Novels since 1900

Site-map

2008-10-11T09:47:00.018+13:00

[Marcantonio Raimondi: The Dream of Raphael (1508)]

Novels since 1900

This site presents the fossil remnants of a course I taught for one semester at Auckland University in 2008. Having inherited both the booklist and the structure of lectures, I wasn't able to introduce nearly as many innovations as I would have liked.

For instance, the reading list would have been very different if I'd had my way (for further details, see the blogpost here), and there would have been far more interactive tutorials and far fewer formal lectures.

Anyway, I haven't substantially revised it. It is what it is. I did try and give a kind of potted history of twentieth-century culture as an accompaniment to the discussion of the eight novels, so there's probably some material here which may continue to be of general interest. I feel a certain fondness for some of the connections I managed to make in the heat of the moment.

Student responses were, I would have to say, somewhat mixed. Quite a lot of them enjoyed the New Historicist gestures towards more social history and contextualisation of the novels; others would clearly have preferred to stay with the previous emphasis on New Critical close readings.

You can't please all of the people all of the time. As long as you please yourself, though ... I guess that's the main thing.

Administration:

Welcome

Course Description

Assignments

Timetable

Authors:

[Maggie Taylor: Girl with a Bee Dress]

Willa Cather (1873-1947)

E. M. Forster (1879-1940)

James Joyce (1882-1941)

Graham Greene (1904-1991)

John Barth (1930- )

Margaret Atwood (1939- )

Ian McEwan (1948- )

Louise Erdrich (1954- )

Novels:

[Leonora Carrington: Labyrinth]

A Portrait of the Artist (1916)

My Ántonia (1918)

A Passage to India (1924)

The Floating Opera (1957)

The End of the Road (1958)

The Comedians (1966)

Cat’s Eye (1988)

Tracks (1988)

Atonement (2001)

Lectures:

[Rembrandt van Rijn: The Anatomy lecture of Dr Nicolaes Tulp (1632)]

lecture 1 - Introduction: The Novel since 1900

lecture 2 - Willa Cather: What is a Novel?

lecture 3 - Willa Cather: The Significance of the Frontier

lecture 4 - James Joyce: International Modernism

lecture 5 - James Joyce: Stephen Hero

lecture 6 - James Joyce: The 3 Nets

lecture 7 - E. M. Forster: Bloomsbury & The Raj

lecture 8 - E. M. Forster: Plot

lecture 9 - E. M. Forster: The Trial

lecture 10 - John Barth: Existentialism, Postmodernism &c.

lecture 11 - John Barth: The Floating Opera (Detail)

lecture 12 - John Barth: The End of the Road (Character)

lecture 13 - Graham Greene: The Bipolar Explorer
[Sean Sturm]

lecture 14 - Graham Greene: Theme & Symbolism

lecture 15 - Graham Greene: That Voodoo You Do

lecture 16 - Margaret Atwood: Feminist Discourses
[Agnieszka Zabicka]

lecture 17 - Margaret Atwood: Time

lecture 18 - Margaret Atwood: Bullies & Artists

lecture 19 - Louise Erdrich: The Native American Renaissance

lecture 20 - Louise Erdrich: Structure

lecture 21 - Ian McEwan: Thatcher Means Death

lecture 22 - Ian McEwan: Style

lecture 23 - Ian McEwan: The 30s & the 40s

lecture 24 - Conclusion: The 21st Century

Tutorials:

[Writing Freelance Star]

Tutorial 1: Introductions

Tutorial 2: Willa Cather

Tutorial 3: James Joyce

Tutorial 4: E. M. Forster

Tutorial 5: John Barth: The Floating Opera

Tutorial 6: John Barth: The End of the Road

Tutorial 7: Graham Greene

Tutorial 8: Margaret Atwood

Tutorial 9: Louise Erdrich

Tutorial 10: Ian McEwan

Tutorial 10

2008-06-11T10:41:00.027+12:00

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Ian McEwan

The 21st Century

We'll be talking some more about the exam, about the different types of "reading" available to us, "dirty" (i.e. historicist) or "clean" (i.e. formalist), and the ways in which they can be related to various different books in the course.

I'll also be speculating, in the last lecture of all, on what new directions the novel is pursuing now, in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Tutorial 9

2008-06-11T10:41:00.026+12:00

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Louise Erdrich

Ojibwe Country

Two suggestive quotes from Louise Erdrich's travel book Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country (Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 2003):

Very traditional people are very careful about attribution. When a story begins there is a prefacing history of that story's origin that is as complicated as the Modern Language Association guidelines to forming footnotes. [p.39]

and:

... Would it be better to confront an ill-motived intruder who was well read, or one indifferent to literature? [p.94]

Tutorial 8

2008-06-11T10:40:00.028+12:00

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Margaret Atwood

Negotiating with the Dead:
Canada and the Malevolent North

Bully or bullied? Which were you at school?

Artist or subject matter? Where do your talents lie?

Tutorial 7

2008-06-11T10:40:00.026+12:00

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Graham Greene

Colonialism & Catholicism

I think the map is handy to give you some sense of the territory - the ubiquitous closeness of the Dominican Republic, the nearness of Cuba.

This tutorial will be another chance to debate the many questions raised by Greene's intriguing, multifaceted novel. I'll be continuing that process in today's lecture, too.

Tutorial 6

2008-06-11T10:39:00.042+12:00

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John Barth: The End of the Road

Character

Remember that Assignment 2 is due in this Friday.

In the tutorial we'll be discussing the concept of character in fiction as it relates to Barth's The End of the Road.

Existentialism is a way of thinking associated with the dilemma of how to achieve self-justification and authenticity in an essentially arbitrary cosmos.

On the one hand, this might be said to cry out for parody.

On the other hand, what other theory of human behaviour do we have to replace it?

Tutorial 5

2008-06-11T10:39:00.041+12:00

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John Barth: The Floating Opera

Assignment 2

The essay topics for Assignment two will be available online, at the lecture, and in the English Department assignment cubbyholes (just along from the secretaries' office), by Thursday 28th August.

In this week's tutorials we'll be discussing the fine art of writing a review (At least one of the prescribed topics for each novel will invite you to compose a book-review for a specific context).

We'll also talk about the more creative responses required by some of the other essay topics.

Tutorial 4

2008-06-11T10:39:00.038+12:00

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E. M. Forster

The Novel tells a story

The English storm the platform in the picture above (from a production of the dramatisation by Santha Rama Rau - basis for the later film by David Lean).

Professor Don Smith, who was at the first performance of the play, tells me that there were a lot of complaints by reviewers afterwards about the "impossibility" of the scene where all the English characters move out of the body of the courtroom to sit up on a level with the judge. They reiterated the old complaint that Forster simply didn't know the Anglo-Indians.

He did know them. He just didn't like them. The scene is (of course) in the novel.

Don said it was fascinating to see Forster sitting there, at the front of the hall, hunched in his chair, saying nothing. Difficult to tell if he enjoyed the show or not.

*

Contact details for the stage two and stage three student representatives for 220/356 are now available here.

Tutorial 3

2008-06-11T10:38:00.025+12:00

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James Joyce

Narrative point-of-view

Assignment one is due in the Department on Friday of this week, so it's imperative that you're in a tutorial by now, and thus have someone designated to mark your work.

Tutorial 2

2008-06-11T10:38:00.024+12:00

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Willa Cather

Aspects of the Novel

Discussion of Assignment One, the close reading, due in the Department on Friday 15th August (by 5 pm)

Tutorial 1

2008-06-11T10:37:00.009+12:00

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Introductions

This is mainly a meeting to get to know one another and to discuss the nature of the course as a whole, and your prior experience of novel-reading.

You should make sure that you have a copy of the Administration Guide (with updated contact details), and are familiar with the regulations and assessment structure of the paper.

Stage two students will be tutored by Agnieszka Zabicka (contact details here) and myself, Jack Ross (contact details here).

Stage three students will be tutored by Sean Sturm (contact details here).

Tutorial lists should be up in the Department or available online.

Lecture 24

2008-06-10T15:17:00.018+12:00

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Wk 12 - Thurs (23/10), 3-4 pm lecture: HSB2

Conclusion: The 21st Century

In a 1964 letter to his close friend, Ron Goulart, the appallingly prolific (and intermittently brilliant) science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick (1928-82) explained how he, personally, set out to write a novel:

this is how PKD gets 55,00 words (the adequate mileage) out of his typewriter: by having 3 persons, 3 levels, 2 themes (one outer or world-sized, the other inner or individual sized), with a melding of all, then, at last, a humane final note.

The three characters should be, respectively:

“First character, not protagonist but … less than life, a sort of everyman who exists throughout book but is, well, passive; we learn the entire world or background as we see it acting on him”;

“In Chapter Two comes the ‘protag,’ who gets a two-syllable name such as ‘Tom Stonecypher,’ as opposed to the monosyllabic ‘Al Glunch’ tag for the Chapter One ‘subman’”;

“through Mr. S’s eyes and ears, we glimpse for the first time … superhuman reality – and the human being, shall we call him Mr. Ubermensch? Who inhabits this realm.”

So, “just as Mr G. is the taxpayer and Mr S. is the ‘I,’ the median person, Mr. U is Mr. God, Mr. Big” – the plot development of the book is based on blending the original personal dilemma (“marital problems or sex problems or whatever it is”) of Mr. S with the worldwide “Atlas weight” problems faced by Mr. U, until:

The terminal structural mechanism is revealed: THE PERSONAL PROBLEM OF MR. S IS THE PUBLIC SOLUTION FOR MR. U. And this can occur whether Mr. S is with or pitted against Mr. U.

[Quoted from Lawrence Sutin, Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (1989): 138].

It all sounds a bit mechanical, and certainly helps to explain how Dick managed to churn out eleven novels in two years, but when one adds that among them were classics such as Martian Time-Slip, Now Wait for Last Year, Dr Bloodmoney, The Simulacra, and Clans of the Alphane Moon, one has to acknowledge that there may be something to be said for such formulaic blueprints after all. Possibly the most disconcerting of them all, however, was The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, which depicts an invasion of Earth by some kind of Gnostic demiurge who has taken on the form of the slit-eyed, prosthetic-handed, steel-jawed Terran entrepreneur, Palmer Eldritch ...

Having spent much of the past three months discussing a number of allegedly exemplary, but certainly influential, 20th-century novels, I guess the time has now come to ask the question where is the novel going now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century? Atonement (2001) was, essentially, a backward glance over travelled roads. It's no accident that it's been parcelled up with Henry James's What Maisie Knew (1896) by its paperback publishers.

Does the future belong to the likes of Ian McEwan, or to Philip K. Dick and his heirs? On the one hand, when I look at some of the successes of the past few years, I see:

Experiments in style and format (but not subject-matter) such as Mark Z. Danielewski's horror novel House of Leaves (2000) or Craig Thompson's grahic novel Blankets (2003)?
Blurring of genre / style boundaries in texts such as Alan Moore's graphic novel The Lost Girls (2006) or W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz (2001)?

[image source]

According to Johnny Truant, the tattoo-shop apprentice who discovers Zampanò's work, once you read The Navidson Record,

For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You'll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you'll realize it's always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won't understand why or how.
- Mark Z. Danielewski

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In Thompson's composition process, pages are initially composed

in a very illegible form, a shorthand where words and pictures blur into alien scribbles ... I'm working with words and pictures right from the beginning, but the picture might not look any different from a letter, because they're just a bunch of scribbles on a page.
- Craig Thompson

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Truth is a well-known pathological liar. It invariably turns out to be Fiction wearing a fancy frock. ... Self-proclaimed Fiction, on the other hand, is entirely honest. You can tell this, because it comes right out and says, "I'm a Liar," right there on the dust jacket.
- Alan Moore

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Every river, as we know, must have banks on both sides, so where, seen in those terms, where are the banks of time? What would be this river’s qualities, qualities perhaps corresponding to those of water, which is fluid, rather heavy, and translucent? In what way do objects immersed in time differ from those left untouched by it? Why do we show the hours of light and darkness in the same circle? Why does time stand eternally still and motionless in one place, and rush headlong by in another? Could we not claim, said Austerlitz, that time itself has been nonconcurrent over the centuries and the millennia? It is not so long ago, after all, that it began spreading out over everything. And is not human life in many parts of the earth governed to this day less by time than by the weather, and thus by an unquantifiable dimension which disregards linear regularity, does not progress constantly forward but moves in eddies, is marked by episodes of congestion and irruption, recurs in ever-changing form, and evolves in no one knows what direction?
- W G Sebald

I don't know if it's really the job of critics - especially Academic ones - to be prophetic, but I'm putting my money on the second of these alternatives.

For the moment, though, we're left with this set of novels written since 1900. However, as Borges reminds us, our view of the progression of the novel will rewrite itself continuously as the future unfolds. The Novel Now is always precisely that - from the perspective of now - never really just an exercise in historical reconstruction.

Exam Structure

• Final Examination (3 hours)

15th November:

[Stage 2: 3 essay questions (60%)]

[Stage 3: either 3 essay questions or 1 pre-announced question (50%)]

NB: You are not permitted to answer on any of the novels / authors you've written about in the rest of the course. Nor may you answer on both John Barth novels - only one of these two works may be written about by any student.

Course Assessment

A course-assessment form will be handed out. These forms are anonymous, and will be used solely for the improvement of the course as it stands at present. The envelopes they are sealed in will not be opened until final results in the paper are determined.

GOOD LUCK!

Lecture 23

2008-06-10T15:16:00.031+12:00

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Wk 12 - Mon (20/10), 3-4 pm lecture: HSB1

Ian McEwan: Atonement (2001) -

The 30s & the 40s

In the first lecture on Ian McEwan's Atonement, we talked about the cultural fallout of Thatcherism, probably the most significant social convulsion in Britain since the Second World War, a set of ideas and attitudes whose shockwaves are still reverberating now, despite more than a decade of "New Labour."

In the second lecture I examined the complex narrative frame of the novel - the doubt thrown on any and every level of "truth" within it.

This has perhaps had the effect of leaving you a bit in the dark, both in in terms of what I'm driving at overall, and (possibly) in your mood. Last week's lecture did finish up rather bleakly.

Bear with me, though. Today I'm going to try and knit up the loose ends and finish off my reading of the novel as a whole. Mostly I'll be concentrating on the idea of "Atonement" and all its various reverberations and overtones, but I think the best way to start is with a more considered treatment of the novel's setting.

Atonement ends with the words: "But now I must sleep" (370). I don't know if I'm right to hear in those words an echo of Wilfred Owen's "Strange Meeting" (1918):

It seemed that out of battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which titanic wars had groined.

Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then ,as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless.
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall, -
By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.
...
I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now...'

But, in any case, whether a specific reference is meant or not, I think it offers us a good alternative way into the novel: its recreation not only of the incidents in Briony Tallis's imagined past, but also of the atmosphere of those past eras. You could call it, I suppose, pastiche -- but like any attempt to parody a style or set of attitudes, it carries with it an implicit critique of the omissions as well as the successes in past ways of seeing. That's the best defence for the (so-called) historical novel, I guess. It's never about the past so much as it's about the present and our inheritance from that past.

Basically those settings come down to two: a country-house summer in the thirties and the "miracle of Dunkirk" in the first summer of the Second World War.

• Setting (or mise-en-scène)

Country House detective story

[Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers etc. -- but also Forster's Howards End (1910) and Waugh's Brideshead Revisited (1945)]

What is the significance of the country house in British fiction? Obviously it's a good vehicle for examining themes of class, of course (peasants, servants, guests, and Aristocrats / Middle-Class Social climbers at home). It pits nostalgia and conservatism against the encroachments of modernity -- and that's as true in detective fiction as it is in more considered "state-of-England" novels such as Howards End or Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (1989).

In chapter six of Atonement Briony's mother Emily Tallis's migraine provides a pretext for an almost Fall-of-the-House-of-Usher like self-identification with the fabric of her own estate. She is forced to conclude, though, that:

She could send her tendrils into every room of the house, but she could not send them into the future. She also knew that, ultimately, it was her own peace of mind she strove for; self-interest and kindness were best not separated. (71)

The country-house is, finally - from Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey to Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited - a symbol for well-meaning selfishness. Lady Marchmain, General Tilney and Emily Tallis are birds of a feather. "Self-interest and kindness were best not separated" - an oxymoron if ever I heard one.

Dunkirk as the human condition

[the 1940s -- Dylan Thomas (The Edge of Love (2008)), Edith Sitwell, the new Apocalypse]

What is the significance of Dunkirk in British history? A glorious defeat. A miracle. "Britain loses every battle but the last." John Masefield, then Poet Laureate, wrote a book about it called The Nine Days' Wonder (he'd distinguished himself in the First World War by writing a book about Gallipoli which began each chapter with a quotation from the medieval french epic La Chanson de Roland, and compared Sir Ian Hamilton to Charlemagne). Paul Gallico's The Snow Goose (1941) memorialises the fleet of little boats which set sail from the coasts of England to pick up soldiers from the beach and ferry them out to the waiting warships and transports.

A lot of powerful myths and archetypes are therefore bound up with Robbie's nightmarish retreat to the beaches through the Apocalyptic war landscape of Northern France.

He folded the map away, and as he straightened from picking up the coat and was slinging it around his shoulders, he saw it. The others, sensing his movement, turned around, and followed his gaze. It was a leg in a tree. A mature plane tree, only just in leaf. The leg was twenty feet up, wedged in the first forking of the trunk, bare, severed cleanly above the knee. From where they stood there was no sign of blood or torn flesh. It was a perfect leg, pale, smooth, small enough to be a child's. The way it was angled in the fork, it seemed to be on display, for their benefit or enlightenment: this is a leg. (192)

Note the careful detail of this description. "it seemed to be on display" - like a kind of Surrealist outrage, a urinal or other found object put up in an art gallery "pour epater les bourgeois" [to shock the townsfolk].

I think it's important to remember here that every war is as much of an ideological battle as it is a physical one. Think of the famous opening passage from Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (1929):

There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

And then compare them to this, Winston Churchill speaking to the House of Commons on 4th June, 1940:

Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender

I think it's a fair juxtaposition. There's something magnificent about those Churchillian periods, of course: just like that speech two weeks later heralding the beginning of the Battle of Britain:
Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, "This was their finest hour."

But we must beware. That was the point of all those surrealist outrages in the first place. Hitler could make eloquent, moving speeches, too - so could Goebbels. So could (for that matter) Walt Disney, whom Goebbels admired as the master propagandist of the age.

That's the main point, I think, of Robbie's long walk through the pointless, petty human disasters which are the true face of war. He is, to all intents and purposes, already dead. Already on p.192 we get a succinct description of the wound which will gradually kill him through septicaemia. It's not for me, perhaps, to speculate on the presence or otherwise of "glory" in such a wound - it's not in the back, after all. "He nothing common did or mean / Upon that memorable scene" - but it seems a little hard that he should have to die for it, after all. As A. E. Housman put it:

Here dead lie we because we did not choose
To live and shame the land from which we sprung.
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;
But young men think it is, and we were young.

• Theme (or Implication)

What, then, is Briony atoning for? The sin of not speaking up, for believing her own well-meaning exaggerations (a common characteristic of writers), for confusing "self-interest and kindness" -- her admitted desire to save her sister from a sex-fiend; her more shadowy jealousy and desire to keep Robbie for herself (as in fact she succeeds in doing, by embalming him in this marble mausoleum of a book: a kind of textual Taj Mahal constructed in his memory).

What is McEwan atoning for? W. H. Auden again put it best, perhaps, in his "At the Grave of Henry James" (1945):

All will be judged. Master of nuance and scruple,
Pray for me and for all writers, living or dead:
Because there are many whose works
Are in better taste than their lives, because there is no end
To the vanity of our calling, make intercession
For the treason of all clerks.

For every Hemingway, stripping our rhetoric bare and showing us the grinning skull beneath the skin, there's a Masefield lavishly hymning the deeds of a Commander who never actually left his warship to go ashore on the Dardanelles. For every Evelyn Waugh, exposing the cruelty and pretensions of the aristocratic Flytes, there's an Agatha Christie keeping impostors and jumped-up bounders in their place. For every A. E. Housman there's a Rudyard Kipling. Yes, there are many "whose works / are in better taste than their lives."

Is Ian McEwan on the side of the angels, then? He has a fine line in depicting the cruelly, tragically mixed motives of fallible human beings. Influencing other people's lives by the way one depicts and reinvents them is a heavy responsibility to bear, though, and it's hard to avoid the suspicion sometimes that it might have been better never even to start. "First do no harm" is the first precept taught to medical students.

"It's better to be damned for action than inaction" is a counter-maxim which might be applied here, but in every case it's best to suspect the consequences of one's own ignorance and vanity - as in Briony's case, the results of getting the wrong end of the stick.

Lecture 22

2008-06-10T15:16:00.028+12:00

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Wk 11 - Thurs (16/10), 3-4 pm lecture: HSB2

Ian McEwan: Atonement (2001) -

Style

Let’s go back, for the discussion of this crucial last novel, to our nine muses of the novel:

Character (or Psychological portraiture)
Detail (or Verisimilitude)
Plot (or Story)
Point-of-View (or Mode of narration)
Setting (or Mise-en-scène)
Structure (or Architecture)
Style (or Tone of voice)
Theme (or Implication)
Timing (or Duration - real or seeming - of action)

Each one has dominated the discussion of one of our novels:

Setting for Cather, My Ántonia (1918)
Point-of-view for Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
Plot for Forster, A Passage to India (1924)
Detail for Barth, The Floating Opera (1957)
Character for Barth, The End of the Road (1958)
Theme for Greene, The Comedians (1966)
Time for Atwood, Cat's Eye (1988)
Structure for Louise Erdrich, Tracks (1988)
Style for Ian McEwan, Atonement (2001)

So let’s continue the discussion by attempting to apply these diverse categories to Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001):

I'm going to begin with:

• Style (or Tone of Voice)

which in this case is closely bound up with:

• Narration (or Point-of-View)

Briony Tallis is an author. We are presented with three pieces of her work, each with inbuilt authorial commentary:
early: The Trials of Arabella (1935)

middle: Two Figures by a Fountain (1940)

late: Atonement (1999) itself.

Could [Ian McEwan's] Briony Tallis, then, be seen as analogous to [Willa Cather's] Jim Burden? Which one should we discuss when discussing the style of this particular author?

It actually makes an immense difference. NcEwan may know, or mean to imply, things which are quite opaque to Briony. Since we think we are listening to him when actually we are listening to him pretending to be her, it's difficult to be sure what level of complication evidence lies on in this tissue of part-truths and evasions.

• Plot (or Story)

Take, for example, the theme of incest in the novel. Why does Briony's father support Robbie through Cambridge, and then propose to pay for his medical degree? Is he his (illegitimate) son. Is that the reason why the father is so strangely absent from the novel? Does Briony choose to make him so?

Is that why both parents are so happy to have Robbie taken away as soon as his interest in Cecilia becomes apparent? They really make very little effort to find out the truth about Lola's rape / forced seduction. Is it his half-sister whom he's in love with?

The book doesn't say. It's left a tantalising possibility, but no more than that. We're left with a single voice, whom we have to trust to give us information as there isn't any alternative.

• Character (or Psychological portraiture)

Let's talk some more about that voice, then [all quotes from Ian McEwan, Atonement. 2001 (London: Vintage, 2007)]:

As she stood in the nursery waiting for her cousins' return, she sensed she could write a scene like the one by the fountain and she could include a hidden observer like herself. She could imagine herself hurrying down now to her bedroom, to a clean block of lined paper and her marbled, Bakelite fountain pen. She could see the simple sentences, the accumulating telepathic symbols, unfurling at the nib's end. She could write the scene three times over, from three points of view; her excitement was in the prospect of freedom, of being delivered from the cumbrous struggle between good and bad, heroes and villains. None of these three was bad, nor were they particularly good. She need not judge. There did not have to be a moral. She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive. It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had equal value. That was the only moral a story need have. (40)

Briony has grown out of the infantile morality play of The Trials of Arabella and her earlier fiction, and is entering the new world of Modernism. Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner. But that isn't the whole story by any means. McEwan [Briony] goes on:

Six decades later [i.e. in 1995] she would describe how at the age of thirteen she had written her way through a whole history of literature, beginning with stories derived from the European tradition of folk tales, through drama with simple moral intent, to arrive at an impartial psychological realism which she had discovered for herself, one special morning during a heat wave in 1935.

And now the crucial part:

She would be well aware of the extent of her self-mythologising [my emphasis], and she gave her account a self-mocking, or mock-heroic tone. Her fiction was known for its amorality, and like all authors pressed by a repeated question, she felt obliged to produce a story line, a plot of her development that contained the moment when she became recognizably herself. She knew ... that it was not the long-ago morning she was recalling so much as her subsequent accounts of it. (41)

But this really is a crucial morning. The incident with the vase has just occurred, which will be the pretext for a series of acts on her part which she repents for the rest of her life -- a morality tale, then, rather than a piece of "amoral" observation? What seems certain to the 13-yr-old and the older nurse is by no means clear to the older woman.

And what sort of writer did she become? I can't read you the whole of the fascinating letter which McEwan has put into the mouth of Cyril Connolly, co-editor of Horizon, but I will quote a few salient extracts:

There are some good images ... and you both capture a flow of thought, and represent it with subtle differences in order to make attempts at characterisation. Something unique and unexplained is caught [my emphasis]. However, we wondered whether it owed a little too much to the techniques of Mrs. Woolf. The crystalline present moment is of course a worthy subject in itself, especially for poetry ... However, such writing can become precious when there is no sense of forward movement. Put the other way round, our attention would have been held even more effectively has there been an underlying pull of simple narrative. (312)

It's worth noting that this seems to be precisely the kind of writing foreseen in Briony's vision from the window (and, parenthetically, I'd not the resemblances between Margaret Atwood's 25-year struggle to write Cat's Eye, and Briony Tallis's 60-year travail over Atonement - there seems to be a little of Atwood in her tart, self-mocking commentary on her own efforts above, too).

Connolly goes on:

If this girl has so fully misunderstood or been so wholly baffled by the strange little scene that has unfolded before her, how might it affect the lives of the two adults? Might she come between them in some disastrous fashion? Or bring them closer, either by accident or design? Might she innocently expose them somehow, to the young woman's parents perhaps? They surely would not approve of a liaison between their eldest daughter and their charlady's son. Might the young couple come to use her as a messenger? (313)

McEwan is being a bit clever here. He's intimating a plot development somewhat along the lines of L. P. Hartley's The Go-Between (1953 - filmed 1971), which begins with the immortal lines: "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." It's rather unpleasantly coincidental that he himself had to fight off charges of plagiarism when it came to the plot of this, his most famous novel. More or less the same thing has occurred with his most recent one, On Chesil Beach (2007), as it did with The Cement Garden (1978), back at the beginning of his career.

The obvious way to read this passage, then, is an example of Connolly's intuition. He can see the lines of the "true" story behind the elaborate subterfuge of psychological niceties put up by the adolescent Briony. After all, we know that McEwan invented the whole kit and caboodle, Connolly leter and all.

But he also invented Briony, and she is a mmost unreliable person. She lies about Robbie (albeit out of the best of motives, to save her own sister form his beastly attenionis -- later, though, after the pond incident, we come to realise that it's because she's in love with him herself (232)). She lies in putting together this essentially innocuous version of the vase-and-fountain incident. And she lies later when she creates the final scene of reconciliation and hope between Robbie and Cecilia.

Lying is, in fact, equated with virtue by Briony to a surprising extent. Even in teh scne with the wounded French solider (307-9) she sees her duty as lying to him and impersonating another person.

Is any of the story true, then? Did anything come of the fountain incident? If we doubt that, we doubt the whole book, but aren't we right to do so? Take the bizarre final sequence of the novel, after the completion of the ms. she has "vascular dementia," she's told -- "not as bad as Alzheimer's" (354) (which afflicted the novelist Iris Murdoch) but still pretty bad. Can we trust her memory, then? She is a novelist = professional liar, after all.

When I am dead, and the Marshalls are dead, and the novel is finally published, we will only exist as my inventions. ... No one will care what events and which individuals were misrepresented to make a novel. I know there's always a certain kind of reader who will be compelled to ask, But what really happened? The answer is simple: the lovers survive and flourish.

"And they all lived happily ever after." Of course they did, because the storyteller saw it as her duty to make it so. She'd punished them (and herself) and now she chose to forgive them. But:

how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheist. It as always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all. (371)

It's a terribly bleak picture: one that applies even more strongly to Ian McEwan, the "onlie begetter" of all these fictional characters, than to Briony, their supposed (though dodgy) chronicler.

Henry James said that the whole duty of the novelist was to "dramatise, dramatise, dramatise." Somewhat like Briony's [and McEwan's] remark that "like all authors pressed by a repeated question, she felt obliged to produce a story line, a plot of her development that contained the moment when she became recognizably herself." (41) Is that "story line" the novel Atonement?

James went on to say that (so far as he was concerned) the three rules of human conduct could be summed up as: "Be kind; be kind; be kind." Somewhat like Briony's final reflection that "it isn't weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair, to let my lovers live and to unite them at the end." (372)

Next week: more on the novel's setting, structure, and incidental felicities.

Lecture 21

2008-06-10T15:15:00.020+12:00

[image source]

Wk 11 - Mon (13/10), 3-4 pm lecture: HSB1

Ian McEwan: Atonement (2001) -

Thatcher Means Death

Critical Methodologies

What is a "reading" (so-called)?

Perhaps the best analogy is with modelling (in scientific terms). A reading is a kind of computer model of a work of art, not incorporating everything that's in the original -- since if it did it would simply be that original -- but accouting for as many aspects as possible.

We can therefore talk about rich readings, or reductionist readings, or ideological readings without committing ourselves to a belief in the truth and/or falsity of any reading of, say, a novel. It's a good reading insofar as we find it useful in accounting for the individual features and oddities of that particular work of art.

Another prevalent distinction is between clean readings and dirty readings.

A "clean" reading (and the term is, intentionally, a loaded one) is - for the purposes of this argument - one which confines itself to the formal features of a work of art, without straying outside it into the fields of biography, history or cultural politics. New Critics, Structuralists (and even certain post-structuralists) have an ideological predisposition for this type of reading. It's principal practical device is the "Close reading," pioneered by I. A Richards in England and the Southern Agrarian critics in the United States. Many teachers still find this intentional self-limiting a useful pedagogical aid, particularly in junior classes.

A "dirty" reading, by contrast, is one which concerns itself with historical and cultural agency. It depends on a certain amount of knowledge of a number of fields on teh part of the critic, and is therefore a somewhat less popular means of instruction at undergraduate level.

You'll perceive, on my part, a tendency to prefer dirty readings over clean readings throughout the body of this course. This is not so much because I like showing off the fact that I've read some history, as because I have certain difficulties with the basic postulates of the confined, ahistorical reading.

Take the simple matter of textual integrity, for instance. One of the early critical reading of Herman Melville's novel White-Jacket (1850) made great play with a scene where the hero falls from the mast of a ship at sea and, as he sinks beneath the waves, is touched by "some soiled fish of the deep."

But then it turned out that "soiled" was in fact a misprint for the far less resonant "coiled."

What can you do about things like that? Misprints, errors of punctuation or spacing, editorial intrusions on the author's original intentions? You have to get dirty, I'm afraid. There's no choice but to enter the complex and vexed arena of textual criticism.

Some texts are (relatively) stable and reliable. Does one really have to know which are which before beginning to scrutinise their more minute and telling details? I can't myself see much alternative, I'm afraid.

But of course it doesn't stop there. Can one read (say) Ian McEwan's fiction of the eighties and nineties with no knowledge of the cultural history of that era? Quite likely so - at present. Because we're not really conscious of the weight of cultural baggage which enables us to make sense of his cabinet ministers and Academics and their less respectable contemporaries.

But such information recedes, inexorably, with the passage of time. I was in the UK in the late 1980s. Some of what I read or hear about that epoch makes sense to me because I was there. I remember, shortly after arriving, seeing written on a wall: "Thatcher means Death."

Who was Margaret Thatcher? Why was she being apostrophized in this way in 1986? Does it matter? It's up to me (of course) to prove that it does - but I'm afraid I generally find the arguments in favour of ignorance less compelling than the ones in favour of acquiring some more knowledge - of whatever kind.

The UK in the 1980s

Margaret Thatcher became Leader of the British Conservative Party in 1975, and was elected Prime Minister in 1979, after Labour's so-called "Winter of Discontent." She was finally toppled in 1990 by John Major, her own choice of successor (though her support for him would evaporate over time).

She was a strong supporter of Ronald Reagan's aggressive foreign policy, an opponent of Trade Unions and what she saw as a bloated, inefficient Civil Service. The Thatcher era was associated with laissez-faire, Monetarist economics, and a get-rich-quick, entrepreneurial mentality in business (somewhat undercut by the 1987 stock market crash.

A characteristic quote [from an interview in Woman's Own magazine, 23 September 1987]:

I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand "I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it!" or "I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!" "I am homeless, the Government must house me!" and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour and life is a reciprocal business and people have got the entitlements too much in mind without the obligations...

Such views understandably attracted some cultural commentary. On the one hand there was the portrayal of the grasping young ignoramuses of the Thatcher era in novels such as Martin Amis’ Money (1984) and London Fields (1989), or films such as Mike Leigh's High Hopes (1988) or (retrospectively) Ken Loach's The Navigators (2001). Then there's the fascinating, multilayered complexity of Salman Rushdie's examination of the racial politics of the era, The Satanic Verses (1988).

But before any of those there was Ian McEwan's The Ploughman’s Lunch (1983)

[image source]

Atonement

So what’s McEwan's fiction really about?

"Ian Macabre," as he was called after his first few titles, has gradually developed more of a political consciousness as his prestige and reputation grows.

Lecture 20

2008-06-10T15:14:00.037+12:00

[image source]

Wk 10 - Thurs (9/10), 3-4 pm lecture: HSB2

Louise Erdrich: Tracks (1988) -

Structure

Leslie Fiedler, in The Return of the Vanishing American (1968), refers to four persistent foci of mythic patterning in American literature, which he identifies with the four points of the compass:

The Eastern: the novel of manners, in a European or sophisticated east-coast setting (henry james, Edith Wharton, Scott Fitzgerald)
The Western: the novel of the frontier (he'd include Herman Melville here, as well as some of Mark Twain)
The Northern: the austere New England Yankee novel (Ethan Frome, The Country of the Pointed Firs)
The Southern (Huckleberrry Finn, The Grandissimes - even Uncle Tom's Cabin and Gone with the Wind

This seems to refer back to the distinction between (so-called) "Redskins and Palefaces" in American literature which I discussed in my first lecture on Willa Cather.

If Tracks is a Western, though, what kind of a Western is it?

Some fairly obvious points about the narrative:

Nanapush begins and ends the story, and generally seems to be more reliable as a narrator - or at any rate less biassed against Fleur Pillager.

Pauline's story begins with an account of Fleur's relations with the lake monster, and goes on to an account of her rape by the men of Argus. This encourages us to see her as an unreliable, self-justifying witness.

Nanapush has a longer memory than any other surviving member of the tribe, and a tendency to see things in a traditional sense. According to the author of the wikipedia entry on the book, his name equates with Nanabozho, a Native American Trickster figure.

Pauline's religious fanaticism, and propensity for the dead operates as a kind of parody of assimilation to a dominant ideology. "Internalizing the standards of the aggressor," as Toril Moi put it in Sexual / Textual Politics (1985).

Nanapush's story is being told to Lulu, Fleur's daughter, presumably in the 1940s, many years after the events described in the book, which roughly span the period between 1912, when Nanapush saves Fleur, to 1924, when Lulu returns from Boarding School. The status of Pauline's account is less certain.

So whose story is it? Nanapush's, Pauline's, Fleur's - or Lulu's? Or does the significance of the story transcend any one of them? Is it, in fact, an allegory of dispossession?

Compare Willa Cather (1918):

Beyond the pond, on the slope that climbed to the cornfield, there was, faintly marked in the grass, a great circle where the Indians used to ride. Jake and Otto were sure that when they galloped round that ring the Indians tortured prisoners, bound to a stake in the centre; but grandfather thought they merely ran races or trained horses there. Whenever one looked at this slope against the setting sun, the circle showed like a pattern in the grass; and this morning, when the first light spray of snow lay over it, it came out with wonderful distinctness, like strokes of Chinese white on canvas. The old figure stirred me as it had never done before and seemed a good omen for the winter.

Where else does the term "tracks" come up in Cather's narrative? At the very end:

On the level land the tracks had almost disappeared - were mere shadings in the grass, and a stranger would not have noticed them. But wherever the road had crossed a draw, it was easy to find. The rains had made channels of the wheel-ruts and washed them so deeply that the sod had never healed over them. They looked like gashes torn by a grizzly's claws, on the slopes where the farm-wagons used to lurch up out of the hollows with a pull that brought curling muscles on the smooth hips of the horses.

And at the beginning:

This was the road over which Antonia and I came on that night when we got off the train at Black Hawk and were bedded down in the straw, wondering children, being taken we knew not whither. ... Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.

I'm not suggesting that Erdrich is making a direct reference to Cather's version of the settlement of the great plains, from "buffalo and Indian times" to the present day of the story, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't.

The question is, what are we to conclude from it? Is it a hopeful parable, or yet another account of the Last of the Mohicans? The return, or the passing, of the Vanishing American?

The question may seem a little crass and reductionist, but what is Erdrich's point in telling us this involved, tortured story of hunger, disease, rape, murder, love, redemption, and religious mania? Does she know herself? Is it really necessary for her to spell it out in words of one syllable?

Once again, all we have to go on is the words of her text, slippery and fork-tongued as they are. "Traditional people," she reminds us helpfully, "are very careful about attribution. When a story begins there is a prefacing history of that story's origin that is as complicated as the Modern Language Association guidelines to forming footnotes." An interesting analogy. Does a well-documented and footnoted lie (or fiction) become any less of a lie?

The double-play between Pauline and Nanapush seems to me not so much designed to invite us to endorse one or other of the two narrators, as to show the soul of the dispossessed under colonialism.

Where Willa Cather's conception of the Western (in her case mixed with the stylistic affectations of the Eastern) is essentially elegiac, though, Louise Erdrich's Western has elements of the Northern in it instead. And, what's more, seems designed more to point towards a future, however precarious, for its various embattled characters than as a lament for a "precious, incommunicable past."

This, to me, is the significance of her parody of Magic Realist tropes (channeled as they are almost exclusively through the voice of the fanatical Pauline), as well as her careful charting of the economic processes of dispossession: unpaid land-taxes, appropriated by the "Kashpaw" collaborator, Nestor.

It's like a return to the strategies of Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude: magic is easy to believe in, but the sheer blind cruelty of unadulterated economic imperialism is always more of a stretch.

Lecture 19

2008-06-10T15:14:00.033+12:00

[image source]

Wk 10 - Mon (6/10), 3-4 pm lecture: HSB1

Louise Erdrich: Tracks (1988) -

The Native American Renaissance

For John F Kennedy's inauguration as President of the United States Robert Frost wrote a new poem entitled, "Dedication". Like many others he conceived the new president as … the perfect combination of spirit and flesh, passion and toughness, poetry and reality … But the poet was old (87) and he couldn't see the words because of the sun's glare that bright, cold January day [20 January, 1961]. The poem's newness to him and his unfamiliarity with and uncertainty about the way it went caused him to stumble uncertainly with his voice and tone and he gave up. Instead he fell back on an old one he knew perfectly, and in the most splendidly commanding of voices, recited it impeccably:

The Gift Outright

The land was ours before we were the land's.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia.
But we were England's, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak.
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.

– Jackie Jura, Orwell Today

[Robert Frost]

Something about that iconic scene has always interested me.

This "land vaguely realising westward" is implied to be completely untenanted. But "the deed of gift was many deeds of war" - war against whom, then? It was, after all, "ours" before we were "the land's", which remained "unstoried, artless, unenhanced" until "we" ("still colonials) got there to occupy it.

The poem is a statement of manifest destiny -- an almost Hitlerian vision of Lebensraum opening up for the chosen people. Any stories or arts belonging to the original inhabitants of that land are clearly immaterial, since it is a "gift outright" - from whom? God, Destiny, History?

Compare Chief Joseph (1874):

I have carried a heavy load on my back ever since I was a boy. I learned then that we were but few while the white men were many, and that we could not hold our own with them. We were like deer. They were like grizzly bears. We had a small country. Their country was large. We were contented to let things remain as the Great Spirit Chief made them. They were not; and would change the mountains and rivers if they did not suit them.

and again, on a visit to Washington D. C. after his surrender in 1877:

All men were made by the same Great Spirit Chief. They are all brothers. The earth is the mother of all people, and all people should have equal rights upon it. You might as well expect all rivers to run backward as that any man who was born a free man should be contented penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases. If you tie a horse to a stake, do you expect he will grow fat? If you pen an Indian up on a small spot of earth and compel him to stay there, he will not be contented nor will he grow and prosper.

[Chief Joseph]

By 1961, that story seemed to be over. The appropriation of the land appeared to have been accomplished, the so-called 'Vanishing American,' or Indian, latterly Native American, safely confined to reservations on barren, unwanted land.

When he published his book The Return of the Vanishing American in 1968, the cultural critic Leslie Fiedler was really only talking about the return of the Indian as a literary theme. It was the age of hippies and beatniks and Easy Rider, and somehow Native American lore had become cool again. He concludes his book by saying:

If a myth of America is to exist in the future, it is incumbent on our writers, no matter how square and scared they may be in their deepest hearts, to conduct with the mad just such a dialogue as their predecessors learned long ago to conduct with the aboriginal dwellers in the actual Western Wilderness. It is easy to forget, but essential to remember, that the shadowy creatures living scarcely imaginable lives in the forests of Virginia once seemed as threatening to all that good Europeans believed as the acid-head or the borderline schizophrenic on the Lower East Side now seems to all that good Americans have come to believe in its place.(186-87)

In other words, he sees the hippie cult of unreason as the natural heir to the complex cultural matrix of native American life. Interesting.

Then, however, everything changed.

The catalyst of that change was (as so often) a book. The book, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970), subtitled "An Indian History of the American West," written by a hitherto quite obscure historian of the Great Plains called Dee Brown, had the effect of dispelling all the comforting lies which had grown up around the colonisation of the "Great American Wilderness."

It was a chronicle of broken promises, broken treaties, blatant racism and - essentially - genocide. "I cannot understand why so many chiefs are allowed to talk so many different ways, and promise so many different things," as Chief Joseph put it. "Good words do not last long unless they amount to something."

I am tired of talk that comes to nothing. It makes my heart sick when I remember all the good words and all the broken promises. There has been too much talking by men who had no right to talk.

His words, and those of the other great Indian chiefs, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, even Geronimo, had always had an eloquent, mythopoeic power to them, but now Brown illustrated, in inexorable, heartbreaking detail, the fact that not one of the treaties signed by the American Government had been kept, not one promise had been carried out. It read like a chronicle of Nazi expansionism written a century after Hitler's victory in the Second World War.

Brown, himself a patriotic American, had his own complex agenda, but the strength of his book was its dispassionate, documentary precision. Suddenly John Wayne started to look like Heydrich. And a great deal of breast-beating ensued.

The formation of the American Indian Movement, AIM, in the seventies was to some extent prompted by Brown's book -- but also by other political protest groups such as the Black Panthers or the Weathermen. The F. B. I treated them all alike -- as dangerous revolutionaries to be infiltrated and neutralised.

If you're interested in that story, and it's a fascinating one, I recommend Peter Matthiessen's 1983 book In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, which tells the saga of Leonard Peltier, a member of AIM who was - many believe - framed for the killing of two FBI agents in 1975.

[Leonard Peltier's arrest]

One thing that gives substance to Matthiessen's claim is the fact that his book was held up for eight years in court by a series of frivolous libel suits brought by various FBI agents and state officials after its first hardback publication. It thus became essentially unobtainable until his court victory in 1991.

The other long, complex and multifaceted story I'd like to tell, but hardly have time to do more than touch on today, is that of the growth of the literary movement called Magic Realism in world fiction. Why? Simply in order to understand the ground that a writer such as Louise Erdrich is standing on.

It's one thing for Brown and Matthiessen to tell historical tales of Native American oppression and dispossession, quite another to overhear the beginnings of a people speaking for themselves. If that's what we are hearing in Erdrich's Tracks and the other novels in her Dakota Quartet.

[Antonio Ruiz, El sueño de la Malinche (1939)]

Perhaps I can just mention a few salient names:

Alejo Carpentier, The Kingdom of This World (1949)
Miguel Angel Asturias, Men of Maize (1949)
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
Mario Vargas Llosa, The War of the End of the World (1981)
N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn (1968)
Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits (1982)

Louise Erdrich has had a lot of success in the American literary world. Is that comforting, or suspicious? Does it imply that she's a more acceptable face to Native American culture than activists such as Peltier or Russell Means? Is she, in short, subversive or assimilated?

We have to beware of essentialist arguments. Her books, finally, must speak for themselves - but then no book ever really does speak for itself, out of cultural context, without consideration of the means of production. I'm enough of a Historicist to make that claim, at least. Take the example of B Wongar, for example. Did his work cease to be of value when it was pointed out that he was not an Australian Aborigine, as he had claimed (or at least implied), but an Eastern European ethnographer?

Lecture 18

2008-06-10T15:13:00.048+12:00

[image source: Deirdre Leber, "Cat's Eye"]

Wk 9 - Thurs (2/10), 3-4 pm lecture: HSB2

Margaret Atwood: Cat's Eye (1988) -

Bullies & Artists

MORNING IN THE BURNED HOUSE

In the burned house I am eating breakfast.
You understand there is no house, there is no breakfast,
yet here I am.

The spoon which was melted scrapes against
the bowl which was melted also.
No one else is around.

Where have they gone to, brother and sister,
mother and father? Off along the shore,
perhaps. Their clothes are still on the hangers,

their dishes piled beside the sink,
which is beside the woodstove
with its grate and sooty kettle,

every detail clear,
tin cup and rippled mirror.
the day is bright and songless,

the lake is blue, the forest watchful.
In the east a bank of cloud
rises up silently like dark bread.

I can see the swirls in the oilcloth,
I can see the flaws in the glass,
those flares where the sun hits them.

I can't see my own arms and legs
or know if this is a trap or a blessing,
finding myself back here, where everything

in this house has long been over,
kettle and mirror, spoon and bowl,
including my own body,

including the body I had then,
including the body I have now
as I sit at this morning table, alone and happy,

bare child's feet on the scorched floorboards
(I can almost see)
in my burning clothes, the thin green shorts

and grubby yellow T-shirt
holding my cindery, non-existent,
radiant flesh. Incandescent.

from Morning in the Burned House (1995)
[Margaret Atwood, Eating Fire: Selected Poetry 1965-1995 (London: Virago, 1998) 367-68.]

This is the last poem included in Atwood’s 1998 Selected Poems, as “This is a Photograph of me” was the first.

Dreams
[all quotes from Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye. 1988. London: Virago, 1992]

p. 145: “As if I’ve been given permission I begin to dream:”

I dream that our house has burnt down. Nothing of it remains; blackened stumps dot the place where it’s been, as if there has been a forest fire. A huge mountain of mud rises beside it.

My parents are dead but also alive. They’re lying side by sides, in their summer clothes, and sinking down through the earth, which is hard but transparent, like ice. They look up at me sorrowfully as they recede. (166-67)

[image source]

The Undead

pp. 211-12. The horror comics

p. 233. Elaine reveals she is a vampire.

p.241. A girl is murdered in the ravine.

p.252. Cordelia explains why she dug the hole, "I wanted to put a chair in it and sit down there. By myself."

p.373. Elaine's suicide attempt.

pp.394-95. Her mother makes the crucial revelation about the girls true malevolence.

[image source]

Bullies

"Do poets really suffer more
than other people? isn't it only
that they get their pictures taken
and are seen to do it?
The loony bins are full of those
who never wrote a poem.
Most suicides are not
poets: a good statistic.

Some days though, I want, still,
to be like other people;

but then I go and talk with them,
these people who are supposed to be
other, and they are much like us,
except that they lack the sort of thing
we think of as a voice. ..."

- "The Words Continue their Journey" (1984) [Eating Fire, 284-85]

The Bully as double –
(Cordelia's trajectory as a mirror image of Elaine's)

Abuse and its aftermath
(Graham Greene’s story about "Carter," who gave rise - allegedly - to his entire career – and whom he met later in Burma. And who, like Cordelia, thought that the two of them had been schoolchums …)

[image source]

How do you read a painting?

"Two voices
took turns using my eyes:

one had manners,
painted in watercolours,
used hushed tones when speaking
of mountains or Niagara Falls,
composed uplifting verse
and expended sentiment
upon the poor.

The other voice
had other knowledge:
that men sweat
always and drink often,
that pigs are pigs
but must be eaten
anyway, that unborn babies
fester like wounds in the body ..."

- "The Double Voice" (1970) [Eating Fire, 74]

The artist as self-parody (Jon) / self-exploration (narrator)

pp. 407-409. Two paintings: “Cat's Eye” and “Unified Field Theory”.

Lecture 17

2008-06-10T15:13:00.043+12:00

[image source]

Wk 9 - Mon (29/9), 3-4 pm lecture: HSB1

Margaret Atwood: Cat's Eye (1988) -

Time

THIS IS A PHOTOGRAPH OF ME

It was taken some time ago.
At first it seems to be
a smeared
print: blurred lines and grey flecks
blended with the paper;

then, as you scan
it, you see in the left-hand corner
a thing that is like a branch: part of a tree
(balsam or spruce) emerging
and, to the right, halfway up
what ought to be a gentle
slope, a small frame house.

In the background there is a lake,
and beyond that, some low hills.

(The photograph was taken
the day after I drowned.

I am in the lake, in the centre
of the picture, just under the surface.

it is difficult to say where
precisely, or to say
how large or small I am:
the effect of water
on light is a distortion

but if you look long enough,
eventually
you will be able to see me.)

from The Circle Game (1966)
[Margaret Atwood, Eating Fire: Selected Poetry 1965-1995
(London: Virago, 1998) 2.]

"In a riddle whose answer is chess, what is the only word that must not be used?"

I thought for a moment.

The word 'chess'," I replied.

"Exactly," Albert said. "The Garden of Forking Paths is a huge riddle, or parable, whose subject is time; that secret purpose forbids Ts'ui Pen the merest mention of its name. To always omit one word, to employ awkward metaphors and obvious circumlocutions, is perhaps the most emphatic way of calling attention to that word. ... I have compared hundreds of manuscripts, I have corrected the errors introduced through the negligence of copyists, I have reached a hypothesis for the plan of that chaos, I have reestablished, or believe I've reestablished, its fundamental order - I have translated the entire work; and I know that not once does the word 'time' appear."

- Jorge Luis Borges, "The Garden of Forking Paths." Collected Fictions. Trans. Andrew Hurley. New York: Penguin, 1999. 119-28.

What's the missing word in Atwood's novel? Certainly not "time" ...

Theories of Time:

In physics and other sciences, time is considered one of the few fundamental quantities. Time is used to define other quantities – such as velocity – and defining time in terms of such quantities would result in circularity of definition.

An operational definition of time, wherein one says that observing a certain number of repetitions of one or another standard cyclical event (such as the passage of a free-swinging pendulum) constitutes one standard unit such as the second, has a high utility value in the conduct of both advanced experiments and everyday affairs of life. The operational definition leaves aside the question whether there is something called time, apart from the counting activity just mentioned, that flows and that can be measured.

Among prominent philosophers, there are two distinct viewpoints on time. One view is that time is part of the fundamental structure of the universe, a dimension in which events occur in sequence. Time travel, in this view, becomes a possibility as other "times" persist like frames of a film strip, spread out across the time line. Sir Isaac Newton subscribed to this realist view, and hence it is sometimes referred to as Newtonian time.

The opposing view is that time does not refer to any kind of "container" that events and objects "move through", nor to any entity that "flows", but that it is instead part of a fundamental intellectual structure (together with space and number) within which humans sequence and compare events. This second view, in the tradition of Gottfried Leibniz and Immanuel Kant, holds that time is neither an event nor a thing, and thus is not itself measurable nor can it be traveled.

Quotes from Errol Morris, dir. A Brief History of Time (1991):

Where did the universe come from?
Will time ever come to an end?
Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

This documentary is a biographical exploration of the life of Stephen Hawking, not a version of his 1988 bestseller of the same name.

Narrative Time

How do you represent duration?
Does the time spent exeriencing it equal the time elapsed in a narrative?
Why does Atwood use an unmediated present tense for the then, and a mixture of past and present tense for the now in her book?

We're told that she began the book in 1964: "The book is sometimes seen as containing autobiographical elements. For example, like Risley, Atwood is the daughter of an entomologist. However, Atwood has rarely, if ever, commented on the similarities directly."

That doesn't quite agree with what we heard last week from Atwood's own mouth, courtesy of Agnieszka. There she denied writing "endless pieces of autobiography" - an interesting choice of phrase.

She also said "We got a real dish of Freud, so we are told that the early years were very, very important," but perhaps there are other ways to take Freud. Let's consider these lines from W. H. Auden’s "In Memory of Sigmund Freud" (1939):

He wasn’t clever at all: he merely told
The unhappy Present to recite the Past
Like a poetry lesson till sooner
Or later it faltered at the line where ...

Long ago the accusations had begun ...
- Auden, Selected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber, 1979) 92.

That's one way to read it. It certainly fits the almost archaeological narrative structure of the book.

Another way to approach the structure of Atwood's novel also has to do with time. One can draw analogies with Proust's famous experience with a madeleine cake dipped in a cup of herbal tea.

What are the memory triggers in Cat's Eye? One, of course, is:

The Blue Cat's Eye Marble:
[all quotes from Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye. 1988. London: Virago, 1992]

pp. 397-98: Finding the red purse she used to take to church. "I look into it, and see my life entire."

Another thing I get for Christmas is a red plastic purse, oval in shape, with a gold-coloured clasp and a handle at the top end. It’s soft and pliable inside the house, but hardens outside in the cold, so that things rattle in it. I keep my allowance in it, five cents a week. (55)

The cat's eyes are my favorites ... My favourite one is blue. I put it in my red plastic purse to keep it safe. I risk my other cat’s eyes to be shot at, but not this one. (62-63)

Her brother buries a jar of marbles in the ravine. “He tells me he’s done these things but he doesn’t say why, or where the jars are buried.” (63)

I take the blue cat’s eye marble out of my red plastic purse and leave it in my bureau drawer, and put the nickel my mother’s given me for the collection plate into my purse instead. (97)

The Ravine:

Shortly after meeting Cordelia (named after the youngest daughter of King Lear, with two sisters called Perdita and Miranda), they walk over the bridge across the ravine:
"Cordelia says that because the stream flows right out of the cemetery it's made of dissolved dead people." (75)

Cordelia digs a hole in her backyard. (106)

They shut Elaine [aka – the Catholic – Mary Queen of Scots] in the hole. (107-8)

She starts to peel her feet. (114)

She fears for baby Brian at her friend's hands. (132-5)

She's aware that Cordelia is "driven by the urge to see how far she can go. She's backing me towards an edge, like the edge of a cliff: one step back, another step, and I'll be over and falling" (154).

However, by now the cat's eye marble has become a charm. (141)

I keep my cat's eye in my pocket, where I can hold onto it. It rests in my hand, valuable as a jewel, looking out through bone and cloth with its impartial gaze. With the help of its power I retreat back into my eyes. Up ahead of me are Cordelia, Grace and Carol. I look at their shapes as they walk, the way shadow moves from one leg to another, the blocks of colour, a red square of cardigan, a blue triangle of skirt. They’re like puppets up ahead, small and clear. I could see them or not, at will. (155)

She thinks she can control them by turning them into problems in perspective: Art problems. But maybe that’s a bit beyond even this talisman’s powers …

The Madonna:

On pp.182-3 Elaine picks up a picture of the Virgin Mary on the street. As a result:

I can no longer pray to God so I will pray to the Virgin Mary instead ... My prayers are wordless, defiant, dry-eyed, desperate, without hope. Nothing happens. I squeeze my fists into my eyes until they hurt. For an instant I think I see a face, then a splash of blue, but now all I can see is the heart. There it is, bright red, rounded, with a dark light around it, a blackness like luminous velvet. Gold comes out from the centre, then fades. It's the heart all right. it looks like my red plastic purse. (183-84).

She can't pray to God because on pp. 179-80 Mrs. Smeath called her a heathen, and made it clear that she both knows and approves of what the girls are doing to her.

pp. 187-89. The primal scene in the ravine.

pp.190-91. Her mother finds her.

p. 192. Cordelia rings her, but when she goes back to school, she finds her power is gone.

p. 203: she puts the marble away in the purse: for good, as she thinks.

Lecture 16

2008-06-10T15:12:00.016+12:00

[image source]

Wk 8 - Thurs (25/9), 3-4 pm lecture: HSB2

Margaret Atwood: Cat's Eye (1988) -

Feminist Discourses

Here are some notes from the guest lecture given by Agnieszka Zabicka:

Quotes

Some of the quotations used in my lecture:

Atwood on writing:

Writing – the setting down of words – is an ordinary enough activity, and … there’s nothing very mysterious about it. Anyone literate can take implement in hand and make marks on a flat surface. Being a writer, however, seems to be a socially acknowledged role, and one that carries some sort of weight or impressive significance – we hear a capital W on Writer. … Happy the writer who begins simply with the activity itself – the defacement of blank pages of paper – without having first encountered the socially acknowledged role. It is not always a particularly blissful or fortunate role to find yourself saddled with, and it comes with a price; though, like many roles, it can lend a certain kind of power to those who assume the costume.

But the costume varies. Every child is born, not only to specific parents, within a specific language and climate and political situation, but also into a pre-existing matrix of opinions about children – whether they should be seen and not heard, whether sparing the rod spoils them, whether they should be praised every day so they won’t develop negative self-esteem, and so forth. So also it is with writers. No writer emerges from childhood into a pristine environment, free from other people’s biases about writers. All of us bump up against a number of preconceptions about what we are or ought to be like, what constitutes good writing, and what social functions writing fulfils, or ought to fulfil. All of us develop our own ideas about what we are writing in relation to these preconceptions. Whether we attempt to live up to them, rebel against them, or find others using them to judge us, they affect our lives as writers.

(Negotiating with the Dead, pp. 4-5)

Atwood on her early life:

By the time I was born [in 1939], my father was running a tiny forest-insect research station in northern Quebec. Every spring my parents would take off for the North; every autumn, when snow set in, they would return to a city – usually to a different apartment each time. At the age of six months, I was carried into the woods in a packsack, and this landscape became my hometown.

The childhoods of writers are thought to have something to do with their vocation, but when you look at these childhoods they are in fact very different. What they often contain, however, are books and solitude, and my own childhood was right on track. There were no films or theatres in the North, and the radio didn’t work very well. But there were always books. I learned to read early, was an avid reader and read everything I could get my hands on – no one ever told me I couldn’t read a book. My mother liked quietness in children, and a child who is reading is very quiet.

[…] A good many writers have had isolated childhoods; a good many have also had storytellers in their lives. My primal storyteller was my brother; at first I featured only as audience, but soon was allowed to join in. The rule was that you kept going until you ran out of ideas or just wanted a turn at being the listener. Our main saga involved a race of supernatural animals that lived on a distant planet. An ignorant person might have mistaken these for rabbits, but they were ruthless carnivores and could fly through the air. These stories were adventures: war, weapons, enemies and allies, hidden treasure, and daring escapes were the main features.

Stories were for twilight, and when it was raining; the rest of time, life was brisk and practical. There was very little said about moral and social misdemeanours – we didn’t have much opportunity for them. We did get instructions about avoiding lethal stupidity – don’t sent forest fires, don’t fall out of boats, don’t go swimming in thunderstorms – that sort of thing. […] Squeamishness and whining were not encouraged; girls were not expected to do more of it than boys and crying was not viewed with indulgence. Rational debate was smiled upon, as was curiosity about almost everything.

But deep down I was not a rationalist. I was the youngest and the weepiest of the family, frequently set for naps due to fatigue, and thought to be sensitive and even a bit sickly; perhaps this was because I showed an undue interest in sissy stuff like knitting and dresses and stuffed bunnies. My own view of myself was that I was small and innocuous, a marshmallow compared to the others. I was a poor shot with a 22, for instance, and not very good with an ax. It took me a long time to figure out that the youngest in a family of dragons is still a dragon from the point of view of those who find dragons alarming.

[…] When I was eight we moved again [to Toronto] … at that time a stodgy provincial city of seven hundred thousand. I was now faced with real life, in the form of other little girls – their prudery and snobbery, their Byzantine social life based on whispering and vicious gossip, and an inability to pick up earthworms without wriggling all over and making mewing noises like a kitten. I was more familiar with the forthright mindset of boys: the rope burn and the dead-finger trick were familiar to me – but little girls were almost an alien species. I was very curious about them, and remain so.

(Negotiating with the Dead, pp.7-10)

Atwood ‘On Being a Woman Writer’:

There is no critical vocabulary for expressing the concept of good/female. Work by a male writer is often spoken of by critics admiring it as having ‘balls’; ever heard anyone speak admiringly of work by a woman as having ‘tits’

(Quoted in Brutal Choreographies, p.2)

[…] I’m against that kind of determinism that says because you are this, thou shalt be so – you know, because you have a womb, your style has to have a hole in the middle of it.

(Quoted in Brutal Choreographies, p.4)

Atwood on feminism:

Am I a propagandist? No! Am I an observer of society? Yes! And no one who observes society can fail to make observations which are feminist. That is just based on real life commonsense.

(Quoted in Brutal Choreographies, p.3)

Atwood on ‘the in-between time’:

We got a real dish of Freud, so we are told that the early years were very, very important. And then we have a whole cult of romance and sex … so the later period becomes important. The in-between time I think we have forgotten because it’s been indicated to us that it is not important.

(Quoted in Brutal Choreographies, p.159)

Marilyn French on Atwood:

For almost thirty years, I have depended on Margaret Atwood for books that treat women as full human beings. It is still rare for writers, female or male, to depict women as intelligent, active beings with the capacity for moral choice and moral error: they are still often depicted as people whose single choice concerns the disposal of their genital organs. I count on Atwood to be brilliant, perceptive, profound and searching, someone who does not avoid the ‘darker’ sides of female being, the weak or wavering or foolish.

(Quoted in Cooke, Margaret Atwood, p.13)

Atwood on duck and pâté:

There is an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine – ‘Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet duck because you like pâté’. That’s a light enough comment upon the disappointments of encountering the famous, or even the moderately well-known – they are always shorter and older and more ordinary than you expected – but there’s a more sinister way of looking at it as well. In order for the pâté to be made and then eaten, the duck must first be killed. And who is it that does the killing?

(Negotiating with the Dead, p. 35)

Bonus: Margaret Atwood ‘Gertrude Talks Back’:

I always thought it was a mistake, calling you Hamlet. I mean, what kind of name is that for a young boy? It was your father's idea. Nothing would do but that you had to be called after him? Selfish. The other kids at school used to tease the life out of you. The nicknames! And those terrible jokes about pork.

I wanted to call you George.

I am not wringing my hands. I'm drying my nails.

Darling, please stop fidgeting with my mirror. That'll be the third one you've broken.

Yes, I've seen those pictures, thank you very much.

I know your father was handsomer than Claudius. High brow, aquiline nose and so on, looked great in uniform. But handsome isn't everything, especially in a man, and far be it from me to speak ill of the dead, but I think it’s about time I pointed out to you that your dad just wasn't a whole lot of fun. Noble. Sure, I grant you. But Claudius, well, he likes a drink now and then. He appreciates a decent meal. He enjoys a laugh, know what I mean? You don't always have to be tiptoeing around because of some holier-than-thou principle or something.

By the way, darling, I wish you wouldn't call your stepdad the bloat king. He does have a slight weight problem, and it hurts his feelings.

The rank sweat of what? My bed is certainly not enseamed, whatever that might be! A nasty sty, indeed! Not that it's any of your business, but I change those sheets twice a week, which is more than you do, judging from that student slum pigpen in Wittenberg. I'll certainly never visit you there again without prior warning! I see that laundry of yours when you bring it home, and not often enough either, by a long shot! Only when you run out of black socks.

And let me tell you, everyone sweats at a time like that, as you'd find out if you ever gave it a try. A real girlfriend would do you a heap of good. Not like that pasty-faced what's-her-name, all trussed up like a prize turkey in those touch-me-not corsets of hers. If you ask me, there's something off about that girl. Borderline. Any little shock could push her right over the edge.

Go get yourself someone more down-to-earth. Have a nice roll in the hay. Then you can talk to me about nasty sties.

No darling, I am not mad at you. But I must say you're an awful prig sometimes. Just like your Dad. The Flesh, he'd say. You'd think it was dog dirt. You can excuse that in a young person, they are always so intolerant, but in someone his age it was getting, well, very hard to live with and that's the understatement of the year.

Some days I think it would have been better for both of us if you hadn't been an only child. But you realize who you have to thank for that. You have no idea what I used to put up with. And every time I felt like a little, you know, just to warm up my aging bones, it was like I'd suggested murder.

Oh! You think what? You think Claudius murdered your Dad? Well, no wonder you've been so rude to him at the dinner table!

If I'd known that, I could have put you straight in no time flat.

It wasn't Claudius, darling.

It was me.

(Good Bones and Simple Murders. New York: Doubleday, 1994. 16-19)

Bibliography

Some of the web resources I used in preparing this lecture:

Atwood’s home page: Includes poems, photographs, cartoons, bibliography, links and much more.

The Margaret Atwood society webpage: Useful links, news and articles.

Cat's Eye: One of many portals containing material on Cat’s Eye.

Video resources (available for use on site at the Audiovisual Library):

Writers in Conversation: Margaret Atwood with Hermione Lee (VCR) Audiovisual Library LV96-113

The South Bank Show: Interview with Margaret Atwood (VCR) Audiovisual Library LV04-031

Select bibliography of secondary sources:

Atwood, Margaret. Negotiating with the Dead. A Writer on Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002.
An imaginative and entertaining discussion of the pleasures and purposes of writing – in Atwood’s own words.

Bouson, J. Brooks. Brutal Choreographies. Oppositional Strategies and Narrative Design in the Novels of Margaret Atwood. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1993.
A chronological account of Atwood’s novels up to and including Cat’s Eye.

Cooke, Nathalie. Margaret Atwood. A Critical Companion. Greenwood and London: Greenwood Press, 2004.
An accessible introduction to Atwood’s life and work.

Howells, Coral Ann. Margaret Atwood. London: Palgrave, 1996
Another thorough discussion of all Atwood novels up to and including Oryx and Crake.

Howells, Coral Ann, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006.
A collection of outstanding critical accounts of all major Atwood works.

Osborne, Carol. ‘Constructing the self through memory: Cat’s Eye as a novel of female self-development.’ Frontiers, 1994, available online here (Access date 15 September 2008).
An interesting reading of Cat’s Eye as a female Bildungsroman.

Lecture 15

2008-06-10T15:11:00.036+12:00

[image source]

Wk 8 - Mon (22/9), 3-4 pm lecture: HSB1

Graham Greene: The Comedians -

That Voodoo You Do

There are a number of questions which any reading of the book has to try and answer:

What's the significance of the title and epigraph?
Why does the book begin on board ship, and continue there for so long?
Why does it end as it does, so anticlimactically?
Why does the film, scripted by Greene himself, end so differently?

My answers to these are mostly attempts to explore the ramifications of a single theme. Or, rather, the various intertwining ideas and associations which grow out of this one strand in the novel.

That theme is voodoo.

Binaries:

Belief & Unbelief
Saints & Sinners
Tarts & Toffs
Catholicism & Voodoo
Lovers & Zombies

In chapter 2 of part 2, Joseph, Brown and young Philipot attend a voodoo ceremony:

During the two years of prosperity, I had watched, as a matter of duty, the Voodoo dances performed for tourists. To me who had been born a Catholic they seemed as distasteful as the ceremony of the Eucharist would have seemed performed as a ballet on Broadway. ...

I remembered how young Philipot had said to me ... "The gods of Dahomey may be what we need." Governments had failed him, I had failed him, Jones had failed him - he had no Bren gun; he was here, listening to the drums, waiting, for strength, for courage, for a decision. On the earth-floor, around a small brazier, a design had been drawn in ashes, the summons to a god. Was it a summons to Legba, the gay seducer of women, to sweet Erzulie, the virgin of purity and love, to Ogoun Ferraille, the patron of warriors, or to Baron Samedi in his black clothes and his black Tonton glasses, hungry for the dead? (164)

That, of course, is the source of Papa Doc's power, his status as an incarnation of Baron Samedi, Lord of the cemetery. The Tonton Macoutes, his secret police, wear dark glasses "as a uniform, to terrify" [94] Why? Because the eyes really are the window to the soul. They're the only way of distinguishing the zombie from the living man. That's why they abduct the coffin of old Philipot, the minister - to threaten his relatives with the idea that his body will be enslaved by the black magician.

I remembered that one arm which had been held in the flames appeared as light as a mulatto's. I told myself it could not possibly have been Philipot's. Philipot's poems had been published in an elegant limited edition, bound in vellum. He had been educated like myself by the Jesuits; he had attended the Sorbonne; I remembered how he had quoted the lines of Baudelaire to me at the swimming-pool. If Philipot was one of the initiates, what a triumph that would present for Papa Doc as he dragged his country down. (165)

The reference to Baudelaire is to the conversation between Brown and Philipot on p.123:

I remember looking at [Jones] one night on the boat from America - it was after the ship's concert - and wondering, are you and I both comedians?"

"They can say that of most of us. Wasn't I a comedian with my verses smelling of Les Fleurs du Mal, published on hand-made paper at my own expense? ... The same money would have brought me a Bren perhaps." (It was a magic word to him now - Bren.)

And what is a comedian? In French, it means an actor, not a humourist. Hence too, perhaps, the book's epigraph.

Do you see how the voodoo ceremony, the possession of the participants by various parts and roles, begins to fit the book?

Remember, too, Greene's statement from Ways of Escape:

How dangerous it is for a critic to have no technical awareness of the novel. Surely the great prefaces of Henry James have marked one novelist's route indelibly - the route of 'the point of view'. There was no ambiguity in my mind; the ambiguity was in the minds of [the characters] whom I had chosen for my 'points of view'. (32)

Brown's ideas about Baudelaire, the Sorbonne, the artefacts of high civilisation may not be - almost certainly are not - Greene's.

Let's go back to that concert aboard ship, in fact. What happens? Mr. Baxter recites a poem about the Blitz. And Mr Fernandez bursts into tears. (33-34)

Fernandez, it turns out, is an undertaker. Baxter is not long for this world (he dies when the ship reaches the Dominican Republic). What roles are they playing?

The parallels go on, if we wish to pursue them. What of Martha, Brown's mistress? "Was it a summons to Legba, the gay seducer of women, to sweet Erzulie, the virgin of purity and love?" Brown loses Martha because he can't persuade himself he really wants her, or deserves her

Indecision ... is part of the modern mind. We have lost the power of clear action because we have lost the ability to believe. (154)

He plants Jones in their household and then becomes jealous of him. His final stroke is to organise Jones's downfall - which turns out also to be his own.

The swimming-pool is another potent symbol for Brown - signalling the advent of "sweet Erzulie"?

Once I had looked out of my window at two in the morning. There was a great yellow moon and a girl was making love in the pool. She didn't notice me watching her; he didn't notice anything. that night I thought before I slept, "I have arrived." (46)

Now, of course, it's ruined by Philipot's suicide. That, and the presence of the Smiths:

... there in the pool avoiding the gardener's rake, swam Mr Smith, wearing a pair of dark grey nylon bathing-pants which billowed out behind him in the water, giving him the hind-quarters of some prehistoric beast. ... When he saw me he stood up in the water like a myth. His breasts were covered with long strands of white hair. (95-96)

Lecture 14

2008-06-10T15:11:00.034+12:00

[image source]

Wk 7 - Thurs (18/9), 3-4 pm lecture: HSB2

Graham Greene: The Comedians (1966) -

Theme & Symbolism

"If there are recurrent themes in my novels it is perhaps
only because there have been recurrent themes in my life.
Failure seemed then to be one of them."

- Graham Greene, A Sort of Life, 1971 (Penguin, 1974) 154.

The Other

For once, let's take an author at his word.

One theme easy to detect in Graham Greene's life and work (as Sean pointed out last week) is the Double.

In fact, the epilogue to the second volume of his autobiography, Ways of Escape (1980), entitled "The Other," explores this idea at length.

This "other" who goes around impersonating Graham Greene is:

of indeterminate age
financially insolvent
of dubious morals (sexual and otherwise)

Having been psychoanalysed while still in his teens (as described in the first volume of autobiography, A Sort of Life (1971), there's little possibility that he would introduce such an idea naively or unknowingly: "For years, after my analysis, I could take no interest in any visual thing: staring at a sight that others assured me was beautiful I felt nothing. I was fixed, like a negative in a chemical bath." (93)

Note that highly-charged image - "a negative in a chemical bath."

More Binaries:

Belief & Unbelief
Saints & Sinners
Tarts & Toffs
Catholicism & Voodoo
Lovers & Zombies

Coming to The Comedians, 1966 (London: Readers' Book Club, 1967), then, we observe that the character Brown has a good deal in common with his creator Green(e). So much so that he explicitly disavows any resemblance in the preface to the novel - "I want to make it clear that the narrator of this tale, though his name is Brown, is not Greene." (5) He goes on to talk about this misapprehension as one of the inevitable perils of first-person narration.

More to the point, then, Brown sees in Jones a kind of double. Both are names of convenience. Jones asks very early on, in fact, after outlining his own "double" theory of humanity: "you aren't a tart by any chance pretending to be a toff?" (23)

If Jones is the id to Brown's self-conscious ego (to return to psychoanalytic terminology), Smith clearly functions as his conscience or super-ego.

Brown's love affair with Martha is echoed by the Smiths harmonious and mutually-supportive marriage. On the other hand, he is jealous of Jones's instant intimacy with the whole Pineda family. They like him because he makes them laugh - a spontaneity unattainable by the perpetually self-questioning Brown.

If I were to choose an epigraph for all the novels I have written, it would be from [Robert Browning's] Bishop Blougram's Apology:
'Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things.
The honest thief, the tender murderer,
The superstitious atheist ...
We watch while these in equilibrium keep
The giddy line midway.

- Greene, A Sort of Life, 85.

In terms of reading the book, though, character doubles will only take us part of the way. We have to examine its setting, also.

I couldn't help smiling when I thought of all the readers who have asked me why I sometimes write thrillers, as though a writer chooses his subject instead of the subject choosing him. Our whole planet since the war has swung into the fog-belt of melodrama, and, perhaps, if one doesn't ask questions, one can escape the knowledge of the route we are on. (170-71)

- Graham Greene, Ways of Escape, 1980 (Penguin, 1981) 170-71.

One of the great strengths of Greene as a writer is his choice of subject matter - and the fact that he was able to change and adapt in the second half of his career not only to the banal realities of Cold War politics, but also to the immense human issues brought up by the end of European colonialism and the establishment of a postcolonial consciousness.

[Port-au-Prince, Haiti]

Gary Brecher, The War Nerd: "The Big Hate" (19/2/04).

In a way, the only sad thing about Haiti is the way we keep trying to make it into Ohio. Because it never will be, and only looks ridiculous trying, giving the local killers fancy democratic names. If we just let Haiti be Haiti - a crazy, gory voodoo kingdom - people might learn to respect the place. I have, after reading up on it. Haiti's history isn't just a lot of killing, either. A lot of Haitian leaders were brilliant guys who weren't afraid of anybody - not Napoleon, not Jesus, not nobody. These guys were self-made black Roman Emperors. They came up the hard way, out of slavery in the cane fields, and beat the European armies that tried to take the place back. All comers -French, British, Spanish - the Haitians took them all on and put the fear into them. The only people they can't beat is themselves, and that's nothing for soldiers to be ashamed of.

Gary Brecher, The War Nerd: "Haiti 2: The Rerun" (4/3/04).

... After the Marines left in 1934, the Army was about the only thing that was still running properly.

From 1934 to 1957, Haiti was even more messy than usual. It was "Coups R Us," with more name changes than the Golden State Warriors coaching staff. And about as much success, too.

A humble, smiling little black country doctor, Francois Duvalier, was the one man who figured out a way to bring the whole country under his control.

Problem #1 was the Army, because it could and did overthrow any President who got uppity. Problem #2 was bonding with the big "black" population who didn't know or care who was running the cities. Duvalier started by courting the black peasants. He talked a lot of "black and proud" stuff and got officially interested in Voodoo, which made the peasants feel like he was a homeboy and also scared the Hell out of them, since Duvalier let it be known that he was in touch with some very scary spirits.

Then he took on the Army. They'd put him in charge; now he wanted to make sure they could never take him out. He announced he was President-for-Life, but that didn't impress anybody. He was the eighth Haitian to claim that title. It meant about as much as a Don King title bout.

Duvalier wasn't just woofing, though. He took two classic power-consolidating steps -- so any of you wannabe-dictators out there, get your Palm Pilots out and take notes. First, he set up a Presidential Guard, separate from the Army and packed it with his own men. Second, he started a second armed force, a counterweight to the army. Think Saddam's Republican Guard, Khomeini's Islamic Revolutionary Guard/Pasdaran, or Maoist Red Guard.

Duvalier's group was just as ruthless as any, but a lot more colorful, no pun intended. He'd done his homework in Haitian voodoo stories, and he organized a gang he called the "Tontons Makouts," which means "bogeyman." The Makouts fanned out through the cane fields, became something between a protection racket, a voodoo cult, and a Duvalier private army. They were the coolest, scariest thing to hit rural Haiti since...since ever. I mean, there weren't too many exciting career options out there: cut cane all day in the heat, come home to a one-room shed, catch a simple cold and die for lack of medicine. You can see why getting to be a voodoo disciple/ninja assassin kind of had appeal.

The Makouts kept the countryside terrified, and the Presidential guard rode herd on Port-au-Prince. And "Papa Doc" ruled over all of it, smiling for the cameras and killing anybody who even looked cross-eyed at him. He did away with at least 30,000 people -- and the peasants still loved him.

They gave him the ultimate compliment any dictator can get: he died in power. And the system he'd set up was so strong that even his idiot fat son, Jean-Claude, managed to survive in power for 15 years. He'd've died in office too, but he was so stupid he married a snotty mulatto girl the peasants hated, then spent $3 million on the wedding while sugar prices were falling through the dirt floor.

In 1986, it finally boiled over. A rising started, in...guess which city? Right: Gonaives. It spread south, right on cue. The Americans urged the President to leave...He fled the country...and a new regime came in, proud as punch, promising to "rid Haiti of corruption."

See what I mean? You don't need to write a new Haiti news story. Just take the old ones and change the dates.

When people asked the German novelist Gunter Grass in the 1980s why he chose to live in ruined Berlin, he replied that it was the place closest to the "realities of the age." This was before the fall of the war and the re-unification of Germany in 1989, mind you. I don't know if he still lives there now.

Greene's choice of settings such as Haiti, Vietnam, Cuba and Paraguay for his post-war fictions was clearly suggested by similar motives, though he attributes it mainly to the need to escape "boredom."

There he felt closest to the reality of his (and, I'm afraid) our time. Would that this were a common attitude among writers. It isn't, though, so it would be wrong to suggest that our interest in Graham Greene can be a purely historical one. I would suggest that he has important things to tell us about those errors of the past which got us into the mess we're in now.

That's one reason people still kept on reading his 1955 novel The Quiet American as a clue to what went wrong in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s. It wasn't so much that Greene was uncommonly prescient as that he was there on the ground with his eyes and ears open. That novel, like The Comedians, is mainly centred around the complexities of a love triangle (a very frequent situation in Greene's own life), but the backdrop - in that case - came to overshadow the foreground.

I'm not sure he wanted the same thing to happen with The Comedians. There are a number of questions which any reading of the book has to try and answer:

What's the significance of the title and epigraph?
Why does the book begin on board ship, and continue there for so long?
Why does it end as it does, so anticlimactically?
Why does the film, scripted by Greene himself, end so differently?

We'll start off next week's lecture with a discussion of these.

Lecture 13

2008-06-10T15:10:00.028+12:00

[image source]

Wk 7 - Mon (15/9), 3-4 pm lecture: HSB1

Graham Greene: The Comedians (1966) -

The Bipolar Explorer

Here are some notes from Sean Sturm's guest lecture on Graham Greene:

Doubling in Greeneland:

Greene as novelist and Greene as secret agent
Greene’s division of his oeuvre into “entertainments” (thrillers) and “novels”
Greene as imperialist and Greene as deracinated nomad
Greene as pragmatist and as existentialist Catholic
Greene as man in control [the Cs. or ego/Ich] and cruel demiurge; Greene as man at the prey of dark forces, internal and external [the Ucs. or Id/Es and a world of angst] . . .

Fritz Lang (dir.), The Ministry of Fear (USA: Paramount, 1944):

This is the Ministry of Fear, a network of terror that lays bare the secret thoughts in every man’s mind, using strange, hypnotic torture, relentless, cunning, tangling their quarry in a web of horror until he reaches the brink of madness . . .

“Who speaks? Who said that? Who told you that? [Scream] . . .”

There is no escape from the Ministry of Fear—where menace lurks behind every shadow, where the blind man sees and strikes in the night . . .

Graham Greene, Ways of Escape (Simon and Schuster, 1980):

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human condition. . . .

Sigmund Freud, “Creative Writers and Daydreaming [Der Dichter und das Phantasieren]” (1908):

Writers are egoists; the hero = the writer’s self, thus literature is autobiographical. In fact,
writers are borderline neurotics: imaginative activity provides them with the release that prevents them from becoming fully-fledged neurotics—creativity is thus a substitute for neurotic symptoms, pathologies, etc.
Writing is a form of confession, then, akin to the neurotic’s confession to his or her analyst, or rather,
literature is therapy, both for the writer and for the reader, where we can vicariously live out our own wishes and work out our own problems, etc.
And it’s structured like dreams: the mechanisms operative in dreams, that is, condensation, displacement, composite images, spatial logic, lack of systematic connections, lack of causality, amongst others, are also operative in literature.

Greene on travel in The Lawless Roads (1939):

There is so much weariness and disappointment in travel that people have to open up — in railway trains, over a fire, on the decks of steamers, and in the palm courts of hotels on a rainy day. They have to pass the time somehow, and they can pass it only with themselves. Like the characters in Chekhov they have no reserves — you learn the most intimate secrets. You get an impression of a world peopled by eccentrics, of odd professions, almost incredible stupidities, and, to balance them, amazing endurances.

Graham Greene on The Comedians:

My first two visits to Haiti in the fifties had been happy enough. That was the time of President Magloire, there was extreme poverty, but there were many tourists and some of the money they brought was allowed to trickle down the social scale. . . . I met Haitian poets and painters and novelists, and one man I like above all who was the model for Doctor Magiot in The Comedians, a novel I never dreamed then that I would come to write. He was a doctor and a philosopher — but not a Communist. For a time he had been Minister of Health, but he found his hands too tied, so he resigned (something which it would have been very dangerous to do under Doctor Duvalier). . . . He was a very big man and very black, of great dignity and with an old-world courtesy. He was to die in exile—more fortunately than Doctor Magiot? Who can tell? It was during that period I attended the Voodoo ceremony I describe in the novel. . . .

In my hotel, the Oloffson (I call the Trianon in The Comedians), there were three guests besides myself—the Italian manager of the casino and an old American artist and his wife — a gentle couple whom I cannot deny bore some resemblance to Mr. and Mrs. Smith of the novel. He wanted to teach the use of the silk screen to Haitian artists, so that they could earn a better living by selling reproductions of their paintings in the States…One night the three of us braved the dark to visit the brothel I have described as Mere Catherine’s. There were no customers except a couple of Tontons Macoute. “Mr. Smith” began to draw the girls who had been dancing together decorously and decoratively, and the Tontons glared through their dark glasses at this strange spectacle of a fearless happiness and an innocence they couldn’t understand. . . .

The Comedians, I am glad to say, touched him [Papa Doc Duvalier] on the raw. He attacked it personally in an interview he gave in Le Matin, the paper he owned in Port-au-Prince — the only review I have ever received from a Chief of State. “Le livre n’est pas bien ecrit. Comme l’oeuvre d’un ecrivain et d’un journaliste, le livre n’a aucune valeur.”

[F]or five long years after my visit his Ministry of Foreign Affairs published an elaborate and elegant brochure, illustrated on glossy paper, dealing with my case. A lot of research had gone into its preparation, with many quotations drawn from the introductions I had written for a French edition of my books. Printed in French and English and entitled Graham Greene Demasque Finally Exposed, it included a rather biased sketch of my career. This expensive work was distributed to the Press through the Haitian embassies in Europe, but distribution cased abruptly when the President found the result was not the one he desired. “A liar, a cretin, a stool-pigeon . . . unbalanced, sadistic, perverted . . . a perfect ignoramus . . . lying to his heart’s content . . . the shame of proud and noble England . . . a spy . . . a drug addict . . . a torturer." (The last epithet has always a little puzzled me.)

I am proud to have had Haitian friends who fought courageously in the mountains against Doctor Duvalier, but a writer is not so powerless as he usually feels, and a pen, as well as a silver bullet, can draw blood.

(from Ways of Escape, 228-230, 232).

Lecture 12

2008-06-10T15:10:00.022+12:00

[image source]

Wk 6 - Thurs (28/8), 3-4 pm lecture: HSB2

John Barth: The End of the Road (1958) -

Character

Theories of Character (Critical & Psychological)

Extracts from Aristotle’s Poetics:

… one should not show worthy men passing from good fortune to bad. That does not arouse fear or pity but shocks our feelings.

Nor again wicked people passing from bad fortune to good. That is the most untragic of all, having none of the requisite qualities, since it does not satisfy our feelings or arouse pity or fear.

Nor again the passing of a thoroughly bad man from good fortune to bad fortune. Such a structure might satisfy our feelings but it arouses neither pity nor fear, the one being for the man who does not deserve his misfortune, and the other for the man who is like ourselves – pity for the undeserved misfortune, fear for the man like ourselves …

There remains then the mean between these. This is the sort of man who is not pre-eminently virtuous and just, and yet it is through no badness or villainy of his own that he falls into the fortune, but rather through some flaw in him … the change must be not to good fortune from bad but, on the contrary, from good to bad fortune, and it must not be due to villainy but to some great flaw in such a man as we have described ...

The Theory of the Humours:

BLOOD - Air (hot / moist) - SANGUINE:
amorous, happy, generous
YELLOW BILE - Fire (hot / dry) - CHOLERIC:
violent, vengeful
PHLEGM - Water (cold / moist) - PHLEGMATIC:
dull, pale, cowardly
BLACK BILE - Earth (cold / dry) - MELANCHOLIC:
gluttonous, lazy, sentimental

The Jungian Theory of Character:

Extravert or

Introvert?

Think out loud

Keep thoughts to yourself

Show energy and enthusiasm for activities

Watch first, then try task or activity

Easily distracted

Can ignore distractions

Attracted to action and activity

Like to spend time alone to get re-energized

Act before you think

Like to observe before trying things

Say things before thinking them through

Pause before answering new questions

Like variety and lots of action

Enjoy individual or small group activities

Think out loud while talking to others

Think ahead, then respond to others

Dramatis Personae

Jake Horner:

Ex-graduate student at Johns Hopkins, ex-resident of the Farm, extreme sufferer from immobility.

Joe Morgan:

History teacher at Wicomico State Teachers' College, Boy Scout troupe leader, husband of Rennie, father of two boys, extreme ideologist of personal responsibility.

Rennie Morgan:

Husband of Joe, lover of Jake, mother of two boys (3 and 4 years old), extreme convert to Joe's philosophy of personal responsibility, backslider to Jake's doctrine of complete unaccountability.

Peggy Rankin:

Jake's "middle-aged pick-up," cast by him later in the narrative as "girl most likely to know where to find an abortionist".

The Doctor:

Unnamed Black physician / pyschiatrist of dubious credentials, director of the Farm, Jake's guide and therapist.

Dr Schott:

White President of Wicomico State Teachers' College, with a vague and disordered mind.

The missing ingredient is, perhaps, Barth's implicit critique of Behaviourism.

You're all familiar with Pavlov's experiments on salivating dogs. More to the point, perhaps, is the (so-called) Radical Behaviorism of the American B. F. Skinner (1904-1990). After a false start doing a degree in English literature and trying to become a writer, he went on to do a PhD in Psychology at Harvard.

His version of Behaviorism "radically rejected mediating constructs and the hypothetico-deductive method, instead offering a strongly inductive, data driven approach that has proven to be successful in dozens of areas from behavioral pharmacology to language therapy in the developmentally delayed." In this he might be seen as an heir to American Pragmatism, the philosophical movement headed by William James and Charles S. Peirce.

His views on teaching can be summarised as follows:

People have a fear of failure
There is a lack of directions
There is also a lack of clarity in the direction
Positive reinforcement is not used enough
The task is not broken down into small enough steps

Skinner suggests that with all of the obstacles out of the way any age appropriate skill can be taught using his 5 principles:

Have small steps
Work from most simple to most complex tasks
Repeat the directions as many times as possible
Give immediate feedback
Give positive reinforcement

[wikipedia]

For our purposes, though, the Skinner book which is of most importance is Walden Two (1948), a fictionalised account of a successful Utopian community in 1940s America.

This story has been much criticised (but also much read). There have even been a number of attempts to set up an actual community along the lines suggested by Skinner - none (as yet) successful, unfortunately.

Lecture 11

2008-06-10T15:09:00.033+12:00

[image source]

Wk 6 - Mon (25/8), 3-4 pm lecture: HSB1

John Barth: The Floating Opera (1957) -

Detail

The Coastline Measurement Problem

I like to observe to apprentice fiction writers that the coastline problem applies to every story; in fact, it applies to every narrated action within every story. How long does it take Irma to answer the telephone, once she hears it ring? In real life, anywhere from a few seconds up to maybe half a minute, if the caller persists and the answering machine doesn’t intervene; in narrated life, however, whether factual or fictional, the answer depends on the author’s verbal/narrative waypoints. It may take no longer than the space between the word dingaling and the word “Hello?” Or it may take eight wordsworth of space and time: Irma picked up the telephone and said “Hello?” Or it may be that Irma hesitates and reflects a bit on who might be calling; or she may hesitate and reflect a lot – her narrative, anyhow, may do so. Irma may set down her glass of chablis (what brand of chablis? What sort of glass?); she may tap the ash from her cigarette (What brand of cigarette? Tap the ash into what?), reflecting that she would probably be a non-drinker/non-smoker these days if it weren’t that her estranged abstemious party-pooping husband, Fred, always used to nag her so on that subject, and wondering whether that’s Fred calling now, or Fred’s lawyer, or maybe her own lawyer, Rodriguez, whose interest in her own case she’s half afraid is becoming more than merely professional. … Irma’s author may even freeze-frame between ring and response and cut to an extended flashback, perhaps several chaptersworth of retrospective marital case history. Indeed, an entire novel may elapse with Fred (or Rodriquez) on hold so to speak; Laurence Sterne’s account of the biological conception of Tristram Shandy nicely illustrates the coastline measurement problem in its narrative aspect. Likewise these remarks …

– "Ad Lib Libraries and the Coastline Measurement Problem," in
Further Fridays: Essays, Lectures and Other Nonfiction, 1984-1994
(Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 19895), pp.241-42.

Once could argue that The Floating Opera represents the convergence of two great cultural tributaries, both very influential in the early to mid-1950s.

On the one hand, there's the (so-called) Latin American craze - Carmen Miranda, the movies Gilda (1946), The Three Caballeros (1944), Orfeu Negro (1959), etc.

On the other hand, there's post-war Existentialism, as it manifested itself in the writings of Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre (especially the trilogy of novels Les chemins de la liberte [The Paths of Freedom] (1945-49), and Simone de Beauvoir.

The Hispanification of North America

One of my Penn State students .. showed me the way, by introducing me to a turn-of-the century Brazilian writer named Joaquim Machado de Assis, several of whose novels were just then appearing in English translation. I checked Machado out of the Pattee library – first his Braz Cubas (retitled Epitaph of a Small Winner in its English translation) and then Dom Casmurro and Quinças Borba (the latter retitled Philosopher or Dog? in its English version) – and those novels supplied me with model resolutions of a problem whose terms I could not have articulated before it was well behind me.

– "Borges and I: a mini-memoir." in Further Fridays, p.165.

We did not have the term "Postmodernism" in our critical vocabulary back in the 1950s, but Machado's combination of formal playfulness, narrative self-consciousness and self-reflexiveness, political scepticism, and emotional seriousness tempered with dry comedy – they add up to a kind of proto-postmodernism which appealed to me very strongly indeed … Later in my life I learned that behind Machado stands the first English postmodernist novel: I mean Tristram Shandy, no doubt a more brilliant performance than any of Machado's. But much as I honor Laurence Sterne, I have never been able quite to finish Tristram Shandy. there is a larger humanity in Machado de Assis than there is Laurence Sterne; I prefer the kind of technical fireworks that speak to my heart as well as to my mind and my funnybone – formalism with a Latino accent: formalismo.

– "The Spanish Connection." in Further Fridays, pp.44-45.

As well as that, of course, there's the tradition of the minstrel show, popular in the southern States both before and after the Civil War, with its stereotypes of the simple-minded Tambo and Bones, exchanging crosstalk before being called to order by the Interlocutor, a kind of blackface Master of Ceremonies.

Thomas "Daddy" Rice introduced the earliest slave archetype with his song "Jump Jim Crow" and its accompanying dance. He claimed to have learned the number by watching an old, limping black stable hand dancing and singing, "Wheel about and turn about and do jus' so/Eb'ry time I wheel about I jump Jim Crow."

... Slave characters in general came to be low-comedy types with names that matched the instruments they played: Brudder Tambo (or simply Tambo) for the tambourine and Brudder Bones (or Bones) for the bone castanets or bones. These endmen (for their position in the minstrel semicircle) were ignorant and poorly spoken, being conned, electrocuted, or run over in various sketches. They happily shared their stupidity; one slave character said that to get to China, one had only to go up in a balloon and wait for the world to rotate below. Highly musical and unable to sit still, they constantly contorted their bodies wildly while singing.

Lecture 10

2008-06-10T15:09:00.032+12:00

[image source]

Wk 5 - Thurs (21/8), 3-4 pm lecture: HSB2

John Barth: The Floating Opera (1957) / The End of the Road (1958) -

Existentialism, Postmodernism & the Post-war

The Outsider

Albert Camus' L’Étranger was first published by Libraire Gallimard in Paris in 1942. In 1946, it was first translated into English by British author Stuart Gilbert and this translation was read by millions for over four decades. A second English translation was published in 1982 by British publishing house Hamish Hamilton. This translation, by Joseph Laredo, was adopted by Penguin Books in 1983 and reprinted for Penguin Classics in 2000. In 1989, another translation by American Matthew Ward was published.

The tone of the three English translations is quite different, with the Gilbert translation exhibiting a more formal tone. An example of this difference can be found in the first sentence of the first chapter:

French: "Aujourd'hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas. J'ai reçu un télégramme de l'asile: Mère décédée. Enterrement demain. Sentiments distingués. Cela ne veut rien dire. C'était peut-être hier"

Gilbert translation: "Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can't be sure. The telegram from the Home says: YOUR MOTHER PASSED AWAY. FUNERAL TOMORROW. DEEP SYMPATHY. Which leaves the matter doubtful; it could have been yesterday."

Ward translation: "Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know. I got a telegram from the home: Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours. That doesn't mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday."

Laredo translation: "Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know. I had a telegram from the home: 'Mother passed away. Funeral tomorrow. Yours sincerely.' That doesn't mean anything. It may have been yesterday."

Plot Summary:

At the start of the novel, Meursault attends his mother's funeral, where he does not express any of the usual emotions that such an event often induces. He is asked if he wants to view the body of his mother but declines, instead smoking and drinking coffee in front of the body. Meursault sent his mother there because he felt she would be more happy with other people rather than living alone with Meursault in his apartment. The novel goes on to document the next few days of his life through the first person point-of-view. His best friend Raymond Sintès, one of his neighbors, of whom Meursault aids in dismissing his Arab girlfriend because Raymond suspects her of infidelity. Later, Raymond and Meursault encounter her brothers on a beach, and Raymond is injured in a resulting knife fight. After retreating, Meursault returns to the beach and shoots one of the brothers in a moment of confusion caused in part by the glare of the sun. "The Arab" is killed, and Meursault fires four more times into the dead body.

At the trial, the prosecuting attorneys seem more interested in the inability or unwillingness of Meursault to cry at his mother's funeral than the murder of the Arab, because they find his lack of remorse offensive. The argument follows that if Meursault is incapable of remorse, he should be considered a dangerous misanthrope who should be executed by guillotine in order to set an example for others who consider murder. Meursault is charged largely due to the lack of emotions shown at his mother's funeral, rather than for the murder of the Arab man.

As the novel comes to a close, Meursault meets with a chaplain and rejects the chaplain's insistence that he turn to God. The novel ends with Meursault recognizing the universe's indifference toward humankind. The final lines echo his new realization: "As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself — so like a brother, really — I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate."

- Wikipedia

John Barth

Intellectual and spiritual disorientation is the family disease of all my main characters - a disease usually complicated by ontological disorienation, since knowing where you're at is often contingent upon knowing who you are.

- "Getting Oriented." in The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction (New York: Putnam's, 1984), p.131.

According to Brian McHale’s Postmodernist Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1987), p.9:

The dominant of modernist fiction is epistemological. That is, modernist fiction deploys strategies which engage and foreground questions such as … “How can I interpret this world of which I am a part? And what am I in it?” Other typical modernist questions might be added: What is there to be known?; Who knows it?; How do they know it, and with what degree of certainty?; How is knowledge transmitted from one knower to another, and with what degree of reliability?; How does the object of knowledge change as it passes from knower to knower?; What are limits of the knowable? And so on.

He then goes on to formulate a second thesis (p.10):

The dominant of postmodernist fiction is ontological. That is, postmodernist fiction deploys strategies which engage and foreground questions like the ones Dick Higgins [in A Dialectic of Centuries (1978)] calls “post-cognitive”: “Which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it?” Other typical postmodernist questions bear either on the ontology of the literary text itself or on the ontology of the world which it projects, for instance: What is a world?; What kinds of world are there, how are they constituted, and how do they differ?; What happens when different kinds of world are placed in confrontation, or when boundaries between worlds are violated?; What is the mode of existence of a text, and what is the mode of existence of the world (or worlds) it projects?; How is a projected world structured? And so on.

Epistemology foregrounds questions of consciousness.

Ontology foregrounds questions of existence.

It's interesting to find such an explicit invitation to pose such questions even in the preface to our reprint of Barth's first two novels:

THE FLOATING OPERA and THE END OF THE ROAD:
FOREWORD TO DOUBLEDAY ANCHOR EDITION

My books tend to come in pairs, as did their author; I am half of a set of opposite-sex twins.

1. In a Sense, I am Jacob Horner

IN A SENSE, I AM JACOB HORNER.

- The End of the Road

1. Tuning My Piano

So. Todd Andrews is my name. You can spell it with one or two d's; I get letters addressed either way. I almost warned you against the single-d spelling, for fear you'd say, "Tod is German for death: perhaps the name is symbolic." I myself use two d's, partly in order to avoid that symbolism. But you see, I ended by not warning you at all, and that's because it just occurred to me that the double-d Todd is symbolic, too, and accurately so. Tod is death, and this book hasn't much to do with death; Todd is almost Tod - that is, almost death - and this book ,if it gets written, has very much to do with almost-death.

- The Floating Opera

Labels

The author of these words is a fifty-eight year old storyteller, mainly a novelist, who -- as a student in the 1940s and fifties -- cut his apprentice literary teeth on the likes of Frank Kafka, Thomas Mann, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound: the old masters of what we now call literary High Modernism …

When my first novel (The Floating Opera) was published in the mid-1950s, it was approved by the critic Leslie Fiedler as an example of "provincial American existentialism." The description intrigued me; like a good provincial , I went and read Sartre and Camus to learn what existentialism was, and I concurred with Mr. Fiedler … if not altogether with Sartre and Camus. If people had done such things in those days, I'd have had a T-shirt printed up for myself: PROVINCIAL AMERICAN EXISTENTIALIST.

My second novel – The End of the Road, published two years later – was generally assigned to a new category called Black Humor. I buckled down and read such alleged fellow Black Humorists as John Hawkes, Kurt Vonnegut .. and (when he arrived on the scene) Joseph Heller, and I decided that this was not a bad team to be on: the Existential Black Humorists.

But my third, fourth and fifth books, published through the 1960s, came to be described no longer as Existentialist or Black Humorist, but as Fabulist, and the term was made retroactive to those earlier productions too …

Sure enough, just when I had a pretty good idea was Fabulism was, in the 1970s the stuff began to be called Postmodernist. With increasing frequency I found myself categorized under that label, not only with my old U.S. teammates, but with some first-rate foreign ones: Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Gabriel Garçia Márquez. I had hoped that some women would sign on next time the ship changed names – would be signed on, I should say, since the artists themselves are not normally consulted in these matters.

– "Postmodernism Revisited." in Further Fridays: Essays, Lectures and Other Nonfiction, 1984-1994 (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1995), pp.117-18.

Lecture 9

2008-06-10T15:08:00.018+12:00

[image source]

Wk 5 - Mon (18/8), 3-4 pm lecture: HSB1

E. M. Forster: A Passage to India (1924) -

The Trial

To E. M. Forster

Here, though the bombs are real and dangerous,
And Italy and King's are far away,
And we're afraid that you will speak to us,
You promise still the inner life shall pay.

As we run down the slope of Hate with gladness
You trip us up like an unnoticed stone,
And just as we are closeted with madness
You interrupt us like the telephone.

For we are Lucy, Turton, Philip, we
Wish international evil, are excited
To join the jolly ranks of the benighted

Where Reason is denied and Love ignored:
But, as we swear our lie, Miss Avery
Comes out into the garden with the sword.

- W. H. Auden, "In Time of War" (1938)

"Only connect" - epigraph to Howards End (1910)

"Why can't we be friends now?" said the other [Fielding], holding him [Aziz] affectionately. "It's what I want. It's what you want."

But the horses didn't want it - they swerved apart; the earth didn't want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single-file; the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as they issued from the gap and saw Mau beneath: they didn't want it, they said in their hundred voices, "No, not yet," and the sky said, "No, not there."
- A Passage to India, p.289.

Two Analogies:

Franz Kafka, Der Process [The Trial] (1925)
(English translation, by Edwin and Willa Muir, first published in 1935).

Jemand mußte Josef K. verleumdet haben, denn ohne daß er etwas Böses getan hätte, wurde er eines Morgens verhaftet.

[Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., for without having done anything wrong, he was arrested one morning.]

- a bureaucratic nightmare of confusion and mistaken identity.

[Woodcutter, commoner and priest]

Akira Kurosawa, dir. Rashomon (1950) - based on two stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa: "Rashomon" (1915) provides the setting, while "In a Grove" (1921) provides the characters and plot.

- multiple points-of-view on the same event contradict the notion of a simple, discoverable truth.

The Trial

A Passage to India, chapter XXIV (pp. 196-211):

The Defence: Mr Amritrao & Aziz’s friend Mahmoud Ali, the Nawab Bahadur, Mr Fielding.
The Prosecution: Major Callendar, the Turtons, Ronny Heaslop:
“My old Das [the judge] is all right” … “Not one of them’s all right” (199)
Major Callendar, the Doctor, on “buck niggers” (200)
Mrs Turton on the rights of Englishwomen (200)
Mr McBryde, the Superintendent, on “Oriental Pathology” (202)
The rise to the platform (202)
The descent from the platform (203-4)
The Witnesses: Mrs Moore on being “one with the universe.” (194)
Mrs Moore introduced into the argument (206)
Mrs Moore converted into a Hindu deity (207)
Adela’s evidence (a little like Alice’s evidence?) (210-11)

“I tried to show that India is an unexplainable muddle by introducing an unexplained muddle – Miss Quested’s experience in the cave. When asked what happened there, I don’t know … Some fallacy, not a serious one, has seduced us both, some confusion between the dish and the dinner.”
– E. M. Forster to William Plomer in 1934 [Quoted in Furbank, II, 124-25]

A fascinating piece of indirection. Admittedly the details of the legal procedures, approved by Forster’s friend Masood, contained a number of serious inaccuracies [listed by his correspondent H. H. Shipley – letter quoted in Furbank, vol. II, pp.126-7], but the crux of the matter was, as he himself said:

I don’t like Anglo-Indians as a class. I tried to suppress this and be fair to them, but my lack of sympathy came through.

You say I don’t like them because I don’t really know them. But how can I ever like them when I happen to like the Indians and they don’t? … Sympathy is finite [my emphasis] – at least mine is, alas, – so that as the rope is pulled into the right hand it slips out of the left. [letter quoted in Furbank, 11: 129]

Epilogue: Temple

Is the ending a success or a failure? Climax or anticlimax? The two boats crashing on the lake brings about a rapprochement between Fielding and Aziz, but there’s no reason to think it lasting. Friendship is not really finally possible between the two men.

How we judge the ending of the book has a good deal to do with how our stand on other matters. D. H. Lawrence wrote to Forster shortly after the book’s publication:

I don’t care about Bou-oum – Nor all the universe. Only the dark ahead & the silence into which we haven’t yet spoken our impertinent echoes. – You saying human relationships don’t matter, then after all hingeing your book on a very unsatisfactory relationship between two men! … After one’s primary relation to the X – I don’t know what to call it, but not god or the universe – only human relationships matter.
- D. H. Lawrence (1924) [Quoted in Furbank, II: 124]

A summation of a kind - but also a refusal to acknowledge the necessity of enshrining this paradox at the heart of his book.

Lecture 8

2008-06-10T15:07:00.036+12:00

[image source]

Wk 4 - Thurs (14/8), 3-4 pm lecture: HSB2

E. M. Forster: A Passage to India (1924) -

Plot

Plots are for dead people.
– Tracey Slaughter

We are to visualize the English novelists not as floating down the stream [of time] ... but as seated together in a room, a circular room, a sort of British museum reading room, all writing their novels simultaneously …
– E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (1927)

Extracts from Aristotle’s Poetics:

The plot … is the first principle and as it were the soul of tragedy: character comes second.

Plots … must have length but must be easily taken in by the memory.

A plot does not have unity … simply because it deals with a single hero. Many and indeed innumerable things happen to an individual, some of which do not go to make up any unity …

The plot … must represent a single piece of action and the whole of it; and the component incidents must be so arranged that if one of them be transposed or removed, the unity of the whole is dislocated and destroyed. For if the presence or absence of a thing makes no visible difference, then it is not an integral part of the whole.

Aristotle’s Poetics - Terminology:

Imitation [mimesis] is “an instinct implanted in man from childhood … through imitation [he] learns his earliest lessons …”

"Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity."

Reversal [peripeteia] is “a change of the situation into the opposite …”

Recognition [anagnorisis] is “a change from ignorance to knowledge, producing either friendship or hatred in those who are destined for good fortune or ill.”

Purgation [catharsis] is “giving relief to overcharged feeling …”

Extracts from Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Philosophy of Composition":

It is only with the denouement constantly in view that we can give a plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation ...

I prefer commencing with the consideration of an effect. … I say to myself, in the first place, “Of the innumerable effects, or impressions, of which the heart, the intellect, or … the soul is susceptible, what one shall I, on the present occasion, select?”

Having chosen a novel, first, and secondly a vivid effect, I consider whether it can be best wrought by incident or tone – whether by ordinary incidents and peculiar tone, or the converse, or by peculiarity both of incident and tone – afterward looking about me (or rather within) for such combinations of event, or tone, as shall best aid me in the construction of the effect.

The Marabar Caves

A Passage to India:

Professor Godbole describes the caves on pp.83-84.
Chapter XII (pp.125-27): a geological account of their formation and character.
pp. 143-45 - Mrs Moore's experience of being almost suffocated inside the first cave.
p.149: Adela Quested's tactless question about the number of Aziz's wives, followed by his ducking into a cave for a cigarette.
Chapter XVI - Aziz's observation of the scene after Adela has disappeared.
Chapter XXII - After hearing everyone else's views, we are finally allowed to meet Adela and hear her own ambiguous account of what took place.

I think the jury is out on whether this story is designed to produce suspense (Aristotle and Poe's prescription for narrative), or to illustrate the inner, secret life of each character (E. M. Forster's - as outlined in Aspects of the Novel).

Lecture 7

2008-06-10T15:07:00.032+12:00

[image source]

Wk 4 - Mon (11/8), 3-4 pm lecture: HSB1

E. M. Forster: A Passage to India (1924) -

Bloomsbury and the Raj

Is Miss Quested a "post-impressionist"? (p.77)

[All page references to E. M. Forster, A Passage to India. 1924. Ed. Oliver Stallybrass. 1979. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984.]

The Dreadnought Hoax (1910)

'The Dreadnought Hoax was a practical joke pulled by Horace de Vere Cole in 1910. Cole tricked the Royal Navy into showing their flagship, the warship HMS Dreadnought to a supposed delegation of Abyssinian royals. The hoax drew attention in Britain to the emergence of the Bloomsbury Group.

The hoax involved Cole and five friends — writer Virginia Stephen (later Virginia Woolf), her brother Adrian Stephen, Guy Ridley, Anthony Buxton and artist Duncan Grant — who disguised themselves with skin darkeners and turbans. The disguise's main limitation was that the "royals" could not eat anything or their make-up would be ruined. Adrian Stephen took the role of "interpreter".

On 10 February 1910 the trick began. Cole had an accomplice send a telegram to HMS Dreadnought which was then moored in Weymouth, Dorset. The message said that the ship must be prepared for the visit of a group of princes from Abyssinia and was purportedly signed by Foreign Office Under-secretary Sir Charles Hardinge.

Cole with his entourage went to London's Paddington station where Cole claimed that he was "Herbert Cholmondeley" of the UK Foreign Office and demanded a special train to Weymouth. The stationmaster arranged a VIP coach.

In Weymouth, the navy welcomed the princes with an honour guard. Unfortunately, nobody had found an Abyssinian flag, so the navy proceeded to use that of Zanzibar and to play Zanzibar's national anthem. Their visitors did not appear to notice.

The group inspected the fleet. They distributed cards printed in Swahili and talked with each other in a broken Latin. To show their appreciation, they yelled invented words. They asked for prayer mats and bestowed fake military honours on some of the officers. One officer familiar with both Cole and Virginia Stephen failed to recognize either one, possibly because he heard the interpreter's strong German accent and was worried in case a German spy came on-board.

When they were on the train, Anthony Buxton sneezed and blew off his false whiskers, but managed to stick them back before anyone noticed. Cole told a train conductor that he could serve royals lunch only with white gloves. This was, of course, to avoid the problem with the make-up.

In London, they revealed the ruse by sending a letter and a group photo to the Daily Mirror. The Royal Navy briefly became an object of ridicule and demanded that Cole be arrested. However, Cole and his compatriots had not broken any law. The Navy sent two officers to cane Cole as a punishment—but Cole countered that it was they who should be caned because they had been fooled in the first place.'
[wikipedia]

The Bloomsbury Group

Personnel:

Virginia Stephen (1882-1941) & Leonard Woolf (1880-1969)
Clive Bell (1881-1964) & Vanessa Stephen (1879-1961) & Duncan Grant (1885-1978)
Roger Fry (1866-1934)
Lytton Strachey (1880-1932) & Dora Carrington (1893-1932)
John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946)

Crucial dates:

1903 – G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica
1907 – Clive Bell marries Vanessa Stephen
1910 – Roger Fry’s Post-impressionist exhibition
1910 – The Dreadnought Hoax
1912 – Leonard Woolf returns from Ceylon to marry Virginia Stephen
1912 – Lytton Strachey, Landmarks in French Literature
1914 – Clive Bell, Art
1915 – Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out
1916 – Bertrand Russell dismissed from Trinity College, Cambridge for his pacifist views. He is later imprisoned under the notorious Defence of the Realm Act (DORA).
1917 – Virginia and Leonard Woolf found the Hogarth Press
1918 – Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr. Arnold, General Gordon
1919 – Virginia Woolf, Modern Fiction
1921 – Lytton Strachey, Queen Victoria
1925 – Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway
1925 – Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader
1927 – Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
1928 – Clive Bell, Civilization
1928 – Lytton Strachey, Elizabeth and Essex: A Tragic History
1928 – Virginia Woolf, Orlando
1929 – Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
1931 – Virginia Woolf, The Waves
1932 – Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader: Second Series
1938 – Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas
1941 – Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts
1942 – Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth and Other Essays

Is Mr Turton a "great man"? (Ronnie Heaslop)

The Amritsar Massacre

'Dyer is infamous for the orders which he gave on April 13, 1919 in Amritsar. It was under his command that 90 troops, comprising of 25 Gurkhas of 1st/9th Gurkha Rifles, 25 Pathans and Baluch of 54th Sikhs and 59th Sindh Rifles, all armed with .303 Lee-Enfield rifles and the Gurkhas additionally armed with khukris opened fire on a gathering of unarmed civilians, including women and children gathered at the Jallianwalla Bagh in what came to be later known as the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.

The civilians had assembled at Jallianwala Bagh to participate in the annual Baisakhi celebrations which are both a religious as well as a cultural festival of the Punjabis. The Bagh-space comprised 6–7 acres and was walled on all sides except for five entrances, four of them being very narrow and admitting only a few people at a time. The fifth entrance was blocked by the armed soldiers and by two armoured cars armed with machine guns, although these vehicles were unable to pass through the entrance. Upon entering the park, the General immediately ordered troops to fire directly upon the assembled gathering; firing continued till his troops' ammunition of 1650 rounds was fully exhausted. The firing continued unabated for about 10 minutes. From time to time, Dyer "checked his fire and directed it upon places where the crowd was thickest"; he did this not because the crowd was slow to disperse, but because he (the General) "had made up his mind to punish them for having assembled there." Some of the soldiers initially fired in the air, at which General Dyer shouted: "Fire low. What have you been brought here for?." Later, Dyer's own testimony revealed that the crowd was not given any warning to disperse and he felt no remorse for having ordered his troops to fire.

'The worst part of the whole thing was that the firing was directed towards the exit gates through which the people were running out. There were small 3 or 4 outlets in all and bullets were actually rained over the people at all these gates... and many got trampled under the feet of the rushing crowds and thus lost their lives... even those who lay flat on the ground were fired upon.'

The official reports quote 379 dead and over 1,000 injured. However, public enquiry estimates, figures from Government Civil Servants in the city as well as counts from the Home Political cite numbers well over a thousand dead. According to a Home Political Deposit report, the number was over 1,000, with more than 1,200 wounded. Dr. Smith, a British civil surgeon at Amritsar, indicated over 1800 casualties. These massive casualties earned general Dyer the infamous epitaph of "The Butcher of Amritsar" in India. It has been repeatedly pointed out that the actual figures were deliberately suppressed by the government for political reasons.

On the day following the massacre, Mr. Kitchin, the Commissioner of Lahore as well as General Dyer, both used threatening language. The following is the English translation of Dyer's Urdu Statement directed at the local residents of Amritsar on the afternoon of April 14, 1919, a day after the Amritsar massacre:

"You people know well that I am a Sepoy and soldier. Do you want war or peace? If you wish for a war, the Government is prepared for it, and if you want peace, then obey my orders and open all your shops; else I will shoot. For me the battle-field of France or Amritsar is the same. I am a military man and I will go straight. Neither shall I move to the right nor to the left. Speak up, if you want war? In case there is to be peace, my order is to open all shops at once. You people talk against the Government and persons educated in Germany and Bengal talk sedition. I shall report all these. Obey my orders. I do not wish to have anything else. I have served in the military for over 30 years. I understand the Indian Sepoy and Sikh people very well. You will have to obey my orders and observe peace. Otherwise the shops will be opened by force and Rifles. You will have to report to me of the Badmash. I will shoot them. Obey my orders and open shops. Speak up if you want war? You have committed a bad act in killing the English. The revenge will be taken upon you and upon your children."

Brigadier Dyer designated the spot where Miss Marcella Sherwood was assaulted sacred and daytime pickets were placed at either end of the street. Anyone wishing to proceed in the street between 6am and 8pm was made to crawl the 150 yards (140 m) on all fours, lying flat on their bellies. The order was not required at night due to a curfew. The humiliation of the order struck the Indians deeply. Most importantly, the order effectively closed the street. The houses had no back doors and the inhabitants could not go out without climbing down from their roofs. This order was in effect from April 19 until April 25, 1919. No doctor or supplier was allowed in, resulting in the sick being untended.

On his return to Britain, General Dyer was presented with a purse of 26,000 pounds sterling, a huge sum in those days, which emerged from a collection on his behalf by the Morning Post, a conservative, pro-Imperialistic newspaper, which later merged with the Daily Telegraph. A Thirteen Women Committee was constituted to present "the Saviour of the Punjab with sword of honour and a purse." This single incident incensed the Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore so much that he renounced his knighthood in protest. The Morning Post had supported Dyer’s action on grounds stating that the massacre was necessary to "Protect the honor of European Women."
...
General Dyer was oblivious of the events that he was responsible for. He wrote an article in the Globe of 21 January 1921, titled, "The Peril to the Empire". It commenced with, "India does not want self-government. She does not understand it." He went on to write:
It is only to an enlightened people that free speech and a free press can be extended. The Indian people want no such enlightenment ...
There should be an eleventh commandment in India, "Thou shalt not agitate" ...
Gandhi will not lead India to capable self-government. The British Raj must continue, firm and unshaken in its administration of justice to all men.'

[wikipedia]

British India

Important Dates:

• 1757 – Robert Clive wins the Battle of Plassey, the real beginning of the East India Company’s rule in India (present since the late 17th century).
• 1769–70 – Great Bengal Famine: 10 million dead (disputed as excessive)
• 1773 – Warren Hastings created the first British Governor General of India.
• 1783–84 – Chalisa famine: Severe famine. Large areas were depopulated. Up to 11 million people may have died during the years 1782–84.
• 1791–92 – Doji bara famine or Skull famine. One of the most severe famines known. People died in such numbers that they could not be cremated or buried. It is thought that 11 million people may have died during the years 1788–94.
• 1837–38 – Agra famine of 1837–38: 800,000 dead (disputed as inadequate)
• 1843 – Annexation of Sindh.
• 1849 – Anglo-Sikh wars result in the annexation of Kashmir, Punjab and the North-West Frontier.
• 1857 – The Indian Mutiny.
• 1858 – British India created.
• 1865–66 – Orissa famine of 1866: 1 million dead.
• 1868–70 – Rajputana famine of 1869: 1.5 million dead (mostly in the princely states of Rajputana)
• 1873–74 – Bihar famine of 1873–74: A large and generous relief effort was organized by the Bengal government. There were no mortalities during the famine.
• 1876 – Queen Victoria becomes Empress of India.
• 1876–78 – Great Famine of 1876–78: 5.25 million in British territory. Mortality unknown for princely states.
• 1896–97 Indian famine of 1896–97: 1,000,000 dead (in British territories). Mortality unknown for princely states.
• 1899–1901 Indian famine of 1899-1900: 1 million dead (in British territories). Mortality unknown for princely states.
• 1919 – Amritsar massacre kills at least 379 (official figures). Unofficial estimates are over 1,000.
• 1943–44 Bengal famine of 1943: 1–1.5 million dead from starvation; 3 million including deaths from epidemics.
• 1947 – British withdraw from India. Partition massacres kill an estimated half million people.

The E. M. Forster Story

Yes - oh dear yes - the novel tells a story
– E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel. 1927. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974. p.34.

1879 – Edward Morgan Forster is born in London on the 1st of January.
1880 – His father, an architect, dies.
1887 – He inherits £8,000 from his paternal great-aunt Marianne Thornton (enough to live on – enabling him to become a writer).
1893-96 – Attends Tonbridge School in Kent as a day boy.
1897-1901 – Goes to King's College, Cambridge, where he becomes a member of the Apostles, the nucleus of the Bloomsbury Group.
1901-05 – After leaving university, travels on the continent (France, Italy, Germany and as far as Greece): albeit for the most part with his mother.
1905 – Publishes his first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread.
1907 – Publishes The Longest Journey, an autobiographical novel.
1908 – Publishes A Room with a View, a comedy of manners, his lightest novel.
1910 – Publishes Howards End, a ‘state-of-England’ novel.
1911 – Publishes The Celestial Omnibus, a collection of short stories.
1912-13 – Works unsuccessfully on Arctic Summer, his proposed follow-up to Howards End.
1913-14 – Works instead on Maurice, his homosexual ‘coming-out’ novel.
1914 – Visits Egypt, Germany and India with the classicist Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson.
1914 – The First World War breaks out; Forster becomes a conscientious objector
1916-17– While engaged in hospital work for the Red Cross in Egypt, meets in Alexandria a seventeen-year-old tram conductor, Mohammed el-Adl, with whom he fell in love. Has his first sexual encounter with another man.
1922 – Mohammed dies of tuberculosis.
1922 – Publishes Alexandria: A History and Guide.
1923 – Publishes Pharos and Pharillon, a collection of travel essays.
1921-22 – Spends a second period in India as private secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas. While living at the court, Forster has the first ongoing sexual relationship of his life, with Kanaya, a young boy who serves him also as barber.
1924 – Publishes A Passage to India, his most successful novel, which wins the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
1925-45 – Forster lives with his mother Alice Clare (Lily) in West Hackhurst, Abinger Hammer, finally leaving on 23 September, 1946.
1927 – Publishes Aspects of the Novel, based on his Clark lectures, given at Cambridge earlier that year.
1928 – Publishes The Eternal Moment, a collection of short stories.
1930s – Begins a stable, ongoing relationship with Bob Buckingham, a constable in the London Metropolitan Police. Also develops a friendship with Buckingham's wife May.
1934 – Publishes Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, a biography.
1936 – Publishes Abinger Harvest, a collection of essays.
1946 – Forster is elected an honorary fellow of King's College, Cambridge, and thereafter lived for the most part in college, doing relatively little.
1947 – Publishes Collected Short Stories.
1951 – Publishes Two Cheers for Democracy, a collection of essays.
1952 – Writes the libretto for Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd, in collaboration with Eric Crozier.
1953 – Publishes The Hill of Devi, a collection of letters and observations recorded during his stay in India in the early 20s.
1953 – Made a Companion of Honour.
1956 – Publishes Marianne Thornton, A Domestic Biography.
1960 – Attends first performance of Santha Rama Rau’s dramatisation of A Passage to India, at the Oxford Playhouse.
1969 – Made a member of the Order of Merit.
1970 – Dies in Coventry on 7th June, at the age of 91, at the Buckinghams’ home.
1971 – Maurice, written 1913–14, is published posthumously.
1972 – The Life to Come and Other Stories published posthumously.
1977 – P. N. Furbank, E. M. Forster: The Growth of the Novelist, 1879-1914.
1978 – P. N. Furbank, E. M. Forster: Polycrates’ Ring, 1914-1970.
1983-85 – Forster’s Selected Letters published posthumously.
1984 – The film of A Passage to India, directed by David Lean, released.
1985 – Forster’s Commonplace Book published posthumously.
1985 – The film of A Room with a View, directed by James Ivory, released.
1987 – The film of Maurice, directed by James Ivory, released.
1991 – The film of Where Angels Fear to Tread, directed by Charles Sturridge, released.
1992 – The film of Howards End, directed by James Ivory, released.
2001 – The Feminine Note in Literature, a collection of essays, is published posthumously.
2003 – Arctic Summer, an unfinished novel, is published posthumously with some other uncollected fictional fragments.

Lecture 6

2008-06-10T15:06:00.049+12:00

[image source]

Wk 3 - Thurs (7/8), 3-4 pm lecture: HSB2

James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist -

The Three Nets

– This race and this country and this life produced me, he said. I shall express myself as I am.

– Try to be one of us, repeated Davin. In heart you are an Irish man but your pride is too powerful.

– My ancestors threw off their language and took another Stephen said. They allowed a handful of foreigners to subject them. Do you fancy I am going to pay in my own life and person debts they made? What for?

– For our freedom, said Davin.

– No honourable and sincere man, said Stephen, has given up to you his life and his youth and his affections from the days of Tone to those of Parnell, but you sold him to the enemy or failed him in need or reviled him and left him for another. And you invite me to be one of you. I'd see you damned first.

– They died for their ideals, Stevie, said Davin. Our day will come yet, believe me.
Stephen, following his own thought, was silent for an instant.

– The soul is born, he said vaguely, first in those moments I told you of. It has a slow and dark birth, more mysterious than the birth of the body. When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.

The net of religion:

– Now let us try for a moment to realize, as far as we can, the nature of that abode of the damned which the justice of an offended God has called into existence for the eternal punishment of sinners. Hell is a strait and dark and foul-smelling prison, an abode of demons and lost souls, filled with fire and smoke. The straitness of this prison house is expressly designed by God to punish those who refused to be bound by His laws. In earthly prisons the poor captive has at least some liberty of movement, were it only within the four walls of his cell or in the gloomy yard of his prison. Not so in hell. There, by reason of the great number of the damned, the prisoners are heaped together in their awful prison, the walls of which are said to be four thousand miles thick: and the damned are so utterly bound and helpless that, as a blessed saint, Saint Anselm, writes in his book on similitudes, they are not even able to remove from the eye a worm that gnaws it.

– They lie in exterior darkness. For, remember, the fire of hell gives forth no light. As, at the command of God, the fire of the Babylonian furnace lost its heat but not its light, so, at the command of God, the fire of hell, while retaining the intensity of its heat, burns eternally in darkness. It is a never ending storm of darkness, dark flames and dark smoke of burning brimstone, amid which the bodies are heaped one upon another without even a glimpse of air. Of all the plagues with which the land of the Pharaohs were smitten one plague alone, that of darkness, was called horrible. What name, then, shall we give to the darkness of hell which is to last not for three days alone but for all eternity?

– The horror of this strait and dark prison is increased by its awful stench. All the filth of the world, all the offal and scum of the world, we are told, shall run there as to a vast reeking sewer when the terrible conflagration of the last day has purged the world. The brimstone, too, which burns there in such prodigious quantity fills all hell with its intolerable stench; and the bodies of the damned themselves exhale such a pestilential odour that, as saint Bonaventure says, one of them alone would suffice to infect the whole world. The very air of this world, that pure element, becomes foul and unbreathable when it has been long enclosed. Consider then what must be the foulness of the air of hell. Imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and decomposing in the grave, a jelly-like mass of liquid corruption. Imagine such a corpse a prey to flames, devoured by the fire of burning brimstone and giving off dense choking fumes of nauseous loathsome decomposition. And then imagine this sickening stench, multiplied a millionfold and a millionfold again from the millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the reeking darkness, a huge and rotting human fungus. Imagine all this, and you will have some idea of the horror of the stench of hell.

– But this stench is not, horrible though it is, the greatest physical torment to which the damned are subjected. The torment of fire is the greatest torment to which the tyrant has ever subjected his fellow creatures. Place your finger for a moment in the flame of a candle and you will feel the pain of fire. But our earthly fire was created by God for the benefit of man, to maintain in him the spark of life and to help him in the useful arts, whereas the fire of hell is of another quality and was created by God to torture and punish the unrepentant sinner. Our earthly fire also consumes more or less rapidly according as the object which it attacks is more or less combustible, so that human ingenuity has even succeeded in inventing chemical preparations to check or frustrate its action. But the sulphurous brimstone which burns in hell is a substance which is specially designed to burn for ever and for ever with unspeakable fury. Moreover, our earthly fire destroys at the same time as it burns, so that the more intense it is the shorter is its duration; but the fire of hell has this property, that it preserves that which it burns, and, though it rages with incredible intensity, it rages for ever.

– Our earthly fire again, no matter how fierce or widespread it may be, is always of a limited extent; but the lake of fire in hell is boundless, shoreless and bottomless. It is on record that the devil himself, when asked the question by a certain soldier, was obliged to confess that if a whole mountain were thrown into the burning ocean of hell it would be burned up In an instant like a piece of wax. And this terrible fire will not afflict the bodies of the damned only from without, but each lost soul will be a hell unto itself, the boundless fire raging in its very vitals. O, how terrible is the lot of those wretched beings! The blood seethes and boils in the veins, the brains are boiling in the skull, the heart in the breast glowing and bursting, the bowels a red-hot mass of burning pulp, the tender eyes flaming like molten balls.

– And yet what I have said as to the strength and quality and boundlessness of this fire is as nothing when compared to its intensity, an intensity which it has as being the instrument chosen by divine design for the punishment of soul and body alike. It is a fire which proceeds directly from the ire of God, working not of its own activity but as an instrument of Divine vengeance. As the waters of baptism cleanse the soul with the body, so do the fires of punishment torture the spirit with the flesh. Every sense of the flesh is tortured and every faculty of the soul therewith: the eyes with impenetrable utter darkness, the nose with noisome odours, the ears with yells and howls and execrations, the taste with foul matter, leprous corruption, nameless suffocating filth, the touch with redhot goads and spikes, with cruel tongues of flame. And through the several torments of the senses the immortal soul is tortured eternally in its very essence amid the leagues upon leagues of glowing fires kindled in the abyss by the offended majesty of the Omnipotent God and fanned into everlasting and ever-increasing fury by the breath of the anger of the God-head.

– Consider finally that the torment of this infernal prison is increased by the company of the damned themselves. Evil company on earth is so noxious that the plants, as if by instinct, withdraw from the company of whatsoever is deadly or hurtful to them. In hell all laws are overturned– there is no thought of family or country, of ties, of relationships. The damned howl and scream at one another, their torture and rage intensified by the presence of beings tortured and raging like themselves. All sense of humanity is forgotten. The yells of the suffering sinners fill the remotest corners of the vast abyss. The mouths of the damned are full of blasphemies against God and of hatred for their fellow sufferers and of curses against those souls which were their accomplices in sin. In olden times it was the custom to punish the parricide, the man who had raised his murderous hand against his father, by casting him into the depths of the sea in a sack in which were placed a cock, a monkey, and a serpent. The intention of those law-givers who framed such a law, which seems cruel in our times, was to punish the criminal by the company of hurtful and hateful beasts. But what is the fury of those dumb beasts compared with the fury of execration which bursts from the parched lips and aching throats of the damned in hell when they behold in their companions in misery those who aided and abetted them in sin, those whose words sowed the first seeds of evil thinking and evil living in their minds, those whose immodest suggestions led them on to sin, those whose eyes tempted and allured them from the path of virtue. They turn upon those accomplices and upbraid them and curse them. But they are helpless and hopeless: it is too late now for repentance.

– Last of all consider the frightful torment to those damned souls, tempters and tempted alike, of the company of the devils. These devils will afflict the damned in two ways, by their presence and by their reproaches. We can have no idea of how horrible these devils are. Saint Catherine of Siena once saw a devil and she has written that, rather than look again for one single instant on such a frightful monster, she would prefer to walk until the end of her life along a track of red coals. These devils, who were once beautiful angels, have become as hideous and ugly as they once were beautiful. They mock and jeer at the lost souls whom they dragged down to ruin. It is they, the foul demons, who are made in hell the voices of conscience. Why did you sin? Why did you lend an ear to the temptings of friends? Why did you turn aside from your pious practices and good works? Why did you not shun the occasions of sin? Why did you not leave that evil companion? Why did you not give up that lewd habit, that impure habit? Why did you not listen to the counsels of your confessor? Why did you not, even after you had fallen the first or the second or the third or the fourth or the hundredth time, repent of your evil ways and turn to God who only waited for your repentance to absolve you of your sins? Now the time for repentance has gone by. Time is, time was, but time shall be no more! Time was to sin in secrecy, to indulge in that sloth and pride, to covet the unlawful, to yield to the promptings of your lower nature, to live like the beasts of the field, nay worse than the beasts of the field, for they, at least, are but brutes and have no reason to guide them: time was, but time shall be no more. God spoke to you by so many voices, but you would not hear. You would not crush out that pride and anger in your heart, you would not restore those ill-gotten goods, you would not obey the precepts of your holy church nor attend to your religious duties, you would not abandon those wicked companions, you would not avoid those dangerous temptations. Such is the language of those fiendish tormentors, words of taunting and of reproach, of hatred and of disgust. Of disgust, yes! For even they, the very devils, when they sinned, sinned by such a sin as alone was compatible with such angelical natures, a rebellion of the intellect: and they, even they, the foul devils must turn away, revolted and disgusted, from the contemplation of those unspeakable sins by which degraded man outrages and defiles the temple of the Holy Ghost, defiles and pollutes himself.

– O, my dear little brothers in Christ, may it never be our lot to hear that language! May it never be our lot, I say! In the last day of terrible reckoning I pray fervently to God that not a single soul of those who are in this chapel today may be found among those miserable beings whom the Great Judge shall command to depart for ever from His sight, that not one of us may ever hear ringing in his ears the awful sentence of rejection: DEPART FROM ME, YE CURSED, INTO EVERLASTING FIRE WHICH WAS PREPARED FOR THE DEVIL AND HIS ANGELS!

But still ...

– Then, said Cranly, you do not intend to become a protestant?

– I said that I had lost the faith, Stephen answered, but not that I had lost self-respect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?

The net of language:

– One difficulty, said Stephen, in esthetic discussion is to know whether words are being used according to the literary tradition or according to the tradition of the marketplace. I remember a sentence of Newman's in which he says of the Blessed Virgin that she was detained in the full company of the saints. The use of the word in the marketplace is quite different. I HOPE I AM NOT DETAINING YOU.

– Not in the least, said the dean politely.

– No, no, said Stephen, smiling, I mean –

– Yes, yes; I see, said the dean quickly, I quite catch the point: DETAIN.

He thrust forward his under jaw and uttered a dry short cough.

– To return to the lamp, he said, the feeding of it is also a nice problem. You must choose the pure oil and you must be careful when you pour it in not to overflow it, not to pour in more than the funnel can hold.

– What funnel? asked Stephen.

– The funnel through which you pour the oil into your lamp.

– That? said Stephen. Is that called a funnel? Is it not a tundish?

– What is a tundish?

– That. The... funnel.

– Is that called a tundish in Ireland? asked the dean. I never heard the word in my life.

– It is called a tundish in Lower Drumcondra, said Stephen, laughing, where they speak the best English.

– A tundish, said the dean reflectively. That is a most interesting word. I must look that word up. Upon my word I must.

His courtesy of manner rang a little false … The dean repeated the word yet again.

– Tundish! Well now, that is interesting!

– The question you asked me a moment ago seems to me more interesting. What is that beauty which the artist struggles to express from lumps of earth, said Stephen coldly.

The little word seemed to have turned a rapier point of his sensitiveness against this courteous and vigilant foe. He felt with a smart of dejection that the man to whom he was speaking was a countryman of Ben Jonson. He thought:

– The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words HOME, CHRIST, ALE, MASTER, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.

The net of nationality:

Irish History (19th-20th century)

1798 – The Society of United Irishmen rebel but the rebellion is crushed at the battle of Vinegar Hill in June. Wolfe Tone commits suicide after being captured.

1800 – The Act of Union joins England and Ireland (the act comes into effect in 1801).

1803 – Robert Emmet's rising in Dublin. The rising is crushed and Emmet is executed.

1807 – Famine in Ireland.

1817 – Famine and typhus in Ireland.

1820s – Agrarian unrest is led by a secret society called the Ribbonmen.

1821-1822 – Famine strikes Ireland again.

1823 – Daniel O'Connell founds the Catholic Association.

1829 – The Catholic Emancipation Act allows Catholics to enter parliament and to hold public office.

1830-1834 – Famine stalks Ireland again.

1832 – Cholera epidemic in Irish towns.

1836 – Famine strikes again.

1840 – Young Ireland is founded.

1841 – The population of Ireland is 8,175,000.

1845-1849 – The potato blight causes a potato famine. Perhaps 1 million people die. Many more emigrate. The population of Ireland falls dramatically. The famine is at its worst in the West and Southwest of Ireland.

1848-1850 – Cholera epidemics.

1851 – The population of Ireland has fallen to 6,552,000.

1858 – The Irish Republican Brotherhood is formed.

1867 – Fenian rising.

1869 – The Church of Ireland is disestablished.

1873 – The Home Rule League is formed.

1879 – The Irish National Land League is formed. It demands the 'three f's', fair rent, fixity of tenure and free sale of land.

1880 – A new verb enters the language 'to boycott'. Charles Stewart Parnell, the leader of the Land League declares that if a tenant is evicted and somebody else takes over the land that person is to be ostracised. The first person so treated is a Captain Boycott.

1881– Parnell is imprisoned.

1882 – James Joyce is born. Parnell is released.

1884 – The Gaelic Athletic Association is founded.

1886 – The first Home Rule bill is rejected by the British parliament.

1890 – Parnell is named as co-respondent in a divorce case.

1893 – The Gaelic League is founded. The second Home Rule bill is passed by the British House of Commons but is rejected by the House of Lords.

1898 – The Irish Local Government Act gives Ireland local government similar to the English system.

1903 – A final Land Act makes it still easier for tenant farmers to obtain loans and buy their land. As a result millions of acres change hands by 1921.

1905 – Sinn Fein is founded.

1909 – The Irish Transport and General Workers Union is founded.

1913 – The Ulster Volunteer Force is founded. Tram strike in Dublin. A third Home Rule bill is passed by the British parliament. However the act is put on hold in September because of the outbreak of the First World War.

1916 – The Easter Rising. James Joyce publishes A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse -
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

- W. B. Yeats, "Easter, 1916"

1919 – The Irish Volunteers are renamed the Irish Republican Army. A number of Sinn Fein MPs were elected to the British parliament in December 1918. However, they refuse to take their seats. Instead they form their own parliament in Dublin called the Dail Eireann. Eammon de Valera is elected president of the Dail.

1919-1921 – The War of Independence. The IRA fights a guerrilla war against the British.

1920 – Ireland is partitioned. The Government of Ireland Act forms 2 parliaments in Ireland. One in the North and one in the South. Both are to have their own prime minister. However both are to be subordinate to the British parliament. The 'Black and Tans' are formed to reinforce the Royal Irish Constabulary.

1921– The Northern parliament meets for the first time. Sinn Fein win almost all the seats for the Southern parliament but they refuse to take their seats. Instead they carry on meeting in the Dail Eireann. A truce is made between the IRA and the British. An Anglo-Irish treaty partitions Ireland.

1922– The Dail agrees to the treaty but civil war begins between those who accept the treaty and those who don't. Michael Collins is killed. James Joyce publishes Ulysses.

1923 – The civil war ends; William Butler Yeats wins the Nobel Prize for Literature.

1926 – Fianna Fail is founded.

1932-1937 – Eamon De Valera is Prime Minister.

1936 – The IRA is banned in the Irish Free State

1937 – A new constitution comes into force. The Irish Free State becomes Eire. Douglas Hyde is the first president.

1937-1948 – de Valera is Taoiseach.

1939 – James Joyce publishes Finnegans Wake.

1941 – James Joyce dies.

1949 – The Republic of Ireland Act makes Eire a republic.

1951-1954 – de Valera is Taoiseach again.

1955 – Ireland joins the United Nations.

1957-1959 – de Valera is Taoiseach for the 3rd time.

1959-1973 – de Valera is President.

1969 – Beginning of 'The Troubles' in Northern Ireland.

1972 – 'Bloody Sunday' in Derry. Fourteen people are killed when the British 1st Parachute Regiment opens fire on demonstrators.

1973 – Ireland joins the EEC (forerunner of the EU).

1985 – The Anglo-Irish agreement.

The Five Ages of Stephen

Section 1 - Infant / Schoolboy:

Pandying [51-61]
Unjust and unfair – courage and defiance.

Section 2 -- Schoolboy:

Generous to his family with his prize money – sexual awakening.

Section 3 -- Schoolboy:

The Fire Sermon – repentance and shame.

Section 4 - Schoolboy:

The question of vocation [166-75] - Answered by the birdgirl.

Section 5 - Student:

Discussion with Lynch on aesthetics: Wholeness, harmony and radiance. [229-31]
Discussion with Cranly – abandoning lover (EC), country and mother. “I will not serve” [260]

[Page references to James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Seamus Deane (Penguin, 1999)]

Lecture 5

2008-06-10T15:06:00.048+12:00

[image source]

Wk 3 - Mon (4/8), 3-4 pm lecture: HSB1

James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) -

Stephen Hero

Narrative points-of-view:

• First-person (I-based):

“Call me Ishmael.”
– Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)

This informs us that a person called Ishmael is going to be telling us the story. He may be the main character, or protagonist, or (like Dr. Watson in the Sherlock Holmes stories) simply a witness to events. They will, however, be confined to what he himself has seen, and to his own interpretations (which may well be mistaken).

• Second-person (You-based):

“You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade.”
– Italo Calvino, Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore (1979)

In this case the narrator and the reader are (in theory, at least) the same person. It’s a rare – and somewhat unrealistic – technique, since people generally don’t address themselves as “you,” but can work in very self-conscious stories, often known as metafictions.

• Third-person (limited):

“Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo ...

His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face.”
– James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

This is a narrative centred around the experiences of one character, and confined to his or her experiences and perceptions, but actually told by an invisible narrator privy only to the thoughts and feelings of the protagonist.

• Third-person (omniscient):

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times ...”
– Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

Often known as Eye-of-God narration. This narrator is privy to complete information about all the characters (and events) in a story, rather than just one of them. The accuracy of the account should be nowhere called into question.

• Unreliable Narrator:

“To some extent ALL narrators are unreliable”
– Wikipedia online

Sometimes an author intends you to distrust the (generally first-person) narrator of a story. Their account may be biassed for reasons of prejudice, ignorance, or mental instability. If this is the case, the author should clearly signal details to us which conflict with the spin the narrator is giving.

• Choice of Narrative Viewpoint:

If the point of your story is the unreliability of interpretation, it’s best to choose a first-person narrator (common in 20th-century Modernism).

If the point of your story is to portray aspects of the social and physical world around us, then a third-person narrator is better (19th-century Realism).

If the point of your story is the paradoxes inherent in story-telling itself, then an (unreliable) first-person – or second-person – narrator is usual (late 20th-century Postmodernism).

•

By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments. He told Cranly that the clock of the Ballast Office was capable of an epiphany. Cranly questioned the inscrutable dial of the Ballast Office clock with his no less inscrutable countenance.

– Yes, said Stephen, I will pass it time after time, allude to it, refer to it, catch a glimpse of it. It is only an item in the catalogue of Dublin’s street furniture. Then all at once I see it and I know at once what it is: epiphany.

– What?

– Imagine my glimpses at that clock as the gropings of a spiritual eye which seeks to adjust its vision to an exact focus. The moment the focus is reached the object is epiphanised. It is just in this epiphany that I find the third, the supreme quality of beauty.

– James Joyce, Stephen Hero: Part of the first draft of “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” 1904-06. Ed. Theodore Spencer. 1944. Rev, John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon. 1956. London: Ace Books, 1961, pp.186-87.

•

– To finish what I was saying about beauty, said Stephen, the most satisfying relations of the sensible must therefore correspond to the necessary phases of artistic apprehension. Find these and you find the qualities of universal beauty. Aquinas says: AD PULCRITUDINEM TRIA REQUIRUNTUR INTEGRITAS, CONSONANTIA, CLARITAS. I translate it so: THREE THINGS ARE NEEDED FOR BEAUTY, WHOLENESS, HARMONY, AND RADIANCE. Do these correspond to the phases of apprehension? Are you following?

– Of course, I am, said Lynch. If you think I have an excrementitious intelligence run after Donovan and ask him to listen to you.

Stephen pointed to a basket which a butcher's boy had slung inverted on his head.

– Look at that basket, he said.

– I see it, said Lynch.

– In order to see that basket, said Stephen, your mind first of all separates the basket from the rest of the visible universe which is not the basket. The first phase of apprehension is a bounding line drawn about the object to be apprehended. An esthetic image is presented to us either in space or in time.

What is audible is presented in time, what is visible is presented in space. But, temporal or spatial, the esthetic image is first luminously apprehended as selfbounded and selfcontained upon the immeasurable background of space or time which is not it. You apprehended it as ONE thing. You see it as one whole. You apprehend its wholeness. That is INTEGRITAS.

– Bull's eye! said Lynch, laughing. Go on.

– Then, said Stephen, you pass from point to point, led by its formal lines; you apprehend it as balanced part against part within its limits; you feel the rhythm of its structure. In other words, the synthesis of immediate perception is followed by the analysis of apprehension. Having first felt that it is ONE thing you feel now that it is a THING. You apprehend it as complex, multiple, divisible, separable, made up of its parts, the result of its parts and their sum, harmonious. That is CONSONANTIA.

– Bull's eye again! said Lynch wittily. Tell me now what is CLARITAS and you win the cigar.

– The connotation of the word, Stephen said, is rather vague. Aquinas uses a term which seems to be inexact. It baffled me for a long time. It would lead you to believe that he had in mind symbolism or idealism, the supreme quality of beauty being a light from some other world, the idea of which the matter is but the shadow, the reality of which it is but the symbol. I thought he might mean that CLARITAS is the artistic discovery and representation of the divine purpose in anything or a force of generalization which would make the esthetic image a universal one, make it outshine its proper conditions. But that is literary talk. I understand it so. When you have apprehended that basket as one thing and have then analysed it according to its form and apprehended it as a thing you make the only synthesis which is logically and esthetically permissible. You see that it is that thing which it is and no other thing. The radiance of which he speaks in the scholastic QUIDDITAS, the WHATNESS of a thing. This supreme quality is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination. The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelley's, called the enchantment of the heart.

Lecture 4

2008-06-10T15:05:00.030+12:00

[image source]

Wk 2 - Thurs (31/7), 3-4 pm lecture: HSB2

James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) -

International Modernism

Art Movements (late 19th Century / early 20th century)

1880 – post-impressionism

1905 – fauvism

1905 – expressionism

1907 – Pablo Picasso: Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

1908 – cubism

1909 – futurism

1909 – Henri Matisse: La danse

1910 – Roger Fry: Post-impressionist exhibition, London

1910 – Frank Lloyd Wright: Robie House, Chicago

1912 – vorticism

1913 – Igor Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring

1914 – Wyndham Lewis: BLAST (Issue I)

1915 – Ezra Pound begins The Cantos

1916 – dada

1917 – Marcel Duchamp: Fountain

1918 – Tristan Tzara: Dadaist manifesto

1919 – bauhaus

1920s – art deco

1920s – magic realism

1920s – constructivism

1922 – T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land

1922 – James Joyce: Ulysses

1924 – surrealism

1924 – André Breton: Surrealist manifesto

•

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo...

His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face.

He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: she sold lemon platt.

O, the wild rose blossoms
On the little green place.

He sang that song. That was his song.

O, the green wothe botheth.

When you wet the bed first it is warm then it gets cold. His mother put on the oilsheet. That had the queer smell.

His mother had a nicer smell than his father. She played on the piano the sailor's hornpipe for him to dance. He danced:

Tralala lala,
Tralala tralaladdy,
Tralala lala,
Tralala lala.

Uncle Charles and Dante clapped. They were older than his father and mother but uncle Charles was older than Dante.

Dante had two brushes in her press. The brush with the maroon velvet back was for Michael Davitt and the brush with the green velvet back was for Parnell. Dante gave him a cachou every time he brought her a piece of tissue paper.

The Vances lived in number seven. They had a different father and mother. They were Eileen's father and mother. When they were grown up he was going to marry Eileen. He hid under the table. His mother said:

– O, Stephen will apologize.

Dante said:

– O, if not, the eagles will come and pull out his eyes. –

Pull out his eyes,
Apologize,
Apologize,
Pull out his eyes.
Apologize,
Pull out his eyes,
Pull out his eyes,
Apologize.

•

April 16. Away! Away!

The spell of arms and voices: the white arms of roads, their promise of close embraces and the black arms of tall ships that stand against the moon, their tale of distant nations. They are held out to say: We are alone – come. And the voices say with them: We are your kinsmen. And the air is thick with their company as they call to me, their kinsman, making ready to go, shaking the wings of their exultant and terrible youth.

April 26. Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life, I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

April 27. Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.

Dublin, 1904
Trieste, 1914

What goes on in between these two passages, the first and last in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man?

– Lessing, said Stephen, should not have taken a group of statues to write of. The art, being inferior, does not present the forms I spoke of distinguished clearly one from another. Even in literature, the highest and most spiritual art, the forms are often confused. The lyrical form is in fact the simplest verbal vesture of an instant of emotion, a rhythmical cry such as ages ago cheered on the man who pulled at the oar or dragged stones up a slope. He who utters it is more conscious of the instant of emotion than of himself as feeling emotion. The simplest epical form is seen emerging out of lyrical literature when the artist prolongs and broods upon himself as the centre of an epical event and this form progresses till the centre of emotional gravity is equidistant from the artist himself and from others. The narrative is no longer purely personal. The personality of the artist passes into the narration itself, flowing round and round the persons and the action like a vital sea. This progress you will see easily in that old English ballad TURPIN HERO which begins in the first person and ends in the third person. The dramatic form is reached when the vitality which has flowed and eddied round each person fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and intangible esthetic life. The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak. The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of esthetic, like that of material creation, is accomplished. The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.

Lecture 3

2008-06-10T15:05:00.029+12:00

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Wk 2 - Mon (28/7), 3-4 pm lecture: HSB1

Willa Cather: My Ántonia (1918) -

"The Significance of the Frontier in American History"

Three ways of mythologising the American frontier:

We sat looking off across the country, watching the sun go down. The curly grass about us was on fire now. The bark of the oaks turned red as copper. There was a shimmer of gold on the brown river. Out in the stream the sandbars glittered like glass, and the light trembled in the willow thickets as if little flames were leaping among them. The breeze sank to stillness. In the ravine a ringdove mourned plaintively, and somewhere off in the bushes an owl hooted. The girls sat listless, leaning against each other. The long fingers of the sun touched their foreheads.

Presently we saw a curious thing: There were no clouds, the sun was going down in a limpid, gold-washed sky. Just as the lower edge of the red disk rested on the high fields against the horizon, a great black figure suddenly appeared on the face of the sun. We sprang to our feet, straining our eyes toward it. In a moment we realized what it was. On some upland farm, a plough had been left standing in the field. The sun was sinking just behind it. Magnified across the distance by the horizontal light, it stood out against the sun, was exactly contained within the circle of the disk; the handles, the tongue, the share - black against the molten red. There it was, heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun.

Even while we whispered about it, our vision disappeared; the ball dropped and dropped until the red tip went beneath the earth. The fields below us were dark, the sky was growing pale, and that forgotten plough had sunk back to its own littleness somewhere on the prairie.

- Willa Cather, My Antonia, Bk 2, Chapter XIV.

Frederick Turner's The Frontier in American History (1920) included his landmark essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American History"(A paper read at the meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago, July 12, 1893. It first appeared in the Proceedings of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, December 14, 1893):

From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of profound importance. The works of travelers along each frontier from colonial days onward describe certain common traits, and these traits have, while softening down, still persisted as survivals in the place of their origin, even when a higher social organization succeeded. The result is that to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom--these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier. Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them. He would be a rash prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life has now entirely ceased. Movement has been its dominant fact, and, unless this training has no effect upon a people, the American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise. But never again will such gifts of free land offer themselves. For a moment, at the frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant. There is no tabula rasa. The stubborn American environment is there with its imperious summons to accept its conditions; the inherited ways of doing things are also there; and yet, in spite of environment, and in spite of custom, each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifference to its lessons, have accompanied the frontier. What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the nations of Europe more remotely. And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925):

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes - a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter - to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning -

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Perhaps the most important things to note are:

The close consonance in date (1918, 1920 and 1925).
The elegiac tone.
The importance of the European / American dichtomy: Old World / New World; Paleface / Redskin ("Back in the ’30s, Philip Rahv memorably divided American fiction writers into redskins and palefaces — Mark Twain epitomized the wild men, Henry James the civilized — a chasm that today may be outmoded or politically indelicate ..." Bill Marx).

How do these considerations help us read Willa Cather? Is she trying to "legitimise" the Western? Trying to use the example of Virgil to find a voice for the wild life of the frontier?

Lecture 2

2008-06-10T15:04:00.019+12:00

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Wk 1 - Thurs (24/7), 3-4 pm lecture: HSB2

Willa Cather: My Ántonia (1918) -

"What is a Novel?"

What is a novel?

Novels are generally written in prose, that’s one defining feature (except that there are verse novels and graphic novels, too).
They tend to be fairly substantial, over 50,000 words in length (though, again, there are exceptions).
They’re fictional, in that they make no claim to be considered as statements of fact (though biographical and historical novels abound, some of which are virtually exclusively factual – at any rate in intent. Far more so, at any rate, than many histories and autobiographies).

What we call a novel is generally held to be a product of the self-conscious individualism encouraged by European modernity and the rise of mercantile capitalism in the 17th-18th century. There were certainly long prose fictions before then, some of considerable sophistication and interest. But the form didn’t really start to become dominant (at any rate in European literature) till the advent of writers such as Defoe, Richardson and Fielding in England, Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau in France.

The ancestors of the modern novel can clearly be seen in the characteristics of books such as Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722), Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), or Voltaire’s Candide (1759).

On the one hand we have the influence of historiography. Long prose narratives tended to begin as historical chronicles and analyses of past events: Herodotus and Thucydides in Greece, Livy and Tacitus in Rome, Ssu-Ma Chien in China.
On the other hand we have the long narrative epic poem, designed for recitation and memorisation: Homer, Virgil, Dante, The Epic of Gilgamesh, even. These stories are full of incident and vivid description, strongly prophetic of the strengths of the novel, but they perhaps lack its focus on realistic psychology and characterisation.
For these we need a third factor: autobiography. This tends to begin as religious apologia or confession of some sort. Saint Augustine’s 5th-century Confessions are generally regarded as the first true autobiography in Western literature. His book had many successors, generally with similar religious motives – at any rate until the advent of Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1571) and other similar Renaissance wits and egotists.

The ancient Greeks believed in nine Muses, divine daughters of Zeus and the goddess Memory, who governed all the arts. The exact line-up (and even the number) is disputed, but it’s generally thought to be:

Calliope (beautiful speaker): muse of epic or heroic poetry
Clio (glorious one): muse of history
Erato (amorous one): muse of lyric, love and erotic poetry
Euterpe (well-pleasing): muse of music and lyric poetry
Melpomene (chanting one): muse of tragedy
Polyhymnia (hymn-singer): muse of sacred song and oratory
Terpsichore (delighting in dance): muse of choral song and dance
Thalia (blossoming one): muse of comedy and pastoral poetry
Urania (celestial one): muse of astronomy

Fielding called Tom Jones a "comic epic in prose", so I imagine he saw it as combining the influence of Calliope, Clio and Thalia: Epic, History and Pastoral. Melpomene and Polyhymnia (Tragedy and Oratory) would have to be included in there somewhere, too, though, I suspect.

I’d like to propose, then, for the purposes of our discussion, 9 Muses of the Novel:

Character (or Psychological portraiture)
Detail (or Verisimilitude)
Narration (or Point of View)
Plot (or Story)
Setting (or mise-en-scène)
Structure (or Architecture)
Style (or Tone of Voice)
Theme (or Implication)
Timing (or Duration)

All of them require a bit of unpacking, which I shall endeavour to do in detail throughout the semester by letting one dominate the discussion of each of our nine novels:

Setting for Cather, My Ántonia (1918)
Narrative point-of-view for Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
Plot for Forster, A Passage to India (1924)
Detail for Barth, The Floating Opera (1957)
Character for Barth, The End of the Road (1958)
Theme & Symbolism for Greene, The Comedians (1966)
Time for Atwood, Cat's Eye (1988)
Structure for Louise Erdrich, Tracks (1988)
Style for Ian McEwan, Atonement (2001)

To begin with, though, let’s start the discussion with Willa Cather’s My Ántonia:

Narration (or Point of View: pov for short)

Jim Burden’s autobiographical, first-person narrative is filtered through the “editorship” of an unnamed friend, presumably identifiable – at any rate to some degree – with the “Willa Cather” whose name appears on the title-page.

It’s hard to know why this framing technique has been adopted, except to emphasise the verisimilitude of these recollections – which thus become similar to, but not identical with, Cather’s own. This also involves a change in the sex of the memoirist which might be held to have extensive thematic implications.

Plot

This is where our initial discussion of the genres ancestral to the novel begins to become relevant. Jim repeatedly invokes Virgil. Not so much the epic poet of the Aeneid as the pastoral poet of the Georgics, that comparatively uneventful and understated (though digressive) textbook on the several arts of agriculture.

This justifies the author (one would presume) in steering away from so many clichés of the historical romance: the love story between the protagonists, the tragic denouement, etc.

Setting

This is clearly crucial for Cather – and certainly for subsequent readers and commentators. She was hailed in her time as the one who had “saved” the Western and the immigrant narrative from its pop-culture roots and had given it a new dignity and maturity. Nebraska, the frontier state she grew up in, was regarded as her “territory” in the same way that Hardy’s Wessex or Dickens’s London were identified with a particular novelist.

Though she may have welcomed, and even consciously fostered this identification at first, she certainly shied away from its somewhat-belittling implications in later years. Again, the identification with the provincial-turned-cosmopolitan Roman Virgil is important here.

I should note further that by “setting” I mean location in place and time.

Structure

Some have found My Ántonia’s structure admirable, others flawed. Hermione Lee, in the introduction to your edition, sums up the debate as follows:

Critics ... have fussed quite unnecessarily over whether the story was Jim’s or Ántonia’s, whether, if Ántonia was the “heroine”, so much space should be given to Lena Lingard … David Daiches feels that the section on the Hired Girls is structurally unsound, or can only be justified if Jim is “fitting himself to be the ideal observer of Ántonia.” He feels also that the novel should have more effectively ended, tragically, with Ántonia betrayed and pregnant, “alone in the field with a gathering darkness,” rather than being “redeemed with a conventional happy ending.”

In other words, he’d prefer it if Cather had rewritten Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

It comes down, basically, to a film-director (or film-editor’s) questions: How should you begin and end each scene? Where should the camera cut in and cut out? Which scenes do you need, and which can be discarded? We can debate such issues endlessly – but they can scarcely be regarded as trivial or supererogatory.
Many different stories, and many different slants on the same story, can be constructed out of basically the same materials – witness all the endless retellings of the same archetypal narratives: boy meets girl, etc.

Style (or Tone of Voice)

Cather was generally regarded as a “beautiful” “poetic” prose-writer, and in fact she requires a sophisticated and flexible range of tones to animate so comparatively uneventful and evocative a novel. There’s no air of the impromptu in her writing.

This, however, is something we’ll explore in more detail next time, when we come to close reading a passage from the book.

Character

This (at least arguably) is the real justification of the success of the novel as a genre, and at least one reason for its continued dominance. We are – as we should be -- fascinated by other human beings: how they think, how they react to events. All theories of Psychology attempt to generalise human behaviour in a scientific and quantifiable way. The novel – fiction in general – tries, by contrast, to describe and celebrate the individual and irreducible.
All fiction-writers draw on their own experience of the world and of human nature, then try to communicate these insights to readers. Why? Presumably in order to achieve greater empathy with (or at least understanding of) one another.

There’s a great deal which could be said about Jim, about Ántonia – or rather his perception of Ántonia at all the various ages and stages we encounter her in the novel – but also about the incidental characters who adorn the story: Mr Shimerda and his turbulent family, the melancholy Russians, the hired hands on the farm, and the rather repellent bourgeoisie of Black Hawk.

All I have time to note here, though, is that the sophistication and insight of these portraits increases as Jim himself grows up.

Detail (or Verisimilitude)

This might be seem as mere embellishment to setting or characterisation, but there’s a certain sense, too, that what makes a novel a novel is the use of details of the passing scene to give a sense of verisimilitude or believability to the story. Deploying these details artfully is a good deal of the skill of the novelist.

“The revolver in a story must be fired,” as Chekhov said. Randomly-piled-up or carelessly deployed detail simply serves to make the world of the story incoherent to readers. I’ll have a good deal to say throughout the course about the very different ways our nine novelists approach this essential feature of their narratives.

Theme (or Implication)

Which leads us to that awful (but, I fear, unavoidable) term: theme. I’d like in a way to replace it with something like leit-motif, the musical phrase accompanying particular characters in operas or film-scores. These repeated trains of thought which are woven into the story – or which particular readers or interpreters see as woven into the story – should (at least potentially) add up collectively to give it its overall meaning or significance.

Again, we’ll have a lot more to say about his when we get to the close reading exercise next week.

Timing (or Duration)

Finally, is this one really a separate category? If plot, or story, is what actually happens to the characters in the book, and narration, or point-of-view, is how we’re told about what happens to them, and structure, or architecture, is how the telling is disposed and arranged on the pages, why do we need a label called timing?

I guess it’s because real (and apparent) duration is such an important consideration to fiction-writers in general but novelists in particular. How do you show time elapsing in your story? One way is to observe the so-called Aristotelian unities, and have your narrative elapsing (possibly with flashbacks and other vignettes) in a day or a few hours. That way the duration of reading can roughly equate with the period during which the narrative takes place (Barth’s Floating Opera follows this pattern, as does Atwood’s Cat’s Eye).

Another solution is to present us with a series of vignettes or patches of time (Forster in A Passage to India does something like this; Joyce’s Portrait and McEwan’s Atonement also, but in a more complex and multi-layered way).

Another solution is to give us a narrator or narrators recording their own autobiographical story in their own time, with characteristic elisions and expansions (Cather’s My Ántonia, Barth’s End of the Road, Erdrich’s Tracks – to some extent Greene’s Comedians).

How time is seen to operate in the story and how it actually does operate can be very different, though. Green’s Mr. Brown draws out or contracts certain scenes in his narrative every bit as artfully as Joyce or McEwan’s less prominently-displayed narrators.

An easy mnemonic for our nine Muses might be:

C & D: Character & Detail
2 P’s: P-o-v & Plot
3 S’s: Setting, Structure, Style
2 T’s: Theme & Timing

Lecture 1

2008-06-10T15:02:00.010+12:00

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Wk 1 - Mon (21/7), 3-4 pm lecture: HSB1

Introduction: The Novel since 1900

Let me submit the following practical suggestion. Literature, real literature, must not be gulped down like some potion which may be good for the heart or good for the brain - the brain, that stomach of the soul. Literature must be taken and broken to bits, pulled apart, squashed - then its lovely reek will be smelt in the hollow of the palm, it will be munched and rolled upon the tongue with relish; then, and only then, its rare flavour will be appreciated at its true worth and the broken and crushed parts will again come together in your mind and disclose the beauty of a unity to which you have contributed something of your own blood.
- Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers, 1982 (London: Picador, 1983) p. 105.

How should one read a novel?

If the novel was the dominant genre of the nineteenth century, and film of the twentieth century, what precisely do we have to learn by focussing specifically on a set of novels written since 1900?

Maybe we have to go back even further before we ask that question. What is the purpose of writing fiction? More to the point, why do we read it?

Nabokov has some interesting reflections on that subject, also:

The case of count Beust is an excellent example to bring into any discussion about so-called real life and so-called fiction. There on the one hand is a historical fact, a certain Beust, a statesman, a diplomat, who not only has existed but has left a book of memoirs in two volumes, wherein he carefully recalls all the witty repartees, and political puns, which he had made in the course of his long political career on this or that occasion. And here, on the other hand, is Steve Oblonksi whom Tolstoy [in Anna Karenin] created from top to toe, and the question is which of the two, the "real-life" Count Beust, or the "fictitious" Prince Oblonksi is more alive, is more real, is more believable, Despite his memoirs - long-winded memoirs full of dead clichés - the good Beust remains a vague and conventional figure, whereas Oblonski, who never existed, is immortally vivid. And furthermore, Beust himself acquires a little sparkle by his participating in a Tolstoyan paragraph, in a fictitious world.
- Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature, p. 213.

This mention of the "fictitious world" of a novel - in this case, of Anna Karenina - brings us to the main theme of this lecture: the different worlds we have to understand before we can really penetrate what is going on any piece of fiction.

First of all, there's the world of the author: her or his biography, intellectual context, set of worldly concerns ...

Secondly, there's the setting (contemporary or consciously "historical") of the novel. Even if it is supposed to take place roughly around the same time at which it was composed, that may require some elucidation for later readers.

Thirdly, there's the fictive universe of the novel itself. How does this world operate? What are its fundamental laws of nature? The same as ours in the "real world" - or significantly different? What aspects of existence, in other words, are foregrounded in this particular author's version of the texture of experience?

No two commentators will come up with exactly the same descriptions of even these basic features of any "fictitious world" - nevertheless, it would be foolish to pretend that the process of definition is entirely arbitrary.

Stanley Fish, way back in 1980, asked Is There a Text in this Class? I think that we have to allow that there is in order to have a discussion at all, but we can also permit a huge amount of variation when it comes to our sense of the features of any particular text.

We can also employ our basic evidence for its nature - the letter of the text - more or less adroitly.

Assignments

2008-06-09T15:50:00.038+12:00

Stage Two Students
(enrolled in English 220)

Description: Close-reading exercise
Date due: Week 4 (Friday 15/8)
Length: 500 words
Worth: 10%

Description: Essay
Date due: Week 7 (Friday 19/9)
Length: 1000 words
Worth: 20%

Description: 3-hour Exam (closed book)
Structure: Three essay questions
Worth: 60%

Description: Participation
Based on: Class Exercises + Contribution to discussion
Worth: 10%

Stage Three Students
(enrolled in English 356)

Description: Close-reading exercise
Date due: Week 4 (Friday 15/8)
Length: 500 words
Worth: 10%

Description: Essay
Date due: Week 7 (Friday 19/9)
Length: 1500-2000 words
Worth: 30%

Description: 3-hour Exam (closed book)
Structure: Three essay questions
or one pre-announced question
Worth: 50%

Description: Participation
Based on: Class Exercises + Contribution to discussion
Worth: 10%

Assignment Rubrics:

• Assignment 1: Close-reading exercise
[Same for Stage 2 & Stage 3: 500 words (10%)]

In this assignment, you will be asked either to write a short close-reading of a selected passage from one of the nine novels in the course, or to compose a pastiche of the prose-style of one of our eight authors.

You'll be marked on the wit and insight of your reading: whether analysis or parody.

• Assignment 2: Essay
[Stage 2: 1000 words (20%)]
[Stage 3: 1500-2000 words (30%)]

Two sets of essay questions, one for Stage 2 students and another for Stage 3 students, will be handed out later in the semester. You cannot answer on the same author you used for Assignment 1.

• Final Examination (3 hours)
[Stage 2: 3 essay questions (60%)]
[Stage 3: either 3 essay questions or 1 pre-announced question (50%)]

NB: You are not permitted to answer on any of the novels / authors you've written about in the rest of the course. Nor may you answer on both John Barth novels - only one of these two works may be written about by any student.

• Tutorial Participation (10%)

This will be based on two things:
Class quizzes. At the beginning of each tutorial (after the first) you will be asked to write down the answer to a quick question about the reading for that tutorial. Correct responses will be tallied up and will give you 9 of your marks.
Contributions to discussion. The more constructively and consistently you take part in class activities, the more certain you are to earn this extra mark.

Assignment 1: Close-reading exercise
[500 words (10%)]

Either write a short close-reading of one of the nine extracts below;
Or compose a pastiche of the prose-style of one of our eight authors.

You'll be marked on the wit and insight of your reading: whether analysis or parody.

I sat down in the middle of the garden, where snakes could scarcely approach unseen, and leaned my back against a warm yellow pumpkin. There were some ground-cherry bushes growing along the furrows, full of fruit. I turned back the papery triangular sheaths that protected the berries and ate a few. All about me giant grasshoppers, twice as big as any I had ever seen, were doing acrobatic feats among the dried vines. The gophers scurried up and down the ploughed ground. There in the sheltered draw-bottom the wind did not blow very hard, but I could hear it singing its humming tune up on the level, and I could see the tall grasses wave. The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers. Queer little red bugs came out and moved in slow squadrons around me. Their backs were polished vermilion, with black spots. I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.
[Willa Cather, My Ántonia (1918), Bk 1, chapter II.]

A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane's and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and soft-hued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips, where the white fringes of her drawers were like feathering of soft white down. Her slate-blue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a bird's, soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some dark-plumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face.

She was alone and still, gazing out to sea; and when she felt his presence and the worship of his eyes her eyes turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze, without shame or wantonness. Long, long she suffered his gaze and then quietly withdrew her eyes from his and bent them towards the stream, gently stirring the water with her foot hither and thither. The first faint noise of gently moving water broke the silence, low and faint and whispering, faint as the bells of sleep; hither and thither, hither and thither; and a faint flame trembled on her cheek.

– Heavenly God! cried Stephen's soul, in an outburst of profane joy.
[James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), section IV.]

Miss Quested and Aziz and a guide continued the slightly tedious expedition. They did not talk much, for the sun was getting high. The air felt like a warm bath into which hotter water is trickling constantly, the temperature rose and rose, the boulders said, 'I am alive: the small stones answered, 'I am almost alive.' Between the chinks lay the ashes of little plants. They meant to climb to the rocking-stone on the summit, but it was too far, and they contented themselves with the big group of caves. En route for these, they encountered several isolated caves, which the guide persuaded them to visit, but really there was nothing to see; they lit a match, admired its reflection in the polish, tested the echo and came out again. Aziz was 'pretty sure they should come on some interesting old carvings soon', but only meant he wished there were some carvings. His deeper thoughts were about breakfast. Symptoms of disorganization had appeared as he left the camp. He ran over the menu: an English breakfast, porridge and mutton chops, but some Indian dishes to cause conversation, and pan afterwards. He had never liked Miss Quested as much as Mrs Moore, and had little to say to her, less than ever now that she would marry a English official.
[E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924), Part II, chapter XV.]

The thermometer outside the offices of the daily Banner read eighty-nine degrees when I walked past it on my way uptown. Few people were on the streets. At the curb in front of a large funeral parlor a black hearse was parked, its loading door closed, and several mourners, along with the black-suited employees of the establishment, stood quietly about in the yard. As I approached, an aged Chesapeake Bay retriever bitch loped from a hydrangea bush out onto the sidewalk and up onto the undertaker’s porch, followed closely by a prancing, sniffing young mongrel setter. I saw the Chesapeake Bay dog stop to shake herself in front of the door; the setter clambered upon her at once, his long tongue lolling. Just then the door opened and the pallbearers came out with a casket. Their path was blocked by the dogs. Some of the bearers smiled guiltily; an employee caught the setter on his haunches with an unfunereal kick. The bitch trundled off the porch, her lover still half on her, and took up a position in the middle of the sidewalk, near the hearse. The pair then resumed their amours in the glaring sun, to the embarrassment of the company, who pretended not to notice them while the hearse’s door was opened and the casket gently loaded aboard.
[John Barth, The Floating Opera (1957), chapter XI.]

“In life,” he said, “there are no essentially major or minor characters. To that extent, all fiction and biography, and most historiography, are a lie. Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story. Hamlet could be told from Polonius’s point of view and called The Tragedy of Polonius, Lord Chamberlain of Denmark. He didn’t think he was a minor character in anything, I daresay. Or suppose you’re an usher in a wedding. From the groom’s viewpoint he’s the major character; the others play supporting parts, even the bride. From your viewpoint, though, the wedding is a minor episode in the very interesting history of your life, and the bride and groom both are minor figures. What you’ve done is choose to play the part of a minor character: it can be pleasant for you to pretend to be less important than you know you are, as Odysseus does when he disguises as a swineherd. And every member of the congregation at the wedding sees himself as the major character, condescending to witness the spectacle. So in this sense, fiction isn’t a lie at all, but a true representation of the distortion that everyone makes of life.
[John Barth, The End of the Road (1958), chapter 6.]

Next day I sat in a deck-chair on the sheltered starboard-side and let myself roll languidly in and out of the sun with the motions of the mauve-green sea. I tried to read a novel, but the heavy foreseeable progress of its characters down the uninteresting corridors of power made me drowsy, and when the book fell upon the deck, I did not bother to retrieve it. My eyes opened only when the traveller in pharmaceutical products passed by; be clung to the rail with two hands and seemed to climb along it as though it were a ladder. he was panting heavily and he had an expression of desperate purpose as though he knew to what the climb led and knew that it was worth his effort, but knew too that he would never have the strength to reach the end. Again I drowsed and found myself alone in a blacked-out room and someone touched me with a cold hand. I woke and it was Mr Fernandez who had, I suppose, been surprised by the steep roll of the boat and had steadied himself against me. I had the impression of a shower of gold dropping from a black sky as his spectacles caught the fitful sun. "Yes," he said, "yes," smiling an apology as he lurched upon his way.
[Graham Greene, The Comedians (1966), chapter 1.]

Cordelia and Grace and Carol take me to the deep hole in Cordelia's backyard. I'm wearing a black dress and a cloak, from the dress-up cupboard. I'm supposed to be Mary Queen of Scots, headless already. They pick me up by the underarms and the feet and lower me into the hole. Then they arrange the boards over the top. The daylight air disappears, and there's the sound of dirt hitting the boards, shovelful after shovelful. Inside the hole it's dim and cold and damp and smells like toad burrows.

Up above, outside, I can hear their voices, and then I can't hear them. I lie there wondering when it will be time to come out. Nothing happens. When I was put into the hole I knew it was a game; now I know it is not one. I feel sadness, a sense of betrayal. Then I feel the darkness pressing down on me; then terror.

When I remember back to this time in the hole, I can't really remember what happened to me while I was in it. I can't remember what I really felt. Maybe nothing happened, maybe these emotions I remember are not the right emotions. I know the others came and got me out after a while, and the game or some other game continued. I have no image of myself in the hole; only a black square filled with nothing, a square like a door. Perhaps the square is empty; perhaps it's only a marker, a time marker that separates the time before it from the time after. The point at which I lost power. Was I crying when they took me out of the hole? It seems likely. On the other hand I doubt it. But I can't remember.
[Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye (1988), Section IV, chapter 20.]

The first time she drowned in the cold and glassy waters of Matchimanito, Fleur Pillager was only a child. Two men saw the boat tip, saw her struggle in the waves. They rowed over to the place she went down, and jumped in. When they lifted her over the gunwales, she was cold to the touch and stiff, so they slapped her face, shook her by the heels, worked her arms and pounded her back until she coughed up lake water. She shivered all over like a dog, then took a breath. But it wasn't long afterward that those two men disappeared. The first wandered off and the other, Jean Hat, got himself run over by his own surveyor's cart.

It went to show, the people said. It figured to them all right. By saving Fleur Pillager, those two had lost themselves.

The next time she fell in the lake, Fleur Pillager was fifteen years old and no one touched her. She washed on shore, her skin a dull dead gray, but when George Many Women bent to look closer, he saw her chest move. Then her eyes spun open, clear black agate, and she looked at him. "You take my place," she hissed. Everybody scattered and left her there, so no one knows how she dragged herself home. Soon after that we noticed Many Women changed, grew afraid, wouldn't leave his house and would not be forced to go near water or guide the mappers back into the bush. For his caution, he lived until the day that his sons brought him a new tin bathtub. Then the first time he used it he slipped, got knocked out, and breathed water while his wife stood in the other room frying breakfast.
[Louise Erdrich, Tracks (1988), Chapter 2.]

As she stood in the nursery waiting for her cousins' return, she sensed she could write a scene like the one by the fountain and she could include a hidden observer like herself. She could imagine herself hurrying down now to her bedroom, to a clean block of lined paper and her marbled, Bakelite fountain pen. She could see the simple sentences, the accumulating telepathic symbols, unfurling at the nib's end. She could write the scene three times over, from three points of view; her excitement was in the prospect of freedom, of being delivered from the cumbrous struggle between good and bad, heroes and villains. None of these three was bad, nor were they particularly good. She need not judge. There did not have to be a moral. She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive. It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had equal value. That was the only moral a story need have.
[Ian McEwan, Atonement (2001), chapter 3.]

Assignment 2: Essay
[Stage 2 students only - 1000 words (20%)]

Answer one question only.

Normal in-line citations (in either MLA or APA format) will be required for any material quoted or referred to in your essay. This includes the set text under discussion, even if you're using the exact edition recommended for the course.

NB: You may not answer on the same author you wrote about in Assignment 1: the close-reading exercise.

A standard 10% variation above or below the prescribed word limit is permissible in this essay.

NB: Please remember to include a word count at the end.

1. Willa Cather, My Ántonia (1918)

Either:
Write a review of Willa Cather’s novel intended for a local Nebraska newspaper in 1918.

Or:
Write an account of Jim Burden’s visit to the Cuzak household from the point-of-view of either Ántonia or her husband.

Or:
Write an essay discussing whether or not My Ántonia can be considered a feminist novel.

2. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

Either:
Write a review of James Joyce’s novel intended for a Dublin newspaper in 1916.

Or:
Write a review of James Joyce’s novel intended for a London newspaper in 1916.

Or:
Write a character sketch of Stephen Dedalus from the point-of-view of either his mother or one of his sisters.

Or:
Write an essay discussing why the sermons Stephen hears at the retreat are reiterated at such length in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man?

3. E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924)

Either:
Write a review of E. M. Forster’s novel intended for an Indian Nationalist journal in 1924.

Or:
Write a review of E. M. Forster’s novel intended for a London weekly magazine in 1924.

Or:
Write an account of the Marabar Caves incident from the point-of-view of either Professor Godbole or Miss Derek.

Or:
Is Forster's A Passage to India mainly concerned with politics or mysticism? Discuss.

4. John Barth, The Floating Opera (1957)

Either:
Write a review of John Barth’s The Floating Opera intended for a local Tidewater Maryland newspaper in 1957.

Or:
Write an analysis of Todd Andrew’s affair with Jane Mack from the point-of-view of either Jane or her husband.

Or:
The Floating Opera is best read as a parody of Post-war Existentialism. Discuss.

5. John Barth, The End of the Road (1958):

Either:
Write a review of John Barth’s The End of the Road intended for a New York daily newspaper in 1958.

Or:
Write a character sketch of Jake Horner from the point-of-view of either Peggy Rankin or the Doctor.

Or:
What is the significance of the last word in The End of the Road?

6. Graham Greene, The Comedians (1966):

Either:
Write a review of Graham Greene’s novel intended for a local Port-au-Prince newspaper in 1966.

Or:
Write a review of Graham Greene’s novel intended for a London weekly magazine in 1966.

Or:
Write a description of Mr Brown from the point-of-view of either Martha or Mrs. Smith.

Or:
The Comedians deals with a specific place at a specific time. Do its themes also have broader implications?

7. Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye (1988):

Either:
Write a review of Margaret Atwood’s novel intended for a Toronto newspaper in 1988.

Or:
Write a review of Margaret Atwood’s novel intended for a New York newspaper in 1988.

Or:
Write a character sketch of Elaine Risley from the point-of-view of either her first husband Jon or the grown-up Cordelia.

Or:
In Cat’s Eye, how does the theme of bullying relate to the theme of art?

8. Louise Erdrich, Tracks (1988):

Either:
Write a review of Louis Erdrich’s novel intended for a local Dakota newspaper in 1988.

Or:
Write a description of either Nanapush or Pauline from Fleur Pillager’s point-of-view.

Or:
Tracks has a double ending, since it depicts both the departure of Fleur and the return of Lulu. What is the significance of this double ending?

9. Ian McEwan, Atonement (2001):

Either:
Write a review of Ian McEwan’s novel intended for a London weekly magazine in 2001.

Or:
Write a review of the film which might have been made in the 1940s of Briony Tallis’s novella Two Figures by a Fountain, if it had been accepted for publication in Horizon magazine.

Or:
Atonement contains many allusions to earlier literature. What, in your view, is the significance of these allusions?

Assignment 2: Essay
[Stage 3 students only - 1500-2000 words (30%)]

Answer one question only.

Normal in-line citations (in either MLA or APA format) will be required for any material quoted or referred to in your essay. This includes the set text under discussion, even if you're using the exact edition recommended for the course.

NB: You may not answer on the same author you wrote about in Assignment 1: the close-reading exercise.

The upper and lower limits in the word count (i.e. 1500-2000 words) are to be adhered to strictly.

NB: Please remember to include a word count at the end of your essay.

1. Willa Cather, My Ántonia (1918)

Either:
Write a review of the original publication of Willa Cather’s novel, intended for a New York critical quarterly in 1918.

Or:
Write a review of a popular reissue of Willa Cather’s novel, intended for a New York critical quarterly in 2008.

Or:
Write a character analysis of Jim Burden from the point-of-view of either Ántonia Cuzak or Gaston Cleric.

2. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

Either:
Write a review of the original publication of James Joyce's novel, intended for an Irish literary magazine in 1916.

Or:
Write a review of the first publication of Seamus Deane's Penguin edition of James Joyce's novel, intended for an international literary critical journal in 1999.

Or:
Write a character analysis of Stephen Dedalus from the point-of-view of either his father or one of his sisters.

3. E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924)

Either:
Write a review of the original publication of E. M. Forster's novel, intended for an Indian Nationalist Journal in 1924.

Or:
Write a review of the first publication of Oliver Stallybrass's Abinger edition of E. M. Forster's novel, intended for an international literary critical journal in 1979.

Or:
Write an account of the Marabar Caves incident from the point-of-view of either Professor Godbole or Miss Derek.

4. John Barth, The Floating Opera (1957)

Either:
Write a review of the original publication of John Barth’s The Floating Opera, intended for a New York literary quarterly in 1957.

Or:
Write a review of the first publication of the revised Doubleday edition of The Floating Opera and The End of the Road, published with a new introduction by the author, intended for an international literary critical journal in 1988.

Or:
Write an analysis of Todd Andrew’s affair with Jane Mack from the point-of-view of either Jane or her husband.

5. John Barth, The End of the Road (1958):

Either:
Write a review of the original publication of John Barth’s The End of the Road, intended for a New York critical quarterly in 1958.

Or:
Write a character analysis of Jake Horner from the point-of-view of either Peggy Rankin or (in more technical terms) the Doctor.

6. Graham Greene, The Comedians (1966):

Either:
Write a critical review of Graham Greene’s novel intended for a local Port-au-Prince newspaper in 1966.

Or:
Write a review of Graham Greene’s novel intended for a London critical quarterly in 1966.

Or:
Write a character analysis of Mr Brown from the point-of-view of either Martha or Jones or Mrs. Smith.

7. Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye (1988):

Either:
Write a review of Margaret Atwood’s novel intended for a New York critical quarterly in 1988.

Or:
Write a character analysis of Elaine Risley from the point-of-view of either her first husband Jon or the grown-up Cordelia.

8. Louise Erdrich, Tracks (1988):

Either:
Write a review of Louis Erdrich’s novel intended for a New York critical quarterly in 1988.

Or:
Write a character analysis of either Nanapush or Pauline from Fleur Pillager’s point-of-view.

9. Ian McEwan, Atonement (2001):

Either:
Write a critical review of Ian McEwan’s novel intended for an international literary magazine in 2001.

Or:
Write a critical review of the film which might have been made in the mid-1940s of Briony Tallis’s novella Two Figures by a Fountain, if it had been accepted for publication in Horizon magazine.

Pre-announced Examination Questions
NB: These apply to Stage 3 students only.

You have the choice of answering either one of the questions below or 3 unseen single-author essay questions from the exam paper.

Whichever alternative you choose, the exam is worth 50% of your final grade.

If Tracks (1988) and My Ántonia (1918) are both revisionist Westerns, which aspects of the traditional Western are they attempting to subvert? Discuss with close reference to both Willa Cather and Louise Erdrich.

“How dangerous it is for a critic to have no technical awareness of the novel.” Discuss this remark of Graham Greene’s with reference to two ostensibly topical, political novels: The Comedians (1966), set in Haiti under Papa Doc, and E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), set in India under the Raj.

Zombies and the Undead infest both The Comedians (1966) and Cat’s Eye (1988). Discuss the very different ways in which Graham Greene and Margaret Atwood employ this unusual thematic device.

If Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001) offers a protracted farewell to the twentieth-century novel, in all its complexity and variety, could James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) be said to have done the same thing for nineteenth-century fiction? Or are both novels more forward-looking than that?

Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001) and John Barth’s The End of the Road (1958) both constitute extended meditations on the moral responsibility of the creative artist. Discuss with close reference to both novels.

If Cather’s My Ántonia (1918) is as much of a Bildungsroman [novel of education] as Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), what exactly have Jim Burden and Stephen Dedalus, respectively, learned by the end of their very different fictional journeys? Compare and contrast the two novels.

“When my first novel (The Floating Opera) was published in the mid-1950s, it was approved by the critic Leslie Fiedler as an example of ‘provincial American existentialism’.” says John Barth. Could the same description be applied to Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, published thirty years later in Canada? Discuss with close reference to the characters of Todd Andrews and Elaine Risley.

E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) and Louise Erdrich’s Tracks (1988) are both novels which set out to dramatise the divided psychological state of a colonised people. Are the conclusions they come to so very different? Does either novel hold out any particular hope at its conclusion?

Timetable

2008-06-09T15:50:00.036+12:00

Semester Two (21/7/-25/10/08)

Week 1

Mon (21/7) - 3-4 pm, lecture 1
Introduction: The Novel since 1900

Thurs (24/7)- 3-4 pm, lecture 2
Willa Cather: What is a Novel?

Week 2

Mon (28/7): 3-4 pm, lecture 3
Willa Cather: My Ántonia (1918) - The Significance of the Frontier in American History

Thurs (31/7): 3-4 pm, lecture 4
James Joyce: International Modernism

Tutorial 1: Introductions

Week 3

Mon (4/8) - 3-4 pm, lecture 5
James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist (1916) - Stephen Hero

Thurs (7/8) - 3-4 pm, lecture 6
James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist - The 3 Nets

Tutorial 2: Willa Cather

Week 4

Mon (11/8) - 3-4 pm, lecture 7
E. M. Forster: Bloomsbury & The Raj

Thurs (14/8) - 3-4 pm, lecture 8
E. M. Forster: A Passage to India (1924) - Plot

Tutorial 3: James Joyce

Assignment 1: Close-reading exercise due in

Week 5

Mon (18/8) - 3-4 pm, lecture 9
E. M. Forster: A Passage to India - The Trial

Thurs (21/8) - 3-4 pm, lecture 10
John Barth: Existentialism, Postmodernism & the Postwar

Tutorial 4: E. M. Forster

Week 6

Mon (25/8) - 3-4 pm, lecture 11
John Barth: The Floating Opera (1957) - Detail

Thurs (28/8) - 3-4 pm, lecture 12
John Barth: The End of the Road (1958) - Character

Tutorial 5: John Barth: The Floating Opera

MID-SEMESTER BREAK (1/9-12/9/08)

Week 7

Mon (15/9) - 3-4 pm, lecture 13
Graham Greene: The Bipolar Explorer [Sean Sturm]

Thurs (18/9) - 3-4 pm, lecture 14
Graham Greene: The Comedians (1966) - Theme & Symbolism

Tutorial 6: John Barth: The End of the Road

Assignment 2: Essay due in

Week 8

Mon (22/9) - 3-4 pm, lecture 15
Graham Greene: The Comedians (1966) - That Voodoo You Do

Thurs (25/9) - 3-4 pm, lecture 16
Margaret Atwood: Feminist Discourses [Agnieszka Zabicka]

Tutorial 7: Graham Greene

Week 9

Mon (29/9) - 3-4 pm, lecture 17
Margaret Atwood: Cat’s Eye (1988) – Time

Thurs (2/10) - 3-4 pm, lecture 18
Margaret Atwood: Cat's Eye - Bullies & Artists

Tutorial 8: Margaret Atwood

Week 10

Mon (6/10) - 3-4 pm, lecture 19
Louise Erdrich: The Native American Renaissance

Thurs (9/10) - 3-4 pm, lecture 20
Louise Erdrich: Tracks (1988) - Structure

Tutorial 9: Louise Erdrich

Week 11

Mon (13/10) - 3-4 pm, lecture 21
Ian McEwan: Thatcher Means Death

Thurs (16/10) - 3-4 pm, lecture 22
Ian McEwan: Atonement (2001) – Style

Tutorial 10: Ian McEwan

Week 12

Mon (20/10) - 3-4 pm, lecture 23
Ian McEwan: Atonement – The 30s & the 40s

Thurs (23/10) - 3-4 pm, lecture 24
Conclusion: The 21st Century

Labour Day (27/10/08)

Course Description

2008-06-09T15:49:00.008+12:00

Library Resources

The direct link to the University Library's resources for this course [ENG220 / 356] can be accessed here.

To see it in context with the other English pages, go here.

Assignment Presentation

All the work you hand in should adhere to the following guidelines:.
Typed: handwritten work cannot be submitted in this course.
Double-spaced.
Printed on one side only of A4 sheets.
12 or 14-point type: smaller or larger is unacceptable.
Margins at least 2.5 cm (1 inch) all around (including top and bottom).
Available in electronic as well as hard-copy form.

Turnitin

We take plagiarism extremely seriously. If you take all or part of someone else’s work without acknowledgement, and present it as your own, you can expect to receive – at the very least – a zero grade for that assignment.

Depending on the seriousness of the offence, you may also face failure in the course as a whole. If in doubt, ask.

The Department now employs the online system called Turnitin to detect copying or plagiarism.

What this means is that you will have to submit each assignment both in electronic form - to the Turnitin website - and in hard-copy, to your tutor.

No assignment will be graded until it has been positively assessed by the website.

For further guidelines, see the Department for an information handout, or visit this webpage for the same information in electronic form.

Marking

Tutors are not required to mark or comment on drafts of assignments. You are, however, welcome to discuss your work with them during their appointed office hours.

If you disagree with a mark, I suggest that you wait for a few days before talking to us about it. Give yourself that much time to reread and reflect on the grade and the comments. If you still have a query or complaint after that, you should consult your tutor first of all. If you are still dissatisfied, you may contact the course controller (contact details given here).

Late Assignments

All work is due in tutorials on the dates given in the timetable.

Late work, without an extension, will incur a penalty of one mark per day.

If it is more than one week late, your tutor may refuse to accept or grade it.

Extensions

If you want an extension, you must ask for one from your tutor. They will be given sparingly, in cases of bereavement, illness or “family crisis.” You will be asked to provide medical certificates for illness.

You must ask for the extension before the assignment is due.

Atonement (2001)

2008-04-13T15:06:00.012+12:00

Ian McEwan
Atonement (2001)

Extract:

As she stood in the nursery waiting for her cousins' return, she sensed she could write a scene like the one by the fountain and she could include a hidden observer like herself. She could imagine herself hurrying down now to her bedroom, to a clean block of lined paper and her marbled, Bakelite fountain pen. She could see the simple sentences, the accumulating telepathic symbols, unfurling at the nib's end. She could write the scene three times over, from three points of view; her excitement was in the prospect of freedom, of being delivered from the cumbrous struggle between good and bad, heroes and villains. None of these three was bad, nor were they particularly good. She need not judge. There did not have to be a moral. She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive. It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had equal value. That was the only moral a story need have.

– Ian McEwan, Atonement, chapter 3

Critical Responses:

"We're each of us, McEwan suggests, composing our lives." - Ron Charles, Christian Science Monitor.

"The careful structuring of the work calls attention to its artifice and reminds us of two alternate assertions about what art does: Keats's Romantic assurance that artistic beauty is truth and Auden's disclaimer that poetry makes nothing happen. This novel shows how such seemingly contradictory statements can both be true at once." - Edward T. Wheeler, Commonweal.

"Refracting an upper-class nightmare through a war story, McEwan fulfills the conventions he's playing with, and that very play - in contrast to so much fashionable pomo cleverness - leads to genuine heartbreak." - Troy Patterson, Entertainment Weekly.

"If Atonement tells an engrossing story, supremely well, it also meditates, from start to end, on story-telling and its pitfalls. … McEwan has never written into, and out of, literary history so brazenly before." - Boyd Tonkin, The Independent.

"Suffice to say, any initial hesitancy about style -- any fear that, for once, McEwan may not be not in control of his material -- all play their part in his larger purpose. On the one hand, McEwan seems to be retrospectively inserting his name into the pantheon of British novelists of the 1930s and 1940s. But he is also, of course, doing more than this" - Geoff Dyer, The Guardian.

"All this is at the same time an allegory of art and its moral contradictions. … It is not hard to read this novel as McEwan's own atonement for a lucrative lifetime of magnificent professional lying." - Terry Eagleton, The Lancet.

"McEwan's skill has here developed to the point where it gives disquiet as well as pleasure. … It is, in perhaps the only possible way, a philosophical novel, pitting the imagination against what it has to imagine if we are to be given the false assurance that there is a match between our fictions and the specifications of reality. The pleasure it gives depends as much on our suspending belief as on our suspending disbelief." - Frank Kermode, London Review of Books.

"Atonement is both a criticism of fiction and a defense of fiction; a criticism of its shaping and exclusive torque, and a defense of its ideal democratic generosity to all. A criticism of fiction's misuse; and a defense of an ideal." - James Wood, The New Republic.

"On one level, it is manifestly high-calibre stuff: cool, perceptive, serious and vibrant with surprises. (…) So it is probably silly to waste time pointing out that the most glaring aspects of the book are its weaknesses and omissions. As usual, McEwan has contrived a good story; but he seems weirdly reluctant to tell it." - Robert Winder, New Statesman.

"This book, McEwan's grandest and most ambitious yet, is much more than the story of a single act of atonement. ... Briony Tallis may need to atone, but Ian McEwan has nothing to apologize for." - Daniel Mendelsohn, New York.

"Ian McEwan's latest novel is a dark, sleek trap of a book. … Lying is, after all, what Atonement is about as much as it is about guilt, penitence or, for that matter, art." - Laura Miller, Salon.

"Whether Briony’s conscience can ever be clear, and, more important, whether McEwan’s purpose can be adequately served by such a device, is open to question. That these are troubling matters is certainly well established. The ending, however, is too lenient. (…) Here his suave attempts to establish morbid feelings as inspiration for a life’s work - and for that work to be crowned with success - are unconvincing." - Anita Brookner, The Spectator.

"McEwan is crafty. Even as he shows us the damages of story-telling, he demonstrates its beguilements on every page." - Richard Lacayo, Time.

"My only regret is that because he uses rapid editing and time shifts, too many of the dilemmas and tensions that are established in the first half of the book are left unresolved. (…) Still, the first part of the book is magically readable and never has McEwan shown himself to be more in sympathy with the vulnerability of the human heart." - Jason Cowley, The Times.

"Probably the most impressive aspect to Atonement ... is the precision with which it examines its own novelistic mechanisms." - Robert McFarland , Times Literary Supplement.

"The author decides what 'really happened'. That's always the case. That is what fiction is. And here, for once, the author has presented his decision in a near-perfect manner - in particular because he shows so well how this particular reality (or un-reality) came about (and leaves the inevitable lingering questions of what can be believed, of what is truth and what is wishful thinking and what pure invention). Questions remain - but McEwan makes a convincing case for their needing to remain, and for readers needing to confront them. Trust us: neat endings, tied up with a bow, aren't nearly as satisfying as what McEwan has to offer.

Fiction doesn't offer certainty, or absolute answers. It is nothing like factual, literal truth. But McEwan here shows why this fiction-truth is better, and what amazing power fiction has.

It hardly plays a major role until near the end, but Atonement is a convincing example of why authors write novels - indeed, of how (and why) we all create our own realities (be they in book form, or merely mind-games that allow us to bear the enormity that is life itself). Both Briony-as-author and, much more significantly, McEwan-as-author make a very impressive case for the continued role and need for the novel." - Anon, The Complete Review.

"... There are a number of feminist issues here, initially about gendering in issues of blame and guilt in domestic situations, and then their connection with the public arena of war. The roles of both men and women have to be considered in any paradigm of resolution or atonement. Firstly, Lola is obviously the object of sexualised constructions of femininity. Then what ensues (when Robbie is accused, charged, found guilty and imprisioned, all on Briony’s testimony) is Briony’s fault. Both cases, that is, come close to blaming the victim, Lola for her naïvety and Briony for her inflamed imagination. Now Briony is trying to “come back” and atone for the lie she told, knowingly or not, and the damage it caused.

That is, the plot depends upon events of male violence, yet seems to ask or expect of Briony implicitly and overtly some kind of atonement, just as she does herself, initially for the rape accusation she made because it was against the wrong man. In part three, however, Briony may be felt to be carrying not only this responsibility but somehow the burdens of war as well, in terms of the reader’s experience. Almost, she is suffering because of or even for war itself, including the nationally shameful retreat and horrendous evacuation at Dunkirk.

Yet Robbie, and to some degree Cecelia, is presented textually as the real victim and lamb-to-be-sacrificed on account of wrong-doing. (In the movie, they’re both glimpsed at different times flung into a cruciform posture, Robbie at Bray Dunes and Cecelia after the bombing of the Balham underground station.) That is, it’s Robbie’s suffering, as the blameless victim in Judaeo-Christian terms, which feels as if that is what will achieve atonement, if anything does, both for the rape and for the war – rather than anything Briony might do. In this way, and with this effect, the narrative of Briony’s inner being in part one is structurally replaced by the events and suffering of men in war in parts two and three.

The last twenty pages suggest that atonement might be sought by writing. Both the book and the movie again interrogate the function of the writer, when it turns out that the whole narrative we have read or seen is itself the storyline of a novel-within-a novel, a novel which Briony, aged 77, has finally completed (or in the movie, just published). Now a famous writer, and having reworked this particular narrative for nearly sixty years, she has written her last and, she says, only fully autobiographical novel. Yet as we turn back to Briony’s endless guilt she is seen, in having written the ending of this, her own story, to have rewritten the events it portrays.

That is, as a writer, she will atone for the tragic domestic events she set underway (in “real life”) by bringing about some kind of fictional happy ending. But surely, we think, it’s rather pathetic, and even to be seen as another form of indulgent female self-deception, for a woman writer (Briony, aka “BT 1999” on p. 349) to believe she can atone for the sins of the world by writing a happy ending for her lovers? Isn’t she simply creating another instance of Romantic fiction with all its burdens, and thus aren’t we all – us too, as readers – implicated in its problems? At the same time, isn’t Briony herself the victim of the genre she was born and educated into? Aren’t we all? But how else, as Briony says aged 77 – and it’s an important question – can we begin to envision happiness or the triumph of love? How else except through creative writing and reading do we “reclothe us in our rightful mind”?

Behind all this is the actual (or “implied”) author Ian McEwan. What of his own moral responsibility as a writer? The comment on pp. 314-5 that “artists are politically impotent” (in a letter from the younger Briony’s would-be publishers) is clearly to be taken as unacceptable. McEwan explores concerns about specifically societal – beyond simply personal – questions of guilt, atonement and forgiveness a number of times in other books, as The Concrete Garden, The Child in Time, Enduring Love and (especially) Saturday indicate. In Atonement, is it perhaps exploitative and patronising to create a (woman) character to try to do this work – to take up this social, moral and literary challenge – and then to criticise her for it?

Or is it something that’s inevitable, a socio-literary project whose goal is always already lost?
[H]ow can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God?… There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are aetheists. It was always an impossible task. And that was precisely the point. The attempt was all.(p.371)

And that, I think, is a marvellous manifesto for any artist."

- Judith Dale, Women's Studies Newsletter, 28 (2) (November, 2007): 25-26.

Atonement (2007)
directed by Joe Wright
screenplay by Christopher Hampton
starring Keira Knightley, James McAvoy & Vanessa Redgrave

Quotes:

Briony - 18 years old: I am very, very sorry for the terrible distress that I have caused you. I am very, very sorry...

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Briony Tallis, aged 13: Lola, can I tell you something? Something really terrible?
Lola Quincey: Yes please.
Briony Tallis, aged 13: What's the worst word you can possibly imagine?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Paul Marshall: Bite it... You've got to bite it...

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Robbie Turner: [about the letter he sent her] It was a mistake.
Cecilia Tallis: Briony read it.
Robbie Turner: I'm so sorry, it was the wrong version.
Cecilia Tallis: Yes.
Robbie Turner: It was never meant to be read.
Cecilia Tallis: No.
[walks away, Robbie follows her]
Cecilia Tallis: What was in the version I was meant to read?
Robbie Turner: Don't know... it was more formal, and less...
Cecilia Tallis: Anatomical?
Robbie Turner: Yes.

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Cecilia Tallis: My brother and I found the two of them down by the lake.
Police Inspector: You didn't see anyone else?
Cecilia Tallis: I wouldn't necessarily believe everything Briony tells you. She's rather fanciful.

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Briony Tallis, aged 13: How can you hate plays?

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[last lines]
Older Briony: So, my sister and Robbie were never able to have the time together they both so longed for... and deserved. Which ever since I've... ever since I've always felt I prevented. But what sense of hope or satisfaction could a reader derive from an ending like that? So in the book, I wanted to give Robbie and Cecilia what they lost out on in life. I'd like to think this isn't weakness or... evasion... but a final act of kindness. I gave them their happiness.

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Tommy Nettle: No one speaks the fucking lingo out here. You can't say 'pass the biscuit' or 'where's me hand grenade?', they just shrug. Cause they hate us too. I mean, that's the point. We fight in France and the French fucking hate us. Make me Home Secretary and I'll sort this out in a fucking minute. We got India and Africa, right? Jerry can have France and Belgium and whatever else they want. Who's fucking ever been to Poland? It's all about room, Empire. They want more empire, give 'em this shithole, we keep ours and it's Bob's your uncle and Fanny's your fucking aunt! Think about it.

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Briony Tallis, aged 13: The princess was well aware of his remorseless wickedness. But that made it no easier to overcome the voluminous love she felt in her heart for Sir Romulus. The princess knew instinctively that the one with red hair was not to be trusted. As his young ward dived again and again into the depths of the lake, in search of the enchanted chalice, Sir Romulus twirled his luxuriant mustache. Sir Romulus rode with his two companions, northwards, drawing ever closer to an effulgent sea. So heroic in manner, he appeared so valiant in word... And no could ever guess at the darkness lurking in the black heart of Sir Romulus Turnbull. He was the most dangerous man in the world.

Critical Responses:

"Despite my constant dislike to Keira Knightly, I was unable to disapprove of her acting in this film. She has improved massively since the first pirates film. The film itself has an intriguing plot line which keeps you hooked throughout. The film includes humour at the start and fascination by the end. I loved watching this film and I enjoyed the smartness of the story." - Internet Movie Database.

"This is a modern masterpiece and will become an instant classic ..." - Internet Movie Database.

"There is more than a little similarity between Atonement and The Go-Between. Both tell of love between different classes, and an intruding message carrier between the two. Furthermore, Sarah Greenwood's sensuous set design (in the first act) and accurate war holes (in the second), along with the sound design, which features buzzing bees, works cleverly on a subconscious level to add to the tension.." - Internet Movie Database.

"I had the privilege of being an extra in the Redcar, Dunkirk scene and once seen in its full glory and effect on the big screen I was simply in awe and glad to have been a part of it. Walking along Redcar beach from now on will never quite be the same again. I am quite sure that the movie will win a number of awards within the next 12 months, but that is not what really matters. Movies are there to entertain, tell a story and affect you emotionally and by God this did it in spades! If you have not seen it yet, you must!" - Internet Movie Database.

Tracks (1988)

2008-04-13T15:05:00.011+12:00

Louise Erdrich
Tracks (1988)

Extract:

The first time she drowned in the cold and glassy waters of Matchimanito, Fleur Pillager was only a child. Two men saw the boat tip, saw her struggle in the waves. They rowed over to the place she went down, and jumped in. When they lifted her over the gunwales, she was cold to the touch and stiff, so they slapped her face, shook her by the heels, worked her arms and pounded her back until she coughed up lake water. She shivered all over like a dog, then took a breath. But it wasn't long afterward that those two men disappeared. The first wandered off and the other, Jean Hat, got himself run over by his own surveyor's cart.

It went to show, the people said. It figured to them all right. By saving Fleur Pillager, those two had lost themselves.

The next time she fell in the lake, Fleur Pillager was fifteen years old and no one touched her. She washed on shore, her skin a dull dead gray, but when George Many Women bent to look closer, he saw her chest move. Then her eyes spun open, clear black agate, and she looked at him. "You take my place," she hissed. Everybody scattered and left her there, so no one knows how she dragged herself home. Soon after that we noticed Many Women changed, grew afraid, wouldn't leave his house and would not be forced to go near water or guide the mappers back into the bush. For his caution, he lived until the day that his sons brought him a new tin bathtub. Then the first time he used it he slipped, got knocked out, and breathed water while his wife stood in the other room frying breakfast.

– Louise Erdrich, Tracks, chapter II.

Quotes:

Tobasonakwut always begins his story ... by attributing it to his uncle Kwekwekibiness. Very traditional people are very careful about attribution. When a story begins there is a prefacing history of that story's origin that is as complicated as the Modern Language Association guidelines to form in footnotes. [p.39]

The door shows signs of having been forced open. I can still see the crowbar marks where a lock was jimmied. And oh dear, it is only replaced with a push-in knob that can be undone with a library card, or any stiff bit of plastic, I think, as I don't suppose that someone intent on breaking into room 33 would use a library card. Or if they did, I wonder ... would it be a good sign or a bad sign? Would it be better to confront an ill-motived intruder who was well read, or one indifferent to literature? [p.94]
- Louise Erdrich, Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country (Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 2003), p.94.

Cat's Eye (1988)

2008-04-13T15:04:00.010+12:00

Margaret Atwood
Cat's Eye (1988)

Extract:

Cordelia and Grace and Carol take me to the deep hole in Cordelia's backyard. I'm wearing a black dress and a cloak, from the dress-up cupboard. I'm supposed to be Mary Queen of Scots, headless already. They pick me up by the underarms and the feet and lower me into the hole. Then they arrange the boards over the top. The daylight air disappears, and there's the sound of dirt hitting the boards, shovelful after shovelful. Inside the hole it's dim and cold and damp and smells like toad burrows.

Up above, outside, I can hear their voices, and then I can't hear them. I lie there wondering when it will be time to come out. Nothing happens. When I was put into the hole I knew it was a game; now I know it is not one. I feel sadness, a sense of betrayal. Then I feel the darkness pressing down on me; then terror.

When I remember back to this time in the hole, I can't really remember what happened to me while I was in it. I can't remember what I really felt. Maybe nothing happened, maybe these emotions I remember are not the right emotions.I know the others came and got me out after a while, and the game or some other game continued. I have no image of myself in the hole; only a black square filled with nothing, a square like a door. Perhaps the square is empty; perhaps it's only a marker, a time marker that separates the time before it from the time after. The point at which I lost power. Was I crying when they took me out of the hole? It seems likely. On the other hand I doubt it. But I can't remember.

– Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye, Section IV, chapter 20.

Quotes:

Toronto was never dull, for me. Dull isn't a word you'd use to describe such misery, and enchantment ... In my dreams of this city I am always lost. [14]

He doesn't write his name, or dirty words, as other boys do, as I know from snowbanks. Instead he writes: MARS. Or, if he's feeling up to it, something longer: JUPITER. By the end of the summer he has done the whole solar system , three times over, in pee. [68]

"We have long attention spans," I say. "We eat everything on our plates. We save string. We make do."
She looks puzzled. That's all I want to say about the forties. [89]

Cordelia is digging a hole, in her back garden where there is no sod. She has started several holes before, but they have been unsuccessful, they struck rock. This one is more promising ... She's very wrapped up in this hole, it's hard to get her to play anything else. [106]

In the endless time when Cordelia had such power over me, I peeled the skin off my feet. I did it at night, when I was supposed to be sleeping. ... In the mornings I would pull my socks on, over my peeled feet. It was painful to walk, but not impossible. The pain gave me something definite to think about, something immediate. It was something to hold onto. [113-14]

The snow angel has feathery wings and a tiny pin-head. Where her hands stopped, down near her sides, are the imprints of her fingers, like little claws. [185]

Josef tells me he once shot a man in the head; what disturbed him was how easy it was to do it. He says he hates the Life Drawing class, he will not go on with it forever, cooped up in this provincial backwater teaching the rudiments to morons. "I come from a country that no longer exists," he says "and you come from a country that does not yet exist." once I would have thought this profound. Now I wonder what he means. [305]

The past isn't quaint while you're in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you can see it as decor, not as the shape your life's been squeezed into. [363]

– Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye. 1989 (London: Virago, 1992).

The Comedians (1966)

2008-04-13T15:03:00.014+12:00

Graham Greene
The Comedians (1966)

Extract:

Next day I sat in a deck-chair on the sheltered starboard-side and let myself roll languidly in and out of the sun with the motions of the mauve-green sea. I tried to read a novel, but the heavy foreseeable progress of its characters down the uninteresting corridors of power made me drowsy, and when the book fell upon the deck, I did not bother to retrieve it. My eyes opened only when the traveller in pharmaceutical products passed by; be clung to the rail with two hands and seemed to climb along it as though it were a ladder. he was panting heavily and he had an expression of desperate purpose as though he knew to what the climb led and knew that it was worth his effort, but knew too that he would never have the strength to reach the end. Again I drowsed and found myself alone in a blacked-out room and someone touched me with a cold hand. I woke and it was Mr Fernandez who had, I suppose, been surprised by the steep roll of the boat and had steadied himself against me. I had the impression of a shower of gold dropping from a black sky as his spectacles caught the fitful sun. "Yes," he said, "yes," smiling an apology as he lurched upon his way.

– Graham Greene, The Comedians, chapter 1.

Quotes:

from A Sort of Life, 1971 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974):

I suffered in those days [my school days], like a character of mine, Jones, in The Comedians, from flat feet, and I had to wear supports inside my shoes and have massage from a gym mistress. The massage tickled a little and my soles sometimes ached, but on the whole I found the treatment agreeable, perhaps because it was given by a woman. (48)

Does this imply that Greene has put as much of himself into Jones as into Brown?

[T]he hidden spots of the Chilterns were all the dearer because they were on the very borders of Metroland. They had the excitement of a frontier. (79)

Experiments with Russian Roulette [pp.92-96]:
"It was the fear of boredom which took me to Tabasco during the religious persecution, to a leproserie in the Congo, to the Kikuyu reserve during the Mau-Mau insurrection, to the emergency in Malaya and to the French war in Vietnam. There,in those last three regions of clandestine war, the fear of ambush served me just as effectively as the revolver from the corner-cupboard in the life-long war against boredom." (95-96)

I suppose ... that every novelist has something in common with a spy: he watches, he overhears, he seeks motives and analyses character, and in his attempt to serve literature he is unscrupulous. (103)

There was a wonderful absence of traffic [during the General Strike of 1926] ; it was a beautiful hushed London we were not to know again until the blitz, and there was the exciting sense of living on a frontier, close to violence. (127)

Now when I write I put down on the page a mere skeleton of a novel - nearly all my revisions are in the nature of additions, of second thoughts to make the bare bones live - but in those days [1929] to revise was to prune and prune and prune. (138)

Ways of Escape, 1980 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981):

In those black days for authors - they ended with the [Second World] war and a change in the libel laws - there was one firm of solicitors who went out of their way to incite actions for libel, checking the names of characters with the names in the London telephone directory ... the more uncommon the name the greater the danger, which was one reason why in my novel The Comedians I called my principal characters Brown, Jones and Smith (24).

How dangerous it is for a critic to have no technical awareness of the novel. Surely the great prefaces of Henry James have marked one novelist's route indelibly - the route of 'the point of view'. There was no ambiguity in my mind; the ambiguity was in the minds of Kate and Anthony [in England Made Me] whom I had chosen for my 'points of view'. (32)

Indecision ruled the Government before the Emergency [in Kenya] and it ruled the Emergency because it is part of the modern mind. We have lost the power of clear action because we have lost the ability to believe. (154)

The Comedians (1967)
directed by Peter Glenville
screenplay by Graham Greene
starring Richard Burton, Alec Guinness, Elizabeth Taylor & Peter Ustinov

Critical Responses:

"This film does not belong to Burton, Taylor, Guinness, Ustinov, Jones or Lillian Gish. It belongs to Greene, Glenville and the French cinematographer Henri Decae.

I do not imply that Burton was not good - but George C Scott said one should evaluate a performance by remembering the character more than the actor. It is in that context that I remember the four main characters. Burton's kisses are different here than say in "Boom" or "Cleopatra" - only to add detail to the character. Taylor is strangely subdued only to add power to her smoldering role. Guinness gradual unmasking is pathetic yet endearing only to add more substance to the character. Decae's camera captures details that shock - e.g., empty drawers in desks to collect bribes, public executions of rebels watched by school kids ..." - Internet Movie Database.

The End of the Road (1958)

2008-04-13T15:01:00.016+12:00

John Barth
The End of the Road (1958)

Extracts:

“In life,” he said, “there are no essentially major or minor characters. To that extent, all fiction and biography, and most historiography, are a lie. Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story. Hamlet could be told from Polonius’s point of view and called The Tragedy of Polonius, Lord Chamberlain of Denmark. He didn’t think he was a minor character in anything, I daresay. Or suppose you’re an usher in a wedding. From the groom’s viewpoint he’s the major character; the others play supporting parts, even the bride. From your viewpoint, though, the wedding is a minor episode in the very interesting history of your life, and the bride and groom both are minor figures. What you’ve done is choose to play the part of a minor character: it can be pleasant for you to pretend to be less important than you know you are, as Odysseus does when he disguises as a swineherd. And every member of the congregation at the wedding sees himself as the major character, condescending to witness the spectacle. So in this sense, fiction isn’t a lie at all, but a true representation of the distortion that everyone makes of life.

– John Barth, The End of the Road, chapter 6.

One of your colleagues has reported that in his copy of our prescribed text, John Barth, The Floating Opera and the End of the Road (New York: Anchor Books, 1988), p.355, the opening page of chapter 8, is simply repeated over the page, meaning that p.356 is entirely missing.

If you're in the same predicament, here's the text of p.356 from my own copy:

[...] evening of my last interview with Rennie, Joe had not been to school. Shirley, Dr. Schott's secretary, announced that Mr. Morgan was ill, but was expected to return to work any day. The suspense involved in his absence was torturous, to be sure: was he actually ill, or had Rennie confessed her adultery? What was the specific connection between her confession and his absence? Most important of all, what would his reaction be? These were terrifying questions, but while they made me shrink at the thought of finally coming face to face with him, they also worked counter to any suicidal impulses; I could not kill myself at least until they were answered, if no other reason than that from one very special point of view I would never learn whether doing away with myself had been called for.

On the third day, after lunch, Joe appeared at school and taught his afternoon classes. I paled when accidentally I met him in the main hallway between periods; my nervousness was made more excruciating by the fact that we had time to do no more than say hello to each other. He was entirely calm, but my feelings must have shown all over my face. I've no idea how I managed my last two classes.

At four o'clock I went to my office to grade my first batch of compositions, and a few minutes later Joe walked in. The two men who shared the office had gone home. Joe sat on the edge of the desk next to mine.

"How's it going?" he asked.

I shook my head, aching to tell him everything before he could tell me he already knew; but by this time I was so demoralized and confirmed in my weakness that all I could see was the remote possibility that he still didn't know. As long as this possibility existed I was not strong enough to confess, and yet I knew very well that whatever happened to remove it would at the same time render my confession pointless.

"First batch of themes," I said, keeping my eyes on them. "How do you feel? Shirley said you've been sick."

"I have," Joe said. No doubt his face would have told me how to understand this reply, but I couldn't look him in the face. I pretended to examine a theme paper, and clutched at the hope that he was speaking literally.

End of the Road (1970)
directed by Aram Avakian
screenplay by Dennis McGuire, Terry Southern & Aram Avakian
starring Stacy Keach, James Earl Jones & Dorothy Tristan

Critical Responses:

"The principal difference between the novel and the film is that the novel concludes with a harrowing abortion, whereas the film is an abortion from start to finish." - John Simon.

"I would like to refute many of the negative comments about this film. It is the closest, I believe, that an American film of the period came to emulating the look and sound of late 60s' Godard or Bergman's Persona. End of the Road would be be a perfect companion to a series of films that might include Performance, the aforementioned Bergman, Mickey One (which director Avakian edited), or William Friedkin's adaptation of The Birthday Party. I am a big fan of Barth's novel, but I feel this radical adaptation extends the original in a way that is equally groundbreaking. The novel was more about the fifties, while the film is shaped by the explosive events of 1968 - Tet, the Kennedy and King assassinations, student riots, the rise of Nixon/Agnew - which take the whole idea of the novel's "politics of the personal" to another level. A DVD restoration of this misunderstood landmark is well overdue." - Internet Movie Database.

The Floating Opera (1957)

2008-04-13T14:59:00.009+12:00

John Barth
The Floating Opera (1957)

Extract:

The thermometer outside the offices of the daily Banner read eighty-nine degrees when I walked past it on my way uptown. Few people were on the streets. At the curb in front of a large funeral parlor a black hearse was parked, its loading door closed, and several mourners, along with the black-suited employees of the establishment, stood quietly about in the yard. As I approached, an aged Chesapeake Bay retriever bitch loped from a hydrangea bush out onto the sidewalk and up onto the undertaker’s porch, followed closely by a prancing, sniffing young mongrel setter. I saw the Chesapeake Bay dog stop to shake herself in front of the door; the setter clambered upon her at once, his long tongue lolling. Just then the door opened and the pallbearers came out with a casket. Their path was blocked by the dogs. Some of the bearers smiled guiltily; an employee caught the setter on his haunches with an unfunereal kick. The bitch trundled off the porch, her lover still half on her, and took up a position in the middle of the sidewalk, near the hearse. The pair then resumed their amours in the glaring sun, to the embarrassment of the company, who pretended not to notice them while the hearse’s door was opened and the casket gently loaded aboard.

– John Barth, The Floating Opera, chapter XI.

Quotes:

I covered his dirty stubbled face with kisses: his staring eyes, his shuddering neck. Incredibly, now that I look back on it, he responded in kind! The fear left him, as it had left me, and for an hour, I'm sure, we clung to each other.

If the notion of homosexuality enters your head, you're normal, I think. If you judge either the German sergeant or myself to have been homosexual, you're stupid.

– John Barth, The Floating Opera, p.65.