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Contents
CONTENTS
1
1.1
1.2
1.2.1
1.3
1.3.1
1.3.2
1.4
1.4.1
1.4.2
1.5
1.5.1
1.5.2
1.5.3
1.6
1.6.1
1.6.2
1.6.3
2
2.1
2.1.1
2.1.2
2.1.3
2.2
2.2.1
2.2.2
2.2.3
2.2.4
2.2.5
2.2.6
INTRODUCTION
UNIT 1
What is Victorianism?
Victorianism between Utilitarianism and Idealism
The Victorian Novel
Novel Writing and Novel Reading from Charles Dickens (Early
Victorianism) to Thomas Hardy (Late Victorianism)
Charles Dickenss Contribution to the Victorian Novel
Plot in Dickenss Novel Great Expectations
Pattern in Great Expectations
The Bront Sisters Contribution to the Victorian Novel
Charlotte Bronts Novel Jane Eyre, a Feminine Version of the
Story of Initiation and Development
Point of View in Jane Eyre
Emily Bronts Gothic in Wuthering Heights
Wuthering Heights: A Shocking Novel
Wuthering Heights: A Novel of Multiple Points of View
Plot in Wuthering Heights
Thomas Hardys Wessex Novel Tess of the dUrbervilles
Tess of the dUrbervilles A Novel of Character and Environment,
Pessimism and Fate
Plot in Tess of the dUrbervilles
A Tragic Ending and a Symbolic Setting
Summary
Key Terms
Glossary of Terms and Comments
Gallery of Personalities
SAA No. 1
Answers to SAQs
Bibliography
4
4
5
6
6
UNIT 2
Unit Objectives
Joseph Conrad and Henry James, Two Forerunners of
Modernism
Joseph Conrads Tale Heart of Darkness: the Importance of
Exotic Setting
Imperialism in Heart of Darkness
Plot in Heart of Darkness
The Difficulty of the Text
Henry Jamess Ghost Story The Turn of the Screw
Plot in The Turn of the Screw
Can the Governess Be Trusted?
Is the Governess a Heroine or a Villain?
Who / What Are Miles and Flora?
What Are the Ghosts?
How Does the Phrase the Turn of the Screw Apply to the
7
7
10
10
10
13
14
14
14
16
18
19
19
20
21
21
22
22
23
24
26
27
28
28
29
30
30
33
35
35
38
28
39
40
41
i
Contents
Governesss Tale?
Summary
Key Terms
Glossary of Terms and Comments
SAA No. 2
Answers to SAQs
Bibliography
3
3.1
3.2
3.3
3.4
3.4.1
3.4.2
3.4.3
3.4.4
3.4.5
3.4.6
4
4.1
4.2
4.3
4.4
5
5.1
5.2
5.3
ii
UNIT 3
Unit Objectives
Modernist Principles and Aesthetics
Virginia Woolfs Essay Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown: A Modernist
Manifesto
Free Expression and Novelty: the Basic Principles of Modernism
Internationalism
Modernist Aesthetics
Iconoclasm
Impressionism
Post-Impressionism
Genre-Boundary Breaking
The Death of the Author and the Birth of the Reader
Collage / Montage
Summary
Key Terms
Glossary of Terms and Comments
Gallery of Personalities
SAA No. 3
Answers to SAQs
Bibliography
41
42
42
43
43
46
47
48
48
48
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
58
59
59
60
60
62
62
64
UNIT 4
Unit Objectives
Stream of Consciousness One-day City Novels: Virginia Woolf
Mrs. Dalloway and James Joyces Ulysses
Experiments with Time: One-day Novels
Cinematic Devices: Space and Time Montage
City Novels: Dublin and London
Stream of Consciousness and Subjectivity
Summary
Key Terms
Glossary of Terms and Comments
Gallery of Personalities
SAA No. 4
Answers to SAQs
Bibliography
66
69
70
73
77
78
78
80
80
81
84
UNIT 5
Unit Objectives
Modernist Art Novels
Virginia Woolfs Art Novel To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolfs Art Novel The Waves
James Joyces Art Novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
85
86
86
86
90
93
65
66
66
Contents
6
6.1
6.2
6.3
6.4
7
7.1
7.2
7.3
7.4
7.5
7.6
7.7
8.1
8.2
8.2.1
8.2.2
8.3
8.3.1
8.3.2
8.3.3
Summary
Key Terms
Glossary of Terms and Comments
Gallery of Personalities
SAA No. 5
Answers to SAQs
Bibliography
94
95
95
96
98
99
101
UNIT 6
Unit Objectives
D. H. Lawrences Novel of Sensibility
Taboo Breaking
Free Indirect Style
Antagonism and Oneness in The Rainbow
Symbolism in The Rainbow
Summary
Key Terms
Glossary of Terms and Comments
SAA No. 6
Answers to SAQs
Bibliography
102
103
103
104
106
108
112
114
115
115
116
116
119
UNIT 7
Unit Objectives
Aldous Huxley A Lover of Science, Literature and the Arts
Huxleys Characters
Satire and European Models
Continuing a Line of Tradition
Mark Rampions Point in Point Counter Point
Philip Quarles, the Novelist In the Novel
The Musicalisation of Fiction
A Novelists Novel of Ideas; The Pure Novel
Summary
Key Terms
Glossary and Comments
Gallery of Personalities
SAA No. 7
Answers to SAQs
Bibliography
120
121
121
121
122
124
124
125
126
129
130
131
131
132
133
134
135
UNIT 8
From Modern to Postmodern
Unit Objectives
Postmodernism in Literature and the Arts
Postmodernist Aesthetics
Image, Copy, Surface, Spectacle
Collage / Montage
The Postmodernism of Play
Intertextuality, Intertext
Metafiction
Alternative Worlds; Heterotopia
136
137
137
138
139
139
140
142
143
143
143
iii
Contents
8.4
8.4.1
8.4.2
8.4.3
8.4.4
8.4.5
8.4.6
8.5
8.5.1
8.5.2
8.5.3
iv
144
144
147
147
148
148
150
151
151
152
153
153
153
154
155
155
155
158
159
Victorianism
INTRODUCTION
Victorianism
looks into Aldous Huxleys novel Point Counter Point in terms of the
musicalisation of fiction, novel of ideas and pure novel. Unit 8 From
Modernism to Postmodernism identifies postmodernism as a new
paradigm shift, looks into the main aspects of postmodernist
aesthetics and illustrates them with John Fowless novels The Magus
and The French Lieutenants Woman and David Lodges campus
novel Nice Work.
Learning tasks
Each of these eight units contains a certain number of learning
tasks marked as Stop and Think, Self-Assessed Questions
(SAQs) and one Send-Away Assignment (SAA). The Stop and
Think assignments elicit the students' own opinions with regards to
certain ideas in the unit. Each Stop and Think assignment is
provided with a blank space to be filled out. Where there is no clue
leading to an answer, the Stop and Think tasks ask students to
devise a portfolio to be discussed in the tutorials. The Self
Assessed Questions (SAQs) occur at approximately every two
pages in each unit and anticipate the students' need to build on the
ideas presented. They pose questions which refer the students to
essential aspects treated in the respective unit. The students'
answers, written in the blank spaces of the SAQ boxes, may be
confronted to those given in the Answers to SAQs section at the
end of each unit. There is also a note following each SAQ, pairs or
groups of SAQs, which ask students to revise certain sections in the
unit in case they fail to give proper answers. The Send Away
Assignments (SAAs) elicit the learners global understanding and
acquisition of the essential aspects treated in each of the units. The
completed SAAs will be sent to the tutor, at times set in agreement
with the tutor, by regular mail or e-mail.
Appendices
To facilitate the distance learners acquisition of the subjects
tackled, a series of appendices have been added to each unit:
Summary, which encapsulates topical ideas; Key Concepts, a list of
the basic concepts; Glossary of Terms and Comments, with
entries to terms, idiomatic expressions and mythological characters
and places; Gallery of Personalities, with entries that sketch the
portraits of the personalities referred to in the unit. Terms, concepts
and names listed in the Key Concepts section or explained in the
Glossary of Terms and Comments and Gallery of Personalities
sections are marked using the symbol.
The assessment methods and instruments consist in essayprojects for each of the three sections of the module, which is the
equivalent in the distance learning system of continuous assessment
(three projects for 40 % of the final grade). The final test will be an
oral exam counting for 60 % of the final grade. On a 0 to 10 points
yardstick, the evaluation criteria will be the following: 1 base point,
theoretical approach of the topic 4 points, richness and relevance
of the examples given 3 points, focused argument of the specificity
of each of the three periods studied 2 points.
2
Victorianism
UNIT 1
VICTORIANISM: AN AGE OF EXTREMES
Unit Outline
1
1.1
1.2
1.2.1
1.3
1.3.1
1.3.2
1.4
1.4.1
1.4.2
1.5
1.5.1
1.5.2
1.5.3
1.6
1.6.1
1.6.2
1.6.3
Unit Objectives
What is Victorianism?
Victorianism between Utilitarianism and Idealism
The Victorian Novel
Novel Writing and Novel Reading from Charles
Dickens (Early Victorianism) to Thomas Hardy
(Late Victorianism)
Charles Dickenss Contribution to the Victorian
Novel
Plot in Dickenss Novel Great Expectations
Pattern in Great Expectations
The Bront Sisters Contribution to the Victorian
Novel
Charlotte Bronts Novel Jane Eyre, a Feminine
Version of the Story of Initiation and Development
Point of View in Jane Eyre
Emily Bronts Gothic in Wuthering Heights
Wuthering Heights: A Shocking Novel
Wuthering Heights: A Novel of Multiple Points of
View
Plot in Wuthering Heights
Thomas Hardys Wessex Novel Tess of the
dUrbervilles
Tess of the dUrbervilles A Novel of Character
and Environment, Pessimism and Fate
Plot in Tess of the dUrbervilles
A Tragic Ending and a Symbolic Setting
19
20
Summary
Key Terms
Glossary of Terms and Comments
Gallery of Personalities
SAA No. 1
Answers to SAQs
Bibliography
21
21
22
22
23
24
26
4
4
5
6
6
7
7
10
10
10
13
14
14
14
16
18
19
Victorianism
Unit objectives
1. What is Victorianism?
For historians, the term Victorian is used to describe a period
in history from 1837 to 1901, marked by the reign of Queen Victoria
of England. Queen Victoria had a great influence not only on her
country but also on the world.
This time interval (1837 1901) encompasses great changes
in society. The invention of petroleum-powered engines in the 1840s,
along with innovations in steam and coal-powered technologies, led
to the replacement of human labour (assisted by animals) with
machines.
Society changed under the influence and along with this rapid
A time of change
process of industrialization. The bourgeoisie, a fresh class full of
and progress
energy, came to power. This class was busy investing, working, and
creating their own institutions and rules, which were essentially
modern.
Victorianism was also a time of world travel, exporting and
exploration, and an age of Imperialism.
When historians think of the age, therefore, they think of a
time of change and progress.
Victorianism
Things or
values?
Victorianism
Until the end of the 19th century, the majority of the Victorians
did not purchase their serious fiction brand new when it came out in
volume form, but borrowed it from circulating libraries.
That must have been one of the reasons why not all novels
appeared first in volume form: some initially emerged as serials. The
self-publishing writer Charles Dickens brought out most of his fictions
in monthly parts, famously creating an urgent demand for each new
number. This explains why Charles Dickens believed that a storyteller and a story-reader should establish a mutual understanding as
soon as possible.
Charles Dickens was symptomatic as a fiction publisher in still
another way. Editing two magazines in which he and other
contemporary writers published their fiction, Dickens influenced
fiction in two ways: one was that he facilitated a mode of publication
which implicitly encouraged the reading of novels alongside other
forms of writing, while another was that serialization affected fiction
writing from many points of view. Thus, novelists had to cope with
some pressures: they had to extend their stories in order to fill
several volumes, or they had to cut and compress in order to meet
the space constraints of a magazine column, or they had to create
suspense in order to pace serial publication and encourage the
Victorianism
Novels were
models
Search for a
beginning
An existence
without plot
Charles Dickenss Great Expectations (serialized in 18601861) is exemplary for an analysis of plot in many respects, not
least of all for its beginning. This is so because what the novel
chooses to present at its outset is precisely the search for a
beginning (see quote 1 in the Reader).
As in many novels written by Dickens and as in many 19th
century novels, the hero is an orphan. The only thing he knows about
himself in the first passages of the novel is his name, Pip. However,
not even that name is a full name, since Pip is what his infant
tongue could make of Philip Pirrip. In those passages, Pip is shown
in front of his parents tombs, trying to make sense of his origins.
Lying beyond the grave, those origins are misty and uncertain.
Thus, loss of origin, misreading, and the troubles of identity
will be the themes governing the plot and explored later on. This
beginning establishes Pips existence as an existence without a plot.
The opening passages also provide the reader with an
element that will actually grow into the plot: Pip encounters a convict,
whose name is Magwitch. The convict asks Pip for a file to cut his
chains and the loaf of bread in his pocket. From that moment on,
Pips life will be intertwined with the convicts, since Magwitch will be
his benefactor.
The orphans fellowship with the convict will remain with him
all his life but in a state of repression on Pips part, because he will
have great expectations.
7
Victorianism
SAQ 1
What is the significance of this scene in the development of the
plot?
Victorianism
Pips return
SAQ 2
What is the significance of the ending of Great Expectations?
Victorianism
10
Victorianism
Charlotte Bront
Locked in the
red room
SAQ 3
Read quote 2 in the Reader. What is the importance of the red
room episode in the progression of the plot?
Victorianism
Lowood
Thornfield
Moor House
Happy ending
12
Victorianism
SAQ 4
Read quote 3 in the Reader. What is the importance of first
person point of view in Jane Eyre? Relate it to the fact that this is
a womans story.
Victorianism
Emily Bront
14
Victorianism
Intertwined
destinies
SAQ 5
Read quote 5 in the Reader. Why is Lockwoods experience
strange in the scene quoted? Is the strangeness of the scene
relevant to Lockwoods status as a narrator? (Bear in mind that
the readers comprehension depends on his point of view!)
Victorianism
Victorianism
Victorianism
SAQ 6
What is the significance of this bifurcated ending (Heathcliffs
reunion with Catherine in death at Wuthering Heights, and
Catherines planned reunion with Hareton at the Grange)?
18
Victorianism
19
Victorianism
I could not
bear the loss of
you any
longer.
Left alone, without any support, and having to help her family
out, she finds work at Flintcombe Ash. The place is dreary, the
season winter, and the work very hard. Although Tess writes to
Angel, telling him about her miserable condition and her unaltered
love for him, her letters fail to reach him.
Alec traces Tess and insists that they should be together
again. Out of despair and feeling hopeless and helpless, Tess
eventually accepts Alecs offer. When she hears that Angel has
returned to England and realizes he has forgiven her, she kills Alec in
a fit of anger.
Tess and Angel run away to escape from human justice, and
they have a few days when they desperately cling to each other.
SAQ 7
Read quote 7 in the Reader. What is the relation between this
tragic ending and the symbolic setting?
20
Victorianism
Summary
This unit introduces you to Victorian literature and to the
notion of Victorianism. The evolution of the Victorian novel from its
early to its late stages is illustrated with the most representative
novels written by the most outstanding writers of the period.
The first section of this unit is dedicated to Charles Dickenss
accomplished novel Great Expectations as a novel of the
protagonists formation and development with a well knit plot and
balanced structure.
The second and third sections deal with the contribution of two
women writers to the Victorian novel: Charlotte Bronts Jane Eyre
and her sister Emilys Wuthering Heights. Jane Eyre is presented as
a feminine version of the novel of development, focusing on the
protagonists keen sense of self-analysis. Wuthering Heights is
treated as a shocking Victorian novel of consuming passion and also
as a feminine Gothic.
The fourth section treats Thomas Hardys Tess of the
dUrbervilles as a modern tragedy, a novel of character and setting.
Unit 2 will introduce you to late Victorianism, whose main
representatives are Joseph Conrad and Henry James. These two
novelists are also the forerunners of modernism.
Key Terms
Victorianism
Utilitarianism and Idealism
Novel
Serialization
Author
Plot
Pattern
Story
Epilogue
Autobiography
Point of view
Self-analysis
Gothic
Wessex
Tragedy
21
Victorianism
Gallery of Personalities
Victorianism
Benthams ideas had great influence on the reforms of the latter part
of the 19th century in the administration of the British government, on
criminal law and on procedure in both criminal and civil law.
SAA No. 1
Explain the main aspects of the Victorian novel in terms of:
character, plot, story of initiation, formation and development,
point of view (first person, multiple, third person), Gothic
elements, tragic vision.
Note that the protagonists in Great Expectations, Jane Eyre and
Wuthering Heights are orphans, while Tess in Hardys novel is a
poor country girl. The plot of all these novels is focused on the
initiation and development of the protagonist. Great Expectations
and Jane Eyre are first person narratives, and these give more
immediacy to their stories. Wuthering Heights uses multiple
points of view, and this, together with the tragic aura and sense
of strangeness, makes the novel unique in Victorian fiction.
Although Tess of the dUrbervilles is written in the third person, it
is a character-focused novel which deals with the condition of a
19th century woman in a most sensitive way.
Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights use Gothic elements: the red
room episode and the character of Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre;
Wuthering Heights as a setting, the characters of Heathcliff and
Catherine, their consuming impossible love and their reunion
after death at Wuthering Heights.
Wuthering Heights and Tess of the dUrbervilles articulate a
tragic vision. This justified many critics to call them modern
tragedies.
Please send your answers to your tutor.
Your paper should not be longer than four pages.
Please note that the quality of your ideas and the coherence of
the essay will be 70 % of your grade, while the accuracy of your
language will count for 30 %.
23
Victorianism
Answers to SAQs
SAQ 1
The opening passages of Great Expectations set the scene
and atmosphere, announce the main themes and the mood of the
whole novel. This first scene with the boy Pip in the graveyard is one
of the best beginnings in almost all of Dickenss mature novels and in
the Victorian novel. In less than one page the reader is given a
character, his background and his setting.
With a few more paragraphs, the reader is immersed in a
decisive action, which is already outlined: Pip is an orphan in search
for a father and for his own condition. His sense of identity is vague
and confused, and the encounter with the convict Magwitch in the
graveyard is the germinal scene of the novel. While he is held by the
convict, Pip sees the world upside down, and in the course of
Dickenss novel the reader is invited to try the same view. This
particular change of point of view is an ancient device of irony, but an
excellent one. Irony essentially points to an incongruity between
appearance and essence. A number of ironic reversals and
ambiguous situations develop out of this first scene and the point of
view it proposes.
SAQ 2
The ending of Great Expectations shows Pip out of the
confusion he has been in, but it is ambiguous enough not to give
readers a clue as to what his future might be like. Indeed, the mists
rise at this point in Pips life, but they might fall again, although Pip
sounds optimistic about Estella not parting from him.
It is possible that readers find in Great Expectations a
modernity of attitude which expects the narrative to be open ended.
This implies that readers are supposed to construct their own sense
of how to take it, that the text resists single meaning. The ambiguity
of the ending also comes from the fact that the readers have only
Pips text (a form of autobiography) to work upon, and this is certainly
not final or necessarily authoritative.
Please revise section 1.3.1 in case you have failed to give
answers comparable to those given to SAQ 1 and SAQ 2 in this
section.
SAQ 3
The red room has deathly associations (red as the colour of
blood, the room possibly being haunted by Janes dead uncle, and
Jane has the impression that she sees a ghost in it).
The red room is also a symbol of imprisonment. Playing on
strong notes of strangeness, the scene is Gothic, dramatizing a dark
side that will re-emerge in the story under the form of the mad
woman in the attic (Bertha Mason). Jane will always fight this dark
side. The scene has an anticipatory function as a metaphor of the
prison, because throughout the novel Jane will be imprisoned in
many ways, particularly relating to class, gender, and religion. It is
out of this manifold imprisonment that Jane will try to escape.
24
Victorianism
Victorianism
Bibliography
Bront, Charlotte, (1847)1994), Jane Eyre, Penguin Books, A
Penguin / Godfrey Cave Edition
Bront, Emily, (1847)2003), Wuthering Heights, Penguin
Books, Revised Edition
Dickens, Charles, Great Expectations, (1861)2000), Cliffs
Notes, New edition
Hardy, Thomas, (1891)1998), Tess of the dUrbervilles, edited
by John Paul Riquelme, Boston: Bedford Books / Case Studies in
Contemporary Criticism Series.
26
UNIT 2
THE DAWN OF A NEW AGE: JOSEPH CONRAD AND HENRY
JAMES
Unit Outline
2
2.1
2.1.1
2.1.2
2.1.3
2.2
2.2.1
2.2.2
2.2.3
2.2.4
2.2.5
2.2.6
Unit Objectives
Joseph Conrad and Henry James, Two
Forerunners of Modernism
Joseph Conrads Tale Heart of
Darkness: the Importance of Exotic
Setting
Imperialism in Heart of Darkness
Plot in Heart of Darkness
The Difficulty of the Text
Henry Jamess Ghost Story The Turn
of the Screw
Plot in The Turn of the Screw
Can the Governess Be Trusted?
Is the Governess a Heroine or a Villain?
Who / What Are Miles and Flora?
What Are the Ghosts?
How Does the Phrase the Turn of the
Screw Apply to the Governesss Tale?
Summary
Key Terms
Glossary of Terms and Comments
SAA No. 2
Answers to SAQs
Bibliography
28
28
29
30
30
33
35
35
38
28
39
40
41
41
42
42
43
43
46
27
Unit objectives
29
A journey
30
SAQ 1
This quote is taken from the fourth section of Part I. It records
Marlows initial impression of the Central Station. What is the
contrast used by Marlow here? To what effects is this contrast
used?
31
SAQ 2
What could Kurtz mean by these words? Do they affect our
understanding of the plot?
Do you see
him? Do you
see the story?
33
SAQ 3
Marlow is confused about Kurtz. Does his confusion (as a
narrator) have any effects upon the reader?
Darkness
Fog
34
It was as if all
the rest of the
scene had been
stricken with
death.
36
37
How can I
retrace today
the strange
steps of my
obsession?
if he were
innocent,
what then on
earth was I?
38
SAQ 4
Try to explain what Miles and Flora are starting from the possibility
that the governesss state of mind is confused and maybe she
hallucinates.
39
She was a
lady.
And he so
dreadfully
below, said
Mrs. Grose.
SAQ 5
Explain this hypothesis. Why does the governess need to
continue her game of imagination and involve the children in it?
2.2.6 How Does the Phrase the Turn of the Screw Apply to the
Governesss Tale?
By titling his tale The Turn of the Screw, James implies that
this phrase is a fitting representation of the tale. The phrase is a
metaphor suggesting that a tales effect on its readers is comparable
to a screw boring into a hole. With each turn of the screw, the storys
point drives readers further and on a deeper level.
James gives a turn of the screw with each chapter of the tale
to amplify its ability to penetrate. He also frames the tale told by the
governess in the first person. The frame is an intriguing but
It is all obscure ambiguous prologue that foreshadows delicious dread.
and imperfect,
Douglas is the first to turn the screw when he says: I quite
the picture, the agree in regard to Griffins ghost, or whatever it was that its
story, but there appearing first to the little boy, at so tender an age, adds a particular
is a suggestion touch. But its not the first occurrence of its charming kind that I know
of a strangely
to have involved a child. If the child gives the effect another turn of
gruesome
the screw, what do you say to two children - ?
effect in it.
The screw turns again when we understand that the children
of the governesss tale are not merely victims but participants in the
ghosts evil plot.
The screw bores into the planks of reason until those planks
crack and threaten to plunge us into explorations of insanity. As we
go along reading, we grow more and more suspicious of the
governesss judgments, in fact so suspicious as to consider her the
villain.
Summary
This unit introduces you to the dark stories of two writers of
the end of the 19th century: Joseph Conrad and Henry James. It
makes a point of the fact that the two writers discussed here are two
late Victorians looking anxiously back into a disintegrating world and
forward to an uncertain future.
This unit insists on the two writers darkness of vision in order
to demonstrate that this marks a transition from a world in dissolution
(Victorianism) to an age which thoroughly questions the values of
that world (early 20th century).
It is significant that Joseph Conrad and Henry James explored
two major territories: Heart of Darkness takes us into the threatening
colonial possessions of the Empire, while The Turn of the Screw
plunges us into the darkest regions of the mind. These explorations
pose troubling questions about the impossibility of constructing
meaning, leaving the explorers (readers) in a confused state of mind.
The next units will deal with this troubling legacy of
Victorianism, which gave the early 20th century writers a sense that
they should do away with it and create new modes of writing.
41
Key Terms
Exotic
Imperialism
Ghost story
Tale
Narrator
Ambiguity
42
SAA No. 2
Comment upon the significance and implications of the two
writers darkness of vision in Heart of Darkness and The Turn of
the Screw.
Take into account the main aspects that inform their vision:
- the imperial system (Heart of Darkness)
- moral and psychological ambiguity( Heart of Darkness
and The Turn of the Screw)
- class issues (the governess and her socially unacceptable
fondness of the master in The Turn of the Screw)
Send your essay to your tutor. Do not take more than three
pages.
Please note that the quality of your ideas and the coherence of
the essay will be 70 % of your grade, while the accuracy of your
language will count for 30 %.
Answers to SAQs
SAQ 1
The word ivory has taken on a life of its own for the men who
work with the Company. It is very significant that the white colour of
ivory can be associated with the white European colonizers and their
greed. Thus, ivory to them is no longer the tusk of an elephant (a
natural thing), but a guarantee of economic prosperity (dead matter
turned into an object of trade).
Marlows reference to a decaying corpse is both literal and
figurative: both elephants and native Africans die as a result of the
white mans pursuit of ivory, and the entire enterprise is rotten to the
core.
The strangest thing is that the word ivory has lost all
connection to any physical reality and has itself become an object of
worship: the worship of dead matter turned into profit.
In contrast to this rotten language of commerce, the jungle is
dark and silent. Marlow is at a loss for meanings here: he does not
know how to take it. Is it evil, or is it truth? His dilemma is suggestive
of the white mans incapacity to understand the meaning of a world
which threatens him by being unfamiliar and which he in his turn has
threatened by his fantastic invasion.
43
SAQ 2
Kurtzs words Exterminate all the brutes is ambiguous in the
sense that brutes may refer to the elephants, to the natives or to
both.
His words The horror! The horror! are even more ambiguous.
The horror could be almost anything. The most confusing possibility
is, however, that it may mean nothing, in the sense that what it
means may never be known to Marlow, who will thus never be able
to express it in words.
Marlow will ponder Kurtzs last words and Kurtzs memory for
the rest of his life. Maybe Kurtz was deliberately ambiguous and
calculated the effects of this ambiguity. It is obvious that he wanted
power and grandeur all his life. His act of leaving ambiguous
messages behind for Marlow to ponder may be indicative of his
desire to turn himself into an enigma and thus ensure his own
immortality.
Of course, this affects the readers understanding of plot and
character in this text.
Please revise section 2.1.2 in case you have failed to give
answers comparable to those given to SAQ 1 and SAQ 2 in this
section.
SAQ 3
Kurtz has explored the fascination of horror, and Marlows
task, as a man who met him, is to make sense of Kurtzs character
and Kurtzs life. It is obvious that Marlow is fascinated by Kurtzs
fascinations.
The difficulty of Marlows task, however, is that he does not
know how to accommodate the different aspects of Kurtz into a story.
Marlow expresses these problems by saying that he [Kurtz]
was just a word for me, implying that he cannot go beyond the
surface of the word to the essence of the man.
This device of exploring a character, represented by two or
more different aspects of itself, brings us to the threshold of a time
when character is seen as so complex that no single pair of eyes
(Marlows), no single story (Marlows) and no single plot can reveal
him completely.
Thus, the narrators confusion (Marlows) becomes the
readers: how can we read the story of a man when the teller of that
story cannot pull the strings of the story together? What is the
reality and the truth beyond the character whose story we are
reading? This is why Marlow gives us the dream alternative: dream
has no logic. Dream is vague and ambiguous, and dream is not real!
Please revise section 2.1.3 in case you have failed to give
an answer comparable to the one given to SAQ 3 in this section.
44
SAQ 4
Like Heart of Darkness, with its suggestions of dream, The
Turn of the Screw may read as a nightmare. The governess is
presumably attracted by the childrens tutor, who has hired her for
the job. It is very likely that this should be the reason why she feels
bad. She knows it is not proper for a woman of her condition to fall in
love with her employer, and she starts to unfold her memories by
confessing:
After rising, in town, to meet his appeal, I had at all events a
couple of very bad days found myself doubtful again, felt indeed
sure I had made a mistake. In this state of mind I spent the long
hours of bumping, swinging coach that carried me to the stoppingplace at which I was to be met by a vehicle from the house.
The whole story may be the governesss bad dream of going
to Bly in this state of mind. Everything goes wrong there, of course,
because everything is a projection of this bad state of mind: the
ghosts she encounters are her projections and so is everybody and
everything else.
The children are, very strangely, mirrored projections of the
two ghosts: they are evil, scheming and corrupted, just like the
ghosts.
The strangeness is amplified by the near and far design. The
two ghosts are seen only across, as it were, and beyond in
strange places and on high places, the top of houses, the outside of
windows, the further edge of pools, but the governess makes out a
deep design (she implies intention) on their part to shorten the
distance and overcome the obstacle. Is not the distance shortened
by the presence of the two children, who are in the near sphere,
always around? Even when they seem to step across, the governess
finds them in the room and not outside, on her side of the lake, and
not on the other.
Therefore Miles and Flora, who are so elusive, so hard to pin
down, may be the governesss projections. They are on the near
side, making the design complete and the grip of horror tight.
The strange thing is, however, that in a sense, the children are
more ghostly than the ghosts: they are now here, now gone, now
good, now bad, now loving and now hateful. They change faces in
a manner that may be more dangerous and more horrifying than the
ghosts, which are always the same.
Please revise section 2.2.4 in case you have failed to give
an answer comparable to the one given to SAQ 4 in this section.
SAQ 5
The governess may have a nightmare, or she may even
hallucinate. She sleeps very little, and it is scientifically demonstrated
that too little sleep or no sleep at all over a longer period of time has
this effect on people: they start to hallucinate.
That Quint is a replacement of the master, which the
governesss mind projects, is suggested by a piece of information
provided by Mrs. Grose. Listening to the governesss description of
45
the ghost, Mrs. Grose identifies it as Quints and tells the governess
that the clothes he wears are the masters. It seems that when he
was alive, he wore the masters clothes, taking the masters
prerogatives together with them. He was no gentleman, though.
However, Miss Jessel was, according to Mrs. Grose, a lady.
Supposedly she and Peter Quint were in love. That was a love
society could not approve, and this may be the reason of Miss
Jessels death.
Projecting herself as Miss Jessel, the governess thus
identifies with her as a lady.
Is this scenario a nightmare only because it casts two ghosts
in the main parts? This is only a partial answer. The reason is, in the
first place, that the governess cannot have a nice dream of a relation
which is not sanctioned by social norms. That is why she feels so
bad about taking the job: she takes it from the wrong position of a
governess seduced by the master. In her nightmare, she reverses
the ranks, but the nightmare worsens.
Why are the children needed in this scenario? In any nightmare
images proliferate, overlap and change forms. Situations get out of
control, nasty incidents occur again and again, getting worse and
worse. The two children in The Turn of the Screw actually increase the
horror effects: they are presumably innocent, but the governess
hesitates between their innocence and their wickedness. Worse than
that, she grows more and more convinced that they are corrupted and
wicked rather than innocent. Miles and Flora are needed to complete
the design of the nightmare and to increase its effects.
However, the children are also needed for a reason which
relates their presence in the design to language and communication.
Any text needs language to be a text. Any text is also a form of
communication. The governesss story is fantastic, ambiguous, and
therefore strange to the point of being incommunicable. It is also
threatened by the silence and absence of the two ghosts. If the two
ghosts are silent and strange manifestations of present absences,
always appearing across or beyond, the two children are the
palpable presences in the near sphere, which the design needs.
Very importantly, they are also the governesss interlocutors, persons
with whom she can communicate.
It is true that their communication is made difficult by the
childrens (especially Miless) silence, but it still is a form of
(problematic) communication that allows the text to be a text. In this
respect, Mrs. Grose is an unsatisfactory interlocutor for a different
reason: she cannot understand what the children seem to know.
Please revise section 2.2.5 in case you have failed to give
an answer comparable to the one given to SAQ 5 in this section.
Bibliography
Conrad, Joseph, (1902)1994) Heart of Darkness, Penguin
Books, A Penguin / Godfrey Cave Edition
James, Henry, (1898)1994) The Turn of the Screw, Penguin
Books, A Penguin / Godfrey Cave Edition
46
UNIT 3
MODERNIST PRINCIPLES AND AESTHETICS
Unit Outline
3
3.1
3.2
3.3
3.4
3.4.1
3.4.2
3.4.3
3.4.4
3.4.5
3.4.6
Unit Objectives
Modernist Principles and Aesthetics
Virginia Woolfs Essay Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown: A
Modernist Manifesto
Free Expression and Novelty: the Basic Principles of
Modernism
Internationalism
Modernist Aesthetics
Iconoclasm
Impressionism
Post-Impressionism
Genre-Boundary Breaking
The Death of the Author and the Birth of the Reader
Collage / Montage
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
58
Summary
Key Terms
Glossary of Terms and Comments
Gallery of Personalities
SAA No. 3
Answers to SAQs
Bibliography
59
59
60
60
62
62
64
48
48
48
51
47
Unit objectives
After you have read through this chapter, you should be able to:
Identify Modernism as a paradigm of novelty
Explain Virginia Woolfs argument in the essay Mr.
Bennett and Mrs. Brown a manifesto of literary
modernism
Identify the essential principles and features of
modernism and explain them in terms of:
- free expression
- novelty
- internationalism
Identify the new aesthetics of modernism and explain
them in terms of:
- iconoclasm
- Impressionism
- Post-Impressionism
- genre-boundary breaking
- collage / montage
- a new emphasis on the readers / viewers
perception
48
49
What is reality?
SAQ 1
What can Woolf mean by the question what is reality? How can
Woolfs reality make a difference from Bennetts?
The
Edwardians
were
materialists
The Georgian
age was
a season of
failures and
fragments
Exile
3.3 Internationalism
Stream of
consciousness
Bohemia
52
SAQ 2
Why did internationalism animate the writers discussed above?
Look at it as one of the fundamental principles of modernism.
Relate this principle to their pursuit of novelty and free
expression and to their impulse to cross borders and live in exile
both literally and figuratively.
3.4.1. Iconoclasm
Iconoclasm implies a challenge to tradition, namely a
challenge to and the overturning of traditional beliefs, customs and
values.
Woolfs argument in Modern Fiction and Mr. Bennett and
Mrs. Brown accounted for the new techniques of capturing reality
in a subjective way. Writers shifted their focus from objectivity to
subjectivity through stream of consciousness, interior monologue
and free indirect style. Thus, it may be stated that iconoclasm was an
essential attitude embraced by the early 20th century writers.
Early 20th century writers (the modernists) rejected the
traditional mode of realism and experimented with new modes.
SAQ 3
Read Woolfs argument in the essay Mr. Bennett and Mrs.
Brown (3.1) in terms of iconoclasm. You have found a couple of
ideas related to the modernists iconoclastic approaches in the
subchapters above.
3.4.2 Impressionism
Claude Monet
Rouen Cathedral
Musicalisation of
the canvas
Claude Monet
Rouen Cathedral
Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order
in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and
incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon
the consciousness.
SAQ 4
How does Woolfs argument here relate to Impressionism in
painting and music?
SAQ 5
Read quote 9 in the Reader.
Identify some impressionistic elements and aspects in that
passage.
3.4.3 Post-Impressionism
Inevitably the dissatisfaction with their own work that all the
Impressionist painters felt in the 1880s was reflected in the next
generation.
The main characteristic of Post-Impressionism is a newly
found abstractionism which the artists sought in symbolism. PostImpressionist designs are angular and abstract.
56
Abstract
symbolism
Vincent Van
Gogh
Still Life:
Japanese Vase
with Roses and
Anemones
Bored by
narrative
3.4.5 The Death of the Author and the Birth of the Reader
The daring experiments undertaken by Virginia Woolf, James
Joyce, D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley in the early 20th century
were underpinned and supported by modernist aesthetics, which
they embraced at the risk of the fragmentary and failure.
One may as well say that these writers achievements lie in
their courage to face, challenge and even risk failure. And perhaps
their greatest achievement is the birth of the reader at the expense of
the death of the author, whose death was actually a dissipation
into the text.
Readers are the
Since the author disappears, readers become important in
last destination the sense that they are the last destination of the text.
of the text
Modernist texts are difficult because they challenge tradition
and experiment new techniques that ask readers to re-adjust
themselves to novelty. The authors of these texts knew how difficult
re-adjustment was, but they were determined to take this risk.
Summary
This unit introduces you to modernist principles and
aesthetics. The first section looks into Virginia Woolfs essay Mr.
Bennett and Mrs. Brown as a manifesto of modernism.
The second section dwells on principles of modernism:
freedom, novelty, and internationalism, which mapped out a
bohemian Europe.
The last section looks into the modernist aesthetics of
iconoclasm, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, genre-boundary
breaking, the new role of the reader as a participant in meaning
construction and collage / montage.
The next units will show you how these principles work in
some major modernist novels.
Key Terms
Edwardian
Georgian
Internationalism
Free expression
Modernism
Iconoclasm
Impressionism
Post-Impressionism
Genre-boundary breaking
The death of the author and the birth of the reader
Collage / montage
59
especially in oils
Cosmopolitanism usually refers to metropolises, which are big
dispersed
Gallery of Personalities
British novelists and dramatists of the early 20th century. His fiction is
concerned mainly with the English upper middle-class life and
questions of social justice.
60
Please note that the quality of your ideas and the coherence of
the essay will be 70 % of your grade, while the accuracy of your
language will count for 30 %.
Answers to SAQs
SAQ 1
To the realists, reality was the totality of real things in the
world, independent of peoples knowledge or perception of them.
Therefore, reality was objective in the sense that it consisted of
facts. Objectivity is an attitude free of any bias caused by personal
feelings or impressions. Contrary to this, in the early 20th century,
philosophers and scientists developed an interest in subjectivity,
that is in the impression reality makes upon the mind. Subjective
idealism also played a large role in the development of this new
attitude. Pushing subjectivity to the extreme, it argues that the
external world only exists because it is perceived to exist and does
not have an existence of its own. This interest in subjectivity
underpins Romantic poetry, Henry Jamess psychological Gothic in
The Turn of the Screw, Impressionist painting, the techniques of
stream of consciousness, interior monologue and free indirect style in
modernist fiction (the novels of Woolf, Joyce, Lawrence).
Please revise section 3.1 in case you have failed to give
an answer comparable to the one given to SAQ 1 in this section.
62
SAQ 2
While the Victorian age had created a centre-located and
centre-oriented culture, a paradigm which was maintained in the
Edwardian period, the Georgian period marked a departure from that
model. Victorian culture (1837-1901) had grown into a model centred
round the British Empire and Edwardian culture (1901-1910). This
only hardened that model.
To the Georgians (1910-1936), who saw the signs of the
Empire already tearing apart and the threats of global catastrophes
ahead, this centre and the model it had created could no longer hold.
To that geographically and culturally located centrality, the
modernist artists preferred a freedom of expression often associated
with border crossing and exile. Internationalism was this new
geographical and cultural remapping of the world, another form by
which the solidity and materialism of the Empire broke to pieces,
while a spiritual model took its place.
Please revise section 3.3 in case you have failed to give
an answer comparable to the one given to SAQ 2 in this section.
SAQ 3
Pointing to the difference contemporary books (that is early
20 century novels) make from the realist novel in their approach to
character, Woolf states that there is nothing that people differ about
more than the reality of characters. To Woolfs mind, the
Edwardians books were of great value, and indeed of great
necessity, but the Edwardians were never interested in character in
itself; or in the book in itself. They were interested in something
outside [i.e. objective reality]. According to Woolf, the problem is that
the Edwardian writers have looked very powerfully, searchingly, and
sympathetically out of the window; at factories, at Utopias, even at
the decoration and upholstery of the carriage; but never at her [i.e.
Mrs. Brown, the prototype of character], never at life, never at human
nature.
Woolfs attitude to this line of tradition, the realist novel, is
essentially iconoclastic. Therefore, she meant to pull down the idols
of that tradition: interest in objective reality, in the world outside, in its
solidity and boring details. Thus she continues her argument with the
realists to make her point of the necessity that the novel should find
new tools:
And so they [the Edwardians] have developed a technique of
novel-writing which suits their purpose; they have made tools and
established conventions which do their business. But those tools are
not our tools, and that business is not our business. For us those
conventions are ruin, those tools are death.
th
63
SAQ 4
To the Impressionist painters and musicians, the essence of
life and reality was the way in which it was perceived through the
various impressions coming from all sides.
Impressionism conveyed perceptions as luminous vibration,
a phrase which borrows the important notion of vibration from
music.
In those passages of Modern Fiction in which she describes
the mind receiving a myriad impressions, the incessant shower of
innumerable atoms, the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the
order in which they fall, Woolf extrapolates the techniques of
Impressionism in painting to the medium of literature.
In the novels written by Woolf and Joyce, luminous vibration
is translated as stream of consciousness and epiphany.
SAQ 5
This passage and the whole discussion on aesthetics in A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is worth reading in conjunction
with Virginia Woolfs well-known essays on modern fiction and worth
considering too in relation to the aims and achievements of their
contemporary French painting.
What both Joyce and Woolf had in common with French
painting is the impressionistic mode. The essential characteristic of
impressionism is its change of emphasis from the thing perceived to
the process of perception.
James Joyce sought a desolidification of the fabric of things
through the translation of various techniques of painting and music
in the new evanescent fabric of his texts. Since early in his literary
career, he theorized epiphany, a radical departure from the solidity
and objectivity which had been the principles of realist fiction.
Please revise section 3.4.2 in case you have failed to give
answers comparable to those given to SAQ 4 and SAQ 5 in this
section.
Bibliography
Bradbury, Malcolm (1993) The Modern British Novel, Secker
and Warburg, London (the chapters dedicated to the early 20th
century novel)
Dowling, David (1985) Bloomsbury Aesthetics and the Novels
of Forster and Woolf, St. Martins Press, New York (chapter 6 Woolf
and Painting)
Woolf, Virginia (1967) Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown in
Collected Essays, Volume I, New York: Brace & World, Inc.
64
UNIT 4
MAJOR CONTRIBUTIONS TO MODERNIST BRITISH FICTION
EXPERIMENTAL NOVELS
Unit Outline
4
4.1
4.2
4.3
4.4
Unit Objectives
Stream of Consciousness One-day City Novels: Virginia W
Mrs. Dalloway and James Joyces Ulysses
Experiments with Time: One-day Novels
Cinematic Devices: Space and Time Montage
City Novels: Dublin and London
Stream of Consciousness and Subjectivity
66
69
70
73
Summary
Key Terms
Glossary of Terms and Comments
Gallery of Personalities
SAA No. 4
Answers to SAQs
Bibliography
77
78
78
80
80
81
84
66
66
65
After you have read through this unit, you should be able to:
explain the innovative character of the experimental
novel
identify the main elements of novelty in the modernist
novel
describe the main features of style and technique in
these novels in terms of:
- stream of consciousness
- interior monologue
- flashbacks, space and time montage
- experiments with time
- subjectivity
Billingsgate Market,
London
66
SAQ 1
What could Clarissa mean by the remark quoted above? What
does this moment of June mean to her? You may wish to read
another passage in order to answer this question. Read quote 10
in the Reader.
67
Likewise, James Joyce had Molly Bloom, one of the key figures
in Ulysses explode into a series of vital yeses while remembering
her past, in a stream of thoughts and impressions unobstructed by
any punctuation marks in the last approximately 30 pages of the
book. In those 30 pages, Mollys present impressions plunge her into
the past.
68
SAQ 2
Read quote 11 in the Reader. The passage is the opening of
Mrs. Dalloway. Pay attention to the words in bold. What do they
indicate?
69
SAQ 3
Read quote 12 in the Reader. What are the effects of space and
time montage in this (and other) passage(s) of Mrs. Dalloway?
Westminster
Bridge 1909
A tram and horse
traffic. Big Ben in
the distance
70
Nassau Street,
Dublin, circa 1900
71
SAQ 4
Read quote 14 in the Reader. What is the connection between
the setting (modern Dublin) and the topics debated by Leopold
Bloom and Stephen Dedalus?
How can the characters and their relations be shaped by the
same space (modern Dublin) which they inhabit?
72
Mr. Bloom
Watercolour by the Contemporary Irish artist
Roger Cummiskey.
Painting from James Joyces caricature of
Leopold Bloom, drawn in Myron Nuttings studio
in the 1920s.
SAQ 5
Read quote 15 in the Reader. Explain how Blooms mind
operates on more than one level at the same time. You may start
from considering the way in which dialogue (the level of
communication between the two characters, which is a form they
choose to exchange impressions and thoughts) alternates with
Blooms private thoughts, which he keeps to himself.
The Mountain
Flower
Watercolour by
artist Roger
Cummiskey
74
SAQ 6
Read quote 16 in the Reader. What are the stylistic effects of
Joyces violation of grammar and disintegration of syntax in
those stream of consciousness passages? Note that V. Woolf
made a point of these new stylistic effects in her essay Mr.
Bennett and Mrs. Brown.
Gibraltar Remembered
Watercolour by
Roger Cummiskey,
inspired by the last
lines in Ulysses
75
SAQ 7
Read quote 17 in the Reader. What is peculiar about this
passage? What kind of experience does it evoke? What would
you call Joyces style here? What are the effects of this style?
SAQ 8
Read quote 18 in the Reader. Starting from that quoted passage,
characterize Septimus Warren Smith. What is his frame of
mind? What are his problems? Can he cope with them? If he
cannot, why do you think it is so?
Summary
This unit presents the experimental novel. This innovation in
the British fiction of the early 20th century is illustrated by Woolf and
Joyces experiments with time in their one-day novels Mrs. Dalloway
and Ulysses.
The first section looks into the way in which Woolf and Joyce
experimented with time by focusing on one day of their characters
lives in Mrs. Dalloway and Ulysses.
The second section dwells on Woolf and Joyces use of
cinematic devices (flashbacks, time and space montage) in these
novels, relating this aspect to time and setting.
77
Key Terms
78
Gallery of Personalities
Please note that the quality of your ideas and the coherence
of the essay will be 70 % of your grade, while the accuracy
of your language will count for 30 %.
80
Answers to SAQs
SAQ 1
Think of one day in your life. A lot of things may happen to
you. Some are routine: you wake up, have breakfast or fail to have it
(as usual!!! and you start to worry about your health, thinking that
something bad may happen to you one day). You are on time or you
are late for work (as usual!!!). You cross streets. You avoid places
you dont like, look for places you like, teach your classes, cross
streets again and come back home tired, sometimes exhausted, etc.,
etc. But some unusual things may happen, from the most trivial to
the most unbelievable, from the most pleasant to the nastiest
surprises: you look for your keys and on this very day, when you
have to be there earlier, you cannot find them. You quarrel with your
neighbour. Your cat is run down by a car. A friend whom you havent
seen for years pays you a visit. Youre giving a party in the evening,
but you burn the cake! This one day is the present to you, of
course, like to everybody else, but your friends visit plunges you into
the past, and the burnt cake reminds you of your absent-mindedness
a couple of years ago, when you forgot you were having a party in
the evening!
This is what Clarissa means by it is very, very dangerous to
live even one day. She also means that this moment (this one day)
is very much like a lot of other days and at the same time different,
unrepeatable in the combination of events that makes it this one day
(and not another). What Clarissa means is that ones life is this one
day, and this one day is ones life.
SAQ 2
This passage suggests Clarissas plunge into the past, when
she was 18 and lived at Bourton. Now she is in her fifties and lives in
London. The squeak of the hinges, which she hears now, is a noise
she anticipates: the doors of her house in London will be taken off
their hinges because she will give a party in the evening. However,
the squeak, which she anticipates, reminds her of the little squeak
of the French doors at Bourton about 30 years before! In this
passage, Mrs. Dalloway has a flashback.
Please revise section 4.1 in case you have failed to give
answers comparable to those given to SAQ 1 and SAQ 2 in this
section.
SAQ 3
This passage is one of the most symbolic key episodes in
Mrs. Dalloway. It illustrates a device that brought literature very close
to cinematography. The device is called space montage, and it
relies on the characters spatial perceptions of the same external
event (such as the prime ministers car, the sky-writing plane, the
pattern of the clouds in Mrs. Dalloway).
81
SAQ 8
This passage grants access to the mind of Septimus Warren
Smith. All the elements connecting Septimus and Clarissa in the
novel suggest that Septimus Warren Smith is Clarissa Dalloways
double. If she is a woman nearing death and fearing it, he is a
shell-shocked veteran who experienced death and now fears it.
Although they fear the same thing and have visions that are strikingly
similar, there is a world of difference between their voices and their
minds.
The devastating effect of the war is a poignant theme in
Woolfs fiction. Septimus Warren Smith is treated as a symbol of the
shell-shocked veteran suffering from delusions and developing an
inescapable sense of guilt about crimes he is not responsible for. He
stands for the thousands of war victims of his own kind.
Septimus expresses a sense of futility and alienation when he
thinks to himself that the world itself is without meaning or that
Shakespeare, the writer who used to inspire him in his early youth,
actually loathed humanity.
Septimus has been changed for ever by his war experience,
and it is significant that now the whole European cultural tradition and
literary heritage are to him as spiteful as modern everyday life. He
thinks to himself that the secret signal which one generation passes,
under disguise, to the next is loathing, hatred, despair. He finds no
meaning and no consolation in anything, so he creates his own inner
world to withdraw into (the world of his thoughts).
Septimus, who is marked by the most terrible scar of
modernity (the war), may also be seen as the symbol of the modern
individual whose self has fallen to pieces. In the novel he is the
eternal scapegoat, the eternal sufferer.
Please revise section 4.4 in case you have failed to give
answers comparable to those given to SAQ 5, SAQ 6, SAQ 7 and
SAQ8 in this section.
Bibliography
Joyce, James (1922)1946) Ulysses, Random House, New
York
Lodge, David (1992) The Art of Fiction, Penguin Books
(chapter 9 The Stream of Consciousness and chapter 10 Interior
Monologue)
Stevenson, Randall (1993) The British Novel Since the
Thirties, Institutul European, Iai (chapter 1 The Novel 1900-1930)
Woolf, Virginia (1925)1996) Mrs. Dalloway, Penguin Books
84
UNIT 5
MODERNIST ART NOVELS
Unit Outline
5
5.1
5.2
5.3
Unit Objectives
Modernist Art Novels
Virginia Woolfs Art Novel To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolfs Art Novel The Waves
James Joyces Art Novel A Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man
86
86
86
90
93
Summary
Key Terms
Glossary of Terms and Comments
Gallery of Personalities
SAA No. 5
Answers to SAQs
Bibliography
94
95
95
96
98
99
101
85
Unit objectives
After you have read through this unit you should be able to:
Identify the main aspects of modernist aesthetics in
Virginia Woolfs art novels To the Lighthouse and The
Waves
Explain the role of the artist in To the Lighthouse and The
Waves
Explain why To the Lighthouse and The Waves are
modernist art novels
Identify the main aspects of modernist aesthetics in
James Joyces A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Explain the significance of Stephen Dedaluss name in
James Joyces novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man
Explain the role of the artists formation in A Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man
Identify mythopoetic elements in A Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man
Cornwall Godrevy
Lighthouse
86
87
SAQ 1
Why does Lily Briscoe relate her art (painting) to Mrs.
Ramsay? What is the spirit of art?
88
SAQ 2
Read quote 19 in the Reader. Why is it so important that Lily
should reconcile her perceptions of and relations with Mr. and
Mrs. Ramsay, the two opposites?
89
SAQ 3
Read quote 20 in the Reader. What is the relevance of that
passage to the theme of the artist and his / her art? What is the
role of the artist and his / her art here?
SAQ 4
Read quote 21 in the Reader. Why is Bernard, Woolfs
mouthpiece in this novel so dissatisfied with his words and
phrases? What kind of art is he trying to achieve?
See also unit 3, subchapter 3.1 for possible connections between
Bernards problems and Woolfs quarrel with the realists in her
essay Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.
SAQ 5
This descriptive passage is actually the opening of The Waves.
You may also wish to read quote 22 in the Reader. Such
descriptive passages (the so-called interludes) alternate with
the episodes.
What are the stylistic features of this passage? (Is it narrative or
descriptive? Can you find enumerations, repetitions?) How can
you relate it to other literary genres (poetry) and other art forms
(painting, music)? Besides being descriptive of the first phase of
the cycle of the day, does this passage suggest the same phase
of any other cycles?
92
James Joyce
Watercolour by
Roger Cummiskey
SAQ 6
Read the passage above carefully. How can you relate the
stress laid by Stephen upon the soul of a man (actually his own
soul) to the title? What kind of portrait did Joyce intend to draw
in this book?
Summary
This unit presents three modernist art novels: Virginia Woolfs
To the Lighthouse and The Waves and James Joyces A Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man.
The first section looks into Woolfs novel To the Lighthouse,
treating it in terms of modernist aesthetics and focusing upon the
artist figure Lily Briscoe and her androgynous mind. The argument
also insists upon Woolfs interest in shape, pattern and design as
essential aspects of modernist art in this book.
The second section deals with Woolfs The Waves, continuing
the argument of the androgynous mind, which is embodied in the
figure of Bernard, the artist in this novel, and also Woolfs alter ego.
The Waves is also treated as a departure from the novel as a genre,
a play-poem in prose rather than a novel.
The third section dwells on James Joyces novel of the artists
formation A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It also makes a
point of the stylistic peculiarities of this art novel, which mingles
realism, symbolism, the epiphanic, poetry, music and prose in its
mythopoetic formula.
The next section will present D. H. Lawrences taboo breaking
novel of free indirect style The Rainbow.
94
Key Terms
Androgynous
Interlude
Episode
Mythopoeia
Gallery of Personalities
96
97
SAA No. 5
Read the passage below:
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 sea-bird. Her
long slender bare legs were delicate as a cranes and pure
save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself
as a sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and softhued as
ivory, were bared almost to the hips where the white fringes
of her drawers were like featherings of soft white down. Her
slateblue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and
dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a birds soft and
slight, slight and soft as the breast of some darkplumaged
dove. But her long fair hair was girlish, and touched with the
wonder of mortal beauty, her face.
This passage is taken from Chapter IV of A Portrait. To
many readers, this and the passages following it may be the
most beautiful ones in the whole book. Stephens vision as
he stands by the rivulet in the strand is an epiphany.
You may wish to give the lines of the passage the layout of
a poem. Even if you keep it as it is, you may read it as a
poem. What are the qualities of Joyces style here? Would
they justify the association of his prose with poetry? Do
those qualities invite associations with other art forms
(music, painting)? You may wish to use Joyces poem
She Weeps Over Rahoon illustrated by Roger
Cummiskey (above) to support your argument.
Motivate your answer in an essay.
Send the essay (not longer than three pages) to your
tutor.
Please note that the quality of your ideas and the
coherence of the essay will be 70 % of your grade, while
the accuracy of your language will count for 30 %.
98
Answers to SAQs
SAQ 1
The artist Lily Briscoe needs to give shape to shapelessness
because art means order. Everyday life is chaotic: experiences,
feelings and impressions are often contradictory. Masculinity and
femininity are also contradictory: while masculinity is abstract and
cold, femininity is warm, simple and concrete. However, art needs to
embrace contradictions and to render chaos in an orderly way. Art
needs pattern, form and design. Art needs to be both abstract and
concrete.
Lily feels that Mrs. Ramsay stands for this spirit of harmony
and reconciliation that her art needs.
SAQ 2
The contrast between selfish masculinity (embodied by Mr.
Ramsay) and generous kind femininity (embodied by his wife, Mrs.
Ramsay) is obvious in this passage. While Mr. Ramsay takes, Mrs.
Ramsay gives; while Mr. Ramsay is always moody, Mrs. Ramsay is
always blissful; while Mr. Ramsay brings chaos into their universe,
Mrs. Ramsay brings order, harmony and gives shape to
formlessness. However, it is also obvious that Lily has to reconcile
this contrast if she wants to fulfill her creative potential and
materialize it in her painting. If she fails to reconcile the two
Opposites, she will not finish her painting, and she will not
have her vision.
Please revise section 5.1 in case you have failed to give
answers comparable to those given to SAQ 1 and SAQ 2 in this
section.
SAQ 3
Bernard, the novelist in The Waves, feels that he is not exactly
himself, but in a way a self that unites the selves of his friends
(Percival, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny, Susan and Louis).
In the last 50 pages of the book, Bernard sums up, that is he
unfolds his own life, which is intertwined with the lives of his friends.
He also tries to find words and phrases that might capture their lives.
Like Lily, who is an artist in painting, Bernard, who is an artist in
words and phrases (that is literature), has to give meaning and shape
to the meaninglessness and shapelessness of life. Like Lily, who is
inspired by Mrs. Ramsay (the artist of life), Bernard is aware that art
and his artistic self need to make connections, to join people and
things together, to achieve harmony, and to turn mortality into
eternity through art.
In this passage, Bernard thinks of his own identity, but he finds
himself unable to tell it from the identities of his friends, three of
whom are females and three other males. He feels that he is both
male and female, both himself and the others.
99
SAQ 4
Woolf projected her own wish to write something new onto
the novelist Bernard in The Waves. Bernard stands for the artist who
struggles with novelty. His words and phrases follow no tradition in
literature, and he feels unsafe when he handles them.
The art he wishes to create is in fact the book we read: The
Waves. The nine interludes, and also the alternation of interludes
and episodes follow Woolfs design, which she put in Bernards
hands. His problems with style, technique and design echo Woolfs
problems with these aspects of novelty in the novel.
SAQ 5
An obvious innovative formal feature of The Waves is the
series of nine interludes in italics. Reading them through, one
realizes the parallelism of form and the effect of gradation in the
pursuit of the cycle of the sun from crack to sunrise, then through
midday and sunset to darkness in their openings. The interludes may
also be seen as a huge canvas, an abstract landscape, against
which the drama of human existence unfolds, which is probably why
Woolf visualized her characters as statues against the sky. Being
highly descriptive, pictorial, but also musical and poetic, the
interludes are a background radiating many connotations: while they
may read as descriptive of the progression of one day from dawn
until dark, they may also suggest other possible associations
between this cycle, the cycle of seasons and also the stages of
human life, which implies the connection between macro- and microcosmos, especially since the nine poetic landscapes of the interludes
counterpoint the nine episodes. However, the interludes may be
suggestive of a much larger span from genesis until apocalypse.
Please revise section 5.2 in case you have failed to give
answers comparable to those given to SAQ 3, SAQ 4 and SAQ 5
in this section.
SAQ 6
Joyces intention was to draw a spiritual portrait of his young
artist. Thus, the aspects of Stephen Dedalus profile focus upon his
soul. His solitude, his silence, exile, and cunning are characteristic
features of the modernist artist as marginalized by society, less
understood but a lot more sensitive, even more heroic, than the
average person. Stephens interest in sensory experiences and
received impressions, complemented by a very strong interest in
words and their meanings, complete his artistic profile.
When Stephen takes flight (i.e. when he leaves Ireland), he
leaves behind not only his country but also the nineteenth-century
novel and its realist mode.
Please revise section 5.3 in case you have failed to give
an answer comparable to the one given to SAQ 6 in this section.
100
Bibliography
Attridge, Derek (ed.) (1999) The Cambridge Companion to
James Joyce, CUP (Chapter 5 Stephen Hero, Dubliners , and A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Styles of Realism and Fantasy
by John Paul Riquelme)
Dowling, David (1985) Bloomsbury Aesthetics and the Novels
of Forster and Woolf, St. Martins Press, New York (Chapter 6 Woolf
and Painting and Chapter 7 Woolfs Novels see subchapters Mrs.
Dalloway and The Waves)
Joyce, James (1916)1993) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man, Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Seamus Deane,
Penguin Books
Woolf, Virginia (1927)1955) To the Lighthouse, Harcourt,
Brace & World, Inc., New York
Woolf, Virginia (1931)1950) The Waves, Harvest Books,
Harvest Edition
101
UNIT 6
FREE INDIRECT STYLE AND TABOO BREAKING
Unit Outline
6
6.1
6.2
6.3
6.4
102
Unit Objectives
D. H. Lawrences Novel of Sensibility
Taboo Breaking
Free Indirect Style
Antagonism and Oneness in The Rainbow
Symbolism in The Rainbow
103
103
104
106
108
112
Summary
Key Terms
Glossary of Terms and Comments
SAA No. 6
Answers to SAQs
Bibliography
114
115
115
116
116
119
Unit objectives
D. H. Lawrence
103
104
SAQ 1
Read the passage above carefully. What are Pauls feelings?
How can you relate them to taboo breaking?
105
106
SAQ 2
Read the passage above carefully. Can you draw a portrait of
Ursulas soul starting from this passage? How deep into the
characters intimacy did Lawrence go in such passages?
108
SAQ 3
Read the passage above carefully. How can you relate this
relation between husband and wife to the themes of antagonism/
difference - oneness and attraction - repulsion?
109
SAQ 4
Read quote 23 in the Reader. How and why do couple
relationships deteriorate in this new Brangwen generation?
SAQ 5
Read the passage above carefully. Why is the antagonism
between Ursula and Anton so fierce?
112
SAQ 6
Read the passage above carefully. How can you relate it to the
motif of the original bliss and the Fall?
SAQ 7
Read the passage above carefully. How can you relate this
description of Toms dead body to the biblical symbol of the
Flood?
Summary
This unit presents D. H. Lawrences contribution to the
modernist English novel in relation to both a forerunner such as
Thomas Hardy and to his contemporary writers Virginia Woolf and
James Joyce, who opted for apparently more daring techniques of
capturing subjectivity in their stream of consciousness experimental
novels.
However, Lawrences innovations concern both subject matter
and techniques. In terms of subject matter, his novels are daring,
even shocking explorations of sex, and the techniques deployed can
be regarded as a version of the subjective novel, a formula also
developed by Woolf and Joyce.
114
Key Terms
Novel of sensibility
Subjective novel
Taboo and taboo breaking
Free indirect style or discourse
Antagonism and oneness
Symbols:
- the rainbow
- the Garden of Eden
- the Fall
- the Flood
115
SAA 6
Explain the couples explorations of love, hate, sex, life and
death along the three Brangwen generations in The
Rainbow. What are the main elements and aspects of
modernity that make these explorations so dramatic in the
novel?
Send the answers to these questions to your tutor. Do
not take longer than three pages.
Please note that the quality of your ideas and the coherence
of the essay will be 70 % of your grade, while the accuracy of
your language will count for 30 %.
Answers to SAQs
SAQ 1
Sons and Lovers ends with Paul a derelict in the drift toward
death, which Lawrence thought of in more general terms as the
disease syndrome of his time and of the Europe of his time. But the
death drift and death worship are for Lawrence hideous distortions of
the natural relationship of death to life. The whole passage is
dominated by the dramatic tension between light and darkness,
which is symbolic of the tension between life and death internalized
by Paul. Eventually Paul decides to head towards the lights of the
city, overcoming his death drift. It is very significant that he does it
from this position of a person who is now, at the end and in the end,
free of and from everything and everybody: he has no religion, no
class to fit in, no family, no ties, no country, no prejudices and no firm
holds. This nakedness of everything and this homelessness are
symbolic of the characters freedom from all conventions and
constrictions, which can no longer affect him. Pauls mood and final
decision imply that he has transgressed all conventions and norms,
breaking all the taboos imposed by the system.
Please revise section 6.1 in case you have failed to give
an answer comparable to the one given to SAQ 1 in this section.
SAQ 2
It is clear that the voice which says ah and Oh the bliss! is
not wholly Lawrences or the narrators own, but really a partial
transcription of Ursulas, though this is not conventionally marked for
the reader by such phrases as she said or she thought. What these
very intimate thoughts and feelings suggest is that Ursulas is of a
116
highly sensitive nature. She craves for purity, which she sees
everywhere around her in nature. The problem is that this craving is
too intimate and too unconventional to be communicated aloud to a
world governed by conventions. The passage makes it very clear in
the last line, which sets the contrast between the genuineness of
Ursulas unconventional nature and the obligations imposed by social
conventions: She could scarcely tear herself away to go to school.
Please revise section 6.2 in case you have failed to give
an answer comparable to the one given to SAQ 2 in this section.
SAQ 3
Tom Brangwens apprehensions are not, after all, just the
timeless worries of husbands but unprecedented seismic shocks
brought about by the modernization of his world. Throughout his
life, from all points of view, Tom is forced to live with the radical
changes of modernity brought about by the pressures of
industrialization upon the natural life on the farm. Thomas Hardy had
thematized this devastating effect of an increasingly mechanized
society upon the individual before Lawrence. Lawrence was born
later only to see that those effects were turning the farmers life into
hell (Toms restlessness is a translation of hell).
The point Lawrence made is that these changes also affect
the life of the couple. Husbands feel marriage turn into a relationship
on the edge, dominated by contradictory feelings of attraction and
repulsion. Tom feels it to be so and relates it to the fact that nature is
less and less part of the couples life. That is why he constantly looks
for comfort by talking to the child, or to the dog between his knees
(unspoiled creatures). However, pressures never release him. He
feels the pressures of antagonism in his wifes foreignness, which
represents the distance between all people and especially between
the sexes. Toms apprehensions are, in other words, that distance
and foreignness may grow so sharp as to become unbridgeable
antagonism, radical estrangement and irrecoverable separation: She
belonged elsewhere. Any moment, she might be gone.
SAQ 4
To many readers and critics Anna and Will epitomize the first
modern couple. They seem to lose all ties with nature and tradition
that Tom and Lydia (the first couple in the book) still managed to
preserve. The tensions in this couple become so fierce that no
equilibrium can eventually be restored. In their couple antagonism
prevails. The man, having lost his inherited mastery, comes to
depend on satisfactions of sexuality as on a drug, while the woman
comes to resent what she will eventually regard as his infantile male
weakness. Anna and Will can never reclaim their honeymoon
fulfillment of passion, nor can they reconcile passion and sensuality.
So their lives dwindle away in disorganization and in minor
consummations and complaints. As the passage suggests, Will is a
fool, while Anna is his fierce opponent in the name of a newly gained
womanly power, which is a consequence of his loss of inherited
manly mastery.
117
SAQ 5
This fiery attack engenders an approach to the crisis of the
age, which had its roots (as Woolf pointed out in her essays and also
implied in her novels) in Victorian phallocentrism and Edwardian
materialism. The markedly feminine note brought about in the
English fiction of the early 20th century by Woolf is struck here by
Lawrences character Ursula. It is not that Anton would not be
anaristocrat. We are reminded in the same passage that he always
felt that by rights he belonged to the ruling aristocracy. The fact is
that he is nonetheless committed to the system attacked so
vehemently by Ursula. He is committed to the equality of dirt, that is
money and moreover to Rule Britannia (the British Empire and its
domination). It is this patriarchal imperial domination and
arrogance that Ursula so irrevocably rejects, flinging her embittered
disapproval of it in Antons stunned face.
Please revise section 6.3 in case you have failed to give
answers comparable to those given to SAQ 3, SAQ 4 and SAQ 5
in this section.
SAQ 6
In this passage, Anna and Will are complete and beyond the
touch of time or change, which is a state of atemporal and aspatial
perfection. Indeed, they look as if they were the first couple. To them
this moment feels like eternity, a timelessness enjoyed by Adam and
Eve in the Garden of Eden. However, the subsequent passages
plunge them gradually into time, change, exterior space and friction.
SAQ 7
In these passages, Tom Brangwen is essentially an
archetype: in death he is no longer the turn of the century-early 20th
century troubled man, but Everyman, not at all the conventional
individualist hero of English fiction. In death he has reached a state
of beyondness. He has transcended his own physicality and all the
torments that go with it.
Tom is the patriarch, paterfamilias of the novel, like
Noah. The generations that follow Tom: Anna (his daughter), Will
(Annas husband and Toms nephew), and Ursula (Toms
granddaughter) have their origin in him. Dying in the Flood, he gives
them the chance to people the earth after his death. This, and also
the fact that he has transcended sufferance, must be what makes
Anna almost glad.
Please revise section 6.4 in case you have failed to give
answers comparable to those given to SAQ 6 and SAQ 7 in this
section.
118
Bibliography
Lawrence, D. H. (1915)1971) The Rainbow (1915); rpt.
Harmondsworth: Penguin
Lodge, David (1996) The Practice of Writing. Essays,
Lectures, Reviews and a Diary, Secker and Warburg, London
(Chapter Sex and Creativity in the Young D. H. Lawrence)
Spilka, Mark (ed.) (1963) D. H. Lawrence, A Collection of
Critical Essays, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, N. J. (The
Originality of The Rainbow by Marvin Mudrick)
Stevenson, Randall (1993) The British Novel Since the
Thirties, Institutul European , Iai (Chapter 1 The Novel, 19001930)
119
Unit 7
THE MUSICALISATION OF FICTION, THE NOVEL OF IDEAS
Unit Outline
7
7.1
7.2
7.3
7.4
7.5
7.6
7.7
120
Unit objectives
Aldous Huxley A Lover of Science,
Literature and the Arts
Huxleys Characters
Satire and European Models
Continuing a Line of Tradition
Mark Rampions Point in Point Counter Point
Philip Quarles, the Novelist In the Novel
The Musicalisation of Fiction
A Novelists Novel of Ideas; The Pure Novel
121
121
Summary
Key Terms
Glossary and Comments
Gallery of Personalities
SAA No. 7
Answers to SAQs
Bibliography
130
131
131
132
133
134
135
121
122
124
124
125
126
129
Unit objectives
Aldous Huxley
121
122
SAQ 1
Read quote 15 in the Reader. This is an argument made by Mark
Rampion, one of the characters in Point Counter Point. Does
Rampions argument bear any relevance to the world you live in?
123
124
SAQ 2
Read quote 17 in the Reader. That is a discussion between Mark
Rampion and Philip Quarles, the novelist in the novel. Does
Rampion actually mean what he says? Compare his point in this
discussion with his notion of balance. If he does not mean it,
how can you explain the contradiction of these two points made
by the same character?
SAQ 3
What is Philip Quarless point of putting a novelist into a novel
and the effects of multiplying the novelists inside the novel?
126
Viking Eggeling
DiagonalSymphonie
127
SAQ 4
What is the counterpoint technique used by Huxley in this
discussion? What is the meaning of Rampions comments?
128
SAQ 5
How are characters conceived in the novel of ideas?
129
Filomena de
Andrade Booth
Counterpoint
Summary
This unit presents Aldous Huxleys contribution to the
modernist English novel. This contribution is the novel of ideas,
which Huxley saw as a formula enabling him to experiment with the
musicalisation of fiction. The formula Huxley envisaged was
symphonic literature, a pure novel.
This unit introduces you to Huxleys background, which relied
on sciences, literature and the arts. As he himself was a refined
intellectual, his characters belong to this category.
130
Key Terms
Satire
Irony
Counterpoint:
Musicalisation of fiction
Noncongenital novelist
Novel of ideas
Paradox
Counterpoint:
1. In music, counterpoint means the sounding together of two or
more melodic lines, each of which displays an individual and
differentiated melodic contour and rhythmic profile
2. In any of the other arts, counterpoint refers to a theme or element
that forms a contrast with another
Gallery of Personalities
Please note that the quality of your ideas and the coherence of
the essay will be 70 % of your grade, while the accuracy of your
language will count for 30 %.
133
Answers to SAQs
SAQ 1
Rampion finds himself surrounded by people who are less
than fully human. To his mind, those who deny their humanity are
perverts. In the context of Point Counter Point, Rampions remark is
justifiable, all the more so as the audience to whom he makes his
point are Burlap, Quarles, and Spandrell, who are perverts.
At the same time, Rampions point here can be seen as a
critique of the novel of ideas, related as it is to the sterility of
modernity and of modern ideas in particular.
Please revise section 7.2 in case you have failed to give
an answer comparable to the one given to SAQ 1 in this section.
SAQ 2
Rampions point here leads to the novel Brave New World.
There is an incongruity between his remark of living dualistically as
robots at work, on the one hand, and as human beings for the rest of
the time, on the other. This point actually expresses the opposite of
Rampions ideal of the perfect harmony the individuals should
achieve within and without in order to maintain their human status.
Why does Rampion make this point to Quarles? The answer
may be that Rampion objects to any form of dehumanization, and
that he considers Quarless cold and abstract intellectualism to be
one of these forms leading to robotism.
Please revise section 7.4 in case you have failed to give
an answer comparable to the one given to SAQ 2 in this section.
SAQ 3
Philips point of putting a novelist into a novel reflects on
Huxleys own technique of doing the same thing in Point Counter
Point. He puts Philip into Point Counter Point, just as Philip (the
novelist inside the novel) plans to do in his projected novel. The fact
is that Philips point is to multiply the novelists he puts into his
projected novel, which creates a special effect. This implies going as
deep and as far as possible until you create an effect of the so-called
Chinese boxes (box within box within box within box within box, etc.,
with virtually no end or limits).
The implications are manifold: just one novelist (that is one
reflective mind) cannot do justice to the complexity of reality;
subjectivities and scientific backgrounds differ, but at the same time
subjectivities are limited to one field, and findings are partial. Truths
cannot be fixed. That is why the novel needs many points of view
(novelists) which can multiply the approaches and perspectives.
Philips point of multiplying the novelists inside his novel is also
self-ironical and critical in that it exposes the relativity of truth and the
fragility of story-telling with which the novel so painfully struggles.
Please revise section 7.5 in case you have failed to give
an answer comparable to the one given to SAQ 3 in this section.
134
SAQ 4
Spandrell is a distinctly Freudian conception. First, plainly,
there is his Oedipus complex. Very significantly, he is also driven
by death instincts. According to Freud, death instincts further the
most universal endeavour of all living substance namely to return to
a state of inactivity. In this confrontation between Spandrell and
Rampion, music provides Spandrell with an abstraction.
On the other hand, Rampion is a pagan, natural spirit, a
worshipper of life. To him, abstraction (here the non-physical
abstraction of music) is dangerous.
It is obvious that Mark Rampion and Spandrell are the
opposite of each other. So are their ideas and attitudes to life. The
argument between the two is the dramatization of a debate within
Huxley himself. A part of the author that desires life (Rampions
point) is checked by another part that aspires to a heaven of inactivity
(Spandrells point supported by Beethovens Quartet). Thus Point
Counter Point represents Huxleys own crisis.
Please revise section 7.6 in case you have failed to give
an answer comparable to the one given to SAQ 4 in this section.
SAQ 5
The chief characteristic of the novel of ideas is that its
characters are embodiments of ideas. Indeed, throughout Point
Counter Point the reader gets the feeling that characters are
validated by their ideas.
However, since the ideas of all characters clash, it is impossible
to locate the novelists own philosophy in a single character.
To fail to be a born novelist does not mean to fail to be a
novelist at all. The difference is that while the born or congenital
novelist is an incessant spinner of tales largely for their own sake,
the noncongenital novelist or modern satirical novelist of ideas is an
intellectually superior being. The noncongenital novelist successfully
simulates the behaviour of a novelist to dramatize his themes and
thus gain an audience. Anyway, the audience targeted by this kind of
novel can only be an intellectual elite.
Please revise section 7.7 in case you have failed to give
an answer comparable to the one given to SAQ 5 in this section.
Bibliography
Ferns, C.S. (1980) Aldous Huxley: Novelist, The Athlone
Press, London (Chapter 4 Point Counter Point and Eyeless in Gaza)
Huxley, Aldous (1994) Point Counter Point, Penguin Books
Meckier, Jerome (ed.) (1995) Critical Essays on Aldous
Huxley, E. G. K. Hall & Co., New York (Introduction: Aldous Huxley
and the Congenital Novelists: New Ideas about the Novel of Ideas by
Jerome Meckier and Accepting the Universe: The Rampion
Hypothesis in Point Counter Point and Island by Keith May)
135
UNIT 8
FROM MODERNISM TO POSTMODERNISM
Unit Outline
8
8.1
8.2
8.2.1
8.2.2
8.3
8.3.1
8.3.2
8.3.3
8.4
8.4.1
8.4.2
8.4.3
8.4.4
8.4.5
8.4.6
8.5
8.5.1
8.5.2
8.5.3
136
137
137
138
139
139
140
142
143
143
143
144
Summary
Key Concepts
Glossary of Terms and Comments
Gallery of Personalities
SAA No. 8
Answers to SAQs
Bibliography
153
153
154
155
155
155
157
144
147
147
148
148
150
151
151
152
153
Unit objectives
After you have completed the study of this unit you should be
able to:
Identify postmodernism as a change and a new mode
Identify the main aspects of postmodernist aesthetics:
- image, copy, surface, spectacle
- collage / montage
Explain the notion of postmodernism of play
Identify intertext, metafiction, alternative worlds and
heterotopia as main aspects of postmodernism of
play
Explain how these aspects work in John Fowless The
French Lieutenants Woman, The Magus and in
David Lodges Nice Work
Identify godgames and indefinite ending in John
Foweless novel The Magus
Explain the effects of these strategies in The Magus
Identify authorial tricks and multiple endings in The
French Lieutenants Woman
Explain the effects of these strategies
Explain why David Lodges Nice Work can be
considered a campus novel
Identify the refined intelligent humour and irony in David
Lodges Nice Work
Explain Lodges point of writing as essentially
communication and art as delight
139
140
141
SAQ 1
Examine David Salles Tight as Houses (1980), which is an
illustration of collage (see picture above). What elements of
collage can you distinguish there?
142
8.3.2. Metafiction
Metafiction is a mode of writing that comments on its own
activities. This implies that metafiction is a self-reflexive mode.
Literature is said to be self-reflexive when the author
deliberately draws attention to the fictional nature of the work.
This mode is by no means new. It was used by Shakespeare
in his play Hamlet, when Prince Hamlet comments upon the actors
tendency to overact in the play within a play he has arranged.
Metafictional techniques were less frequently employed in the
later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but have returned to be
self-consciously and insistently used in many recent novels. John
Fowless The Magus, The French Lieutenants Woman and David
Lodges Nice Work, to be discussed in the next subchapters, are
examples of the metafictional mode in contemporary British fiction.
143
144
SAQ 2
Are there alternative worlds in The Magus? Relate this concept to
Conchiss godgame.
SAQ 3
What are the elements of play, process, performance, happening
and participation used by Fowles in The Magus?
SAQ 4
Why does this unresolved ending of The Magus leave readers
undecided?
SAQ 5
Now that you have read the Metafiction subchapter (8.3.2),
answer the following question: which of the metafictional
techniques listed there did Fowles use in the passage quoted
above? What is the effect of this technique?
149
SAQ 6
How do the multiple endings in The French Lieutenants Woman
engage the reader? Relate Fowless multiple endings with
postmodernist indeterminacy and refusal of fixity.
SAQ 7
What is the effect of these two framing mottos?
Summary
This unit introduces you to postmodernism and its aesthetics,
pointing both to what connects postmodernism to modernism and
what separates the two modes.
The postmodernism of play is a version of postmodernism that
uses a lot of elements characteristic of this contemporary mode of
writing. Thus, intertextuality and metafiction emphasize the
playfulness of postmodernist texts.
Postmodernism of play is illustrated by novels acknowledged
to be representative of their kind: John Fowless The Magus and The
French Lieutenants Woman and David Lodges Nice Work.
By exploring the ways in which these contemporary British
writers make use of intertextuality and metafiction in their novels, this
unit traces the trends in late 20th century fiction, which reshaped this
genre and gave it the looks it has today.
Key Terms
154
Gallery of Personalities
SAA No. 8
Comment upon the playfulness of John Fowless The Magus,
French Lieutenants Woman and David Lodges Nice Work in
the light of the remark given below:
The commentary provided by self-conscious fiction carries
the more or less explicit message: this is make-believe or
this is a play.
(From Patricia Waugh, Metafiction. The Theory and Practice
of Self-Conscious Fiction)
Send your essay (not longer than four pages) to your
tutor.
Please note that the quality of your ideas and the coherence
of the essay will be 70 % of your grade, while the accuracy of
your language will count for 30 %.
Answers to SAQs
SAQ 1
The technique used by David Salle in this collage is that of
colliding and superimposing images. Thus, the viewers eyes are
invited to trace a pattern out of superimposed and even colliding
patterns. What the eyes can discern is not visible at first sight. The
eyes need some re-adjustment to this superimposition and collision
of a naked woman lying in what seems to be a deliberately darker
background and the suggestion of a silhouette in white standing in
the foreground. There is actually a web of traces in the foreground
that suggests that the silhouette may be not just something else but
other things as well.
Please revise section 8.2.2 in case you have failed to give
an answer comparable to the one given to SAQ 1 in this section.
155
SAQ 2
It is obvious that Conchis plays with Urfe a godgame in
which he performs the role of God (actually a puppeteer and an
illusionist), and Urfe the role of a pawn on his chess board or else an
actor in his theatre or even a puppet in Conchiss hands.
Conchis is also the director of this theatre or performance,
which is essentially postmodernist in the sense that it plays with
Urfes need to distinguish between reality and illusion. Conchiss
godgame aims to blur this distinction. The development of the plot
in The Magus so far reaches a point at which Urfe, a 20th century
man, finds himself in the 17th century without knowing how and when
he got there. The shock both he and the readers are given at this
point is that nothing is certain or fixed, the world we inhabit even less
so.
SAQ 3
Conchis continues to play his godgame with Urfe. Besides
blurring the distinction between reality and illusion, his godgame
also blurs the distinction between the actors active performance and
the spectators passive watching. In Conchiss godgame, which
seems to be a series of playful improvisations (happenings), both
actors and spectators are performers.
Thus, Conchiss godgame implies a high degree of
participation both on the part of his hired actors (though Urfe and
the readers find out that they are actors only later, and not even that
is certain!) and on the part of Urfe and even the readers. Readers
participate mainly in the sense that they tend to identify with Urfe in
this strange scenario of initiation.
SAQ 4
The ending of The Magus is an excellent example of
postmodernist indeterminacy. The indeterminacy of the ending only
reinforces the playfulness of the whole text. In other words, a
postmodernist like Fowles could not have made a point of
indeterminacy if he had provided the readers with a determinate
ending. This would have spoiled the whole point of the godgame
and Urfes appreciation of it.
Please revise section 8.4.1 in case you have failed to give
answers comparable to those given to SAQ 2, SAQ 3 and SAQ 4
in this section.
SAQ 5
Authorial intrusion is a metafictional element. Thus, Fowless
postmodernist novel The French Lieutenants Woman implies,
reminds us, and then reinforces that authors do not simply invent
novels. Authors work through linguistic, artistic and cultural
conventions. Therefore, they are themselves invented by readers
who thus become authors working through linguistic, artistic and
cultural conventions.
Please revise section 8.4.5 in case you have failed to give
an answer comparable to the one given to SAQ 5 in this section.
156
SAQ 6
Metafictional novelists such as Fowles make the readers
explicitly aware of their role as players. The reader of The French
Lieutenants Woman, having to choose an ending, becomes a player
in the game.
The multiple endings in The French Lieutenants Woman also
reinforce the postmodernist indeterminacy and refusal of fixity, which
opposes the traditional realist view of clear resolution (one ending,
which is the solution of plot, no matter how intricate plot may be).
Please revise section 8.4.6 in case you have failed to give
an answer comparable to the one given to SAQ 6 in this section.
SAQ 7
Lodge submits himself to a kind of literary ventriloquism, in
which he lets Bronts pen underwrite his text, provide or fail to
provide the clues and give the reader as much liberty to travel
through borderless worlds as one may take. The author himself takes
the liberty to write his text as an intertext or palimpsest of
intersecting layers of writing.
Intertextuality, an essential aspect of metafiction, reinforces
the idea that literary fiction is an intersection of multiple alternative
worlds. Literary fiction is, in other words, a game of imagination.
Please revise section 8.5.2 in case you have failed to give
an answer comparable to the one given to SAQ 7 in this section.
Bibliography
Fowles, John (1969) The French Lieutenants Woman,
London, Cape
Fowles, John (1977) The Magus, London, Cape
Harvey, David (1990) The Condition of Postmodernity, An
Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Cambridge MA & Oxford
UK: Blackwell
Lodge, David (1990) Nice Work, Penguin Books
Waugh, Patricia (1984) Metafiction: The Theory and Practice
of Self-conscious Fiction, London, Methuen (Chapters Worlds of
Words: the Fantastic as an Alternative World, Fictionality and
Context: from Role-playing to Language Games)
http://lidiavianu.scriptmania.com/david_lodge.htm
157
Selective Bibliography
SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Burlui, Irina, Lectures in 20th Century British Literature,
Editura Universitii Al. I. Cuza, Iai, 1980
2. Clinescu, Matei, Cele cinci fee ale modernitii.
Modernism, Avangard, Decaden, Kitsch, Postmodernism, Editura
Univers, Bucureti, 1995
3. Cuitaru, Codrin Liviu, The Victorian Novel. A Course in the
19th Century English Novel. A Critical Approach, Al. I. Cuza
University Press, Iai, 2004
4. Ford, Boris (ed.), The New Pelican Guide to English
Literature, vol. 7, From James to Eliot, Penguin Books, 1990 (see
Part I, The Social and Intellectual Background, Virginia Woolf: The
Theory and Practice of Fiction, E. M. Forsters Good Influence,
The Consistency of James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence and Women in
Love)
5. Galea, Ileana, Victorianism and Literature, Editura Dacia,
Cluj-Napoca, 1996
6. Miroiu, Mihai, Virginia Woolf, Editura Univers, Bucureti,
1997
7. Vere, Grigore, Charles Dickens, Editura Albatros,
Bucureti, 1984
158
159
160
Quote 2
Daylight began to forsake the red room; it was past four
oclock, and the beclouded afternoon was tending to drear twilight. I
heard the rain still beating continuously on the staircase window, and
the wind howling in the grove behind the hall; I grew by degrees cold
as a stone, and then my courage sank. My habitual mood of
humiliation, self-doubt, forlorn depression, fell damp on the embers
of my decaying ire. All said I was wicked, and perhaps I might be so:
what thought had I been but just conceiving of starving myself to
death? That certainly was a crime: and was I fit to die? Or was the
vault under the chancel of Gateshead Church an inviting bourne? In
such vault I had been told did Mr Reed lie buried; and led by this
thought to recall his idea, I dwelt on it with gathering dread. I could
not remember him, but I knew that he was my own uncle my
mothers brother that he had taken me while a parentless infant to
his house; and that in his last moments he had required a promise of
Mrs Reed that she would rear and maintain me as one of her own
children. Mrs Reed had probably considered that she had kept this
promise; and so she had, I dare say, as well as her nature would
permit her: but how could she really like an interloper, not of her
race, and unconnected with her, after her husbands death, by any
tie? It must have been most irksome to find herself bound by a hardwrung pledge to stand in the stead of a parent to a strange child she
could not love, and to see an uncongenial alien permanently
intruded on her own family group.
A singular notion dawned upon me. I doubted not never
doubted that if Mr Reed had been alive he would have treated me
kindly; and now, as I sat looking at the white bed and overshadowed
walls occasionally also turning a fascinated eye towards the dimly
gleaming mirror I began to recall what I had heard of dead men,
troubled in their graves by the violation of their last wishes, revisiting
the earth to punish the perjured and avenge the oppressed; and I
thought Mr Reeds spirit, harassed by the wrongs of his sisters child,
might quit its abode whether in the church vault or in the unknown
world of the departed and rise before me in this chamber. I wiped
my tears and hushed my sobs, fearful lest any sign of violent grief
might waken a preternatural voice to comfort me, or elicit from the
gloom some haloed face, bending over me with strange pity. This
idea, consolatory in theory, I felt would be terrible if realized: with all
my might I endeavoured to stifle it I endeavoured to be firm.
Shaking my hair from my eyes, I lifted my head and tried to look
boldly round the dark room; at this moment a light gleamed on the
wall. Was it, I asked myself, a ray from the moon penetrating some
aperture in the blind? No; moonlight was still, and this stirred; while I
gazed, it glided up to the ceiling and quivered over my head. I can
now conjecture readily that this streak of light was, in all likelihood, a
gleam from a lantern carried by some one across the lawn; but then,
prepared as my mind was for horror, shaken as my nerves were by
agitation, I thought the swift-darting beam was a herald of some
coming vision from another world. My heart beat thick, my head grew
161
162
Quote 5
This time, I remembered I was lying in the oak closet, and I
heard distinctly the gusty wind, and the driving of the snow; I heard,
also, the fir bough repeat its teasing sound, and described it to the
right cause: but it annoyed me so much, that I resolved to silence it,
if possible; and, I thought, I rose and endeavoured to unhasp the
casement. The hook was soldered into the staple: a circumstance
observed by me when awake, but forgotten. I must stop it,
nevertheless! I muttered, knocking my knuckles through the glass,
and stretching an arm out to seize the importunate branch; instead
of which, my fingers closed on the fingers of a little, ice-cold hand!
The intense horror of nightmare came over me: I tried to draw back
my arm, but the hand clung to it, and a most melancholy voice
sobbed, Let me in let me in! Who are you? I asked, struggling,
meanwhile, to disengage myself. Catherine Linton, it replied,
shiveringly
(Emily Bront, Wuthering Heights)
Quote 6
This fertile and sheltered tract of country, in which the fields
are never brown and the springs never dry, is bounded on the south
by the bold chalk ridge that embraces the prominences of
Hambledon Hill, Bulbarrow, Nettlecombe-Tout, Dogbury, High Stoy,
and Bubb Down. The traveller from the coast, who, after plodding
northward for a score of miles over calcareous downs and cornlands, suddenly reaches the verge of one of these escarpments, is
surprised and delighted to behold, extended like a map beneath him,
a country differing absolutely from that which he has passed
through. Behind him the hills are open, the sun blazes down upon
fields so large as to give an unenclosed character to the landscape,
the lanes are white, the hedges low and plashed, the atmosphere
colourless. Here, in the valley, the world seems to be constructed
upon a smaller and more delicate scale; the fields are mere
paddocks, so reduced that from this height their hedgerows appear a
network of dark green threads overspreading the paler green of the
grass. The atmosphere beneath is languorous, and is so tinged with
azure that what artists call the middle distance partakes also of that
hue, while the horizon beyond is of the deepest ultramarine. Arable
lands are few and limited; with but slight exceptions the prospect is a
broad rich mass of grass and trees, mantling minor hills and dales
within the major. Such is the Vale of Blackmoor.
(Thomas Hardy, Tess of the dUrbervilles)
163
Quote 7
They had proceeded thus gropingly two or three miles further
when on a sudden Clare became conscious of some vast erection
close in his front, rising sheer from the grass. They had almost struck
themselves against it.
What monstrous place is this? said Angel.
It hums, said she.Hearken!
He listened. The wind, playing upon the edifice, produced a
booming tune, like the note of some gigantic one-stringed harp. No
other sound came from it, and lifting his hand and advancing a step
or two, Clare felt the vertical surface of the structure. It seemed to be
of solid stone, without joint or moulding. Carrying his fingers onward
he found that what he had come in contact with was a colossal
rectangular pillar; by stretching out his left hand he could feel a
similar one adjoining. At an indefinite height overhead something
made the black sky blacker, which had the semblance of a vast
architrave uniting the pillars horizontally. They carefully entered
beneath and between; the surfaces echoed their soft rustle; but they
seemed to be still out of doors. The place was roofless. Tess drew
her breath fearfully, and Angel, perplexed, said What can it be?
//
It is Stonehenge! said Clare.
The heathen temple, you mean?
Yes, older than the centuries; older than the dUrbervilles!
Well, what shall we do, darling? We may find shelter further on. But
Tess, really tired by this time, flung herself upon a slab that lay close
at hand, and was sheltered from the wind by a pillar. //
I dont want to go any further, Angel, she said stretching out
her hand for his. //
In the far north-east sky he could see between the pillars a
level streak of light. //
Did they sacrifice to God here? asked she.
No, said he.
Who to?
I believe to the sun. //
In a minute or two her breathing became more regular, her
clasp of his hand relaxed, and she fell asleep. // The eastward
pillars and their architraves stood up blackly against the light, and
the great flame-shaped Sun-stone beyond them; and the stone of
sacrifice midway. Presently the night died out, and the quivering little
pools in the cup-like hollows of the stones lay still. At the same time
something seemed to move on the verge of the dip eastward a
mere dot. It was the head of a man approaching them from the
hollow beyond the Sun-stone. Clare wished they had gone onward,
but in the circumstances decided to remain quiet. The figure came
straight towards the circle of pillars in which they were.
164
//
The dawn shone full on the front of the man westward, and
Clare could discern from this that he was tall, and walked as if
trained. They all closed in with evident purpose. Her story then was
true! Springing to his feet, he looked around for a weapon, loose
stone, means of escape, anything. By this time the nearest man was
upon him.
It is no use, sir, he said. There are sixteen of us on the Plain,
and the whole country is reared.
Let her finish her sleep! he implored in a whisper of the men
as they gathered round.
//
What is it, Angel? she said, starting up. Have they come for
me?
Yes, dearest, he said. They have come.
It is as it should be, she murmured. Angel, I am almost glad
yes, glad! This happiness could not have lasted. It was too much. I
have had enough; and now I shall not live for you to despise me!
She stood up, shook herself, and went forward, neither of the men
having moved. I am ready, she said quietly.
(Thomas Hardy, Tess of the dUrbervilles)
165
UNIT 2
THE DAWN OF A NEW AGE: JOSEPH CONRAD AND HENRY
JAMES
Quote 8
166
About three in the morning some large fish leaped, and the
loud splash made me jump as though a gun had been fired. When
the sun rose there was a white fog, very warm and clammy, and
more blinding than the night. It did not shift or drive; it was just there,
standing all round you like something solid. At eight or nine,
perhaps, it lifted as a shutter lifts. We had a glimpse of the towering
multitude of trees, of the immense matted jungle, with the blazing
little ball of the sun hanging over it all perfectly still and then the
white shutter came down again, smoothly, as if sliding in greased
grooves. I ordered the chain, which had begun to heave in, to be
paid out again. Before it stopped running with a muffled rattle, a cry,
a very loud cry, as if of infinited desolation, soared slowly in the
opaque air. It ceased. A complaining clamour, modulated in savage
discords, filled our ears. The sheer unexpectedness of it made my
hair stir under my cap. It dont know how it struck the others; to me it
seemed as though the mist itself had screamed, so suddenly, and
apparently from all sides at once, did this tumultuous and mournful
uproar arise. It culminated in a hurried outbreak of almost intolerably
excessive shrieking, which stopped short, leaving us stiffened in a
variety of silly attitudes, and obstinately listening to the nearly as
appalling and excessive silence. Good God! What is the meaning
stammered at my elbow one of the pilgrims, - a little fat man, with
sandy hair and red whiskers, who wore side-spring boots, and pink
pyjamas tucked into his socks. Two others remained open-mouthed
a whole minute, then dashed into the little cabin, to rush out
incontinently and stand darting scared glances, with Winchesters at
ready in their hands. What we could see was just the steamer we
were on, her outlines blurred as though she had been on the point of
dissolving, and a misty strip of water, perhaps two feet broad, around
her and that was all. The rest of the world was nowhere, as far as
our eyes and ears were concerned. Just nowhere. Gone,
disappeared; swept off without leaving a whisper or a shadow
behind.
(Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness)
167
UNIT 4
MAJOR CONTRIBUTIONS TO MODERNIST BRITISH FICTION
Quote 10
In peoples eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the
bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans,
sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in
the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some
aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this
moment of June.
(Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway)
Quote 11
And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning fresh
as if issued to children on a beach.
What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to
her when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear
now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at
Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, like the flap of a
wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of
eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing
there at the open window, that something awful was about to
happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding
off them and the rooks rising, falling
(Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway)
Quote 12
Suddenly Mrs. Coates looked up into the sky. The sound of
an aeroplane bored ominously into the ears of the crowd. There it
was coming over the trees, letting out white smoke from behind,
which curled and twisted, actually writing something! making letters
in the sky! Everyone looked up.
(Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway)
168
Quote 13
The clouds to which the letters E, G, or L had attached
themselves moved freely, as if destined to cross from West to East
on a mission of the greatest importance which would never be
revealed, and yet certainly so it was a mission of the greatest
importance. Then suddenly, as a train comes out of a tunnel, the
aeroplane rushed out of the clouds again, the sound boring into the
ears of all people in the Mall, in the Green Park, in Piccadilly, in
Regent Street, in Regents Park, and the bar of smoke curved
behind and it dropped down, and it soared up and wrote one letter
after another but what word was it writing?
(Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway)
Quote 14
What parallel course did Bloom and Stephen follow
returning? Staring united both at normal walking pace they followed
in the order named Lower and Middle Gardiner streets and Mountjoy
square, west: then, at reduced pace, each bearing left, Gardiners
place by an inadvertence as far as the corner of Temple street,
north: then at reduced pace with interruptions of halt, bearing right,
Temple street, north, as far as Hardwicke place. Approaching,
disparate, at relaxed
walking pace they crossed both the circus before Georges church
diametrically, the chord in any circle being less than the arc which it
subtends.
Of what did the duumvirate deliberate during their itinerary?
Pot Pourri of Joycean Music, literature, Ireland, Dublin, Paris, friendship, woman,
prostitution, diet, the influence of gaslight or the light of arc and
Images
glowlamps on the growth of adjoining paraheliotropic trees, exposed
by Roger
corporation emergency dustbuckets, the Roman catholic church,
Cummiskey
ecclesiastical celibacy, the Irish nation, jesuit education, careers, the
study of medicine, the past day, the maleficent influence of
presabbath, Stephens collapse.
(James Joyce, Ulysses)
Quote 15
- Sad occasions, Mr Kernan began politely.
Mr Bloom closed his eyes and sadly twice bowed his head.
The others are putting on their hats, Mr Kernan said. I
suppose we can do so too. We are the last. This cemetery is a
treacherous place.
They covered their heads.
- The reverend gentleman read the service too quickly, dont
you think? Mr Kernan said with reproof.
Mr Bloom nodded gravely, looking in the quick bloodshot
eyes. Secret eyes, secret searching eyes. Mason, I think: not sure.
Beside him again. We are the last. In the same boat. Hope hell say
something else.
169
Bloomsday Reenacted
Watercolour by
Roger Cummiskey
Mr Kerman added:
- The service of the Irish church, used in Mount Jerome, is
simpler, more impressive, I must say.
Mr Bloom gave prudent assent. The language of course was
another thing.
Mr Kernan said with solemnity:
I am the resurrection and the life. That touches a mans
inmost heart.
- It does, Mr Bloom said.
Your heart perhaps but what price the fellow in the six feet by
two with his toes to the daisies? No touching that. Seat of the
affections. Broken heart. A pump after all, pumping thousands of
gallons of blood every day. One fine day it gets bunged up and there
you are. Lots of them lying around here: lungs, hearts, livers. Old
rusty pumps: damn the thing else. The resurrection and the life.
Once you are dead you are dead.
(James Joyce, Ulysses)
Quote 16
Yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my
breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are
flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his
life and the sun shines for you today yes
Bella
Watercolour
by Roger
Cummiskey
Quote 17
After he woke me up last night same dream or was it? Wait.
Open hallway. Street of harlots. Remember. Haroun al Raschid. I am
almosting it. That man led me, spoke. I was not afraid. The melon he
had he held against my face. Smiled: creamfruit smell. That was the
rule, said. In. Come. Red carpet spread. You will see who.
(James Joyce, Ulysses)
170
Quote 18
Men must not cut down trees. There is a God. (He noted
such revelations on the backs of envelopes.) Change the world. No
one kills from hatred. Make it known (he wrote it down). He waited.
He listened. A sparrow perched on the railing opposite chirped
Septimus, Septimus, four or five times over and went on, drawing its
notes out, to sing freshly and piercingly in Greek words how there is
no crime and, joined by another sparrow, they sang in voices
prolonged and piercing in Greek words, from trees in the meadow of
life beyond a river where the dead walk, how there is no death.
171
UNIT 5
MODERNIST ART NOVELS
Quote 19
But with Mr. Ramsay bearing down on her, she could do
nothing. Every time he approached he was walking up and down
the terrace ruin approached, chaos approached. She could not
paint. She stopped, she turned; she took up this rag; she squeezed
that tube. But all she did was to ward him off a moment. He made it
impossible for her to do anything.
You shant touch your canvas, he seemed to say, bearing
down on her, till youve given me what I want of you. Here he was,
close upon her again, greedy, distraught. Well, thought Lily in despair,
letting her right hand fall at her side, it would be simpler then to have
it over. Surely, she could imitate from recollection the glow, the
rhapsody, the self-surrender, she had seen on so many womens
faces (on Mrs. Ramsays, for instance) when on some occasion like
this they blazed up she could remember the look on Mrs.
Ramsays face into a rupture of sympathy, of delight in the
reward they had, which, though the reason of it escaped her,
evidently conferred on them the most supreme bliss of which
human nature was capable. Here he was, stopped by her side. She
would give him what she could.
(Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse)
Quote 20
And now I ask, Who am I? I have been talking of Bernard,
Neville, Jinny, Susan, Rhoda and Louis. Am I all of them? Am I one
and distinct? I do not know. We sat here together. But now Percival
is dead; and Rhoda is dead; we are divided; we are not here. Yet I
cannot find any obstacle separating us. There is no division
between me and them. As I talked I felt I am you. This difference
we make so much of, this identity we so feverishly cherish, was
overcome. []Here on my brow is the blow I got when Percival fell.
Here on the nape on my neck is the kiss Jinny gave Louis. My eyes
fill with Susans tears. I see far away, quivering like a gold thread,
the pillar Rhoda saw, and feel the rush of the wind of her flight when
she leapt.
(Virginia Woolf, The Waves)
172
Quote 21
A phrase. An imperfect phrase. And what are phrases?
They have left me very little to lay on the table, beside Susans
hand; to take from my pocket, with Nevilles credentials. I am not an
authority on law, or medicine, or finance. I am wrapped round with
phrases, like damp straw; I glow, phosphorescent. And each of you
feels when I speak, I am lit up, I am glowing. The little boys used to
feel Thats a good one, thats a good one, as the phrases bubbled
up from my lips under the elm trees in the playing- fields. They too
bubbled up; they also escaped with my phrases.
173
UNIT 6
FREE INDIRECT STYLE AND TABOO BREAKING
Quote 23
Youve a right to do as I want, he cried.
Fool! she answered. Fool!
Ill let you know whos master, he cried.
Fool! she answered. Fool! Ive known my own father, who
could put a dozen of you in his pipe and push them down with his
finger-end. Dont I know what a fool you are!
(D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow)
Quote 24
And I will establish my covenant with you; neither shall all
flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood; neither shall there
any more be a flood to destroy the earth.
[12] And God said, This is the token of the covenant which I
make between me and you and every living creature that is with you,
for perpetual generations:
[13] I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of
a covenant between me and the earth.
[14] And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the
earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud:
[15] And I will remember my covenant, which is between me
and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall no
more become a flood to destroy all flesh.
[16] And the bow shall be in the cloud; and I will look upon it,
that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and
every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth.
[17] And God said unto Noah, This is the token of the
covenant, which I have established between me and all flesh that is
upon the earth.
(Book of Genesis, Chapter 9, King James version)
In everything she saw she grasped and groped to find the
creation of the living God, instead of the old, hard barren form of
bygone living. Sometimes great terror possessed her. Sometimes
she lost touch, she lost her feeling, she could only know the old
horror of the husk which bound in her and all mankind. They were all
in prison, they were all going mad.
She saw the stiffened bodies of the colliers, which seemed
already enclosed in a coffin, she saw their unchanging eyes, the
eyes of those who are buried alive: she saw the hard, cutting edges
of the new houses, which seemed to spread over the hillside in their
insentient triumph, the triumphs of horrible, amorphous angles and
straight lines, the expression of corruption triumphant and
unopposed, corruption so pure that it is hard and brittle: she saw the
dun atmosphere over the blackened hills opposite, the dark blotches
174
Rainbow of Wishes
By Yakovlev
Alexander
175
UNIT 7
THE MUSICALISATION OF FICTION, THE NOVEL OF IDEAS
Quote 25
And all perverted in the same way by trying to be nonhuman. Non-humanly religious, non-humanly moral, non-humanly
intellectual and scientific, non-humanly specialized and efficient,
non-humanly the business man, non-humanly avaricious and
property-loving, non-humanly lascivious and Don Juanesque, nonhumanly the conscious individual even in love. All perverts.
Perverted towards goodness or badness, towards spirit or flesh but
always away from the central norm, always away from humanity.
The worlds an asylum of perverts.
(Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point)
Quote 26
a creature on a tight rope, walking delicately, equilibrated,
with mind and consciousness and spirit at one end of the balancing
pole, and body and instinct and all thats unconscious and earthy
and mysterious at the other. Balanced.
(Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point)
Quote 27
The root of the evils in the individual psychology; so its there
youd have to begin. The first step would be to make people live
dualistically, in two compartments. In one compartment as
industrialized workers, in the other as human beings. As idiots and
machines for eight hours out of every twenty-four and real human
beings for the rest.
(Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point)
176
Quote 28
It started four or five months ago as a visual image. A woman
stands at the end of a deserted quay and stares out to sea.
//
It was obviously mysterious. It was vaguely romantic. It also
seemed, perhaps because of the latter quality, not to belong to today.
The woman obstinately refused to stare out of the window of an
airport lounge; it had to be this ancient quay //. The woman had no
face, no particular degree of sexuality. But she was Victorian; since I
always saw her in the same static long shot, with her back turned, she
represented a reproach on the Victorian Age. An outcast. // I began
to fall in love with her. Or with her stance. I didnt know which.
(John Fowles, Notes on an Unfinished Novel, in Malcolm
Bradbury, The Novel Today. Contemporary Writers on Modern
Fiction, Fontana Press)
Quote 29
There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that
allows other freedoms to exist. And I must conform to that definition.
The novelist is still a god, since he creates //; what has changed is
that we are no longer the gods of the Victorian image, omniscient
and decreeing; but in the new theological image with freedom our
first principle, not authority.
(John Fowles, The French Lieutenants Woman)
John Fowles
177
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