimum, whilst raising its level of subtlety and psychological insight to new heights. Every smallest detail within her stories is carefully chosen to complete a pattern which the whole tale symbolises. She was also an early feminist in presenting many of her stories from a convincingly radical point of view. In this she was rather like her friend and contemporary, Virginia Woolf with whom she discussed the new literary techniques they were both developing at the same time. Unfortunately, Katherine Mansfield died at only thirty-five when she was at the height of her powers.
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James Joyce - Dubliners - book jacket James Joyce published Dubliners in 1916 and established himself immediately as a great writer. This has been an enormously influential collection which helped to establish the form of the modern short story. These are studies of Dublin life and characters written in a stark, pared-down style. Most of the characters and scenes are mean and petty – sometimes even tragic. Joyce had difficulty finding a publisher for this his first book, and it did not appear until many years after it had been written. It was severely attacked because the names of actual persons and places in Dublin are mentioned in it. Several of the characters introduced in Dubliners eventually reappear in his great novel Ulysses. In terms of literary technique, Joyce is best known for his use of the ‘epiphany’ – the revealing moment or experience used as a focal point for the purpose of the story.
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The Whiplash Ending

It used to be thought that the ‘point’ of a short story was best held back until the last paragraph. The idea was that the reader was being entertained – and then suddenly surprised by a revelation or an unexpected reversal or twist. O. Henry popularised this device in the US. However, most serious modern writers after Chekhov came to think that this was rather a cheap strategy. They proposed instead the relatively eventless story which presents a situation that unfolds itself to the reader for contemplation.

Virginia Woolf stories Virginia Woolf took the short story as it had come to be developed post-Chekhov, and with it she blended the prose poem, poetic meditations, and the plotless event. Her finest achievements in this form – Kew Gardens, Sunday or Monday, and The Lady in the Looking-glass‘ – create new linguistic worlds without the prop of a story line. These offer a poetic evocation of life and meditations on time, memory, and death. This edition contains all the classic short stories such as The Mark on the Wall, A Haunted House, and The String Quartet – but also the shorter fragments and experimental pieces such as Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street. These ‘sketches’ (as she called them) were used to practice the techniques she used in her longer fictions. Nearly fifty pieces written over the course of Woolf’s writing career are arranged chronologically to offer insights into her development as a writer. This is well presented and edited in a scholarly manner by Susan Dick.
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Metamorphosis Franz Kafka created stories and ‘fragments’ (as he called them) which are a strange, often nightmarish mixture of tale and philosophic meditation. Start with Metamorphosis – the account of a young salesman who wakes up to find he has been transformed into a giant insect. This particular collection also includes Kafka’s first publication – a slim volume of what he called ‘Meditations’ – as well as the forty-page ‘Letter to his Father’. It also contains the story in which he predicted the horrors of the concentration camps – ‘In the Penal Colony’. Kafka is famous for having anticipated in his work many of the modern states of psychological angst, alienation, and existential terror which became commonplace later in the century.
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Epiphanies and Moments

James Joyce’s contribution to the short story was a device he called the ‘epiphany’. Following Guy de Maupassant and Chekhov, he wrote the series of stories Dubliners which were pared down in terms of literary style and focussed their effect on a revelation. A sudden remark, a symbol, or moment epitomises and clarifies the meaning of a complex experience. This usually comes at the end of the story – either for the character in the story or for the reader. Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf followed a similar route of playing down action and events in favour of dramatising insights into character and states of mind. Woolf called these ‘moments of being’.

Jorge Luis Borges - The Total Library Jorge Luis Borges like Katherine Mansfield, only wrote short stories. He was an Argentinian, much influenced by English Literature. His tales manage to combine literary playfulness and a rich style with strange explorations of mind-bending ideas. He is credited as one of the fathers of magical realism, which is one feature of Latin-American literature which has spread worldwide since the 1960s. His stories often start in a concrete, realistic world then gradually slide into strange dreamlike states and end up leaving you to wonder where on earth you are, and how you got there. Funes, the Memorious explores the idea of a man who cannot forget anything; The Garden of Forking Paths is a marvellous double-take on the detective story; and Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is a pseudo-essay concerning encyclopedia entries of an imaginary world – which begin to invade and multiply within our own. He also wrote some rather amusing literary spoofs, which are collected in this edition.
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Ernest Hemingway trained as a newspaper reporter and began writing short stories in the post-Chekhov period, consciously influenced by his admiration for the Russian novelist Turgenev. He is celebrated for his terseness and understatement – a sort of literary tough-guy style which was much imitated at one time His persistent themes are physical and moral courage, stoicism, and what he called ‘grace under pressure’. Because his stories are so pared to the bone, free of all superfluous decoration, and so reliant on the closely observed detail, they fit well within the modernist style. He once won a bet that he could write a short story in six words. The result was – ‘For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.’ His reputation as a novelist has plummeted recently, but his stories are still worth reading.
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John Cheever is a story writer in the smooth and sophisticated New Yorker school. His writing is urbane, thoughtful, and his social details well observed. What he writes about are the small moments of enlightenment which lie waiting in everyday life, as well as the smouldering vices which lurk beneath the polite surface of suburban America. This is no doubt a reflection of Cheever’s own experience. For many years as a successful writer and family man he was also an alcoholic and led a secret double life as a homosexual. His main themes include the duality of human nature: sometimes dramatized as the disparity between a character’s decorous social persona and inner corruption. His is a literary approach which has given rise to many imitators, perhaps the best known of whom is Anne Tyler. He’s sometimes called ‘the Checkhov of the suburbs’.

Nadine GordimerNadine Gordimer is one of the few modern writers who have developed the short story as a literary genre beyond what Virginia Woolf pushed it to in the early modernist phase. She starts off in modern post-Chekhovian 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, she experiments heavily with point of view, narrative perspective, unexplained incidents, switches between internal monologue and third person narrative and a heavy use of ‘as if’ prose where narrator-author boundaries become very blurred. 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. All of this can 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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© Roy Johnson 2004

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Twentieth Century – literary timeline – part 1

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a chronicle of events, literatures, politics, and the arts

1895. X-rays discovered; invention of the cinematograph; trial and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde; Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest and An Ideal Husband; H.G. Wells, The Time Machine.

1896. Wireless telegraphy invented; Abyssinians defeat occupying Italian forces – first defeat of colonising power by natives; Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure; Anton Chekhov, The Seagull; Daily Mail first published.

1897. Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee; Henry James, The Spoils of Poynton , What Masie Knew; Bram Stoker, Dracula.

1898. Second Anglo-Boer War begins. Henry James, The Turn of the Screw ; Thomas Hardy, Wessex Poems; George Bernard Shaw, Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant; H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds.

1899. British disasters in South Africa. Schoenberg Verklarte Nacht; Henry James, The Awkward Age; Kate Chopin, The Awakening; Anton Chekhov, Uncle Vanya.

1900. Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim; Deaths of Nietzsche, Wilde, and Ruskin; Max Planck announces quantum theory. Daily Express started.

1901. Queen Victoria dies – Edwardian period begins; First wireless communication between UK and USA; H.G.Welles, The First Men in the Moon; Rudyard Kipling, Kim; First Nobel prize for literature – R.P.A.Sully Prudhomme (F).

1902. End of Boer War; Henry James, The Wings of the Dove;
Arnold Bennett Anna of the Five Towns; Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness; Nobel prize – T. Mommsen (G).

Click for details at AmazonOxford Companion to Twentieth Century Literature in English is a new reference guide to English-language writers and writing throughout the present century, in all major genres and from all around the world – from Joseph Conrad to Will Self, Virginia Woolf to David Mamet, Ezra Pound to Peter Carey, James Joyce to Amy Tan. Includes entries on literary movements, periodicals, and over 400 individual works, as well as articles on some 2,400 authors, plus a good introduction by John Sutherland.

1903. First flight in heavier-than-air machine by Wright brothers in USA; first silent movie, The Great Train Robbery; Henry James, The Ambassadors; Daily Mirror started; Nobel prize – B. Bjornson (N).

1904. New York subway opens; Russo-Japanese war begins; Henry James, The Golden Bowl; Joseph Conrad, Nostromo; Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard; Death of Chekhov; Nobel prize – F. Mistral (F) and J. Echegary (Sp).

1905. ‘Bloody Sunday’ massacre of protesters in St Petersburg; Einstein, Special Theory of Relativity; Freud, Theory of Sexuality; E.M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread; Nobel prize – H. Sienkiewicz (P).

1906. First Liberal government in UK; death of Ibsen; General strike in Russia – followed by first (limited) democratic parliament; Women’s Suffrage movement active; San Francisco destroyed by earthquake and fire; Labour Party formed. Nobel prize – G. Carducci (I)

1907. Belgium seizes Congo; Austria seizes Bosnia and Herzegovina; Picasso introduces cubism; first electric washing machine; Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent; E.M.Forster, The Longest Journey; Nobel prize – Rudyard Kipling (UK)

1908. Ford introduces Model-T; Elgar’s First Symphony; E.M.Forster, A Room with a View; first Old Age Pensions; Nobel prize – R. Eucken (G)

1909. Ford produces first cheap cars – Model T; Death of George Meredith; Bleriot flies across English Channel; Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto; Vaughn Williams Fantasy on a Theme of Thomas Tallis; Nobel – S. Lagerlöf (S)

The Twentieth CenturyTwentieth-century Britain is an account of political, industrial, commercial, and cultural development in England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland. It’s particularly strong on the changing face of government, and it also relates issues of the day to the great writers and artists of the period. This ‘very short introduction’ series offers a potted account of the subject in handy pocket-book format, with plenty of suggestions for further reading.

1910. Death of Tolstoy, Edward VII, and Florence Nightingale; E.M.Forster, Howards End; Arnold Bennett, Clayhanger; H.G.Wells, The History of Mr Polly; Nobel prize – P. Heyse (G).

1911. Rutherford discovers structure of atom in Manchester; Chinese revolution; Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes; D.H. Lawrence, The White Peacock; Nobel prize – M. Maeterlink (Be).

1912. China becomes a republic following revolution; Sinking of the Titanic; railway, mining, and coal strikes in UK. Daily Herald started; Schoenberg Pierrot Lunaire; Nobel prize – G. Hauptmann (G)

1913. New Statesman started; first crossword puzzle; Thomas Mann, Death in Venice; D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers; Stravinsky The Rite of Spring; Nobel prize – R. Tagore (In)

1914. Outbreak of first world war; first traffic lights; Panama Canal opened; James Joyce, Dubliners; Marcel Proust begins to publish A la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past); Nobel prize – not awarded.

1915. First air attacks on London; Germans use poison gas in war; Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis; Einstein, General Theory of Relativity; D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow; Ford Maddox Ford, The Good Soldier; D.W.Griffith, The Birth of a Nation; Nobel prize – R. Roland (F).

1916. First Battle of the Somme; Battle of Verdun; Australians slaughtered in Gallipoli campaign; Easter Rising in Dublin; James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Prokofiev Classical Symphony; Nobel prize – V. von Heidenstam (S).

1917. USA enters the war; October Revolution in Russia; battle of Passchendaele; T.S. Eliot Prufrock and Other Observations; Nobel prize – K. Gjellerup (D) and H. Pontoppidan (Da).

1918. Second Battle of the Somme; German offensive collapses; end of war [Nov 11]; Votes for women over 30; influenza pandemic kills millions; Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians; Nobel prize – not awarded.

1919. Peace Treaty ratified at Versailles; Einstein’s Relativity Theory confirmed during solar eclipse; Breakup of former Habsburg Empire; Alcock and Brown make first flight across Atlantic; prohibition in US; Ronald Firbank, Valmouth; Franz Kafka, In the Penal Colony; Nobel prize – K. Spitteler (Sw).

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© Roy Johnson 2005

Twentieth century literature
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Twentieth Century – literary timeline – part 2

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a chronicle of events, literature, and politics

1920. League of Nations established; Oxford University admits women;
D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love; Nobel prize – K. Hamsun (N).

1921. Irish Free State proclaimed; extreme inflation in Germany; Fatty Arbuckle scandal in US; Nobel prize – Anatole France (F).

1922. Fascists march on Rome under Mussolini; Kemel Ataturk founds modern Turkey; T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land; James Joyce, Ulysses; Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party; Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus; John Galsworthy, The Forsyth Saga; Nobel prize – J. Benavente (Sp).

1923. Charleston craze; BBC begins radio broadcasting in the UK; William Walton Facade; Nobel prize – W.B. Yeats (Ir).

1924. First UK Labour government formed under Ramsey MacDonald (lasts nine months); Deaths of Lenin, Franz Kafka, and Joseph Conrad; Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain; E.M. Forster, A Passage to India; Nobel prize – W. Raymont (P).

1925. John Logie Baird televises an image of a human face; Webern Wozzeck; Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf; Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway; Nobel prize – George Bernard Shaw (UK).

1926. UK General Strike; first demonstration of television in UK; Fritz Lang, Metropolis; Nobel prize – G. Deledda (I).

1927. Lindbergh flies solo across Atlantic; first talkie film – Al Jolson in ‘The Jazz Singer’; Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse; Nobel prize – Henri Bergson (Fr).

Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Literature - Click for details at AmazonOxford Companion to Twentieth Century Literature in English is a new reference guide to English-language writers and writing throughout the present century, in all major genres and from all around the world – from Joseph Conrad to Will Self, Virginia Woolf to David Mamet, Ezra Pound to Peter Carey, James Joyce to Amy Tan. Includes entries on literary movements, periodicals, and over 400 individual works, as well as articles on some 2,400 authors, plus a good introduction by John Sutherland.

1928. Women in UK get same voting rights as men; Death of Thomas Hardy; first Oxford English Dictionary published; penicillin discovered;
D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover; Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall; Nobel prize – S. Undset (N).

1929. Slump in US, followed by collapse of New York Stock Exchange; Start of world economic depression; Second UK Labour government under MacDonald;
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own; first experimental television broadcast; Kurt Weil The Threepenny Opera; Nobel prize – Thomas Mann (G).

1930. Mass unemployment in UK; Death of D.H. Lawrence.
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying; Nobel prize – Sinclair Lewis (US).

1931. Resignation of UK Labour government, followed by formation of national coalition government; Empire State building completed in New York; Virginia Woolf, The Waves; Nobel prize – R.A. Karfeldt (S).

1932. Hunger marches start in UK; scientists split the atom; air conditioning invented; Aldous Huxley, Brave New World; Nobel prize – John Galsworthy (UK).

1933. Adolf Hitler appointed Chancellor of Germany; first Nazi concentration camps; prohibition ends in US; Radio Luxembourg begins commercial broadcasts to UK; George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London;Jean Vigo, L’Atalante; Nobel prize – Ivan Bunin (USSR).

1934. Hitler becomes Dictator; Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust; Samuel Beckett, More Pricks than Kicks; Nobel prize – Luigi Pirandello (I).

1935. Germany re-arms; Italians invade Abyssinia (Ethiopia); Prokofiev Romeo and Juliet; Nobel prize – not awarded.

1936. Death of George V in UK, followed by Edward VIII, who is forced to abdicate; Stalinist show trials in USSR; Civil War in Spain begins; Germany re-occupies the Rheinland; BBC begins television transmissions; Aaron Copland El Salon Mexico; Nobel prize – Eugene O’Neil (USA).

1937. Neville Chamberlain UK prime minister; Destruction of Guernica;
George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier; Nobel prize – Roger Martin du Gard (Fr).

Twentieth Century Britain - Click for details at AmazonTwentieth-century Britain is an account of political, industrial, commercial, and cultural development in England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland. It’s particularly strong on the changing face of government, and it also relates issues of the day to the great writers and artists of the period. This ‘very short introduction’ series offers a potted account of the subject in handy pocket-book format, with plenty of suggestions for further reading.

1938. Germans occupy Austria; Chamberlain meets Hitler to make infamous Munich ‘agreement’ to prevent war; Samuel Beckett, Murphy; John Dos Passos, USA; Nobel prize – Pearl S. Buck (USA).

1939. Fascists win Civil War in Spain; Stalin makes pact with Hitler; Germany invades Poland; Britain and France declare war on Germany; helicopter invented;
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake; Nobel prize – F.E. Silanpaa (Fi).

1940. Germany invades north-west Europe; Fall of France; British troops evacuated from Dunkirk; Battle of Britain; Start of ‘Blitz’ bombing raids over London; Churchill heads national coalition government; assassination of Trotsky; Nobel prize – not awarded.

1941. Germany invades USSR; Japanese destroy US fleet at Pearl Harbour; USA enters the war; siege of Leningrad; Deaths of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf; Orson Wells, Citizen Kane; Nobel prize – not awarded.

1942. Battle of Stalingrad; Battle of Midway; Beveridge report establishes basis of modern Welfare State; T-shirt invented; Nobel prize – not awarded.

1943. Anglo-American armies invade Italy; Warsaw uprising; Nobel prize – not awarded.

1944. D-Day invasion of France; ball-point pens go on sale; German V1 and V2 rockets fired; R.A. Butler’s Education Act; Aaron Copland Appalachian Spring; Nobel prize – J.V. Jensen (Da).

1945. End of war in Europe; Atomic bombs dropped on Japan; first computer built; microwave oven invented; United Nations founded; huge Labour victory in UK general election; Atlee becomes prime minister, George Orwell, Animal Farm; Nobel prize – G. Mistral (Ch).

1946. Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ speech; Nuremberg war trials; bikinis introduced; United Nations opens in New York; Nobel prize – Herman Hesse (Sw)

1947. Marshall Plan of aid to Europe; Jewish refugees turned away by UK; Polaroid camera invented; coal and other industries nationalised in UK; transfer of power to independent India, Pakistan, and Burma. Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus; Nobel prize – A. Gide (Fr)

1948. Berlin airlift; state of Israel founded; Railways and electricity nationalised in UK; Bevan launches National Health Service in UK. Nobel prize – T.S. Eliot (UK)

1949. East Germany created; Mao Tse Tung declares Republic of China; NATO founded; Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex; George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty Four; Nobel prize – W. Faulkner (USA)

The Twentieth Centurynext

© Roy Johnson 2009

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