Modernism Archives - Page 12 of 15

The Castle

August 10, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Kafka’s last major work

The Castle was Kafka’s last novel, and like most of his others (except The Trial) it was never completed. Indeed, it ends abruptly, breaking off half way through a sentence. But it towers like some sort of an unfinished masterpiece over the rest of his work. Anthea Ball, the translator of this new edition from OUP, makes the case that The Castle is unlike The Trial because it is set in the countryside and it is mainly concerned with a village community. This is what might be called a ‘charitable’ interpretation.

Others are likely to note that it has a very similar protagonist, with the same initial name (K) who seeks acceptance into the village and is condemned to failure in his attempts to gain admission to the Castle. This building dominates the entire locality and houses swarms of unseen officials and various bureaucrats representing authority in the absence of its real owner, who never appears.

The castle is also likened to a church or cathedral – and the villagers do in fact pay it religious devotions. Visitors to Kafka’s home town of Prague do not have to look far to see the likely origin of this powerful symbol. Prague Castle towers above every possible view from the surrounding city.

The villagers live in a state of what Marx called ‘rural idiocy’ because of their reverence for this unseen authority. Kafka’s other works are mainly set in a city – and he himself rarely left Prague where he was born, went to school and university, and worked – until the very end of his short life. But The Castle is world of shabby, overworked and undernourished peasants who live in hovels and endure brutish behaviour from everyone above them in the pecking order.

K does his best to challenge in a rational manner the benighted obeisance in which the villagers are held because of their irrational respect for the Castle’s authority – especially in the form of Klamm, an official of such awesome power that people are even afraid to say his name or look at him. But K is met with ambiguity, contradiction, and absurdity at every attempt to deal with the strange world in which he finds himself.

There is also the usual sexual ambiguity one comes to expect in Kafka’s work. When K arrives in the village, Frieda the barmaid is Klamm’s mistress, but she gives him up in favour of the newcomer K. The two of them consummate their passion on the floor of the bar room amongst beer puddles, unknowingly observed by the comic twins Artur and Jeremiah. This experience transports K into ‘another land’ – and yet he quickly gets fed up with her and spends all his time thinking about gaining access to the Castle.

Any number of possible interpretations of the novel have been discussed at length in the critical writing on Kafka. It has often been seen as a novel-length version of his parable ‘Before the Law’ in which a man seeks entry to the Law but is denied by a gatekeeper. The man decides to wait and only when he is dying asks why no other people have ever sought entrance. The gatekeeper replies “This entrance was assigned only to you. And now I am going to close it”.

These new editions of Kafka’s main works from Oxford University Press offer fresh translations, and they come with extended introductory essays, full explanatory notes, a bibliography, and both a biographical preface on Kafka and a chronology of his life. They also explain the very complex provenance of the text.

The Castle is not for readers new to Kafka. Better to start with the short stories, such as Metamorphosis or his shorter novel The Trial. But for anything like a complete Kafka experience, this one is unmissable. It is also a surprisingly funny novel at times, despite its sombre overtones.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Franz Kafka, The Castle, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp.279, ISBN 0199238286

More on Franz Kafka
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

The Good Soldier

March 1, 2013 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Good Soldier was first published simultaneously in London and New York by John Lane at The Bodley Head in March 1915. In fact the opening of the novel had appeared a year before in the first issue of Wyndham Lewis’s aggressively modern Vorticist magazine Blast in June 1914, under its original title of ‘The Saddest Story’. Ford was asked by his publisher to change the title of the novel on the grounds that sad stories would be difficult to sell during a time of war. Ford suggested the title The Good Soldier in a spirit of irony, but it was accepted and it stuck.

The Good Soldier – critical commentary

Narrative complexity

Although it is not as well known as other modernist classics, such as D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, or James Joyce’s Ulysses, Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier certainly shares many of their values, and was written using a number of similar experimental techniques. The most obvious of those is the chronological complexity of the narrative.

The story is related by a narrator John Dowell who is also a character in the story. But his account of events is extremely fragmented, and their temporal sequence is fractured in a way which makes great demands on the reader. The events themselves occur over a stretch of twenty-four years, essentially spanning the period between 1892 and 1916 – even though the novel was published in 1915. But these events are revealed to the reader in a series of scenes which shift backwards and forwards in time. Ford makes dramatic use of prolepsis and analepsis (flashes forwards and backwards).

Modern editions of the text often have a chronology included, to assist readers in reconstructing the sequence of the episodes. Dowell as narrator is fully aware of this shifting backwards and forwards of the story line, and indeed makes apologies for his uncertainty and lack of skill in reconstructing events.

Having said that, he is also very precise about certain dates, and at other times cannot remember if some something has happened or not. This was a technique which Ford Madox Ford called ‘impressionism’, and it was his attempt to reflect as a form of literary realism the fact that human beings cannot always remember things accurately. Nor can we always know the exact truth about events that have taken place.

It is interesting to note that this technique of narrative fragmentation was also a hallmark of Joseph Conrad, with whom Ford collaborated as a novelist in The Inheritors (1901), Romance (1903, and The Nature of a Crime (1909). In addition to this Ford also exploits the modernist device of the unreliable narrator.

The unreliable narrator

Henry James and to a lesser extent Joseph Conrad are often credited as the first modern writers to exploit the technique which has come to be known as ‘the unreliable narrator’ – and Ford was acquainted with both of these fellow authors.

The unreliable narrator is a device which exploits the fact that when novel-length stories are delivered in the first person narrative mode, the reader has a natural inclination to believe that the truth is being told. After all, if the narrator is going to get the facts wrong or tell lies, why use this device in the first place? But modernist writers have embraced the idea that human beings do make mistakes in their perception of events; they are misguided in their judgement of others; and they may have motivations of which they themselves are unaware.

The skill of the modernist is to create a narrative in the first person mode whereby the narrator gives the reader enough information to form an independent judgement about events which differs from the narrator’s

Henry James did this in The Turn of the Screw, where all the ‘facts’ of the case are presented by the governess in a horror story – and the reader has just enough information to realise that she is neurotic and wrong in the judgements she makes. Her narrative tells one story, behind which the astute reader sees another which is quite different.

Vladimir Nabokov takes this literary device to an extreme in his novel Pale Fire, in which his narrator is editing a long poem written by a fellow college professor. The footnotes to the poem purport to explain its meaning, but what they reveal is that the narrator is a mad man.

Ford’s narrator John Dowell is unreliable in that he makes mistakes, forgets what he has previously said, and generally gives the impression of someone who is not sure of what is going on around him. After all, for the whole of his marriage to Florence she is having adulterous affairs with two other men without his knowledge.

The problem is that there are so many mistakes and contradictions, there becomes growing suspicion that these are errors on the author’s part – not simply Dowell’s. The text gives a distinct impression that Ford might be an author who is not incomplete control of the strategy he is adopting. For instance, he seems to forget from time to time that his narrator Dowell is supposed to be American. Dowell passes comments on Americans from a European perspective, in a voice which is suspiciously that of an author, not a fictional character.

And of course all of this is novelist’s sleight of hand on Ford’s part, because the logic of first person narratives is that narrators must have all the facts of the case at their disposal at the point of finishing the story. If they were genuinely unaware of some facts or circumstances in the earlier part of their account, they could go back and correct it later.

Dowell keeps shifting his approach to characters and events, and he claims to be relating his tale over a period of time – so gives the impression of doing just that. But in fact he knows the outcome of events right from the start of his account, as his suggestive hints reveal:

Permanence? Stability! I can’t believe it’s gone. I can’t believe that that long, tranquil life, which was just stepping a minuet, vanished in four crashing days at the end of nine years and six weeks.

The four crashing days (no matter where they are finely placed in the complicated chronology of events) are the period in which he has learned from Leonora of his wife’s infidelity with first a blackmailer, and then the man he thought of as his best friend. He knew from the outset that he had been duped.

The conversational style

In addition to these complexities of narrative mode, Ford also develops a very conversational tone for Dowell’s delivery of the story. He actually says that he thinks of his account as addressing a listener directly. ‘I have stuck to my idea of being in a country cottage with a silent listener, hearing between the gusts of the wind and amidst the noises of the distant sea, the story as it comes.’

Dowell speaks directly to the reader; he uses lots of repetition; corrects himself after making mistakes; raises questions, confesses that he doesn’t understand the events he is relating; uses hesitation, ellipsis, and often leaves statements unfinished.

You are to remember that all this happened a month before Leonora went into the girl’s room at night. I have been casting back again, but I cannot help it. It is so difficult to keep all these people going. I tell you about Leonora and bring her up to date; then about Edward, who has fallen behind. And the girl gets hopelessly left behind. I wish I could put it down in diary form.

Credibility

The Good Soldier is also a very difficult novel to ‘interpret’. Even though all the information in the story comes to us from Dowell, he seems as a character to be incredibly dim and lacking in good judgement. His wife is having affairs with the blackmailer Jimmy and Dowell’s best friend Ashburnham for years without Dowell suspecting, and even when he does find out, he does nothing about it. Indeed, he even tells us he felt nothing about it.

And when giving an account of people’s occupations, he describes his own as ‘absolutely nothing’. He spends all his time with people who are poisonously hostile to each other; the lives of other characters all around him are wrecked by deception and adultery; and he does nothing.

In the end, the one character who he continues to admire and hold up as a paragon of virtue, is Ashburnham, his best and only friend, who has been cuckolding him for years. Ashburnham goes through the novel as a serial adulterer who gambles away half his family fortune and ends up cutting his own throat because of his suppressed lust for a young girl whose paternal care he has undertaken. Yet Dowell admires, even ‘loves’ Ashburnham right to the end – because he is kind to his tenants.

The Good Soldier – study resources

The Good Soldier – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

The Good Soldier – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

The Good Soldier – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

The Good Soldier – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

The Good Soldier – Norton Critical Editions – Amazon UK

The Good Soldier – Norton Critical Editions – Amazon US

The Good Soldier – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Good Soldier – eBook formats at Gutenberg

The Good Soldier – DVD of 1981 film version – Amazon UK

The Good Soldier – plot summary

Part I

American John Dowell and his wife Florence are living in Europe, ostensibly for the sake of her health, as she has a weak heart. At the German spa resort of Bad Nauheim they meet Captain Edward Ashburnham and his wife Leonora and strike up a close relationship with them. They all enjoy each other’s company, they go on excursions together, and are inseparable as friends.

Dowell as narrator present the Ashburnhams as an ideal if rather colourless couple, but then gradually begins to reveal all sorts of unsavoury details about their lives. Dowell discovers that Ashburnham has committed a string of sexual infidelities in the past, and has lost a lot of money gambling. His wife has forced him to make over all his money into her name. Their marriage was arranged, and he has been a slave to his sexual passions. He has also had to rent out the family estate at Branshaw Teleragh in Hampshire.

It gradually becomes apparent that Ashburnham is conducting an affair with Dowell’s wife Florence. Dowell claims to feel nothing about it, and both couples maintain a polite public appearance. Ashburnham’s wife Leonora also knows about the affair.

The Ashburnhams have recently arrived from India, where the Captain was serving in the army. Dowell reveals that Leonora has paid for the travelling expenses of Mrs Masie Maidan, her husband’s lover in India, so that she could accompany them to Europe. But when Mrs Maidan realises that Ashburnham has tired of her and has turned his attentions towards Florence Dowell, she plans to go back to her husband in India. However, she suddenly dies whilst packing her travelling case.

Part II

Dowell backtracks to recount the story of his courtship and marriage to Florence, after which she immediately begins to feign a bad heart. It transpires that her family , who disapprove of her marriage, have paid Jimmy, an old disreputable ‘admirer’ of Florence’s to stay in Europe, away from her.

When Dowell and Florence arrive in Paris for their honeymoon, Jimmy turns up and stays with them. Dowell fails to realise that Jimmy and Florence are lovers, right under his nose.

Dowell reveals that Florence deployed her new lover Ashburnham to get rid of Jimmy by ‘knocking [his] teeth down his throat’. In fact Dowell claims to empathise with the difficulties Ashburnham, Florence, and Leonora face in maintaining the veneer of respectability whilst all three are involved in this adulterous triangle. Dowell himself appears to be either unaware or untouched by what is going on around him. It is unclear if he is a complete fool, a bloodless psychopath, or a liar.

Florence is plotting to run off with Ashburnham when she is recognised as a former lover of Jimmy’s by an English guest at the hotel, and she commits suicide, not wishing to face the shame of such a revelation. Dowell appears unmoved by his wife’s death, and reveals that he is in love with Nancy, a young girl to whom the Ashburnhams act as guardian. He leaves for America.

Part III

Ashburnham and Leonora are left in Bad Nauheim, fighting over his growing obsession with Nancy. The narrative then leaps backwards again to cover the period of Ashburnham’s early marriage to Leonora which was arranged by their parents. Animus soon develops between them, and when Ashburnham kisses a girl in a railway carriage (the ‘Kilsyte affair’) it awakens his sex urges. These burst into life in his brief dalliance on the Riviera with La Dolciquita, the mistress of a Grand Duke. She demands money to be his mistress, and he loses money gambling to raise the funds to keep her.

Leonora has meanwhile seized control of the family’s finances with a London solicitor. She lets out the family home at Branshaw and arranges for her husband to be transferred to India, where they spend the next eight years, trying to recoup financially.

In India Ashburnham begins an affair with Mrs Basil, the wife of a fellow officer. The husband finds out, and blackmails Ashburnham on a regular basis, threatening to expose him. When Colonel Basil is transferred to the Boer War, Ashburnham begins an affair with Mrs Masie Maidan. Leonora has meanwhile managed to solve their financial problems and proposes a return to their Hampshire estate.

Part IV

The narrative loops back in time again to pick up the story shortly before Masie Maidan’s death in Bad Nauheim. Dowell explains Leonora’s motivation in trying to win back her husband, who is just starting an affair with Dowell’s wife. The Ashburnhams go back to their estate at Branshaw, where Leonora starts to harass Ashburnham over money matters.

Dowell returns from America to stay at Branshaw, where he reports on Leonora’s dejection and headaches. Ashburnham is meanwhile eaten up with unexpressed desire for Nancy, a young girl who has been in their care since her parents abandoned her. Leonora finally confronts Ashburnham about Nancy, then tries to prevent the girl leaving to rejoin her feckless mother. She would sooner hand her husband over to the girl than have her leave. In this confrontation Nancy reveals that she is in love with Ashburnham.

Dowell then switches to recount events from Nancy’s point of view – her youthful awakening to the knowledge of personal unhappiness, divorce, and her love for Ashburnham, who she thinks must love someone else, until Leonora reveals to her that her husband is dying for the love of Nancy herself. But she also reveals Ashburnham’s all infidelities, which kills off Nancy’s idealised vision of him. Ashburnham arranges for someone to take care of Nancy’s mother, then summons Dowell to Branshaw.

Dowell returns to his own point of view, and reveals the end of the story before describing the events that bring it about. Nancy goes to join her father in India, and on the journey there learns that Ashburnham has committed suicide (by cutting his own throat). She becomes slightly mad with religious monomania, and Dowell is despatched to bring her back to Branshaw. Leonora meanwhile sells the house to Dowell and marries the colourless Rodney Bayham. The novel concludes with Dowell living at Branshaw with Nancy, who is now so deranged he is unable to marry her, and at the very end of his narrative he describes the events leading up to Ashburnham’s suicide.

Principal characters

John Dowell	the narrator – a wealthy American living in Europe
Florence Dowell	his wife, a university graduate
Captain Edward (Teddy) Ashburnham	an ex-Army county magistrate and Tory landowner
Leonora Ashburnham	his Irish catholic childless wife
Nancy Rufford	‘the girl’ who has been adopted by the Ashburnhams
Mrs Rufford	Nancy’s mother, who abandons her
Major Rufford	a brutish army man with a loud voice
John Hurlbird	Florence’s uncle, from whom Dowell inherits
Miss Florence Hurlbird	Florence’s elder aunt in Connecticut
Miss Emily Hurlbird	Florence’s younger aunt
Mrs Masie Maidan	Ashburnham’s mistress in India
Bunny	Masie’s husband
Jimmy	Florence’s lover in Paris, a blackmailer
La Dolciquita	the Spanish mistress of a Grand Duke, with whom Ashburnham has an affair
Colonel Basil	a colleague of Ashburnham’s in India who borrows money from him
Mrs Basil	Ashburnham’s sympathetic mistress in India
Rodney Bayham	an admirer of Leonora’s who she marries

Other novels by Ford Madox Ford

Parade’s End – Wordsworth Classics edition

Parade’s End – Kindle edition

The Longest Journey

January 25, 2013 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Longest Journey (1907) was Forster’s second novel, and one of which he said “I am most glad to have written”. But its reputation has not fared so well as his other novels. It is probably the least known of his major works, and unlike the other novels it has not be made into a film. In one sense, it is a Bildungsroman in ironic reverse, because the protagonist is wiser at the outset than he is at the end of the book.

E.M.Forster

The Longest Journey – critical commentary

The Second Novel

It is often observed that novelists who produce a successful first novel sometimes find it difficult to produce a follow-up work of similar quality. It is certainly true that the consensus of critical opinion on The Longest Journey is that it is regarded as something of a failure following Forester’s success with Where Angels Fear to Tread. It is certainly a more structurally ambitious work – but the problem is that its parts do not hang together successfully.

We are being offered Rickie’s story as a sort of positive lesson despite the fact that he is killed at its conclusion. He sees himself as a failure, but he has re-united meaningfully with his own brother; he has rejected the moral values of Sawston school and his brother-in-law; he has seen his own wife for the shallow creature that she is; and he has also restored the relationship with his bosom Cambridge friend Ansell. Moreover, the stories he has composed during his short life as an adult turn out to be successful after all – a posthumous tribute to the aesthetic values he worked out in his Cambridge days.

Death

The passage of events in novel depends upon an extraordinary number of deaths. Rickie’s uncle Mr Failing dies intestate, which leaves inheritance a large issue, and is certainly a source of conflict between Rickie and his wife. Agnes wants Rickie to befriend his eccentric aunt so that she will favour him in her will. Rickie is outraged at this greediness, and feels that Stephen should inherit the money.

Both Rickie’s parents die in rapid succession, leaving a convenient void to cover up the issue of Stephen’s parentage. And Stephen’s father (Robert) dies only seventeen days after eloping with Rickie’s mother.

Rickie and Agnes’s daughter dies shortly after being born, and Rickie himself is killed on the railway, which earlier in the novel has also claimed the life of a young child.

Spirit of place

Forster was quite interested in what we now call ‘spirit of place’ – the idea that certain geographic locations have a quasi-mystical aura which is detectable for people sensitive enough to make themselves receptive to it. His short stories feature this phenomenon, and his novel A Passage to India has at its centre the episode in the Marabar caves on which the plot turns.

In The Longest Journey it features largely in the scenes that take place in Wiltshire, particularly in Rickie’s exploration of the Salisbury Plain and the Fisbury (Cadbury) Rings where he feels he can sense the spirits of long dead ancestors.

He saw Old Sarum, and hints of the Avon Valley, and the land above Stonehenge. And behind him he saw the great wood beginning unobtrusively, as if the down tooneeded shaving; and into it the road to London slipped, covering the bushes with white dust. Chalk made the dust white, chalk made the water clear, chalk made the clear rolling outlines of the land, and favoured the grass and the distant coronals of trees. Here is the heart of our island: the Chilterns, the North Downs, the South Downs radiate hence. The fibres of England unite in Wiltshire, and did we condescend to worship her, here we should erect our national shrine.

The Longest Journey – study resources

The Longest Journey – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Longest Journey – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

The Longest Journey – Amazon Kindle edition

The Longest Journey – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

The Longest Journey – audioBook versions at LibriVox

The Cambridge Companion to E.M.Forster – Amazon UK

E.M.Forster at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

E.M.Forster at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study resources

The Longest Journey – plot summary

Cambridge

Rickie Elliot is an orphan and an ex public schoolboy who is in his second year at Cambridge. He is visited by family friends Agnes Pembroke and her elder brother Herbert, who is a housemaster at a school. Agnes is engaged to Gerald Dawes, who does not yet have enough money to marry her. After seeing the engaged couple embracing, Rickie offers Gerald some of his own money so that he can enjoy happiness with Agnes. He does not think he will need the money himself, since he does not wish to marry, having a hereditary disability which he does not wish to pass on to any children. But his offer is spurned as insulting.

Rickie falls in love with Agnes, but idolises her, feels himself an inadequate lover, and keeps alive the notion that she shared an ideal love with Gerald. He announces his engagement to her at a breakfast party at college. Ansell predicts that Rickie has been duped by a scheming Agnes and advises him against her. But Rickie merely takes this as a sign of their deep friendship, because they can be so frank with each other.

Rickie is not quite so well off as he thought, and there is therefore to be another long engagement. He takes Agnes to meet his rather eccentric aunt Emily at her estate at Cadover in Wiltshire. There he meets her protege, Stephen Wonham, a semi-educated young man. Although they have very little interest in each other, his aunt wishes to promote their friendship.

The two young men go for an excursion on horseback to Salisbury, but Rickie becomes bored and turns back, leaving Stephen to go on, get drunk and fight with a soldier he encounters. Later Rickie walks amongst ancient earthworks and feels a kinship with what he sees as dead spirits there. His aunt reveals that Stephen is Rickie’s half brother, which sends Rickie into a faint. Even though he feels it is a symbolic and important revelation, Agnes persuades him not to tell Stephen and to keep the relationship secret.

Rickie passes a year trying to place his short stories with publishers, but doesn’t get anywhere. Instead he marries Agnes and becomes a teacher at Sawston School, where her brother Herbert is trying to impose public school traditions on what was originally a grammar school.

Sawston

The marriage gives him a limited degree of satisfaction, and he becomes embroiled in petty disputes over the way the school is run. His old Cambridge friend Ansell is disappointed in Rickie’s relationship with Agnes, and refuses to visit him.

Rickie’s daughter is born with an inherited deformity and dies in infancy. The marriage goes sour. Agnes tries to heal the rift between Rickie and his aunt Emily – but he realises that she is fortune-hunting, and it fuels his resentment towards Stephen, even though he thinks Stephen should inherit his aunt’s money.

When it emerges that Stephen has been behaving badly and is being sent to Canada, Rickie realises that Agnes has been stoking prejudice against him. In an argument, he reveals to Herbert the ‘truth’ (as he sees it) about Stephen’s relationship to the Elliot family.

Meanwhile, Ansell is visiting Sawston, where he meets Stephen, who has learnt that Rickie is his half brother during an argument with Mrs Failing. Ansell is very impressed with Stephen as a ‘child of nature’. Agnes tries to buy off Stephen, who takes offence and leaves. Ansell then reveals in the school dining hall that Stephen is in fact Rickie’s mother’s illegitimate child.

Wiltshire

At this dramatic crux, the narrative loops back in time to relate the circumstances of Stephen’s origins. A cultivated countryman falls in love with Mrs Elliot, and at a point where she realises that her husband no longer loves her, she runs away with him to Sweden, where he drowns in the sea. Stephen is born as a result of this brief liaison, his origins are hushed up, and he is raised by Emily Failing.

Back in the narrative present, Stephen leaves Sawston and wanders aimlessly for a while, then returns to see Rickie, who has in the meantime realised that he loves his brother and wants to help him – particularly to stop drinking. Rickie leaves Sawston with Stephen and they travel together to Salisbury then Cadover.

Rickie’s aunt Emily advises him to go back to his wife, even though they do not love each other. Rickie feels that to do so would be a sort of spiritual death, But when trying to recover Stephen from another night’s drinking, Rickie is killed by an oncoming train when pulling his brother off the tracks.

Stephen survives, gets married, and has a child. The last scene of the novel sees him haggling with Pembroke over money due to him for the publication of Rickie’s stories, which have become successful after his death.

Cambridge – King’s College

Principal characters

Frederick (Rickie) Elliot	parentless ex public schoolboy, with deformed foot, Cambridge undergraduate
Stewart Ansell	clever fellow student, Jewish
Tilliard	fellow student
Agnes Pembroke	young woman
Herbert Pembroke	her elder brother – housemaster at Sawston school
Gerald Dawes	her fiancé, a soldier
Mrs Aberdeen	Rickie’s bed-maker (domestic help)
Mr Elliot	Rickie’s cruel father
Mrs Elliot	Rickie’s remote mother
Mrs Lewin	chaperone to Agnes
Mr Failing	the original owner of Cadover – a socialist
Emily Failing	Rickie’s artistic and eccentric aunt
Stephen (Podge) Wonham	Mrs Failing’s protege and Rickie’s half-brother (19)
Mr Jackson	teacher of classics at Sawston School
Varnan	the bullied schoolboy at Sawston

manuscript page of Forster’s The Longest Journey

Other work by E.M. Forster

A Passage to India, (1923) was started in 1913 then finished partly in response to the Amritsar massacre of 1919. Snobbish and racist colonial administrators and their wives are contrasted with sympathetically drawn Indian characters. Dr Aziz is groundlessly accused of assaulting a naive English girl on a visit to the mystic Marabar Caves. There is a set piece trial scene, where she dramatically withdraws any charges. The results strengthen the forces of Indian nationalism, which are accurately predicted to be successful ‘after the next European war’ at the end of the novel. Issues of politics, race, and gender, set against vivid descriptions of Chandrapore and memorable evocations of the surrounding landscape. This is generally regarded as Forster’s masterpiece.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Howards End – DVD This is arguably Forster’s greatest work, and the film lives up to it. It is well acted, with very good performances from Emma Thompson and Helena Bonham Carter as the Schlegel sisters, and Anthony Hopkins as the bully Willcox. The locations and details are accurate, and it lives up to the critical, poignant scenes of the original – particularly the conflict between the upper middle-class Wilcoxes and the working-class aspirant Leonard Baskt. This is another adaptation which I have watched several times over, and always been impressed.
Buy the DVD at Amazon UK
Buy the DVD at Amazon US

More on E.M. Forster
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

The Mark on the Wall

April 1, 2013 by Roy Johnson

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

The Mark on the Wall appeared in July 1917 as part of the very first publication of the Hogarth Press. It was printed in Two Stories, accompanied by the story Three Jews written by Leonard Woolf. The hand-produced ‘volume’ (of only thirty-four pages) was illustrated with woodcuts by Dora Carrington.

Virginia Woolf

The Mark on the Wall – critical commentary

Biography

In many of the experimental and quasi-philosophic narratives of her early modernist phase, Woolf uses an un-named and disembodied first person narrator as a vehicle to spin out the text. It is perfectly natural to think of this narrator as being Woolf herself. After all, she embeds the materials of her own life into her prose – the London scenes, the house in Sussex, her smoking cigarettes, reading and writing – and she includes many of the themes she would go on to develop in her later work.

In The Mark on the Wall she raises the issues of male authority and the construction of social hierarchies she ridicules in her discussion of Whitaker’s Table of Precedence. Both of these she developed in the years that followed until they reached their devastating climax in her fully developed attack on patriarchy in Three Guineas.

She also raises the issue of how novelists give an account of ‘reality’ in literary fiction – something that will be a preoccupation for the next twenty years of her life as a writer

Even Homer nods

Sometimes even the most celebrated and talented writers make mistakes – and Virginia Woolf is no exception. In a well-known passage from this story she evokes the uncertainty and precariousness of life.

Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour — landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one’s hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office!

This term shoot of course should be chute, though it is understandable why mention of ‘Tube’ and ‘Shot’, plus images of propulsion should put the term ‘shoot’ into her mind. It’s strange however that nobody in the hundred years (almost) since the story first appeared has though to correct the slip.

The Mark on the Wall – study resources

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon UK

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon US

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon UK

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon US

Monday or Tuesday and Other Stories – Gutenberg.org

Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon UK

Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon US

The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon UK

The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle edition

The Mark on the Wall – an alternative reading

The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

The Mark on the Wall – story synopsis

An un-named first person narrator, observing a mark on the wall of a sitting room, uses the image as the starting point for a series of reflections, imaginary pictures, and observations about the nature of reality and what can and cannot be known. Topics include the previous occupants of the house, and the range of objects which are lost during the course of everyday life

The narrative then becomes self-referential and reflects upon the very activity of following trains of thought. It passes on to includes how the Self is made up of the reflections of other people, and how future novelists might take this into account in their depictions of reality.

This leads to a critique of generalisations and certainties about the existing order of things, and how the act of challenging them can produce a state of ‘illegitimate freedom’.

The mark is compared to a burial tumulous on the Sussex Downs, which leads on to a character sketch of an amateur archeologist and remnants of history in a local museum. And yet none of these objects guarrantee any sense of ‘knowledge’, and even the very notion of knowledge itself is questioned.

Whitaker’s Table of Precedence is used as a symbol of what society thinks of as fixed certainties, and encouragement to action is seen as a way of avoiding painful or disturbing thoughts.

The concrete objects of the external world offer a sense of what is real, and the example of a wooden chest of drawers is traced back to its origin as a tree, which goes on living in the objects that can be made from it.

The subjects over which these thoughts have ranged are then recalled, and the reverie is interrupted by the arrival of a second figure, who reveals that the mark on the wall is in fact a snail.

The Mark on the Wall – first appearance

Cover design by Leonard and Virginia Woolf

Other works by Virginia Woolf

Jacob’s Room (1922) was Woolf’s first and most dramatic break with traditional narrative fiction. It was also the first of her novels she published herself, as co-founder of the Hogarth Press. This gave her for the first time the freedom to write exactly as she wished. The story is a thinly disguised portrait of her brother Thoby – as he is perceived by others, and in his dealings with two young women. The novel does not have a conventional plot, and the point of view shifts constantly and without any signals or transitions from one character to another. Woolf was creating a form of story telling in which several things are discussed at the same time, creating an impression of simultaneity, and a flow of continuity in life which was one of her most important contributions to literary modernism.
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Kew Gardens is a collection of experimental short stories in which Woolf tested out ideas and techniques which she then later incorporated into her novels. After Chekhov, they represent the most important development in the modern short story as a literary form. Incident and narrative are replaced by evocations of mood, poetic imagery, philosophic reflection, and subtleties of composition and structure. The shortest piece, ‘Monday or Tuesday’, is a one-page wonder of compression. This collection is a cornerstone of literary modernism. No other writer – with the possible exception of Nadine Gordimer, has taken the short story as a literary genre as far as this.
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Virginia Woolf is a readable and well illustrated biography by John Lehmann, who at one point worked as her assistant and business partner at the Hogarth Press. It is described by the blurb as ‘A critical biography of Virginia Woolf containing illustrations that are a record of the Bloomsbury Group and the literary and artistic world that surrounded a writer who is immensely popular today’. This is an attractive and very accessible introduction to the subject which has been very popular with readers ever since it was first published..
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Virginia Woolf – web links

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

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

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

Virginia Woolf at Gutenberg
Selected eTexts of her novels and stories in a variety of digital formats.

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

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

Orlando – Sally Potter’s film archive
The text and film script, production notes, casting, locations, set designs, publicity photos, video clips, costume designs, and interviews.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – short stories
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
Virginia Woolf – life and works

The Mausoleum Book

April 13, 2016 by Roy Johnson

the intellectual life and two marriages of Leslie Stephen

Leslie Stephen has every right to be considered the ‘father’ of the Bloomsbury Group. His two sons Thoby and Adrian attended Trinity Hall, Cambridge.where their father had been a tutor and fellow. The sons invited their talented friends home to meet Stephen’s equally gifted daughters Vanessa and Virginia; and Sir Leslie helped to introduce the twentieth century and the first shoots of its modernism by publishing writers such as Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad. The intellectual and social connections that underlay the Bloomsbury Group actually went back into the middle of the nineteenth century.

Sir Leslie Stephen (1832—1904)

The Mausoleum Book is a very personal account of Stephen’s two marriages was written in 1895 following the death of Stephen’s second wife Julia, and it was intended to be an entirely private document, addressed as a record to the family. Indeed it remained unseen outside this circle until its first publication in 1977. His children were slightly embarrassed by the tone of the memoir, which in his introduction Alan Bell calls one of ‘unrestrained lamentation’. But it has to be said that Leslie Stephen was doing something fairly unusual for the period – facing up to bereavement and the facts of death without the consolation of any religious belief. He had rejected what he called the ‘Noah’s ark myth’ and the trappings of religious ideology once and for all whilst at Cambridge – an act of intellectual honesty which led him to resign from his position of tutor at Trinity.

Having announced to his children at the outset of the memoir that it was to be about their mother, he launches immediately into an account of his own life – Cambridge, loss of religious belief, early days as a journalist, friendships with Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Carlyle, and George Eliot. His family was also friendly with William Makepeace Thackeray, through whom he met their daughter Harriet Marion (‘Minny’) who was to become his first wife.

But no sooner is Minny introduced than he immediately goes on to reflect on her sister Anny, who was a. popular novelist at the time. He describes her intellectual superiority, and her temperamental shortcomings. At this point the shadow of hereditary insanity in the Thackeray family is raised, and Stephen’s wife Minny dies very suddenly. His account then prepares the ground for his second marriage to the beautiful Julia Princep Jackson.

He backtracks very gallantly to give a history of her first marriage to Herbert Duckworth, painfully scanning their love letters and admitting she had been very happy in her choice of husband. Alas, this happiness was to last only three years, for Duckworth died very suddenly in 1870.

The shock and sadness of this sudden bereavement turned her into ‘a kind of sister of mercy’. She became engrossed in nursing skills which were reflected in her publication Notes from a Sickroom (1883) which forms an interesting bookend to her daughter Virginia Woolf’s later On Being Ill (1926).

Following their double loss, Leslie Stephen and Julia Duckworth became neighbours in Hyde Park Gate. They were close friends, united in widowhood, and had five children between them – one of whom (Laura, from his marriage to Minny) eventually became permanently incarcerated in a mental institution for the rest of her life.

They had domestic situations and social connections in common; they were old friends; and they lived in the same road – yet when he proposed marriage she turned him down, whilst protesting that she admired and even ‘loved’ him. They continued in this paradoxical impasse for a number of years until 1878 when she finally accepted his offer.

He claims that they were blissfully happy ever after – though his account should be taken along with the often more critical memoirs of his children (particularly Virginia’s) who all saw him as something of a domestic tyrant.

He paints a warm picture of summer holidays at Talland House in St Ives, Cornwall which will be familiar to those who have read To the Lighthouse – though the setting of the novel is supposed to be the Hebrides, a part of the narrative which is wholly unconvincing.

The memoir becomes slightly bizarre when he includes character sketches of people known to Julia but who had died at the time of its composition. These include the grotesquely entertaining figure of Halford Vaughan, who took a lofty and disdainful attitude to his adoring wife and devoted a lifetime to the composition of a magnum opus of which he only ever completed the introductory chapter, which completely fails to identify even the subject under consideration.

From this point on, the narrative becomes truly maudlin. There is amazingly little mention of his ‘new’ children with Julia (Thoby, Vanessa, Virginia, and Adrian) but endless accounts of other people’s illnesses and deaths.

For a while he protests in what seems to be a self-effacing manner about his own lack of literary achievement – only to then reveal his wife’s refutation of this view, something that he offers as an example of her superior judgement. He also lists compliments he has received from distinguished figures on his literary powers — ‘one of the greatest philosophic writers’ — but mentions them as something to confirm the wisdom of Julia’s views. This is a fairly devious way of patting yourself on the back. And it gets worse:

I can not doubt, without impugning her [Julia’s] judgement, that there must be something loveable in me.

This may even be true – but it’s no wonder that his children found their father’s memoir something of an embarrassment. But this slim volume is a rich vein of information for devotees of Bloomsbury, and a valuable insight into aspects of sentimental life of the late nineteenth century.

The Mausoleum Book – Amazon UK
The Mausoleum Book – Amazon US

NB! – On Amazon this book is classed as a rare item, and is priced accordingly. But don’t be put off: I bought my copy for one penny.

Leslie Stephen, The Mausoleum Book, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977, pp.118, ISBN: 0198120842

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Twentieth century literature

The Modern Movement

May 22, 2009 by Roy Johnson

themes and developments in English Literature 1910-1940

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on literature
More on the novella
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More on short stories

The Mysterious Case of Miss V

March 24, 2013 by Roy Johnson

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

The Mysterious Case of Miss V was written around the same time as Phyllis and Rosamond (1906). Like her other very early short stories, it was not published during her own lifetime. The first version of the story had a different ending.

Virginia Woolf

The Mysterious Case of Miss V – critical commentary

The short story

This story uses a device Woolf was to exploit many times – perhaps most famously in her essay Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown: that is, to write in the persona of a narrator (very typically a writer) who dreams up an imaginary fictional character to illustrate some point about human character or the relationship between fiction and real life.

In this case the imaginary young woman is everywoman: even her name changes from Janet V. to Mary V. part way through the story. And it is quite clear that Woolf is generalising about women’s experience, not simply conjuring up the existence of an individual. She invites readers to identify with the situation she describes in phrases such as ‘The case with which such fate befalls you‘ [my emphasis].

This is a story without a dramatised central character, and with no plot in any conventional sense. It is also amazingly short – and a taste of what was to come a dozen years later in even shorter stories such as Kew Gardens and Monday or Tuesday.

Very early in her career Woolf was moving away from the conventions of the traditional short story, and developing those aspects of prose fiction which were to form the substance of literary modernism in the Edwardian and Georgian period. Brevity of expression, understatement, and compression of ideas were just some of those devices

Yet this is a story that captures an idea. It isn’t an essay or a documentary. It creates an account of a subtle social phenomenon and a pulse of life such as we expect from a piece of short fiction.

Theme

This is a story about the ‘invisibility’ of women in society. and the alienation of the individual in modern city life. First of all Woolf establishes that the situation she examines is entirely normal. ‘Such a story as hers and her sister’s … one might mention a dozen such sisters in one breath’.

The young woman she posits may be encountered socialising in a perfectly normal manner, but then seems to vanish from society, leaving no trace: ‘and then you moved on and she seemed to melt into some armchair or chest of drawers’.

One of the most interesting things about this story is the fact that it originally had a completely different ending. In the original conclusion to the narrative, after the maid has opened the door, the narrator recounts ‘I walked straight in and saw Mary V. sitting at a table.’

The Mysterious Case of Miss V – study resources

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon UK

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon US

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon UK

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon US

Monday or Tuesday and Other Stories – Gutenberg.org

Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon UK

Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon US

The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon UK

The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle edition

The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

The Mysterious Case of Miss V – story synopsis

An un-named first person narrator speculates on the commonplace observation that individuals can be lonely, even when they live in a crowded modern city.

The case is illustrated by Miss V. who lives in London and mixes in drawing rooms, concerts, and parties, but whose presence is so unsubstantial that she comes and goes without notice.

The narrator awakes one morning and calls out Miss V’s name, but she cannot summon up the memory of her substance any longer. She decides the next day to pay her a visit to establish her existence.

But when she arrives at the flat where Miss V. lives, a maid announces that she has been ill for two months and died the morning before.

Principal characters

I	the un-named first person narrator
Miss Janet V.	a virtually anonymous young woman

Virginia Woolf podcast

A eulogy to words

Other works by Virginia Woolf

Mrs Dalloway (1925) is probably the most accessible of her great novels. A day in the life of a London society hostess is used as the structure for her experiments in multiple points of view. The themes she explores are the nature of personal identity; memory and consciousness; the passage of time; and the tensions between the forces of Life and Death. The novel abandons conventional notions of plot in favour of a mosaic of events. She gives a very lyrical response to the fundamental question, ‘What is it like to be alive?’ And her answer is a sensuous expression of metropolitan existence. The novel also features her rich expression of ‘interior monologue’ as a narrative technique, and it offers a subtle critique of society recovering in the aftermath of the first world war. This novel is now seen as a central text of English literary modernism.
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To the Lighthouse (1927) is the second of the twin jewels in the crown of her late experimental phase. It is concerned with the passage of time, the nature of human consciousness, and the process of artistic creativity. Woolf substitutes symbolism and poetic prose for any notion of plot, and the novel is composed as a tryptich of three almost static scenes – during the second of which the principal character Mrs Ramsay dies – literally within a parenthesis. The writing is lyrical and philosophical at the same time. Many critics see this as her greatest achievement, and Woolf herself realised that with this book she was taking the novel form into hitherto unknown territory.
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The Complete Shorter Fiction contains all the classic short stories such as The Mark on the Wall, A Haunted House, and The String Quartet – but also the shorter fragments and experimental pieces such as Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street. These ‘sketches’ (as she called them) were used to practice the techniques she used in her longer fictions. Nearly fifty pieces written over the course of Woolf’s writing career are arranged chronologically to offer insights into her development as a writer. This is one for connoisseurs – well presented and edited in a scholarly manner.
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