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Ethan Frome

July 12, 2011 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Edidth Wharton wrote the first version of Ethan Frome in French, as an exercise for her tutor and gave it the title Hiver (1907). It consisted of only a few pages, and was abandoned unfinished. But she returned to the story in 1911 and added the structural device of the outer narrator. Some people see the story as a reflection of Wharton’s own life, since it was around this time that she brought to an end both her own unhappy marriage and her love affair with W. Morton Fullerton. However, it is also possible to see in the story elements of her much earlier novel The House of Mirth (1905).

Edith Wharton

She regarded the novella as a significant turning point in her career as a writer – the end of her ‘apprenticeship’ as she called it. And for both its form and its brevity it has become a classic in the teaching of American literature, though it’s not so well known in Britain and the rest of Europe. However, it is an amazingly powerful story, and is told in a stark stripped-down style which suits both its subject and its setting of poor New England farming country.

Ethan Frome – critical commentary

Structure

The bulk of the narrative concerns events which take place within the space of only two or three days. But the story is ‘framed by a brief introduction and afterward which reveal the state of affairs twenty years later. The dramatic effect of this framing device is to both create narrative tension and to emphasise the fact that the events of these few days have an effect which lasts for the remainder of the characters’ lives.

In the introduction an unnamed narrator (an engineer or project manager) stays in the local town whilst he is working nearby. He learns something of Ethan’s background from the locals, and hires him as a driver. One night they are cut off by a snow storm, and Ethan offers him accommodation for the night. This is related in first person narrative mode.
Part two is a flashback in third person omniscient narrative mode recounting events that took place twenty years earlier. This includes Ethan’s unhappy marriage to Zeena, his passion for Mattie, and the events leading up to their fateful sledge ride.
The afterward returns in first person mode to the morning after the introduction, in which the tragic consequences of the sledge ride are revealed to the narrator.

Narrative

The narrator claims that he has pieced together the story from scraps of information related to him by the local inhabitants. However, much of the story’s substance consists of the thoughts and feelings of Ethan and Mattie which only they could have known. Ethan is characterised as a taciturn and remote person who has been damaged by his life experiences, and the implication of the tale is that Mattie has been reduced to an almost vegetative state: so it is very unlikely that they would have given the narrator an account of their personal lives.

This is a weakness of narrative logic, but it is amply compensated by the concentrated drama of the main story itself.

The novella

You might wonder why Ethan Frome is generally regarded as a novella rather than a long short story. It’s because it possesses all the classic features of a novella.

Unity of place
Everything in the story takes place in Starkfield. The narrator arrives there; the events of twenty years earlier all took place there; and all the characters concerned are still there when the story ends.

Unity of action
The essential drama of the story unfolds in more or less one continuous action. Ethan realises he is attracted to Mattie – and so does Zeena. He enjoys his chaste dinner with her. And Zeena returns the following day with her plan to break up the relationship – at which Ethan rebels and takes Mattie on the fateful sledge ride.

These events are compressed into the shortest possible chronological sequence – which is framed by the narrator’s introduction and conclusion.

Unity of atmosphere
The events take place in winter, and the grim cold blanketting of snow remains present throughout as a unifying feature and a reminder of the emotionally life-supressing forces at work in the story.

Unity of character
There are a number of named characters in the story, but all of the drama is focussed on the three principals – Ethan, Zeena, and Mattie – who are locked together in a desperate power struggle.

They are locked into a triangle of rivalry at the start of events. Both Ethan and Mattie wish to escape from the bitter dominance of Zeena. But the power nexus is given an ironic twist be the events of the denouement: both Ethan and Mattie become entirely dependent on Zeena, who is forced to look after them.

Use of symbols
The persistent presence of cold and snow reflects the sexual repression which pervades the entire story.

Ethan’s house has lost part of its previous shape, just as he has become permanently injured as a result of the big ‘smash-up’ in the sledge ride.

Zeena has a glass bowl (a wedding present) which she never uses – but it is broken during the meagre supper that Ethan and Mattie share on their evening together.

The main issue
A short story is often a small incident from life which illuminates a character, or presents a moment of revelation. But a novella deals with a subject which stands for a much larger and all-important statement about the larger issues of life. It might contain a similar number of characters, but they represent more universal forces at work.

Ethan Frome deals with the entire adult lives of its three principal characters. The actions they take in the few crucial days which form the crux of the story turn out to determine the rest of their lives.

Ethan Frome – study resources

Ethan Frome – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

Ethan Frome – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

Ethan Frome – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

Ethan Frome – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

Ethan Frome – Cliffs Notes – Amazon UK

Ethan Frome – Spark Notes – Amazon UK

Ethan Frome – York Notes – Amazon UK

Ethan Frome – Norton Critical Editions – Amazon UK

Ethan Frome – free eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

Ethan Frome – free audioBook version at Project Gutenberg

Ethan Frome – DVD of 1993 movie adaptation – Amazon UK

Ethan Frome – DVD of 1993 movie adaptation – Amazon US

Ethan Frome – Kindle eBook edition

A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Ethan Frome – plot summary

Ethan Frome is a poor working farmer who lives in a small remote town in Massachusetts. He exists in a state of near poverty with his wife Zeena (Zenobia), a grim, prematurely aged woman who makes hypochondria her hobby and his life a misery. Ethan has travelled as far as Florida and has intellectual aspirations, but he has never been able to develop or fulfil them. Living with them as an unpaid household help is Zeena’s cousin, Mattie Silver, a young woman who has lost her parents.

When Ethan escorts Mattie home from the local dance, he realises that he is deeply moved by her presence. This is something his wife is aware of, and she plans to be rid of the girl. When Zeena goes away overnight to consult a doctor, Ethan plans to enjoy a rare evening together with Mattie. They eat a humble supper together, and nothing except good feelings pass between them.

Next day Zeena returns to announce that she has ‘complications’ that will require a full time servant who she has already hired, and that Mattie must leave. Ethan is horrified by the prospect and makes plans to leave Zeena, but realises that he hasn’t the money or the prospects to support Mattie.

Nevertheless, he defies his wife and insists on driving Mattie to the station. On the way there he and Mattie declare their love for each other. Before the train arrives he fulfils a promise to take her sledging. After one very exhilarating run down a dangerous slope, Mattie proposes a suicide pact so that they will spend their last moments together. Ethan agrees, but instead of being united in death, they are both horribly injured.

Ethan and Mattie spend the rest of their lives in the care of Zeena.

first edition 1911

Principal characters

I	an unnamed outer narrator who works in engineering
Ethan Frome	a poor farmer with aspirations for a better life
Zeena (Zenobia)	his grim, prematurely aged wife, who makes a career of hypochondria
Harmon Gow	a Starkfield resident
Mrs Ned Hale	the narrator’s landlady
Michael Eady	Irish store owner
Denis Eady	his son, who dances with Mattie
Mattie Silver	Zeena’s cousin
Andrew Hale	a builder
Jotham Powell	a hired hand who does work for Ethan

Film adaptation

1993 film adaptation starring Liam Neeson

Other works by Edith Wharton

The Age of Innocence (1920) is Edith Wharton’s most famous novel, written immediately after the end of the First World War. It’s a brilliantly realized anatomy of New York society in the 1870s. Newland Archer is charming, tactful, and enlightened. He accepts society’s standards and abides by its rules, but he also recognizes its limitations. His engagement to the impeccable May Welland assures him of a safe and conventional future – until the arrival of May’s cousin Ellen Olenska puts all his plans in jeopardy. Independent, free-thinking, and scandalously separated from her husband, Ellen forces Archer to question the values and assumptions of his narrow world. As their love for each other grows, Archer has to decide where his ultimate loyalty lies.
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The Custom of the Country (1913) is Edith Wharton’s satiric anatomy of American society in the first decade of the twentieth century. It follows the career of Undine Spragg, recently arrived in New York from the midwest and determined to conquer high society. Glamorous, selfish, mercenary and manipulative, her principal assets are her striking beauty, her tenacity, and her father’s money. With her sights set on an advantageous marriage, Undine pursues her schemes in a world of shifting values, where triumph is swiftly followed by disillusion. This is a study of modern ambition and materialism written a hundred years before its time.
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The House of Mirth (1905) is the story of Lily Bart, who is beautiful, poor, and still unmarried at twenty-nine. In her search for a husband with money and position she betrays her own heart and sows the seeds of the tragedy that finally overwhelms her. The book is a disturbing analysis of the stifling limitations imposed upon women of Wharton’s generation. In telling the story of Lily Bart, who must marry to survive, Wharton recasts the age-old themes of family, marriage, and money in ways that transform the traditional novel of manners into an arresting modern document of cultural anthropology.
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Edith Wharton – web links

Edith Wharton at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major novels, tutorials on the shorter fiction, bibliographies, critiques of the shorter fiction, and web links.

Edith Wharton at Gutenberg
Free eTexts of the major novels and collections of stories in a variety of digital formats – also includes travel writing and interior design.

Edith Wharton at Wikipedia
Full details of novels, stories, and travel writing, adaptations for television and the cinema, plus web links to related sites.

The Edith Wharton Society
Old but comprehensive collection of free eTexts of the major novels, stories, and travel writing, linking archives at University of Virginia and Washington State University.

The Mount: Edith Wharton’s Home
Aggressively commercial site devoted to exploiting The Mount – the house and estate designed by Edith Wharton. Plan your wedding reception here.

Edith Wharton at Fantastic Fiction
A compilation which purports to be a complete bibliography, arranged as novels, collections, non-fiction, anthologies, short stories, letters, and commentaries – but is largely links to book-selling sites, which however contain some hidden gems.

Edith Wharton’s manuscripts
Archive of Wharton holdings at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

More on Edith Wharton
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

Eugene Pickering

July 12, 2013 by Roy Johnson

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

Eugene Pickering first appeared in magazine form in The Atlantic Monthly for October—November 1874. Stories by popular writers William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and Oliver Wendell Holmes appeared in the same magazine, as well as poetry by Bret Harte and Henry W, Longfellow, The tale was then reprinted in book form amongst A Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales the following year.

Bad Homburg – Germany

Eugene Pickering – critical commentary

Eugene is not only naive in the ways of the world, having been isolated and cosseted by his father for twenty-seven years, but he is also symbolically short-sighted. He is unable to ‘see’ Madam Blumenthal as the rogue female seductress. She is glamorous, experienced, bohemian, an author, and (according to Niedermeyer) something of an adventuress. What this tale represents then is yet another warning to men about the dangers of forming romantic relationships with women.

Reinforcing this ‘fear of engagement’ element in the first part of the story is the pre-arranged contract of marriage which has been created by Pickering’s father. Eugene Eugene refuses to open the letter (thinking it is a summons to the altar) and wishes to ‘live’ freely before he submits himself to what he clearly sees as the negative experience of Matrimony. This ‘fear of marriage’ motif is a theme to which James turned again and again in his tales – from The Path of Duty to Owen Wingrave

Eugene Pickering – study resources

The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon US

Complete Stories 1874—1884 – Library of America – Amazon UK

Complete Stories 1874—1884 – Library of America – Amazon US

Eugene Pickering – Kindle edition

Eugene Pickering – Paperback edition – Amazon UK

Eugene Pickering – eBook versions at Gutenberg

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

Eugene Pickering – plot summary

Part I At Bad Homburg in Germany an un-named narrator sees an old acquaintance Eugene Pickering rather shyly gambling at the tables with an attractive woman who wins money. The two men meet next day, and the narrator recalls how they were schoolboy friends. Pickering has been sheltered and cosseted by an over-protective father who has recently died. He now feels liberated and full of potential, but lacking in strength.

Shortly before his death, his father has made him promise to marry Isabel Vernon, the daughter of an old business associate – a promise he feels obliged to honour. He has received a letter he has not opened, believing it to be a summons to the altar: he asks the narrator to keep it for him for a month whilst he explores his desire to live freely. He also reveals that he has an appointment to meet the glamorous Madam Blumenthal. The narrator advises him to leave Homburg immediately, but he refuses. The next day Pickering has been bowled over with enthusiasm for Madam Blumenthal and feels he has dispelled all his previous diffidence.

Part II The narrator’s friend Niedermeyer warns him against Madam Blumenthal, saying that she is bohemian, raffish, is critical of marriage, and has been left with little money by her deceased husband. He recounts the story of a strict officer who fell in love with her , but was rejected when he asked her to give up writing novels. She claimed motives of pure art, flings her manuscript into the fire, but publishes it shortly afterwards nevertheless.

The narrator meets her at a concert and finds her very attractive. She claims to be a democrat and a ‘revolutionist’. She asks him to tell her all about Pickering. The narrator realises that Pickering is hopelessly in love with her. He has made a full declaration of love to her, but she says she will respond to him after he has more experience of life and women.

The narrator visits Madam Blumenthal in order to assess her motives and her sincerity. She asks him again about Pickering, because she fears that he is holding something back. The ‘something’ is his engagement to Isabel Vernon, which the narrator then reveals to Madam Blumenthal.

When the two men meet next day, Pickering reveals that he has renounced the promise made to his father, has told Madam Blumenthal about it, and asked her to marry him. She wants three days to decide, and goes to Wiesbaden. Niedermeyer predicts that she will turn the episode into a little romance and then drop Pickering. But Pickering sends a note from Wiesbaden saying that she has accepted him

Some days later however, the narrator visits Pickering in Cologne, where he reveals that Madam Blumenthal has gone back on her word. She was merely testing him to see how far he would go. The narrator then returns the sealed letter he has been keeping for Pickering. It turns out not to be a summons but a dismissal: the girl refused to be bound by her father’s arrangement.

The two men then travel on in Europe, Pickering recovers his spirits, and when they finally reach Venice he is planning to visit Isabel in Smyrna. Six months later he reports that she is a very charming woman.

Principal characters

I	the un-named narrator
Eugene Pickering	his old school friend
Mr Pickering	Eugene’s father, a widower
Mr Vernon	business friend of Mr Pickering in Smyrna
Isabel Vernon	his daughter
Madam Anastasia Blumenthal	a glamorous bohemian widow
Mr Blumenthal	her poor Jewish husband
Niedermeyer	an Austrian ex-diplomat, friend of the narrator

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

Other works by Henry James

The Bostonians (1886) is a novel about the early feminist movement. The heroine Verena Tarrant is an ‘inspirational speaker’ who is taken under the wing of Olive Chancellor, a man-hating suffragette and radical feminist. Trying to pull her in the opposite direction is Basil Ransom, a vigorous young man from the South to whom Verena becomes more and more attracted. The dramatic contest to possess her is played out with some witty and often rather sardonic touches, and as usual James keeps the reader guessing about the outcome until the very last page.

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What Masie Knew (1897) A young girl is caught between parents who are in the middle of personal conflict, adultery, and divorce. Can she survive without becoming corrupted? It’s touch and go – and not made easier for the reader by the attentions of an older man who decides to ‘look after’ her. This comes from the beginning of James’s ‘Late Phase’, so be prepared for longer and longer sentences. In fact it’s said that whilst composing this novel, James switched from writing longhand to using dictation – and it shows if you look carefully enough – part way through the book.
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The Ambassadors (1903) Lambert Strether is sent from America to Paris to recall Chadwick Newsome, a young man who is reported to be compromising himself by an entanglement with a wicked woman. However, Strether’s mission fails when he is seduced by the social pleasures of the European capital, and he takes Newsome’s side. So a second ambassador is dispatched in the form of the more determined Sarah Pocock. She delivers an ultimatum which is resisted by the two young men, but then an accident reveals unpleasant truths to Strether, who is faced by a test of loyalty between old Europe and the new USA. This edition presents the latest scholarship on James and includes an introduction, notes, selected criticism, a text summary and a chronology of James’s life and times.
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Buy the book at Amazon US

Henry James – web links

Henry James at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides, tutorials on the Complete Tales, book reviews. bibliographies, and web links.

The Complete Works
Sixty books in one 13.5 MB Kindle eBook download for £1.92 at Amazon.co.uk. The complete novels, stories, travel writing, and prefaces. Also includes his autobiographies, plays, and literary criticism – with illustrations.

The Ladder – a Henry James website
A collection of eTexts of the tales, novels, plays, and prefaces – with links to available free eTexts at Project Gutenberg and elsewhere.

A Hyper-Concordance to the Works
Japanese-based online research tool that locates the use of any word or phrase in context. Find that illusive quotable phrase.

The Henry James Resource Center
A web site with biography, bibliographies, adaptations, archival resources, suggested reading, and recent scholarship.

Online Books Page
A collection of online texts, including novels, stories, travel writing, literary criticism, and letters.

Henry James at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of eTexts, available in a variety of eBook formats.

The Complete Letters
Archive of the complete correspondence (1855-1878) work in progress – published by the University of Nebraska Press.

The Scholar’s Guide to Web Sites
An old-fashioned but major jumpstation – a website of websites and resouces.

Henry James – The Complete Tales
Tutorials on the complete collection of over one hundred tales, novellas, and short stories.

Henry James on the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations of James’s novels and stories for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production features, film reviews, box office, and even quizzes.

More tales by James
More on literature
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

Eugenie Grandet

June 7, 2017 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Eugenie Grandet (1833) was one of the first great works to emerge from Balzac’s grand survey of French society, a collection to which he gave the general title La Comedie Humaine. It’s a short novel, but one that signals all the themes he was to explore in the many volumes that followed. Principal issues include social ambition, thwarted dreams, disappointed love, greed, and underpinning everything else the accumulation of property and the yearning for social status.

If you have not read Balzac before, this is a good place to start. The story is quite simple. A young provincial girl Eugenie is dominated by her tyrannical father, the miser Felix Grandet. She falls in love with her playboy cousin Charles, and when he is suddenly left penniless she gives him all her money and waits seven years for him to make his fortune abroad. Events do not turn out quite as she hopes – or as the reader might think.

Eugenie Grandet – commentary

Characterisation

This is an early work by Balzac, and some of the characters are not particularly well defined. It is difficult to tell the difference between the members of the Grassins and the Cruchots for instance, the two families who are both hoping to marry a son to the heiress Eugenie. But one character dominates the entire narrative – the miser Felix Grandet. He is relentlessly mean, penny-pinching, acquisitive, and pathologically obsessed with money – gold in particular. His character dominates the entire novel, from first page to last.

He not only apportions the meagre rations for the family meals every day, but he puts out the fire in one room so as to save fuel when going into another. He doles out the lumps of sugar for people’s coffee – and even cuts up the lumps into smaller pieces in his spare time.

This petty domestic tyranny is quite amusing, yet at the level of commercial enterprise he is enormously successful. From his origins as a humble cooper, he acquires vineyards; he sells his wine at a profit; he outsmarts his competitors; he buys and sells commodities at the right time, and he calculates the profitability of his land to maximise its return on investment.

However, the extent of his greed reaches far more serious depths. He eventually defrauds his own daughter by arranging a legal document in which she signs over control of her own inheritance to him. And he remains au fond a study in pathological avarice – obsessed by gold, which he hoards in his closely guarded room and gloats over at night in private. He is memorable because he is so much larger than life figure.

His daughter Eugenie on the other hand is the innocent victim of his psychological sadism and domestic tyranny. Eugenie and her mother suffer his bullying without complaint for the major part of the novel. There is an element of Cordelia and King Lear in their relationship.

But Eugenie’s provincial Calvary is interrupted by a major occurrence in her otherwise uneventful life. She falls in love with her dashing cousin Charles. This at first has all the appearance of a fairy tale – the princess in her metaphorical tower rescued by the arrival of a handsome prince.

Balzac continues to exploit reader expectations in pursuit of this portrayal of virtuous innocence. Eugenie and Charles seal their mutual love with a pact of fidelity, Eugenie gives him all her money to fund his colonial expedition, and she then waits for him patiently for seven years. It is at this point that Balzac reveals his creative genius with a double irony and a dramatic shift in Eugenie’s characterisation.

The double irony

Charles turns out to be a shallow-minded adventurer. He is revealed as an unscrupulous slave trader who on return to Europe seeks to marry into the lower echelons of the aristocracy. His letter to Eugenie renouncing their pact of eternal love strikes her like a hammer blow.

But she does not capitulate to the shock in a conventional manner. Instead, she contracts a marriage of convenience to someone else – on the explicit condition that it is never consummated. She does this still bearing what she calls ‘an inextinguishable love in [her] heart’- for the memory of what Charles once was to her. That is part one of the double irony.

Part two comes in successive phases. First Eugenie marries her wealthy suitor the President de Bonfons. She thereby enhances her social status, and then on his early demise (and because they have by her design no children) she inherits his personal fortune to add to her own. Even after paying off her uncle’s bad debts she is still in possession of seventeen million Francs – a fact whose significance is not lost on the greedy and ambitious Charles.

But a further twist is yet to come – less dramatic, though just as significant in terms of the novel’s major themes. This immensely rich Eugenie, a widow at thirty-three, then lives on in the drab house where she was raised. Furthermore, she voluntarily adopts the frugal lifestyle of her earlier years, even dressing in her mother’s clothes. She becomes, in one sense, not unlike her father.

The Napoleonic Code

There is one feature to the background of events in the novel which may not be immediately apparent to readers unfamiliar with French society and its conventions. Following the revolution of 1793 there was a radical overhauling of the legal system. This included a law that required property and capital to be inherited solely via family connections.

If you are English with a million Pounds in the bank, you can leave this money to whomever you wish by making a will. You can nominate as legatees your children, your friends, or the Battersea Dogs Home. But in France, your money (and property) can only be willed to your children. [This is an over-simplification of a very complex system.]

In Eugenie Grandet the gold-obsessed Felix Grandet has made everyone suffer whilst amassing his considerable wealth. But fortunately for the sake of poetic justice, the entire property and its income from rents and dividends on government bonds reverts to Eugenie following her father’s death. She also increases her net worth by marrying the President – and because it is a marriage of convenience with no consummation and no possible children – she inherits all the President’s wealth on his demise.

The intrusive narrator

This is a term used to describe stories or novels in which the person telling the story (the narrator) intrudes his or her own opinions into the account of events. The narrator might be a fictional character, or it might be the author. Many narratives are presented by neutral or ‘invisible’ narrators who remain absent from the story they are telling.

Balzac on the other hand is one of literature’s most famously intrusive narrators. He pretends to be offering a neutral and unbiased account of events. This is in keeping with his claim that he is acting like a scientist or a professional sociologist, recording the history of French manners in the post-revolutionary epoch.

But he intrudes regularly and quite blatantly into his own stories to deliver his opinions on French history, to give mini-lectures on the workings of the financial markets, and homilies on ‘behalf’ of his own characters. He generalises wildly on the nature of men and women and their ‘place’ in society; he volunteers his opinions on famous works of art; and he proselytises repeatedly on behalf of the Catholic Church and the need to retain a Monarchy

This is a feature of Balzac’s style which some of his critics have found very irritating, but his defenders (and I am one of them) point out that many of his opinions reflect a well-founded knowledge of the way society worked at the time of his writing. His personal beliefs (Catholicism and Monarchism) can safely be ignored, because they do not seriously affect the logic of his narratives. And many of his aesthetic judgements have been substantiated by subsequent commentators and have stood the test of time. If there are occasional infelicities, this is a small price to pay for the entertaining exuberance of his volcanic creativity.

Balzac was a prodigiously productive novelist – but he was also a failed businessman. He knew how the markets worked. He knew that contracts drawn up by lawyers in one generation could influence the destinies of characters in the next. He knew the connections between the law, the stock market, and the lifestyles people could afford.

We read him not just as a great story teller, but also as a perceptive sociologist and even a political philosopher. When he reveals exactly the sources and extent of each character’s income, this is his method of showing how morals and manners were closely related to economics. It is not surprising that Balzac was one of Karl Marx’s favourite novelists.

Eugenie Grandet – study resources

Eugenie Grandet – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Eugenie Grandet – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Eugenie Grandet – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Eugenie Grandet – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

Eugenie Grandet – Everyman – Amazon UK

Eugenie Grandet – Everyman – Amazon US

Cambridge Companion to Balzac – Cambridge UP – Amazon UK

Eugenie Grandet – plot synopsis

Portrait of Bourgeois

An old miser Felix Grandet becomes a wealthy landowner and vine grower in Saumur. The locals speculate enviously on the extent of his wealth and wonder who will marry his daughter Eugenie. Grandet imposes a frugal and cheese-paring regime on the whole household, which is run by his faithful servant Big Nanon.

On Eugenie’s birthday the house is visited by the Grassis and the Grachots who bring presents. Both families are trying to marry a son into the Grandet family. Suddenly, a dashing young cousin Charles Grandet arrives from Paris.

The Cousin from Paris

Charles is a playboy and a dandy. Eugenie is overwhelmed by his charm and novelty. Grandet receives a letter from his brother Guillaume consigning the boy to his care. The brother is bankrupt and about to commit suicide. Charles wonders why his father has sent him to such a wretched and miserable house.

Provincial Love

Eugenie falls in love with Charles. She and Nanon start to break the frugal house rules to provide Charles with some lunch. Grandet arrives and is outraged by their extravagance. Grandet reveals to Charles the fact of his father’s death. He then sells off his wine stock and plans to invest in government bonds. He also devises a scheme to rescue his brother’s honour and the family name – but without spending any money.

A Miser’s Promises and Lovers’ Vows

Grandet pretends he is going to recover his brother’s debts and recruits the Grassins to act for him. He then travels secretly at night to sell all his gold. Eugenie reads Charles’ goodbye letter to his lover Annettte. She then gives him all the gold coins she has saved.

Grandet makes a lot of money from the sale of his gold. Eugenie and Charles enjoy the innocent birth of their love whilst he prepares to depart for the Indes. Grandet buys up all of Charles’s gold and arranges legal papers that renounce any claims Charles has on his father’s estate. Grandet then delays payments of his brother’s debts for the next five years.

Family Sorrows

Grandet discovers that Eugenie has given all her gold to Charles. He imprisons her in her room, and her mother becomes ill with the worry. The town’s people get to know and disapprove of Grandet. The lawyer Gruchot intercedes to point out that if Mme Grandet dies, Eugenie will inherit all her estate, depleting Grandet’s capital and property. Because of this, Grandet lifts his ban on Eugenie, but it is too late to save Mme Grandet, who dies. Grandet then cheats Eugenie out of her inheritance.

For the next five years Grandet instructs Eugenie on the running of his estates, then he too dies. As a result, Eugenie inherits seventeen million Francs, from which she pays Nanon a generous annuity. Nanon marries the gamekeeper, who becomes steward for the whole Grandet estates.

The Way of the World

For seven years Eugenie simply endures her fate. But Charles meanwhile has been a slave trader and an unscrupulous trader in the Indes. He has made his fortune, and is planning a loveless marriage into the fallen aristocracy in order to acquire a name and status. Eugenie receives his letter of dismissal from Paris and is devastated.

With her hopes crushed, she contracts an unconsummated marriage to the President de Bonfons. When he dies shortly afterwards, she becomes a widow at thirty-three, and the heiress to an even greater fortune. She devotes her life to charitable works, and goes on living a frugal life in the house of her father.

Eugenie Grandet – prinipal characters

Felix Grandet	a wine-grower, land-owner, miser, dealer in currency and government stocks
Mme Grandet	his timid and long-suffering wife
Eugenie Grandet	his innocent and virtuous daughter
Guillaume Grandet	his brother, who becomes bankrupt and commits suicide
Charles Grandet	Eugenie’s dashing and handsome cousin, with whom she falls in love
Big Nanon	the tall and strong household servant
Mr Conoillier	the gamekeeper who becomes the estate steward
President de Bonfons	suitor to Eugenie, who she eventually marries

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Europe

April 24, 2013 by Roy Johnson

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

Europe first appeared in Scribner’s Magazine for June 1899, and later the following year in the collection of stories The Soft Side published by Methuen.

Europe – critical commentary

This is a black comedy, in a somewhat similar spirit to James’s earlier story Four Meetings (1877) where the magnetic draw of European culture for Americans proves to be beyond the reach of Caroline Spencer, a New England schoolteacher. In her case she is defrauded of her life’s dream by her unscrupulous cousin.

Here too there is a family connection – but one much closer, of mother and daughters. Old Mrs Rimmel has had a successful earlier life with her celebrated husband, enjoyed her own European tour, and only had her three daughters late in life.

Now the implication is that the puritanical sense of duty that rules in their Boston household grinds the lives of the daughters into prematurely aged drudges, attending to the needs of their increasingly disoriented mother.

Europe as symbol

Europe functions as an idea, a dream of cultural riches – perhaps like some atavistic draw for the American descendents of European settlers for what might be, what could be. Certainly as someone who had lived on both contents throughout his life, James was very conscious of the European—American polarity and what it meant for both groups of people, and he frequently contrasted Europe with all types of Americans – sophisticated New Yorkers, puritannical Bostonians, gentlemanly southerners, and robust Californians.

The more suave New York narrator is able to pass between the two continents with ease, whereas the group of four Bostonian ladies are locked in an ethos of self-denying austerity. This is a strain of American culture which James had explored in greater depth before in works such as The Bostonians.

It is emphasised that the Rimmels are typical New Englanders – old Puritan stock – whereas the narrator is from New York. They have become trapped in a life-denying cycle of emotional inter-dependency. The narrator is particularly scathing about the old woman’s psychological grip on her daughters. She has had the pleasures and benefits of a European tour of her own when (much) younger, but is denying them the chance of the same experience. Only one of her daughters is able to make the break – and she never goes back

Europe – study resources

The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon US

Complete Stories 1898—1910 – Library of America – Amazon UK

Complete Stories 1898—1910 – Library of America – Amazon US

Europe – HTML New York edition

Europe – HTML version at Gutenberg

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

Europe – plot summary

Part I. After many years living in Boston as spinster ladies, Becky and Jane Rimmel are finally due to visit Europe, leaving their elderly widowed mother to be looked after by their sister Maria. Old Mrs Rimmel visited Europe many years before (in the early nineteenth century, it would seem) and the continent has been held up to the three daughters ever since as a sort of cultural Nirvanah. The ‘girls’ (who are in fact elderly) tease the story’s narrator about his knowledge of Europe and discuss the possibility of meeting up there.

Part II. However, just before their departure, their mother has a seizure, and the trip is postponed. The narrator discusses Mrs Rimmel’s immense age with his sister-in-law who is a friend of the family. Years pass by in which the narrator himself twice visits Europe, which the Rimmels claim is ‘waiting’ for them. The narrator feels angry that the three sisters are growing old, and that their mother is selfishly denying them valuable life experiences. Then suddenly Jane, the youngest daughter makes the break and travels to Europe with some friends the Hathaways. Old Mrs Rimmel begins to lose sense of time.

Part III. The Hathaways return from the European tour later that year – but they have left Jane behind, because she insists on seeing more of Europe. She has become self-assertive and rebellious, refuses to be chaperoned, and has taken to ‘flirting’. Her sister Becky is supporting her financially. The narrator is delighted by what he sees as the development of the sisters’ potential. When the narrator next visits Boston he is amazed to find Becky at his sister-in-law’s house, looking as old as her mother. He opines that Jane will never return from Europe, and Becky tells him that their mother is no longer alive.

Part IV. But when the narrator visits their home next day old Mrs Rimmel is corpse-like, but still living. She has persuaded herself that Jane has died in Europe. Becky then dies, having worn herself out with looking after her mother. The narrator visits the house again and finds Maria looking even older than her mother. She ruefully observes that she will now never visit Europe. Then old Mrs Rimmel, in what appears to be her last gasp of life, announces that Becky has gone to Europe – and the narrator agrees with her.

Principal characters

I	the un-named narrator
Mrs Rimmel	an elderly Bostonian widow
Becky Rimmel	her eldest daughter, who dies
Maria Rimmel	her daughter
Jane Rimmel	her youngest daughter, who leaves

Other works by Henry James

The Bostonians (1886) is a novel about the early feminist movement. The heroine Verena Tarrant is an ‘inspirational speaker’ who is taken under the wing of Olive Chancellor, a man-hating suffragette and radical feminist. Trying to pull her in the opposite direction is Basil Ransom, a vigorous young man to whom Verena becomes more and more attracted. The dramatic contest to possess her is played out with some witty and often rather sardonic touches, and as usual James keeps the reader guessing about the outcome until the very last page.

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Henry James – web links

Henry James at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides, tutorials on the Complete Tales, book reviews. bibliographies, and web links.

The Ladder – a Henry James website
A collection of eTexts of the tales, novels, plays, and prefaces – with links to available free eTexts at Project Gutenberg and elsewhere.

A Hyper-Concordance to the Works
Japanese-based online research tool that locates the use of any word or phrase in context. Find that illusive quotable phrase.

The Henry James Resource Center
A web site with biography, bibliographies, adaptations, archival resources, suggested reading, and recent scholarship.

Online Books Page
A collection of online texts, including novels, stories, travel writing, literary criticism, and letters.

Henry James at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of eTexts, available in a variety of eBook formats.

The Complete Letters
Archive of the complete correspondence (1855-1878) work in progress – published by the University of Nebraska Press.

The Scholar’s Guide to Web Sites
An old-fashioned but major jumpstation – a website of websites and resouces.

Henry James – The Complete Tales
Tutorials on the complete collection of over one hundred tales, novellas, and short stories.

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Explosion in a Cathedral

September 29, 2018 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study guide, commentary, political background

Explosion in a Cathedral (1962) is a major novel by Alejo Carpentier that deals with the effects of the French revolution in the Caribbean. Its central character is based on a real person, Victor Hughes, a baker’s son from Marseilles, who became a leading figure in events on the colonial island of Guadeloupe.

The novel was first published in Spanish with the title El Siglo de las Luces. The English version was translated from the French edition whose title was Le Siecle des Lumiers. Carpentier spoke French but wrote in Spanish. The English translation is by John Sturrock, and its title is taken from a painting that figures in the narrative and symbolises the explosive nature of the revolution.

Explosion in a Cathedral – commentary

The political background

The subject of Carpentier’s novel is the effects of the French Revolution in the Caribbean. At that time in the late eighteenth century (The Age of Enlightenment) the islands of this region were occupied by colonising Europeans – the French, the Dutch, the English, and the Spanish – all of whom were intermittently at war with each other.

A near-neighbour was America, which had undergone its own revolution in 1776. They had defeated their colonial occupiers the British, and declared the Rights of Man (written by Englishman Thomas Paine). All of these European powers (and America) were squabbling for the material wealth created by these Caribbean colonies – wealth generated by the use of slave labour.

The novel begins in Havana, Cuba, which at that time was under Spanish rule. The action then passes on to Guadeloupe, which the French adventurer Victor Hughes seizes from the English. His companion Esteban is then despatched to Cayenne, the capital city of French Guiana, after which he returns to Havana.

The main drama of the French revolution and its decisions unfold in Paris, outside the events of the fictional narrative. The revolution itself has already taken place, and is followed by the Terror in which many of the original leaders are executed. There is then a counter-revolution which reverses many of the radical proposals of the original revolutionaries.

During this process of upheaval the revolution accepted the principles of the universal rights of man – and abolished slavery, on which French (and other) colonies were entirely dependent. This decision was later diluted then reversed, but for a short while some of these colonies became for the first time in history republics governed by former slaves. Carpentier’s earlier novel The Kingdom of this World (1949) deals with this process in Hispaniola (Haiti).

Revolution as disruption

There were three political problems affecting the entire region of the Antilles (the Caribbean). First was the rapacious conflict between European colonising powers. In the scramble for wealth, countries formed strategic alliances with their enemies, then dissolved them just as quickly and formed new ones.

Second was the ever-changing decrees promulgated by the revolutionary centre in Paris. Mandatory rules were harshly imposed, then replaced by their opposites. One moment a leading figure could be a Supreme Hero, next he could be declared an Enemy of the People – and executed. The revolution was making up these rules as it went along.

And the rules didn’t just affect Paris: they applied throughout the whole of the newly-proclaimed republic, which included mainland France and its many colonies in the Caribbean and elsewhere. It is worth reflecting that Guiana, a country in Latin America almost on the equator, is still a colony of France, as is La Reunion, an island in the Indian Ocean. (Ironies of history: both of these colonies are now part of the European Union.)

The third problem was the delay of up to several weeks before any new decrees arrived in the Caribbean after a sea passage across the Atlantic. Events were changing rapidly in the metropolitan centre of Paris, but they could only reach the colonies via a lengthy sea voyage. The colonial outposts were often enforcing a set of rules that had already been superseded weeks or even months previously.

There was a fourth problem – well illustrated in the figure of Victor Hughes. When new regulations reached the colony, they were not always obeyed. Victor Hughes, as a purist from the first phase of the revolution, was prepared to export the guillotine as a symbol of the revolution’s fanatical desire to eliminate its enemies. But when the counter-revolution moderated this fanaticism, he refuses to accept its revised directives.

Carpentier assumes that his readers know these principal events and the leaders of the revolution. He generally alludes to the main figures – Robespierre, Danton, and Saint-Just – without naming them, and they are certainly not foregrounded.

Apart from Hughes, the main historical character who appears in the novel is the lesser-known Billaud-Varenne. He was an important figure during the Terror, but he had been overthrown during the events of the counter-revolution (Thermidor) and he had been exiled to Cayenne in French Guiana. He is reduced almost to a figure of fun – rotting in the colony to which the revolution exported its prisoners.

Esteban witnesses the same phenomenon when he (rather improbably) goes to southern France and finds the Basques resistant to new and long-delayed directives arriving from Paris. The revolutionaries re-name towns, but so far as the local people are concerned, Chauvin-Dragon remains Saint-Jean-de-Luz, just as it always has been.

Characters

Carpentier is trying to capture the sweep of grand scale historical events, and as such he does not concentrate so much on the psychology of individual characters as is common in many traditional European novels. In this he adopts a remarkably similar approach to the historical novels of the writer Victor Serge, which deal with the effects of the Russian revolution. The two writers were near-contemporaries, but there is little reason to believe that they were aware of each other.

The three principal characters in a traditional sense are the siblings Carlos and Sofia, plus their orphan cousin Esteban. Carlos plays almost no part in the story, most of which concerns Esteban’s travels and his reaction to revolutionary events.

Esteban follows Victor Hughes throughout the Caribbean (even to France at one point) and gradually becomes more sceptical about the revolution. He is uneducated, and clings to the traditional religious beliefs of his fellow countrymen. In this sense he represents the view of the average person.

He is intimately connected with the Caribbean and its land and sea. But he also has higher aspirations and goals, even if he is unable to articulate them in any meaningful manner.

Sofia, as a female representative of the historical period, is forced to take a passive, background role. She is close to her brother and her cousin, and she shares their enthusiasm for revolutionary principles. But she is unable to ‘find’ herself, even in her brief marriage to Jorge, until she leaves Havana and travels to join Victor Hughes, the man who has awakened her dormant sexuality. When he betrays his revolutionary principles, she deserts him and joins Esteban in Spain.

Revolution

Many critics of Carpentier’s novels observe that he often shows revolutions that degenerate into dictatorships, which then give rise to further revolts. They conclude from this that he has a cyclic view of history – one in which ‘history repeats itself’. That is, revolutions only lead to equally bloody counter-revolutions and no real progress is made. This seems to me an over-simplified and mistaken understanding of his work.

What Carpentier does not shirk as a responsible novelist is the fact that revolutions are violent and bloody events, often involving cruelty and injustice. But he does show very clearly that revolutions are a result of economic and class conflicts. More than that, he argues quite clearly that revolutions progress from below upwards, not as a result of decisions made by ruling elites.

In the context of the Caribbean, this is illustrated perfectly well by the case of the slave revolts – in which a dispossessed lower group (almost classless) rises against its oppressors – the owners and managers of the plantations. And as Carpentier points out, the abolition of slavery was not some altruistic diktat that arose from the good will of a Parisian committee. It was the outcome of numerous historical uprisings:

Ten years later the drums were beating in Haiti; in the Cap region the Muslim Mackandal, a one-armed man to whom lycanthropic powers were attributed, began a Revolution-by-Poison … Only seven years ago, just when it seemed that White Supremacy had been re-established on the continent, another black Mohammedan, Boukman, had risen in the Bosque Caiman in San Domingo, burning houses and devastating the countryside. And it was no more than three years ago that the negroes in Jamaica had rebelled again, to avenge the condemnation of two thieves who had been tortured in Trelawney Town.

A structural oddity

It should be reasonably clear that the structure of the novel is one that centres on the three orphaned relatives – Sofia, Carlos, and Esteban – confronted by a fourth man, Victor Hughes, who will change their lives. Esteban carries the main part of narrative events. It is through his eyes that we witness the early phases of the revolution in the Caribbean.

Later, the decay of revolutionary principles is witnessed by Sofia when she leaves Havana to join Hughes in his fiefdom at Cayenne in French Guiana. She becomes disenchanted by Hughes’ lack of principles and flees to Europe.

Carlos, who has been absent since the first pages of the novel, returns in its final chapter to uncover news of Sofia and Esteban in Madrid. They have remained committed to the earliest principles of the revolution and have disappeared into the fight to preserve them.

Yet there is an unexplained peculiarity about the structure of the novel. It actually begins with a short preface which is Esteban’s first-person account describing the erection of a guillotine on board La Pique as it sails for Guadeloupe. There is never any return to this first-person mode of delivering the story, nor is there any explanation offered for how this preface relates to the rest of the novel.

The reading experience

If you have not experienced the work of Alejo Carpentier before, your first exposure to this novel might seem rather strange, or the narrative almost laboured. He was trying to create a new approach to fiction which combined the traditions of European culture with the need to reflect the world of the central Americas and their exotic substance and histories.

In Explosion in a Cathedral he is also trying to show historical and political forces at work – with the result that interest in individuals takes a secondary place in the narrative. His emphasis is on social change and the ideological forces that shape society as a whole.

What no reader can be unaware of, even in translation, is his deep feeling for the physical world in which he sets the events of his narrative, the wide range of his interests, and the spectacular technical vocabulary with which he articulates his vision of the world.

Carpentier was a student of both music and architecture, and he has written on both these subjects, which are plainly evident in the novel. But he also demonstrates a profound feeling for topics as wide-ranging as oceanography, domestic furnishing, and even the fabrics of everyday clothing and the flavours and ingredients of ethnic cuisine.

The girandoles and chandeliers, the lustrous mirrors and glass shutters of Esteban’s childhood had reappeared … In a food shop, next door to a butcher’s where turtle meat was displayed alongside a shoulder of lamb studded with cloves of garlic, Esteban once more saw wonders he had quite forgotten – bottles of porter, thick Westphalia hams, smoked eels and red mullet, anchovies pickled in capers and bay leaves, and potent Durham mustard. Along the river cruised boats with gilded prows and lamps on their poops, their negro oarsmen wearing white loin-cloths, and paddling amidst awnings and canopies of bright silks or Genoa velvet. They had reached such a pitch of refinement that the mahogany floors were rubbed every day with bitter oranges, whose juice, absorbed by the wood, gave off a delicious aromatic perfume.

Explosion in a Cathedral – study resources

Explosion in a Cathedral (1962) – Amazon UK

El siglo de las luces (1962) – Amazon UK

Explosion in a Cathedral (1962) – Amazon US

El siglo de las luces (1962) – Amazon US

Explosion in a Cathedral – plot summary

Chapter One

Following the death of a rich plantation owner, his son Carlos, daughter Sofia, and their orphan cousin Esteban live in the grand but neglected family home in Havana, Cuba. They explore their father’s commercial warehouse but dream of escaping to more sophisticated lands. Educational and scientific apparatus is imported, and they live an existence of nocturnal intellectual questing.

After a year’s mourning they are visited by the Frenchman Victor Hughes who regales them with tales of his commercial travels. They all play charades and he becomes a regular visitor. When Esteban has an attack of asthma Victor produces the mulatto doctor Oge who cures him by burning plants growing nearby.

Following his cure, Esteban begins visiting a prostitute. A cyclone passes over the city, Sofia is attacked by a man and she realises that she is sexually desirable. Victor takes stock inventories in the warehouse and uncovers corruption by the family’s legal executors.

When rumblings of political unrest begin, they escape to a finca on the family estate. Victor and Oge expound their revolutionary views. They travel to the south of the island and join a ship sailing for Port-au-Prince in San Domingo. In Santiago de Cuba the town is over-run with refugees fleeing the uprising in the north of the island. They escape, but find insurrection and danger wherever they land.

Chapter Two

Esteban becomes enthused by revolutionary fervour, which he perceives as a mixture of Freemasonry and religion. Victor tells him this is counter-revolutionary, and that Jacobinism is the new morality. Esteban is tasked to foment revolutionary activity, and travels to the Basque country and southern France where he finds religious belief deeply embedded.

Esteban feels cut off from the centre of power and confused by the plethora of new regulations being issued from Paris. Hearing that Victor Hughes is in the region, he writes to him and is invited to join an expeditionary force going to Guadeloupe. The Spanish and the French are at war, and are being harassed by the British in Europe and the Antilles.

Victor Hughes becomes more authoritarian, and makes excuses for ‘unfortunate’ revolutionary excesses. He has a guillotine erected on board the ship, even though he is going to announce the abolition of slavery.

Guadeloupe and St. Lucia have been occupied by the British, but Victor Hughes orders an attack, which is successful at first. But Pointe-a-Pitre is put under siege. After four weeks Hughes drives out the aggressors and seizes control of half the island.

When an edict arrives from Paris he restores belief in the Supreme Being. Then the guillotine is erected and public executions begin, introducing a reign of Terror. When news of the fall of Robespierre reaches Guadeloupe, Hughes decides to continue as if nothing had changed. He puts Esteban on board as ship’s clerk on a voyage that is supposed to promote the revolution in the Antilles.

Chapter Three

Esteban is reunited with the aquatic world. The flotilla sails through the Antilles acting like pirates. They are joined by a boat carrying escaped slaves. The female passengers are raped, and the captain takes the whole group to a Dutch-controlled island where they can be sold. All bounty is returned to Victor Hughes in Guadeloupe.

As time goes on, there is a peace treaty between France and Spain – but Hughes ignores it and continues privateering and building up his business empire at Pointe-a-Pitre.

Guadeloupe grows ever more prosperous, but Hughes wishes to declare war against America because of their support of the British against the French. There is an opera performance given by the passengers of a captured ship, after which America declares war on France. Hughes realises he is about to be replaced by a directive from Paris. He gives Esteban letters of safe conduct for French Guiana.

Chapter Four

Esteban finds the capital Cayenne run down and under-developed. He feels that the revolution has failed because it does not have convincing Gods to replace those of Christianity that have been overthrown.

He takes money and provisions to Billaud-Varenne, the exiled revolutionary. Former commanders of the Terror are rotting in the prison-colony. Esteban transfers to nearby Paramarimbo in Dutch Suriname then, finally realising that there is no Heaven on Earth, he sails back home to Havana.

Chapter Five

Esteban is disappointed to find that Sofia is now married. He recounts his adventures, believing that the cost of the revolution has been too high. His cousins disagree: they cling to their original Jacobin beliefs. At Christmas they go to the elaborate finca of Sofia’s husband’s family. Esteban desires Sofia, but she rejects him.

As the Age of Enlightenment draws to a close, Sofia’s husband Jorge is afflicted with a virulent fever. Captain Dexter visits with news that Hughes has been re-established in Cayenne. Jorge dies, and Esteban secretly hopes that everything will return to normal.

But it is revealed that Sofia is in love with Victor Hughes and wishes to join him in Cayenne. Esteban tries to stop her but fails. When the police search the house for evidence of support for the revolution, Esteban delivers a long ‘confession’ giving her time to escape on Dexter’s ship the Arrow.

Chapter Six

Sophia is en route via Venezuela to join Hughes in order to promote the principles of the revolution in the Americas, since it seems to have failed in Europe. On arrival in Cayenne she is taken to Hughes’ private hacienda. Her relationship with Hughes is a success: she comes to life physically and still believes that she is destined for some sort of significant life experience.

Suddenly a new decree reintroduces slavery, and Hughes applies it just as ruthlessly as he did its abolition. He tries to create cultivated European gardens in what is essentially a wilderness. When the slaves suddenly revolt and escape into the jungle he organises troops to track them down – much to Sofia’s disgust. The expedition is a failure, and they return defeated and infected with fever.

The fever affects the entire town, and Hughes almost goes blind. When it lifts and he eventually recovers, Sofia leaves him and sets sail for Europe.

Chapter Seven

Carlos turns up at a house in Madrid and pieces together from gossip the story of Sofia and Esteban’s last days there. They threw themselves into a revolt against the French and were never heard of again.

Explosion in a Cathedral – characters

Esteban	an orphan, originally asthmatic, follower of Hughes
Sofia	spirited and intelligent, in love with Hughes
Carlos	her brother
Victor Hughes	a French adventurer, businessman, and former Jacobin revolutionary
Doctor Oge	a revolutionary
Remigio	a negro servant
Caleb Dexter	American captain of the Arrow
Barthelemy	captain of L’Ami du Peuple
Jorge	Sofia’s husband who dies

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F.L.Lucas – Tragedy

October 4, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

F.L. Lucas,Tragedy in Relation to Aristotle’s ‘Poetics’ (1927) The Hogarth Lectures on Literature, First Series, No. 2.

F.L. (Peter) Lucas was a former Apostle and classical scholar at King’s College Cambridge. The Woolfs also published his unsuccessful novel The River Flows (1926).

Hogarth Press studies

Woolf’s-head Publishing is a wonderful collection of cover designs, book jackets, and illustrations – but also a beautiful example of book production in its own right. It was produced as an exhibition catalogue and has quite rightly gone on to enjoy an independent life of its own. This book is a genuine collector’s item, and only months after its first publication it started to win awards for its design and production values. Anyone with the slightest interest in book production, graphic design, typography, or Bloomsbury will want to own a copy the minute they clap eyes on it.

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Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: Hogarth Press, 1917-41 John Willis brings the remarkable story of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s success as publishers to life. He generates interesting thumbnail sketches of all the Hogarth Press authors, which brings both them and the books they wrote into sharp focus. He also follows the development of many of its best-selling titles, and there’s a full account of the social and cultural development of the press. This is a scholarly work with extensive footnotes, bibliographies, and suggestions for further reading – but most of all it is a very readable study in cultural history.

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Falk: A Reminiscence

November 23, 2011 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Falk (1903) is not one of Joseph Conrad’s better-known stories, yet it deserves to be. It is just as successful as Heart of Darkness in exploring powerful and extreme situations. It was first published in the collection Typhoon and Other Tales (1903) and is the only one of Conrad’s stories which did not first appear serialized in magazine publication. This was because the editor objected to the fact that the very powerfully evoked central female character never speaks.

Joseph Conrad

Falk – critical commentary

Inter-textuality

Falk (1903) is composed of many elements Conrad used in his other novels and novellas. The story begins with a group of mariners dining in a small river-hostelry in the Thames estuary discussing seafaring matters – a situation he had already used in Heart of Darkness, which was written the year before. He even uses a similar comparison of the narrative present with a distant past – not that of the Roman invasion, but of primeval man telling tales of his experience.

An unnamed outer-narrator sets the scene, and then the story is taken up by a second and equally unnamed inner-narrator – a type rather like Marlow, the inner-narrator of Heart of Darkness and other Conrad tales. He is recounting events which took place when he was a younger man.

The young man is taking up his first assignment as a captain – a plot device Conrad had used in Heart of Darkness and was to use again in both The Shadow-Line and The Secret Sharer. The location of events is not specified, but it corresponds in many details to Bangkok, which appears in the two later novellas. He is also taking over from a rather dubious previous captain who has died, and his ship is held up in port with a sickly crew.

Characters from other Conrad tales appear in the story: Schomberg the gossipy Alsatian hotel owner who appears in Lord Jim (1900) and Victory (1915); Gambril, the elderly sailor who also appears in The Shadow-Line. And of course Falk’s dreadful experiences drifting powerless on a doomed ship towards the South Pole carries unmistakable echoes of The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner and The Flying Dutchman legend.

A Darwinian reading

It’s possible to argue that Falk is concerned with the elemental forces which man needs in order to survive. In the animal world there are three basic instincts which combine to form a will to prevail – that results in ‘the survival of the fittest’. These are the hunt for food, the urge to procreate, and the fight for territory.

Falk himself embodies all of these forces to a marked degree. He fights to stay alive, and he is even prepared to confront one of society’s most sacred taboos – he will kill and eat human flesh in order to endure and prevail.

His yearning for Hermann’s niece is a powerful, all-consuming physical passion. Despite all his sufferings on board the Borgmester Dahl, his unfulfilled desire for her hurts him more deeply. It is a more painful feeling to endure. ‘This is worse pain. This is more terrible’ he exclaims. It’s interesting to note that when Falk tows away Hermann’s ship by force, the narrator observes ‘I could not believe that a simple towing operation could suggest so plainly the idea of abduction, of rape. Falk was simply running off with the Diana‘.

He gets what he yearns for in the end. And it’s interesting to note that he also asserts his dominance in terms of territory. With his tug boat on the river he has a monopoly over navigation, and can charge whatever he wishes for piloting ships to the open sea. He does a similar thing in the struggle for survival on the stricken Borgmester Dahl by siezing control of the last firearm on board. The young captain reflects ‘He was a born monopolist’.

Falk endures the most extreme conditions imaginable – hunger, deprivation, and the threat of death. As the Borgmester Dahl drifts aimlessly towards the south pole, he inhabits a microcosm of a Hobbesian world. His life is nasty, brutish, and is likely to be short. And he is surrounded by cowards and incompetents. Yet he wills himself to endure; he takes control of the ship; and he is prepared to fight back against man’s inhumanity to man when the carpenter attacks him. He triumphs and survives. ‘They all died … But I would not die … Only the best man would survive. It was a great, terrible, and cruel misfortune.’

The food and eating leitmotif

Imagery of food and eating occur repeatedly throughout the story. The narrative begins with men of the sea ‘dining in a small river-hostelry. And they are compared with their primitive counterparts telling ‘tales of hunger and hunt – and of women perhaps!’amongst gnawed bones.

The young captain dines on chops at Schomberg’s table d’hote and listens (whilst the hotelier eats ‘furiously’) to his complaints against Falk. These complaints are based of food an cooking. Falk refuses to dine at Schomberg’s hotel because he is a vegetarian. He has also stolen Schomberg’s native cook.

Schomberg regards Falk as unnatural because he does not eat meat: ‘A white man should eat like a white man … Ought to eat meat, must eat meat.’ But Falk even bans meat-eating from his own ship, and pays his crew a supplements to their wages for the inconvenience. The young captain reflects ruefully on the state of affairs:

I was engaged just then in eating despondently a piece of stale Dutch cheese, being too much crushed to care what I swallowed myself, let alone bothering my head about Falk’s ideas of gastronomy. I could expect from their study no clue to his conduct in matters of business, which seemed to me totally unrestrained by morality or even by the commonest sort of decency.

This is a wonderful example of the sort of ironic prolepses Conrad embeds in his text. Falk’s ideas of gastronomy have been formed by exactly the same extreme experiences which have influenced his moral attitudes to business and society. He has seen and endured the Worst, and he has survived in the most primitive struggle for existence. And his shock at finding himself forced to eat a fellow human being leads to his choice of vegetarianism. There is therefore a direct link between his gastronomy and his morality. But the young captain does not know that at this point of the narrative.

Falk’s final descent into cannibalism is reinforced by understatement. He tells his bride-to-be and father-in-law: “I have eaten man”.

Story or novella?

There is no clear dividing line between a long story and a novella – in terms of length. At approximately 20,000 words it would be possible to argue that Falk is a long story: The first part deals with a young captain and his experiences on shore in Bangkok: the second part recounts the shocking details of Falk’s experiences on board the Borgmester Dahl.

But the fundamental issues at stake in this story are so profound (the fight for survival – see above) and the concentrated imagery with which the story is articulated is so dense, that this narrative has all the qualities of a novella. It focuses on eating to stay alive, reproducing to continue the human race, and establishing dominance of a territorial space.

It’s true that there are a greater number of named characters in the story than normally appear in a novella – not all of them with important parts to play in the plot. But the focus of attention is largely on Falk, Hermann, and the narrator. Quite astonishingly, Hermann’s niece is also a vital part of the story – even though she is never named, she never speaks, and she does nothing except represent animal magnetism in its most vital form.

Falk – study resources

Falk – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

Falk – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

Falk – Kindle eBook (annotated)

Falk – Tredition paperback – Amazon UK

Falk – Tredition paperback – Amazon US

Falk – eBook at Project Gutenberg

Joseph Conrad: A Biography – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Routledge Guide to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad – Amazon UK

Notes on Life and Letters – Amazon UK

Joseph Conrad – biographical notes

Falk – plot summary

A young mariner (‘not yet thirty’) takes charge of a ship in the far east (Bangkok) when the previous captain dies. The crew are sickly and unfriendly, the ship has no provisions, and there are delays in getting under way. He befriends Hermann, the captain of the Diana, a German ship which is moored nearby. Hermann lives on board with his wife, his four children, and his niece – who is a simple but physically attractive young woman. Hermann is planning to sell his ship and go back to Germany to retire. Also passing time with this family is Falk, the captain of a tug with a monopoly of navigation on the river leading out to the coast.

Falk is a remote, taciturn, and rather forbidding figure who is not popular with the local officials and traders. When the young captain’s and Hermann’s vessels are ready to depart, the young captain is annoyed to discover that Falk takes the Diana out first, damaging Hermann’s ship in the process. The captain tries to hire the one possible alternative navigator, but discovers that Falk has bought him off.

It transpires that Falk has taken this precipitate action because he is consumed with a passionate desire for Hermann’s voluptuous niece, and thinks the young captain is a rival. The captain confronts Falk, reassuring him that he has no designs on the girl. Falk asks for his diplomatic assistance in re-establishing good relations with Hermann, so that he can propose to the niece.

The young captain opens negotiations, and Hermann very reluctantly allows Falk to plead his case. But Falk explains that there is one thing the niece should know about him if she is to accept his offer of marriage – the fact that he had once eaten human flesh.

This sends Hermann into a explosion of outraged sensibility. The captain assumes that Falk has been involved in a shipwreck, but Falk explains to him the story of his experiences on a ship which is damaged beyond repair by storms at sea. It drifts helplessly into the Antarctic Ocean, and runs out of provisions. The crew and the captain are feckless, and start to die off or jump overboard. The ship’s carpenter tries to kill Falk, but Falk kills him instead, whereupon he and the remaining crew eat the man before eventually being rescued.

The young captain speaks on Falk’s behalf to Hermann, who eventually consents to the match – motivated partly by saving the cost of an extra cabin (for the niece) on the journey back to Bremen. When the young captain returns to the port five years later, Mr and Mrs Falk are no longer there.

Principal characters

—	the unnamed outer narrator
—	the unnamed inner-narrator
Hermann	a German ship master
Mrs Hermann	his wife
—	his physically attractive niece
Lena, Gustav, Carl, Nicholas	the Hermann children
Falk	a Danish or Norwegian tugboat captain
Schomberg	an Alsatian hotel-keeper
Mrs Schomberg	his grinning wife
Mr Siegers	principal in shipping office
Johnson	former captain, now a drunk who has gone native
Gambril	an elderly seaman

Biography

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad offers a series of essays by leading Conrad scholars aimed at both students and the general reader. There’s a chronology and overview of Conrad’s life, then chapters that explore significant issues in his major writings, and deal in depth with individual works. These are followed by discussions of the special nature of Conrad’s narrative techniques, his complex relationships with late-Victorian imperialism and with literary Modernism, and his influence on other writers and artists. Each essay provides guidance to further reading, and a concluding chapter surveys the body of Conrad criticism.

Joseph Conrad’s writing table

Joseph Conrad’s writing

Manuscript page from Heart of Darkness

Other work by Joseph Conrad

Nostromo (1904) is Conrad’s ‘big’ political novel – into which he packs all of his major subjects and themes. It is set in the imaginary Latin-American country of Costaguana – and features a stolen hoard of silver, desperate acts of courage, characters trembling on the brink of moral panic. The political background encompasses nationalist revolution and the Imperialism of foreign intervention. Silver is the pivot of the whole story – revealing the courage of some and the corruption and destruction of others. Conrad’s narration is as usual complex and oblique. He begins half way through the events of the revolution, and proceeds by way of flashbacks and glimpses into the future.
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The Secret Agent (1907) is a short novel and a masterpiece of sustained irony. It is based on the real incident of a bomb attack on the Greenwich Observatory in 1888 and features a cast of wonderfully grotesque characters: Verloc the lazy double agent, Inspector Heat of Scotland Yard, and the Professor – an anarchist who wanders through the novel with bombs strapped round his waist and the detonator in his hand. The English government and police are subject to sustained criticism, and the novel bristles with some wonderfully orchestrated effects of dramatic irony – all set in the murky atmosphere of Victorian London. Here Conrad prefigures all the ambiguities which surround two-faced international relations, duplicitous State realpolitik, and terrorist outrage which still beset us more than a hundred years later.
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Joseph Conrad web links

Joseph Conrad at Mantex
Biography, tutorials, book reviews, study guides, videos, web links.

Joseph Conrad – his greatest novels and novellas
Brief notes introducing his major works in recommended editions.

Joseph Conrad at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts in a variety of formats.

Joseph Conrad at Wikipedia
Biography, major works, literary career, style, politics, and further reading.

Joseph Conrad at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production notes, box office, trivia, and quizzes.

Works by Joseph Conrad
Large online database of free HTML texts, digital scans, and eText versions of novels, stories, and occasional writings.

The Joseph Conrad Society (UK)
Conradian journal, reviews. and scholarly resources.

The Joseph Conrad Society of America
American-based – recent publications, journal, awards, conferences.

Hyper-Concordance of Conrad’s works
Locate a word or phrase – in the context of the novel or story.

More on Joseph Conrad
Twentieth century literature
More on Joseph Conrad tales

Far from the Madding Crowd

March 22, 2010 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, characters, criticism, study resources

Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) was the first of Hardy’s novels to apply the name of Wessex to the landscape of south west England, and the first to gain him widespread popularity as a novelist. It originally appeared anonymously as a monthly serial in the Cornhill Magazine, and was revised extensively for its first publication in single volume format.

Heroine and estate-owner Bathsheba Everdene is romantically involved with three very different men. The dashing Sergeant Troy, who is handsome but unreliable; Farmer Boldwood, who is honourable but middle-aged; and man-of-the-soil Gabriel Oak, who is worthy and prepared to bide his time. The conflicts between them and the ensuing drama has lots of plot twists plus a rich picture of rural life.

Thomas Hardy is one of the few writers (D.H. Lawrence was another) who made a significant contribution to English literature in the form of the novel, poetry, and the short story. His writing is full of delightful effects, beautiful images and striking language.

He creates unforgettable characters and orchestrates stories which pull at your heart strings. It has to be said that he also relies on coincidences and improbabilities of plot which (though common in the nineteenth century) some people see as weaknesses. However, his sense of drama, his powerful language, and his wonderful depiction of the English countryside make him an enduring favourite.

Far from the Madding Crowd – plot summary

At the beginning of the novel, Bathsheba Everdene is a beautiful young woman without a fortune. She meets Gabriel Oak, a young farmer, and saves his life one evening. He asks her to marry him, but she refuses because she does not love him. Upon inheriting her uncle’s prosperous farm she moves away to the town of Weatherbury.

A disaster befalls Gabriel’s farm and he loses his sheep; he is forced to give up farming. He goes looking for work, and in his travels finds himself in Weatherbury. After rescuing a local farm from fire he asks the mistress if she needs a shepherd. It is Bathsheba, and she hires him.

As Bathsheba learns to manage her farm she becomes acquainted with her neighbor, Mr. Boldwood, and on a whim sends him a valentine card with the words “Marry me.” Boldwood becomes obsessed with her and becomes her second suitor. Rich and handsome, he has been sought after by many women. Bathsheba refuses him because she does not love him, but she then agrees to review her decision at some future date.

The same night, Bathsheba meets a handsome soldier, Sergeant Troy. She doesn’t know that he has recently made a local girl, Fanny Robin, pregnant and almost married her. Troy falls in love with Bathsheba, enraging Boldwood. Bathsheba travels to Bath to warn Troy of Boldwood’s anger, and while she is there, Troy persuades her to marry him.

Gabriel Oak has remained her friend throughout and does not approve of the marriage. A few weeks after his marriage to Bathsheba, Troy sees Fanny, poor and sick; she later dies giving birth to their child. Bathsheba discovers that Troy is the father. Grief-stricken at Fanny’s death and riddled with shame, Troy runs away and is thought to have drowned.

With Troy supposedly dead, Boldwood becomes more and more emphatic about marrying Bathsheba. Troy sees Bathsheba at a fair and decides to return to her. Boldwood holds a Christmas party, to which he invites Bathsheba and again proposes marriage. Just after she has agreed, Troy arrives to claim her. Bathsheba screams, and Boldwood shoots Troy dead. He is sentenced to life in prison. A few months later, Bathsheba marries Gabriel, who has become a prosperous bailiff.

Study resources

Far from the Madding Crowd – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

Far from the Madding Crowd – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

Far from the Madding Crowd – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

Far from the Madding Crowd – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

Far from the Madding Crowd – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Far from the Madding Crowd – Kindle eBook version

Far from the Madding Crowd – York Notes – Amazon UK

Far from the Madding Crowd – Brodie’s Notes – Amazon UK

Far from the Madding Crowd – 1967 film version on DVD – Amazon UK

Far from the Madding Crowd – audioBook version – Amazon UK

Far from the Madding Crowd – audioBook version at LibriVox

Far from the Madding Crowd – eBook versions at Gutenberg

Thomas Hardy: A Biography – definitive study – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy – Amazon UK

The Complete Critical Guide to Thomas Hardy – Amazon UK

Authors in Context – Thomas Hardy – Amazon UK

Oxford Reader’s Companion to Hardy – Amazon UK

Film version

John Schlesinger’s film adaptation (1967) has an outstanding sound track by Richard Rodney Bennett, and stalwart performances from an all star cast of Julie Christie as Bathsheba, Alan Bates as Gabriel Oak, Terence Stamp as Sergeant Troy, and Peter Finch as Boldwood – plus delicious a country bumpkin role for Freddy Jones. The film was shot by now-director Nicolas Roeg (Don’t Look Now and Bad Timing) and the screenplay was written by novelist Frederic Raphael. This film is a visual treat which has stood the test of time.

See reviews of the film at the Internet Movie Database

Principal characters

Gabriel Oak	a young and loyal farmer
Bathsheba Everdene	young woman who inherits a farm
Sargeant Frank Troy	handsome and dashing young soldier
William Boldwood	well-to-do farm owner
Fanny Robin	a poor orphan servant girl
Joseph Poorgrass	a timid farm labourer
Pennyways	a bailiff on Bathsheba’s farm

Far from the Madding Crowd – title

Hardy took the title for his novel from Thomas Gray’s poem Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751):

Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife
Their sober wishes never learn’d to stray;
Along the cool sequester’d vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.

The title is often mis-quoted as ‘Far from the Maddening Crowd’ – though interestingly, both words mean the same thing.

Hardy’s WESSEX

Hardy’s study

reconstructed in Dorchester museum

Other works by Thomas Hardy

The Return of the Native (1878) It’s often said that this is one of the most Hardyesque of all the novels. There are some stand-out characters: Eustacia Vye, a heroine who patrols the moors looking out for her man through a telescope; Clym Yeobright, a hero who can’t escape his mother’s influence; and Diggory Ven, an itinerant trader who wanders in and out of the story covered in red dye. Improbable coincidences and dramatic ironies abound – and over it all presides the brooding presence of Egdon Heath. But underneath the melodrama, there are profound psychological forces at work. You need to be patient. This is one for Hardy enthusiasts – not beginners. This edition, unlike any other currently available, retains the text of the novel’s first edition, without the later changes that substantially altered Hardy’s original intentions.
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The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) is probably Hardy’s greatest work – a novel whose aspirations are matched by artistic shaping and control. It is the tragic history of Michael Henchard – a man who rises to civic prominence, but whose past comes back to haunt him. This is not surprising, because he sells his wife in the opening chapter. When she comes back unexpectedly, he is trapped between present and past. He is also locked into a psychological contest with an alter-ego figure with whom he battles both metaphorically and realistically. Henchard falls in the course of the novel from civic honour and commercial greatness into a tragic figure, a man defeated by his own strengths as much as his weaknesses. There are strong echoes of King Lear here, and some of the most dramatic and psychologically revealing scenes in all of Hardy’s work.
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Thomas Hardy – web links

Thomas Hardy at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major novels, book reviews. bibliographies, critiques of the shorter fiction, and web links.

The Thomas Hardy Collection
The complete novels, stories, and poetry – Kindle eBook single file download for £1.29 at Amazon.

Thomas Hardy at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts in a variety of digital formats.

Thomas Hardy at Wikipedia
Biographical notes, social background, the novels and literary themes, poetry, religious beliefs and influence, biographies and criticism.

The Thomas Hardy Society
Dorset-based site featuring educational activities, a biennial conference, a journal (three times a year) with links to the texts of all the major works.

The Thomas Hardy Association
American-based site with photos and academic resources. Be prepared to search and drill down to reach the more useful materials.

Thomas Hardy on the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors, actors, production features, box office, film reviews, and even quizzes.

Thomas Hardy – online literary criticism
Small collection of academic papers and articles ‘favoring signed articles by recognized scholars and articles published in peer-reviewed sources’.

Thomas Hardy’s Wessex
Evolution of Wessex, contemporary reviews, maps, bibliography, links to other web sites, and history.

More on Thomas Hardy
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

Father and Son

April 30, 2012 by Roy Johnson

A child pulled between religion, science, and poetry

Father and Son (1907) is a profoundly sad book which details the struggle between religious belief and scientific rationalism in the middle of the nineteenth century. It has the appearance of an autobiography, but author Edmund Gosse stresses more than once that it’s a ‘study of two temperaments’, by which he means the relationship between him and his father, Philip Gosse. It’s sad because his story details the terrible struggle between two people who obviously love each other dearly, but in ways which are completely different and even antagonistic.

The father is a strict, authoritarian, and evangelical Christian who wishes to control and mould a son entirely in his own image. The son feels oppressed, lonely, burdened with anxiety and self-doubt, and he is denied the pleasures and innocence of a normal childhood. On almost every page the reader is invited to sympathise with the fragile and tender feelings of a young boy who is denied any form of natural enjoyment, but is exhorted to prepare himself for Judgement Day. Before even the age of ten he is being commanded to prove the fervour of his commitment to the True Way to God.

His father Philip Gosse was a successful writer, a naturalist, and a member of the fundamentalist Christian sect of Plymouth Brethren. They believed that every word of the Bible was literally true because in their terms it was the actual word of God. All other religious beliefs were deemed heretical and their adherents doomed to hell and damnation – particularly Catholics. The Lord would only save those who truly believed, and who were prepared to be baptised (often for a second time) as adults.

To accept this ideology was only the beginning. After that it was the duty of every true believer to proselytise and convert non-believers to the True Way. The young Gosse had this drummed into him relentlessly in a domestic routine which was puritanical, cheerless, and devoid of any normal social pleasures.

The narrative documents his lonely childhood in Islington with no friends, the early death of his mother, and an amazing absence of any formal education. This was followed by a move to live in Devon when he was about ten years old – which provided a slight amelioration in the grimness of life. But it’s significant that this slim pleasure was found in gathering and documenting specimens of sea creatures in rock pools on the shore – which was precisely his father’s scientific specialism.

The central point of the drama comes in 1857 when his father published a work of theory (with the unfortunate title of Omphalos) which sought to reconcile Biblical accounts of creation (Genesis) with scientific evidence of the world’s evolution over millions and millions of years. His explanation was a version of what we now call creationism. He suggested that God made the world completely in six days – and that it already contained all the aeons of materials that we now see as historical evidence. Moreover, all its animal life was in a fully developed state of being.

Expecting great things from this work, he was mortified when it was badly received, and of course two years later in 1859 Darwin delivered the hammer blow of The Origin of Species which provided the explanation that is still accepted today and that constituted a challenge to religious belief that left it reeling.

Boarding school provided a slight relief from the physical presence of parental pressure. However, the interrogations his father had subjected him to personally were immediately replaced by an almost daily demanded for written evidence detailing proof of his son’s efforts to remain uncontaminated and free from the temptations of ‘infidelity’. At that time this meant adherence to the True Way and was code for a virulent strain of anti-Catholicism.

The young Gosse discovered Shakespeare and romantic poetry as a sort of alternative and antidote to the extreme puritanism his father continued to impose on him, but in the end he never shook off the shackles of religious belief. It’s interesting to note that this semi-confessional memoir and heart-rending account of a spiritually anguished childhood originally ended with Gosse in a religious fervour, imploring the Lord to take him away:

Come now, Lord Jesus, come now and take me to for ever with Thee in Thy Paradise. I am ready to come. My heart is purged from sin, there is nothing that keeps me rooted to this wicked world … take me before I have known the temptations of life, before I have to go to London and all the dreadful things that happen there.

It was the publisher Heinemann who insisted on his writing an Epilogue which brought the account to its natural conclusion – which was the eventual (partial) triumph of the son’s sense of personal identity over the tyranny of such an oppressive father figure.

The struggle between them continued even when Gosse was a young adult, living independently. Eventually he mustered sufficient courage to express mild reservations about evangelical Christianity and its exclusive claim to the Truth. But it is his father’s devastating and uncompromising riposte, holding to the logic of his fundamentalist belief which is the artistic conclusion of the narrative.

Some readers have said that it is the oppressive, scholarly, and Ahab-like figure of Gosse senior who emerges as the more admirable of the two characters (or ‘temperaments’) and that Gosse junior reveals himself as a feeble, complaining, and self-centred figure.

That’s why the book is so sad – because it’s almost impossible not to wish that this young child then young man could break away from his emotionally tyrannical father – having the confidence to throw off the system of belief that is being welded onto him like a suit of armour. But he never really succeeds.

Gosse went on to become a successful man of letters and was instrumental in introducing figures such as Ibsen and Gide into English literary culture, but this is the book for which he will be remembered. It’s rather like one of the Cotman or Crome watercolours that are evoked in the text – offering a pastoral and sentimental vision of English childhood that nevertheless captures the powerful ideological conflicts that affected the latter part of the Victorian era. It’s perhaps significant that the memoir was published only a few years before Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, a book that helped to draw a line under the same phenomenon for once and all.

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Edmund Gosse, Father and Son, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp.241, ISBN: 0199539111

Fictions

November 30, 2015 by Roy Johnson

short stories of fantasy, parody, mystery, and satire

Fictions (1944) is a single-volume compilation of two collections of short stories which made Jorge Luis Borges famous – his 1941 publication The Garden of Forking Paths and the 1944 follow-up Artifices. He is one of the few writers to achieve international fame merely on the strength of short stories (Katherine Mansfield was another rare case).

His approach is distinctly playful. The stories are in the form of fantasies, essays on imaginary objects, fake biographies, bibliographic parodies, detective stories, and a form he is particularly fond of – commentaries on other people’s work, real and imaginary. He defends this approach in a typically witty manner:

It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books — setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that these books already exist, and offer a commentary on them.

This illustrates the ironic, tongue-in-cheek approach he brings to the short story form. He is also keen on blurring the distinction between fiction and reality. A story might begin by referring to the real world or a well known text, but he then blends it with fictional inventions or fanciful distortions which produce an effect like philosophic mind games. As a reader, you are suddenly no longer sure in which conceptual plane the narrative is taking place.

As a former librarian, he frequently highlights the bibliographic elements of his creations. He offers academic references (often spurious) for the sources of his information and bogus but amusing footnotes to support the authenticity of his narratives .

Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is a story in which Borges and his friend Bioy Casares (a real Argentinean writer) find one volume of an encyclopaedia that documents an imaginary world. It has been written by a collective of scholars working in secret. The language of this world has no nouns, there are no sciences, and one of the many schools of its philosophy denies the existence of time. The story has a postscript explaining how the project was later expanded to produce the invention of an entire planet. This at first appears to be a failure, but then physical objects from this imaginary world begin to appear in the fictional ‘present’.

In Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, a French belle-lettrist decides to re-write the whole of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, word for word from scratch. The story has an amusing defence that claims his reproduction (of which he only manages a couple of chapters) is more subtle than the original – because it was written three hundred years later. This conceit prefigures a school of literary criticism (Cultural Materialism) which argues that the meaning of a text is influenced both by the time in which it was produced as well as the time in which it is read.

In The Circular Ruins a man crawls into a primitive temple with the task of dreaming another person into being. He eventually manages it – first the heart, then the lungs, and so on. This being becomes his ‘son’, and he worries that his creation might come to realise that he is the projection of somebody else’s dream. When he tries to escape from this metaphysical problem, he suddenly realises that somebody else is dreaming him.

The Lottery of Babylon is a Kafka-like invention of a society run on pure chance, in which everyone is compelled to participate. Lots are drawn which might result in torture, death, or infinite riches. But even the administration of the results are subject to chance, and might be carried out at random, reversed, or simply ignored.

Another plot device favoured by Borges is the point of view reversal or the hidden narrator – such as the Irish republican in The Shape of the Sword who tells the story of how he saved the life of a coward during the civil war. He protects his comrade from his abject fear, only to find that the man has betrayed him to the Black and Tans. When the narrator is brought before a firing squad for execution the story turns itself inside out to reveal that the narrator is in fact the coward.

Funes, the Memorious is the potted biography of a poor young Argentinean boy who has a memory so prodigious that he cannot forget anything. As a child Ireneo Funes always knows exactly what time it is at any moment and can remember trivial events with chronological exactitude. He is thrown off a horse, crippled, and when he recovers he discovers that his memory is virtually infinite. He can remember the shape of clouds on any particular day, the pattern of the leaves on a tree, or the veins of decorative marbling in a book he has only seen once.

Whilst the stories are marvellously inventive, it has to be said that they are not uniformly consistent in quality. Some are formless and not much more than self-indulgent whimsy. But the best are tightly wrought and well constructed, with no superfluous material at all – just as a good short story should be. Borges went on to produce an enormously varied body of work – essays, poetry, translations, lectures, film and book reviews – in addition to his now-famous stories. But this collection Fictions remains what might be called his ‘signature’ work.

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Jorge Luis Borges, Fictions, London: Penguin Classics, 2000, pp.179, ISBN: 0141183845

Jorge Louis Borges links

Jorge Luis Borges – biography

Borges Center – University of Pittsburgh

BBC Radio 4 audio documentary

Paris Review – Interview

More on Jorge Luis Borges
Twentieth century literature
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Ethan Frome – critical commentary

Ethan Frome – study resources

Ethan Frome – plot summary

Principal characters

Film adaptation

Further reading

Other works by Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton – web links

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

Eugene Pickering – critical commentary

Eugene Pickering – study resources

Eugene Pickering – plot summary

Principal characters

Further reading

Other works by Henry James

Henry James – web links

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Eugenie Grandet – commentary

Eugenie Grandet – study resources

Eugenie Grandet – plot synopsis

Eugenie Grandet – prinipal characters

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

Europe – critical commentary

Europe – study resources

Europe – plot summary

Principal characters

Further reading

Other works by Henry James

Henry James – web links

tutorial, study guide, commentary, political background

Explosion in a Cathedral – commentary

Explosion in a Cathedral – study resources

Explosion in a Cathedral – plot summary

Explosion in a Cathedral – characters

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

Hogarth Press studies

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Falk – critical commentary

Falk – study resources

Falk – plot summary

Principal characters

Biography

Further reading

Joseph Conrad’s writing

Other work by Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad web links

tutorial, characters, criticism, study resources

Far from the Madding Crowd – plot summary

Study resources

Film version

Principal characters

Far from the Madding Crowd – title

Further reading

Hardy’s study

Other works by Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy – web links

A child pulled between religion, science, and poetry

short stories of fantasy, parody, mystery, and satire

Jorge Louis Borges links

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