—al 2013, y martes, a los asiduos lectores de este blog. Suponiendo que
exista alguno, cosa que no me consta. Cada día que pasa, y cada
año, veo de modo más claro la vanidad de todos nuestros esfuerzos, en
blogs y bibliografías y redes sociales. No
es necesario que me imiten en eso, ni en nada más tampoco.
On the Car Blue
Romance and Realism 1891-1914
Chapter 17 of The Illustrated Oxford History of British
Drama, by Simon Trussler:
The tension between Victorian verities and Edwardian frivolities was
already perceptible when, in 1901, the portly Prince of Wales belatedly
succeeded to the throne. A world ever more closely resembling our own
had been ushered in as much by the arrival of primitive film and
popular halfpenny newspapers in the 1890s as by the activities of
trades unionists and the suffragettes at home and intimations of
revolution abroad in the following decade—which also saw the
parliamentary struggle of the last great Liberal government to lay the
foundations of a Welfare State. Already the rights and wrongs of the
Boer War, bridging the old century and the new, had divided the nation,
and soon the First World War (by present-day standards a conflict
somewhat short on technology, but profligate of suffering and death)
was to cast its long, engulfing shadow.
[Illustration:] the
fall from the tower of the title character in The Master Builder, by Henrik Ibsen
(1828-1906). This illustration (from the Pall Mall Budget) is of the first
British production at the Trafalgar Theatre in 1893.Watching Herbert
Waring's Solness is his youthful hero-worshipper Hilda Wangel, played
by the anglicized American actress Elizabeth Robins (1862-1952), who
held the British stage rights to most of Ibsen's plays. Among other of
his leading female roles, she played Martha Bernick in Pillars of Society (1889), Mrs.
Linde in A Doll's House
(1891), the title role in Hedda
Gabler (1891), Rebecca West in Rosmersholm
(1893), Asta Allmers in Little Eyolf
(1896), and Ella Rentheim in John
Gabriel Borkman (1896). Controversy over the true merits of the
Norwegian dramatist dominated critical discussion during this period.
Though his cause was championed both by his first translator William
Archer and by the young Bernard Shaw, he was virulently attacked by
such conservative writers as the ageing but influential theatre critic
of the Daily Telegraph,
Clement Scott.
THEATRE AS 'SOCIAL LUXURY'
In the face of all this, commercial theatre remained cosily complacent,
concerned to insulate the class interests it served. An Italian
observer, Mario Borsa, writing in 1908 in The English Stage of Today,
summed it up: 'The entire organization of the theatre reflects that
special and aristocratic conception of its status which is the point of
view of its patrons.' In consequence, although London was 'overrun
with theatres', there was, in Borsa's judgement, a pervasive
'intellectual apathy' behind the 'lack of good prose drama'—or, as even
that most Anglophilic of immigrants, Henry James, had to concede, the
theatre in England was 'a social luxury and not an artistic necessity'.
Such contemporary comments should serve to caution us against the
selective recall to which some theatre historians have been prone as
they earnestly trace the ascendancy of 'the new drama'. This, although
it undeniably existed, was in truth written by and for a mere handful
of intellectuals—while the West End theatre continued to cater to
audiences who were either unconcerned with or actively seeking
diversion from political and industrial struggles symptomatic of
profound social discontent. Ibsenism may have been as quintessential to
Bernard Shaw as socialism: but neither was considered a fit subject in
polite conversation.
The nation was becoming no less intellectually than it was socially
divided. The 'moderns' in the theatre, as in all the arts, were by and
large radical in their political as in their artistic beliefs, just as
they not only held but were now able to propound a rationalist
philosophy which would have been unmentionable (if not unthinkable) a
bare thirty years earlier. Yet they still sought to storm the citadels
of that 'special and aristocratic' theatre, with little thought of
reaching a popular audience through its own forms of art—of which the
music hall, as we shall see, was enjoying a proud heyday before its
fall—or of touching the habits and tastes of other than the well-to-do.
In the West End theatres, the curtain generally rose at eight o'clock,
to permit patrons to dine beforehand, and was down in time for
'carriages at eleven' and a late supper. Evening dress was de rigueur
except in the residual pit and the gallery, whose lowlier patrons were
generally assigned their own entrances in adjoining alleyways—and so
discouraged from joining the fashionable foyer throng. Certainly, they
were not expected to have much to contribute to the plays themselves:
thus, Arthur Pinero claimed that 'a certain order of ideas expressed or
questions discussed' was simply beyond the powers 'of the English
lower-middle and lower classes' to articulate. And it is ironic that
even Bernard Shaw, for all his declared socialism, in practice seemed
to concur—his occasional working-class characters being drawn either
from the long typology of clever servants, such as Enry Straker in Man and Superman, or conceived as
good-natured but indolent buffoons, as when Alfred Doolittle in Pygmalion fulfils the expectations
of his charactonym (a convention now rare in the 'realistic' drama).
THE ACTOR-MANAGER AS MATINEE IDOL
Often, when dramatists strayed from idealizing the respectable classes
in their contemporary drawing-rooms, it was to transplant their value
system into the realms of romance: and the last great generation of
actor-managers increasingly found it expedient to cast themselves in
the choicest romantic leads. It was George Alexander who began the
trend in 1896 when, in the face of scepticism from his contemporaries,
he accepted Edward Rose's adaptation of Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda,
himself doubling the roles of Rudolf Rassendyl and the King—thereby
restoring the fortunes of the St James's Theatre, which he managed from
1891 until his death in 1918.
But sometimes actors found themselves trapped within the romantic
personae they created. Lewis Waller,
for all his personal modesty and classical ambitions, thus came to be
increasingly identified with just two parts—those of D'Artagnan in the
most successful of numerous adaptations of Dumas's The Three Musketeers (1898), and of
Booth Tarkington's eponymous Monsieur
Beaucaire
(1902). To Waller is usually given the doubtful credit of becoming the
first matinee idol—his faithful followers even wearing badges
proclaiming that they were 'Keen on Waller' (a slogan which quickly
gave way to it unfortunate acronym).
Among his fellow matinee idols, none was a better physical embodiment
of the 'interesting' romantic type than Johnston Forbes-Robertson. This
'dreamy, poetic-looking creature'—as he was described by Ellen Terry,
who had played opposite him as early as 1874 in The Wandering Heir—was
already in his forties when, to Irving's absence, he triumphed as Romeo
to Mrs Patrick Campbell's Juliet in 1894, and three years later he gave
what was generally acclaimed as a definitive Hamlet for the fin-de-siècle
generation, causing
Irving to forswear acting the part again.
Johnston Forbes-Robertson
(1853-1937) in the role of Hamlet—which he
first played at the age of forty-four, 1897. Seeing this performance is
said to have inspired Shaw to write Caesar
and Cleopatra,
in which Forbes-Robertson eventually played in 1907. Generally
recognized as the inheritor of Irving's mantle, Forbes-Robertson, like
Lewis Waller, had a 'fallback' role, in his case that of the Stranger
in Jerome's mystical melodrama The
Passing of the Third Floor Back—although, perhaps to the envy of
Waller, Forbes-Robertson could count no less on the enduring popularity
of his Hamlet According to
Hesketh Pearson, biographer of The
Last Actor-Managers, Charles Wyndham could similarly rely on
reviving David Garrick, Hare
on A Pair of Spectacles,
Alexander on The Importance of Being Earnest,
Tree on Trilby,
Martin-Harvey on The Only Way, and
Fred Terry on The Scarlet Pimpernel.
Lewis Waller (1860-1915) in The Three Musketeers
(1898). Waller was embarrassed by his reputation as supposedly the
first of the great 'matinee idols': he much preferred Shakespearean or
light comedy roles, but found himself (like several other of the great
actor-managers of the period) inescapably identified with the romantic
leads his fans preferred. ('Will no one', he is said to have pleaded,
'rid me of these turbulent priestesses?') He was also greatly admired
in Booth Tarkington's Monsieur
Beaucaire
(1902), playing the even-tempered Frenchman of the title, whose
exquisite debonaire wit gallantly puts down ill-bred English rivals.
Forbes-Robertson's last great success was as the enigmatically
beneficient Stranger in Jerome K. Jerome's The Passing of the Third Floor Back
(1908), a sort of bourgeoisified Bloomsbury equivalent to the
mysterious vagrant in Maxim Gorky's Lower
Depths.
The self-denial personified by Jerome's Stranger was approved as a
vicarious virtue by audiences not much given to its practice: thus, no
less popular was the role of the selfless Sidney Carton which John
Martin-Harvey had carved for himself at the Lyceum (again while Irving
was on tour) in a dramatization of Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities,The Only Way
(1899). Unfortunately the character so overwhelmed Martin-Harvey's
reputation that, to borrow Bryan Forbes's apt metaphor, 'his many
journeys to the tumbrel led to a guillotining of what might have been a
more varied and distinguished career'.
Towering above all these, with his usual deceptively indolent air, was
Herbert Beerbohm Tree, who managed the Haymarket from 1887, just eight
years after his professional debut, until he built the new Her
Majesty's Theatre across the road in 1897. Tree produced Shakespeare
with a legendary extravagance to which we shall return, while as an
actor he preferred larger-than-life characters ranging from Falstaff to
Fagin. Even when he found himself bowing to the new taste for romance,
he usually managed to tune-in a character to his own temperamental
wavelength—as with his Svengali in Paul Potter's adaptation of George
du Maurier's Trilby (1895).
Tree was also prepared to take occasional risks on less formulaic
stuff, with varying degrees of success. When he staged Ibsen's Enemy of the People
in 1893 it barely graduated from matinees to evenings, achieving a mere
seven performances: but in 1914 it was Tree who gave Shaw his first
great commercial success with Pygmalion
—in which Mrs. Patrick Campbell playing Eliza, completed an unholy
trinity of creatively tensile personalities. However, among the
actor-managers it was George Alexander who most consistently preferred
new British plays, and who staged at the St. James's Wilde's Lady Winderemere's Fan (1892) and
Pinero's The Second Mrs Tanqueray
(1893). Both plays raised and, in the end, ducked the issue of the
sexual 'double standard'—which brings us to the one serious issue with
which West End audiences did (as it were) flirt: the 'woman question'.
THE 'WOMAN QUESTION'
As pursued in the drama, the debate over the 'woman question' largely
reflected a patriarchal concern to give the matter serious attnetion
and then to come down solidly in favour of the status quo. Sydney
Grundy (a dependable churner-out of overly well-made plays after the
manner of the French boulevardist Sardou) thus wrote an eponymous
put-down of The New Woman for
the Comedy Theatre in 1894, the year in which the phrase enterd popular
usage, in clear expectation that his audience would share his own
conclusion—that she was really 'as old as Eve, and just as hungry for
the fruit she plucked'.
Of course, the prevailing sexual hypocrisy touched the theatre no less
than the rest of society. In The
Case of Rebellious Susan
(1894), another of that topical cluster of plays of the early 1890s
which deigned to notice the 'woman question', Henry Arthur Jones, while
calmly affirming the inevitability of male philandering, set out to
show how a wife who tries to pay back her husband in kind comes to
grief, repentance, and acceptance of the woman's role—to 'forgive the
wretched till they learn constancy'. The manager of the Criterion,
Charles Wyndham, refused to allow his leading lady, Mary Moore, to
utter the one line which would have confirmed Susan's adultery: but in
real life, though very unobtrusively, Wyndham had loong been committing
adultery with Mary Moore. Like Wyndham, Tree managed to acquire a
knighthood while at the same time breeding children faster with his
mistress than his wife, and personifying the ideal of the Edwardian
male described by Frank Harris as 'adultery with all home comforts'.
Ironically, the profession of actress was meanwhile becoming, if not
exactly respectable, at least a good deal more acceptable than it had
been—although no less an actress than Ellen Terry had bolstered all the
worst Victorian expectations of her caling by strewing an estranged
husband, a lover, and ilegitimate children in her wake. (Careless of
the respectability vicariously restored by her association with Irving,
she took a third husband half her age in her sixtieth year, and was
duly made to wait until three years before her death in
1928—thirthy-three years after Irving's knighthood—to be created a
Dame.)
retitled
Successive census returns reveal that whereas in 1851 there
had
been around half as many actresses as actors, by 1881 women were
outnumbering men in the profession, as they have continued to do ever
since: precisely, their numbers rose from 891 in 1861 to 3,696 thirty
years later. However happily such figures may reflect the improved
social standing of the profession as a whole, and a wider acceptance
that actresses were not instantly to be identified as whores, it was,
none the less, largely the male dramatist's typoloty of womanhood which
determined the parts they were permitted to play.
When Robertsonian society dramas had begun both to emulate and to
educate in polite behaviour, the public tendency to confuse manners
displayed on stage and off encouraged the assumption that a socially
acceptable role reflected an actresse's 'real' nature. So while the
American Adah Isaacs Menken, in achieving a succès de scandale
with her notorious breeches role as mazeppa, was behaving as might be
expected of a foreigner, English actresses wishing to advance their
social standing had followed the lead of Helen Faucit—who had made a
'good' marriage and been able to retire early by specializing in roles
which identified her with the Victorian ideal of demure, domesticated
womanhood. Even Ellen Terry enjoyed one of her greatest successes, as
Imogen in Cymbeline, in part
because the role embodied the untainted female virtue deemed desirable
by the Victorian patriarchy.
Ellen Terry as Imogen in Cymbeline.
Playing opposite Irving's Iachimo in the Lyceum production of 1896, she
had to embody a Victorian ideal of constancy in the face of doubts and
temptations—to become, in Swinburne's words, 'the most adorable woman
ever created by God or man'. Terry's genius added some mercurial spirit
to the character, but the patriarchal expectations which confined her
were as much part of Irving's acting style as of her audience's life
style. Shaw warned her of 'an idiotic paragon of virtue produced by
Shakespeare's views of what a
woman ought to be'
And so when Clement Scott, nearing his dotage in 1898, warned that 'it
is nearly impossible for a woman to remain pure who adopts the stage as
a profession', the collective outrage of the London managements secured
the old man's dismissal from his influential position on the Daily Telegraph.
But male playwrights continued to assume that in the serious affairs of
their life their sex was, as of right, cast in the decision-making
role: thus, in such products of the patriarchy as Jones's later plays The Liars (1897) and Mrs Dane's Defence
(1900), young reprobates are saved from the clutches of 'women with a
past' in order to fulfil their destinies as the providers and
legislators of society.
Thoughtful actresses were well aware that the roles they were given to
play made them haplessly complicit in the way that their sex was
presented on stage. Even the vaguely supportive Pinero deeming it
necessary to convert his title-character in The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith
(1895) from a 'woman agitator' with 'original independent ideas' (as
her creator, Mrs Patrick Campbell, described her) into a creature of
'Bible-reading inertia' in the last act.
So a growing number of women began to write their own plays—a task few
had successfully attempted since the eighteenth century, despite (or
perhaps becaue of) the pre-eminence of women in the less public form
of the novel. And, with the predominantly male breed of actor-managers
unsypathetic (as much on account of the absence of central roles for
themselves as from ingrained prejudice), women had also to involve
themselves in management—as did Lena Ashwell, when she took over the
Kingsway Theatre in 1907. In the following year was formed the
Actresses' Franchise League, which offered active—and activist—support
to the campaign for women's sufrage. As in the days of Chartism,
sympathetic performers would sugar the propagandist pill at meetings
and rallies—at first with solo acts, then with specially written plays.
One of the best of these, a collaboration between Cicely Hamilton and
'Christopher' St John, female partner to Ellen Terry's daughter Edith
Craig, was a swift-moving farce entitled How the Vote Was Won
(1909), which fulfilled the anticipatory promise of its title by
showing women taking men an¡t their word—and completely overwhelming
them with demands for the 'protection' they claimed as their
prerogative.
A more conventionally prestigious outcome of the League's activities
was its members' reluctantly-conceded participation in the glaa
celebrations of 1911 for the Coronation of King George V—in which,
ironically but imaginatively, they presented a masque by Ben Jonson, The Vision of Delight.
And some women prominent in the movement went on to form permanent
companies—most notably Inez Bensusan, who mounted a successful women's
season at the Coronet in 1913, and Edith Craig, whose Pioneer Players,
formed in the following year, managed to survive beyond the First World
War.
PROBLEM PLAYS—AND POPULAR PLAYS
Other women's plays were more orthodox in structure if not in theme,
and probably neither Cicely Hamilton, whose Diana of Dobson's was staged by
Ashwell at the Kingsway in 1908, or Gilda Sowerby, whose Rutherford and Son
enjoyed a full season's run at the Vaudeville in 1912, would have
objected to her work being labelled a 'problem play'—though it was with
malice aforethought that Grundy had coined the term in the 1890s to
describe the collision between the belated English discovery of
naturalism and that discussion or ilustration of a specific social
'issue' which so often distinguisehd its dramatic expression.
Of the continental 'slice-of-life' realism of Zola—as more immediately
of Gerhard Hauptmann's The Weavers
or Gorky's The Lower Depths—there
was very little trace in the British theatre: indeed, such rare
examples as spring to mind were products either of the women's movement
or of the more down-to earth provincial theatre (to which we shall
shortly turn). And so it was, for example, that D. H. Lawrence's vivid
depictions of a coal-mining community in A Collier's Friday Night, The
Daughter-in-Law, and The
Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd—all of which were written before
1912—remained unperformed for over fifty years.
Predictably, the box sets which entrapped the characters of the 'new
drama' more often than not represented domestic or business interiors
not dissimilar from those in which their audiences passed their
lives—or aspired so to do. So while Bernard Shaw wryly acknowledged
that the 'problems' identified in his Widowers'
Houses or in Mrs Warren's
Profession—respectively
slum landlordism and prostitution—qualified them as 'Plays Unpleasant',
not one of their scenes is set in a slum or a brothel. Rather than in
any closer visual (or for that matter verbal) approximation to the
'real' —or, more precisely, much sense that it should be other than
bourgeois in its dramaturgic boundaries—it was largely in a changed
perception of character that naturalism in the new drama was now
manifesting itself.
In melodrama (as indeed in society drama) character had been largely a
function of plot—the product of changes rung, often arbitrarily, upon a
set of immutable traits. The assumptions behind the received rules
which governed this socio-dramatic decorum were either duly fulfilled,
or simply inverted—as when aristocrats are turned into villains, or
labourers are endowed with nobility of spirit. Naturalism, on the other
hand, presented character as it presumed it to be formed in life—as a
composite effect of heredity
and environment. In this it became, however, a mode not much less
deterministic than classical tragedy.
This, while it is clearly more 'realistic' that past actions rather
than plot mechanics should be seen as the driving force behind present
events, man's destiny appears no less inescapable when it is governed
by birth and social circumstance than when ruled by an implacable fate.
And so a sense of inevitability pervades even the choicest products of
the new naturalism—whether twisted towards tragedy as by Ibsen in Ghosts, or towards comedy as by
Shaw in Man and Superman.
Despite the best intentions of the dramatists, this could not but
bolster an audience's feelings that, however imperfect the world might
be, there was not much that they personally could do about it.
It is not surprising, then, that in the works of such writers as Alfred
Sutro, St John Hankin, and the emergent Somerset Maugham, native
naturalism should have integrated itself so soon and so seamlessly with
the old 'society drama'. And even while the freer-spirited among the
new dramatists were trying to broaden its horizons—Granville Barker, for
example, through the unresolved dilemma of The Voysey Inheritance (1905), or
Galsworthy thorugh the egalitarian concerns of Strife (1909) and Justice (1910)—on the Continent the
creative energies of the style were already on the wane.
Henrik Ibsen had thus written his last play in 1899, by which time
Alfred Jarry had strangled individual psychology almost at birth in the
proto-absurdist Ubu Roi.
August Strindberg was already moving into his expressionistic phase,
and Maurice Maeterlinck was sparking symbolism into fitful dramatic
life. The closest counterpart the British theatre could muster was
Stephen Phillips—whom William Archer, with what proved to be undue
optimism, acclaimed as a new Milton for his high poetic dramas such as Herod (1900) Ulysses (1902), and, most notably, Paolo and Francesca (1902). Both
Alexander and Tree briefly took him up, but his work soon floundered
into high-sounding incoherence.
Poster for the first production of J. M. Barrie's perennial Christmas
show, Peter Pan, at the Duke
of York's Theatre, 1904. Barrie (1860-1937) wrote other, more grown-up
whimsies, such as Quality Street
(1902) and Mary Rose (1920),
but these have weathered less well than his gentle social satires,
notably The Admirable Crichton
(1902), What Every Woman Knows
(1908), and Dear Brutus
(1917), where his chronic sentimentality is redressed by imagination
and an insistent, insidious charm.
The theatrically enduring plays of the period often tell us truths in
their authors' despite. Thus, Brandon Thomas skilfully energized that
most perennial of farces, Charles's
Aunt
(1892), by blending mild sexual titillation into his even milder satire
upon social and mercenary ambitions: while this was sufficient to
ensure the play's contemporary success, today we can relish, too, its
understated, perhaps sublimated uncertainties about gender role and the
ageing process.
Other uncertainties, social rather than sexual, lie beneath the
mannered surface of James Barries's The
Admirable Crichton (1902),
whose titular paragon of a butler, his household marooned on a desert
island, assumes the master's role only to withdraw into his 'proper
place' with the return to normalcy. Even so, Squire Bancroft. as
recorded by A. E. W. Mason, was surely not alone in feeling that such a
juxtaposition of the drawing room and the servants' hall was 'a very
painful subject'. And the even more enduringly successful Peter Pan
(1904) is, for all its whimsical pleasures, no less painful in the
truths it tells, whether about Barrie's own psyche—or about a
patriarchal society which was already gearing up to fight a world war
according to the ethics of the preparatory school.
The relative popularity of writers we might today consider of greater
importance is instructive. Futures collated by the critic Ian Clarke
indicate that although plays by Shaw enjoyed 2,568 performances between
1890 and 1919, Jones notched up a total of 3,690, and Pinero no fewer
than 4.834—while Galsworthy and Barker managed a mere 290 and 231
respectively. Shaw, who actually overtook his rivals in the final
decade, was thus alone among the 'new' dramatists in breaking into the
commercial sector, and so making an impact upon an audience beyond the
intellectual elite: but it took him well over a decade after his first
play reached the stage, and a good deal of conscious
self-publicizing—not to mention the staking out of acceptable
boundaries—to establish a platform from which to do so.
All through the 1890s Shaw had thus remained more influential as a
critic than as a dramatist, while meanwhile calculatedly fashioning
himself as a socialist enfant
terrible
(albeit in early middle age) and a prototype of what we would today
call a media celebrity. In 1898, when only two of his seven Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant
had been performed, he also took the then unusual step of publishing
them in a nicely-presented reading edition, apparently as the only way
of guaranteeing them a reasonable circulation. For his fortunes as a
performed playwright were at first inseparable from the activities of
the little play-producing societies which, since the creation of the
Independent Theatre by J. T. Grein in 1891, had been attempting to
emulate the work of the 'free theatres' of continental Europe—and which
played (in borrowed theatres) to audiences which, however critically
receptive, were usally very small indeed.
For most of its six-year existence the main concern of the Independent
Theatre was with the work of little-known foreign dramatists (ibsen of
course among them) but it had also launched Shaw's belated dramatic
career in 1892 with a production of Widowers'
Houses.
Its mantle was inherited by the New Century Theatre, formed in 1897 by
Elizabeth Robins, a pioneer of the Ibsenite as of the women's movement,
and then, more enduringly, indeed, until the very eve of the First
World War—by the Stage Society, which gave Shaw renewed exposure with
its opening production of You Never
Can Tell in 1899. In the following year came the premier of Candida—in which the role of
Marchbanks as played by the then rising actor and aspirant playwright
Harley Granville Barker.
From the first production of Shaw's Man and Superman,
staged in 1905 during the Vedrenne-Barker management of the Court: Ann
Whitefield and Jack Tanner, the couple drawn irreisistibly together by
the 'life force', were played by Lillah McCarthy (also seen as Viola
[below] and her future husband, Granville Barker—here in distinctively
Shavian guise. Barker only adopted the more familiar hyphenated form
following his second marriage, when, at his new wife's instigation, he
abandoned the stage—but produced the valuable series of Prefaces to Shakespeare.
It was when Granville Barker entered into mangerial partnership with J.
E. Vedrenne at the Court Theatre from 1904 to 1907 that Shaw's work
began to reach a wider public. No fewer than eleven of his plays were
produced, firmly establishing his reputation as a 'new' but
entertaining comic dramatist, while the Vedrenne-Barker seasons also
presented work by Barker himself, Galsworthy, and Hankin—not to mention
Euripides, three of whose tragedies (in new translations by Gilbert
Murray) were restore to the live theatre after centuries of confinement
to the study. Somerset Maugham followed in Shaw's footsteps, though not
his politics, making his name with productions first by the Stage
Society and then at the Court—whence Lady
Frederick
transferred to the West End in 1907, to be joined within a year by
three more of Maugham's finely-honed yet hollow-centred society dramas.
Shaw himself had by now entered heartily into what was to prove his
lifelong role as licensed jester to a social system which, as a
self-proclaimed communist, he supposedly despised. Since he also
believed that the sex drive was controlled by 'creative evolution'
(which he theatricalized as the 'life force') any love interest in his
comedies tends towards coyness and the encouragement of good
breeding—understood as a matter not of armorial bearings but of eugenic
engineering. In this as in other matters the Shavian 'tone of voice' is
inimitable: but so far from filling his plays with spokespeople for
himself, as popular legend asserts, Shaw gives the devil considerably
more than his due in the dramatized debates which flesh out his plots
serious issues all too frequently being reduced to rhetorical
diversions in the process.
Shaw's topical satire upon the Irish question, John Bull's Other Island
(1904), was thus greatly enjoyed by most of its supposed targets—the
Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour, actually paying a return visit. And
although in Major Barbara
(1905) Shaw dared to delve so far into the sanitized lower depths of
London as a Salvation Army hostel, his delight in dialectical paradox
ensures that he ends up apparently in favour of armament production as
a species of social service. Only in Heartbreak
House,
written during the First World War when armament production was no
longer a laughing matter, does a raw nerve of honesty seem touched
within himself, creating a more contemplative, bittersweet mood which
the English later came to insist on regarding at Chekhovian. Thus far,
however, few had so much as heard of Anton Chekhov.
The little play-producing societies were believed, by virtue of of
their club status, to enjoy immunity from the Lord Chamberlain's
continuing powers of censorship. It is not simply that Ghosts would not have been produced
in the commercial theatre: it could
not have been, since the Examiner of Plays in the Lord Chamberlain's
Office had made it clear that he would refuse a licence—as he later
refused one for Mrs. Warren's
Profession in 1902 and for Barker's Waste in
1907. An intensive and widely-supported campaign against the censorship
resulted in a parliamentary Committee of Enquity in 1909, which took
voluminous evidence from the great, the good, and the opinionated
before deciding to leave things more or less as they were—to the relief
of the commercial managers, who had no wish to second-guess an
audience's tastes, and who valued the protection a licence seemed to
afford.
THE REPERTORY MOVEMENT
In other respects, attempts to 'organize the theatre', if not quite as
irresistible as the late-Victorian critic Matthew Arnold had proposed,
met with mixed success. The opening in 1904 of what was to become the
Royal Academy of Dramatic Art owed much to the energy and generosity of
Beerbohm Tree—incongruously, since he had always claimed that acting
could not be taught. RADA was only the first of many such schools of
acting, and the improved standards of training which resulted were to
affect entry into the profession as profoundly as the formation in 1903
of the Actors' Union—whose efforts to secure better pay and conditions
remained largely unrealized until, ironically, it ceased to be a union
in name and, as Actors' Equity, became one in practice in 1929.
In 1904, William Archer and Granville Barker had published an elaborate
Scheme and Estimates for a National
Theare
which, despite some premature laying of foundation stones, was to take
even longer to reach fruition Their advocacy of performances playing in
'true repertoire' on the continentl model went beyond the limited-run
system which was then being employed at the Court: but when it was put
into practice following the move of Vedrenne and Barker to the Savoy in
1907, its expense led to the dissolution of their partnership. In 1910,
Charles Frohman also tried to run a repertory season of ten plays at
the Duke of York's: and while it was surely significant that so wily a
commercial manager should make the attempt, even more so was its
failure, which bore Darwinian witness to the way in which the long-run
system, the survival of the threatrically fittest, had reshaped the
habits of West End audiences.
Outside London, however, a typically British compromise between the
limited run and 'true' repertoire, whereby single productions were
played (often twice nightly) for a single week, began to be adopted as
preferable, locally-based alternative to the touring system. The
earliest theatre to be run on such lines was set up in Manchester in
1907 by Miss Annie Horniman, heiress to a tea fortune, and between 1908
and 1913 further 'rep' theatres were established in Glasgow, Liverpool,
Birmingham, and Bristol. From 1908 at the Gaiety, Miss Horniman's
Manchester company worked with particular success to reflect local
attitudes and concerns—which, though arguably just as class-ridden as
those of the West End, now seem less exclusively and claustrophobically
so.
The most notable exponents of the 'Manchester School' of playwriting
were Allan Monkhouse, with Reaping
the Wind (1908) and Mary
Broome (1911); Stanley Houghton, with The Younger Generation (1910) and Hindle Wakes (1912); and Harold
Brighouse—a writer of more than neibhourhood naturalism, whose The Northerners (1914) is almost
as expressionistic in its exploration of a Luddite theme as is Hobson's ChoiceHobson—its
plot hinging upon a strong woman who stands up for 'her' man—was alone
in finding favour in London, where 'provincial' had long been favoured
as an appropriate epithet of abuse for Henrik Ibsen.
Earlier, in 1904, the munificent Miss Horniman had taken a lease on the
Abbey Theatre in Dublin, where the poet W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory,
George Moore, and Edward Martyn had been sustaining the Irish Literary
Theatre since 1890. While Yeats was able to tap into the mythic roots
of the Irish consciousness in plays which, further afield, have
remained a rather specialist taste, Lady Gregory was more at home with
an enecdotal, almost domesticated approach to her resurgent nation's
folklore: then, in J. M. Synge, the new Abbey company found a voice of
naturalistic genius, as readily expressed through the tragic dimension
in Riders to the Sea (1904)
as in the peasant comedy of The
Playboy of the Western World (1907).
Owing to his premature death in 1909, Synge's plays were sadly few in
number, and some met with hostility from audiences over-sensitive to
supposed affronts to their national dignity—most famously during the 'Playboy riots' which marred both
the Dublin and New York premieres, but also on account of the wry
anti-clericalism of The Tinker's
Wedding,
which opened in London in 1909 since it was considered 'too dangerous'
for the Abbey. In truth, Synge gave a vital, poetic expression to the
Irish national character and new cause for its reviving cultural pride
no less than had Shakespeare for his own countrymen three centuries
earlier.
APPROACHES TO SHAKESPEARE
Shakespearean productions during this period ranged across an
ever-widening stylistic spectrum. After 1897 the showcase for the
established (indeed, expected) spectacular approach shifted from the
Lyceum to the new Her Majesty's, where Tree follwoed Irving in cutting
his texts and rearranging his scenes in the case of decorative
convenience. Long waits during all the complicated scene changes were
none the less common, though Tree did eliminate two intervals by
reducing the conventional five act divisions to the three which were
becoming the norm in new plays.
(1916) in its more
recognizable workaday mould. Unsurprisingly,
Lillah McCarthy as Viola in Granville Barker's production of Twelfth Night
at the Savoy (1912). Norman Wilkinson's formal and stylized permanent
set contrasted with the lavish embellishments (and real grass) employed
by Tree. While best remembered for her roles in Barker's productions
(which included many of Shaw's female leads), Lillah McCarthy
(1875-1960) also went into management on her own account, at the Little
Theatre in 1912 and at the Kingsway in 1919—a year after the divorce
from Barker which was effectively to bring both their careers in the
live theatre to an end.
Tree's elaborate and top-heavy style was to attract ridicule soon
enough_ but if he took both his naturalism and his symbolism a touch
too literally, the aim was often similar to that of his revered
near-contemporary, Stanislavsky, in his legendary productions of
Chekhov for the Moscow Arts Theatre during the same period—even down to
the twittering of attendant birds, arguably no les superflous in
Konstantin Stanislavsky's The
Cherry Orchard than
in Tree's Much Ado About
Nothing. Again, Tree's live rabbits on stage for A Midsummer Night's Dream and his
terraces of real grass in Twelfth
Night have
passed into theatrical folklore as examples of misconceived straining
after verisimilitude: yet they suggest an instinct not that different
from Stanislavsky's when he commended the filling of hollow oars with
water for realistic splashing along Venetian canals in Othello.
The forum scene from the
production of Julius Caesar (1911)
by Herbert Beerbohm Tree, showing his characteristic concern for
the scenic and actorly detail of the stage picture. Here, Tree, playing
Antony, is standing with his back to the rostrum. While taking risks on
productions of Ibsen and Shaw, Tree (1853-1917) was also ruthless in
establishing his own stage presence, whether as Svengali in Trilby (1895), Falstaff in Henry IV, Part I (1896)—or (against a
no-less-determined Mrs. Patrick Campbell) in Shaw's Pygmalion
(1914). Tree managed the Haymarket from 1887, then personally oversaw
the building of Her Majesty's, which became his base from 1897 to 1915.
From 1905 Tree invited fellow Shakespareans to participate in annual
festivals to commemorate the bardic birthday: and so diretors—as we can
now unreservedly begin to call those who saw it as their function to
give artistic cohesion to a production—as different as F. R. Benson and
and Wiliam Poel both found themselves working at His Majesty's (as the
theatre had duly become). Benson had for some thirty years been touring
Shakespeare round the provinces with one of the last stock companies
worthy of the name—and from 1886 had also been responsible for mounting
the annual festivals at the new Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in
Stratford-upon-Avon (opened in 1879), where bardolatry was just
beginning its acceleration from the light fantatic to the light
industrial.
As a director, Benson's approach seems to have varied between the
highly athletic, jogging Henry V
along at a welcome pace, and the sonorously funereal, stretching out
his Hamlet
to six hours excluding an interval for dinner. William Poel was more
consistent in seeking to recover the 'swiftness and ease' which he
believed to have characterized Elizabethan acting, in the wider
interests of replicating the manner in which he believed the plays had
first been staged. No less pioneering than his Hamlet
of 1881, based on the First Quarto in a seminal conjunction of
scholarly and theatrical disciplines, was his restoration to the living
repertoire of the works of Shakespeare's contemporaries. His revival
for the Independent Theatre of Webster's The Duchess of Malfi
in 1892 coincided, moreover, with the popularization of the 'minor'
Elizabethans and Jacobeans through Havelock Ellis's launching of the
influential, bravely unexpurgated, Mermaid Series of 'The Best Plays of
the Old Dramatists'.
A year later, again for Grein, Poel staged Measure for Measure
in a would-be facsimile of the original Fortune. Then, in 1895. he
formed his own Elizabethan Stage Society, which for the next ten years
mounted what Poel proclaimed to be 'authentic' Elizabethan
productions—with Johnson's plays, among others, happily featuring
alongside Shakespeare's. Although subsequent scholarship has cast doubt
on some of his beliefs—and he himself often vitiated the intimacy he
sought by pitching his Elizabethan platform behind a host proscenium
arch—Poel's was a leading influence in the clearing away of centuries
of accumulated clutter, both physical and metaphysical, from
Shakespearean production.
Rhetorically Poel revealed, in Lillah McCarthy's words, that it was
possible 'to keep the exquisite rhythm and cadence of the verse even
whilst the drama was hurtling along its swift tempestuous course'
Lillah McCarthy is herself best remembered as the creator of the
earliest of Shaw's female leads—in which she was directed by Granville
Barker, who became not only her husband but her collaborator on a
series of Shakespearean productions mounted at the Savoy Theatre
between 1912 and 1914. In these the lessons of Poel's work were
assimilated, but its niceties adapted to the conditions of contemporary
staging and the expectations of a contemporary audience.
Barker thus built an apron stage out over the front stalls of his
theatre, and replaced its footlights with a batten mounted across the
front of the dress circle. His eclectic approach even extended to
incorporating some of the revolutionary design ideas then being
propunded by Ellen Terry's son, Gordon Craig—a curious, lonely figure,
whose monumental columns and sweeping swathes of teps had little to do
with Elizabethan staging, but did begin to meet the need for single
settings conducive to a play's atmosphere and properly uninterrupted
pace.
Spending his long life largely in self-imposed exile, Craig enjoyed
more influence as a theorist than a practitioner, his view of actors as
super-marionettes tending to attract frustrated directors but to deter
the profession at large. Yet he remained devoted to the memory of
Irving—not only as a surrogate father, but for the kind of mesmeric
power with which as an actor he had, in The Bells,
transcended melodrama. However, as a theatrical force melodrama had
virtually died along with its last traditional exponent, William
Terriss—struck down in 1897 at the stage door of the thatre with whose
very name it had become synonymous, the Adelphi.
DEVELOPMENTS IN MUSIC HALL
While the increasingly diverse nature of the music-hall bill now made
it 'variety' indeed, many of the stars of the pre-war years remained
true to the proletarian traition of the older 'halls'—not least Marie
Lloyd, prohibited from appearing before royalty as much on account of
her risky double meanings on stage as her unconventional private life.
The period saw many other such legendary acts at peak form and peak
popularity—varieties of comic experience ranging from the 'character'
acts of George Robey and Harry Tate to the 'eccentric' Dan Leno and
Little Tich, from the 'grotesque' comedy of Nellie Wallace o the
'coster' comedy of Albert Chevalier and Gus Ellen, from the stylized
Scots of Harry Lauder to the stylish males of Vesta Tilley—glimpsed in
characteristic military mode on the songs-sheet cover [below].
Honourably, most such bill-topping acts showed solidarity with their
humbler brothers and sisters in the music-hall strike which followed
the formation of the 'Variety Artists' Federation in 1906, and which
secured a slight improvement in conditions. Then, in 1912, a
long-standing dispute over the inclusion of 'dramatic' material was
resolved with the legalization of sketches up to thirty minutes in
length. However, an earlier advance was by then proving
double-edged—the music-hall managers having at first welcomed the
arrival in the 1890s of the first short moving pictures, which they
hired for 'ciné-variety' bills on the grounds of novelty and relative
cheapness. But within a decade feature-length movies had arrived along
with purpose-built cinemas to exhibit them, and film had become a
dangerous competitor—not only for audiences, but also for performers.
Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel, both graduates of Fred Karno's
slapstick company, were just two of those who deserted the halls as
also their native land for the lure of boom-town Hollywood.
A leading music-hall singer of a slightly earlier period, 'the Great
Macdermott', otherwise G. H. Farrell, had achieved a hit at the time of
the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 with 'We don't want to fight, but by
Jingo! if we do', a patriotic ditty which added the word 'jingoism' to
the language—and continued, 'We've got the ships, we've got the men and
got the money, too.' By the time that the jingoism which fuelled the
First World War had been purged, nearly a million men from Britain
alone lay dead, some in the still-disciplined ranks of the war
cemeteries, some scattered disorderly and dismembered across the poppy
fields of Flanders—one million of the ten milion who died in a war
which left wounded twice as many more, to devastate a generation and
sow only the seeds of renewed conflict.
[Note: the illustration in Trussler's book is from The Bold Militiaman, another song
sheet]
Vesta Tilley (1864-1952), most famous of music-hall male impersonators,
pictured on a song-sheet cover in typically jingoistic mood. Even
before the First Wrold War, Tilley's strutting soldierly personae were
no less popular and only a little less plentiful than her gallery of
would-be dandies and elegant young men about town. Unambiguously female
in her personal life, on stage Tilley created gamine males who combined
the centuries-old appeal of 'breeches parts' for the men in her
audience with an unthreatening image of an asexual Adonis for her many
female admirers. During the First World War, Vesta Tilley made forceful
appeals for recruitment in numbers such as 'The Army of To-day's
Alright' and 'Jolly Good Luck to the Girl who Loves a Soldier'. Her
act, in the words of Elaine Aston, thus 'moved away from satirical
comment on social behaviour towards prescribing or instruvting people
on how to behave'—men, in whort, being urged to volunteer for the
trenches., and women to permit them the sexual licence their heroism
merited. She made her farewell appearance at the London Coliseum in
1920.
FROM BURLESQUE TO REVUE
Burlesque had been kept artificially alive through the dedication of
John Hollingshead and the genius of his leading players, Fred Leslie
and Nellie Warren: but its dual attractions of sexual display and
gentle satire now began to find distinct outlets in the rapidly
developing forms of musical comedy and revue.
'Musical variety farce', as Hollingshead's partner and successor at the
Gaiety, George Edwardes, dubbed it, was at first quite decorous,
hinting at rather than disclosing the femininity of the Gaiety Girl—a
species that bred generically from the show so-titled in 1893 to spawn
the Shop Girls and other girls decoratively packaged for decades to
come. Of course, impresarios soon saw the potential for exploiting the
fleshlier reaches of the 'chorus girl', who thus found herself
supplanting the 'legit' actress as a lady-in-waiting for the 'stage
door Johnny'—in whose company she entered many a smart restaurant, just
occasionally the peerage, and the reach-me-down demonology of the
censorious.
The more intimate style of revue began hesitantly to find itslf in Under the Clock at the Court in
1893, and was fully formed by 1899 when Potpourri
opened at the little Coronet in Notting Hill. Its genealogy having been
interrupted along with Henry Fielding's theatrical career, this now
blended topical skits, songs, and parodies of fashionable plays into
political satire rather less barbed than Fielding's—although one title
appearing to claim direct descent from his Historical Register for 1736 did
open at the Crystal Palace just two days before Potpourri: called, intriguingly, A Dream of Whitaker's Almanack, it
appears, alas, to have sunk without a trace.
Revues on a more lavish scale became increasingly popular after the
turn of the century. At the Empire in Leicester Square the shows ranged
from Venus 1906, which
vaguely celebrated womanhood, to By
George!
in 1911, which even more vaguely celebrated the new King. And at the
Coliseum in St Martin's Lane, purpose-built as a variety theatre in
1904, Oswald Stoll celebrated his own large debt to the French style—a
debt which later extended to his titles, as Stoll nudged customers into
the refurbished Middlesex Music Hall with C'est Bon! and Cachez Ça! and C'est chic!
In 1912 Everybody's Doing It
at the Empire duly acknowledged the arrival of ragtime, fresh from the
USA. in the same year Albert de Courville set out to become the
Londoner's Ziegfeld with the first full-scale spectacle after the
American manner, Hullo, Rag-time!
at the Hippodrome—while at the Alhambra André Charlot arrived from
Paris to present Kill That Fly!
Then, in 1914, C. B. Cochran began his management of the new and
intimately proportioned Ambassadors, and two years later also took on
the adjoining St Martin's (where his opening Houp la!
exploited the more relaxed wartime attitude towards female flesh on
display). By this time Charlot had moved to the Vaudeville, along with
such coming names as Binnie Hele, Beatrice Lillie, and Gertrude
Lawrence.
Thanks to longer holidays and cheap railway excursions, the seaside
resorts had entered upon their boom years with the new century, and
troupes of pierrots from many a beach and pier-head drew from and fed
into revue, and music hall besides—Pelissier's Follies most
successfully venturing inland to appear in variety, as also by royal
command at Sandringham. King Edward's tastes had lowered a little the
class barriers that once separated music-hall audiences from their
'betters', and the inauguration in 1912 under his successor of an
annual Royal Variety Performance (aptly enough at the Palace Theatre)
accelerated this legitimation. But Marie Lloyd, more on account of her
doubtul morals than her double meanings, was not invited.
[Illustrations]: The
presumed naughtiness of all things French was exploited by Oswald Stoll
with a sequence of French-titled revues at the Middlesex. On the left,
the spelling-out in the cause of modesty of one such offering, Cachez-Ça (1913), is an oblique
refernce to the banning of a poster for the earlier C'est Chic—on
account of its excess of pink flesh. As the illustration on the right
attests, American influence was no less strong: here, the chorus dances
down the 'joy plank' used in Hullo,
Rag-time! at the Hippodrome (1912).
Una escena de The Pirates of
Penzance, de Gilbert y Sullivan (1879), sobre eso de enviar
soldados a la guerra a cubrirse de gloria.... Toda una sátira mordaz
del discurso patriótico y militarista de la época victoriana—y una
coreografía genial en esta adaptación cinematográfica:
(... ) all that is most authentic and arresting in the
poetry of James Thomson
is absolutely “without hope, and without God in the world.” It is the
poetry of sheer, overmastering, inexorable despair—a passionate, and
almost fierce, declaration of faith in pessimism as the only true
philosophy of life. Here we have one who unequivocally affirms
that every struggle brings defeat
Because Fate holds no prize to crown
success;
That all the oracles are dumb or cheat
Because they have no secret to express;
That none can pierce the vast black
veil uncertain
Because there is no light behind the
curtain;
That all is vanity and nothingness.
—oOo—
This little life is all we must endure,
The grave's most holy
peace is ever
sure,
We fall asleep
and never wake again;
Nothing is of us but the
mouldering flesh,
Whose elements dissolve
and merge afresh
In earth, air,
water, plants, and other men.
We finish thus; and all
our wretched
race
Shall finish with its
cycle, and give place
To other
beings with their own time-doom:
Infinite aeons ere our
kind began;
Infinite aeons after the
last man
Has joined the
mammoth in earth's tomb and
womb.
We bow down to the
universal laws,
Which never had for man a
special clause
Of cruelty or
kindness, love or hate:
If toads and vultures are
obscene to sight,
If tigers burn with beauty
and with
might,
Is it by
favour or by wrath of Fate?
All substance lives and
struggles evermore
Through countless shapes
continually at war,
By countless
interactions interknit:
If one is born a certain
day on
earth,
All times and forces
tended to that birth,
Not all the
world could change or hinder it.
I find no hint throughout
the Universe
Of good or ill, of
blessing or of curse;
I find alone
Necessity
Supreme;
With infinite Mystery,
abysmal, dark,
Unlighted ever by the
faintest spark
For us the
flitting shadows of a dream.
Pinter, Harold.
The Room. 1957. In Pinter, The Room and The Dumb Waiter.
_____. The Birthday Party. Drama. 1958.
_____. The Caretaker. Drama.
1959.
_____. The Dumb Waiter.
Drama. First performed 1960.
_____. A Slight Ache. Drama.
In Pinter, A Slight Ache. A Night
Out. London: Methuen, 1961.
_____. The Hothouse. Drama.
In Pinter, Plays One. London:
Faber and Faber.
_____. A Night Out. Drama.
In Pinter, A Slight Ache. A Night
Out. London: Methuen, 1961.
_____. The Black and White.
In Pinter, Plays One. London: Faber and Faber.
_____. The Examination. London:
Methuen, 1963.
_____. The Dwarfs. In Pinter,
Plays Two. London: Faber and Faber.
_____. The Lover. Drama.
1963. In Pinter, The Collection and
The Lover. (Methuen's Modern Plays).
_____. Tea Party. TV drama.
1965.
_____. The Collection. Drama.
In Pinter, The Collection and The
Lover. (Methuen's Modern Plays).
_____. Night School.
Drama. In Pinter, Plays
Two. London: Faber and Faber.
_____. The Homecoming. Drama.
1965. (Methuen's Modern Plays). London: Methuen.
_____. The Basement. TV
drama. 1967.
_____. Landscape. Drama.
First broadcast BBC, 25 April 1968. 1st staged by the RSC, Aldsych
Theatre, London , 2 July 1969. Dir. Peter Hall.
_____. The Go-Between.
Screenplay, based on L. P. Hartley's novel. 1969.
_____. Silence. 1969. In
Pinter, Plays: Three. London: Faber and Faber, 1991. 189-209.
_____. Old Times. Drama.
London: Methuen, 1971.
_____. No Man's Land. TV
drama. 1975.
_____. Betrayal. TV drama.
1978.
_____. Poems and Prose 1949-1977. London:
Eyre Methuen, 1978.
_____. The Proust Screenplay. (= A
la Recherche du Temps Perdu). Screenplay, based on Marcel
Proust's novel. 1978.
_____. Mountain Language. New
York: Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988.
_____. One for the Road.
Drama. In Pinter, Plays Four. London: Faber and Faber, 1993.
_____. Victoria Station. In
Pinter, Plays Four. London: Faber and Faber, 1993.
_____. Party Time. Drama.
_____. Request Stop. Drama.
In Pinter, Plays Two. London: Faber and Faber.
_____. Last to Go. Drama. In
Pinter, Plays Two. London: Faber and Faber.
_____. Special Offer. Drama.
In Pinter, Plays Two. London: Faber and Faber.
_____. Trouble in the Works.
Drama. In Pinter, Plays Two. London: Faber and Faber.
_____. Family Voices. London:
Next Editions / Faber, 1981.
_____. The French Lieutenant's Woman.
Screenplay based on John Fowles' novel. 1982.
_____. A Kind of Alaska.
Drama. 1982.
_____. Night. Drama. In
Pinter, Plays Three. London:
Faber and Faber, 1991.
_____. That's Your Trouble. Drama.
In Pinter, Plays Three.
London: Faber and Faber, 1991.
_____. That's All. In Pinter,
Plays Three. London: Faber
and Faber, 1991.
_____. Applicant. In Pinter, Plays Three. London: Faber and
Faber, 1991.
_____. Interview. In Pinter, Plays Three. London: Faber and
Faber, 1991.
_____. Dialogue for Three. In
Pinter, Plays Three. London: Faber and Faber, 1991.
_____. Collected Poems and Prose.
London: Methuen, 1986.
_____. Monologue. In Pinter,
Plays Four. London: Faber and Faber, 1993.
_____. The Heat of the Day.
Screenplay.
_____. The Comfort of Strangers and
Other Screenplays (Reunion, Victory, Turtle Diary).
_____. The Trial. Screenplay.
_____. Moonlight. Drama. 1993.
_____. Ashes to Ashes. Drama.
1996.
_____. Various Voices: Prose,
Poetry, Politics 1948-1998.
_____. "Art, Truth, and Politics." Nobel Lecture, Dec. 2005.
Nobelprize.org http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/2005/pinter-lecture-e.html
2005-12-09
_____. "Arte, verdad y política. Trans. José Ángel García Landa and
Beatriz Penas Ibáñez. In Fírgoa: Universidade pública 9 Dec. 2005. http://firgoa.usc.es/drupal/node/24005
2005-12-09
From the Oxford Companion to English Literature:
Harold Pinter (1930-[2008]), poet and playwright,
born in East London, the son of a Jewish tailor, and educated at
Hackney Downs Grammar School. He began to publish poetry in periodicals
before he was 20, then became a professional actor, working mainly in
repertory. His first play, The Room,
was performed in Bristol in 1957, followed in 1958 by a London
production of The Birthday Party,
in which Stanley, an out-of-work pianist in a seaside boarding house,
is mysteriously threatened and taken over by two intruders, an Irishman
and a Jew, who present him with a Kafkaesque indictment of unexplained
crimes. Pinter's distinctive voice was soon reconized, and many
critical and commercial successes followed, including The Caretaker (1960), The Lover (1963), The Homecoming (1965), Old Times (1971), and No Man's Land (1975). Betrayal
(1978; film, 1982) is an ironic tragedy which ends in beginning and
traces with a reversed chronology the development of a love affair
between a man and his best friend's wife. Later plays include A Kind of Alaska (1982), based on a
work by O. Sacks, One for the Road
(1984), Mountain Language
(1988), Party Time (1991),
and Ashes to Ashes
(1996, a short drama of the Holocaust). Pinter's gift for portraying,
by means of dialogue which realistically produces the nuances of
colloquial speech, the difficulties of communication and the many
layers of meaning in language, paue, and silence, have created a style
labelled by the popular imagination as 'Pinteresque'., and his themes
—nameless menace, erotic fantasy obsession and jealousy, family
hatreds, and mental disturbance—are equally recognizable. Pinter has
also written extensively for radio and television, directed plays, and
written several screenplays, which include versions of L. P. Hartley's The Go-Between (1969), A la recherche du temps perdu
(1978) and J. Fowles's The French
Lieutenant's Woman (1982). Poems
and Prose, 1947-1977 was published in 1978. See The Life and Work of Harold Pinter
(1996) by Michael Billington.
The
Caretaker, a
play by H. Pinter, performed and published in 1960.
One of Pinter's characteristically enigmatic dramas, it is built on
the interaction of three characters, the tramp Davies and the brothers
Aston and Mick. Aston has rescued Davies from a brawl and brought him
back to a junk-filled room, in which he offers Davies a bed and,
eventually, an ill-defined post as caretaker. The characters reveal
themselves in inconsequential dialogue and obsessional monologue.
Davies is worried about his papers, the blacks, gas leaks, and getting
to Sidcup; Aston reveals that he has suffered headaches ever since
undergoing electric shock treatment for his 'complaint'; Mick, the
youngest, is alternately bully, cajoler, and materialist visionary,
with dreams of transforming the room into a fashionable penthouse. In
the end both brothers turn on Davies and evict him. The dialogue is at
once naturalistic and surreal; the litany of London place names
(Finsbury Park, Shepherd's Bush, Putney) and of decorator's jargon
(charcoal-grey worktops, teak veneeer) serves to highlight the no
man's-land in which the characters in fact meet.
The
Homecoming, a play by H. Pinter, performed and published
1965.
A black Freudian family drama, the play presents the return to his
north London home and ostentatiously womanless family of Teddy, an
academic, and his wife of six years, Ruth, once a photographic model.
The patriarch, Mac, a butcher, is alternately violent and cringing in
manner, and the other two sons, Lenny and Joey, in a very short time
make sexual overtures to Ruth, who calmly accepts them; by the end of
the play, Teddy has decided to leave her with the family, who intend to
establish her as a professional prostitute. The tone is dark, erotic,
and threatening; the shocking and the banal are sharply juxtaposed
throughout. Ruth's acceptance of her role as mother, mistress, and
possibly breadwinner for her new family, and her rejection of her
husband, are intricately connected with the enigmatic figure of the
long-dead mother. Jessie, who is both reviled and idolized by her
survivors.
Hay que ver el capítulo correspondiente de la Cambridge
History of English and American Literature, en red en Bartleby.com,
en el volumen XIII,
sobre teatro del siglo XIX:
VIII.
Nineteenth-Century Drama
By HAROLD CHILD, sometime Scholar of Brasenose College,
Oxford
Hay muchos materiales sobre el periodo 1890-1950, y sobre
todo sobre
la obra de Bernard Shaw, que lo domina, en el sitio web de Richard F.
Dietrich, Richard F. Ozymandias: The
Complete Works of R. F. Dietrich http://chuma.cas.usf.edu/~dietrich/
Sir Arthur Wing Pinero (1855-1934).
He left school at 10 to work in his father's solicitor's practice, but,
stage-struck from youth, became an actor, and was noticed by H. Irving
who later produced some of his plays. His first one-act play, Two Hundred a Year, performed in
1877, heralded a successful and prolific career. The first of his
farces, The Magistrate
(perf. 1885), involves a series of ludicrous confusions between Mr
Posket, the magistrate, and his family; it brought Pinero both fame and
wealth. Later farces, such as The
School-Mistress (1887), did nearly as well, as did his
sentimental comedy Sweet Lavender (1888).
His first serious play, on what was to be the recurrent theme of double
standards for men and women, was The
Profligate
(1889); it was praised by Archer, and noted not only for its frankness
but also for its absence of the standard devices of soliloquy and
aside. Lady Bountiful (1891)
was the first of the 'social' plays in which Pinero was deemed to
display his understanding of women. The
Second Mrs Tanqueray (1893), returning to the theme of double
standards, was a lasting success. The
Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith (1895) again dealt with a woman's dubious
past. Trelawny of the 'Wells'
(1898), a sentimental comedy nostalgically recalling his own passion
for the theatre he had haunted as a boy, also had great success. He
continued to write, but, although knighted in 1909, lived through many
years of dwindling reputation and disillusion, eclipsed by the reising
popularity of the new theatre of Ibsen and G.
B. Shaw.
The Second Mrs Tanqueray, a
play by Sir A. Pinero, first performed 1893.
Tanqueray, knowing of Paula's past reputation, still determines to
marry her, in the belief that his love and the generosity of his
friends will prove strong enough to counter prejudice and hypocrisy.
Ellean, his young convent-bred daughter from a previous marriage, comes
to live with him and Paula; soon Tanqueray begins to realize that
Ellean, his friends, and his own suspicions are proving too powerful an
opposition to his once-loving marriage. whan Paula realizes that she
has lost his love, she kills herself. Because of the daring theme
Pinero had great difficulty in having the play accepted for production,
but once produced it was an immediate and abiding success.
—de Gilbert y Sullivan (1881), en la ópera de Sydney:
Surface Tension
The Speculative Theatre 1871-91
Ch. 16 of The Cambridge Illustrated
History of British Theatre, by Simon Trussler:
However clear-sighted may have been Karl Marx's diagnosis of the
ill-effects of nineteenth-century laissez
faire capitalism,
his prognosis, especially if misread as a programme for continuing
action, was deeply flawed. He acknowledged the skill of the English
ruling classes in deflecting revolutionary tendencies through timely
concessions: but he recognized less well their capacity to assimilate
or, where necessary, to cauterize the traditional culture of the
proletariat—the breeding ground of effective subversion.
At the lowly level of recreation, the process of assimilation had been
accelerating since mid-century. many of the sports which, though played
for generations according to vague but locally recognized oral codes,
had been banned as disruptive in their 'unofficial' forms now began to
be 'officially' resuscitated—replete with printed rulebooks,
top-hatted regulating bodies, and all the class ramifications of
'amateur' and 'professional' status. However, those popular customs
which threatened profits as well as peace of mind had, necessarily, to
be put down rather than merely contained. And so it was, for example,
that the diverse ways in which midwinter had traditionally been
celebrated were now tidied up and at first confined to Christmas Day
itself: the addition of Boxing Day (following the act of 1871 which
established Bank Holidays) was thus made to appear a benevolent
concession rather than a grudging acknowledgement of a far ampler
ancient right.
Not only were the twelve days reduced to two, but a once-communal feast
was turned inward upon the family and the domestic hearth—even the
raucous street music of the waits being suppressed in favour of the
'rediscovery' of carols, so much more reverent and demure. And all
those charitable ladies who, on Christmas Day, massaged their
consciences by doling out to those incarcerated in prisons and
workhouses their one decent meal of the year had now, in the cause of
temperance, to concede that their healths be drunk in water instead of
good ale—while the annual treat was, of course, preferably to be
confined to the 'deserving' rather than the recalcitrant poor.
Despite all these tendencies, Epiphany long kept its hold on the
popular imagination, although its traditional inversions had become
largely symbolic—practical jokes, typically, rendered down to cardboard
as the subjects of Twelfth Night cards (which long predated Christmas
cards as we know them). Stubbornly, however, seasonal topsy-turvydom
did survive—not least in traditions of cross-dressing, an indecorous
ebullience which disturbed not only the smug religiosity of the makers
of the Victorian Christmas but the discreet hypocrisies of their sexual
habits.
And so it was that the subversive transvestism of old became a
sanctioned form of sublimation, made manifest in the rituals of
pantomime—which, although often a Christmas offering in the past, was
now becoming exclusively so. In the process, most lingering
associations with the old commedia
masks were purged, as Harlequin and Columbine gave way to a
transsexually titillating principal boy and principal girl, backed up
by a chorus line inf fleshings. The Clown was cut down to the likes of
Buttons, and Pantaloon unsexed to become the Dame—a male in drag,
usually a music-hall favorite drafted in to boost the box-office, as
pop stars and television personalities are today.
Drury Lane, notably under the management of Augustus Harris from 1879
to 1896 restored its drifting fortunes by specializing, for
ever-lengthening Christmas seasons, in pantomimes of the most
spectacular kind—filling out its year with sensation dramas similarly
dependent upon extravagant effects, for which the theatre's technical
resources as well as its sheer size made it well suited. Such effects
ranged from the sinking of the Birkenhead in Cheer, Boys, Cheer (1895) to August
Bank Holiday on Hampstead Heath in The
Great Ruby (1898) and a full-scale horse-race in The Whip (1909).
[Illustr.] Augustus
Harris (1852-96) under whose management from 1879 Drury Lane
interspersed its regular diet of spectacular dramas with an annual
'Christmas' pantomime which might run past Easter. Although condemned
by traditionalists for his recruitment of music-hall performers in
panto, Harris retained many of its older features, including the Clown
and the harlequinade—which duly featured in Babes
in the Wood. Dan Leno, whom Harris
introduced to the West End in this production, remained teamed with
Herbert Campbell in pantomimes at the Lane until both died in 1904.
This cartoon was one of the long sequence published in Vanity
Fair by 'Ape' and (as in this case)
'Spy', otherwise Sir Leslie Ward.
(Illustr.): Impressions of characters from Babes in the
Wood, Augustus Harris's Drury Lane
pantomime of 1888. These were drawn for the Illustrated
Sporting and Dramatic—the
journalistic conjunction reminding us of the strong links between the
stage and the turf at this time. Dan Leno is shown here in the 'dame'
role of the wicked aunt, with Harriet Vernon (she of the redoubtable
thighs) as the 'principal boy', Robin Hood. The two babes ('of forty or
thereabouts', as the Sporting and Dramatic reminds us) are older music-hall stars,
Herbert Campbell and Harry Nicholls.
A NEW BOOM IN THEATRE BUILDING
That the ruling classes were now showing some readiness to alleviate
the harshest excesses of the industrial revolution had to do in part
with enlightened self-interest, in part with a calculated a ppeal to
class allegiances. Thus, because factory owners tended to be
free-trading Liberals, and imperialist Conservative government might
embark upon industrial reforms without offence to its supporters in the
rural shires—while in the process wooing those newly enfranchised by
the Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884, which gave the vote to virtually all
male householders. No less important, the Ballot Act of 1872 kept
secret from employers and landlords alike the way in which a man cast
that vote: and although no woman was yet able to cast hers, the Married
Women's Property Acts of 1870 and 1882 marked a first step towards
greater economic independence.
Although the Elementary Education Act of 1870 was passed by Gladstone's
first Liberal administration, it was thus his successor Disraeli—the
first to deplore 'two nations' living in mutual ignorance—who as leader
of the Conservative government of 1874 enacted a programme of reforms
which one of the first two Labour MPs then elected declared to have
'done more for the working classes in five years than the Liberals in
fifty'. Factory legislation significantly loosened the shackles of long
hours and insufferable conditions, while trades unions were freed from
criminal penalties for strike action and peaceful picketing. Under a
Public Health Act, sewage systems were built which have only recently
begun to show their age. An Enclosures Act not only brought the private
absorption of common land virtually to an end, but increased the
provision of public recreation grounds and allotments And local
authorities were encouraged to build 'artisans' dwellings'—thus
creating the very system of council houses that more recent
Conservative governments have been anxious to dismantle.
Although conditions for ordinary working people thus began slowly to
improve, the 1870s saw also the start of a severe trade depression
which, with only two brief intermissions, persisted almost until the
end of the century. But since some of the causative factors—tariff
barriers abroad, the end of the railway boom at home—left investors
with spare capital, the theatre, as an alternative focus for
speculation, ironically benefited, and it was during this period that
an 'entertainment industry' effectively emerged.
However, the tale of the two London theatres known as 'the rickety
twins' suggests that this development could have its pitfalls. On a
site between the churches of St Clement Dane and St Mary le Strand were
thus constructed in 1868 and 1870 the back-to-back playhouses best
remembered as the Globe and the Opera Comique. Slum clearance in the
area to make way for the Aldwych and Kingsway development was already
being actively planned, and the speculative builder Sefton Parry
therefore erected both theatres of the flimsiest materials in
expectation of their imminent demolition—and his own hefty
compensation. They were considered serious fire hazards, although in
the event both manged just to outlive the century.
Two sturdier products of the new boom in theatre building also opened
in 1870—the charming Vaudeville in the Strand, and the first Royal
Court, whose situation in Sloane Square testified to the ever-westward
drift of fashionable London. On Regent (soon to be Piccadilly) Circus,
the subterranean location of the Criterion Theatre, built in 1874
beneath the restaurant of the same name, bore witness to the spiralling
land values in the heart of the West End. Even further west, if never
quite so fashionable, Hammersmith saw its Lyric Opera House go up in
1888. And in 1881 had opened both the Comedy, in Panton Street between
the Haymarket and Leicester Square, and the first Savoy, midway along
the Strand. The Playhouse, which followed a year later, was anecdotally
another of Sefton Parry's gambles, owing its obscure situation off the
Embankment to an anticipated extension of the Charing Cross railway,
from which he hoped in vain to profit.
In 1884 the Prince of Wales's opened in Covent Street, off Piccadilly
Circus—and then, in 1887, were completed the slum clearances which now
drove Charing Cross Road north towards Oxford Street from Trafalgar
Square, and Shaftesbury Avenue south-west from Holborn down to
Piccadilly. The very heart of theatreland now underwent a rapid
transplant, fed by these wide, well-lit, and accessible arteries. In
1888 the first Shaftesbury Theatre went up near Cambridge Circus, where
the two roads crossed, to be closely followed by the Lyric, just a
little further west: and then, in 1891, arose the great sprawl of the
Palace, at first as the Royal English Opera, to dominate the Circus
itself. The Garrick had already staked a first claim for the theatre
along Charing Cross Road in 1889, and three years later arose the
almost abutting Trafalgar, now known as the Duke of York's, with its
frontage on St Martin's Lane.
THE VINTAGE
VICTORIAN THEATRE
The Empire
music hall, Newcastle, pictured
in 1891, and probably much as it had been for the previous half
century. Note the cane chairs for the orchestra, the plush seats in the
'front stalls' —and the hard benches in the slips. Flock wallpaper and
pictures lend a homely touch to the auditorium, which contrasts with
the fantasy world conjured up on the stage
Our
illustration shows some typical features of the vintage Victorian
theatre: its fully-formed and ornately gilded picture-frame
stage, from which any residual trace of apron and stage doors has been
eliminated; its rich but highly (and sometimes confusingly) eclectic
embellishments; its pit foreshortened or (as here) abandoned before
encroaching stalls; and upper tiers ever-extending towards the stage,
as new techniques of cantilevering removed the necessity for so many
supporting pillars. Other less immediately obvious characteristics were
dictated by considerations of safety: these included, besides improved
ventilation, a new tendency for the pit to be sunk below ground so that
the dress circle was at entrance level, and a requirement that the
theatre should be isolated from surrounding buildings by passageways.
Since rooms could no longer be built above
the auditorium, the fly-tower now became a dominant external feature,
while new scenographic techniques were encouraging the internal
improvement and development of the flying space. However, overriding
commercial considerations meant that, in comparison with continental
practice, front-of-house facilities in the new theatres were meagre,
with box-office, cloak-room, and refreshment areas often so cramped as
not even to be adequately functional. As, in many such theatres, they
remain.
But the most enduringly important
innovation in theatre construction to occur during this period lay, of
course, in the use of electric lighting. Richard D'Oyly Carte led the
way in 1881, his new Savoy not only the first theatre but the first
public building of any kind in London to be so lit; and later in the
1880s two disastrous fires within two years at the Theatre Royal,
Exeter, accelerated a nationwide conversion from gas which was
virtually complete by the end of the century. But D'Oyly Carte
continued to illuminate the auditorium as well as the stage during
performances, and this hungover habit at first limited the artistic
potential of electricity—at a time when Henry Irving was insisting not
only on the lowering of the house lights at the Lyceum, but on the
retention where possible of gas, which he believed to permit subtler
control over his effects.
Irving was, indeed, entirely modern in
deploying light not merely for illumination but for dramatic emphasis,
a diffusion and variation allowed more readily by the banks of
individual gas taps and valves than by the initially more limited
controls over the new source. Famously, Irving relished, too, the
resources of limelight—not merely for its mellow brilliance in tracking
his own actions like a modern follow-spot but for the varying
impressions of moonlight and directional or waning sunlight it
facilitated.
IRVING AND THE LYCEUM YEARS
In view of his approach to lighting, it is ironic that in other
respects the period's leading actor-manager, Henry Irving, was a rather
old-fashioned player with a preference for an old-fashioned repertoire.
Indeed, in 1877 there even appeared a small, anonymous pamphlet
entitled The Fashionable Tragedian—a
'criticism with ten illustrations' which set out to prove that, for all
his then burgeoning influence, Irving was, in truth, 'a very bad
actor'.
Unlike much of the critical sniping to which he was subjected, this
squib in brown paper wrappers merits attention because its authors,
William Archer and Robert W. Lowe, were to become respectively the
leading critic and theatre historian of their generation. And both
clearly sensed, as early in their own careers as in Irving's, that the
grip this charismatic performer was already exerting would encourage
(as it also exemplified) a spirit of conservatism which for some time
yet would insulate the British theatre from the new drama of Europe.
For while Irving was not a 'very bad actor', he did, as Shaw perceived
and complained, choose to contour his greatness within a corset of very
constraining trim.
Having served an old-style extended apprenticeship in the provinces,
Irving spent five inconspicuous years in London before being noticed in
1871, at the age of 32, in the role of Digby Grant in James Albery's Two Roses—
a role which, ironically, was also to be among the most modern he ever
attempted. Albery, whose dilutions of what Archer described as the
'flippant and feebly sentimental small talk' of the 'Robertsonian
school of playwriting' kept the new Vaudeville full for 294
performances, was briefly hailed as the natural successor of Tom
Robertson—who, already in ill-health, died the following year. However,
Robertson proved to have no natural successor—although hes widely
imitated knack of making dialogue trip with seeming ease from
well-mannered tongues made this an era when affluent amateurs
encouraged themselves to believe that acting was an accomplishment
easily acquired.
Thus arose a new breed of superior supernumeraries—'extra ladies and
gentlemen' who duly got their billing, but seldom in other than
walk-on roles. And among the fond (though in this case not so foolish)
parents who encouraged their offspring in their histrionic ambitions
was one Hezekiah Bateman, who, also in 1871, had gone so far as to take
the lease of the old Lyceum Theatre—which was still finding it hard to
live up to the pretensions of its portico—as a showcase for the talents
of his four daughters.
Bateman duly recruited Irving to the company: but neither the opening
play by his own wifre nor the stage adaptation of Dickens's Pickwick Papers which followed
caught the imagination of audiences. And so it was very much as a final
fling that Bateman agreed to let Irving take the lead in an adaptation
from the French by Leopold Lewis of a melodrama entitled The Bells, in which Irving was to
take the role of the haunted burgomaster Mathias. The opening night of
25 November 1871 not only rescued Bateman's fortunes but, in the words
of Clement Scott—a critic as traditional in his tastes as Archer was
innovatory—lifted Irving 'at one bound above his contemporaries'.
That same night, Irving, returning home, is said to have stepped down
from his cab and out of his marriage when his socially ambitious wife
asked irritably if he was going to go on making a fool of himself all
his life. His subsequent career was dedicated to showing that making a
fool of oneself might be no bar to social advancement: and in 1895, at
the second time of asking, he duly accepted a knighthood—the first such
honour for services to the theatre, which could from then on regard
itself as officially respectable and respectably official. A knighthood
for Squire Bancroft followed in
1897, and for Charles Wyndham, aptly an Edwardian creation, in 1902.
Meanwhile, in September 1872, began Irving's long association with the
hack dramatist W. G. Wills, whose reincarnation of the martyr king in
the actor's won image for the historical romance Charles I led to his appointment as
house dramatist to the Lyceum at £300 a year. Wills's talent, like
Lewis's, was mediocre, but in every sense adaptive—and subervient to
Irving's requireemnts, as in his mangling of Goethe's Faust in 1885, to the interests of
the actor's Mephistopheles.
Henry Irving's
Mephistopheles in W. G. Wills's version of Goethe's Faust (Lyceum, 1885). Against
massive costs of over £15,000, the production (five years in the
planning) took in nearly £70,000 in its first year and £57,000 in its
second. By then Irving had added the grotesque splendours of a scene in
the Witches' Kitchen to the climactic Walpurgisnacht revels on the
Brocken Mountain, in which (according to Clement Scott) a 'shrieking,
gibbering crowd' of witches, goblins, and apes from hell made a
terrifying contrast with 'shadowy greys and greens' suggestive of
Gustave Doré.
Even the poet Tennyson, then
entering his dotage, permitted Irving to shape the part of Philip of
Spain in Queen Mary (1876) as
a vehicle for his talents, and while the laureate lay dying, Irving
went to work on Becket
(1893), reconstructing the role of the archbishop and a good else
besides.
Irving's first Shakespearean production at the Lyceum, judiciously
chosen, was his Hamlet of
1874. He played the title role 'like a scholar and a gentleman', wrote
Clement Scott: Irving was 'not acting' but 'talking to himself . . .
thinking aloud'. During the run of 200 nights, then unprecedented for a
Shakespeare revival, Bateman died, and his widow, after briefly toying
with the reins of management, amicably resigned them to Irving in 1878.
Irving continued to extend his Shakespearean range, a mannered Othello (1876) and a curiously
unromantic Romeo and Juliet
(1882) easily outweighed by triumphs as Richard III in 1877, as Shylock
in 1879, as Wolsey in Henry VIII in 1892, and as Iachimo in Cymbeline
in 1896.
Despite scenic embellishments of a kind which had driven others into
bankruptcy, incidental music often specially composed for an orchestra
of thirty, and ambitiously choreographed crowd scenes, Irving managed
to make more money from Shakespeare and to play him for lengthier runs,
than had ever proved possible before. He took no less trouble over
lesser plays: his biographer Alan Hughes has thus calculated that the
formidable number of 639 people were employed to work on Robespierre, including 355
performers and musician, 236 technicians (the lighting crew alone
numbering 38), and 48 administrative staff.
That was in 1899: later in the same year Irving gave up his management
of the Lyceum, which he had recently turned into a limited company. He
died six years later, during what he had already declared to be his
farewell tour.
A rare
photograph of
Irving in performance—in Sardou's Robespierre,
on tour to New York in 1900 (cameras were banned at the Lyceum, where
the production had opened the previous year). Irving as Robespierre is
here addressing the hall of the revolutionary Convention in the last
act of the play. The picture is, of course, posed, but begins to
suggest Irving's concern for the careful orchestration of his crowd
scenes.
As an actor, Irving seems to have
exerted a force of will
which not only infused his role but took command of his audience. An
unusual mixture of the protean and the idiosyncratic, he was physically
adept at shrinking, extending, and otherwise dissembling his spidery
limbs into a new character, while deploying mannerisms of speech and
gait which made him, unmistakably and with deliberation, Irving. An
eccentric showman who wooed his audiences rather as Disraeli wooed his
Queen, he sustained the dying tradition of a permanent acting company,
but not in the spirit of interdependence on which Richard Burbage or
even David Garrick had built; rather, Irving was the undisputed first
among unequals.
Only his leading lady, Ellen Terry—whose hiring was
one of the first acts of his independent management—was permitted to
complement rather than challenge his supremacy, and even she had to
confine herself to roles which would reflect Irving's brilliance. As
Beatrice and Benedick, Portia and Shylock, or Imogen and Iachimo the
pair could thus work on an equal footing, but she was unable to play,
for example, Rosalind in As You Like
It, because there was no role of equivalent stature for the
'partner' who was also the boss. Terry's Imogen, which was much to the
taste of virtuous Victorians:
As a manager, Irving well understood his respectable Lyceum audiences
and was always responsive to their predictably limited tasts: but
within these limits his productions were rigorously rehearsed by
disciplined companies, and their polish scrupulously maintained during
long runs which would otherwise have fallen apart. And to be found
among the names of his company were such harbingers of the theatrical
future as George Alexander, Johnston Forbes-Robertson, and John
Martin-Harvey.
PROSPERITY IN THE WEST END
Irving not only brought commercial and (by his own and his audience's
standards) artistic success to the old Lyceum: he also did much to
create a climate in which other West End managements might
prosper—though all, confessedly, were assisted by favourable economic
conditions. Thus, the increase in middle-class incomes consequent upon
falling prices and stable salaries after 1873 allowed them not only to
shunt many patrons of the pit to a more fitting place—well out of sight
in the upper gallery—but also to risk increases in seat prices, thereby
boosting profit margins.
And so, despite Tom Robertson's death in 1871, the Bancrofts continued
to prosper at the Old Prince of Wales's, prettifying safe classics from
Shakespeare to Sheridan with what Bancroft called 'elaborate
illustration'. In 1880, following the retirement of the veteran
Buckstone, they moved to the Haymarket, which he had left largely
unrefurbished: they proceeded to refurbish it thoroughly, gilding the
picture-frame of their proscenium arch, cunningly concealing the
footlights and orchestra, and, to howls of impotent protest, pioneering
the total abolition of the pit. Meanwhile, their protégé John Hare, in
partnership with Madge Robertson and her husband W. H. Kendal, was
winning the public's initially uncertain favour for the new Court
Theatre, the same team later moving successively and successfully to
the St James's and the Garrick.
In 1875 Charles Wyndham began his long association with the underground
Criterion, where at first he specialized in vasectomized adaptations of
French farces, before becoming his own matinee idol in middle age.
Augustus Harris was soon to begin his long reign over pantomime at
Drury Lane, and Richard D'Oyly Carte to take Gilbert and Sullivan's
light operas to triumph from the Opera Comique to the SAvoy—whence
George Edwardes crossed the road to help John Hollingshead keep 'the
sacred lamp of burlesque' burning at the Gaiety. J. L. Toole, taking on
the little Charing Cross Theatre in King William Street in 1879,
reflected the prevailing managerial self-confidence by renaming it
after himself—an American fashion which found few other followers.
The
promenade of the Empire, Leicester Square, in 1902. A youthful
Winston Churchill was among those opposed to the attempts led by Mrs
Ormiston Chant to close down the promenade in 1894 (on the grounds that
it was a haunt of 'ladies of the town'). Later, the theatre housed
revue, and, after the First World War, musicals were performed there,
until it was demolished in 1927 to make way for a cinema.
MUSIC HALL AS
BIG BUSINESS
When, as the spectacular centrepiece to A Life of Pleasure (1893), the
promenade at the Empire Theatre in Leicester Square was recreated on
the stage of Drury Lane, a back-handed compliment was being paid to the
famous music hall. As the notoriety of the Empire promenade confirms
—it was allegedly a favoured haunt of prostitutes—music hall continued
to offend the bourgeoisie, though its appeal (like that of
horse-racing) united the more raffish elements of the aristocracy with
the generality of the working class. This was in spite of the
endeavours of those would-be respectable music-hall managers who banned
alcohol from the auditorium—an auditorium in which the old, convivial
clusters of tables and chairs were giving way before regular rows of
fixed seating, and where performers once welcomed with the raised glass
of the chairman were now identified by numbers slotted into the
invasive and alienating proscenium arch.
Such palatial West End establishments as the Empire,
the nearby Alhambra in Leicester Square, and later the surviving Palace
on Cambridge Circus were, of course, aiming to attract customers of a
different class from those who attended the humbler halls down in the
East End, and there were many gradations of neighbourhood hall in
between. But after 1888 all had to obtain a Certificate of Suitability
by meeting minimum legal standards of safety and sanitation: and the
cost of the necessary reconstruction work often required a major
injection of capital. Companies were therefore floated to build new
halls as well as to rebuild old—often to the designs of 'legit' theatre
architects, such as the prolific Frank Matcham.
Some managements also began to accrete first a local
chain of halls, and then a larger circuit—the beginnings of the
music-hall empires of the likes of Oswald Stoll and Edward Moss. At the
same time, a divide began to open up between the top-billing stars who
were able to command huge salaries to work the new circuits—Dan Leno
and Marie Lloyd being probably the most familiar to emerge during this
period—and their lowlier brethren, whose dispensable services were open
to exploitation. A long struggle for better conditions began with the
formation of the Variety Artists' Association in 1885, well before
'legitimate' players had successfully formed thamselves into a union—a
right at last acknowledged by the social reforms of the 1870s.
[Illustration:]
Opening bill ofr the New
Cross Empire in 1899. Designed by the prolific Frank Matcham, this
typical suburban hall had a capacity of around 2,000. Note the
'credentials of the organizers' whose capital investments are listed
along with their 'present market value'.
NEW WRITING—AND
A NEW STYLE OF OPERETTA
Managements in the [1870s]
required new writing to provide vehicles for
the acting talent at their command and to satisfy the expectations of
their paying public. Indeed, by the 180s the problem of the English
drama was not particularly the absence of a 'literary' output of
intellectual substance—none such had existed for over a century—but
rather the presence of a deeply bourgeois audience which, scornful of
the hearty affirmations of melodrama, had come to prefer the enervated
emotional shorthand of the 'society' style. Writers now seen as
harbingers of a 'new dram' could and did get their work staged in the
West End—just so long as their innovations titillated but did not
seriously disturb their audiences.
The production of original work
was encouraged by the international
copyright agreements which now began to stem the flood of foreign
imports and adaptations. The five years of protection from unauthorized
translation given to foreign writers in 1852 was extended in 1875 to
cover adapted pieces, and in 1887 the Berne Convention strengthened
copyright arrangements between most European countries—the most
important non-signatory, the United States, following with its own
legislation in 1891. Some doubts remained until 1911 as to how far
prior publication of a play might endanger performing rights, and this
led to numerous one-off 'copyright performances': but the new
arrangements did help to encourage reading editions, alongside the
ubiquitous acting texts of Lacy and French—whose technical jargon and
abbreviations proved forbidding to the uninitiated.
As commissions to adapt foreign
plays began to dry up, some writers
unwisely made bids for posterity by attempting those five-act
historical tragedies in blank-verse for which posterity was presumed to
have an unquenchable thirst. As Irving wryly observed in 1880, many of
the unknown authors who submitted such works to him by the score
'proudly claimed that they made a point of never going near a theatre'.
Even such a piece as Joan of Arc
(1871) by the thoroughly professional veteran Tom Taylor, has not only
failed to impress posterity ever since but owed such notoriety as it
enjoyed in its own day to the realism with which the saintly maid was
burnt at the stake.
Among the few writers who achieved
both an immediate and more enduring
fame, W. S. Gilbert occupies a special place. His 'fairy' comedies for
the Kendals at the Haymarket in the early 1870s were, improbably,
satiric burlesques in blank-verse in which Gilbert made audiences laugh
at their own hypocrisies by transplanting them to fairyland. Despite a
prolific early career (in 1872, for example, no fewer than five of his
plays were running in London theatres) at first he won more respect
than acclaim. His satirical edge was a touch too sharp for comfort,
needing not so much to be blunted as to be melodically honed to the
music of Arthur Sullivan.
Although John Hollingshead first
teamed the pair in the over-erudite Thespis
at the Adelphi in 1871, it
was only when Richard D'Oyly Carte, in search of a native equivalent to
the French opera bouffe, persuaded Gilbert to adapt his Trial by Jury for a musical setting
at the Royalty in 1875 that the long, symbiotic association began,
finding a first permanent theatre at the Opera Comique from 1877 to
1881. Then the team transferred along with their latest
production, Patience,
to the new Savoy Theatre, a slight but salubrious step westwards along
the Strand. G. K Chesterton described the characteristic tone of what
have ever since been known as the 'Savoy operas' as capturing that
'half-unreal detachment in which some Victorians came at last to smile
at all opinions including their own'.
The Savoy Theatre, during the opening production,
Patience, in 1881. So closely were
Gilbert and Sullivan's light operas associated with Richard D'Oyly
Carte's new theatre that they are often known collectively as the
'Savoy operas'. The theatre was the first to incorporate electric
lighting, and in its decorations and colouring it was more subdued than
earlier Victorian houses. It was to the Savoy that J. E. Vedrenne and
Granville Barker moved in 1907 from the Court, staging the first London
production of Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra. Between 1912 and 1914 Barker staged here
his innovatory productions of Shakespeare, further described on p. 271.
The theatre was reconstructed in art deco style in 1929, but severely
damaged by fire in 1990.
________
A scene from HMS Pinafore, by
Gilbert and Sullivan:
________
THE LEADING WRITERS
Arthur Wing Pinero, whose later 'problem plays' contributed to the
theatrical debate over the 'woman question' (to which we shall turn in
the next chapter), made an earlier and arguably more deservedly
enduring reputation as the writer of a string of successful farces,
largely for the Court Theatre. From The
Magistrate in 1885 through The
Schoolmistress and Dandy Dick
to The Amazons
in 1893, he rang proficient changes on that distinctively British
pattern whereby would-be adultery and its exposure are secondary to the
dread of embarrassment and social gaffes—a dramatic emphasis also
happily inoffensive to the Lord Chamberlain.
Unlike many other farceurs, Pinero gave the impression of being almost
fond of characters who were only a degree or so offset from reality.
George Rowell compares the types with those of the Aldwych farces of
the 1920s—among them a 'pure and persecuted husband', a 'knowing man of
the world' with his 'vacuous companion' , and a 'formidable matron'.
These were played respectively by Arthur Cecil, John Clayton, Fred
Kerr, and Mrs John Wood—a team whose regular 'lines', well-developed
sense of ensemble, and consummate timing must have endowed Pinero's
writing with the same ring of confidencethat Robertson Hare, Tom Walls,
Ralph Lynn, and Mary Brough were later to give Ben Travers.
[Illustration:]
Arthur Cecil as Posket,
The Magistrate in
Pinero's farce of that name. Seen at the Court in 1885, this was one of
the sequence of plays at that theatre with which Arthur W. Pinero
(1855-1934) consolidated his early reputation as a farceur. After
flirting with a seduction theme in The Profligate (1890), he turned, most famously in The
Second Mrs Tanqueray (1893),
to social dramas and 'problem plays': but these have generally worn
less well than either the farces or such later comedies as Trelawny
of the 'Wells' (1898) and The
Gay Lord Quex (1899). He wrote
inextinguishably on, but was out of touch with the style and values of
the post-Victorian world.
Among those considered leading writers at the time, Henry Arthur Jones
cuts the least appealing figure today. The equivocal stance of his
'problem plays'—and their no less equivocal solutions—must, like
Pinero's, await later discussion: meanwhile, in his early work his
success depended upon combining an old-fashioned melodramatic
instinct—well-matched to the temperament of the actor-manager Wilson
Barrett at the Princess's—with a solid storytelling technique and a
good ear for dialogue. However, such structural skills were too often
blighted by a pervasive and invasive social snobbery—perhaps inspired
by contempt for his own petty-bourgeois origins—as early exemplified in
Saints and Sinners (1884).
Jones went on to specialize variously in dramas of thwarted or
distorted passion, such as Judah
(1890), and old-fashioned intrigue comedies of which The Triumph of the Philistines
(1895) is a typical and The Liars
(1897) a rare superior example. Unfortunately his satire was not only
heavy-handed, but betrayed an almost clinical detestation of the common
people—also evident in his distaste for 'The Theatre of the Mob', as
Jones dubbed it in one of his numerous polemics for a higher drama.
Elsewhere, a shrill anti-clericalism sits oddly with an awed reverence
for high society—any intended criticism of which is effectively muted
by his insistence that those of lowly origins, inhabiting 'the dark
places of the earth', are beneathe the notice of art. Later, he was to
prophesy that 'the epitaph on . . . all this realistic business will
be—it does not matter what happens in kitchen-middens'.
Oscar wilde was outraging and amusing fashionable London by strutting
his aesthetic stuff as early as 1881, when Gilbert parodied such
greenery-yallery decadence (as it was viewed by the properly grey
majority) in Patience.
Although, with nice incongruity, Wilde was a cousin of W. G. Wills, it
was only with Lady Windermere's Fan
(1892) and A Woman of No Importance
(1893) that he found his own, very different kind of theatrical voice:
for within the ostensibly well-made structures of these plays social
norms are obliquely questioned by means of that calculated confusion of
satire, cynicism, and delight in paradox, which was already shaping the
Wildean inverted epigram.
Wilde's masterpiece, The Importance
of Being Earnest
(1895), which pushd this technique to its comic limits, is a farce
rooted in the native stock of situation and mistaken identity rather
than in threatened adultery—though here sublime aristocratic
insouciance substitutes for the precarious poise which Pinero's
middle-class characters strive to maintain. The play is, indeed, in
part a parodic reaction to the Robertsonian style of understatement,
still dwindling into the drawin-room miniaturism of the likes of James
Albery; but where those authors believed that their neatly-turned
phrases aspired to some ultimate truth, Wilde delighted in ultimate
paradox, avowedly aiming at an 'art divorced from life'.
[Illustration:]
George Alexander as Jack Worthing, in mourning for his pretended
brother Ernest, in the first production of Wilde's The
Importance of Being Earnest
at the St James's in 1895. In an interview published one month before
the opening in February, and four months before the libel action which
changed the course of his life, Wilde declared of the play: 'It is
exquisitely trivial, a delicate bubble of fancy, and it has its
philosophy . . . that we should treat all the trivial things of life
very seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and
studied frivolity'.
Wilde was the first in a line of homosexual dramatists whose legally
prescribed distance from social and sexual norms lends ironic weight to
their latter-day comedies of manners. In Earnest,
his own delight in outraging the proprieties gave us an inimitable
slice of art divorced from life—but, as life divorced him so cruelly
from art, it was also to enmesh him in the scandal and imprisonment
which (compounded, it is now believed, by the debilitating progress of
syphilis) led to his premature death.
The would-be successful social critic had to find a more protective
persona, and it was through his genius in creating just such a persona
that Bernard Shaw secured his dominance over the drama of the ensuing
decades. Shaw was, of course, a novelist and critic well before he
found success in the theatre—and by the time he pitched himself into
the critical front-line in the ealry 1890s two of his contemporaries,
Clement Scott and William Archer, had already staked out positions as
heads of the opposing forces in a new battle of 'ancients' versus
'moderns'.
ANCIENTS VERSUS MODERNS
Scott, the theatre critic of the Daily
Telegraph, who also edited the leading general-interest theatre
journal of the day, The Theatre, headed
the traditionalists, while Archer had sounded his optimistic clarion
call for the new in English
Dramatists of To-day
as early as 1882. Writers such as Robert Lowe and Percy Fitzgerald were
at the same time introducing some scholarly discipline into the writing
of theatre history and biography, which in the past had been largely
impressionistic when not unashamedly anecdotal. Lowe also produced his
massive Bibliographical Account of
English Theatrical Literature,
the first serious attempt to review everything published about the
theatre—as valuably distinguished from treatments of the drama as if it
were a branch of literature.
Even the theory of acting, which had not much concerned either the
profession or its critics of late, began to be debated with some
liveliness. As long ago as the 1770s the French encyclopedist and
playwright Denis Diderot had written in defence of objectivity as
opposed to emotional identification in acting: now, Walter Pollock's
translation of Diderot's work as The
Paradox of Acting
(1883) became central to a dispute which found Diderot's
fellow-countryman and disciple, Constant Coquelin (who had published
his own study of intellectually controlled acting technique in 1880),
ranged against no less an authority than Henry Irving. The isues—and
the opinions offered by these and numerous other actors—were summarized
and aanlyzed in Archer's aptly titled Masks
or Faces? in 1888.
Thanks to ever-speedier means of transport, this international exchange
of ideas was increasingly complemented by the cross-fertilization of
theatrical activity. Irving and Wyndham took full companies to America
where earlier they would have taken only themselves, while Sarah
Bernhardt with the company of the Comédie Française visited London from
Paris. From the USA came Edwin Booth to play Othello (to an Iago whicvh
far betted fitted Irving's temperament than his earlier Moor), from
Italy the great tragedian Tomasso Salvini, and from Germany the company
of the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen—often regarded as the first director in
the modern sense, whose meticulous concerns with ensemble playing
certainly influenced Irving's
treatment of his
Lyceum crowd scenes.
Then in 1891 a visit from André Antoine's Théâtre Libre from Paris
inspired the creation of a similar experimental art theatre in London,
the Independent Theatre, by the critic J. T. Grein. This provided a
living platform on which the 'moderns' might focus their attack against
the 'ancients' through their promotion of the already ageing Norwegian
dramatist Henryk Ibsen—among whose champions were both Shaw, whose Quintessence of Ibsenism also
appeared in 1891, and Archer, whose first complete edition of his works
in translation was then in preparation.
However, for most British audiences ibsen remained merely an obscure
dramatist from an obscure vcountry whom such intellectuals had made it
their business to promote well above the heads of their good selves—and
who might therefore consider himself lucky to have had his Doll's House redeemed by the use of
its happy ending in Henry Arthur Jones's version of 1884, coyly
retitled Breaking a Butterfly.
Janet Achurch acted in Archer's more faithful translation in 1889, and
this was duly pronounced 'ibscene' by Scott—who two years later was
scandalized beyond such punning put-downs into his legendary scream of
outrage against the first English performance of Ibsen's Ghosts.
Staged as the opening production of the Independent Theatre at the
Royalty, on 13 March 1891, this was at once condemned by Scott as 'an
open drain, a loathsome sore unbandaged; a dirty act done publicly'—and
anything phoney about the war between 'ancients' and 'moderns' was
clearly over.
[Illustration:
] Wilde's 'studied frivolity' as ironic liberation: Janet Achurch as
Nora Helmer, dancing the tarantella in the middle act of Ibsen's A
Doll's House. This
pen and ink drawing was made when the play was staged for thirty
performances at the Avenue Theatre in 1892—one of no fewer than five
London revivals during the 1890s.
Lo que oímos The Wall de Pink Floyd
en los años 70 finales y en los ochenta, en el cuartito del Cerbuna. El
año pasado remasterizaron el álbum:
It does ring a new note now...
Miércoles
26 de diciembre de 2012
My ResearchGate in 2012
Your published research —me dicen— was viewed 6468 times in 2012.
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También empecé el año con una score
muy alta, cerca del máximo, en ResearchGate— pero le dieron un tuneado
radical a este índice, y ahora mi posicionamiento es francamente
mediocre—y no sé si
mejorable—estoy
en el 1,59 inferior.
En fin, igual que empeoró radicalmente, quizá mejore por imponderables
semejantes. En el SSRN voy mejor, posicionado en el 1,50 % superior. La
verdad quizá esté en la áurea mediocridad.
En fin: los últimos serán los primeros, y así mi última publicación
subida a ResearchGate es una que no contribuirá mucho a subirme los
índices ni los pulgares: Reading
Notes on some English Classics—unas notas de lectura que tomé hace
más de 30 años, cuando leíamos un buen fajo de libros en cada curso de
literatura.
Este blog va de actualidad—no de la actualidad de la actualidad en
general, sino de mi actualidad (para eso es un blog personal). Lo que
sucede en la actualidad me interesa a veces, unas cosas más que otras
evidentemente, pero no necesariamente más que lo que sucedió en otro
tiempo y me acabo de enterar yo ahora, o de las cosas que me atraen la
atención ahora aunque sabía que deberían habérmela atraído tiempo ha.
El mundo pasa simultáneamente, en el pasado y en el presente, y hay que
secuenciarlo aquí poco a poco y en parte, seleccionando claro. No es
pecado que ahora te llame la atención por primera vez Bleak House, o tal aspecto de esa
novela, o las
canciones de Reynaldo Hahn, que ya nadie las oye,
lástima—o esta canción de hacia 1990 cuando éramos otros y no sabíamos
que existía.
Cada cual construye su actualidad con lo que le va atrayendo la
atención. Por qué se la atrae, eso podría estudiarse, pero igual otras
cosas nos atraen más la atención. Es un error dejarse llevar por
principio por la actualidad de los demás, o por la actualidad en
general. Hay que hacerse la de uno mismo. Qué pretencioso creer que ya
conocemos todos los clásicos y que por tanto no han de estar nunca de
actualidad para nosotros, o las curiosidades que jamás llegaron a
clásicas...
—y qué pretencioso simular que lo de anteayer ya no es
relevante porque estamos de vuelta, porque anteayer estábamos atentos a
todo lo que sucedía simultáneamente, estábamos siempre en el centro de
la acción, where the action is, atentos
al meollo.
Y a lo que ya había sucedido, siempre. ¡Anda
ya...!
La
interesante
discusión en el blog sobre el artículo de los tres niveles, se
centró en el problema de la evolución, aunque este era solo derivado. Y
no fue muy acertado por mi parte hablar de tres niveles de la
vida humana, pues más bien se trataba de la condición humana o de la
psique humana, o algo así. La vida humana es otra cosa, se manifiesta
en dos vertientes: la vida de cada persona en particular, o
biografía, y la conjunta de las diversas sociedades y naciones,
incluso la del total de la humanidad, o historia.
Sobre la primera, la vida
transcurre como un rosario de avatares, accidentes y casualidades,
mil sucesos que solo muy parcialmente responden al designio o
voluntad del individuo. Por lo común, el yo se maneja en esos sucesos
como el tripulante que intenta llevar una barca a algún sitio, unas
veces con el mar en calma, otras con viento favorable y otras con
borrascas. Pero la embarcación le viene dada, no la ha hecho él a
su gusto, salvo en muy pequeña medida, pues se compone de las
cualidades físicas, intelectuales y psíquicas, los “dones de los
dioses”, o de los genes, que lo limitan o excluyen de ciertas
navegaciones y en cierto grado le impulsan a otras. Y lo mismo pasa con
su orientación: con frecuencia, sobre todo en la juventud, nos
hacemos un proyecto ideal de vida que luego la vida misma se encarga de
modificar, trastocar o desbaratar por completo: los naufragios vitales
no son cosa rara.
A veces suponemos el yo como
simple resultado de los “tres niveles” de que hablaba, o meramente de
las condiciones y presiones sociales, pero fácilmente vemos que no es
así o, mejor dicho, solo lo es hasta cierto punto. Casi nadie está del
todo satisfecho con los dones que ha recibido al nacer, le
parecen escasos para sus merecimientos u objetivos, y el
sentimiento más o menos acentuado de frustración está muy difundido. En
sus memorias, Lerroux cuenta esta anécdota: En el periódico donde
trabajaba de joven había un poeta llamado Luna, jorobado. Un día
discutían de la existencia de Dios, y alguien dijo: “Vamos a ver, el
poeta señor Luna, ¿qué piensa usted de Dios?” El garabato humano saltó
de la silla al suelo, se enderezó tanto como pudo, sacó de debajo de la
mesa la navaja cabritera y clavándola con gesto de fiereza sobre el
tablero, contestó… soltando redonda blasfemia. El gusano se levantaba
iracundo contra el Creador, que había permitido que un alma altiva y
ambiciosa se alojase en un cuerpo miserable y ridículo. Creyentes y
ateos sintieron cruzado su rostro por el trallazo de la grosería y por
el grito de Satanás rebelándose contra la injusticia divina. Por donde
el blasfemo resultaba el más poseído de los deístas, confesor de la
divinidad a la que injuriaba”. Casi todo el mundo tiene una idea
elevada de sí mismo, sea más o menos acertada o equivocada, y lo que
menos tolera es el desprecio a su persona. Una persona que se siente
menospreciada o tratada con injusticia puede llegar a enfermar
psíquicamente o a cometer actos inesperados, crímenes o suicidio.
En cuanto a la presión social solo
moldea parcialmente a las personas. La historia muestra la gran
frecuencia con que diversos individuos se rebelan contra su
circunstancia social, tanto en un sentido colectivista (tratan de
cambiar la sociedad) como personal, rechazando las convenciones o las
leyes. Así, el yo resulta hasta cierto punto independiente tanto de los
condicionantes sociales como de los condicionantes biológicos, sin que
unos y otros sean desdeñables.
Es más, el yo se siente por lo
general independiente en alguna medida de su propia vida. He aquí
una frase genial, cuyo autor ignoro, creo que era francés, por lo
sutil: “¿Quién no es mejor que su propia biografía?”. O, mejor “¿Quién
no se siente superior a su propia biografía?”. La navegación vital
incluye numerosos errores, o actos que nos avergüenzan, o humillaciones
que nos parecen intolerables y que debemos dejar pasar. De ahí el
gran esfuerzo psíquico por justificar de mil modos esos
pequeños o grandes desastres, a fin de mantener la preciosa
estimación del yo, sin la cual la vida se hace insoportable.
La necesidad de autoestima puede
ser exagerada hasta la estupidez, pero existe siempre. Incluso los
esclavos la tenían y a menudo trataban de vengarse de sus amos o de
burlarlos, como muestran, por ejemplo, algunas obras de Plauto; o como
aquel que en la terribles minas de plata de Laurion dejó escrita su
jactancia de ser el mejor en el tajo. Algún autor romano, no recuerdo
cual, escribió “tantos enemigos tienes como esclavos” o algo así. Pero,
en fin, la cuestión es esta: puesto que el yo se autoconsidera
por encima de los condicionantes sociales y biológicos, ¿de dónde
sale él y su autoestima, sea razonable o deformada, sin la
cual la vida le parece indigna o repugnante?
————
—Un argumento muy parecido sobre el imporatante papel de la autoestima
y de la autoevaluación del yo en las motivaciones lo hace Mark Twain en
What Is Man?
La cartografía narrativa consiste en la ubicación de un fenómeno
narrativo (un texto narrativo en este caso) en el marco de una
narratividad general, o de la realidad como gran narración o sistema de
narraciones. La realidad es otras cosas, por supuesto, además de una
gran narrración o un sistema de narraciones; se trata de un aspecto
relevante de la realidad al que estamos prestando atención, o
resaltando con nuestra atención.
El estudio del anclaje narrativo, un aspecto concreto de la cartografía
narrativa, consistirá en examinar cómo se sitúa una narración a sí
misma en relación a otros fenómenos narrativos que dan cuenta del mundo
como secuencia temporal organizada e interpretable—que sitúan a esa
narración en el marco el mundo como gran relato. Para ver qué tipo de
anclaje narrativo se da en una narración, habrá que determinar qué tipo
de conceptualización del mundo en tanto que gran relato se está
invocando o presuponiendo. La historicidad es una manera específica
(moderna, pongamos) de anclaje narrativo.
La cartografía narrativa en sentido amplio también atiende a otras
cuestiones, a saber, la cuestión de los géneros narrativos. Dado el
mundo como gran historia, hay muchas maneras posibles de hablar de
ella, muchos géneros de discurso al respecto. Y un texto narrativo
también puede caracterizarse a sí mismo como una manera determinada de
presentar el mundo, o puede ubicarse de modo más o menos consciente o
explícito en el mapa de los géneros posibles, o aludir a otros géneros
que presenten una perspectiva determinada sobre la realidad (en el
aspecto que se está tratando) o sobre el propio texto, entrando así en
un dialogismo intertextual (del cual nos interesa aquí la dimensión
narrativa, historicista o temporal).
La obra de Bernard Shaw Too True to
Be Good
(1931) se ubica explícitamente en un momento dado de la evolución de la
humanidad, más en concreto en el debate entre socialismo y capitalismo
en el siglo XX. Shaw, un socialista de costumbres austeras, ve gran
parte de los males de la humanidad como consecuencia de la desigualdad
de riquezas, y propone en toda una serie de obras la abolición de la
propiedad privada. Por tanto, Too
True to Be Good
se ubicará no sólo en el contexto histórico de una determinada fase del
desarrollo del capitalismo, y de la reacción comunista, sino también en
el contexto de la obra socialista de Shaw.
Hay que decir que Shaw, con su estilo de vida personal, era muy
consciente de que la vida de los ricos no es una condición para la
felicidad; que la sobreabundancia de propiedades y bienes puede incluso
ser un obstáculo para ella (y aquí es a donde apunta esta obra en
concreto). La visión de los ricos como el ideal de vida puede cegar a
los pobres sobre la naturaleza de la felicidad, y eso es un problema
mayor incluso que el de la propia existencia de desigualdades en los
bienes. La pesadilla insensata que es la vida del rico la
describe la Paciente en el acto III "I was devoured by parasites: by
tourist agencies, steamboat companies, railways, motor car people,
hotel keepers, dressmakers, servants, all trying to get my money by
selling me things I dont really want; shoving me all over the globe to
look at what they call new skies, though they know as well as I do that
it is only the same old sky everywhere; and disabling me by doing all
the things for me that I ought to do for myself to keep myself in
health. They preyed on me to keep themselves alive: they pretended they
were making me happy when it was only by drinking and
drugging--cocktails and cocaine--that I could endure my life."
Son éstos ricos modernos, como queda claro por su tren de vida. El
tipo de ricos de quienes se ocupa la obra también la sitúa
históricamente.
Otra dimensión de la cartografía narrativa irá dirigida a la obra
(texto, fenómeno, etc.) como fenómeno parcial ubicado en el ámbito
global de la producción de un autor—a la relación entre el fenómeno
narrativo concreto (TToo True to Be
Good en este caso) y otro fenómeno histórico-temporal
narrativizado: la vida de un autor, su sentido y su lugar en ella.
Todos estos fenómenos son perspectivizados por el papel del analista y
su situación histórica. Por ejemplo (y haciendo abstracción de la
cuestión principal aquí, nuestro interés por la cartografía y anclaje
narrativos)—podemos valorar las ideas socialistas de Shaw, vistas a
principios del siglo XXI, sobre el trasfondo histórico de la
experiencia socialista y comunista del siglo XX, y de ello se seguirían
como poco importantes matizaciones a su postura. Podríamos argüír, por
ejemplo, cómo Shaw subestima el papel de la iniciativa privada como
creadora de riqueza y civilización, o cómo subestima a Stalin, en esta
obra de 1931, como opresor de vidas, cuerpos y mentes.
Shaw, dramaturgo de ideas, abre sus obras con grandes prefacios
teórico-filosóficos. Y éstos son de interés para nuestro proyecto aquí
porque atienden a diversas dimensiones de la cartografía narrativa. En
este caso presenta una panorámica de los sistemas de gobierno social,
basados en última instancia en una interpretación de la naturaleza y de
las motivaciones humanas—los impulsos egoístas y parasitarios, frente a
los altruistas y socialistas, o, tal y como lo pone Shaw, el Imperio
frente a la Iglesia. También aludirá a su propia intervención en el
debate político en forma de drama, teniendo en cuenta a su público y su
trayectoria pasada todo ello de modo explícito. A lo cual hay que sumar
el dialogismo implícito que el análisis extraiga ya sea del prólogo, ya
de la obra en sí.
Por supuesto que la perspectiva de Shaw (o "la perspectiva de Shaw tal
como la interpreta el analista") no coincidirá con la perspectiva del
analista, y ello añade dimensiones perspectivísticas y narrativas
propias. Por ejemplo, la admiración hacia Stalin o que mencionábamos, y
también hacia el fascismo (" Stalin and Mussolini are the most
responsible statesmen in Europe because they have no hold on their
places except their efficiency"...) —claramente, Shaw no sólo ignora
hechos relevantes que han sido puestos de manifiesto por la historia
subsiguiente, sino que su análisis se basa en una interpretación
errónea de la naturaleza humana, de las motivaciones de la acción
humana, y de la dinámica social. Ignora o es incapaz de ver la dinámica
de opresión y conformismo, de control y de vigilancia mutua, que se da
en la sociedad al margen de la adquisición de bienes materiales. Por
eso no ve a Stalin como un grotesco y monstruoso acumulador de poder,
aunque lo vea como un nuevo Papa, sino como un honesto funcionario
dedicado a su trabajo en la máxima austeridad; por eso es totalmente
ciego al distinto tipo de parasitismo social y de opresión que ejercen
los comisarios políticos, para Shaw una especie de monjes laicos. Shaw
cree que puede haber un gobierno objetivamente científico de los
asuntos humanos al margen de los intereses de lucro personal. Eso sería
too good to be true: no
parece
la naturaleza humana responder a esa creencia, pues el lucro no sólo se
expresa en objetos caros o cuentas millonarias; la naturaleza humana se
lucra a expensas de los demás con poder, opresión, atención e
influencia.
La obra se abre con un acto en el que un monstruo o microbio gigante
dialoga con un médico sobre la paciente que está en la cama. El médico
arguye que no hay un microbio conocido que cause el sarampión. Y en
efecto no lo había dn 1931. Según la Wikipedia, "Measles (also known as
Rubeola, morbilli, or English measles), is an infection of the
respiratory system caused by a virus, specifically a paramyxovirus of
the genus Morbillivirus" ... " In 1954, the virus causing the disease
was isolated from an 11-year old boy from the United States, David
Edmonston, and adapted and propagated on chick embryo tissue culture.
To date, 21 strains of the measles virus have been identified. While at
Merck, Maurice Hilleman developed the first successful vaccine.
Licensed vaccines to prevent the disease became available in 1963."
El médico reonoce que no tiene tratamiento para el sarampión, y que sin
embargo lo simula por el efecto placebo: "Faith is humbug. But it
works."
—quizá de allí pasamos a la explicación del título de la obra. Las
ideas religiosas son too good to be
true, pero quizá en cambio el análisis científico y escéptico de
la realidad sea too true to be good,
es incapaz de generar el ilusionismo, el efecto placebo necesario para
un funcionamiento adecuado de las motivaciones humanas y por tanto de
la sociedad.
Otra manera de situar la obra en la historia es mediante los detalles
de la ambientación y la realidad representada (incluyendo, por ejemplo,
el mobiliario e interiores que se empleen en la representación, pero
también detalles como la caja fuerte de seguridad, el teléfono o el
timbre eléctrico mencionados en el primer acto). Hay que tener en
cuenta el posible desfase entre el momento en que se escribió la obra y
el momento que escenifica, algo que puede hacerse más o menos explícito
con señales deliberadas de historicidad; y también las posibles
distorsiones o desfases temporales introducidos por la adaptación o
recepción posterior de la obra—por ejemplo reubicaciones en una época
anterior o posterior, que pueden a su vez causar incongruencias o
tensiones con diferentes aspectos de la obra, su lenguaje o sus
representaciones de la realidad. Así, un montaje actual de la obra
podría mantener su ambientación en los años 30, o actualizarla en
algunos aspectos —etc.
Shaw alude a su propia reputación como autor de teatro "de ideas," con
obras basadas en debates más que en intriga, con las palabras del
monstruo o microbio al final del acto I: "The play is now virtually
over; but the characters will discuss it at great length for two acts
more".
Un aspecto importante de la cartografía narrativa de la obra es su
ubicación en el panorama comunicativo—en concreto, en este caso, en la
historia del teatro británico o del teatro moderno. En este sentido
vemos a Shaw como un socialista de
salón,
es decir, un autor fundamentalmente integrado (no digamos ya en su
círculo social, su vida personal, etc.) en los círculos sociales e
intelectuales más influyentes de su tiempo. Trabaja "para la
humanidad", pero dirigiéndose a un público muy concreto que es el suyo,
y con un género muy específico que ha de ser recibido por ese público.
Por ejemplo, los personajes de Shaw son siempre caballeros,
aristócratas, con una conciencia de clase extraordinariamente
desarrollada, a la británica—y ése es el trasfondo sobre el cual sus
obras se constryen y sobre el que actúan. Shaw no inaugura nuevos
protocolos comunicativos, sino que sus obras vienen marcadas como fundamentalmente convencionales,
sean las que sean las ideas que en ellas se ventilan. No es
sorprendente que muchas de ellas acaben con protocolos de conciliación
social menos radicales de lo que son las proclamadas ideas del
autor—matrimonios en la clase alta, pactos entre capitalistas y
progresistas, herencias para los intelectuales, desengaños de los
idealistas, etc. El argumento, y no ya tanto el argumento como la
galería de personajes, desactiva por anticipado el socialismo del
autor, reubicándolo no en la acción política sino en un debate de ideas
(en línea, en realidad con las tesis "Fabianas" antirrevolucionarias).
La benevolencia con que se presenta a las clases altas y a sus humores
y caprichos contrasta curiosamente con la supuesta virulencia política
del mensaje de Shaw; en esto, como en tantas otras cosas, la obra es
característica de su época como fenómeno histórico.
Una obra se construye por alusión a géneros anteriores o a referencias
culturales que le proporcionan un tono, una estrucutra, una serie de
convencione. Por ejemplo, Heartbreak
House de Shaw se presenta explícitamente como una pieza "al
estilo ruso" —de Chejov, pongamos—sobre temas británicos. En Man and Superman alude a
Nietzsche
y al darwinismo. En este caso, el acto segundo nos remite a pastiches
imperiales humorísticos, quizá en la tradición de Gilbert y Sullivan,
o, en la caracterización de la "paciente" del primer acto en su disfraz
indígena, a indígenas explícitamente teatrales, de los que sólo se
encuentran en el "ballet ruso".
Critica la obra la hipocresía social que cultiva las mentiras y
ficciones por
su propia conveniencia. Dice Aubrey, el gentilhombre metido a ladrón:
"Make
any statement that is so true that it has been staring us in the
face all our lives, and the whole world will rise up and passionately
contradict you. If you dont withdraw and apologize, it will be the
worse for you. But just tell a thundering silly lie that everyone knows
is a lie, and a murmur of pleased assent will hum up from every quarter
of the globe."
La verdad no tiene valor social en sí: muchas cosas son too true to be good. Quizá
esté reflexionando Bernard Shaw sobre cómo muchos de sus mensajes
revolucionarios son aceptados por su público únicamente porque el
vehículo de los mismos es la ficción, la mentira consensuada.
Otra verdad inconventiente dice la "Paciente" Miss Mopply; que los tres
estafadores no son sino "inefficient fertilizers. We do nothing but
convert good food into bad manure. We are walking factories of bad
manure: thats what we are"—pero Aubrey le reprocha que "ther are
certain disgusting truths that no lady would throw in the teeth of her
fellow creatures--"
Una alusión a H. G. Wells y al creciente pesimismo de estos Fabianos al
final de su vida:
(el Sargento, en el acto III): "What must we do to be saved?" There it
is: not a story in a book as it used to be, but God's truth in the real
actual world. And all the comfort they get is "Flee from the wrath to
come." But where are they to flee to? There they are, meeting at Geneva
or hobnobbing at Chequers over the weekend, asking one another, like
the man in the book, "Whither must we flee?" And nobody can tell them.
The man in the book says "Do you see yonder shining light?" Well, today
the place is blazing with shining lights: shining lights in parliament,
in the papers, in the churches, and in the books that they call
Outlines--Outlines of History and Science and what not--and in spite of
all their ballyhoo here we are waiting in the City of Destruction like
so many sheep for the wrath to come."
El Anciano, padre de Aubrey, hace su aparición para lamentarse de la
educación dada a su hijo, que lo ha convertido en sacerdote y en
estafador. El Anciano era un escéptico, un librepensador, un defensor
de la Verdad, principios que intentó inculcar a su hijo—y ahora ve que
la Verdad quizá haga libre a la gente, pero no la hace mejor. Y así ve
cómo el universo en el que creía, el universo del racionalista
escéptico, se desmorona:
THE
ELDER. Yes, sir: the universe of Isaac Newton, which has been an
impregnable citadel of modern civilization for three hundred years, has
crumbled like the walls of Jericho before the criticism of Einstein.
Newton's universe was the stronghold of rational Determinism: the stars
in their orbits obeyed immutably fixed laws; and when we turned from
surveying their vastness to study the infinite littleness of the atoms,
there too we found the electrons in their orbits obeying the same
universal laws. Every moment of time dictated and determined the
following moment, and was itself dictated and determined by the moment
that came before it. Everything was calculable: everything happened
because it must: the commandments were erased from the tables of the
law; and in their place came the cosmic algebra: the equations of the
mathematicians. Here was my faith: here I found my dogma of
infallibility: I, who scorned alike the Catholic with his vain dream of
responsible Free Will, and the Protestant with his pretence of private
judgment. And now--now--what is left of it? The orbit of the electron
obeys no law: it chooses one path and rejects another: it is as
capricious as the planet Mercury, who wanders from his road to warm his
hands at the sun. All is caprice: the calculable world has become
incalculable: Purpose and Design, the pretexts for all the vilest
superstitions, have risen from the dead to cast down the mighty from
their seats and put paper crowns on presumptuous fools. Formerly, when
differences with my wife, or business worries, tried me too hard, I
sought consolation and reassurance in our natural history museums,
where I could forget all common cares in wondering at the diversity of
forms and colors in the birds and fishes and animals, all produced
without the agency of any designer by the operation of Natural
Selection. Today I dare not enter an aquarium, because I can see
nothing in those grotesque monsters of the deep but the caricatures of
some freakish demon artist: some Zeus-Mephistopheles with paintbox and
plasticine, trying to surpass himself in the production of fantastic
and laughable creatures to people a Noah's ark for his baby. I have to
rush from the building lest I go mad, crying, like the man in your
book, "What must I do to be saved?" Nothing can save us from a
perpetual headlong fall into a bottomless abyss but a solid footing of
dogma; and we no sooner agree to that than we find that the only
trustworthy dogma is that there is no dogma. As I stand here I am
falling into that abyss, down, down, down. We are all falling into it;
and our dizzy brains can utter nothing but madness. My wife has died
cursing me. I do not know how to live without her: we were unhappy
together for forty years. My son, whom I brought up to be an
incorruptible Godfearing atheist, has become a thief and a scoundrel;
and I can say nothing to him but "Go, boy: perish in your villainy; for
neither your father nor anyone else can now give you a good reason for
being a man of honor."
(...)
Determinism is gone, shattered, buried with a thousand dead religions,
evaporated with the clouds of a million forgotten winters. The science
I pinned my faith to is bankrupt: its tales were more foolish than all
the miracles of the priests, its cruelties more horrible than all the
atrocities of the Inquisition. Its spread of enlightenment has been a
spread of cancer: its counsels that were to have established the
millennium have led straight to European suicide. And I--I who believed
in it as no religious fanatic has ever believed in his superstition!
For its sake I helped to destroy the faith of millions of worshippers
in the temples of a thousand creeds. And now look at me and behold the
supreme tragedy of the atheist who has lost his faith--his faith in
atheism, for which more martyrs have perished than for all the creeds
put together. Here I stand, dumb before my scoundrel of a son; for that
is what you are, boy, a common scoundrel and nothing else.
Aubrey a su vez, tranquilo en su cinismo actual, le reprocha al anciano
su propia inmoralidad, que tolera la guerra y los bombardeos si son
actos "patrióticos", y contribuyó a hacerlo inmoral a él mismo. La
experiencia del desengaño del patriotismo y del heroísmo guerrero
también es característicamente moderna, históricamente situada. Como
dice el Sargento en el acto III, "We were not killing the right people
in 1915. We werent even killing the wrong people. It was innocent men
killing one another." En sus notas al final de la obra (1932) el autor
recalca la manera en que fue la experiencia de la Primera Guerra
Mundial para toda una generación la que hizo caer las viejas "verdades"
y abrió los ojos a una crisis espiritual e ideológica generalizada.
En el happy end el coronel
Tallboys es ascendido por error, aunque observa "la justicia es
justicia aunque se haga por error"; su hijo que evitó el servicio
militar se ha hecho durante la guerra "so enormously rich that I cannot
afford to keep up his acquaintance"; la estafadora Sweetie se casa con
el recto Sargento, convencido de que caracteres distintos garantizan la
armonía del matrimonio. Y la Sra Mopply, madre de la paciente, se
libera del mundo de mentiras en que ha vivido toda su vida, fingiendo
ficciones convenientes, y de su papel de madre sacrificada y sufridora:
MRS
MOPPLY. (...) What do you know about myself? my real self? They
told me lies; and I had to pretend to be somebody quite different.
TALLBOYS. Who told you lies, madam? It was not with my authority.
MRS MOPPLY. I wasnt thinking of you. My mother told me lies. My nurse
told me lies. My governess told me lies. Everybody told me lies. The
world is not a bit like what they said it was. I wasnt a bit like what
they said I ought to be. I thought I had to pretend. And I neednt have
pretended at all.
—y si el escepticismo del Anciano se ha visto alterado, ella por su
part declara que "I will never believe anything again as long as I
live."
—y se reconcilia con su hija, que la aborrecía en su vida de señoras
ricas, habiéndose liberado ahora ambas del peso de sus identidades
respectivas.
El servicial cabo Meek les proporciona a todos pasaportes
para
Beocia, un sueño utópico situado en una dimensión distinta de la URSS:
"The Union of Federated Sensible Societies, sir. The U.F.S.S. Everybody
wants to go there now, sir." Pero sólo hay visado para Tallboys, por su
afición a las acuaelas; los demás habrán de volver a Inglaterra.
Aubrey, abandonado por su amante, se dedicará a predicador, que era
su vocación; un predicador sin credo ahora. Y erigiénsose en portavoz
del autor, ha de despedir a todos
con uno de los característicos sermones de Shaw, y decir las verdades
aunque
sean inconvenientes:
AUBREY
[rising] If I may be allowed
to improve the occasion for a moment--
General consternation. All who are seated rise in alarm, except the
patient, who jumps up and claps her hands in mischievous encouragement
to the orator.
MRS MOPPLY }
[together]
{ You hold your tongue,
young man.
SWEETIE }
{ Oh Lord! we're in for it now.
THE ELDER }
{ Shame and silence would better become you, sir.
THE PATIENT }
{ Go on, Pops. It's the only thing you do well.
AUBREY [continuing]--it is
clear to me that though we seem to be
dispersing quietly to do very ordinary things: Sweetie and the Sergeant
to get married [the Sergeant hastily steals down from his grotto,
beckoning to Sweetie to follow him. They both escape along the beach]
the colonel to his wife, his watercolors, and his K.C.B. [the colonel
hurries away noiselessly in the opposite direction] Napoleon
Alexander
Trotsky Meek to his job of repatriating the expedition [Meek takes to
flight up the path through the gap] Mops, like Saint Teresa, to
found
an unladylike sisterhood with her mother as cook-housekeeper [Mrs
Mopply hastily follows the sergeant, dragging with her the patient, who
is listening to Aubrey with signs of becoming rapt in his discourse]
yet they are all, like my father here, falling, falling, falling
endlessly and hopelessly through a void in which they can find no
footing. [The Elder vanishes into
the recesses of St Pauls, leaving his
son to preach in solitude]. There is something fantastic about
them,
something unreal and perverse, something profoundly unsatisfactory.
They are too absurd to be believed in: yet they are not fictions: the
newspapers are full of them: what storyteller, however reckless a liar,
would dare to invent figures so improbable as men and women with their
minds stripped naked? Naked bodies no longer shock us: our sunbathers,
grinning at us from every illustrated summer number of our magazines,
are nuder than shorn lambs. But the horror of the naked mind is still
more than we can bear. Throw off the last rag of your bathing costume;
and I shall not blench nor expect you to blush. You may even throw away
the outer garments of your souls: the manners, the morals, the
decencies. Swear; use dirty words; drink cocktails; kiss and caress and
cuddle until girls who are like roses at eighteen are like battered
demireps at twenty-two: in all these ways the bright young things of
the victory have scandalized their dull old prewar elders and left
nobody but their bright young selves a penny the worse. But how are we
to bear this dreadful new nakedness: the nakedness of the souls who
until now have always disguised themselves from one another in
beautiful impossible idealisms to enable them to bear one another's
company. The iron lighting of war has burnt great rents in these
angelic veils, just as it has smashed great holes in our cathedral
roofs and torn great gashes in our hillsides. Our souls go in rags now;
and the young are spying through the holes and getting glimpses of the
reality that was hidden. And they are not horrified: they exult in
having found us out: they expose their own souls; and when we their
elders desperately try to patch our torn clothes with scraps of the old
material, the young lay violent hands on us and tear from us even the
rags that were left to us. But when they have stripped themselves and
us utterly naked, will they be able to bear the spectacle? You have
seen me try to strip my soul before my father; but when these two young
women stripped themselves more boldly than I--when the old woman had
the mask struck from her soul and revelled in it instead of dying of
it--I shrank from the revelation as from a wind bringing from the
unknown regions of the future a breath which may be a breath of life,
but of a life too keen for me to bear, and therefore for me a blast of
death. I stand midway between youth and age like a man who has missed
his train: too late for the last and too early for the next. What am I
to do? What am I? A soldier who has lost his nerve, a thief who at his
first great theft has found honesty the best policy and restored his
booty to its owner. Nature never intended me for soldiering or
thieving: I am by nature and destiny a preacher. I am the new
Ecclesiastes. But I have no Bible, no creed: the war has shot both out
of my hands. The war has been a fiery forcing house in which we have
grown with a rush like flowers in a late spring following a terrible
winter. And with what result? This: that we have outgrown our religion,
outgrown our political system, outgrown our own strength of mind and
character. The fatal word NOT has been miraculously inserted into all
our creeds: in the desecrated temples where we knelt murmuring "I
believe" we stand with stiff knees and stiffer necks shouting "Up, all!
the erect posture is the mark of the man: let lesser creatures kneel
and crawl: we will not kneel and we do not believe." But what next? Is
NO enough? For a boy, yes: for a man, never. Are we any the less
obsessed with a belief when we are denying it than when we were
affirming it? No: I must have affirmations to preach. Without them the
young will not listen to me; for even the young grow tired of denials.
The negativemonger falls before the soldiers, the men of action, the
fighters, strong in the old uncompromising affirmations which give them
status, duties, certainty of consequences; so that the pugnacious
spirit of man in them can reach out and strike deathblows with
steadfastly closed minds. Their way is straight and sure; but it is the
way of death; and the preacher must preach the way of life. Oh, if I
could only find it! [A white sea fog
swirls up from the beach to his
feet, rising and thickening round him]. I am ignorant: I have
lost my
nerve and am intimidated: all I know is that I must find the way of
life, for myself and all of us, or we shall surely perish. And
meanwhile my gift has possession of me: I must preach and preach and
preach no matter how late the hour and how short the day, no matter
whether I have nothing to say-- The fog has enveloped him; the gap
with its grottoes is lost to sight; the ponderous stones are wisps of
shifting white cloud; there is left only fog: impenetrable fog; but the
incorrigible preacher will not be denied his peroration, which, could
we only hear it distinctly, would probably run--
--or whether in some pentecostal flame of revelation the Spirit will
descend on me and inspire me with a message the sound whereof shall go
out unto all lands and realize for us at last the Kingdom and the Power
and the Glory for ever and ever. Amen. The audience disperses (or the reader
puts down the book) impressed in the English manner with the
Pentecostal flame and the echo from the Lord's Prayer. But fine words
butter no parsnips. A few of the choicer spirits will know that the
Pentecostal flame is always alight at the service of those strong
enough to bear its terrible intensity. They will not forget that it is
accompanied by a rushing mighty wind, and that any rascal who happens
to be also a windbag can get a prodigious volume of talk out of it
without ever going near enough to be shrivelled up. The author, though
himself a professional talk maker, does not believe that the world can
be saved by talk alone. He has given the rascal the last word; but his
own favorite is the woman of action, who begins by knocking the wind
out of the rascal, and ends with a cheerful conviction that the lost
dogs always find their own way home. So they will, perhaps, if the
women go out and look for them.
————
Vemos que la obra se evalúa a sí misma en el discurso final del
personaje, convertido en trasunto del Autor como Profeta, y se expone a
sí misma como una revelación, "too true to be good", del interior de
las mentes y de las actitudes de las personas, arrojadas a una crisis
de sus verdades convencionales tras el shock de la Primera Guerra
Mundial, y el temor a la Segunda que se ve venir. El anclaje narrativo
de la obra en la historia es por tanto excepcionalmente consciente y
deliberado, cosa no extraña tratándose de una obra de vejez de un autor
célebre por su visión crítica del mundo en que vivía.
El autor continúa en propia voz en las notas sobre la obra escritas
para el festival de Malvern (1932), sosteniendo que a pesar de las
palabras del Viejo escéptico no ha abandonado ninguna de sus posiciones
críticas escépticas y socialistas, y que para los males sociales y
espirituales del momento, "extremely practical and precise remedies,
including a complete political reconstitution, a credible and
scientific religion, and a satisfactory economic scheme, are
discoverable by anyone under thirty (the older ones are past praying
for)". También justifica la extraña estructura de su obra en atención a
una necesidad de manatener la atención del público:
"When people have laughed for an hour, they want to be serio-comically
entertained for the next hour; and when that is over they are so tired
of not being wholly serious that they can bear nothing but a torrent of
sermons.
En el Acto III de Man and Superman,
de George Bernard Shaw, los personajes discuten sobre el sentido
de la acción, y del matrimonio y de la reproducción y de la vida y de
la existencia, concluyendo con una defensa de la Fuerza Vital en boca
de Don Juan, una fuerza que guía la evolución y que llevará al hombre
hacia su destino en el Superhombre (en la obra se alude explícitamente
a Nietzsche). El Diablo, otro de los interlocutores, es mas escéptico:
el Universo visto globalmente no tiene propósito, y el hombre, con todo
su cerebro y su inteligencia, no es sino una especie destructiva:
DON
JUAN. You forget that brainless magnificence of body has been tried.
Things immeasurably greater than man in every respect but brain have
existed and perished. The megatherium, the icthyosaurus have paced the
earth with seven-league steps and hidden the day with cloud vast wings.
Where are they now? Fossils in museums, and so few and imperfect at
that, that a knuckle bone or a tooth of one of them is prized beyond
the lives of a thousand soldiers. These things lived and wanted to
live; but for lack of brains they did not know how to carry out their
purpose, and so destroyed themselves.
THE
DEVIL. And is Man any the less destroying himself for all this boasted
brain of his? Have you walked up and down upon the earth lately? I
have; and I have examined Man's wonderful inventions. And I tell you
that in the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death
he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all
the slaughter of plague, pestilence and famine. The peasant I tempt
to-day eats and drinks what was eaten and drunk by the peasants of ten
thousand years ago; and the house he lives in has not altered as much
in a thousand centuries as the fashion of a lady's bonnet in a score of
weeks. But when he goes out to slay, he carries a marvel of mechanism
that lets loose at the touch of his finger all the hidden molecular
energies, and leaves the javelin, the arrow, the blowpipe of his
fathers far behind. In the arts of peace Man is a bungler. I have seen
his cotton factories and the like, with machinery that a greedy dog
could have invented if it had wanted money instead of food. I know his
clumsy typewriters and bungling locomotives and tedious bicycles: they
are toys compared to the Maxim gun, the submarine torpedo boat. There
is nothing in Man's industrial machinery but his greed and sloth: his
heart is in his weapons. This marvellous force of Life of which you
boast is a force of Death: Man measures his strength by his
destructiveness. What is his religion? An excuse for hating ME. What is
his law? An excuse for hanging YOU. What is his morality? Gentility! an
excuse for consuming without producing. What is his art? An excuse for
gloating over pictures of slaughter. What are his politics? Either the
worship of a despot because a despot can kill, or parliamentary
cockfighting. I spent an evening lately in a certain celebrated
legislature, and heard the pot lecturing the kettle for its
blackness,
and ministers answering questions. When I left I chalked up on the door
the old nursery saying—"Ask no questions and you will be told no lies."
I bought a sixpenny family magazine, and found it full of pictures of
young men shooting and stabbing one another. I saw a man die: he was a
London bricklayer's laborer with seven children. He left seventeen
pounds club money; and his wife spent it all on his funeral and went
into the workhouse with the children next day. She would not have spent
sevenpence on her children's schooling: the law had to force her to let
them be taught gratuitously; but on death she spent all she had. Their
imagination glows, their energies rise up at the idea of death, these
people: they love it; and the more horrible it is the more they enjoy
it. Hell is a place far above their comprehension: they derive their
notion of it from two of the greatest fools that ever lived, an Italian
and an Englishman. The Italian described it as a place of mud, frost,
filth, fire, and venomous serpents: all torture. This ass, when he was
not lying about me, was maundering about some woman whom he saw once in
the street. The Englishman described me as being expelled from Heaven
by cannons and gunpowder; and to this day every Briton believes that
the whole of his silly story is in the Bible. What else he says I do
not know; for it is all in a long poem which neither I nor anyone else
ever succeeded in wading through. It is the same in everything. The
highest form of literature is the tragedy, a play in which everybody is
murdered at the end. In the old chronicles you read of earthquakes and
pestilences, and are told that these showed the power and majesty of
God and the littleness of Man. Nowadays the chronicles describe
battles. In a battle two bodies of men shoot at one another with
bullets and explosive shells until one body runs away, when the others
chase the fugitives on horseback and cut them to pieces as they fly.
And this, the chronicle concludes, shows the greatness and majesty of
empires, and the littleness of the vanquished. Over such battles the
people run about the streets yelling with delight, and egg their
Governments on to spend hundreds of millions of money in the slaughter,
whilst the strongest Ministers dare not spend an extra penny in the
pound against the poverty and pestilence through which they themselves
daily walk. I could give you a thousand instances; but they all come to
the same thing: the power that governs the earth is not the power of
Life but of Death; and the inner need that has nerved Life to the
effort of organizing itself into the human being is not the need for
higher life but for a more efficient engine of destruction. The plague,
the famine, the earthquake, the tempest were too spasmodic in their
action; the tiger and crocodile were too easily satiated and not cruel
enough: something more constantly, more ruthlessly, more ingeniously
destructive was needed; and that something was Man, the inventor of the
rack, the stake, the gallows, and the electrocutor; of the sword and
gun; above all, of justice, duty, patriotism and all the other isms by
which even those who are clever enough to be humanely disposed are
persuaded to become the most destructive of all the destroyers.
Más adelante este diálogo, expone o reconoce Don Juan la tesis de que
la evolución humana está guiada por la guerra y la lucha por el poder.
Es una interesante y temprana exposición de la tesis evolutiva de que somos
hijos de la guerra:
THE
DEVIL. Yes; and this civilization! what is it, after all?
DON
JUAN. After all, an excellent peg to hang your cynical commonplaces on;
but BEFORE all, it is an attempt on Man's part to make himself
something more than the mere instrument of Woman's purpose. So far, the
result of Life's continual effort not only to maintain itself, but to
achieve higher and higher organization and completer
self-consciousness, is only, at best, a doubtful campaign between its
forces and those of Death and Degeneration. The battles in this
campaign are mere blunders, mostly won, like actual military battles,
in spite of the commanders.
THE
STATUE. That is a dig at me. No matter: go on, go on.
DON
JUAN. It is a dig at a much higher power than you, Commander. Still,
you must have noticed in your profession that even a stupid general can
win battles when the enemy's general is a little stupider.
THE
STATUE. [very seriously] Most true, Juan, most true. Some donkeys have
amazing luck.
DON
JUAN. Well, the Life Force is stupid; but it is not so stupid as the
forces of Death and Degeneration. Besides, these are in its pay all the
time. And so Life wins, after a fashion. What mere copiousness of
fecundity can supply and mere greed preserve, we possess. The survival
of whatever form of civilization can produce the best rifle and the
best fed riflemen is assured.
THE
DEVIL. Exactly! the survival, not of the most effective means of Life
but of the most effective means of Death. You always come back to my
point, in spite of your wrigglings and evasions and sophistries, not to
mention the intolerable length of your speeches.
El ideal de Don Juan, la evolución creadora de
formas superiores, requiere sin embargo la inteligencia, sea cual sea
su origen. La cima de la existencia humana, lo más parecido
al superhombre que tenemos hoy, es
the
philosophic man: he who seeks in contemplation to discover the inner
will of the world, in invention to discover the means of fulfilling
that will, and in action to do that will by the so-discovered means. Of
all other sorts of men I declare myself tired.
—sin embargo la obra termina con Don Juan
(Tanner) casado con Doña Ana, impulsado se supone por la Fuerza Vital,
y rindiéndose a las argucias matrimoniales femeninas: "The Life Force enchants me: I have the
whole world in my arms when I clasp you"....
Tanto más curiosa esta conclusión desde el punto de vista de Bernard
Shaw, cuando se piensa que su propia esposa impuso en su matrimonio la
condición de no tener relaciones sexuales. Debería de estar pensando en
la vida y deseos de los otros.
From
the Oxford Companion to English
Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble:
(George) Bernard SHAW
(1856-1950), born in Dublin, the youngest child of unhappily married
and inattentive parents. In 1876 he moved to London, joining his mother
and sister, and began his literary career by ghosting music criticism
and writing five unsuccessful novels (including Cashel Byron's Profession, 1886,
and An Unsocial Socialist,
1887, both first published in Today,
in 1885-6- and 1884 respectively). During his first nine years in
London he calculated that he earned less than £10 by his pen. He wrote
music, art, and book criticism for the Dramatic Review (1885-6), Our Corner
(1885-6), the Pall Mall Gazette (1885-8),
the World (1886-94) and the Star (1888-90, as 'Corno di
Bassetto'). His music criticism has been collected in three volumes as Shaw's Music (1981, ed. Dan H.
Laurence) (see also under MUSIC, LITERATURE OF)
and his theatre criticism in four volumes as The Drama Observed (1993, ed. B.
Dukore). He was a drama critic for the Saturday Review (1895-8) and
produced a series of remarkable and controversial weekly articles
(published in book form as Our
Theatres in the Nineties,
3 vols, 1932), voicing his impatience with the artificiality of the
London theatre and pleading for the performance of plays dealing with
contemporary social and moral problems. He campaigned for a theatre of
ideas in Britain comparable to that of Ibsen and Strindberg in
Scandinavia, and came nearest to achieving this with Granville-Barker
at the Court Theatre in London between 1904 and 1907. During this
period he took up various causes and joined several literary and
political societites, notably the Fabian Society, serving on the
executive committee from 1885 to 1911. Not naturally a good public
speaker, he schooled himself to become a brilliant one and gave over
1,000 lectures. he edited and contributed to Fabian Essays in Socialism
(1889) and wrote many tracts setting down his socialist and
collectivist principles. He was a freethinker, a supporter of women's
rights, and an advocate of equality of income, the abolition of private
property, and a radical change in the voting system. He also campaigned
for the simplification of spelling and punctuation and the reform of
the English alphabet. He was well known as a journalist and public
speaker when his first play, Widowers'
Houses (pub. 1893), was produced in 1982, but it met with little
success. There followed Arms and the
Man (1894, pub. 1898: partly used for Oscar Straus's musical The Chocolate Soldier), The Devil's Disciple (perf. NY
1897, pub. 1901), You Never Can Tell
(1899, pub. 1898), Caesar and
Cleopatra (pub. 1901, perf. Berlin 1906), Mrs Warren's Profession (pub. 1898,
perf. 1902), and John Bull's Other
Island
(1904, pub. NY 1907), a play which, thanks to its characteristic
'Shavian' wit, brought his first popular success in London. The critics
also were gradually persuaded that the plays were not simply dry
vehicles for his reformist zeal.
Shaw was an indefatigable worker, writing over 50 plays, including Man and Superman (pub. 1903, perf.
1905), Major Barbara (1905,
pub. NY 1907), The Doctor's Dilemma
(1906, pub. Berlin 1908). Getting
Married (1908, pub. Berlin 1910), Misalliance (191, pub. Berlin
1911), Androcles and the Lion
(pub. Berlin 1913, perf. Hamburg 1913), Pygmalion (perf. Vienna 1913, pub.
Berlin 1913, later turned into the popular musical My Fair Lady), Heartbreak House (pub. 1919, perf.
1920, both NY), Back to Methuselah
(pub. and perf. NY 1921, 1922), Saint
Joan (perf. NY 1923, pub. 1924), The Apple Cart (perf. Warsaw 1929,
pub. Berlin 1929), Too True to Be
Good (perf. Boston 1932, pub. Berlin 1932), Village Wooing (pub. Berlin 1933,
perf. Dallas 1934), The Simpleton of
the Unexpected Isles (perf. NY 1935, pub. Berlin 1935), In Good King Charles's Golden Days (perf.
and publ 1939), and Buoyant Billions
(perf. and pub. Zurich 1948).
These plays were published (some in collections: Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant,
1898; Three Plays for Puritans,
1901) with lengthy prefaces in which Shaw clearly expresses his views
as a non-romantic and a champion of the thinking man. The dramatic
conflict in his plays is the conflict of thought and belief, not that
of neurosis or physical passion. Discussion is the basis of the plays,
and his great wit and intelligence won audiences over to the idea that
mental and moral passion could produce absorbing dramatic material. He
believed that war, disease, and the present brevity of our lifespan
frustrate the 'Life Force' (see under MAN AND SUPERMAN)
and that functional adaptation, a current of creative evolution
activated by the power of human will, was essential to any real
progress, and indeed to the survival of the species. The plays
continued to be performed regularly both during and after his lifetime
(several were made into films) and his unorthodox views, his humour,
and his love of paradox have become an institution. Amongst his other
works should be mentioned The
Quintessence of Ibsenism
(1891, revised and expanded 1913), which reveals his debt to Ibsen as a
playwright and presents an argument for Fabian socialism; The Perfect Wagnerite (1898); Common sense about the War (1914); The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism
and Capitalism(1928);
and Everybody's Political What's What
(1944) Shaw was a prolific letter writer. his correspondence with the
actressses Ellen Terry and Mrs Patrick Campbell, with friends and
colleagues such as H.G. Wells and Gabriel pascal, as well as several
volumes of collected letters, are available in book form.
In 1898 Shaw married Charlotte Payne Townshend. It seems to have been a
marriage of companionship, and they lived together until her death in
1943. He was a strict vegetarian and never drank spirits, coffee, or
tea. He died at the age of 94, as independent as ever an still writing
for the theatre. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1925. See The Bodley Head Collected Plays with Their
Prefaces (7 vols, 1970-74).
The
Fabian Society, a society founded in 1884 consisting of
socialists who advocate a 'Fabian' policy, as opposed to immediate
revolutionary action, and named after Quintus Fabius Maximus, nicknamed
Cunctator or 'the Delayer'
[d. 203 BC - was appointed dictator after Hannibal's crushing victory
at Trasimene (217 BC). He carried on a defensive campaign, avoiding
direct engagements and harassing the enemy. Hence the expression
'Fabian tactics' and the name of the Fabian Society (1884) dedicated to
the gradual introduction of socialism]. One of its instigators was
Thomas Davidson (1840-1900), the illegitimate son of a Scottish
shepherd, a charismatic figure with many disciples who was also
responsible for founding in 1883 the Fellowship of the New Life, a body
which at first attracted some of the same membership, although its aims
were mystical and philsophical rather than political. The Fabians aimed
to influence government and affect policy by permeation rather than by
direct power, and to provide the reseach and analysis to support their
own views and introduce them to others. One of their methods was the
publishing of tracts, or pamphleteering: the first two Fabian tracvts
weere Why Are the many Poor?
(1884) by W. L. Phillips, a house painter and one of the few
working-class members, and A
Manifesto (1884) by G. B. Shaw. Shaw wrote many other
important tractsas did S. Webb. Fabian
Essays in Socialism (1889), edited by Shaw and with
contributions by Webb, Sydney Olivier, and A. Besant sold well and
attracted much attention. The Society itself continued to attract a
distinguished membership of politicians, intellectuals, artists, and
writers, ranging from Keir Hardie, Ramsay Macdonald, and G. D. H. Cole
to E. Carpenter, E. Nesbit, R. Brooke, and W. Crane. See Margaert Cole,
The Story of Fabian Socialism
(1961) and N. and J. Mackenzie, The
First Fabians (1977).
Widowers'
Houses,a
play by Bernard Shaw, first performed 1892, published 1893, and
published (with The Philanderer
and Mrs Warren's Profession )
in Plays Unpleasant (898). It
is designed to show the manner in which the capitalist system perverts
and corrupts human behaviour and relationships, through a
demonstration, in Shaw's words, of 'middle-class respectability and
younger son gentility fattening on the poverty of the slum as flies
fatten on filth'.
Dr. Harry Trench, on a Rhine holiday, meets Blanche Sartorius,
travelling with her wealthy father, and proposes marriage to her:
Sartorius is willing to permit the match if Trench's family (including
his aunt Lady Roxdale) agrees to accept her as an equal. All seems
well, until it is revealed in Act II that Sartorius is a slum landlord.
Trench is horrified, refuses to accept Sartorius' money, suggests that
he and Blanche should live on his £700 a year, and is even more
horrified when Sartorius points out that this income is derived from a
mortgage of Sartorius' property, and that he himself and his miserable
rent collector Lickcheese are merely intermediaries. 'You are the
principal.' Blanche, revealing a passionate and violent nature, rejects
Trench for his hesitations. In the third act Lickcheese, himself now
rich through dubious dealings to the property market, approaches
Sartorius with an apparent philanthropic but in fact remunerative
proposition, which involves Lady Roxdale as a ground landlord and
Trench as mortgagee. Trench, now considerably more cynical, accepts the
deal, and he and Blanche are reunited.
John Bull's Other Island,an ironic description of
Ireland deriving from Leon Paul Blouet's John Bull and His Island
(1884) and used by G. B. Shaw as the title of a play (1904) written at
the request of Yeats 'as a patriotic contribution to the repertory of
the Irish Literary Theatre'.
Man and Superman: A Comedy and a
Philosophy,
a play by Bernard Shaw, first published 1903, first performed (without
Act III) in 1905 by the Stage Society at the Court Theatre.
The play is Shaw's paradoxical version of the Don Juan story, in which
his hero John Tanner (Don Juan Tenorio), provocative, eloquent, and
witty ideologue and author of the Revolutionist's
Handbook
(a work which appears in full as an appendix to the play), is
relentlessly if obliquely pursued by Ann Whitefield, who is more
interested in him as a potential husband than she is in his political
theories. Ann has been entrusted as ward by her dead father jointly to
Tanner and to the elderly respectable Ramsden, who expects her to marry
the devoted and poetic Octavius. Tanner is made aware of Ann's
intentions by his chauffeur Straker (the new man of the polytechnic
revolution), and flees to Spain whither he is pursued by Ann and her
entourage, which includes her mother and Octavius's sister Violet, who
demonstrates, through a matrimonial sub-plot, the superior force of
women. Act III consists of a dream sequence set in hell in which
Tanner, captured by the brigand Mendoza, becomes his ancestor Don Juan,
Mendoza the Devil, Ramsden 'the Statue', and Ann becomes Ana: in one
of Shaw's most characteristic 'Shavio-Socratic' debates, the four
characters discuss the nature of progress, evolution, and the Life
Force, the Devil arguing powerfully that man is essentially
destructive, and Don Juan arguing for the saving power of ideas and
rational effort, for the philosopher as 'nature's pilot'. In the last
act Ann achieves her object, despite Tanner's struggles; the play ends
with the announcement of their impending marriage and Tanner's
submission to the Life Force.
The concept of the Life Force bears some similarity to Bergson's 'élan
vital', although Shaw was not at the time familiar with Bergson's work:
the echo in his 'Superman' of Nietzsche's 'Übermensch' (Also sprach Zarathustra) is,
however, deliberate.
Major
Barbara, a play by Bernard Shaw performed 1905,
published 1907.
It portrays the conflict between spiritual and worldly power embodied
in Barbara, a major in the Salvation Army, and her machiavellian
father, millionaire armaments manufacturer Andrew Undershaft. While
visiting her East End shelter for the poor, as part of a bargain struck
between them, he reveals that the shelter's benefactor, Lord
Saxmundham, made his money through 'Bodgers' whisky', and she suffers a
crisis of faith as she glimpses the possibility that all salvation and
philanthropy are tainted at the source: the next day, visiting his
factory with her mother Lady Britomart and her fiancé, classical
scholar Adolphus Cusins, she is further shaken to discover her father
is a model employer. Cusins enters the debate, reveals that he is
technically a foundling nd therefore eligible to inherit the Undershaft
empire (as Undershaft's own children are not), strikes a hard bargain
with his prospective father-in-law, and agrees to enter the business,
partly persuaded by Undershaft's quoting of Plato to the effect that
'society cannot be saved until either the Professors of Greek take to
making gundpowder, or else the makers of gunpowder become Professors of
Greek'. Barbara, recovering her spirits, embraces this synthesis as a
possibility of hope for the future. The portrait of Cusins is based on
G. Murray.
Pygmalion,one of the most popular plays of
Bernard Shaw, first performed 1913 in Vienna, published in London,
1916.
It describes the transformation of a Cockney flower-seller, Eliza
Doolittle, into a passable imitation of a duchess by the phonetician
Professor Henry Higgins (modelled in part on H. Sweet, and played by
Beerbohm Tree), who undertakes this task in order to win a bet and to
prove his own points about English speech and the class system: he
teaches her to speak standard English and introduces her successfully
to social life, thus wining his bet, but hse rebels against his
dictatorial and thoughtless behaviour, and 'bolts' from his tyranny.
The play ends with a truce between the two of them, as Higgins
acknowledges that she has achieved freedom and independence, and
emerged from his treatment as a 'tower of strength: a consort
battleship': in his postscript Shaw tells us that she marries the
docile and devoted Freddy Eynsford Hill. My Fair Lady, the 1957 musical
version, makes the relationship between Eliza and Higgins significantly
more romantic.
Pygmalion, in classical legend, was the king of Cyprus, who fell in
love with his own sculpture; Aphrodite endowed the statue with life and
transformeed it into the flesh and blood of Galathea.
Heartbreak
House:A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes, a
play by Bernard Shaw, first performed in New York 1920, published there
1919; probably written 1916-17, despite Shaw's claims that he began it
before the war.
It deescribes the impact of Ellie Dunn, daughter of the idealistic and
undworldly Mazzini Dunn, upon the eccentric, complacent, and 'horribly
Bohemian' household of 88-year-old Captain Shotover, with whom she
strikes up an alliance: the inmaes include energetic, beautiful,
dominating Hesione Hushabye (determined Ellie shall not marry the
ageing business magnate Boss Mangan); her husband, the romantic liar
and fantasist Hector Hushabye; her sister, the apparently conventional,
newly returned Lady Utterword; and Lady Utterword's devoted
brother-in-law Randall, prototype of the useless artist. Shaw appears
to be portraying in 'this silly house, this strangely happy house, this
agonizing house, this house without foundations', an aspect of British
(or European) civilization (suggested in part by the Bloomsbury Group,
in part by the society portrayed by Chekhov), about to run on the rocks
or blow itself up through lack of direction and lack of grasp of
economic reality, but, after various Shavian debates on money,
marriage, and morality, the play ends in deep ambiguity: an air raid
destroys Boss Mangan, the practical man (who takes refuge in a gravel
pit where the captain stores dynamite), and is greeted with exhilarated
rapture by Hesione and Elie ('It's splendid: it's like an orchestra:
it's like Beethoven'), who with the rest of the household refuse to
take shelter, and survive.
Back
to Methuselah: A Metabiological pentateuch (1918-20)
is an infrequently performed cycle of five plays by Bernard Shaw,
beginning in the Garden of Eden and reaching the year AD 31,920, which
examines the metaphysical implications of longevity. Shaw revised the
text and its preface, and added a postscript, in the mid-1940s when
choosing Back to Methuselah
to represent his work in the Oxford University Press World's Classics
seires.
Too
True to Be Good,(1931),
a three-act political extravaganza by Bernard Shaw which opens in one
of the richest cities in England, in a patient's bedroom inhabited by a
'poor innocent microbe' made of luminous jelly, and then moves to a sea
beach in a mountainous country patrolled by the omnipresent Private
Meek, Shaw's imaginative portrait of T. E. Lawrence. The surreal plot,
which progresses by means of a series of fantastical illusions and
proliferating identities, contains echoes from The Pilgrim's Progress and The Tempest, and reaches its climax
in a long peroration on the place of human beings in the evolution of
the world.
The
Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism
(1928), G. B. Shaw's answer, 200,000 words long, to a request for 'a
few ideas on socialism' from his sister-in-law, to whom the book is
dedicated. This closely argued and passionately felt political
testament treats women as the have-nots of a male culture and traces
specific social evils to inequality of income. A new edition, with two
additional chapter and retitled The
Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and
Fascism, was published in 1937 as the first two Pelican Books.
Este ranking
mundial de repositorios
de libre acceso lo publica el CSIC. Esta es la clasificación global
basada en una serie de parámetros. Copio aquí los repositorios que
ocupan los 20 primeros puestos:
Se ve, se ve que el primero sigue siendo,
como otros años anteriores, el SSRN. Más sorprende que en el puesto 10,
y luego en el 17, haya unos repositorios españoles (catalanes en
concreto).
Entré en el SSRN en 2007, al crearse el Humanities
Research Network. A finales de 2012 tengo 132 artículos subidos, y
un total de descargas de 5617. Lecturas, no diré que tantas.
En posicionamiento dentro del SSRN sigo subiendo puestos, tanto
absoluta como relativamente:
Jose
Angel Garcia Landa Author Rank is 3,267 out of 213,564
—a
fecha de hoy, vengo a estar por delante del 98,5% de autores (o, lo que
es lo mismo, en el 1,5 % superior). No es mala ubicación, aunque las
puede haber mejores: 3.266 mejores puede haber, en concreto. Seguiremos
escalando, hasta llegar a nuestro nivel de incompetencia, como dicta el
Principio de Peter.
Del repositorio de nuestra universidad, Zaguán, mejor ni hablar. Estoy
allí creo el número uno en contribuciones, pero lo han cerrado y no
admiten más envíos, entretanto se piensan qué hacen con él. A nivel
mundial está el 570, y el 23 de entre los
repositorios españoles. Incluyendo catalanes de momento. Creo que
sólo subirá de puesto con la independencia de Cataluña.
En el segundo ensayo mejora, pero no mucho. Y
eso que lo mío es el ensayo, más que el concierto. Seguiremos dándole
en un futuro, si el tiempo acompaña.
The
Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People,
a play by Oscar
Wilde, first performed at the St James's Theatre, London, on 14
Feb. 1895.
Wilde's most dazzling and epigrammatic work, it describes the
courtships and betrothals of two young men about town, John Worthing
(Jack) and Algernon (Algy) Moncrieff, who are in pursuit respectively
of Gwendolen Fairfax (Algy's cousin) and Jack's ward, Cecily Cardew.
Both young men lead double lives, in that Jack is known in town under
the name of Ernest, while representing to his ward Cecily in the
country that he has a wicked brother Ernest. Algy, to cover his own
diversions, has created a fictitious character, the sickly Bunbury,
whose ill health requires a visit whenever engagements in town
(particularly those with his formidable aunt Lady Bracknell) render his
absence desirable. After many confusions of identity, during which it
transpires that Cecily's governess, Miss Prism, had once mislaid Jack
as a baby in a handbag at Victoria Station, it is revealed that Jack
and Algy are in fact brothers, and that Jack's name is indeed Ernest.
All objections, both financial and genealogical, to both matches, are
thus overcome and Gwendolen's addiction to the very name of 'Ernest' is
satisfied, so all ends happily.
The Way of the World, a
comedy by
Congreve, produced 1700.
Mirabell is in love with Millamant, a niece of Lady Wishfort, and has
pretended to court the aunt in order to conceal his suit of the niece.
The deceit has been revealed to lady Wishfort by Mrs Marwood to revenge
herself on Mirabell, who has rejected her advances. Lady Wishfort, who
now hates Mirabell 'more than a quaker hates a parrot', will deprive
her niece of the half of the inheritance which is in her keeping if
Millamant marries Mirabell. The latter accordingly contrives that his
servant Waitwell shall impersonate an uncle of his, Sir Rowland, make
love to Lady Wishfort, and pretend to marry her, having, however, first
married Lady Wishfort's woman Foible. He hopes by this deception to
force Lady Wishfort to consent to his marriage to her niece. The plot
is discovered by Mrs. Marwood, and also the fact that Mirabell has in
the past had an intrigue with Mrs Fainall, daughter of Lady Wishfort.
She [Mrs. Marwood] conspires with Fainall, her lover, and the pretended
friend of Mirabell, to reveal these facts to Lady Wishfort, while
Fainall is to threaten to divorce his wife and discredit Lady Wishfort,
unless he is given full control of Mrs Fainall's property and
Millamant's portion is also handed over to him. The scheme, however,
fails. Mrs Fainall denies the charge against her and brings proof of
Fainall's affair with Mrs Marwood, while Mirabell produces a deed by
which Mrs Fainall, before her last marriage, made him trustee of her
property. Lady Wishfort, in gratitude for her release from Fainall's
threats, forgives Mirabell and consents to his marriage to Millamant.
Congreve enlives the action with a fine gallery of fools, including Sir
Willful Witwould, Lady Wishfort's boisterous and good-natured country
nephew; they serve to highlight the central contrast between the
passionate and grasping relationship of Fainall and Mrs Marwood and the
delicate process by which Mirabell persuades Millamant that even in
such a mercenary society, love can survive into marriage. The dialogue
is exceptionally brilliant, and many critics also consider the play a
study of the battle between good and evil, rather than of the
characteristically Restoration conflict between the witty and the
foolish.
Aparecen
cosas mías,
buscando en el buscador de la Biblioteca Nacional, llamado Buscón.
(Bueno, mías y de otros Garcialandas, Mercedes y Mariano). Vienen en su
mayoría de Rebiun
(Red de Bibliotecas Universitarias). Incluso listan allí mi
bibliografía, cosa rara.
También aparece entre mi lista de publicaciones en WorldCat,
entre los ebooks, tal que así:
Your list has reached the maximum number of items. Please
create
a new list with a new name; move some items to a new or existing list;
or delete some items.
O: El ejército caníbal. Sigue sorprendiéndonos Polibio con sus rincones
curiosos o
terroríficos. Esto cuenta sobre la preparación de la expedición de
Aníbal contra Roma, desde España (IX, 24):
Cuando proyectaba marchar de España a
Italia con un ejército, Aníbal preveía la gran dificultad de
avituallarlo y de disponer siempre de víveres, ya que, por su duración,
la marcha era casi inacabable y, encima, había que contar con el número
y la ferocidad de los bárbaros que vivían a lo largo de ella. En el
consejo esta dificultad se debatió ampliamente y uno de sus miembros,
llamado también Aníbal, por sobrenombre "el gladiador", hizo evidente
que había sólo un único medio para poder llegar a Italia. Aníbal le
pidió que lo expusiera y él contestó que era preciso enseñar al
ejército a comer carne humana, y habituarle a ello. Aníbal fue incapaz
de oponerse razonadamente a la audacia y a la eficacia de esta idea,
pero nunca la tomó en serio y no intentó convencer a sus amigos. No
falta quien afirma que los actos de salvajismo cometidos por Aníbal en
Italia se deben imputar al otro Aníbal, pero en gran medida se debieron
también a las circunstancias.
Las circunstancias, y los consejos de nuestros amigos, nos vuelven
caníbales.... ¡pero aún tenían el cuajo estos cartagineses de
hablar de la "ferocidad de los bárbaros"!
Mi
aparición en
la base de datos de ISOC.
Qué escasica. Así no haré sexenio; aunque dicen que van a emplear como
base de datos el Scopus y la Web of Science—donde aún aparezco
menos. En general, a las humanidades les esperan criterios más científicos...
—Más abundo en las antípodas, en Trove
(Biblioteca Nacional de Australia). ¡Igual me conocen más aún un poco
más lejos...! No me extrañaría, si nos espían los Aliens.
From
The Oxford Companion to American
Literature, ed. Hart and Leininger:
Toni Morrison (1931-), Ohio-born novelist, originally named Chloe
Anthony Wofford, a graduate of Harvard University, writes about the
problems of black women in the North, like herself. Her novels include The Bluest Eye (1970), about a
young black woman who moves from the old South with the belief that if
only she had blue eyes she would be well accepted; Sula (1973); Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981); and Beloved (1987), about a black woman
after the Civil War recalling her need and thus her action of killing
her baby, Beloved, but now pleasantly greeted by a young woman of that
name, aged about 20, some years after the war. It was awarded a
Pulitzer Prize. Jazz (1992),
set in Harlem of the 1920s, details the experiences, often bitter, of a
couple, Joe and Violet. Playing in
the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) collects
the William E. Massey Sr. Lectures, at Harvard, in the History of
American Civilization. Morrison won the Nobel Prize in 1993, the first
African-American writer to be so honored.
________
From
Richard Gray's History of American
Literature (August Wilson and Toni Morrison):
While [Ed] Bullins has been central to the story of alternative
theater, success on the mainstream stage has tended to elude him. By
contrast, August Wilson [1945-2005] enjoyed considerable mainstream
success. His Ma Rainey's Black Bottom
(1982), Fences (1983), Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1984), The Piano Lesson (1986), Two Trains Running (1992), and Seven Guitars (1995) were all
produced on Broadway, for the most part to critical and commercial
acclaim. Born on "The Hill," a racially mixed area of Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, to a black mother and a white father he seldom saw,
Wilson encountered racial prejudice early. He also encountered two
formative cultural influences: black talk and black music. In a cigar
store in Pittsburgh, he recalled, he would stand around when he was
young listening to old men talling tales and swapping stories. Later,
listening to the records of the blues singer Bessie Smith, he became
determined to capture black cultural and historical experience in his
writing. One of his first publications was, in fact, a poem called
"Bessie." Beginning to write plays in the 1970s, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom
established his reputation. Set in 1920s Chicago, it describes the
economic exploitation of black musicians by white record companies and
the ways in which victims of racism are compelled to direct their rage
at each other rather than at those who cause their oppression. It is
also a memorable combination of the vernacular, violence, and humor. So
is Fences, which concerns the
struggles of a working-class family in the 1950s to find security.
Here, Wilson also uses myth to tell the story of Troy Maxson, a
garbageman, ex-convict, and former Negro Baseball League player, who
cannot believe that his son wil be allowed to benefit from the football
scholarship he has been offered.
Joe Turner's Come and Gone is
set some forty years earlier than Fences,
in a Pittsburgh boarding house in 1911. Focusing on the personal
and cultural aftermath of slavery and the Great Migration, it explores
the lives of characters who are in danger of being cut off from their
roots. The Piano Lesson, in
turn, is placed in 1937 in Pittsburgh: concentrating on a conflict
between a brother and a sister, over who has the right to won a family
heirloom, the piano of the title, it dramatizes the debate between
African-American and mainstream cultural values. Two Trains Running moves
forward several decades, to the late 1960s—to a coffee shop where
regulars discuss their troubled relation to the times—and Seven Guitars then moves back to
the 1940s. Wilson declared that, as a playwright, he wanted to "tell a
history that has never been told." His major plays reflect this. For
him, they were all part of a major project: the "Century Cycle" of ten
plays, each of them intended to investigate a central issue facing
African-Americans in a different decade of the twentieth century. The
others are Jitney (1983), King Hedley II (2000), Gem of the Ocean (2003), and Radio Golf (2005). He was aiming at
nothing less than raising collective awareness: rewriting the history
of every decade so that black life would become a more acknowledged
part of the theatrical history—and, for that matter, the general
history—of America. In 1991 Wilson recalled that his plan, to bring a
silenced past into dramatic speech, began with "a typewritten
yellow-labeled record titled 'Nobody in Town Can Bake a Sweet Jellyroll
Like Mine' by someone called Bessie Smith." "It was the beginning," he
explained, "of my consciousness that I was a representative of a
culture and the carrier of some very valuable antecedents." He
continued to pursue that plan after that, in plays that work precisely
as the "yellow-labeled record" did: by bringing a whole culture and its
past to life, with rhythmic flair and passion.
If any novelist can be said to have a project similar to that of August
Wilson in drama,
it is surely Toni Morrison (1931-). "For me, in doing
novels about African-Americans," she has declared, "I was trying to
move away from the unstated but overwhelming and dominant context that
was white history and to move it into another one." Her work can, in
fact, be seen as an attempt to write several concentric histories of
the American experience from a distinctively African-American
perspective. A series of fictional interventions in American
historiography, her novels draw what she has called, in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the
Literary Imagination (1992), "the overwhelming presence of black
people in the United States" from the margins of the imagination to the
center of American literature and history. What has been distinctive
about the history of the United States, Morrison has argued, is "its
claim to freedom" and "the presence of the unfree within the heart of
the democratic experiment." This was, and remains, "a nation of people
who decided that their world
view would combine agendas for individual freedom and mechanisms for devastating
racial oppression." As such, it "presents a singular landscape for a
writer." And her aim in mapping that landscape has been twofold. On the
one hand, she has charted a specifically black history, giving voice to the
silence: pointing to the culpability for it of White America's
'failure' to apportion human rights equally, while simultaneously
celebrating that history's achievement and identifying its own
failings. On the other, she maps out a general history of America from
the readjusted perspective, the angle of black experience. As Morrison
has noted in Playing in the Dark,
"Africanism is inextricable from the definition of Americanness—from
its origins on through its integrated or disintegrating
twentieth-century self." The history of black America, over the last
two humdred years and perhaps more, is
the history of America, as she sees it. So what she is pursuing,
reclaiming in imaginative terms, is a history of the whole American
experience.
"The crucial difference for me is not the difference between fact and
fiction," Morrison once admitted, "but the distinction between fact and
truth. Because facts can exist without human intelligence, but truth
cannot." That search for truth began with her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970).
It has a simple premise. A narrator, Claudia McTeer, tells the story of
Pecola Breedlove, a black girl whose hunger for love is manifested in a
desire for blue eyes that eventually drives her to insanity. What
complicates is both structural and social. Morrison has said that one
of her goals as a writer is "to have the reader work with the writer in the construction
of the book." And here she uses a number of narrative devices to
realize that goal. The novel opens, for example, with a parodic passage
from a Dick and Jane school primer that presents an ideal, inevitably
white family: the kind of cultural intervention that seems calculated
to create false consciousness. Working with the writer here and
elsewhere in the novel, the reader gradually unravels a tale of
personal and social disintegration. Pecola, it seems, is driven inward
by the norms of white society (the bluest eye, the ideal family) to
shame, the destruction and division of the self. Claudia, the narrator,
finds herself directed outward, to anger against white society: finding
a convenient scapegoat, a focus for anger, for instance, in the "white
baby dolls" she cuts up and destroys. The
Bluest Eye deconstructs the image of the white community as the
site of normality and perfection. It also exposes the realities of life
in an impoverished African-American community, whose abject
socioeconomic status is exacerbated by the politics of race. Those
politics point, in particular, to internalized racism, manacles that
are mind-forged as well as devastatingly material. as Morrison has put
it in an afterword to a recent edition of the novel: "the trauma of
racism is, for the racist and victim, the severe fragmentation of the
self."
Coextensive with Morrison's concern with the psychosocial consequences
of racism is her interest in what she calls "silence and evasion:" the
shadows and absences, the gaps and omissions in American history. In
her second novel, Sula
(1973), for example, she shows how a black community evolves and shapes
itself, with its own cultural resources and elaborate social structure.
She rescues it from a kind of historical anonymity. Through the lives
of the two main characters, Sula Peace and Nel Wright, in turn, she
opens up the area of intimate friendship between African-American
women. Also, though a poignant account of the rifts and disputes
between Sula and Nel, she charts differences, the diverse paths and
possibilities available to females as part of or apart from communal
tradition. Morrison's third novel, Song
of Solomon (1977), sustains her commitment to what is called
here "names that had a meaning:" the evolution of a distinctive black
identity and community through the habit of language. A complex
tapestry of memory and myth, Song of
Solomon tells the story of a young man, Milkman Dead, who comes
to know himself through a return to origins. He is captivated by the
legends surrounding his family from slave times. He learns, in
particular, from the stories of men who flew to freedom and the
realities of women who remained to foster and to nurture. Just as the
novel does, he returns to the past and, through that, discovers how to
live in the present. Tar Baby
(1981) also pursues themes of ancestry and identity, how
African-Americans come to name and know themselves. It does this
primarily through the contrast between two characters, Jadine Childs, a
model, and William (Son) Green, an outcast and wanderer. Jadine,
brought up with the help of white patrons, has been assimilated into
white culture; Son remains outside it, in resistance to it. Drawn to
each other, they seem to be trying to "rescue" each other, the one from
assimilation, the other from separation. "One had a past, the other a
future and each bore the culture to save the race in his hands," the
reader is told. "Mama-spoiled black man, will you mature with me?
Culture-bearing black woman, whose culture are your bearing?" The love
affair between them is aborted. Neither fundamentally changes. And,
although the perspective on Jadine is less than sympathetic ("she has
forgotten her ancient properties," one oracular black character
observes of her), the identity crisis posed by the conflict between her
and Son is never really resolved. Morrison adopts her usual strategy,
of leaving the narrative debate open.
With her fifth and most important novel so far, Beloved (1987), Morrison took the
core of a real story she had encountered while working as a senior
editor at Random House. It was recorded in The Black Book (1974), an eclectic
collection of material relating to more than three hundred years of
African-American history. And it concerned a fugitive slave called
Margaret Garner who killed her daughter, then tried to kill her other
children and herself rather than be returned to slavery. Morrison took
this as the nucleus, the germ of her story about Sethe Suggs, who
killed her own young daughter, Beloved, when faced with the same
threat. Circling backwards and forwards in time, before and after the
Civil War, the novel discloses how Sethe and other
characters—especially her daughter Denver and her lover Paul D—struggle
with a past that cannot but must be remembered, that cannot yet must be
named. In other words, it pivots around the central contradiction in
African-American, and for that matter American, history: living with
impossible memories. There is the need to remember and tell and the
desire to forget; there are memories here with an inexhaustible,
monstrous power to erupt and overwhelm the mind that must somewhere be
commemorated yet laid aside if life is to continue. it is a
contradiction caught in a phrase repeated in the concluding section of
the narrative: "It was not a story to pass on" (where "pass on" could
mean either "pass over" or "pass on to others"). It is one caught, too,
in the scandalous nature of the act, the killing that haunts Sethe. In
that sense, the mother-daughter relationship that Morrison
characteristically focuses on here is at once a denial of the
institution of slavery and a measure of its power.
Beloved is an extraordinary
mix of narrative genres. It has elements of realism, the Gothc, and
African-American folklore. It is a slave narrative that internalizes
slavery and its consequences. It is a historical novel that insists on
history as story, active rehearsal and reinvention of the past. It
weaves its way between the vernacular and a charged lyricism, the
material and the magical, as it emphasizes the centrality of the black,
and in particular black female, experience. It also forces the reader
to collaborate with the author, narrator, and characters in the
construction of meaning: the energetic refiguring of a past that is
seen as a necessary precondition of the present—determining (and so to
be resurrected) yet different (and so to be laid to rest). This
involvement of the reader in the exhumation of a secret that is also
the narrative's secret—the unspeakable heart of the story that remains
intimated rather than spoken—is the main grounds for the emotional
intensity of Beloved. This is
a novel that reorients history, American history in particular, to the
lived experience of black people. it is also a passionate novel, that
sets up a vital, unbreakable circuit between historical events and
emotional consequences, and then connects up that circuit to any one,
black or white, or whatever, who reads it. We the readers are caught as
the main characters of Beloved
are in the "look," the gaze that seeks to reduce the black subject to
the position of otherness. We share with these characters the rigors of
the disciplined body—the denial of the ownership of one's own flesh. We
also participate in the strenuous, successful effort to resist all
this: the right to one's own body and consciousness, the responsibility
for them in the past, present, and future. Above all, we share in the
project of naming. "Did a whiteman saying make it so?" Paul D asks
himself at one point. The immediate answer turns out to be "yes"; the
ultimate answer is "no." The novel and its characters turn out, after
all, to offer another form of "saying," a more authentic way of seeing
and telling the personal and historical past. That is why the last word
of Beloved is, precisely,
"Beloved," because the whole aim of the story, and its protagonist, has
been to name the unnameable. That way, we know by now,
African-Americans and all Americans can come to terms with a past that
should be told, that will not be told (the paradox is irresolvable)—and
then, perhaps, be able to continue.
After Beloved, Morrison
published two books that, with it, form part of a loosely connected
trilogy, Jazz (1992) and Paradise
(1998). Morrison has said that the three novels are about "various
kinds
of love"—the love of a mother for her child, romantic love, and "the
love of God and love for fellow human beings." The three might equally
be described as charting the history of African-Americans. Jazz, set in Harlem in 1929, was
inspired by Morrison reading in a book she was editing, The Harlem Book of the Dead,
about a young woman who, as she lay dying, refused to identify her
lover as the person who had shot her. What distinguishes the novel more
thatn its plot, however, is Morrison's innovative way of telling it.
Imitating the improvisational techniques of jazz music, she presents us
with a narrative that constantly revisits events and a narrator who
frankly confesses her fallibility. "I have been careless and stupid,"
the narrator declares at one point, "and it infuriates me to discover
(again) how unreliable I am." History is consequently presented as a
process of constant telling and retelling, with the openings for
chance, the impromptu, and mistakes that implies. And, at the end, the
responsibility for that process is passed to us, the readers. "Make me,
remake me," the narrator tells us. "You are free to do it and I am free
to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now." Paradise
is set in 1976. However, in describing the intimate contact between two
communities, one a black township and the other a refuge for women, it
circles as far back as 1755. It also supplies another example of
Morrison's characteristic strategy of giving voice to the silence while
initiating its own forms of silence. That is, it brings those
traditionally exiled to the margins, for reasons of race, gender, or
both, to the center of the stage; it allows them to name themselves and
narrate their history. But it quietly intimates its own lack of
authority, the blanks and absences detectable in its own account, and
the responsibility that this imposes on the reader.
In Beloved, for example, the
reader never knows who the young girl is who returns to Sethe during
the course of the story. Is she the ghost of the 2-year-old-daughter
Sethe killed twenty years earlier? Does she recall Sethe's nameless
mother, since some of her dreams and narrations seem to recall the
horrors of the Middle Passage? Is she a myriad figure, a composite of
all the women ever dragged into slavery? Or is she a very singular
young woman who has been driven mad by her enslavement? We cannot know
for sure; all we can do is allow these possibilities to feed into our
own retelling of an intolerable, impossible past, our own project of
naming the unnameable. Nor, for that matter, can we be certain what
happens at the end of Paradise. The
pivotal act of this novel is the shooting, and apparent killing, of the
women at the refuge by nine men from the township. Paradise closes,
however, with the "marvelous" disappearance of the bodies of the women
and the reappearance, then, of four of them. One of the several,
unresolved puzzles of this
story is, therefore, what they return as
—ghosts or human beings who somehow survived the attack. But just as Beloved, for all its push beyond
realism, leaves no doubt as to the monstrous fact of slavery and its central
place in the story of America (indeed, using magic, mystery, as a
measure of that monstrosity), so Paradise
lesaves no doubt about the necessity
for the reappearance of women like these, in some form or another, for
the survival of the republic. Paradise
is a book about the failures of American democracy (hence its setting
in the bicentennial). It is about the strengths and fatal flaws in the
black community (hence its complicity in the shootings). It is about
the core meaning of the African-American story to American history
(hence the narrative connections forged with key events since 1776).
And it is also a book about the failure of patriarchy. Morrison has
resisted the description of herself as a feminist. She is right to do
so because Paradise, like all
her novels, is much more than a polemical statement of a position. But,
in itws own way, it registers a fundamentally optimistic belief in the
recovery of the American republic—a belief that all her work tends to
share—and, in this case, at the hands of women. The beguiling mystery
at the end of Paradise is
centered, just as the mystery at the heart of Beloved
is, by a powerful analysis of history, past disasters, and possible
future directions. Any doubts about that surely dissolve in the
meditations of one female character as she considers the possibility of
reappearance, the return of the women shot by the men of the township.
"When will they return?" she asks herself. "When will they reappear . .
. to rip up and stomp down this prison calling itself a town?" "She
hoped with all her heart that the women were out there," the meditation
concludes, "darkly burnished, biding their time, brass-metaling their
nails, filing their incisors—but out there. Which is to say she hoped
for a miracle."
Apart from the occasional excursion into drama (Dreaming Emmett (1986)) and
critical and social theory (Playing
in the Dark, En-Gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas,
and the Construction of Social Reality (1992)), Morrison has
focused on the writing of novels, her most recent being Love
(2003), set mainly in the 1990s, which explores different forms of
love—familial, romantic, self—and childhood confusion,
miscommunication, and their consequences; and A Mercy (2008), set in early
America, which examines the beginnings of slavery and the roots of
racism.
"Linkterature: From Word to Web." Es una
conferencia invitada que dí (raro en mí eso de dar conferencias, y
menos por invitación) en el congreso International Conference on
Internet and Language ICIL'05 (Castellón de la Plana: Universitat Jaume
I, 27 octubre 2005). Colgué
el texto mientras la preparaba, pero ha ido a parar también a estas
revistas electrónicas del SSRN donde ahora la veo:
Autobuscándme allí, encuentro también este artículo sobre "A
Blog's Life"—a ver cuánto dura la vida del mío, suponiendo que no
sea ya uno de los walking dead, él como yo. Así va terminando: It may
still be too early to say whether the service to the faculty and
students
warrants the time I devote to the blog. It could well be that the users
just don’t
have the right combination of time and interest to make use of it, or
that what it
offers is not what they want to see. Or it will become more useful as
its content is
developed and as users get used to the medium. A couple of months ago
my desk
calendar had a cartoon of a forlorn man in a suit with another man
patting his arm
and saying: “You’re better than ever at something we don’t need done
anymore.”
That resonated: the blog is better than ever, but perhaps it is not
really needed.
Regardless of that assessment, I am glad that I have worked on the blog
because I have learned so much and developed new skills. It’s been fun
for me. It
has also produced unexpected benefits in current awareness for faculty
and stu-
dents....
—artículo sobre Nabokov y sobre la poética de la consciencia
subliminal que publiqué en e European
Journal of English Studies, y que ahora veo incluido en las
páginas de tres revistas electrónicas del SSRN:
La versión de la serie sobre Shakespeare de la BBC, producida
por
Cedric Messina en 1979 (dir. Herbert Wise). (El vídeo de YouTube la
atribuye incorrectamente a Mankiewicz).
From
the Oxford Companion to English
Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble:
AUDEN, W[ystan] H[ugh] (1907-73), the youngest son of a doctor,
brought up in Birmingham and educated at Gresham's School, Holt. He
began to be taken seriously as a poet while still at Christ Church,
Oxford, where he was much influenced by Anglo-Saxon and Middle English
poetry, but also began to explore the means of preserving 'private
spheres' (through poetry) in 'public chaos'. Among his contemporaries,
who were to share some of his left-wing near-Marxist response to the
public chaos of the 1930s were MacNeice, Day-Lewis, and Spender, with
whom his name is often linked (See PYLON SCHOOL).
After Oxford, Auden lived for a time in Berlin; he returned to England
in 1929 to work as a schoolteacher, but continued to visit Germany
regularly, staying with his friend and future collaborator Isherwood.
His first volume, Poems
(including some previously published in a private edition, 1928) was
accepted for publication by T. S. Eliot at Faber and Faber and appeared
in 1930; it was well received and established him as the most talented
voice of his generation.The Orators
followed in 1932, and Look Stranger!
in 1936. In 1932 he became associated with Rupert Doone's Group
Theatre, which produced several of his plays (The Dance of Death, 1933; and, with
Isherwood, The Dog Beneath the Skin,
1935); these owe something to the early plays of Brecht. (See also EXPRESSIONISM).
Working from 1935 with the GPO Film Unit he became friendly with
Britten, who set many of his poems to music and later used Auden's text
for his opera Paul Bunyan. In
1935 he married Erika Mann to provide her with a British passport to
escape from Nazi Germany. A visit to Iceland with MacNeice in 1935
produced their joint Letters from
Iceland (1937); Journey to a
War
(1939, with Isherwood) records a journey to China. Meanwhile in 1937 he
had visited Spain for two months, to support the Republicans, but his
resulting poem 'Spain' (1937) is less partisan and more detached in
tone than might have been expected, and in January 1939 he and
Isherwood left Europe for America (he became a US citizen in 1946)
where he met Chester Kallman, who became his lifelong friend and
companion. Another Time
(1940), containing many of his most famous poems (including 'September
1939' and 'Lullaby'), was followed in 1941 by The Double Man (1941), published in
London as New Year Letter),
a long transitional verse epistle describing the 'baffling crime' of
'two decades of hypocrisy', rejecting political simplifications,
accepting man's essential solitude, and ending with a prayer for refuge
and illumination for the 'muddled heart'. From this time Auden's poetry
became increasingly Christian in tone (to such an extent that he even
altered some of his earlier work to bring it in line and disowned some
of his political pieces); this was perhaps not unconnected with the
death in 1941 of his devout Anglo-Catholic mother, to whom he dedicated
For the Time Being: A Christmas
Oratorio (1944). This was published with The Sea and the Mirror, a series of
dramatic monologues inspired by The
Tempest.The Age of Anxiety:
A Baroque Eclogue
(1948) is a long dramatic poem, reflecting man's isolation, which opens
in a New York bar at night, and ends with dawn on the streets.
Auden's absence during the war led to a poor reception of his works in
England at that period, but the high quality of his later work
reinstated him as an unquestionably major poet; in 1956 he was elected
professor of poetry at Oxford, and in 1962 he became a student (i.e.
fellow) of Christ Church. His major later collections include Nones (1951, NY; 1952, London), The Shield of Achilles (1955),
which includes 'Horae Canonicae' and 'Bucolics' and is considered by
many his best single volume; and Homage
to Clio (1960), which includes a high proportion of light verse.
Auden had edited The Oxford Book of
Light Verse in 1938, and subsequently many other anthologies,
collections, etc.; his own prose criticism includes The Enchafèd Flood (1950, NY; 1951,
London), The Dyer's Hand
(1962, NY; 1963, London), and Secondary
Worlds (1968, T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures). He also wrote
several librettos, notably for Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress (1951,
with Kallman). About the House
(1965, NY; 1966, London), one of his last volumes of verse, contains a
tender evocation of his life with Kallman at their summer house in
Austria. Auden spent much of the last years of his life in London, and
died suddenly in Vienna. His Collected
Poems, edited by Edward Mendleson, were published in 1991. A
volume of Juvenilia, edited
by Katherine Bucknell, appeared in 1994.
Auden's influence on a succeeding generation of poets was incalculable,
comparable only with that, a generation earlier, of Yeats, to whom
Auden himself pays homage in 'In Memory of W.B. Yeats' (1939). His
progress from the engaged, didactic, satiric poems of his youth to the
complexity of his later work offered a wide variety of models—the
urbane, the pastoral, the lyrical, the erudite, the public, and the
introspective mingle with great fluency. He was a master of verse form,
and accomodated traditional patterns to a fresh, easy, and contemporary
language. A life by Humphrey Carpenter was published in 1981. See also The Auden Generation by S. Hynes
(1976).
From
Richard Gray's History of American
Literature:
During the 1920s and 1930s Dos Passos aligned himself politically with
the left. He became disillusioned with communism, however, and broke
completely with his left-wing friends and allies at the time of the
Spanish Civil War. His later fiction, such as the trilogy District of
Columbia (1939-1949) and the novel Midcentury (1961), continue his
stylistic innovations but show an increasingly conservative political
stance. He was always, first and last, an individualist concerned with
the threat to the individual posed first, as he saw it, by capitalism
and then, in his later work, by communism. To that extent, he belonged
in the American Atlantic tradition, with its commitment to the primacy
of the individual, the supreme importance of the single, separate self.
Consistently, Ernest Hemingway (1898-1961) belonged to that tradition
too. For Hemingway, as for many earlier American writers—Thoreau, for
instance, Cooper and Twain—the essential condition of life is solitary,
and the interesting, the only really serious business, is the
management of that solitude. In this respect, the first story, "Indian
Camp," in his first book, In Our Time
(1925), is exemplary. Young Nick
Adams, the protagonist, witnesses a birth and a death. The birth is
exceptionally agonizing, with the mother, an Indian woman, being cut
open by Nick's father and being sewn up with a fishing line. And the
death too is peculiarly awful, the husband in the bunk above, listening
to the woman in her agony, and cutting his throat. "Why did he koll
himself, Daddy?" Nick asks. "I don't know, Nick." comes the reply. "He
couldn't stand things, I guess." Although this is the only significant,
foreground suicide in Hemingway's fiction, the terms have been set.
"Things" will remain to the last hurtful and horrible, to be stood with
as much dignity and courage as possible. For the moment, though, these
things of horror are too much for Nick to dewell on. He must bury them
far down in his mind and rest secure in the shelter of the father. "In
the early morning on the lake sittting in the stern of the boat with
his father rowing," the story concludes, "he felt quite sure that he
would never die."
Such are the good times of boyhood in Hemingway,; not mother and home
but out in the open with father, recreating a frontier idyll. So, in
the second story in In Our Time,
to escape his wife's nervous chatter,
Nick's father goes out for a walk. "I want to go with you," Nick
declares; "all right," his father responds, "come on, then." Soon, when
Nick is older, in the later stories, "The End of Something" and "The
Three-Day Blow," father will be replaced as companion by his friend
Bill. But only the counters have altered, not the game. As the title of
his second collection of stories, Men
Without Women (1927), plainly
indicates, the best times of all, because the least complicated, least
hurtful, and most inwardly peaceful, are had by men or boys together,
preferably in some wide space of land or sea, away from the noise,
pace, and excitement of cities: Jake Barnes, the hero of The Sun Also
Rises (1926) fishing with his companions Bill Gorton and Harris;
Thomas
Hudson and his three sons in Islands
in the Stream (1970); and from In
Our Time, in "Cross-Country Snow," Nick and his friend George
skiing in
Switzerland one last time before Nick commits himself to the trap of
marriage and fatherhood. "Once a man's married, he's absolutely
bitched," is Bill's drunken wisdom in "The Three-Day Blow": bitched by
responsibilities, by domesticity, but above all by the pain locked in
with a love that, one way or another, may easily be broken or lost. And
a man's world, although safe from certain kinds of anxiety or threat,
is for Hemingway only relatively so. A man wil lose his wife but he
will also lose his father, not just in death but in disillusionment.
Near the end of In Our Time,
an exemplary father dies, not Nick's but
the jockey, "My Old Man," with whom, around the race-courses of France
and Italy, the young narrator has had a perfect time out, with no
mother or woman in sight. When his father falls in a steeplechase and
is killed, the son is left to bear not only his grief but also the
discovery that his father had been crooked. It is more than a life that
has been lost. As he overhears the name of his father being besmirched,
it seems to the boy "like when they get started, they don't leave a guy
nothing."
"It was all a nothing," observes the lonely protagonist of "A Clean
Well-Lighted Place" (Winner Take
Nothing (1933)), "and man was a
nothing too." In the face of palpable nothing, meaninglessness, there
are, finally, only the imperatives of conduct and communion with one's
own solitariness. "I did not care what it was all about," Jake
confides in The Sun Also Rises. "All I wanted to know was how to live
in it." One way to "live in it," in some of Hemingway's novels, has a
political slant. To Have and Have Not
(1937) is an emphatic protest
against corruption, political hypocrisy, and the immorality of gross
inequality. For Whom the Bell Tolls (1941)
commemorates three days of a
guerilla action in the Spanish Civil War and ceelbrates the Republican
fight against fascism. "Is suppose I am an anarchist," Hemingway had
written to Dos Passos in 1932; and the novel, like To Have and Have
Not, shows a lonely individualist fighting while he can, not for
a
political program, but for the simple humanist principles of justice
and, above all, liberty. But a more fundamental way to "live in it" is
to live alone. In "Big Two-Hearted River," the story that concludes In
Our Time, Nick starts out from the site of a burned-out town in
Michigan. "There was no town, nothing but the rails and the burned-over
country," the reader is told. "Even the surface had been burned off the
ground." The disaster that has annihilated the town aptly crowns the
world of violence and slaughter revealed in the vignettes that have
interleaved the stories of In Our
Time. For Hemingway, wounded in World
War I, life was war, nasty, brutal, and arbitrary; and that is a lesson
Nick has now learned. Putting this stuff of nightmares behind him, Nick
heads away from the road for the woods ande the river. Far from other
human sounds, he fishes, pitches a tent, builds a fire, prepares
himself food and drink. "He was there, in the good place," the reader
is told. "He was in his home where he had made it." It is a familiar
American moment, this sealing of a solitary compact with nature. It is
also a familiar concluding moment in Hemingway's work: a man alone,
trying to come to terms with the stark facts of life and
death—sometimes the death of a loved one, as in A Farewell to Arms
(1929), other times, as in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" (1938), his own
inevitable and imminent dying. And what seals the compact, and confirms
the starkness is, always, the pellucid clarity of expression, the
stark, simple economy of the terms in which Hemingway's lonely heroes
are rendered to us. "A writer's job is to tell the truth," Hemingway
observed. And he told that truth in a stuyle that was a verbal
equivalent of the grace under pressure shown by his finest
protagonists: concrete, contained, cleaving to the hard facts of life,
only disclosing its deeper urgencies in its repetitions and
repressions—in what its rhythms implied and what it did not say.
Hemingway called this verbal art the art of omission. "You could omit
anything if you knew what you omitted," Hemingway reflected in A
Movable Feast (1964), his memoir of his years in Paris after
World War
I; "and the omitted part would strenghten the story and make people
feel something more than they undestood." He had begun to develop this
art as a newspaperman: the copyroom of the Kansas City Star, where he
worked before World War I, was as much his Yale and Harvard as it was
for Mark Twain, or the whaling ship was for Herman Melville. "Pure
objective writing is the only true form of storytelling," his closest
companion on the Star told him. Hemingway never forgot that advice; and
he never forgot the importance of his newspaper training to him either.
"I was learning to write in those days," he recalled in Death in the
Afternoon, "and I found the greatest difficulty . . . was to put down
what really happened in action, what the actual things were which
produced the emotions that you experienced." The "real thing,"
Hemingway remembered, "was something I was working very hard to try to
get," first in Kansas and then in Paris, where he received
encouragement in his pursuit of concrete fact, and an example of how to
do it, from Ezra Pound and, even more, Gertrude Stein. The experience
of war was also vital here. Like so many of his generation, Hemingway
learned from that war not just a distrust but a hatred of abstraction,
the high-sounding generalizations used as an excuse, or justification,
for mass slaughter. "I was always embarrassed by the words sacred,
glorious, and sacrifice and the expression, in vain," says the
protagonist Frederic Henry in A
Farewell to Arms, set, of course, in
the Great War: "the things that were glorious had no glory and the
stockyards were like the stockyards of Chicago." "There were many words
that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places
had dignity." Like Frederic Henry, Hemingway came to feel that
"abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene";
the simple words, those that carried the samllest burden of stock
attitudes, were the safest ones. What the individual, and the writer,
had to respond to were things and experiences themselves, not ideas
about them; and the closer he or she stuck to them, the less risk there
would be of losing what was truly felt under a mass of evasions and
abstractions. The real thing the person or writer must pursue,
Hemingway felt, is the truth of the individual, immediate experience
and emotion. That truth is discovered by the Hemingway hero—just as it
is by Huckleberry Finn—in seeing and responding to things for himself.
And it is expressed by Hemingway—just as it is for Huck's creator, Mark
Twain—in describing things for oneself, things as they are, not
mediated by convention or abstraction. The style, in fact, is a measure
of commitment: it is the proper reaction to the world translated into
words.
What Hemingway was after, in terms of words and action, is caught in
perhaps his most successful novel, The
Sun Also Rises, the seminal
treatment of the "lost generation" and its disillusionment in the
aftermath of World War I. The story is slight. The book describes a few
weeks of spring in Paris, during which we watch the hero Jake Barnes
living his customary life. He then goes on a fishing trip in Spain and
attends a fiesta in Pamplona. Running through this small slice of life
is a minimal plot, concerned largely with the relationship between Jake
and an Englishwoman, Brett Ashley. Brett is the woman with whom Jake
has beeen in love off and on for some time. But when the novel ends,
Jake and Brett are exactly where they were at the start. The novel
finishes where it began; the characters walk around in a circle, not
getting anywhere but just surviving. This is a world full of people
with nothing to do and no place, apparently, to go. The
characters—typically, for Hemingway, and for many stories of the
postwar period—are situated in another country, an alien place; and
they seem cut off from all sense of purpose, communal identity, or
historical direction. Their common situation is, as one of them
succintly puts it, "miserable"—existentially, that is, rather than
economically. Few of Hemingway's characters have to worry about where
the next meal is coming from; on the contrary, they tend to eat rather
well, food being one of the "real things," the basic sensory pleasures
of life. They live under constant stress, the pressure of living in a
world without meaning, and their challenge is to show grace under that
pressure. In a sense, this is a novel of manners: each character is
judged according to how clearly he or she sees the truth—and, if they
see
it, how well or badly they behave.
The first question asked, implicitly, of all the characters in The Sun
Also Rises is, is he or she "one of us?" That is the character
one of
those who have learned to see what their true circumstances are, and
what they truly feel. Those who have learned this seem to recognize
each other and so constitute a kind of secret society. They are
"aficionados" of life because they understand the perils of existence
just as the good bullfighter, and the good bullfight spectator,
understand the perils of the bullring. Being "one of us," however, is
not enough. There is also the question of how you behave. Some behave
well, like Jake; some behave badly, sometimes, like Brett Ashley. Some
never get the opportunity to behave well or badly because, like the
least attractive character in the book, Robert Cohn, they never see
what life is really like or know what they truly feel. They never
recognize what the rules of the game are, and so they never get to be a
player. What the good player in life should do, how he or she should
behave, is illustrated in the description of the perfect bullfight,
Romero—one of Brett's several lovers—as he confronts the charging bull.
"Romero never made any contortions, always it was straight and pure and
natural in line," Jake tells the reader; he never tries to concoct "a
faked look of danger." He had "The old thing," Jake concludes, "the
holding of his purity of line thorugh a maximum of exposure." Romero
confronts "the real thing," the challenge of life with immediately and
intuitive simplicty. He responds to things as they are, without posture
or pretence, and, in responding this way, he achieves a certain
nobility. It is a neat example of how, in Hemingway's work, realism
assumes a heroic quality, even an aura of romance. The noblest
character is invariably the one who sticks closest to the facts.
That is especially true of Jake Barnes, who holds his purity of line as
both the narrator and the protagonist. As narrator, Jake tries to tell
us what he truly sees and feels, in a prose that is alert to the
particular. As protagonist, Jakes tries for a similar clarity,
simplicity, and honesty; and, for the most part, he succeds. What Jake
has to see and deal with, above all, is his own impotence. He is
incapable of sexual intercourse because of a wound sustained in World
War I. This impotence is not a symbol. For Hemingway, life had no
meaning independent of immediate experience, so symbolism was
impossible for him. It is a fact, an instance of the cruel tricks life
plays and the pressures everyone must, somehow and someday, confront.
For Jake and Brett, love seeks its natural expression and issue in sex,
sensory fulfillment. But this is impossible. And for Jake, as for
Hemingway, to the extent that love or any emotion is not felt in
sensory terms, translated into concrete experience, it is incomplete,
even unreal. This is the trial Jake must face, the fundamental
challenge thrown down to him in life: that his love can never be a
"real thing," it must remain thwarted, a loss and a waste. Sometimes
Jake begins to crack under this pressure. "It is really awfully easy to
be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime," he observes, "but at
night it is another thing." He finds himself sleepless; and, his mind
"jumping around," he even starts quietly to cry. But, fundamentally,
Jake weathers the storm. The end of the novel shows that, despite the
temptation to pity himself, to dream of what might have been, to
indulge in fantasy or fakery, he can see and stand things as they
really are. He can be straight and pure and natural in his response to
even the worst his life has to offer. Brett invites him to indulge, to
escape from truth into daydream: "Oh Jake," she tells him, "We could
have had such a damned good time together." His reply is simple, and
supplies the last words in The Sun
Also Rises: "Yes, isn't it pretty to
think so?" It is the perfect response for the Hemingway hero because it
is so simple and stoical—so tersely, terribly rejecting the "pretty,"
the fanciful, and in doing so registering the volcanic feelings that
have to be contained in order to prevent mental and moral confusion.
Jake is wounded, an exile in a world without pity; but so are all men
and women, Hemingway intimates. He is also a hero—just as, potentially,
we all are if we have the courage to face things and ourselves. Purity
of line is what Jake sticks to, in the face of nothing: he regards it
as his job, his duty to tell the truth. So, of course, does Hemingway;
and, at his best, he does so; he sees and calls things by their right
names.
—oOo—
"I am telling the same story over and over," William Faulkner
(1897-1962) admitted once, "which is myself and the world." That remark
catches one of the major compulsions in his fiction. Faulkner was prone
to interpret any writing, including his own, as a revelation of the
writer's secret life, as his or her dark twin. By extension, he was
inclined to see that writing as shadowed by the repressed myths, the
secret stories of his culture. Repetition was rediscovery, as Faulkner
saw it; his was an art, not of omission like Hemingway's, but of
reinvention, circling back and circling back again, to the life that
had been lived and missed, the emotions that had been felt but not yet
understood. Shaped by the oral traditions of the South, which were
still alive when he was young, and by the refracted techniques of
modernism, to which he was introduced as a young man, Faulkner was
drawn to write in a way that was as old as storytelling and, at the
time, as new as the cinema and Cubism. It was as if he, and his
characters, in T. S. Eliot's famous phrase, had had the experience, but
missed the meaning; and telling became an almost obsessive reaction to
this, a way of responding to the hope that perhaps by the indirections
of the fictive impulse he could find directions out. That the hope was
partial was implicit in the activity of telling the story "over and
over"; Faulkner, like so many of his protagonists and narrators, kept
coming back, and then coming back again, to events that seemed to
resist understanding, to brim with undisclosed meaning. There would
always be blockage between the commemorating writer and the
commemorated experience, as Faulkner's compulsive use of the metaphor
of a window indicated: the window on which a name is inscribed, for
instance, in Requiem for a Nun
(1951), or the window through which Quentin Compson gazes at his native
South, as he travels home from Massachusetts, in The Sound and the Fury
(1929). Writing, for Faulkner, was consequently described as a
transparency and an obstacle, offering communication and discovery to
the inquiring gaze of writer and reader but also impeding him, sealing
him off from full sensory impact.
"You know," Faulkner said once in one of his typically revelatory
asides, "sometimes I think there must be a sort of pollen of ideas
floating in the air, which fertilizes similarly minds here and there
which have not had direct contact." In his case, that "pollen of ideas"
was primarily Southern in origin. He was born, brought up, and spent
most of his life in Mississippi; and most of his fiction is set in his
apocryphal county of Yoknapatawpha, based on his home county of
Lafayette. Not only that, every exploration of identity in his fiction
tends to become an exploration of family, community, and culture. "No
man is himself," Faulkner insisted. "He is the sum of his past." And,
while he was thinking in particular of his own self haunted by his
ancestors when he said this, he was also thinking in particular of that
interpenetration of past and present that is, perhaps, the dominant
theme in Southern society and its cultural forms—and of his own
determining conviction that any identity anywhere is indelibly stamped
by history. A society, Faulkner believed and said, was "the indigenous
dream of any given collection of men having something in common, be it
only geography or climate." It was a material institution and also a
moral, or immoral, force. "Tell
about the South," asks a Canadian character, Shreve, in Absalom, Absalom! (1936). "What's it like there. What do they do
there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all."
In a sense, Faulkner never stopped "telling," since his novels
constitute an imaginative recovery of the South, an attempt to know it
as a region. Those novels not only tell, however, they show. Much of
their power derives from the fact that, in drawing us a map of his
imaginary county, Faulkner is also charting a spiritual geography that
is, in the first instance, his but could be ours as well. The dreams
and obsessions which so startle and fascinate Shreve—with place, with
the past, with evil, with the serpentine connections between history
and identity—all those are the novelist's, and not just an aspect of
described behavior. And as the reader is drawn into the telling,
attends to the myriad voices of every story, he or she becomes an
active member of the debate. The consequence is that when, for example,
Quentin Compson is described in Absalom,
Absalom! as
"a barracks filled with stubborn backlooking ghosts," each reader feels
the description could equally well apply to the story itself, to
Faulkner the master storyteller, and to us his apprentices. Each
reading of the story is its meaning; each reader is caught up in the
rhythm of repetition, the compulsion not only to remember but to
reinterpret.
Faulkner began his creative life as a poet and artist. he published
poems and drawings in student magazines in his hometown of Oxford,
Mississippi; his first book, The
Marble Faun
(1924), was a collection of verse that showed the influence of an
earlier generation of British and French poets, like Swinburne and
Mallarmé. His first two novels, Soldier's
Pay (1925) and Mosquitoes
(1927), are conventional in many ways; the one, a tale of postwar
disillusionment; the other, a satirical novel of ideas. Soldier's Pay,
written in New Orleans, does, however, anticipate some familiar
Faulkner trademarks; the absent center or central figure who is both
there and not there (in this case, because he has been traumatized by
war), the smalltown setting, the black characters, the present shadowed
by the past. And Mosquitoes,
set in and around New Orleans, carries traces of its author's obsession
with the link, if any, between words and doing, language and
experience—and with the question, issuing from that, of whether writing
and speech, by their very nature, are doomed to fail. Sartoris
(1929), his third novel, is the first to be set in his fictional county
of Yoknapatawpha (although it was not given this name until As I Lay Dying (1930)). "Beginning
with Sartoris," Faulkner
later recalled, "I discovered that my own little postage stamp of
native soil was worth writing about, and that by sublimating the actual
into the apocryphal I would have complete liberty to use whatever
talent I might have to its absolute top." Sartoris was originally written as Flags in the Dust;
it was rejected and only published, under its new title, in an edited
version. Any other writer migh have been discouraged by this, to the
point of silence. Faulkner, on the contrary, wrote a series of major
modernist novels over the next seven years: The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying,
Sanctuary (1931), Light in
August (1932) and Absalom,
Absalom! These
were, eventually, to secure his reputation, if not immediately his
future. Although highly regarded, by other writers in particular, he
was frequently in financial trouble. Selling stories to the magazines
like the Saturday Evening Post
helped a little; working periodically in Hollywood, where his more
notable credits included To Have and
Have Not (1945) and The Big
Sleep (1946), helped even more. The restoration of Faulkner's
reputation, and his financial health, began with the publication of The Portable Faulkner
in 1946; it was consolidated by the award of the Nobel Prize in 1950.
By this time, Faulkner had produced fiction reflecting his concerns
about the mobility and anonymity of modern life (Pylon (1935); The Wild Palms (1939)), and his
passionate interest in racial prejudice and racial injustice in the
South (Go Down, Moses (1942); Intruder in the Dust (1948)). He
had also written The Hamlet
(1940), a deeply serious comedy focusing on social transformation in
his region. This was to become the first book in a trilogy dealing with
the rise to power of a poor white entrepreneur called Flem Snopes, and
his eventual fall; the other two were The
Town (1957) and The Mansion
(1959). Generally, the later work betrays an inclination toward a more
open, direct address of social and political issues, and a search for
some grounds for hope, for the belief that humankind would not only
endure but prevail. This was true not only of the later fiction set in
Yoknapatawpha,like Requiem for a Nun, but also of his
monumental A Fable
(1954), set in World War I, which uses the story of Christ to dramatize
its message of peace. There is, certainly, a clear continuity between
this later work and the earlier. Faulkner, for example, never ceased to
be driven by the sense that identity is community and history, that we
are who we are because of our place and past. And he never ceased,
either, to forge a prose animated by the rhythms of the human voice,
talking and telling things obsessively even if only to itself. But
there is also change, transformation. It can be summed up by saying
that Faulkner gravitated, slowly, away from the private to the public,
from the intimacies of the inward vision toward the intensities of the
outward. Or, to put it more simply, he turned from modernism to
modernity.
"Maybe nothing ever happens once and
is finished," reflects Quentin Compson in Absalom, Absalom! Many
lives are woven into one life in Faulkner, many texts into one text—a
text that seems to be without circumference or closure. Repetition and
revision are the norms of consciousness and narrative here. That makes
it difficult, even dangerous, to separate the life of one text from the
others. The inimitable texture of each individual text, and the
translation of the author from modernism to modernity, prevent any one
story or novel from acting properly as a mirror, reflective of
Faulkner's art as a whole. But some measure of that art, at least, can
be taken from the fourth and among the finest of the novels Faulkner
produced, The Sound and the Fury;
it was the one most intimately related to his own experience ("I am
Quentin in The Sound and the Fury,
he once admitted), and his personal favorite because it was, he
declared, his "most splendid failure." The novel is concerned with the
lives and fates of the Compson family, who seem to condense into their
experience the entire history of their region. Four generations of
Compsons appear; and the most important of these is the third
generation, the brothers Quentin, Jason, and Benjy and their sister
Candace, known in the family as Caddy. Three of the four sections into
which the narration is divided are consigned to the voices of the
Compson brothers; the fourth is told in the third person and circles
around the activities of Dilsey Gibson, the cook and maid-of-all-work
in the Compson house. The present time of The Sound and the Fury
is distilled into four days: three of them occurring over the Easter
weekend, 1928, the Quentin section being devoted to a day in 1910 when
he chooses to commit suicide. There is, however, a constant narrative
impulse to repeat and rehearse the past, to be carried back on the old
ineradicable rhythms of memory. The memories are many but the
determining ones for the Compson brothers are of the woman who was at
the center of their childhood world, and who is now lost to them
literally and emotionally: their sister, Caddy Compson.
Caddy is the source and inspiration of what became and remained the
novel closest to Faulkner's own heart. The Sound and the Fury began,
he explained, with the "mental picture . . . of the muddy seat of a
little girl's drawers in a pear tree where she could see through a
window where her grandmother's funeral was taking place"—while her
three brothers gazed at her from down below. She is also the subject of
a book that, as this brief explanation suggests, carries linked
intimations of sex and death. "To me she was the beautiful one, she was
my heart's darling," Faulkner said of Caddy later. "That's what I wrote
the book about," he added, "and I used the tools which seemed to me the
proper tools to try to tell, try to draw the picture of Caddy." Trying
to tell of Caddy, to extract what he called "some ultimate
distillation" from her story is the fundamental project of the book.
And yet she seems somehow to exist apart from or beyond it, to escape
from Faulkner and all the other storytellers. To some extent, this is
because she is the absent presence that haunts so many of Faulkner's
other novels: a figure like, say Addie Bundren in As I Lay Dying or Thomas Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom!,
who obsesses the other characters but very rarely speaks with his or
her own voice. Even more important, though, is the fact that she is
female, and so by definition someone who tends to exist for her creator
outside the parameters of language: Faulkner has adopted here the
archetypal male image of a woman who is at once mother, sister,
daughter, and lover, Eve and Lilith, virgin and whore, to describe what
Wallace Stevens once referred to as "the inconceivable idea of the
sun"—that is, the other, the world outside the self. And while she is
there to the extent that she is the focal point, the eventual object of
each narrator's meditation, she is not there in the sense that she
remains elusive, intangible—as transparent as the water, as invisible
as the odors of the trees and honeysuckle, with which she is constantly
associated. It is as if, just as the narrator tries to focus her in his
camera lens, she slips away leaving little more than the memory of her
name and image.
Not that Faulkner ever stops trying to bring her into focus—for
himself, his characters, and of course for us. Each section of the
book, in fact, represents a different strategy, another attempt to know
her. Essentially, the difference in each section is a matter of
rhetoric, in the sense that each time the tale is told another language
is devised and with a different series of relationships between author,
narrator, subject, and reader. When Benjy occupies our attention right
at the start, for instance, we soon become aware of a radical
inwardness. Profoundly autistic, Benjy lives in a closed world where
the gap between self and other, being and naming cannot be bridged
because it is never known or acknowledged. The realm outside himself
remains as foreign to him as its currency of language does, and
Faulkner is creating an impossible language here, giving voice to the
voiceless. The second section, devoted to Quentin, collapses distance
in another way. "I am Quentin," Faulkner said. And, as we read, we feel
ourselves drawn into a world that seems almost impenetrably private.
Quentin, for his part, tries to abolish the gap between Caddy and
himself—although, of course, not being mentally handicapped he is less
successful at this than Benjy. And he sometimes tends to confess to or
address the reader, or try to address him, and sometimes to forget him.
Whether addressing the reader or not, however, his language remains
intensely claustrophobic and liable to disintegration. Quentin cannot
quite subdue the object to the word; he seems always to be trying to
place things in conventional verbal structures only to find those
structures siled away or dissolve into uncontrolled
stream-of-consciousness. Equally, he cannot quite construct a coherent
story for himself because, in losing his sister Caddy, he has lost what
Henry James would call the "germ" of his narrative—the person, that is,
who made sense of all the disparate elements of life for him by
providing them with an emotional center.
With Jason, in the third section of The
Sound and the Fury,
distance enters. Faulkner is clearly out of sympathy with this Compson
brother, even if he is amused by him (he once said that Jason was the
character of his that he disliked the most). Jason, in turn, while
clearly obsessed with Caddy, never claims any intimacy with her. And
the reader is kept at some remove by the specifically public mode of
speech Jason uses, full of swagger, exaggeration, and saloon-bar
prejudice. Attempting, with some desperation, to lay claim to common
sense and reason—even where, as he is most of the time, he is being
driven by perverse impulse and panic—Jason seems separated from just
about everything, not least himself. The final section of the novel
offers release, of a kind, from all this. The closed circle of the
interior monologue is broken now, the sense of the concrete world is
firm, the visible outline of things finely and even harshly etched, the
rhtythms exact, evocative, and sure. Verbally, we are in a more open
field where otherness is addressed; emotionally, we are released from a
vicious pattern of repetition compulsion, in which absorption in the
self leads somehow to destruction of the self. And yet, and yet . . .
the language remains intricately figurative, insistently artificial.
The emphasis throughout, in the closing pages, is on appearance and
impression, on what seems to be the case rather than what is. We are
still not being told the whole truth, the implication is; there remain
limits to what we can know; despite every effort, even the last section
of the novel does not entirely succeed in naming Caddy. So it is not
entirely surprising that, like the three Compson brothers before her,
Dilsey Gibson, who dominates this section, is eventually tempted to
discard language altogether. Benjy resorted, as he had to, to a howl,
Quentin to suicide, Jason to impotent, speechless rage—all to express
their inarticulacy in the face of the other, their impotence as they
stood in the eye of the storm, facing the sound and fury of time
and change. And Dilsey, responding to a more positive yet passionate
impulse, becomes part of the congregation at an Easter Day
service—where, we are told, "there was not even a voice but instead
their hearts were speaking to one another in changing measures beyond
the need for words." In ways that are, certainly, very different all
four characters place a question mark over their attempts to turn
experience into speech. And they do so, not least, by turning aside
from words, seeking deliverance and redress in a nonverbal world—a
world of pure silence or pure, unintelligible sound.
The closing words of The Sound and
the Fury
appear to bring the wheel full circle. As Benjy Compson sits in a wagon
watching the elements of his small world flow past him, "each in its
ordered place," it is as if everything has now been settled and
arranged. Until, that is, the reader recalls that this
order is one founded on denial, exclusion, a howl of resistance to
strangeness. The ending, it turns out, is no ending at all; it
represents, at most, a continuation of the process of speech—the human
project of putting things in its ordered place—and an invitation to us,
the reader, to continue that process too. We are reminded, as we are at
the close of so many of Faulkner's stories, that no system is ever
complete or completely adequate. Something is always missed out it
seems, some aspect of reality must invariably remain unseen. Since this
is so, no book, not even one like this that uses a multiplicity of
speech systems—a plurality of perspectives, like a Cubist painting—can
ever truly be said to be finished. Language can be a necessary tool for
understanding and dealing with the world, the only way we can hope to
know Caddy; yet perversely, Faulkner suggests, it is as much a function
of ignorance as of knowledge. It implies absence, loss, as well as
fulfillment. Sometimes, Faulkner admitted, he felt that experience,
life "out there," existed beyond the compass of words: a feeling that
would prompt him to claim that all he really liked was "silence.
Silence and horses. And trees." But at other times he seemed to believe
that he should try to inscribe his own scratchings on the surface of
the earth, that he should at least attempt the impossible and tell the
story over again, the story of himself and the world, using all the
tools, all the different voices and idioms available to him. As
Faulkner
himself put it once, "Sometimes I think of doing what Rimbaud did—yet I
will certainly keep on writing as long as I live." So he kept on
writing: his final novel, The
Reivers (1962),
was published only a month before he died. To the end, he produced
stories that said what he suggested every artist was trying, in the
last analysis, to say: "I was here." And
they said it for others beside himself: others, that is, including the
reader.
Cincuenta años se cumplían este año de La Galaxia Gutenberg de Marshall
McLuhan. Hay que leeerlo aunque sea con cincuenta años de retraso. Y si
no por lo menos mi "surfer's guide" al libro, que según veo aparece en
el Cognition & Culture eJournal:
'Bloomsbury' and Beyond: Strachey, Woolf, and Mansfield
From
The Short Oxford History of English
Literature, by Andrew Sanders:
When the narrator of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited
goes up to Oxford as an undergraduate in 1922 he decorates his college
rooms with objects indicative of his 'advanced' but essentially
derivative taste. Charles Ryder hangs up a reproduction of Van Gogh's Sunflowers,
a painting which had been shown at the first Post-Impressionist
exhibition, and he displays a screen painted by Roger Fry that he has
acquired at the closing sale at Fry's pioneering Omega Workshops (a
byword for the clumsily experimental interior design of the period). He
also shows off a collection of books which he later embarrassedly
describes as 'meagre and commonplace.' These books include volumes of Georgian Poetry
(the last in the series of which had just appeared), once popular and
mildly sensational novels by Compton Mackenzie (1883-1972) and Norman
Douglas (1868-1952), Roger Fry's Vision
and Design of 1920 and Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians
of 1918. These last two volumes, issued in a similar popular format in
the early 1920s, are the clearest signals of the extent to which the
young Ryder has been influenced by the canons of taste enunciated by
the group of writers and artists who have come to be known as the
'Bloomsbury Group'.
'Bloomsbury' was never a formal grouping. Its origins lay in male
frienships in late nineteenth-century Cambridge; in the early 1900s it
found a focus in the Gordon Square house of the children of Leslie
Stephen in unfashionable Bloomsbury; it was only with the formation of
the 'Memoir Club' in 1920 that it loosely defined the limits of its
friendships, relationships, and sympathies. The 'Memoir Club'
originally centred on Leslie Stephen's two daughters Virginia and
Vanessa, their husbands Leonard Woolf and Clive Bell, and their friends
and neighbours Desmond and Molly MacCarthy, Duncan Grant, E. M.
Forster, Roger Fry, and John Maynard Keynes. The group was linked by
what Clive Bell later called 'a taste for discussion in the pursuit of
truth and a contempt for conventional ways of thinking and feeling,
contempt for conventional morals if you will'. Their discussions
combined tolerant agnosticism with cultural dogmatism, progressive
rationality with social snobbery, practical jokes with refined
self-advertisement. When in 1928 Bell (1881-1964) attempted to
define 'Civilization' (in a book of that name) he identified an
aggrandized Bloomsbury ideal in the douceur
de vivre
and witty iconoclasm of the France of the Enlightenment (though, as
Virginia Woolf commented, 'in the end it turns out that civiliztion is
a lunch party at No 50 Gordon Square'). To its friends 'Bloomsbury'
offered a prevision of a relaxed, permissive and élitist future; to its
enemies, like the once patronized and later estranged D. H. Lawrence,
it was a tight little world peopled by upper-middle-class 'black
beetles'.
The prime 'Bloomsbury' text, Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians,
suggests that it is easier to see what the group did not represent than
what it did. Strachey's book struck a sympathetic chord with both his
friends and the public at large. Eminent
Victorians
(1918), a collection of four succint biographies of Cardinal Manning,
Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold, and General Gordon, seemed to many
readers to deliver the necessary coup
de grâce
to the false ideals and empty heroism of the nineteenth century. These
were principles which seemed to have been tried on the Western Front
and found disastrously wanting. Strachey (1880-1932) does not so much
mock his subjects as let them damn themselves in the eyes of their more
enlightened successors. He works not by frontal assault by by means of
the sapping innuendo and the carefully placed, explosive epigram. His
models, like Bell's, are the Voltaireand conversationalists of the
Paris salons of the eighteenth century, not the earnest Carlylean
lectures of Victorian London. When, for example, he speculates about
Florence Nightingale's conception of God he jests that 'she felt
towards Him as she might have felt towards a glorified sanitary
engineer'. In a review written in 1909 Strachey had endorsed the idea
that 'the first duty of a great historian is to be an artist'. As his
later studies of Queen Victoria
(1921) and of Elizabeth and Essex
(1928) suggest, Strachey was neither a great historian nor, ultimately,
a great biographer, but he was undoubtedly an innovative craftsman. The
'art' of biography has never been quite the same since. It is not
simply that he was an iconoclast; he was the master of a prose of
elegant disenchantment. His age, if it did not always cultivate
elegance, readily understood disenchantment.
Strachey's biographies challenged the conventional wisdom of
interpretation. They sprang, like the disparate essays assembled in
Roger Fry's Vision and Design,
from an urge to establish a new way of seeing and observing which was
distinct from the stuffy pieties of the Victorians. Fry's title
carefully avoids the word 'form', but it is that word, linked to the
crucially qualifying adjective 'significant', which weaves, by direct
reference and by implication, in and out of the twenty-five short
essays. Although Vision and Design
is primarily dedicated to reconsiderations of painting and sculpture,
the implications of its theoretical formulations for the experimental
fiction of Virginia Woolf are considerable. In his 'Essays in
Aesthetics' Fry distinguishes between 'instinctive reactions to
sensible objects' and the peculiarly human faculty of 'calling up again
. . . the echo of past experiences' in the imagination. The 'whole
consciousness', he argues, 'may be focussed upon the perceptive and the
emotional aspects of the experience' and thus produced in the
imaginative life 'a different set of values, and a different kind of
perception'. As the 'chief organ of teh imaginative life' Art works by
a set of values distinct from those of pure representation. When he
specifically returns to his argument in the book's final 'Retrospect'
Fry offers a further definition of the term 'significant form' as
'something other than agreeable arrangements of form, harmonious
patterns, and the like'. A work of art possessing this elusive, and
seemingly indefinable quality implies, he asserts, 'the effort on the
part of the artist to bend to our emotional understanding by means of
his passionate conviction some intractable material which is alien to
our spirit'.
Virginia
Woolf's criticism distils and reapplies Bell's and Fry's
aesthetic ideas as a means of arguing for the potential freedom of the
novel from commonly received understandings of plot, time, and
identity. In discussing the revision of traditional modes of
representation in her essay 'Modern Fiction', Woolf (1882-1941) insists
that each day 'the mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial,
fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel'. The
novelist, attempting to work with this 'incessant shower of innumerable
atoms', is forced to recognize that 'if he could base his work upon his
own feeling and not upon convention', there would be no plot, no
comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe 'in the accepted
style'. The task of the future novelist, Woolf therefore suggests, is
to convey an impression of the 'luminous halo' of life—'this varying,
this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit'—with as little mixture of the
'alien and external' as possible. What Woolf seeks to defend in her
essays is not necessarily a new range of subjects for the novel, but
new ways of rendering and designing the novel. She does more than
present a challenge to the received idea of realism; she reaches out to
a new aesthetic of realism. Essentially, she defines her own work, and
that of contermporaries, such as Lawrence and Joyce, against the
example of the Edwardian 'materialists' (and Arnold Bennett in
particular) who, to her mind, laid too great a stress on 'the fabric of
things'. Not only did they weigh their fiction down with a plethora of
external detail, they too readily accepted the constraints of
conventional obedience to 'plot' and sequential development. Much as
Roger Fry had seen the liberated artist 'bending' intractable material
into significance, Woolf insists that the twentieth-century novelist
could evolve a new fictional form out of a representation of the
'myriad impressions' which daily impose themselves on the human
consciousness.
As Virginia Woolf's fictional style developed beyond the relatively
conventional parameters of The
Voyage Out (1915) to the experimental representations of
consciousness in Mrs Dalloway
(1925), To the Lighthouse
(1927), and The Waves
(1931), specific characterization recedes and the detailed exploration
of the individual identity tends to melt into a larger and freer
expression. The discontinuities, fragmentations, and disintegrations
which her avant-garde artistic contemporaries observed in both the
external and the spiritual world become focused for Woolf in the idea,
noted in her diary in 1924, of character 'dissipated into shreds'. Her
novels attempt both to 'dissipate' character and to reintegrate human
experience within an aesthetic shape or 'form'. She seeks to represent
the nature of transient sensation, or of conscious and unconscious
mental activity, and then to relate it outwards to a more universal
awareness of pattern and rhythm. The momentary reaction, the
impermanent emotion, the ephemeral stimulus, the random suggestion, and
the dissociated thought are effectively 'bent' into a stylistic
relationship to something coherent and structured. A 'coherence in
things' is what Mrs Ramsay recognizes in a visionary, and
quasi-religious, moment of peace in To
the Lighthouse as
'as stability . . . something . . . immune from change'. The supposedly
random picture of the termporal in Woolf's later fiction is also
informed and 'interpreted' by the invocation of the permanent and
universal, much as the 'arbitrary' in nature was 'interpreted' with
reference to post-Darwinian science, or the complexities of the human
psyche unravelled by the application of newly fashionable Freudian
theory. Although her characters may often seem to be dissolved into
little more than ciphers, what they come to signify is part of a
complex iconographic discourse. In the instances of To the Lighthouse and The Waves
the glancing insights into the identities of characters are
complemented by larger symbols (a flickering lightouse or moving water)
which are allowed to be both temporary and permanent, both 'real' and
resonant, both constant and fluctuating. The fictional whole thus
become a normative expression of certain Modernist themes and modes.
Woolf's particular preoccupation with time is closely related to her
manifest interest in flux, a dissolution or dissipation of distinctions
within a fluid pattern of change and decay, which she recognizes in
nature and science as much as in the human psyche.
The informing presence of women characters with an aesthetic
propensity, or of particular women artists, serves to moderate and
condition the larger ambitions of the narratives in which they appear.
Although Virginia Woolf rarely directly echoes the insistent narrative
voice of a George Eliot, her own work does reflect what she recognized
in her pioneer essay on Eliot (1925) as a tendency to introduce
characters who stand for 'that troubled spirit, that exacting and
questioning and baffled presence' of the novelist herself. If neither
Lily Briscoe nor Miss La Trobe possess the cultural significance of a
Romola or a Dorothea, both are allowed, as amateur artists, to act out
the ordering dilemma of the professional. In the final part of To the Lighthouse
the 'weight' of Lily Briscoe's painting seems to be poised as she
explores the elusive nature of mass and form: 'Beautiful and bright it
should be on the surface, feathery and evanescent, one colour melting
into another like the colours on a butterfly's wint; but beneath the
fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron.' A similar
'visionary' insight temporarily enlightens the amateur author of the
historical pageant around which Between
the Acts
(1941) is shaped. Miss La Trobe watches entranced as butterflies
(traditional images of the human soul) 'gluttonously absorb' the rich
colours of the fancy dress strewn on the grass; the possibility of a
completer art briefly dawns on her, only to fall apart again. In both
novels women's sensibility (and sensitivity) constrasts with the
factual 'materialism' of a world dominated by the kind of men who
'negotiated treaties, ruled India, controlled finance' or who insist,
as Colonel Mayhew does in Between
the Acts,
that no picture of history is complete without reference to the British
Army. The Mrs Ramsays, the Lily Briscoes, and the Miss La Trobes dream
their brief dreams or are vouchsafed momentary 'epiphanies'; the men
are often left content with a limited grasp, and presumed control, of
the physical world.
Virginia Woolf's most complete, but ambiguous, representation of the
life of a woman character's mind in Mrs
Dalloway
is also her most thorough experiment with the new technique of interior
monologue. The novel plays subtly with the problem of an identity which
is both multiple and singular, both public and private, and it
gradually insists on the mutual dependence and opposition of the
perceptions of Clarissa Dalloway and the shell-shocked ramblings of a
victim of the war, Septimus Warren Smith. Mrs Dalloway
reveals both the particular originality of Woolf's fictional mode and
the more general limitations of her social vision. When she returns to
the problem of a dissipated identity in her extraordinary tribute to
the English aristocracy, Orlando
(1928), she seems to seek both to dissolve and define character in a
fanciful concoction of English history nad shifting gender. The book is
in part a sentimental tribute to the personal flair and ancestral
fixation of her aristocratic friend and fellow-writer, Victoria
('Vita') Sackville-West (1892-1962), in part an exploration of a
'masculine' freedom traditionally denied to women. If Woolf's depiction
of the society of her time is as blinkered as that of E. M. Forster by
upper-middle-class snobberies and would-be liberalisms, the historical
perspective which determined her feminism made for a far more
distinctive clarity of argument. In the essay 'Street Haunting'
(published in 1942) she writes of the pleasures of a London flâneuse
who discovers as the front door shuts that the shell-like nature of
domestic withdrawal is broken open 'and there is left of all these
wrinkles and roughnesses a central oyster of perceptiveness, an
enormous eye'. Almost the opposite process is delineated in the study A Room of One's Own
(1929), where the existence of a private space, and of a private
income, is seen as a prerequisite for the development of a woman
writer's creativity. A Room of One's
Own
is, however, far more than an insistent plea for privacy, leisure, and
education; it is a proclamation that women's writing has nearly come of
age. It meditates on the pervasiveness of women as the subjects of
poetry and on their absence from history; it plays as fancifully as the
narrator of Orlando might
with the domestic fate of a woman Shakespeare, but above all it pays
tribute to those English novelists, from Aphra Behn to George Eliot,
who established a tradition of women's writing. 'Masterpieces are not
single and solitary births', she insisted, 'they are the outcome of
many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the
people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.'
It is in this tradition that Virginia Woolf most earnestly sought to
see herself, a tradition which to her would eventually force open a way
for the woman writer to see human beings 'not always in relation to
each otehr but in relation to reality; and to the sky, too, and the
trees or whatever it may be in themselves'.
Woolf's 'significant forms', shaped from glancing insights and
carefully placed and iterated details, are to some degree echoed in the
work of her New Zealand-born contemporary, Katherine Mansfield (the
pseudonym of Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp, 1888-1923). If Mansfield's
success with reviewers and readers seems to have stimulated Woolf's
jealousy rather than critical generosity (Woolf generally found
Mansfield 'inscrutable'), both writers can be seen as developing the
post-impressionist principle of suggestiveness and rhythm from a
distinctively feminine point of view. Mansfield worked determinedly on
a small scale, concentrating on carefully pointed, delicately elusive
short stories. Her succint narratives, collected as In a German Pension (1911), Bliss, and Other Stories (1920),
and The Garden Party, and Other
Stories
(1922), are brief triumphs of style, as style which serves both to
suggest a pervasive atmosphere and to establish a series of evanescent
sensations (creaks, yawns, draughts, cries, footfalls, bird-calls, and
cat's miaows). Where In a German
Pension
conveys a fastidious dislike of Teutonic manners and mannerisms (though
Mansfiedl declined to have the volume reprinted during the Great War),
her later stories move towards a greater technical mastery and to a
larger world-view. She draws significantly on the landscapes and flora
of her native New Zealand (in, for example, 'The Aloe'), she attempst
to explore the responses of a wide spectrum of social types, and, by
means of a style which takes on a yet more shimmering elusiveness, she
endeavours to describe the mysterious 'diversity of life . . . Death
included'. Her own untimely death from tuberculosis cut short a
remarkable innovative career.
La idea de la Guerra desde el Materialismo
filosófico
Tiene Bueno una idea de lo que es el
Estado demasiado idealizada, como si fuese un sistema racional en el
que se puede fundamentar el Derecho, etc. Como si no hubiese
contradicciones objetivas también en los Estados.
Desacredita también a la etología como la filosofía última de la
guerra, sólo porque hay otras perspectivas no reducibles a ella. Pero
es que hay unas perspectivas más básicas o fundamentales que otras, y
la economía, religión, economía, teoría militar, estratética, etc. de
la guerra, han de explicarse con una comprensión previa de la etología
humana. La teoría del cierre categorial, si se entiende como una manera
de aislar las disciplinas en sí mismas, sin atender a la fundamentación
de unas explicaciones en el marco de otras, tendrá unas limitaciones
inherentes. Eso mismo le lleva a rechazar acertadamente carácter
trascendental o metafísico a la categoría de la guerra, que la saca absurdamente
de su propia definición en el nivel de fundamentación que le
corresponde propiamente, distinguiendo entre usos literales y
metafóricos. Pero el lugar donde la ubica propiamente es como
fenómeno político, con lo cual restringe inadecuadamente (e
incoherentemente) su análisis, e impide conceptualizar la violencia de
grupo más allá de la categoría del Estado.
De hecho, no es coherente: al final del segundo vídeo, algunas de sus
reflexiones más osadas sobre la necesidad de la guerra tienen un
planteamiento no "estatalista" sino sociobiológico—o de desfase entre
población y explotación de recursos, razonamiento basado en la teoría
malthusiana en última instancia si se quiere.
From The Oxford Companion to American
Literature, by Hart and Leininger:
E[dward] E[stlin] Cummings (1894-1962), born in
Cambridge, Mass., after receiving his A.B. (1915) and M.A. (1916) from
Harvard joined the service of the American volunteer Norton Harjes
Ambulance Corps in France before the U.S. entered World War I, and in
1917 was confined for several months in a French concentration camp on
an unfounded charge of treasonable correspondence. This experience
provided the basis for his first book, The Enormous Room (1922), a prose
narrative of poetic and personal perception. His first book of poetry, Tulips and Chimneys (1923),
followed by & (1925), XLI Poems (1925), and is 5
(1926, substantially augmented in a reprint of 1985), clearly
established his individual voice and tone. The poems show his
transcendental faith in a world where the self-reliant, joyful, loving
individual is beautifully alife but in which mass man, or the man who
lives by mind alone, without heart and soul, is dead. The true
individual Cummings praised, often reverently and with freshness of
spirit and idiom, but the "unman" was satirized as Cummings presented
witty, bitter parodies of and attacks on the patriotic and cultural
platitudes and shibboleths of the "unworld." This poetry is marked by
experimental word coinages, shifting of grammar, blending of
established stanzaic forms and free verse, flamboyant punning,
typographic distortion, unusual punctuation, and idiosyncratic division
of words, all of which became integral to the ideas and rhythms of his
relatively brief lyrics. These he continued to write with subtlety of
technique and sensitivity of feeling and to publish in ViVa (1931), No Thanks (1935), I/20 (1936), Collected Poems (1938), 50 poems (1940), I x I (1944), Xaire (1950),Poems:
1923-1954 (1954), 95 Poems (1958), and the
posthumously collected 73 Poems
(1963). His other works are him
(1927), an expressionist drama in verse and prose, with kaleidoscopic
scenes dashing from comedy to tragedy; a book which bears no title
(1930); Eimi (1933), a travel
diary utilizing the techniques of his poetry and violently attacking
the regimentation of individuals in the U.S.S.R; Tom (1935), a satirical ballet
based on Uncle Tom's Cabin;CIOPW (1931), drawings and
paintings showing his ability in charcoal,
ink, oil, pencil, and watercolor; Anthropos, The Future of Art
(1944); Santa Claus (1946), a
morality play; and i (1954), "six
nonlectures" delivered at Harvard.
Eimi,
travel narrative by E. E. Cummings of his 36-day visit to the Soviet
Union, published in 1933. This long prose work employs the techniques
of his poetry and, like it, also celebrates the individual of the title
(Greek, "I am"), and with wit and vigor attacks the regimentation of
people in the USSR.
Interesante la crítica que hace Bueno a la cosmología como ambiciosa
ciencia del universo, ciencia frustrada e imposible según Bueno. Aquí
disiento—aun estando de acuerdo con él en su crítica a las cosmologías
variables y gratuitas. Tenemos que partir de una ciencia de la realidad
humana (incluyendo las relaciones humanas) y fundar sobre esa ciencia
el conocimiento del universo o los universos que la rodean. La realidad
inmediata es la realidad fundamental. Pero sobre ella sí se funda una
ciencia global del universo, y una ciencia de las distintas maneras de
pensar el universo, y de la ubicación de los mundos imaginarios humanos
en relación unos a otros.
Es bueno Bueno señalando contradicciones e
incoherencias, pero hay que pasar por alto sus propios maximalismos y
contradicciones. O apreciaciones selectivas. Por ejemplo, la idea
monista de Parménides es contradictoria, pero esto no lo dice Bueno. Si
el Ser es uno y uniforme, y no relacional, no puede tener forma de esfera—ni forma alguna, de
hecho—cosa que parece evidente, aunque no a Parménides. (Y a Bueno...
¡según le dé el viento!).
Rechaza también el uso de la palabra "filosofía" para hablar de la
inherente en las prácticas culturales, lo que en otras ocasiones llama
"filosofía inmersa". Para Bueno la filosofía es (aquí al menos) sólo la
explícitamente formulada, y sin embargo una teoría emergentista o
dialéctica no puede separar claramente una de otra, pues como señalaba
Paul de Man (o se manifestaba en su teoría) el pensamiento explícito
también contiene una filosofía inmersa que otros habrán de extraer o
traer a la luz.
Mrs Dalloway.
Dir. Marleen Gorris. Screenplay by Eileen Atkins, based on the
novel by Virginia Woolf. Cast: Vanessa Redgrave, Rupert Graves,
Natascha McElhone, Sarah Badel, Amelia Bullmore, Phyllis Calvert, Alan
Cox, Oliver Ford Davies, Robert Hardy, Lena Headey, Michael Kitchen,
Robert Portal, John Standing, Margaret Tyzack. Assoc. prod. Paul Frift.
Prod. Des. David Richens. Music by Ilona Sekacz. Ed. Micheil Reichwein.
Photog. Sue Gibson. Exec. Prod. Chris J. Ball, William Tyrer, Simon
Curtis, Bill Shepherd. Co-prod. Hans de Weers. Prod. Lisa Katselas Paré
and Stephen Bayly. First Look Pictures / Bayly/Paré / Bergen Film /
Newmarket Capital / BBC Films / European Co-production Fund UK /
NPS-Television / Dutch Co-production Fund (CoBo) / The Dutch Film
Fund, 1997.
James Joyce was born in Dublin, son of a
talented but feckless father who is accurately described by Stephen Dedalus
in A Portrait of the Artist as Young
Man as a man who had in his time been "a medical student, an
oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician, a small
landlord, a small investor, a drinker, a good fellow, a storyteller,
somebody's secretary, something in a distillery, a tax-gatherer, a
bankrupt, and at present a praiser of his own past." The elder Joyce
drifted steadily down the financial and social scale, his family moving
from house to house, each one less genteel and more shabby than the
previous. James Joyce's whole education was Catholic, from the age of
six to the age of nine at Clongowes Wood College and from eleven to
sixteen at Belvedere College, Dublin. Both were Jesuit institutions and
were norJoymal roads to the priesthood. He then studied modern
languages
at University College, Dublin.
From a comparatively early age Joyce regarded himself as a rebel
against the shabbiness and Philistinism of Dublin. In his early youth
he was very religious, but in his last year at Belvedere he began to
reject his Catholic faith in favor of a literary mission that he saw as
involving rebellion and exile. He refused to play any part in the
nationalist or other popular activities of his fellow students, and he
created some stir by his outspoken articles, one of which, on the
Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, appeared in the Fortnightly Review for April 1900.
He taught himself Norwegian to be able to read Ibsen and to write to
him. When an article by Joyce, significantlytitled The Day of the Rabblement, was
refused, on instructions of the faculty adviser, by the student
magazine that had commissioned it, he had it printed privately. By
1902, when he received his A.B. degree, he was already committed to a
career as an exile and writer. For Joyce, as for his character Stephen
Dedalus, the latter implied the former. To preserve his integrity, to
avoid involvement in popular sentimentalities and dishonesties, and
above all to be able to re-create with both total understanding and
total objectivity the Dublin life he knew so well, he felt that he had
to go abroad.
Joyce was sent to Paris after graduation, was recalled to Dublin by his
mother's fatal illness, had a short spell there as a schoolteacher,
then returned to the Continent in 1904 to teach English at Trieste and
then at Zurich. He took with him Nora Barnacle, an uneducated Galway
girl with no interest in literature; her native vivacity and peasant
wit charmed Joyce, and the two lived in devoted companionship until
Joyce's death, although they were not married until 1931. In 1920 Joyce
settled in Paris, where he lived until December 1940, when the war
forced him to take refuge in Switzerland; he died in Zurich a few weeks
later.
Proud, obstinate, absolutely convinced of his genius, given to fits
of
sudden gaiety and of sudden silence, Joyce was not always an easy
person to get along with, yet he never lacked friends, and throughout
his thirty-six years on the Continent he was always the center of a
literary circle. Life was hard at first. At Trieste he had very little
money, and he did not improve matters by drinking heavily, a habit
checked somewhat by his brother Stanislaus, who came out from Dublin to
act (as Stanislaus put it much later) as his "brother's keeper." His
finantial position was much improved by the patronage of Mrs. Harold
McCormick (Edith Rockefeller), who provided him with a monthly stipend
from March 1917 until September 1919, when they quarreled, apparently
because Joyce refused to submit to psychoanalysis by Carl Jung, who had
been heavily endowed by her. The New York lawyer and art patron John
Quinn, steered in Joyce's direction by Ezra Pound, also helped Joyce
financially in 1917. A more permanent benefactor was the English
feminist and editor Harriet Shaw Weaver, who not only subsidized Joyce
generously from 1917 to the end of his life but occupied herself
indefatigably with arrangements for publishing his work.
Joyce's almost lifelong exile from his native Ireland had something
paradoxical about it. No writer has ever been more soaked in Dublin,
its atmosphere, its history, its topography; in spite of doing most of
his writing from Trieste, Zurich, and Paris, he wrote only and always
about Dublin. He devised ways of expanding his accounts of Dublin,
however, so that they became microcosmos, small-scale models, of all
human life, of all history, and of all geography. Indeed that was his
life's work: to write about Dublin in such a way that he was writing
about all of human experience.
Joyce began his career by writing a series of stories etching with
extraordinary clarity aspects of Dublin life. But these
stories—published as Dubliners
in 1914—are more than sharp realistic sketches. In each, the detail is
so chosen and organized that carefully interacting symbolic meanings
are set up, and as a result, Dubliners
is a book about human fate as well as a series of sketches of Dublin.
Furthermore, the stories are presented in a particular order so that
new meanings arise from the relation between them.
Tha last story in Dubliners,The Dead,
was not part of the original draft of the book but was added later, at
a time when Joyce was preoccupied with the nature of artistic
objectivity. A series of jolting events frees the protagonist,
Gabriel, from his possessiveness and egotism; the view he attains at
the end is the mood of supreme neutrality that Joyce saw as the
beginning of artistic awareness. It is the view of art developed by
Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man. Dubliners represents
Joyce's first phase: he had come directly to terms with the meaning of
his own developement as a man dedicated to writing. He did this by
weaving his autobiography into a novel so finely chiseled and carefully
organized, so stripped of everything superfluous, that each word
contributes to the presentation of the theme: the parallel movement
toward art and toward exile. A part of Joyce's first draft has been
posthumously published under the original title of Stephen Hero (1944); a comparison
between it and the final version that Joyce gave to the world, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
(1916), will show how carefully Joyce reworked and compressed his
material for maximum effect. The Portrait
is not literally true as autobiography, although it has many
autobiographical elements, but it is representatively true not only of
Joyce but of the relation between the artist and society in the early
twentieth century.
In the Portrait Stephen
worked
out a theory of art that considers that art moves from the lyrical
form—which is the simplest, the personal expression of an instant of
emotion—through the narrative form—no longer purely personal—to the
dramatic—the highest and most nearly perfect form, where "the artist,
like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above
his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring
his fingernails." This view of art, which invokes the objectivity, even
the exile, of the artist (even though the artist uses only the
materials provided for him or her by his or her own life), is related
to that held by the poets of the 1890s. More widely, it is related to
the rejection by the artist of the ordinary world of middle-class
values and activities that we see equally, tough in different ways, in
Matthew Arnold's war against the Philistines and in the concept (very
un-Arnoldian) of the artist as bohemian. Joyce's career belongs to that
long chapter in the history of the arts in Western civilization that
begins with the artist's declaring independence and ends with his or
her feeling inevitable alienation. But if Joyce was alienated, as in
certain ways he clearly was, he made his alienation serve his art: the
kinds of writing represented by Ulysses
and Finnegans Wake
represent the most consummate craftsmanship put at the service of a
humanely comic vision of all life. Some of Joyce's innovations in
organization and style have been imitated by other writers, but these
books are, and will probably remain, unique in our literature.
From the beginning, Joyce had trouble with the Philistines. Publication
of Dubliners
was held up for many years while he fougth with both English and Irish
publishers about certain words and phrases that they wished to
eliminate. (It was one of the former who finally published the book).
His masterpiece Ulysses was
banned in both Britain and America on its first appearance in 1922; its
earlier serialization in an American magazine, The Little Review
(March 1918-December 1920) had had to stop abruptly when the U.S. Post
Office brought a charge of obscenity against it. Fortunately, Judge
Woolsey's history-making decision in favour of Ulysses
in a U.S. district court on December 6, 1933, resulted in the lifting
of the ban and the free circulation of the work first in America and
soon afterward in Britain.
Ulysses
Ulysses is an account
of one day in the lives of citizens of Dublin in the year 1904; it is
thus the description of a limited number of events involving a limited
number of people in a limited environment. Yet Joyce's ambition—which
took him seven years to realize—is to make his action into a microcosm
of all human experience. The events are not, therefore, told on a
single level; the story is presented in such a manner that depth and
implication are given to them and they become symbolic of the activity
of the individual in the World. The most obvious of the devices that
Joyce employs to make clear the microcosmic aspect of his story is the
parallel with Homer's Odyssey:
every episode in Ulysses
corresponds in some way to an episode in the Odyssey.
Joyce regarded Homer's Ulysses as the most "complete" man in
literature, a man who is shown in all his aspects—both coward and hero,
cautious and reckless, weak and strong, husband and philanderer, father
and son, dignified and ridiculous; so he makes his hero, Leopold Bloom,
an Irish Jew, into a modern Ulysses and by so doing helps make him
Everyman and make Dublin the world.
The book opens at eight o'clock on the morning of June 16, 1904.
Stephen Dedalus (the same character we saw in the Portrait,
but this is two years after our last glimpse of him there) had been
summoned back to Dublin by his mother's fatal illness and now lives in
an old military tower on the shore with Buck Mulligan, a rollicking
medical student, and and Englishman called Haines. In the first three
episodes of Ulysses,
which
concentrate on Stephen, he is built up as an aloof, uncompromising
artist, rejecting all advances by representatives of the normal world,
the incomplete man, to be contrasted later with the complete Leopold
Bloom, who is much more "normal" and conciliatory. After tracing
Stephen through his early-morning activitites and learning the main
currents of his mind, we go, in the fourth episode, to the home of
Bloom. We follow closely his every activity: attending a funeral,
transacting his business, eating his lunch, walking thorugh the Dublin
streets, worrying about his wife's infidelity with Blazes Boylan—and at
each point the contents of his mind, including retrospect and
anticipation, are presented to the reader, until all his past history
is revealed. Finally, Bloom and Stephen, who have been just missing
each other all day, get together. By this time it is late, and Stephen,
who has been drinking with some medical students, is the worse for
liquor. Bloom, moved by a paternal feeling toward Stephen (his own son
had died in infancy and in a symbolic way Stephen takes his place),
follows him during subsequent adventures in the role of protector. The
climax of the book comes when Stephen, far gone in drink, and Bloom,
worn out with fatigue, succumb to a series of hallucinations where
their subconscious and unconscious come to the surface in dramatic form
and their whole personalities are revealed with a completeness and a
frankness unique in literature. Then Bloom takes the unresponsive
Stephen home and gives him a meal. After Stephen's departure Bloom
retires to bed—it is now two in the morning on June 17—while his wife,
Molly, representing the principles of sex and reproduction on which all
human life is based, closes the book with a long monologue in which her
experiences as woman are remembered.
On the level of realistic description, Ulysses
pulses with life and can be enjoyed for its evocation of early
twentieth-century Dublin. On the level of psychological exploration, it
gives a profound and moving presentation of the personality and
consciousness of Leopold Bloom and (to a lessere extent) Stephen
Dedalus. On the level of style, it exhibits the most fascinating
linguistic virtuosity. On a deeper symbolic level, the novel explores
the paradoxes of human loneliness and sociability (for Bloom is both
Jew and Dubliner, both exile and citizen, just as all of us are in a
sense bothe exiles and citizens), and it explores the problems posed by
the relations between parent and child, between the generations, and
between the sexes. At the same time, through its use of themes from
Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare and from literature, philosophy, and
history, the book weaves a subtle pattern of allusion and suggestion
that illuminates many aspects of human experience. The more one reads Ulysses,
the more one finds in it, but at the same tiem one does not need to
probe into the symbolic meaning to relish both its literary artistry
and its human feeling. At the forefront stands Leopold Bloom, from one
point of view, a frustrated and confused outsider in the society in
which he moves, from another, a champion of kindness and justice whose
humane curiosity about his fellows redeems him from mere vulgarity and
gives the book its positive human foundation.
Readers who come to Ulysses
with expectations about the way the story is to be presented derived
from their reading of Victorian novels or even of such
twentieth-century novelists as Conrad and Lawrence will find much that
is at first puzzling. Joyce presents the consciousness of his
characters directly, without any explanatory comment that tells the
reader whose consciousness is being rendered (this is the stream of
consciousness method). He may move, in the same paragraph and without
any sign that he is making such a transition, from a description of a
character's action—e.g. Stephen walking along the shore or Bloom
entering a restaurant—to an evocation of the character's mental
response to that action. That response is always multiple: it derives
partly from the character's immediate situation and partly fro the
whole complex of attitudes that his past history has created in him. To
suggest this multiplicity, Joyce may vary his style, from the flippant
to the serious or from a realistic description to a suggestive set of
images that indicate what might be called the general tone of the
character's consciousness. Past and present mingle in the texture of
the prose because they mingle in the texture of consciousness, and this
mingling can be indicated by puns, by sudden breaks into a new kind of
style or a new kind of subject matter, or by some other device for
keeping the reader constantly in sight of the shifting, kaleidoscopic
nature of human awareness. With a little experience, the reader learns
to follow the implications of Joyce's shifts in manner and content—even
to follow that at first sight bewildering passage in the "Proteus"
episode in which Stephen does not go to visit his uncle and aunt but,
passing the road that leads to their house, imagines the kind of
conversation that would take place in his home if he had gone to visit his uncle
and had then returned home and reported that he had done so. Ulysses
must not be approached as though it were a novel written in a
traditional manner; all preconceptions must be set aside and we must
follow wherever the author leads us and let the language tell us what
it has to say without our troubling whether language is being used
"properly" or not.
Finnegans
Wake
Joyce's last work, Finnegans Wake,
was published in 1939; it took more than fourteen years to write, and
Joyce considered it his masterpiece. In Ulysses he had made the symbolic
aspect of the novel at least as important as the realistic aspect, but
in Finnegas Wake
he gave up realism altogether. This vast story of a symbolic Irishman's
cosmic dream develops by enormous reverberating puns a continuous
expansion of meaning, the elements in the puns deriving from every
conceivable source in history, literature, mythology, and Joyce's
personal experience. The whole book being (on one level at least) a
dream, Joyce invents his own dream language in which words are
combined, distorted, created by fitting together bits of other words,
used with several different meanings at once, often drawn from several
different languages at once, and fused in all sorts of ways to achieve
whole clusters of meaning simultaneously. In fact, so many echoing
suggestions can be found in every word or phrase that a full annotation
of even a few pages would require a large book. It has taken the
cooperative work of a number of devoted readers to make clear the
complex interactions of the multiple puns and pun clusters, through
which the ideas are projected, and every rereading reveals new
meanings. It is true that many readers find the efforts of explication
demanded by Finnegans Wake
too arduous; some, indeed, feel that the law of diminishing returns has
now begun to operate, and that the effort of both author and reader is
disproportionate. Nevertheless, the book has great beauty and
fascination even for the casual reader. Students are advised to read
aloud—or to listen to the record of Joyce reading aloud—the extract
printed here to appreciate the degree to which the rhythms of the prose
assist in conveying the meaning.
To an even greater extent than Ulysses,
Finnegans Wake
aims at embracing all of human history. The title is from an
Irish-American ballad about Tom Finnegan, a hod carrier who falls
off a ladder when drunk and is apparently killed, but who revives when
during the wake (the watch by the dead body) someone spills whiskey on
him. The theme of death and resurrection, of cycles of change coming
round in the course of history, is central to Finnegans Wake,
which derives one of its main principles of organization from the
cyclical theory of history put forward in 1725 by the Italian
philosopher Giambattista Vico. Vico held that history passes through
four phases: the divine or theocratic, when people are governed by
their awe of the supernatural; the aristocratic (the "heroic age"
reflected in Homer and in Beowulf);
the democratic and individualistic; and the final stage of chaos, a
fall in into confusion startles humanity back into supernatural
reverence and starts the process once again. Joyce, like Yeats, saw his
own generation as the final stage awaiting the shock that will bring
humans back to the first.
A mere account of the narrative line of Finnegans Wake
cannot, of course, give any idea of the content of the work. If one
explains that it opens with Finnegan's fall, then introduces his
successor Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, who is Everyman, and whose dream
constitutes the neovel, that he is presented as having guilt feelings
about an indecency he committed (or may have committed) at Phoenix
Park, Dublin; that his wife, Anna Livia Plurabelle or ALP (who is also
Eve, Iseult, Ireland, the river Liffey), changes her role just as he
does; that he has two sons, Shem and Shaun (or Jerry and Kevin), who
represent introvert and extrovert, artist and practical man, creator
and popularizer, and symbolize this basic dichotomy in human nature by
all kinds of metarmorphoses; and if one adds that, in the four books
into which Finnegans Wake is
divided (after Vico's pattern), actions comic or grotesque or sad or
tender or desperate or passionate or terribly ordinary (and very often
several of these things at the same time) take place with all the
shifting meanings of a dream, so that characters change into others or
into inanimate objects and the setting keeps shifting—if we explain all
this, we still have said very little about what makes Finnegans Wake
what it is. The dreamer, whose initials HCE indicate his universality
("Here Comes Everybody"), is at the same time a particular person, who
keeps a pub at Chapelizod, a Dublin suburb on the river Liffey near
Phoenix Park. His mysterious misdemeanor in Phoenix Park is in a sense
Original Sin: Earwicker is Adam as well as a primeval giant, the Hill
of Howth, the Great Parent ("Haveth Childers Everywhere" is another
expansion of HCE), and Man in History. Other characters who flit and
change through the book, such as the Twelve Customers (who are also
twelve jurymen and public opinion) and the Four Old Men (who are also
judges, the authors of the four Gospels, and the four elements), help
weave the texture of multiple significance so characteristic of the
work. But always it is the punning language, extending significance
downward—rather than the plot, developing it lengthwise—that bears the
main load of meaning.
A
Nocturnal upon Saint Lucy's Day, Being
the Shortest Day
John
Donne
'Tis the year's midnight and it is the
day's, Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself
unmasks; The sun is spent, and
now his flasks Send forth light
squibs, no constant rays.
The world's whole sap is sunk; The general balm th'hydroptic earth hath
drunk, Whither, as to the bed's feet, life is
shrunk, Dead and interred; yet all these seem to
laugh, Compared with me, who am their epitaph. Study me, then, you who shall lovers be At the next world, that is, at the next
spring; For I am every dead
thing In whom love wrought
new alchemy.
For his art did express A quintessence even from nothingness, From dull privations and lean emptiness. He ruined me, and I am re-begot Of absence, darkness, death: things which
are not. All others from all things draw all that's
good, Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they
being have; I, by love's limbeck,
am the grave Of all that's nothing.
Oft a flood
Have we two wept, and so Drowned the whole world, us two; oft did
we grow To be two chaoses when we did show Care to aught else; and often absences Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses. But I am by her death (which word wrongs
her) Of the first nothing the elixir grown; Were I a man, that I
were one I needs must know; I
should prefer,
If I were any beast, Some ends, some means; yea plants, yea
stones detest And love. All, all some properties invest. If I an ordinary nothing were, As shadow, a light and body must be here. But I am none; nor will my sun renew. You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun At this time to the
Goat is run To fetch new lust and
give it you
Enjoy your summer all. Since she enjoys her long night's festival, Let me prepare towards her, and let me call This hour her vigil and her eve, since this Both the year's and the day's deep
midnight is.
II
Darkness
Lord
Byron
I had a dream, which was not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the
stars Did wander darkling in the eternal space, Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth Swung blind and blackening in the moonless
air; Morn came and went—and came, and brought
no day, And men forgot their passions in the dread Of this their desolation; and all hearts Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for
light: And they did live by watchfires—and the thrones, The palaces of crowned kings—the huts, The habitations of all things which dwell, Were burnt for beacons; cities were
consum'd, And men were gather'd round their blazing
homes To look once more into each other's face; Happy were those who dwelt within the eye Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch: A fearful hope was all the world contain'd; Forests were set on fire—but hour by hour They fell and faded—and the crackling
trunks Extinguish'd with a crash—and all was
black. The brows of men by the despairing light Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits The flashes fell upon them; some lay down And hid their eyes and wept; and some did
rest Their chins upon their clenched hands, and
smil'd; And others hurried to and fro, and fed Their funeral piles with fuel, and look'd
up With mad disquietude on the dull sky, The pall of a past world; and then again With curses cast them down upon the dust, And gnash'd their teeth and howl'd: the
wild birds shriek'd And, terrified, did flutter on the ground, And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawl'd And twin'd themselves among the multitude, Hissing, but stingless—they were slain for
food. And War, which for a moment was no more, Did glut himself again: a meal was bought With blood, and each sate sullenly apart Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left; All earth was but one thought—and that was
death Immediate and inglorious; and the pang Of famine fed upon all entrails—men Died, and their bones were tombless as
their flesh; The meagre by the meagre were devour'd, Even dogs assail'd their masters, all save
one, And he was faithful to a corse, and kept The birds and beasts and famish'd men at
bay, Till hunger clung them, or the dropping
dead Lur'd their lank jaws; himself sought out
no food, But with a piteous and perpetual moan, And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand Which answer'd not with a caress—he died. The crowd was famish'd by degrees; but two Of an enormous city did survive, And they were enemies: they met beside The dying embers of an altar-place Where had been heap'd a mass of holy things For an unholy usage; they rak'd up, And shivering scrap'd with their cold
skeleton hands The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath Blew for a little life, and made a flame Which was a mockery; then they lifted up Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld Each other's aspects—saw, and shriek'd,
and died— Even of their mutual hideousness they died, Unknowing who he was upon whose brow Famine had written Fiend. The world was
void, The populous and the powerful was a lump, Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless,
lifeless— A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay. The rivers, lakes and ocean all stood
still, And nothing stirr'd within their silent
depths; Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea, And their masts fell down piecemeal: as
they dropp'd They slept on the abyss without a surge— The waves were dead; the tides were in
their grave, The moon, their mistress, had expir'd
before; The winds were wither'd in the stagnant
air, And the clouds perish'd; Darkness had no
need Of aid from them—She was the Universe.
Nos pasa el director del Departamento un mensaje sobre "buenas
prácticas departamentales" recordándonos a los profesores algunas cosas
que en más de un caso tenemos olvidadas o descuidadas. Tanto que alguna
ni la conocía yo: por ejemplo, que las vacaciones de los funcionarios
son de veintidós días laborables al año—no veintitrés ni treinta. Claro
que con los fines de semana de enmedio, los periodos no lectivos y el
mes de agosto que según reconoce el director es "inhábil a la mayoría
de los efectos" se nos quedan algo más generosas las vacaciones.
También nos dice que debemos avisar en caso de enfermedad o
inasistencia a clase por motivos urgentes, etc. etc.— guardar las horas
de tutorías y ponerlas en horario conveniente a los estudiantes....
Hace poco tuve un caso curioso, de dos días que falté a clase por una
cojera súbita que me dio. Dí aviso al momento, claro, pero no cogí la
baja, que la tradición quiere que se coja (por cojera u otras razones)
al tercer día. Pues le faltó tiempo al catedrático coordinador del
grado para, sin ponerse en contacto conmigo para nada, escribirle al
Vicerrector para denunciarme por no ir a clase y pedirle que me
exigiese en qué días iba a recuperar las clases. Como digo, sin hablar
conmigo para nada antes, que allí se ven las maneras y las intenciones.
Sobre esto también debería haber buenas prácticas.
Otra cosa que dice el director en su mensaje de buenas
prácticas es como sigue:
Como
funcionarios públicos y trabajadores de la administración del Estado,
nuestra jornada laboral es de treinta y siete horas y media semanales
de trabajo efectivo de promedio en cómputo anual (B.O..E. 14 julio
2012) y como profesores del Departamento disponemos de un puesto de
trabajo, más o menos adecuado, en el que desarrollar nuestra labor. Las
peculiaridades de la labor del profesor universitario han de ser
tenidas en cuenta a la hora de valorar su cumplimiento,
(—pongamos, por ejemplo, los cientos, los miles,
de horas anuales que dedico a trabajar en casa, con material y
electricidad que pago yo, pecata minuta, díganle a un fontanero que lo
haga, o a una secretaria)
pero
no deben ser utilizadas como excusa para cometer excesos. Las treinta y
siete horas y media (o siete horas y media diarias de lunes a viernes)
deben estar dedicadas a la labor docente, investigadora y
administrativa. Ocasionalmente estas tareas se podrán realizar fuera de
nuestro puesto de trabajo, pero éste sigue siendo el lugar principal
para su realización. No se trata, pues, de estar en nuestro despacho
cuando tengamos horas de tutorías sino de estar en nuestro puesto de
trabajo siempre que el resto de nuestras tareas no nos lo impida. En
general, la ausencia de un profesor de su lugar de trabajo suele
aumentar la carga de trabajo de los que sí están en él. La mayoría de
nosotros tenemos circunstancias personales que pueden hacer difícil el
cumplimiento de nuestros horarios, pero en eso no nos diferenciamos de
los demás profesores ni de los demás funcionarios.
Quién no podría estar de acuerdo, claro, con una cosa tan
razonable. Aunque un ejemplo se me ocurre, si bien no diré nombres por
quitar hierro. En veinticinco años que llevo rondando por este
departamento, no diré que no he visto nunca un catedrático en horario
de tarde, porque al Dr. Vázquez sí lo he visto varias veces, incluso numerosas,
en la Facultad por la tarde. Pero los demás catedráticos, coordinadores
y demás— en veinticinco años, ni
un solo día
los he visto aparecer por su puesto de trabajo por la tarde. Y esas son
las prácticas que dan ejemplo de cómo se lleva una carrera
universitaria con éxito. Porque ¿quién no querría ser catedrático? Que
levante la mano. ¿Y hay que venir por la tarde para llegar a
catedrático? Parece que no.
Como para ir danto lecciones y, es más, elevando quejas. Tampoco digo
que venga yo mismo todas las tardes al trabajo cuando no tengo ni
clases ni tutorías, por cierto. Para nada. Que antes venía más, pero
las buenas prácticas no animan a ello. Sólo las teorías de las
prácticas. Y tampoco visto lo visto voy a llegar a catedrático antes
por venir mucho por el trabajo—ateniéndonos a la práctica de la
práctica, el trabajo ése hay que hacerlo en otros sitios, y por la
Facultad venir lo justo.
El valor de una idea depende (al menos en buena medida) de su
difusión. Un vídeo de Abaco Digital, de autopromoción para la difusión
de ideas, que habla por sí mismo:
Lo he visto en el YouTube de Ernesto Casasín.
Martes 11 de diciembre de 2012
The Deposition Scene
From
William Shakespeare's Richard II (IV.1)
(King Richard is being deposed by the
rebel Henry Bolinbroke, thereafter Henry IV)
BOLINGBROKE. Fetch hither Richard, that in common view
He may surrender; so we shall proceed
Without suspicion.
YORK. I will be his conduct. Exit
BOLINGBROKE. Lords, you that here are under our arrest,
Procure your sureties for your days of answer.
Little are we beholding to your love,
And little look'd for at your helping hands.
Re-enter YORK, with KING RICHARD, and OFFICERS bearing the regalia
KING RICHARD. Alack, why am I sent for to a king,
Before I have shook off the regal thoughts
Wherewith I reign'd? I hardly yet have learn'd
To insinuate, flatter, bow, and bend my knee.
Give sorrow leave awhile to tutor me
To this submission. Yet I well remember
The favours of these men. Were they not mine?
Did they not sometime cry 'All hail!' to me?
So Judas did to Christ; but he, in twelve,
Found truth in all but one; I, in twelve thousand,
none.
God save the King! Will no man say amen?
Am I both priest and clerk? Well then, amen.
God save the King! although I be not he;
And yet, amen, if heaven do think him me.
To do what service am I sent for hither?
YORK. To do that office of thine own good will
Which tired majesty did make thee offer-
The resignation of thy state and crown
To Henry Bolingbroke.
KING RICHARD. Give me the crown. Here, cousin, seize the crown.
Here, cousin,
On this side my hand, and on that side thine.
Now is this golden crown like a deep well
That owes two buckets, filling one another;
The emptier ever dancing in the air,
The other down, unseen, and full of water.
That bucket down and full of tears am I,
Drinking my griefs, whilst you mount up on high.
BOLINGBROKE. I thought you had been willing to resign.
KING RICHARD. My crown I am; but still my griefs are mine.
You may my glories and my state depose,
But not my griefs; still am I king of those.
BOLINGBROKE. Part of your cares you give me with your crown.
KING RICHARD. Your cares set up do not pluck my cares down.
My care is loss of care, by old care done;
Your care is gain of care, by new care won.
The cares I give I have, though given away;
They tend the crown, yet still with me they stay.
BOLINGBROKE. Are you contented to resign the crown?
KING RICHARD. Ay, no; no, ay; for I must nothing be;
Therefore no no, for I resign to thee.
Now mark me how I will undo myself:
I give this heavy weight from off my head,
And this unwieldy sceptre from my hand,
The pride of kingly sway from out my heart;
With mine own tears I wash away my balm,
With mine own hands I give away my crown,
With mine own tongue deny my sacred state,
With mine own breath release all duteous oaths;
All pomp and majesty I do forswear;
My manors, rents, revenues, I forgo;
My acts, decrees, and statutes, I deny.
God pardon all oaths that are broke to me!
God keep all vows unbroke are made to thee!
Make me, that nothing have, with nothing griev'd,
And thou with all pleas'd, that hast an achiev'd.
Long mayst thou live in Richard's seat to sit,
And soon lie Richard in an earthly pit.
God save King Henry, unking'd Richard says,
And send him many years of sunshine days!
What more remains?
NORTHUMBERLAND. No more; but that you read
These accusations, and these grievous crimes
Committed by your person and your followers
Against the state and profit of this land;
That, by confessing them, the souls of men
May deem that you are worthily depos'd.
KING RICHARD. Must I do so? And must I ravel out
My weav'd-up follies? Gentle Northumberland,
If thy offences were upon record,
Would it not shame thee in so fair a troop
To read a lecture of them? If thou wouldst,
There shouldst thou find one heinous article,
Containing the deposing of a king
And cracking the strong warrant of an oath,
Mark'd with a blot, damn'd in the book of heaven.
Nay, all of you that stand and look upon me
Whilst that my wretchedness doth bait myself,
Though some of you, with Pilate, wash your hands,
Showing an outward pity-yet you Pilates
Have here deliver'd me to my sour cross,
And water cannot wash away your sin.
NORTHUMBERLAND. My lord, dispatch; read o'er these
articles.
KING RICHARD. Mine eyes are full of tears; I cannot see.
And yet salt water blinds them not so much
But they can see a sort of traitors here.
Nay, if I turn mine eyes upon myself,
I find myself a traitor with the rest;
For I have given here my soul's consent
T'undeck the pompous body of a king;
Made glory base, and sovereignty a slave,
Proud majesty a subject, state a peasant.
NORTHUMBERLAND. My lord-
KING RICHARD. No lord of thine, thou haught insulting man,
Nor no man's lord; I have no name, no tide-
No, not that name was given me at the font-
But 'tis usurp'd. Alack the heavy day,
That I have worn so many winters out,
And know not now what name to call myself!
O that I were a mockery king of snow,
Standing before the sun of Bolingbroke
To melt myself away in water drops!
Good king, great king, and yet not greatly good,
An if my word be sterling yet in England,
Let it command a mirror hither straight,
That it may show me what a face I have
Since it is bankrupt of his majesty.
BOLINGBROKE. Go some of you and fetch a looking-glass.
Exit an attendant
NORTHUMBERLAND. Read o'er this paper while the glass doth come.
KING RICHARD. Fiend, thou torments me ere I come to hell.
BOLINGBROKE. Urge it no more, my Lord Northumberland.
NORTHUMBERLAND. The Commons will not, then, be satisfied.
KING RICHARD. They shall be satisfied. I'll read enough,
When I do see the very book indeed
Where all my sins are writ, and that's myself.
Re-enter attendant with glass
Give me that glass, and therein will I read.
No deeper wrinkles yet? Hath sorrow struck
So many blows upon this face of mine
And made no deeper wounds? O flatt'ring glass,
Like to my followers in prosperity,
Thou dost beguile me! Was this face the face
That every day under his household roof
Did keep ten thousand men? Was this the face
That like the sun did make beholders wink?
Is this the face which fac'd so many follies
That was at last out-fac'd by Bolingbroke?
A brittle glory shineth in this face;
As brittle as the glory is the face;
[Dashes the glass against the
ground]
For there it is, crack'd in a hundred shivers.
Mark, silent king, the moral of this sport-
How soon my sorrow hath destroy'd my face.
BOLINGBROKE. The shadow of your sorrow hath destroy'd
The shadow of your face.
KING RICHARD. Say that again.
The shadow of my sorrow? Ha! let's see.
'Tis very true: my grief lies all within;
And these external manner of laments
Are merely shadows to the unseen grief
That swells with silence in the tortur'd soul.
There lies the substance; and I thank thee, king,
For thy great bounty, that not only giv'st
Me cause to wail, but teachest me the way
How to lament the cause. I'll beg one boon,
And then be gone and trouble you no more.
Shall I obtain it?
BOLINGBROKE. Name it, fair cousin.
KING RICHARD. Fair cousin! I am greater than a king;
For when I was a king, my flatterers
Were then but subjects; being now a subject,
I have a king here to my flatterer.
Being so great, I have no need to beg.
BOLINGBROKE. Yet ask.
KING RICHARD. And shall I have?
BOLINGBROKE. You shall.
KING RICHARD. Then give me leave to go.
BOLINGBROKE. Whither?
KING RICHARD. Whither you will, so I were from your sights.
BOLINGBROKE. Go, some of you convey him to the Tower.
KING RICHARD. O, good! Convey! Conveyers are you all,
That rise thus nimbly by a true king's fall.
Exeunt KING RICHARD, some Lords and a Guard
BOLINGBROKE. On Wednesday next we solemnly set down
Our coronation. Lords, prepare yourselves.
Exeunt all but the ABBOT OF WESTMINSTER, the
BISHOP OF CARLISLE, and AUMERLE
ABBOT. A woeful pageant have we here beheld.
CARLISLE. The woe's to come; the children yet unborn
Shall feel this day as sharp to them as thorn.
From the Norton Anthology of English
Literature (7th ed.):
Thomas
Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, of New England stock. He
entered Harvard in 1906 and was influenced there by the
anti-Romanticism of Irving Babbitt and the philosophical and critical
interests of George Santayana, as well as by the enthusiasm that
prevailed in certain Harvard circles for Elizabethan and Jacobean
literature, the Italian Renaissance, and Indian mystical philosophy.
His philosophical studies included intensive work on the English
idealist philosopher F. H. Bradley, on whom he eventually wrote his
Harvard dissertation. (Bradley's emphasis on the private nature of
individual experience, "a circle enclosed on the outside," had
considerable influence on the private imagery of Eliot's poetry and on
the view of the relation between the individual and other individuals
reflected in much of his poetry). Later, Eliot studied literature and
philosophy in France and Germany, before going to England shortly after
the outbreak of World War I in 1914. He studied Greek philosophy at
Oxford, taught school in London, and then obtained a position with
Lloyd's Bank. In 1915 he married an English writer, Vivienne
Haigh-Wood, but the marriage was not a success. She was highly neurotic
and in increasing bad health. The strain told on Eliot, too. By
November 1921 distress and worry had brought him to the verge of a
nervous breakdown, and on medical advice, he went to recuperate in a
Swiss sanatorium. Two months later he returned, pausing in Paris long
enough to give Ezra Pound the manuscript of The Waste Land.
Eliot left his wife in 1933; and she was eventually committed to a
mental home, where she died in 1947. Ten years later he married again
and, for the eight years that remained to him, at last knew happiness. Eliot started writing literary and philosophical reviews soon
after settling in London. He wrote for the Atheaneum and the Times Literary Supplement, among
other periodicals, and was assistant editor of the Egoist from 1917 to 1919. In 1922
he founded the influential quarterly Criterion,
which he edited until it cesased publication in 1939. His poetry first
appeared in 1915, when The Love Song
of J. Alfred Prufrock was printed in Poetry magazine (Chicago) and a
few other short poems were published in the short-lived periodical Blast. His first published
collection of poems was Prufrock and
Other Observations, 1917; two other small collections followed
in 1919 and 1920; in 1922 The Waste
Land appeared, first in the Criterion
in October, then in the Dial
(in America) in November, and finally in book form. Poems 1909-25 (1925) collected
these earlier poems. Meanwhile he was also publishing collections of
his critical essays, notably The
Sacred Wood in 1920 and Homage
to John Dryden in 1924. For
Lancelot Andrewes followed in 1928 and in 1932 lie included most
of these
earlier essays with some new ones in Selected
Essays.
In 1925 he joined the London publishing firm of Faber and Gwyer,
becoming a director when the firm became Faber and Faber. He became a
British subject and joined the Church of England in 1927.
"Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this
variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, mut produce
various and complex results. The poet must become more and more
comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to
dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning." This remark, from
Eliot's essay The Metaphysical Poets
(1921), gives one clue to his poetic method from Prufrock through The Waste Land.
In the tradition of the of the Georgian poets who were active when he
settled in London, he saw an exhausted poetic mode being employed, with
no verbal excitement or original craftsmanship. He sought to make
poetry more subtle, more suggestive, and at the same time more precise.
He had learned from the imagists the necessity of clear and precise
images, and he learned, too, from the philosopher-poet T. E. Hulme and
from his early supporter and adviser Ezra Pound to fear romantic
softness and to regard the poetic medium rather than the poet's
personality as the important factor. At the same time, the "hard, dry"
images advocated by Hulme were not enough for him; he wanted wit,
allusiveness, irony. He saw in the Metaphysical poets how wit and
passion could be combined, and he saw in the French symbolists how an
image could be both absolutely precise in what it referred to
physically and at the same time endlessly suggestive in the meanings it
set up because of its relationship to other images. The combination of
precision, symbolic suggestion, and ironic mockery in the poetry of the
late-nineteenth-century poet Jules Laforgue attracted and influenced
him, and he was influenced too by other nineetenth-century French
poets: by Théophile Gautier's artful carving of impersonal shapes of
meaning, by Charles Baudelaire's strangely evocative explorations of
the symbolic suggestions of objects and images; by the symbolist poets
Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stéphane Mallarmé. He also found in
the Jacobean dramatists a flexible blank verse with overtones of
colloquial movement: Middleton, Tourneur, Webster, and others, taught
him as much—in the way of verse movement, imagery, the counterpointing
of the accent of conversation and the note of terror—as either the
Metaphysicals or the French symbolists.
Hulme's protests against the Romantic concept of poetry fitted in well
enough with what Eliot had learned from Irving Babbitt at Harvard, yet
for all his severity with such poets as Shelley, for all his conscious
cultivation of a classical viewpoint and his insistence on order and
discipline rather than on mere self-expression in art, one side of
Eliot's poetic genius is, in one sense of the word, Romantic. The
symbolist influence on his imagery, his interest in the evocative and
the suggestive, such lines as "And fiddled whisper music on those
strings / And bats with baby faces in the violet light / Whistled, and
beat their wings," and such recurring images as the hyacinth girl and
the rose garden, all show what could be called a Romantic element in
his poetry. But it is combined with a dry ironic allusivness, a play of
wit, and a colloquial element, which are not normally found in poets of
the Romantic tradition.
Eliot's real novelty—and the cause of such bewilderment when his poems
first appeared—was his deliberate elimination of all merely connective
and transitional passages, his building up of the total pattern of
meaning through the immediate juxtaposition of images without overt
explanation of what they are doing, together with his use of oblique
references to other works of literature (some of them quite obscure to
most readers of his time). Prufrock
presents a symbolic landscape where the meaning emerges from the mutual
interaction of the images, and that meaning is enlarged by echoes,
often ironic, of Hesiod and Dante and Shakespeare. The Waste Land
is a series of scenes and images with no author's voice intervening to
tell us where we are, but with the implications developed through
multiple contrasts and through analogies with older literary works
often referred to in a distorted quotation or a half-concealed
allusion. Furthermore, the works referred to are not necessarily works
that are central in the Western literary tradition: besides Dante and
Shakespeare there are pre-Socratic philosophers, minor (as well as
major) seventeenth-century poets and dramatists; works of anthropology,
history, and philosophy; and other echoes of the poet's private
reading. In a culture where there is no longer any assurance on the
part of the poet that his or her public has a common cultural heritage,
a common knowledge of works of the past, Eliot felt it necessary to
build up his own body of references. It is this that marks the
difference between Eliot's use of earlier literature and , say,
Milton's. Both poets are difficult to the modern reader, who needs
editorial assistance in recognizing and understanding many of the
allusions—but Milton was drawing on a body of knowledge common to
educated people in his day. Nevertheless, this aspect of Eliot can be
exaggerated: the fact remains that the nature of his imagery together
with the movement of his verse generally succeed in setting the tone he
requires, in establishing the area of meaning to be developed, so that
even a reader ignorant of most of the literary allusions can often get
the feel of the poem and achieve some understanding of what it says.
Eliot's early poetry, until at least the middle 1920s, is mostly
concerned in one way or another with the Waste Land, with aspects of
the decay of culture in the modern Western world. After his formal
acceptance of Anglican Christianity we find a penitential note in much
of his verse, a note of quiet searching for spiritual peace, with
considerable allusion to biblical, liturgical, and mystical religious
literature and to Dante. Ash
Wednesday
(1930), a poem in six parts, much less fiercely concentrated in style
than the earlier poetry, explores with gentle insistence a mood both
penitential and questioning. The so-called Ariel poems (the title has
nothing to do with their form or content) present or explore aspects of
religious doubt or discovery or revelation, sometimes, as in Marina, using a purely secular
imagery and sometimes, as in Journey
of the Magi, drawing on biblical incident. In Four Quartets (of which the first, Burnt Norton, appeared in the Collected Poems
of 1935, though all four were not completed until 1943, when they were
published together) Eliot further explored essentially religious moods,
dealing with the relation between time and eternity and the cultivation
of that selfless passivithy that can yield the moment of timeless
revelation in the midst of time. The mocking irony, the savage humor,
the deliberately startling juxtapostion of the sordid and the romantic
give way in these later poems to a quieter poetifc idiom, often still
completely allusive but never deliberately shocking.
Eliot's criticism was the criticism of a practicing poet who worked out
in relation to his reading of older literature what he needed to hold
and to admire. He lent the growing weight of his authority to that
shift in literary taste that replaced Milton by Donne as the great
seventeenth-century English poet and replaced tennyson in the
nineteenthy century by Hopkins. His often-quoted description of the
late seventeenth-century "dissociation of sensibility"—keeping with and
passion in separate compartments—which he saw as determining the course
of English poetry throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
is both a contribution to the rewriting of English literary history and
an explanation of what he was aiming at in his own poetry: the
reestablishment of that unified
sensibility he found in Donne and other early seventeenth-century poets
and dramatists. His view of tradition, his dislike of the poetic
exploitation of the author's own personality, his advocacy of what he
called "orthodoxy," made him suspicious of what he considered eccentric
geniuses such as Blake and D. H. Lawrence. On the other side, his
dislike of the grandiloquent and his insistence on complexity and on
the mingling of the formal with the conversational made him distrustful
of the influence of Milton on English poets. He considered himself
"classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in
religion" (For Lancelot Andrewes,
1928), in favor of order against chaos, tradition against eccentricity,
authority against rampant individualism; yet his own poetry is in many
respects untraditional and certainly highly individual in tone. His
conservative and even authoritarian habit of mind alienated some who
admire—and some whose own poetry has been much influenced by—his poetry.
Eliot's plays have all been, directly or indirectly, on religious
themes. Murder in the Cathedral
(1935) deals with the murder of Archbishop Thomas à Becket in an
appropriately ritual manner, with much use of a chorus and wit hthe
central speech in the form of a sermon by the archbishop in his
cathedral shortly before his murder. The
Family Reunion
(1939) deals with the problem of guilt and redemption in a modern
upper-class English family; it makes a deliberate attempt to combine
choric devices from Greek tragedy with a poetic idiom subdued to the
accents of drawing-room conversation. In his three later plays, all
written in the 1950s,. The Cocktail
Party, The Confidential Clerk, and The Elder Statesman,
he achieved popular success by casting a serious religious theme in the
form of a sophisticated modern social comedy, using a verse that is so
conversational in movement that when spoken in the theater it does not
sound like verse at all.
Critics differ on the degree to which Eliot succeeded in his last plays
in combining box-office success with dramatic effectiveness. But there
is no disagreement on his importance as one of the great renovators of
the English poetic dialect, whose influence on a whole generation of
poets, critics, and intellectuals generally was enormous. His range as
a poet is limited, and his interest in the great middle ground of human
experience (as distinct from the extremes of saint and sinner)
deficient, but when in 1948 he was awarded the rare honor of the Order
of Merit by King George VI and also gained the Nobel Prize for
Literature, his positive qualities weere widely and fully
recognized—his poetic cunning, his fine craftasmanship, his original
accent, his historical and representative importance, as the poet of the modern
symbolist-Metaphysical tradition.
The
Waste Land
This is a poem about spiritual dryness, about the kind of
existence in which no regenerating belief gives significance and value
to people's daily activities, sex brings no fruitfulness, and death
heralds no resurrection. Eliot himself gives one of the main clues to
the theme and structure of the poem in a general note, in which he
stated that "not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the
symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston's book on
the Grail Legend: From Ritual to
Romance" (1920). He further acknowledged a general indebtedness
to Sir James Frazer's Golden Bough
(13 volumes, 1890-1915), "especially the . . . volumes Adonis, Attis, Osiris," in
which Frazer deals with ancient vegetation myths and fertility
ceremonies. Weston's study, drawing on material from Frazer and other
anthropologists, traced the relationship of these myths and rituals to
Christianity and most especially to the legend of the Holy Grail. She
found an archetypal fertility myth in the story of the Fisher King
whose death, infirmity, or impotence (there are many forms of the myth)
brought drought and desolation to the land and failure of the power to
reproduce themselves among both humans and beasts. This symbolic Waste
Land can be revived only if a "questing knight" goes to the Chapel
Perilous, situated in the heart of it, and there asks certain ritual
questions about the Grail (or Cup) and the Lance—originally fertility
symbols, female and male, respectively. The proper asking of these
questions revives the king and restores fertility to the land. The
relation of this original Grail myth to fertility cults and rituals
found in many different civilizations, and represented by stories of a
dying god who is later resurrected (e.g., Tammuz, Adonis, Attis) shows
their common origin in a response to the cyclical movement of the
seasons, with vegetation dying in winter to be resurrected again in the
spring. Christianity, according to Weston, gave its own spiritual
meaning to the myth; it "did not hesitate to utilize the already
existing medium of instruction, but boldly identified the Deity of
Vegetation, regarded as Life Principle, with the God of the Christian
Faith." The Fisher King is related to the use of the fish symbol in
early Christianity. Weston states "with certainty that the Fish is a
Life symbol of immemorial antiquity, and that the title of Fisher has,
from the earliest ages, been associated with the Deities whio were held
to be specially connected with the origin and preservation of Life."
Eliot, follwing Weston, thus uses a great variety of mythological and
religious material, both Occidental and Oriental, to paint a symbolic
picture of the modern Waste Land and the need for regeneration. The
terror of that life—its loneliness, emptiness, and irrational
apprehensions—as well as its misuses of sexuality are vividly
presented, but paradoxically, the poem ends with a benediction. Another
significant general source for the poem is the composer Richard Wagner,
some of whose operas (Götterdämmerung
["Twilight of the Gods"], Parsifal,
Rheingold, and Tristand and
Isolde) are drawn on.
The poem as published owed a great deal to the severe pruning of Ezra
Pound; the original manuscript, with Pound's excisions and comments,
provides fascinating information about the genesis and development of
the poem. It was reproduced in facsimile in 1971, edited by Eliot's
widow, Valerie Eliot, who also supplied notes supplementing those that
Eliot himself added when the poem was first published in book form in
1922 and that are included with the present editors' footnotes to the
poem.
Notes
on Eliot's criticism based on René Wellek's A History of Modern Criticism and
other sources:
1. Introduction
2. Classicism and Tradition
3. Impersonality
4. Autonomy of the Poem
5. The Dissociation of Sensibility
6. Language and Technique
7. The Function of Criticism
7. Literature, Morality, Religion
1. Introduction
T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
has
been called "by far the most important critic of the
twentieth century in the English-speaking world." He is
above all a critic of poetry and drama; he is not much interested in
the novel. Eliot does not write any systematic treatise
explaining his theory of poetry; it is expounded in a number of books
and essays written through many years, interspersed with practical
criticism or other speculations on culture. Moreover, Eliot
denies having an aesthetic theory, he claims to suspect thinking
abstractly about poetics. He seems to have a genuine conviction
that ultimate questions are beyond the reach of the intellect, and that
any attempt to define poetry is bound to failure. Eliot distrusts
any criticism that aspires to a scientific knowledge of its subject:
The
true critic is a scrupulous avoider of formulae: he refrains from
statements which pretend to be literally true. He finds fact
nowhere and approximations always. His truths are the truths of
experience rather than of calculation.
Criticism, it seems, does not fully escape the condition of
literature. Eliot should be read therefore with this assumptions:
that he aims at most at an approximation to his subject, the writer or
the poetic experience. Being a poet, Eliot claims that in his
case theory is only "a by-product of my private poetic
workshop", that his theorizing is arbitrary, "epiphenomenal
to [his] taste." According to Wellek, this is not true: in
fact, "Eliot's taste is often in little relation to his theory"
(History 5:178). Eliot's theory is modelled on what he
thinks he should like, not on what he likes; in this sense it fulfils
its own requirements.
Eliot's implied theory itself is coherent enough,
although "some internal contradictions persist" (Wellek, History
5:176). It develops many of the critical concepts that will become
current among critics during the greater part of the century: poetry
must be impersonal. Poetic creation requires aunified
sensibility which permits to find an objective
correlative. But there is a historical dissociation of
sensibility which increases the difficulty of creation for modern
poets. The concepts of tradition and the status of
belief in poetry are also central in Eliot's criticism.
"All these are crucial critical matters for which Eliot found formulas,
if not always convincing solutions" (Wellek, History 5:
176).
2. Classicism and Tradition
In his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919), T. S. Eliot
opposes the critical views then current in England. Apart from
their disorganization, he complains that there is no place left for
tradition in them; only originality and difference are recognized as a
source of value. Therefore, the poets are considered in isolation
from one another, they are misleadingly presented as rootless
individuals.
Whereas
if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often
find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work
may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their
immortality most vigorously. ("Tradition" 14).
Belonging to a poetic tradition should not be confused with repetition,
with servile imitation of the works of the past. What Eliot
mistrusts is the show of personality, novelty and originality.
For Eliot, to be "original" is easy, and "the poem which is absolutely
original is absolutely bad." What is difficult is to belong
to the great poetic tradition. Eliot reverses the usual romantic
view of tradition as a dead weight which must be shaken off by the poet
in search of his voice. Tradition is not a given, but an
end: "It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain
it by great labour" ("Tradition 14). In Eliot we find, therefore,
an anti-Romantic doctrine of artistic creativity, a classicist
conception of poetics. In order to produce great art, the poet
must rely not on his subjectivity and the peculiarities of his
personality, but on a poetic tradition, on maturity and the discipline
of the spirit. "True originality is merely a development."
A poet needs a historical sense, a sense of the
pastness and also of the presentness of the past, of its present-day
relevance. The poet must be introduced to the dead poets'
society. He must become aware
that
the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the
whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence
and composes a simultaneous order. The historical sense, which is
a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless
and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional.
And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious
of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity. No poet, no
artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His
significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relations to
the dead poets and artists . . . . [W]hat happens when a
new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to
all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments
form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the
introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them.
("Tradition" 14-15)
The whole of European literature is therefore an organic whole, a
structural system which is changing constantly. But at the same
time it is always complete; there cannot be any missing parts before
they are created. The usual assumption that the past is
unchangeable is done away with: the past is constantly being reworked
by the preset. Eliot would presumably agree with Borges's dictum
that a a work creates its own predecessors, that a work orders a series
of disparate and previously unrelated works into a teleological series
that points to the newly created work. Tradition, therefore, must
not be conceived as a one-way street. It consists in an interplay
of present and past; the past guides the present and the present alters
the past, giving it a new significance.
"And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of
great difficulties and responsibilities" ("Tradition" 15). A
writer must acquire a knowledge of the past. For some this will
mean erudition, for others it will be a matter of natural acquisition.
In any case, it is necessary. It is naive to dismiss the writers
of the past and try to cut ourselves away from tradition. But do
we not know more than the writers of the past? "Precisely", Eliot
answers, "And they are that which we know" ("Tradition" 16). It
is the knowledge of the past which allows us to be moderns.
Eliot's influence in defining this tradition is also
great: he helps to effect a shift of taste away from romantic poetry,
and revaluates the metaphysical poets, Dryden, Jacobean and Caroline
drama. Dante is the greatest poet of history, "the most European,
the least provincial." Eliot was not particularly
interested in what are usually called "the classics", the writers of
Antiquity or those of the Neoclassical age. "In spite of this
ideological superstructure of classicism, Eliot's taste belongs to a
line which could be called medieval-baroque-symbolist" (Wellek,
History 5:206).
It is easy to imagine the upheaval that this
imaginative and evaluative historical perspective would cause in the
positivistic philology of the early twentieth century, when scholars
were busy with factual data instead of their interpretation, and
assumed quite naturally that the past comes before the present and
quietly stays there. However, Eliot is interested in this notion
of the dead poets' society "as a principle of aesthetic, not merely
historical criticism" ("Tradition" 15). That is, he intends
to use it to explore the nature of poetry, of poetic creation, to apply
it as a guiding principle to the writing of new poetry.
This conception of tradition is suggestive and has
been widely influential. However, it favours a view of poetry
being written in a void, or more precisely, only with respect to
previous poetry. Eliot considers literature as being ultimately
beyond time. The theory is only superficially historic; it
reduces literary history to literary tradition.
3. Impersonality
The poet, then, must renounce the shortcut to originality and surrender
his individuality to tradition, to something more valuable than
himself. Poetry is divorced form his personality: "The progress of the
artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of
personality" ("Tradition" 17). Only in this way can he find his
real self. Like Hulme and Pound, Eliot conceives of poetic
creation as a process of depersonalization. Far from being a
confession, an exhibition of the artist's intimacy, art enables the
artist to escape from the obsession of his emotions and from his
personality. This is the opposite of the expressive,
subjectivist theory of poetry which we found in many Romantics.
The poet must limit himself to be a catalyst of
emotions and feelings that are played through him, while he himself
remains impassible, without being consumed in the reaction. He
must be attentive to the quality of the poetic process, and not to his
own emotions, because "the poet has, not a 'personality' to express,
but a particular medium . . . in which impressions and experiences
combine in peculiar and unexpected ways" ("Tradition" 20). What
is crucial is the nature of this combination, of the chemical reaction
of poetry: the final compound, and not the bare elements. It is
the structure that counts, and not the origin or nature of the
materials. The emotions of the poet as such are uninteresting and
irrelevant; they will count only insomuch as they become poetry.
The poetic emotions are not the psychological emotions experienced by
the author before, during or after the process of composition.
They are the emotions inherent in the poem itself. The two need
not coincide. The emotions which play on the individuality of the
poet may be alien to his poetry, and vice versa. Eliot plays down
the quality of the emotion experienced by the poet. It may be
crude, simple or flat; the poet may still be an excellent poet provided
that the poem itself is not crude, simple, or flat. Eliot draws
here a difference between the emotions of the poet and those in the
poem:
The
business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the
ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings
which are not in actual emotions at all. And emotions which he
has never experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to
him.
("Tradition" 21)
Poetical feelings are complex and general, concrete an precise;
psychological feelings are irrational, vague and indistinct. Of
course, a poem deals with human situations, emotions, attitudes.
And inevitably a personality emerges behind the poem. But these
emotions, this personality, need not be those of the author.
Since poetry is an escape from personality, the best poems tell us
nothing about their author. At times he speaks as if the
personality of the poet did not intervene in the composition of the
poem. The poetic experience is described as a chemical reaction
in which the poet is only a "catalyst": he favours the reaction of the
poetic elements but is not emotionally involved, he remains apart from
the poem. But in his practical criticism Eliot has to recognize
that authors are not that impersonal. Other critics will speak in
this respect of the "implied author" or the "lyrical subject."
Eliot does not use the terms himself, but he shares the views: "Eliot's
criticism uses often a standard of personality which is not, of course,
the anecdotal, empirical personality but the personality pattern
emerging from the work itself" (Wellek, History 5:183). He
even uses this personality which unifies the different works of the
same author as a criterion of value. He accepts that the emotions
used in poetry may be the emotions actually experienced by the author,
as long as they have been transformed: "out of intense personal
experience," the poet "is able to express a general truth; retaining
all the particularity of the experience, to make of it a general
symbol."
Eliot recognizes that the right poetic concentration
is not achieved by simple deliberation and is not completely
conscious. But he is more interested in rejecting the Romantic
account of the process of composition, Wordsworth's "spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings." Eliot stresses instead the
conscious aspect of writing, the importance of consciousness, of
awareness, which is at the same time a flight from subjectivism:
In
fact the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be
conscious and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both
errors tend to make him "personal." Poetry is not a turning loose
of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of a
personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only
those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to
escape from these things. ("Tradition" 21).
The emotion of art is therefore impersonal: it is a matter of the poem,
not of the writer's life. It is not an outpouring, but a
construction, an achievement. And poetic tradition offers the
poet a guidance in this escape from personality. The poet "is not
likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely
the present, but the present moment [= importance] of the past, unless
he is conscious not of what is dead but of what is already
living" ("Tradition" 22).
Writing is a compromise between the personal,
creative and chaotic side of the writer on the one hand and his
critical instinct, his awareness of tradition on the other.
"Probably, indeed, the larger part of the labour of an author in
composing his work is critical labour." The Romantics
ignore this aspect of the process of composition; they do not want to
accept the need of a regulative principle inside the human
spirit. They rely on the individual instead of tradition.
But for Eliot the individual as such has no principles—a belief that
underpins his ethics as well as his poetics.
4. Autonomy of the Poem
4.1.
The Meaning of a Poem 4.2.
Organic Structure 4.3.
The Objective Correlative
4.1. The Meaning of a Poem
The rejection of the authorial meaning is part and parcel of Eliot's
theory of impersonality. If the poet has retreated himself from
the poem once it is finished, the poem becomes an independent object,
autonomous and public, available to judgement. The literary work
of art lies then "somewhere between the writer and the reader; it has a
reality which is not simply the reality the writer is trying to
'express', or of his experience of writing it, or of the experience of
the reader or the writer as reader." It is easy to see that
unless some limits are set or assumed, there is no difference between
this theory and complete freedom of interpretation. Eliot,
however, does not seem to worry about this problem. He assumes
that the objectivity of the poem is evidence enough of its core of
meaning. The poem "in some sense, has its own life . . . the
feeling or emotion or vision resulting from the poem is something
different from the feeling or emotion or vision in the mind of the
poet." That is, the poet is one thing and the intention,
the idea of the author is another thing. They must not be
confused. Only the first is relevant for the reader and the
critic; the poem must not be interpreted or evaluated in relation to
the writer's subjective experience. The origin of the poem "has
no relation to the poem and throws no light upon it."
Biographical criticism is therefore irrelevant: no amount of data about
the author will explain the existence of the poem. As we shall
see later, the critical consequence of this view of the poem as an
autonomous whole is that criticism must concentrate on the work itself,
not on its causes or effects.
This separation of the poet and the poem has further
anti-Romantic consequences. The issue of the sincerity of the
emotion becomes irrelevant. If the emotion represented in the
poem need not be the poet's own, the question of sincerity does not
arise. In fact, it does not arise for the reader if he faces the
poem itself, without any prior knowledge of the author. Eliot
recognizes at first that our knowledge of the poet's insincerity of
feeling affects our enjoyment of the poem. But he soon becomes
more concerned with what he calls "genuineness": he separates the
sincerity of the man from that of the poet, the sincerity which is
built into the poem and is the only relevant one. The subjective,
psychological belief of the author is finally irrelevant.
"Strength of belief has no relation to successful art" (Wellek,
History 5:192).
4.2. Organic structure
According to T. S. Eliot, a poem is an autonomous verbal structure, a
dynamic organism with a life of its own. It is a describable
object, a symbolic world which is amenable to analysis and
judgment. The relevant objects of study are its meaning, the
organization of the materials which constitute it, the relations
between each of the parts and the other parts, as well as the relations
with the overall structure of the work. The object of study is
the work itself, its immanent values, not the poet or the process of
composition. No amount of external criticism, of biography, of
history, source studies, influences, psychological or sociological
studies will be sufficient for the critic. His proper job is to
study the work itself. Of course, the relevant emotions, the
meaning of the work is a part of the work: Eliot is no formalist in
this sense. But "once we have dissociated the speaker of the
lyric from the personality of the poet, even the tiniest lyric reveals
itself as drama" (Wimsatt and Brooks 675). Lyric poetry, the
subjective genre, is objectivised by Eliot's ideal of impersonality;
all art aspires to the classical ideal of the objective drama.
The feelings in lyric are not the feelings of the poet: in poetry there
is simply the expression of an emotion through an object, not the
expression of the author.
An instance of organicism is Eliot's discussion of
the role of verse. Eliot is vague when speaking of metrics, but
nevertheless he insists that its relation to meaning is organic.
The beauty of verse is not the beauty of pure sound: sound and metre
become one with the meaning of the words they organize. Eliot sees the
poem as a "musical pattern of sounds and a musical pattern of secondary
meanings of the words which compose it, and these two patterns are
indissoluble and one." The music of the word "is at a point
of intersection: it arises from its relation first to the words
immediately preceding and following it, and indefinitely to the rest of
the context; and from another relation, that of the immediate meaning
to that context to all the other meanings which it has in other
contexts, to its greater or less wealth of associations."
Poetry aspires to the condition of music (here Eliot agrees with the
Romantics) but it is a music of meaning, not of sound. Actually,
what Eliot is referring to is not music but the peculiar semantics of
the poem, in which the value of the words is fully present and is
moreover contextually overdetermined.
A work may fail to achieve an organic structure, a
unified meaning of its own. According to Eliot, Hamlet is
an artistic failure because Shakespeare has not succeeded in
integrating all the materials of his sources and his own vision in a
successful way. The work shows that it is a product of
various hands instead of being guided by one unifying principle.
It drags along a number of superfluous scenes and irrelevant
motifs. According to Eliot, Hamlet's melancholy is left
unexplained; there is not sufficient motivation for it in the play,
given Gertrude's insignificance. Emotion is not adequately
conveyed, it is in excess of the facts, it is not embodied in the play,
but remains outside. Most people would not agree with
Eliot, but here we are interested mainly in the critical
principles he applies. The relation between character and plot in
drama should also be organic: "in great drama character is always felt
to be—not more important than plot—but somehow integral with plot."
4.3. The Objective
Correlative
The theory of the objective correlative is inspired in the doctrines of
evocation put forward by the French symbolists, as well as in Colerige
and in Johnson's description of the Metaphysical conceit. A
passage in Santayana has been pointed at as the immediate predecessor:
"The glorious emotions with which [the poet] bubbles up must, however,
at all hazards find or feign their correlative objects."
Actually, the term "objective correlative" itself is unimportant.
Eliot seems to have used it literally only in the essay on
Hamlet, which provides also the clearest definition of the
concept.
The
only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an
"objective correlative"; in other words, a set of objects, a situation,
a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular
emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in
sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.
("Hamlet" 145)
An "objective correlative" is then a kind of metaphor for an emotion, a
metaphor where the tenor is an emotion (or rather, a "feeling") and the
vehicle is any literary device: a metaphor proper, a motif, a plot
structure, a character. . . For Wimsatt and Brooks it is
"the verbal equivalent for states of mind and feeling" (668). For
Wellek, the objective correlative is the poem considered as "a symbolic
world which [Eliot] thought of as continuous with the feelings of the
poet, objectifying and patterning them" ; it is
the
right kind of devices, situations, plots, and objects which
motivate the emotion of a character in a play or a novel, or even, as
Eliot used it more broadly, simply as the "equivalent" of the author's
emotion, the successful objectivation of emotion in art.
(History 5:192).
The notion of the objective correlative is the logical result of the
conception of the literary work as an autonomous structure and of the
impersonality of poetic feeling. The work provides the
formula for a feeling particular to itself.
Eliot's own formulation is couched in terms which
are surprisingly psychological and not so distant from the empiricist
doctrines of the association of ideas. Eliseo Vivas has
criticised Eliot's conception of the objective correlative as not being
sufficiently objective: Eliot assumes that the poet is in possession of
an emotion that he tries to express, or that he intends an effect which
is fully formed before he composes the work. For Vivas, "the poet
only discovers his emotion through trying to formulate it in
words." The poet and the reader need not feel alike; poetry
is not to be conceived as the transaction of an emotion from the writer
to the reader. In general, however, Eliot is not guilty of
conceiving poetry as a communication of emotions. The doctrine of
the objective correlative is concerned with an emotion which is
objective, that is, contained in the work: the emphasis is put on the
structure of the poem, and not in the emotion of the poet. The
emphasis is on an emotion which is not spontaneous, but mathematically
calculated: we may usefully remember here the mathematical analogy in
Poe's "Philosophy of Composition." The stress on craftmanship is
anti-Romantic. Eliot favours bold images with the power to
amalgamate disparate experiences (witness the opening of his "Love Song
of J. Alfred Prufrock"). He sees imagination where Colerige saw
only fancy: "in the verses of Marvell . . . there is the making of the
familiar strange, and the strange familiar, which Coleridge attributed
to good poetry."
5. The Dissociation of
Sensibility
Eliot's version of organicism is part and parcel of a whole theory of
history. The idea of a dissociation of sensibility has a
venerable Romantic ancestry: witness for instance Schiller's opposition
between the material drive and the formal drive, and their unification
in the play-drive. It seems to derive more directly from Rémy de
Gourmont's analysis of Laforgue's mind in Promenades littéraires.
Eliot transforms this individual description into a universal
narrative. Originally, the sensibility of the human being was
unified: his emotions, his ideas, his sensations, were all channelled
in the same direction, instead of running against each other.
Then, at a given moment in history, there occurred a dissociation of
this unified sensibility. Eliot usually locates the change in
England and in the seventeenth century. The metaphysical
poets were able to think and feel in an orderly way: in them, there is
an identity of thought and sensation. In them Eliot finds "a
direct apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought into
feeling." "A thought for Donne was an experience: it modified his
sensibility." Eliot praises what he calls Cowley's "wit", a
near-equivalent to the New Critical "irony." "Wit" means range
and comprehensiveness, a refusal to be one-sided, a suggestion of
multiple perspectives on experience. Wit is a "constant
inspection and criticism of experience. It involves, probably, a
recognition implicit in the expression of every experience, of other
kinds of experience which are possible. But after the
metaphysicals the dissociation of sensibility occurs. The
eighteenth century consecrates itself to abstract thought, and becomes
unable to feel. This leads to the opposite reaction in the
nineteenth century, which is submerged by a wave of disorderly
feelings. In the poets of the Victorian and the Georgian age, we
find a confusion of thought and feeling, instead of a harmonic
fusion. Eliot's ideal is the restoration of this unified
sensibility by means of poetry. The artist "should have the
unified sensibility which reaches from the most elementary response to
the highest intellectual abstraction" (Wellek, History
5:198). The poet of unified sensibility should be aware not
only of truth and beauty, but also of good and evil. Dissociation
involves forgetting the problem of good and evil in poetry. Some
of the French Symbolists (Baudelaire, Laforgue) attempted the
reconstitution of a unified sensibility, and they did that partly by
reintroducing the problem of good and evil in poetry; only by dealing
with moral problems and establishing a moral order is it possible to
reunite the whole of man's personality.
Eliot presumably aspires to write a poetry of
unified sensibility, which in his case means also religious
poetry. However, "In the defense against Paul Elmer More's
accusation that there is a cleavage between Eliot's correctly classical
criticism and his perverse modernist poetry, Eliot endorses the strange
view that in a chaotic age poetry must be chaotic." His
poetry would therefore be flawed as the whole age is flawed.
Indeed, Eliot seems to believe that the poet cannot help expressing in
some way the time he lives in. There is an uneasy relationship
between this awareness and the timeless version of literature that he
puts forward in "Tradition and the Individual Talent."
The idea of the objective correlative is also
related to the theory of the unified sensibility. "The poet
becomes the man who returns to this original immediate experience, to a
unified sensibility by objectifying his feeling" (Wellek, History
5:186). Ideas must become feeling⎯even sensory experience:
actually
Eliot . . . exploits the ambiguity of the term 'sensibility'
and conceives this fusion of thought and feeling as equivalent to a
fusion of thought and sensation. The metaphysical poets represent
this fusion to perfection . . . . The poet must both feel and
sense his thought. (Wellek, History
5:187).
The poetry of unified sensibility satisfies Eliot's and man's yearning
for wholeness and integrity.
At times Eliot gives different accounts of the
dissociation of sensibility. He often seems to see the
dissociation as a gradual process, or to locate it at other points in
history. It has, too, practical consequences for the historian of
literature, such as the fragmentation of literary genres. In
order to read the novels of Wilkie Collins we must be able to reunite
the elemnents that have become dissociated in the modern novel.
The Victorian novel reunited the thriller, the sentimental novel, the
philosophical novel. Now these elements have split into as many
genres. The subgenre of the "thriller" did not exist in the
Victorian age because the best novels were thrilling.
6. The Language and Technique of
Poetry
6.1.
Diction 6.2.
Myth and Symbol 6.3.
The use of convention.
6.1. Diction
"Eliot in approaching a work of poetry thinks of it, first of all, as
language" (Wellek, History
5:193). An important
mission of the poet is to restore and to develop language. In
order to do this, the poetry must stand in some relation with common
language. The language of poetry must not "stray too far from the
ordinary everyday language which we use and hear." Eliot
favours "some standard of poetic diction, neither identical with, nor
too remote from current speech." The language of Dryden or
that of Dante are examples of this balanced poetic diction.
Milton, on the other hand, is the example of the way the poet should
not use language, tearing it apart from the common language.
"Milton", Eliot holds, "writes English like a dead
language." Eliot liked Joyce's Ulysses,
but not the
baroque Finnegans Wake.
He rejects those styles in which language
itself becomes the center of attention, instead of pointing towards its
object; he warns against "language dissociated from things, assuming an
independent existence."
The difference between prose and poetry bothers
Eliot. He wants to write prosaic poetry, which nevertheless is
the contrary of Pater's poetic prose: a poetry which exploits the
resources of colloquial language without ceasing to be poetry. He
does not identify poetry and verse; for him poetry is an honorific
term. He complains somewhere that we lack the the word to qualify
good prose as "poetry" qualifies good verse. However, Eliot
justifies the use of verse, even in drama: "if we want to get at the
permanent and universal we tend to express ourselves in
verse."
Eliot defends two very different kinds of
poetry. The first is the poetry of images, the kind of poetry
written by St. John Perse: "The work of poetry is performed by the use
of images: by a cumulative succession of images each fusing with the
next; and by a rapid and unexpected combination of images apparently
unrelated." The other is the poetry of statement, the
poetry which preserves the coherence of a prose argument, with few
images and a solid logical construction⎯the kind of poetry that Dryden
writes. And when speaking of long poems or of drama, he holds
that there must be a difference in degrees of poetic intensity between
the parts. The less "intense" fulfil the role of prose inside the
poem.
In any case, whether we write a poetry of images or
a poetry of ideas, Eliot demands that poetry in our present-day
civilization
must
be difficult. The poet must become more comprehensive, more
allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary,
language into his meaning. It is not sufficient to 'look into our
hearts and write'. One must look into the cerebral cortex, the
nervous system, and the digestive tracts. (Selected Essays
275-76)
As an example of this comprehensive and difficult poetry, he puts
forward the model of the metaphysical poets; but in order to understand
his meaning we must think of his own poetry instead.
The reference to allusion is important . Eliot
became known in the early 1920s because his poetry was "so full of
quotations." Eliot uses fragments of older poetry, lines or
passages from Spenser, Shakespeare, Dante, as an ironic device, in
order to emphasize the difference between the ideal world of the past
and the decayed world of the present. His poetry, therefore,
invokes a large number of world-views and implied contexts which are
brought to bear on the poem. Eliot's disgust with contemporary
reality may be "a traditional literary device" (Sampson 853) but his
technique to convey this disgust is new enough: it is only possible
because Eliot exploits his position at the end of a poetic tradition.
6.2. Myth and Symbol
Eliot sees the connection between poetry, myth, and ritual, but he does
not favour the primitivistic interpretations of Jung or Herbert Read,
or the latter's notion of "unconscious symbols." Consciousness
and unconsciousness are not the parameters in which symbolism
functions: "If we are unconscious that a symbol is a symbol, then is it
a symbol at all? And the moment we become conscious that it is a
symbol, is it any longer a symbol?" Eliot provides an
unmystical description of the use of symbolism a a deliberate device to
control the meaning of words. Symbolism is for Eliot one of the
main resources of the poet. The poet turns the word into a
symbol; that is, he makes it work as much as possible, uniting the
disparate in the concrete, meaning more than it would in other kind of
writing. In Eliot, "Symbol is simply the rightly charged word and
not a pointing to the supernatural" (Wellek, History
5:198).
Likewise, Eliot recommends myth as a method, a
technique. The role of myth in his poetry can be compared to that
of literary allusion. A myth can provide the framework of a
contemporary work. In this respect, Eliot praises the use Joyce
makes of the Odyssey as
a reference basis for Ulysses: myth can
be "a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving shape and significance
to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary
history." The artist is a user of myths, but he is not a
mythmaker. "The artist is more primitive, as well as more
civilized than his contemporaries." The artist is not bound
to the remnants of the past: he encompasses the whole of history.
6.3. The Use of Convention
There are other conventions, apart from myth, available to the
poet. "Rhetoric", used by the critics of the Romantic tradition
as a term of abuse, is revaluated by Eliot. The conscious
artificiality of a genre, its "rhetoric", is not a shortcoming, but a
precondition for a required effect. Eliot reacts against the
naturalistic tradition in drama, and wants to recover the right for a
character to speak in monologue or being aware of his own dramatic
role, the kind of play inside the play that we often find in
Shakespeare. The rhetoric of the Elizabethan and Jacobean
dramatic speeches is the result of a conscious delight in speech.
This is pernicious if it is done for its own sake, "if it is not done
for a particular effect but for a general impressiveness" ("Rhetoric"
42). Generic conventions must be used as elements of poetic
construction. They must become a channel through which to
articulate the emotion in drama. Inarticulate emotion is, as always,
Eliot's bête noire.
Eliot reacts against the dramatic tradition of Shaw
or Ibsen, and calls for a more concentrated, more stylized, more
intense drama, closer to the religious ritual which was at the origin
of drama. To the naturalistic drama of the late nineteenth
century Eliot opposes the poetic drama he was to exemplify himself in
Murder in the Cathedral
and The Cocktail Party.
Poetic drama he defines as "a design of human action and of words, such
as to present at once the two aspects of dramatic and musical
order." An extreme example of the use of conventions with a
view to reaching a particular effect can be seen in melodrama.
Melodrama does not arise naturally, in the way drama does: "we are
asked to accept an improbability, simply for the sake of seeing the
thrilling situation which arises in consequence" (Eliot, "Wilkie
Collins"
467). Eliot speaks of exploring the devices of melodrama,
presumably to turn them to worthier uses.
7. The Function of Criticism
Just like literature, the body of criticism forms an organic whole, a
society of dead critics. There is an unconscious community
between critics as there is one between artists. But criticism is
not autotelic, like art. Its end is "the elucidation of the works
of art and the correction of taste" ("Function").
Eliot insists on the need to adopt critical
standards, to choose the principles of criticism. He draws here a
significant analogy between criticism, literature, religion and
politics. The English tendency is to Protestantism, to
Romanticism, to individualistic, liberal Whiggery and to critical
anarchy. The French tendency is to classicism and Catholicism, to
the establishment of a central authority and the regulation of taste:
the Frenchman seeks external standards in the tradition, and does not
rely on his inner voice alone ("Function"). All of Eliot's
thought is pervaded by this classicist ideal: that we should refer our
subjective principles to general laws, to avoid impressionism and vague
moralism in criticism. Eliot seems to have derived much
inspiration for this from the French critic Remy de Gourmont.
In "Tradition and the Individual Talent", T. S.
Eliot has sown the seeds of both his poetics and his critical
theory. Criticism must concentrate itself on properly literary
matters, not extraliterary considerations. Eliot calls critics
such as the "New Humanists" Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More
"imperfect critics" because their concern is primarily moral, not
artistic. He also reacts against impressionistic criticics, who
are unable to establish critical principles, to formulate the general
laws underlying their impressions, in a word, to objectify what is
subjective. Eliot's poetics based on tradition and
impersonality has a direct bearing on his critical ideas. It is
the poem and not the poet who will become the center of critical
attention. Biographical criticism, or any kind of data concerning
the circumstances of the work instead of the work itself are useless as
an explication of the work. The only relevant tools of the critic
are comparison and analysis.
We have already seen that every poet has a critic
inside him which is his connection with tradition and guides him during
the composition of his work. "The critical activity finds its
highest, its true fulfilment in a kind of union with creation in the
labour of the artist" ("Function" 31). This is Eliot's backhanded
way of showing criticism out of the literary scene. If every poet
has a critic inside himself, there is no need for other critics to show
him his job.
There are more kinds of criticism apart from the one
built-in in the poet. Most of them are not legitimate. The
first is creative criticism, the impressionistic criticism of
Sympson or Pater⎯which is not criticism, in fact: "It does not count"
for Eliot; these critics are actually frustrated, "incomplete
artists." Criticism must be subordinated to creation:
autotelic, creative criticism is not to be accepted. The second
kind is historical criticsm, scholarship, which again is not
criticism proper; it is a legitimate activity in its own right, but
should not be confused with criticism. Eliot is fond of drawing a
distinction between scholarship and practical criticism.
Scholarship is ideally concerned with facts; its aim is to interpret
the meaning of the work in its original historical context.
Criticism is concerned with value judgments: its aim is to determine
the meaning of the work for us, now; the use we can make of it; its
significance to the modern poet. This confrontation will be
replayed again and again during the following decades.
According to Wellek, "making criticism serve only temporary ends while
scholarship serves the permanent seems a specious conclusion based on a
false dichotomy. It pervades Eliot's criticism" (History 5:
178). At one time Eliot claims that "the only genuine criticism
is that of the poet-critic who is criticizing poetry in order to create
poetry." "The important critic is the person who is absorbed in the
present problem of art, and who wishes to bring the forces of the past
to bear on these problems." There is only one exception for
Eliot: Aristotle, who seems to have been good at everything.
Predictably, Eliot was strongly criticized for these views. They
are unduly restrictive, both of the authors and the scope of
criticism. "Later he merely asked the critic to have some
experience in composing poetry" (Wellek, History
5:179). But still Eliot rejects interpretation and judicial
criticism.
A further imperfect kind of criticism is
interpretation. When applied to criticism, Eliot's theory of
impersonality makes him warn us against the dangers of critical
interpretation:
it is fairly certain that "interpretation" . . . is only
legitimate when it is not interpretation at all, but merely putting the
reader in possession of facts which he would otherwise have missed.
("Function" 32).
Qua work of art, the work of art cannot be
interpreted; there is nothing to interpret, we can only criticize it
according to standards, in comparison to other works of art; and for
"interpretation" the chief task is the presentation of relevant
historical facts which the reader is not assumed to know.
("Hamlet" 142)
Even irrelevant historical facts are to be preferred to allegorizing
the work. Even the critics who investigate Shakespeare's laundry
bills are better than those who try to "interpret" the work and succeed
only in interpreting themselves. Eliot has a respect for factual
scholarship that he does not manifest when facing journalistic
criticism. Facts cannot corrupt taste, but random opinons and
fanciful interpretations can. Just as the critic has no business
giving advice to the poet on how to write, he has no business giving
advice to the reader on how to read. The critic, like the author,
must be impersonal; his role is to attract the attention of the reader
to the work, not to himself. Criticism which draws attention to
himself is vicious, and must be avoided. Interpretation is
not true criticism because it falsifies the work. You lose
contact with the work itself, and "instead of insight, you get a
fiction." Interpretation is deceiving because it limits the
meaning of the work even as it claims to explain it. Eliot does
not believe in the possibility of a single or permanent interpretation:
"every interpretation, along perhaps with some utterly contradictory
interpretation, has to be taken up and reinterpreted by any thinking
mind and by every civilization." He looks on interpretation
as "a necessary evil, a makeshift, a compensation for our
imperfections" (Wellek, History
5:180). We have already
mentioned Eliot's conception of the autonomy of the poem, his rejection
of the continued authorial control on the finished work. The
meaning of the poem is left for the reader to decide; it does not seem
to be completely fixed in Eliot's conception. "A poem may appear
to mean different things to different readers, and all of these
meanings may be different from what the author thought he meant."
"The reader's interpretation may differ from the author's and be
equally valid⎯it may even be better." According to Wellek,
"Eliot is right in not wanting to lose this accrual of meaning", but
this does not solve the problem of correctness, which was not really
faced by Eliot (History
5:181).
Judgments of value are also forbidden in
criticism. "The critic must not coerce, and he must not
make judgments of worse and better." He "must simply elucidate;
the reader will form the correct judgment for himself."
These are, presumably, among the statements that we are not supposed to
take literally. Eliot "seems rather to protest against subjective
and arbitrary interpretation and against the dogmatic ranking of
authors." Moreover, "the interdiction of judgment and ranking is
completely belied by Eliot's practice. Ranking, judging, was the
secret of his success and appeal as a critic" (Wellek, History
5:180). Actually, his idea of the poetic tradition, of the
"absolute poetic hierarchy" that we must assume presupposes the
activities of judgement and ranking.
It is to be noted that in rejecting interpretation
and judgment as tasks proper to the critic, Eliot is not dismissing
them completely: instead, he is displacing them into the area of the
reader. What Eliot does is to suppress the mediation of the
critic in areas where his judgment or his interpretation will be in
conflict with those of the reader, who in any case would have to
judge and interpret again the critic's interpretation.
What is left, then, for the critic to do? The
aim of criticism is "the return to the work of art with improved
perception and intensified, because more conscious,
enjoyment." This enjoyment comes from an awareness of how
poetry achieves its effect. The critic can explain the technique
of the poet, the way he says things, instead of the things he
says. But Eliot's own criticism oversteps the limits he sets
here⎯as all criticism should.
8. Literature, Morality,
Religion
The early Eliot defended the autonomy of art. The later Eliot
subordinated it to religion. Poetry is not actual religion nor an
adequate substitute (Eliot always defended this) but in the later years
it is seen as a preparation for religion. The need of critical
regulation we have been commenting on exceeds the purely literary
judgment. Literary criticism must be supplemented by moral and
religious criticism. Because of this Eliot has been
accused of upholding a double standard of value.
Literary
criticism should be completed by criticism from a definite
ethical and theological standpoint . . . . The 'greatness' of
literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards; though we
must remember that whether it is literature or not can be determined
only by literary standards.
The New Critics will reproach Eliot that he has accepted the
division in the first place and will keep trying to fit together the
fragments of the work. According to Wellek, Eliot speaks here "as
if morality and theology were ingredients merely added to minimal
aesthetic value . . . . To accept Eliot's dichotomy of
'greatness' and 'artness' means giving up an organic point of view,
establishing a new divorce of form and content" (History
5:190). But Eliot refuses to subordinate the religious standard
to a wholesale moral aesthetics, and insists on opposing two regulative
principles. He gave a name to this regulative principle when he
declared himself to be a classicist in literature, a royalist in
politics and an Anglo-Catholic in religion.
Morality is a constituent part of literature, and
good literature must be moral. We separate irrationally (and
incompletely) our literary from our religious judgments.
Aesthetic and moral pleasure must not be divorced: a purely "aesthetic"
judgment is an aberration. Reading literature, Eliot argues,
affects not only our taste but the whole of our being. Therefore,
Eliot reacts against purely aesthetic approaches to literature, and
differentiates taste and morality: "For literary judgement we need to
be acutely aware of two things at once: of 'what we like', and of 'what
we ought to like'. Few people are honest enough to know
either." We must learn to know what we feel and to
understand our shortcomings, in taste as in everything
else.
It is here that we meet the problem of belief.
The early Eliot had defended that belief in the ideas used by the poet
is irrelevant to the enjoyment of poetry: "You are not called to
believe in Dante's philosophical and theological views"; he draws "a
difference between philosophical belief and poetic assent"
. Later he will hold, perhaps more sensibly, that this
complete separation is not possible: "One probably has more pleasure in
the poetry when one shares the beliefs of the poet."
According to Wellek, "we are not always able to reach the state of
disinterested contemplation that poetry demands" (History
5:190). The truest philosophy becomes then the best poetic
material. The problem is that Eliot uses the Catholic dogma as
the rule to measure the degree of truth or falsensess of ideas or
philosophical systems. Still, his theory allows a measure of
distance in belief which is still acceptable and does not preclude the
enjoyment of poetry:
When
the doctrine, theory, belief, or 'view of life' presented in the
poem is one which the reader can accept as coherent, mature, and
founded on the facts of experience, it interposes no obstacle to the
reader's enjoyment, whether it be one that he can accept or deny
approve or deprecate.
Eliot separates here logical criteria from aesthetic ones, and once
more he will meet the rebuke of Wellek, who thinks that
coherence
is an aesthetic as well as a logical criterion. . . The
maturity of a work of art is its inclusiveness, its awareness of
complexity, and . . . the correspondence to reality is registered in
the work itself. An incoherent, immature, 'unreal' poem is a bad
poem aesthetically. (History
5:191).
Eliot warns against the effects of bad art.
Literature affects our personality; it contributes to shape it when we
are young. The literature read for amusement may have the
greatest influence, since it is read without effort and
uncritically. To read critically is to realize that literature is
not a presentation, but an interpretation of life: another's
interpretation of life. Literature only becomes knowledge when we
consider it as another person's perspective on reality. Unless we
realize this we are in danger of letting our personality be invaded by
the personality of the writer. For instance, when the author in a
novel condones the behaviour of some characters and condemns others,
our judgment of those characters is affected by that alien
viewpoint. And the novel has become gradually secularized, alien
to a religious view of life. Indeed, contemporary literature as a
whole tends to be degrading, since it has forgotten the supernatural
side of man and concentrates on the inferior natural
life. Eliot complains that our age is the most
parochial of ages: we read only contemporary authors, and forget the
classics. Today it is more difficult than ever to become an
individual, since most people are simply caught in the main drift of
modern culture which leads them to worldly values. The Christian
reader must be aware that most authors today are unbelievers.
Still more: they are unbelievers who do not realize that there are
still believers near them. The Christian reader may enjoy modern
literature and profit from it, but he must know the place of others and
his own.
Eliot deplores Arnold's conception of the end of
religion and his attempts to substitute "culture" or literature for
religion. "The effect of Arnold's religious campaign is to
divorce Religion from thought." In this, Arnold was after
all a Puritan. He surrenders to a blind moral feeling and sees in
Christianism only a source of emotions which do not need any belief to
uphold them. Eliot will likewise reject Arnold's double
offspring, I. A. Richards conception of poetry as psychological
balance, and the "new humanism" of Irving Babbitt. Humanism is an
offshoot of religion, it is dependent on Christianity, its values need
the values of religion to uphold them. Without its religious
basis, humanism will lose its sense of direction: "You cannot make
humanism itself into a religion" ("Babbitt" 475); "the humanist makes
use, in his separation of the 'human' from the 'natural', of that
'supernatural' which he denies." If the supernatural is denied,
the opposition betwen man and nature collapses. The logical
outcome is Pater's doctrine of "art for art's sake" which actually
means "feeling for feeling's sake", and can only lead to an
irresponsible hedonism. These attempts to turn literature or art
into a kind of substitute for religion are the symptoms of the
dissolution of thought which is in progress in the 19th century: "the
isolation of art, philosophy, religion, ethics and literature, is
interrupted by various chimerical attempts to effect imperfect
syntheses" ("Arnold"). Arnold's religion of poetry is therefore a
consequence of the dissociation of sensibility, a further symptom of
decay. Literature is not a source of ethical principles.
The humanist solution is a historical accident, which may serve for
certain individuals, but which cannot provide the basis for society at
large. The life of a culture must stand on a basis which is firm
and true, not derivative or nostalgic.
There is no getting round the real issues. We
must face the problem of religion, of the meaning of existence, because
all our actions depend on the answer we give to that question.
"There are two and only two finally tenable hypotheses about life: the
Catholic and the materialist." This is Eliot's diagnosis of
contemporary society: it is confused, lost; it lacks orientation.
It is unable to educate young people. Education must be related
to the social system. Our education deteriorates because our
society is unsettled, and we have no clear notion of what we
want. The problem of education turns out to be a religious
problem. Education is dominated by the idea of getting on in the
world, no longer by the wish to acquire wisdom. Only technical
efficiency and social promotion count. Modern education focusses
on scientific knowledge of the world and of man⎯which does not mean
understanding of life or self-knowledge. Eliot opposes the idea
of "education for a society of leisure" and of raising up the school
age as a remedy against unemployment. He is also against the
notion that everyone should reach higher education, that the university
should be expanded to the whole of the population. These notions merely
show that modern education has no clear aim: it neglects the questions
of who should be educated, and why. The modern
tendency, according to Eliot, is to let students develop their own
interests, instead of being guided. Studying things for which we
have no taste or aptitude, he argues, is essential: in this way we
learn to take an interest in them. This is one of his arguments
to defend the continued study of the classics at
university. Ultimately, Eliot argues, education must rest
upon a religious conception. "As only the Catholic and the
Communist know, all education must be ultimately religious
education" ("Modern Education" 515). Eliot concludes his
critique of modern society with an appeal to the revival of the
monastic ideal of the Middle Ages.
Eliot "looked complacently upon those who refuse to
choose between Rome and Canterbury on the one hand and Moscow on the
other (Communism is for him a religion) and who refuse to appplaud his
glorification of an earlier state of British culture" (Wellek,
History 5:220). He did not decline as a critic after
his conversion, but he did not solve the problematic relationship
between his theory, his practical criticism, and his own poetry.
Instead, he refused to concentrate on literature and embraced extrinsic
standards of criticism:
his
interests shifted away from literary criticism and thus he was apt
to use literature as documents for his Jeremiads on the modern
world. He embraced a double standard which dissolved the unity of
the work of art as well as the sensibility that goes into its making
and the critical act itself. he thus weakened (on behalf of what
he felt to be higher interests) the impact of his achievement as a
literary critic. Taken in its early purity his literary criticism
seems to be very great indeed" (Wellek, History 5:220).
Works
cited
Eliot, T. S. Selected
Essays. 1932. 3rd ed. London: Faber and Faber, 1951.
Sampson, George. The Concise
Cambridge History of English Literature. 3rd. ed. Rev. by R. C.
Churchill. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1970. 1979.
Wellek, René. "T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)." In Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism: 1750-1950.
Vol. 5: English Criticism, 1900-1950. London: Jonathan Cape,
1986. 176-220.* Wimsatt,
W. K. and Cleanth Brooks. Literary
Criticism: A Short History. New York: Knopf; London: Routledge,
1957.
From the Norton Anthology of English
Literature (7th ed.):
William Butler Yeats was born in Sandymount, Dublin. His
father's family, of English stock, had been in Ireland for at least two
hundred years: his mother's, the Pollexfens, hailing originally from
Devon, had been for some generations in Sligo, in the west of Ireland.
J. B. Yeats, his father, had abandoned law to take up painting, at
which he made a somewhat precarious living. The Yeatses were in London
from 1874 until 1883, when they returned to Ireland—to Howth, a few
miles from Dublin. On leaving high school in Dublin in 1883 Yeats
decided to be an artist, with poetry as his avocation, and attended art
school.; but he soon left, to concentrate on poetry. His first
published poems appeared in the Dublin
University Review in 1885.
Yeats's father was a religious skeptic, but he believed in the
"religion of art." Yeats himself, religious by temperament but unable
to believe in Christian orthodoxy, sought all his life for traditions
of esoteric thought that would compensate for a lost religion. This
search led him to various kinds of mysticism, to folklore, theosophy,
spiritualism, and neoplatonism—not in any strict chronological order,
for he kept returning to and reworking earlier aspects of his thought.
In middle life he elaborated a symbolic system of his own, based on a
variety of sources, that enabled him to strengthen the pattern and
coherence of his poetic imagery. The student of Yeats is constantly
coming up against this willful and sometimes baffling esotericism that
he cultivated sometimes playfully nad sometimes as though it were a
convenient language of symbols. Modern scholarship has traced most of
Yeats's mystical and quasi-mystical ideas to sources that were common
to William Blake and Percy Shelley and that sometimes go far back into
pre-Platonic beliefs and traditions. But his greatness as a poet lies
in his ability to communicate the power and significance of his
symbols, by the way he expresses and organizes them, even to readers
who know nothing of his system.
Yeats's childhood and early manhood were spent between Dublin, London,
and Sligo; and each of these places contributed something to his poetic
development. in London in the 1890s he met the important poets of the
day; and in 1891 was one of the founders of the Rhymers' Club, whose
members included Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson, and many other
characteristic figures of the 1890s. Here he acquired ideas of poetry
that were vaguely pre-Raphaelite: he believed, in this early stage of
his career, that a poet's language should be dreamy, evocative, and
ethereal. From the countryside around Sligo he got something much more
vigorous and earthy—a knowledge of the life of the peasantry and of
their folklore. In Dublin he was influenced by the currents of Irish
nationalism and, although often in disagreement with those who wished
to use literature for crude political ends, he nevertheless learned to
see his poetry as a contribution to a rejuvenated Irish culture. The
three influences of Dublin, London, and Sligo did not develop in
chronological order—he was going to and fro among these places
throughout his early life—and we sometimes find a poem based on Sligo
folklore in the midst of a group of dreamy poems written dunder the
influence of the Rhymers' Club or an echo of Irish nationalist feeling
in a lyric otherwise wholly pre-Raphaelite in tone.
We can distinguish quite clearly, however, the main periods into which
Yeats's poetic career falls. He began in the tradition of
self-conscious Romanticism , which he learned from the London poets of
the 1890s. Edmund Spenser and Shelely, and a little later Blake, were
important influences. One of his early verse plays ends with a song:
The
woods of Arcady are dead And
over is their antique joy; Of
old the world on dreaming fed; Grey
Truth is now her painted toy.
About the same time he was writing poems (e.g. The Stolen Child) deriving from his
Sligo experience, with a quiet precision of natural imagery, country
place names, and themes from folklore. A little later—i.e., in the
latter part of his first period—Dublin literary circles sent him to
Standish O'Grady's History of
Ireland: Heroic Period, where he found the great stories of the
heroic age of Irish history, and to George Sigerson's and Douglas
Hyde's translations of Gaelic poetry into "that dialect which gets from
Gaelic its syntax and keeps its still partly Tudor vocabulary." Even
when he plays with Neoplatonic ideas, as in The Rose of the World (also the
product of the latter part of his early period), he can link them with
Irish heroic themes and so give a dignity and a style to his imagery not normally
associated with this sort of poetic dreaminess. Thus the heroic legends
of old Ireland and the folk traditions of the modern Irish countryside
provided Yeats with a stiffening for his early dreamlike imagery, which
is why even his first, "nineties" phase is productive of interesting
poems. The Lake Isle of Innisfree,
spoiled for some by overanthologizing, is nevertheless a fine poem of
its kind: it is the clarity and control shown in the handling of the
imagery that keeps all romantic fuzziness out of it and gives it its
haunting quality. In The Man who
Dreamed of Faeryland he makes something peculiarly effective out
of the contrast between human activities and the strangeness of nature.
In The Madness of King Goll
the disturbing sense of the otherness
of the natural world drives the king mad. (Such contrasts are common in
the early Yeats; in his later poetry he tries to resolve what he calls
these "antinomies" in inclusive symbols; e.g., Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop.)
It is important to realize that Yeats had a habit of revising his
earlier poems in later printings, tightening up the language and gettin
rid of the more self-indulgent romantic imagery. The revised versions
are found in his Collected Poems,
which, therefore, present a somewhat muted picture of his poetic
development. For the complete picture one should consult The Variorum Edition edited by
Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (1957).
It was Irish nationalism that first sent Yeats in search of a
consistently simpler and more popular style. He tells in one of his
autobiotraphical essays how he sought for a style in which to express
the elemental facts about Irish life and aspirations. This led him to
the concrete image as did Hyde's translations from Gaelic folk songs,
in which "nothing was abstract, nothing worn-out." But other forces
were also working on him. In 1902 a friend gave him the works of the
German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, to which he responded with
great excitement, and it would seem that, in persuading Yeats, the
passive love-poet, to get off his knees, Nietzsche's books prompted his
search for a more active stance, a more masculine style. Looking back
in 1906, he found that he had mistaken the poetic ideal. "Without
knowing it, I had come to care for nothing but impersonal beauty . . .
We should ascend out of common interests, the thoughts of the
newspapers, of the market place, but only so fast as we can carry the
normal, passionate, reasoning self, the personality as a whole." The
result of the abandonment of "impersonal beauty," and of the desire to
"carry the normal, passionate, reasoning self" into his poetry, is seen
in the volumes of collected poems, In
the Seven Woods (1903) and The
Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910). The Folly of Being Comforted and Adam's Curse are from the former of
them, and one can see immediately how Yeats here combines the
colloquial with the formal. This is characteristic of his "second
period."
By this time Yeats had met the beautiful actress and violent Irish
nationalist Maud Gonne, with whom he was desperately in love for many
years, but who persistently refused to marry him. The affair is
reflected in many of the poems of his second period, notably No Second Troy, published in The Green Helmet.
He had also met Lady Gregory, Irish writer and promoter of Irish
literature, in 1896, and she invited him to spend the following summer
at her country house, Coole Park, in Galway. Yeats spent many holidays
with Lady Gregory and discovered the attractiveness of the "country
house ideal," seeing in an aristocratic life of elegance and leisure in
a great house a method of imposing order on chaos and a symbol of the
Neoplatonic dance of life. He expresses this view many times in his
poetry—e.g., at the end of A Prayer
for My Daughter—and
it became an important part of his complex of attitudes. The middle
classes, with their Philistine money grubbing, he detested, and for his
ideal characters he looked either below them, to peasants and beggars,
or above them, to the aristocracy, for each of these had their own
traditions and lived according to them.
It was under Lady Gregory's influence that Yeats became involved in the
founding of the Irish National Theatre in 1899. This led to his active
participation in problems of play production, which included political
problems of censorship, economic problems of paying carpenters and
actors, and other aspects of "theater business, management of men." All
this had an effect on his style. The reactions of Dublin audiences did
not encourage Yeats's trust in popular judgment, and his bitterness
with the "Paudeens," middle-class shopkeepers—who seemed to him to be
without any dignity, or understanding or nobility of spirit—produced
some of the most effective poems of his third or middle period. He was
now becoming more and more of a national figure. Three public
controversies had moved him to anger and poetry; the first over the
hounding of Parnell (To a Shade),
the second over Synge's play The
Playboy of the Western World in 1907, and the third over the
Lane pictures (September 1913).
In each, the cause for which he fought was defeated by the
representatives of the Roman Catholic middle class, and at last,
bitterly turning his back on Ireland, Yats moved to England. Then came
the Easter Rising (Easter 1916),
mounted by members of the class and religion that had so long opposed
him. Persuaded by Gonne (whose estranged husband was one of the
executed leaders of the rising) that "tragic dignity had returned to
Ireland," Yeats himself returned. To mark his new commitment, he
refurbished, occupied, and renamed "Thoor Bayllylee" the Norman tower
on Lady Gregory's land that was to become one of the central symbols of
his later poetry. In 1922 he was appointed a senator of the recently
established Irish Free State and served until 1928, playing an active
part not only in promoting the arts but also in general political
affairs, in which he supported the views of the Protestant landed class.
Meanwhile Yeats was responding in his own way to the change in poetic
taste represented in the poetry and criticism of Ezra Pound and T. S.
Eliot immediately before World War I. A gift for epigram had already
begun to emerge in his poetry; in the volume titled The Wild Swans at Coole
(1919) he has a poem citing Walter Savage Landor (the
nineteenth-century poet who wrote some fine lapidary verse) and John
Donne as masters. To the precision, and the combination of colloquial
and formal, that he had achieved early in the century, he now added a
metaphysical as well as an epigrammatic element, and this is seen in th
later poems of his third period. He also continued his experiments with
different kinds of rhythm. At the same time he was continuing his
search for a language of symbols and pursuing and pursuing his esoteric
studies. Yeats married in 1917, and his wife proved wo sympathetic to
his imaginative needs that the automatic writing which for several
years she produced (believed by Yeats to have been dictated by spirits)
gave him the elements of a symbolic system that he later worked out in
his book A Vision (1925,
1937) and that he used in all sorts of ways in much of his later
poetry. The system was both a theory of the movements of history and a
theory of the different types of personality, each movement and type
being related in various complicated ways to a different phase of the
moon. Some of Yeats's poetry is unintelligible without a knowledge of A Vision,
but the better poems, such as the two on Byzantium, can be appreciated
without such knowledge by the experienced reader who responds
sensitively to the patterning of the imagery reinforced by the
incantatory effect of the rhythms. Some criticism decries attempts by
those who are not experts in the background of Yeats's esoteric thought
to discuss his poetry and insists that only a detailed knowledge of
Yeats's sources can yield his poetic meaning: but while it's true
thatsome particular images do not yeiald all their significance to
those who are ignorant of the background, it is also true that too
literal a paraphrase of the symbolism in the light of the sources robs
the poems of their power by reducing them to mere exercises in the use
of a code.
The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair (1933), from
which the poems from Sailing to
Byzantium through After Long
Silence
have been here selected, represent the mature Yeats at his very best—a
realist-symbolist-Metaphysical poet with an uncanny power over words.
These volumes represent his fourth and greatest period. Here, in his
poems of the 1920s and 1930s, winding stairs, spinning tops, "gyres,"
spirals of all kinds, are important symbols; not only are they
connected with Yeats's philosophy of history and of personality, but
they also serve as a means of resolving some of those contrariesthat
had arrested him from the beginning. Life is a journey up a spiral
staircase; as we grow older we cover the ground we have covered before,
only higher up; as we look down the winding stair below us we measure
our progress by the number of places where we were but no longer are.
The journey is both repetitious and progressive; we go both round and
upward. Though symbolic images of this kind Yeats explores the
paradoxes of time and change, of growth and identity, of love and age,
of life and art, of madness and wisdom.
The Byzantium poems show him trying to escape from the turbulence of
life to the calm eternity of art. But in his fifth and final period he
returned to the turbulence after (if only partly as a result of )
undergoing the Steinach operation to increase his sexual potency in
1934, and his last poems have a controlled yet startling wildness.
Yeats's return to life, to "the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart,"
is one of the most impressive final phases of any poet's career. "I
shall be a sinful man to the end, and think upon my deathbed of all the
nights I wasted in my youth," he wrote in old age to a correspondent,
and in one of his last letters he wrote: "When I try to put all into a
phrase I say, 'Man can embody truth but he cannot know it' . . . The
abstract is not life and everywhere draws out its contradictions. You
can refute Hegel but not the Saint or the Son of Sixpence." When he
died in January 1939, he left a body of verse that, in variety and
power, makes him beyond question the greatest twentieth-century poet of
the English language.
From
The Oxford Companion to American
Literature, by Hart and Leininger:
Robert
[Lee] Frost (1874-1963), member of a New England family, was born in
San Francisco and taken at the age of ten to the New England farm
country with which his poetry is identified. After a brief attendance
at Dartmouth, where he disliked the academic attitude, he became a
bobbin boy in a Massachusetts mill, and a short period at Harvard was
followed by further work, making shoes, editing a country newspaper,
teaching school, and finally farming. This background of craftsmanship
and husbandry had its effect upon his poetry in more than the choice of
subjects, for he demanded that his verse be as simple and honest as an
axe or hoe. After a long period of farming, he moved to England
(1912-15) where he published his first book of poems, A Boy's Will
(1913), whose lyrics, including "Into My Own," "Revelation," "Mowing,"
and "Reluctance," are marked by an intense but restrained emotion and
the characteristic flavor of New England life. He returned to the U.S.
to settle on a New Hampshire farm, having achieved a reputation as an
important American poet through the publication of North of Boston
(1914), described by the author as "a book of people." and showing
brilliant insight into New England character and the background that
formed it. Among the poems in this volume are "Mending Wall," "The
Death of the Hired Man," "The Code," "The Wood-Pile," "Home Burial,"
and "A Servant to Servants."
—"Mending
Wall," blank-verse poem by Robert Frost, published in North of Boston
(1914). Describing the time he and a neighboring farmer spent the day
in replacing fallen stones on the wall which divides their land, the
poet declares, "Something there is that doesn't love a wall." and
expresses his philosophy of tolerance, generosity, and brotherhood in
the contrast between his neighbor's dogmatic "Good fences make good
neighbours" and his own more considered
Before
I built a wall I'd ask to know What
I was walling in or walling out
—"The
Death of the Hired Man," blank-verse dramatic narrative by Robert
Frost, published in North of Boston
(1914). Warren
and Mary, a farmer and his wife, discuss the return of Silas, an aged
farmhand who has worked for them often in the past, always wandering
off when other employment offered itself, and coming "home" at tims of
difficulty. Warren wants to dismiss him, but Mary describes the
poignant contrast between his former proud competence and his present
broken helath, loneliness, and pitiful eagerness to serve. She tells of
his infirm mind, which she thinks a sign of approaching death, and her
husband is moved to reconsider. Whan he enters the house to talk with
Silas, he discovers the old man dead.
—"The Code," blank-verse dramatic narrative by Robert Frost, published
in North of Boston (1914). An
experienced farmhand tells a "town-bred farmer" of the pride his
fellows take in their competence, and the resulting code:
The
hand that knows his business won't be told To
do work better or faster—those two things.
For
illustration he describes an incident that took place when he worked
for a certain Sanders, of Salem, a prodigious worker himself. They were
engaged in unloading a wagon of hay, and Sanders, made the mistake,
while standing below to pile th load, of saying to the hand on the
wagon, "Let her come!" Offended at this breach of the code, the hand
dumped the entire load down on the helpless farmer, regardless of the
danger of suffocating him. Sanders extricated himself, and showed that
he recognized the justice of his employee's act:
"Discharge
me? No! He knew I did just right."
—"The Wood-Pile." blank-verse poem by Robert Frost, published in North of Boston (1914). The
poet suggests a cosmic symbol in his discovery of a weathered,
long-abandoned cord of maple, "cut and split and piled," held from
being scattered by a growing tree on one side and on the other "a stake
and prop, these latter about to fall." This wasted labor can be the
work on ly of "someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks," and could
leave his creation "To warm the frozen swamp as best it could With the
slow smokeless burning of decay."
—"Home Burial," dramatic narrative in blank verse by Robert Frost,
published in North of Boston
(1914). The
incompatibility of a New England farm couple is revealed in the tragic
conflict between them following the death of their only child. The
husband has buried the child in the nearby family plot, and the wife
becomes obsessed by his seemingly unfeeling attitude. Oppressed by
loneliness, she comes to hate him and now feels that the transitoriness
of his grief is a further proof the "the world's evil." She is
determined tha she "must go—somewhere out of this house," but her
husband declares obstinately, "I'll follow and bring you back by force.
I will!—"
—"A Servant to Servants," blank-verse dramatic monologue by Robert
Frost, published in North of Boston
(1914). A
lonely, overworked New England farm wife talks with a visiting
naturalist, and through her eager conversation reveals the tragic story
of her life. Reared in a loveless family, in which her mother's life
had been embittered by the necessity of caring for an obscenely mad
brother-in-law, she herself had been influenced for a time by the
inherited strain of insanity, and welcomed the opportunity to marry
Len, the unfeeling husband who neglects her for his many business
enterprises. Though she craves personal freedom, love, and the touch of
beauty, she is burdened by innumerable menial tasks, including the
feeding of the brutal farmhands, whose "servant" she has become.
The same expressive idiom and brilliant observation appear in Mountain Interval (1916),
containing such characteristic poems as "The Road Not Taken,"
"Birches," "Bond and Free," "A Time to Talk,"
"Snow," "Putting in the Seed," and "An Old Man's Winter Night."
—"The
Road Not Taken," poem in iambic tetrameter by Rober Frost, published in
Mountain Interval (1916). The
poet tells how the course of his life was determined when he came
upon two roads that diverged in a wood. Forced to choose, he "took the
one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference."
—"Birches,"
blank-verse lyric by Robert Frost, published in Mountain Interval
(1916). The poet describes his boyhood pleasure in climbing birch
trees, swinging from the tops until the supple trunks bent in a curve
to the ground. He dreams of being again "a swinger of birches," and
finds in this occupation a symbol for his desired surcease from
"considerations," in which he might
go by climbing a birch tree . . . Toward heaven, till the tree
could bear no more, But
dipped its top and set me down again, That
would be good both going and coming back.
The shrewd humor and Yankee understatement that distinguish such poems
as "The Cow in Apple Time," "A Hundred Collars," and "Brown's Descent"
are exhibited also in Frost's witty self-critical remarks, such as "I
might be called a Synecdochist; for aI prefer the synecdoche in
poetry—that figure of speech in which we use a part for the whole." In
both emotion and language he was restrained, and conveyed his messages
by implication. Although his blank verse is colloquial, it is never
loose, for it possesses the pithy, surcharged economy indigenous to the
New Englander. His genre pieces, in the form of dramatic idylls or
monologues, capture the vernacular of his neighbors north of Boston.
Frost explained his realism saying, "There are two types of realist—the
one who offers a good deal of dirt with his potato to show that it is a
real one; and the one who is satisfied with the potato brushed clean. .
. . To me, the thing that art does for life is to clean it, to strip it
to form." His next book, New
Hampshire
(1923, Pulitzer Prize), shows his ability to deal with genial, informal
subjects, as in "The Star-Splitter," "Maple," "The Axe Helve," "New
Hampshire," and "Paul's Wife," and to concentrate emotional impact into
a few clean-stripped lines, as in "To Earthward," "Two Look at Two,"
"Stopping by Woods on as Snowy Evening," "Gathering Leaves," "Fire and
Ice," and "Fragmentary Blue."
—"The
Star-Splitter," blank-verse narrative by Robert Frost, published in New
Hampshire (1923). Brad
McLaughlin's "life-long curiosity About our place among the infinities"
culminates in his burning his house down for the insurance, to buy a
telescope. He earns a living as a railroad ticket agent and uses his
leisure "for star-gazing" through his glass, "the Star-splitter." Brad
and his friend, the poet, often spend their nights in his activity, but
though it provides material for "some of the best things we ever said,"
they remain in ignorance of the real nature of the universe: "We've
looked and looked, but after all where are we?"
—"Maple," narrative poem in blank verse by Robert Frost, published in New Hampshire (1923). Although
others commonly misunderstand it as "Mabel," Maple, the name of a New
England girl, given her at birth by her dying mother, guides her life
and endows her with a mysterious poetic quality. Her father is unable
or unwilling to make clear the intended meaning, and Maple is able to
find only partial clues, but the man she marries discerns her kinship
with the spirit of the trees, and they share this secret as a motive of
their love.
—"The Axe Helve," blank-verse dramatic narrative by Robert Frost,
published in New Hampshire
(1923). The
poet, chopping wood, is interrupted by a neighboring farmer, the
Frenchman Baptiste, who objects to his using an inferior machine-made
axe-helve. He promises him a good hickory helve of his own cutting, and
that evening the poet visits Baptiste's home, meeting his sociable
wife, who speaks no English. He talks with the earnest workman, who
proves to be a conscientiouss laborer who knows "how to make a short
job long for love of it," and insists that his children shall not
attend school, asserting the superiority of his own proud independence
and appreciation of such essential things as the materials of a
properly durable axe-helve.
—"New Hampshire," blank-verse poem by Robert Frost, published in 1923
as the title piece of a volume which won a Pulitzer prize. In
this familiar monologue, the poet presents a witty defense of his
manner of life and philosophic attitude. He describes New Hampshire as
"one of the two best states in the Union. Vermont's the other," and as
a compact community ahving "one each of everything as in a show-case."
Answering the "glorious bards of Massachusetts" who "taunt the lofty
land with little men," he names friends among the New Hampshire people
he admires and would not change. "I choose to be a plain New Hampshire
farmer," he says, in condemning extremists who demand that he take a
radical attitude.
—"Two Look at Two," blank-verse poem by Robert Frost, published in New Hampshire (1923). A
pair of lovers climb a wooded mountain, and at the approach of night
prepare to turn back but are halted on seeing a doe staring at them
across a fence. The spell broken when she calmly walks off, they are
about to go on again, but are stopped a second time by the appearance
in the same place of "an antlered buck of lusty nostril" who "viewed
them quizzically with jerks of head." After a moment he too disappears,
but the lovers stand spellbound,
As
if the earth in one unlooked-for favor Had
made them certain earth returned their love.
In 1928 he issued a fifth new volume, West-Running Brook, with the same
warm lyric quality that had characterized his first book. His Collected Poems
(1930, Pulitzer Prize) assembled in one volume the work that has a
lifelong continuity in its rhythms, its clear focusing on the
individual, and its observation of the native New England background.
After collecting his poems, although he held positions as an affiliated
teacher at Amherst, Harvard, and Michigan, he continued his literary
career and in 1936 published A
Further Range
(Pulitzer Prize), whose lyrics, though more playful in blending fact
and
fantasy, have beneath their frivolity a deep seriousness. A new edition
of Collected Poems (1939) was
followed by A Witness Tree
(1942, Pulitzer Prize); two blank-verse plays, A Masque of Reason (1946), about
Job, and A Masque of Mercy
(1947), in which Biblical characters in modern setting discuss ethics
and man's relation to God; and Steeple
Bush (1947) and In the
Clearing (1962), later lyrics. The standard collected edition is
The Poetry of Robert Frost
(1969), edited by Edward C. Lathem. His correspondence appears in Letters to Louis Untermeyer (1963)
and Selected Letters (1964),
edited by Lawrance Thompson. Thompson published a controversial full
biography—as official biographer—Robert
Frost (3 vols., 1966-77), giving a harsh view of the poet. A
less tendentious treatment is by William H. Pritchard, Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered
(1984).
Whose woods these are I think I
know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
From
The Oxford Companion to American
Literature, by Hart and Leininger:
Stephen
Crane (1871-1900),
born in New Jersey, spent most of his youth in upstate New York; he
attended Lafayette College and Syracuse University, each for a year,
before moving to New York City to become a struggling author and do
intermittent reporting for the Herald
and Tribune. His first book, Maggie, a Girl of the Streets
(1893), was too grim to find a regular publisher, and remained unsold
even when Crane borrowed from his brother to issue it privately. Early
in 1893, with no personal experience of war, deriving his knowledge
primarily from reading Tolstoy and Battles
and Leaders of the Civil War, he wrote The Red Badge of Courage (1895),
his great realist study of the mind of an inexperienced soldier trapped
in the fury and turmoil of battle.
The success of this book led to the reissue of Maggie, and Crane's reputation was
established. In quick succession appeared his book of free verse,
influenced by Emily Dickinson, The
Black Riders (1895); The
Little Regiment (1896), naturalistic Civil War stories, issued
in England as Pictures of War;
George's Mother (1896), the
story of the dull lives of a young workingman and his mother in New
York; and The Third Violet
(1897), a conventional novelette about the romance of a young artist.
Because of his successful treatment of war in his masterpiece, Crane
was thrust for most of his remaining life into the field of war
reporting. After a period as a correspondent in the South-West and in
Mexico, he was sent with a filibustering expedition to Cuba at the end
of 1896. The sinking of the ship and his subsequent 50-hour struggle
with the waves furnished the theme of his best-known short story, "The
Open Boat." Inexperience and illness made his trip to Greece, to report
the Turkish war, almost futile. Folowing a short residence in England,
he went to Cuba to report the Spanish-American War, and his
journalistic sketches and stories of this period are collected in Wounds in the Rain (1900). his
observation of the Greco-Turkish War resulted in Active Service (1899), a satirical
novel about a war correspondent.
Upon his return to New York, Crane's health was already broken by the
hardships he had endured, and possibly owing to his early treatment of
squalor in Maggie and rumors
about the immorality of his common-law wife, myth now arose to
the effect that he was a drunk, a drug addict, and generally depraved.
Disgusted by unpleasant notoriety, he returned to England, having
meanwhile published two collections of short stories, The Open Boat (1898) and The Monster (1899), and a second
volume of free verse, War is Kind
(1899). Whilomville Stories
(1900) is a collection of tales concerned with typical childhoood
incidents in a small New York town. Crane's last work shows a decrease
in power, for he was broken in health and soon died of tuberculosis in
Germany, where he had gone to seek a cure. Posthumously published
volumes include Great Battles of the
World (1901), an uninspired historical study; Last
Words (1902), a collection of his early tales and
sketches; The O'Ruddy (1903),
an unfinished romance, completed by Robert Barr; and Men, Women, and Boats (1921), a
selection, including several stories never before published. His Letters were collected in 1960,
and the University of Virginia issued a scholarly edition of his works
(10 vols., 1969-75).
Works
Maggie:
A Girl of the Streets, novel by Stephen
Crane, privately issued (1893) under the pseudonym Johnson Smith, but
not regularly published until 1896.
In a slum district of New York City called Rum Alley, Maggie Johnson
and her brother Jimmie are maltreated and neglected children of a
brutal workingman and his dipsomaniac wife. Maggie, attractive though
ignorant and ill cared for, somehow preserves an inner core of
innocence in her miserable, filthy environment. She finds work as a
collar worker in a sweatshop, while Jimmie becomes a truck driver,
typically hard-boiled and fight-loving. Their mother, now widowed, is
constantly drunk and has acquired a lengthy police record. Maggie falls
in love with Jimmie's tough friend Pete, a bartender, who easily
seduces her. For a brief time she lives with Pete, having been
melodramatically disowned by her mother. Jimmie offers only the
questionalble assistance of administering a beating to his former
friend. Pete abandons Maggie, who becomes a prostitute for a few
months. Then, heartbroken and unable to succeed in this uneasy,
exacting occupation, she commits suicide. Her mother makes a great
display of grief, send Jimmie to fetch home the body, and allows
herself to be persuaded by her drinking companions to "forgive" her
"bad, bad child."
The
Red Badge of Courage: An
Episode of the American Civil War,
novel by Stephen Crane, published in 1895. The original manuscript,
containing an added 5000 words (about 10% of the entirety) deleted by
the original publisher, was printed for the first time in 1982. This
psychological study of a soldier's reactions to warfare was written
before Crane had ever seen a battle. His knowledge was at least partly
derived from a popular anthology, Battles
and Leaders of the Civil War. The unnamed battle of the novel
has been identifies as that of Chancellorsville.
Henry Fleming, generally called simply "The youth" or "he," is an
ordinary, inexperienced soldier, "an unknown quantity," torn between a
"little panic-fear" and "visions of broken-bladed glory" as he faces
his first battle. He begins with the state of mind of the raw recruit
who is anxious to get into battle so that he may show his patriotism
and prove himself a hero. He swaggers to keep up his spirits during the
delay that precedes his suddenly being thrust into the slaughter. Then
he is overcome by unthinking fear and runs from the field. He is
ashamed when he joins the wounded, for he has not earned their "red
badge of courage," and then he becomes enraged when he witnesses the
horrid dance of death of his terribly maimed friend, Jim Conklin.
Later, by chance, he gets a minor head wound in a confused struggle
with one of the retreating infantry-men of his own army. The next day,
when his pretense is accepted that the wound is the result of enemy
gunfire, he suddenly begins to fight frantically, and then
automatically seizes the regiment's colors in the charge that
reestablishes its reputation. He moves through this sultry nightmare
with unconscious heroism, and emerges steady, quiet, and truly
courageous.
The
Black Riders and Other Lines,volume
of free verse by Stephen Crane, published in 1895. Influenced by
reading Emily Dickinson, Crane in these concise, intense unrhymed poems
foreshadows the work of the Imagists. Elliptical renderings of his
naturalistic philosophy, they show his bewildered bitterness of youth
buffeted by the great impersonal forces of the world.
The
Monster, and Other Stories, seven tales by Stephen Crane,
published in 1899.
"The Monster," a novelette set in Whilomville, N.Y., is a bitterly
ironic comentary on the cruelty and lack of sympathy of ordinary people
for an act of humanity they do not understand. Henry Johnson, a black
servant in the home of Dr. Trescott, rescuest the physician's young son
from a fire. He is terribly disfigured and loses his sanity, so that no
home can be found for him in the town. Horrified by the "monster," the
townspeople ostracize the doctor and his family because they harbor the
man. It finally appears that Trescott has sacrificed his entire
happiness for an ethical principle he formerly considered
unquestionable. "The Blue Hotel" describes the events that lead to
quarrels and a murder at a bar in a small Nebraska town. The victim, a
stupid, paranoid Swede, who dies with his eyes fixed on the ironic and
symbolic text on a cash register, "This registers the amount of your
purchase," is partly responsible for his own death, and his murderer is
hardly more responsible than others involved in a sequence of events,
although he is sentenced to the penitentiary, because "every sin is the
result of a collaboration," and the one who gets the punishment is the
one who hapens to be at "the apex of a human movement." "His New
Mittens" is concerned with the inner reactions of a small boy who runs
away from home, and the remaining stories are studies of men in
sensational situations or moments of intense excitement.
The
Little Regiment, and Other Episodes of the American Civil War,
six short stories by Stephen Crane, published in 1896 and issued in
England as Pictures of War
(1916).
The title story tells of two brothers in the Union army, whose seeming
antagonism conceals a deep affection. During a battle, one of them is
believed killed, and the other shows signs of bitter grief. When hi
brother suddenly reappears, they greet each other with a curt "hello"
and resume their pose of hostility. "Three Miraculous Soldiers" shows
the reactions of an ignorant Southern girl, who is terrified when a
Union detachment camps on her mother's farm. She helps three
Confederate prisoners to escape, but breaks into hysterical tears over
a sentry they have wounded. "A Mystery of Heroism" is concerned with
the reckless feat of a private who crosses a field during a violent
battle to fetch a pail of drinking water. Whan he returns, apparently
by miracle, the water is accidentally spilled because any of it can be
used. "The Veteran" tells of the heroism of an aged ex-coldier who
sacrifices his life to save the animals in a burning barn.
The
Open Boat, and Other Tales of Adventure,
eight short stories by Stephen Crane, published in 1898, mainly "after
the Fact" of his own experiences as a reporter and war correspondent.
"The Open Boat" is a realistic account of the thoughts and emotions of
four men who escape in a small dinghy from the wrecked steamer Commodore
off the Florida coast. The captain, the cook, an oiler, and a newspaper
correspondent, unable to land because of the dangerous surf, see the
beach tantalizingly near, but are forced to spend the night on the sea.
Next morning they employ their last strength to swim ashore, and all
but the oiler survive. "Death and the Child," reminiscent of The Red Badge of Courage,
has for its scene a battle of the Greco-Turkish War and is concerned
with the psychological reactions of a Greek newspapersman in his first
experience of warfare. At first he desires to fight with his
countrymen, but as he views the battle more intimately he is overcome
by fear and panic, and flees to a nearby mountain, where his
self-centered emotion is contrasted with the indifference of an
abandoned peasant child. "Flanagan, and His Short Filibustering
Adventure" narrates a melodramatic incident of arms smuggling in Cuba
before the Spanish-American War. The remaining stories are sardonically
realistic adventure tales in Mexico and the Far West. One is "The Bride
Comes to Yellow Sky," about a newly married couple, the marshal of
Yellow Sky, Tex., and his bride from San Antonio, who arrive on the
train in his town at the moment that the local bad man goes on a
drunken shooting spree. After a tense moment, the marshal is spared,
not because the bad man was a "student of chivalry; it was merely that
in the presence of this foreign condition he was a simple child of the
earlier plains."
Whilomville
Stories,
13 tales by Stephen Crane, published in 1900. Except for "The Knife,"
concerned with the humorous tribulations of two black men in the town
of Whilomville, when both try to steal the same watermelon, the stories
deal with typical childhood incidents among boys and girls of this
small New York town.
"The Angel Child" tells of an ingenious birthday entertainment invented
by little Cora Trescott, who treats her friends to haircuts at the shop
of an unperceptive barber, to the alarm and sorrow of their parents.
"Lynx-hunting" details the adventures of three small boys with a rifle
who seek a lynx, aim at a chipmuk, and hit a farmer's cow. "The Lover
and the Telltale" is concerned with the tragedy of Jimmie Trescott, who
attacks his school-fellows because they have derided him for writing a
love letter to his cousin Cora, and it is kept after school by his
teacher. "The Trial, Execution, and Burial of Homer Phelps" tells of
the imaginative play of a group of boys, and the misfortunes of their
unwilling victim. "A Little Pilgrimage" deals with the disastrous error
of Jimmie Trescott, who leaves his Sunday school because it has been
announced there will be no Christmas tree this year, only to join
another that follows the same policy. "'Showin' Off'" is a humorous
account of the rivalry between two youngsters for the favors of a vain
little girl in a red hood.
Una extraordinaria serie documental de la BBC
sobre la vida de Shakespeare, presentada por
Michael Wood. Aquí empieza el capítulo 1, "A Time of Revolution."
A
chapter on American realism and Henry James, from A
History of American Literature, by Richard Gray:
Howells never gravitated from realism to
naturalism, with its emphasis on the determining influence of heredity
and environment and its harrowing depiction of landscapes, social and
natural, that are at best indifferent and at worst hostile to
humankind. There is a fundamental benevolence, a belief in human worth
and social betterment, that is caught in one of his most famous remarks
in Criticism and Fiction:
"our novelists concern themselves with the more smiling aspects of
life, which are the more American." That remark would have elicited
sardonic laughter from Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?), who was known as
"bitter Bierce" and "the wickedest man in San Francisco" among his
contemporaries, and seemed to revel in both titles. Born in Ohio,
Bierce participated in the Civil War. The war disgusted him, prompting
him to see soldiers as little more than paid assassins and, when it
ended, he moved to California, where he established a reputation as a
brilliant and caustic journalism. Living in England for four years from
1872, he returned to California. He then published Tales of Soldiers and Civilians in
1891, retitled In the Midst of Life
in England and in the 1898 American edition. Another collection of
stories, Can Such Things Be?,
followed in 1893. More than half the stories in the first collection,
and many in the second, deal with the Civil War; they reflect their
author's feelings of revulsion for military life, and his bleak,
bitterly comic view of existence in general. Some of these stories
capture the vicious confusion of battle, just as, say Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession
to Loyalty
(1867) by John William De Forest (1826-1906) does. In "A Horseman in
the Sky," a young Union soldier is forced by circumstances to kill a
Confederate officer who happens to be his father. Others use
stream-of-consciousness and suspense endings to explore the
subjectivity of time. "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," for example,
presents the fantasy experienced by a man who is being hanged, in the
final seconds of his life. And still others deploy a fluid, almost
surrealistic prose style and black humor to dramatize physical and
emotional violence. So, in "Chickamanga," we see a battleground strewn
with corpses through the eyes of a child. The child sees but does not
understand—although, thanks to an ironic narrator, the reader
does—until the end, when he comes across the ruin of his home and the
dead body of his mother, "the greater part of the forehead ... torn
away." A deaf mute, he then utters "a series of inarticulate and
indescribable cries—something between the chattering of an ape and the
gobbling of a turkey—a starting, soulless, unholy sound." It is the
wreckage of a language, used in rsponse to the "wreck" he sees around
him; he has awoken, hopelessly and helplessly, to the horror of life.
The same dark light that simultaneously illuminates and shadows these
stories also informs Bierce's poems, and the ironic series of
definitions—such as the definition of realism quoted earlier—collected
in The Devil's Dictionary. [Realism
was described by Ambrose Bierce as "The art of depicting nature as it
is seen by toads" and having "the charm suffusing a landscape painted
by a mole, or a story written by a measuring worm"]. In 1913
Bierce traveled into war-tron Mexico to escape American civilization
and to seek, he said, "the good, kind darkness." He must have found it,
for he disappeared. To this day, it is not know when, how, or exactly
where he died.
At first sight, there are few connections between William Dean Howells
and Henry James (1843-1916). Both saw writing as a serious vocation,
and the writing of fiction as a form of artistic endeavor equal to any
other. Both were influential, Howells exerting a powerful influence on
his contemporaries and James mostly on his successors. Both addressed
their work to what they saw as "the real thing," to use James's phrase:
to the strenuous realities of material, mental, and moral existence.
But the differnces between them are clear. Howells, in his very
emphasis on the "commonplace," tended to concentrate on human likeness,
typicality, and give priority, if not a monopoly, to the social
context. James, on the other hand, was intensely interested in what he
called "the special case"; that is, he chose to focus on how common
moral conflicts and shared social concerns were realized in the
complexities of individual experience and encountered by the individual
consciousness. Howells used a variety of fictional techniques, but all
of them were characterized by the directness of the journalist or
historian. James, on the contrary, was what Joseph Conrad famously
called him, "the historian of fine consciences." And to write this
history, thoroughly and accurately, he devoted a lifetime to finding
and developing the right fictional tools. "There is, I think, no more
nutritive or suggestive truth," James wrote in his preface to The Portrait of a Lady
(1881), .".. than that of the perfect dependence of the 'moral' sense
of a work of art on the amount of felt life concerned in producing it."
To create that "felt life," an imaginative experience for the reader,
James experimented with narrative structure and texture, developing
patterns of character or imagery and moments of epiphany—and, above
all, with point of view. "The house of fiction," James insisted, "has
... not one window, but a million—a number of possible windows ...
every one of which has been pierced, or is still pierceable ... by the
need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual
will." It mattered hugely, James knew, which window or windows the
novelist chose to tell his tale because, in a variation of the theory
of relativity or the indeterminacy or uncertainty principle of Werner
Heisenberg (both of which were becoming current at the time James was
still writing), what you saw depended on where you stood. James was not
a moral relativist, by any means, but he became increasingly a
psychological one. His constant experiments with narrative viewpoint,
which were perhaps to be his major contribution to the developing
aesthetics of the novel, sprang ultimately from the sense he shared
with many of his contemporaries in science as well as art that our
knowledge of reality is contingent on perspective.
Howells might have been more interested in social justice and the
simplicities of realism than James; James might have been more
concerned with a kind of secular mysticism of consciousness and the
indeterminate, contingent character of the real. But it is to Howells's
credit that, as critic and editor, he was among the first to recognize
James's talent. "You showed me the way and opened me the door," James
wrote to Howells in gratitude in 1912; "you wrote to me, and confessed
yourself struck with me—I have never forgotten the beautiful thrill of
that." Credit is due to Howells all the more, perhaps, because as they
knew, the two men came from very different backgrounds. James was born
in New York City to a wealthy, patrician family, the grandson of an
Irish immigrant who had amassed a large fortune. His father, Henry
James, Sr. (1811-1882), acquired a reputation as a moral and social
philosopher, developing his own form of liberal Christianity and ideas
for social reform in books like Christianity
the Logic of Creation (1857) and Substance and Shadow; or Morality and
Religion in Their Relation to Life
(1863). Henry James, Sr. encouraged intellectual experiment in his sons
and gave them the freedom to develop their own systems of morality and
discipline. The results were positive. While Henry was to grow up and
into a dedication to literature, the eldest son William James
(1842-1910) was to become the foremost American philosopher of his day,
developing his ideas about psychology and religion and his view that an
idea has meaning only in relation to its consequences in feeling and in
action in, respectively, The
Principles of Psychology (1890), The Varieties of Religious Experience
(1902), and Pragmatism
(1907). These enlightened principles did not extend to women, however.
On the contrary, Henry James, Sr. argued that "Woman" was not truly a
person but "a form of personal affection," whose mission it was to
redeem man from his natural egotism and brutality. Such views, not
untypical for the time, meant that Alice James (1848-1892), the
youngest child and only daughter, was denied the formal education given
to her brothers. Her family, while respecting her abilities—she was,
among other things, an astute critic of both her famous
brothers—coddled and, arguably, stifled her. She had several breakdowns
during her relatively short life; and her daily journal, which she
seems to have intended for publication, only appeared in 1964 as The Diary of Alice James.
After being educated by private tutors until the age of 12, Henry James
went to schools in Europe and the United States. Entering Harvard Law
School in 1862, he withdrew after a year. Then, with the encouragement
of Howells and Charles Eliot Norton (1827-1908), a Harvard professor
and translator of Dante, he began to concentrate on writing. Reviews
and essays appeared in the Atlantic
Monthly and the North
American Review.
In 1869 he returned to Europe, his first visit as an adult, first to
England and then to Italy, which made a deep impression on him. It was
while he was in Europe that his beloved cousin Mary Temple died. How
exactly this affected his later fiction is open to debate, although the
situation of an attractive, lively but doomed or even fatally sick
young girl certainly recurs in such novels as The Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of the Dove (1902) and in
the novella Daisy Miller
(1878). In any event, James's first novel, Watch and Ward, apperared serially
in the Atlantic Monthly in
1871 (and in volume form in 1878). This was followed by his first
collection, A Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales (1875)
and Transatlantic Sketches
(1875), and his first novels of real consequence, Roderick Hudson (1876), The American (1877), and The Europeans
(1878). The story "A Passionate Pilgrim" deals with the reactions of an
eater American "pilgrim" when confronted with the fascinations of the
complex European world of art and affairs. And James himself during
this period was something of a pilgrim in Europe, which he came to
regard as his spiritual fatherland, moving there permanently in 1875.
During a year in Paris, he associated with such masters of the art of
fiction as Flaubert and Turgenev, who encouraged his interest in what
Flaubert called "le mot juste": the right word, the careful planning of
the language and structure of the novel so as to make it an accurate
register of reality. After 1876, however, he made his home mainly in
London, although he maintained an American home in Massachusetts and,
much later, moved to the small town of Rye in Sussex.
James was developing his ideas about his craft, and expressing them in,
for instance, his well-known essay on "The Art of Fiction" (1884). He
was also exploring what were to be the dominant themes of this the
first stage of his career as a novelist, which lasted from roughly 1870
until 1890. There is James's interest in the mired complexities of fate
and freedom, the possibly determining influences of environment and the
possible power, the capacities of the human will: "don't talk about the
will being 'destined'," declares a character in Roderick Hudson as a contribution
to the debate, "The will is destiny itself. That's the way to look at
it." There is his concern for the individual consciousness and the
terms it must negotiate with society, how it maneuvers its way through
moral and mental complexities. Above all, there is "the international
theme," the series of contrasts James draws between Europe and America.
In his book on Nathaniel Hawthorne
(1879) James urged that "the good American" of his own time would be a
more complicated, "more critical person" than the one of the time of
his subject. He was thinking, among other things, of his own difference
from the author of The Scarlet
Letter, which was due, he thought, not only to the eruptions of
civil conflict but to his exemplary encounter with European culture.
There is a residue of "American" romanticism, as James would see it, in
these novels of the first period: stories of young American pilgrims,
dark family secrets, oppressive villains. But this is overlaid by
habits of realism, empirical rigor, and attention to mannerly detail
that James, at least, felt he owed to his European masters: to Flaubert
or Turgenev, say, rather than to Hawthorne. More seriously and
centrally, James was of the passionate belief that, as he puts it in
his account of Hawthorne, "it takes a great deal of history to produce
a little literature"—and that, despite the Civil War, history "had left
in the United States but so thin and impalpable a deposit that we very
soon touch the hard substratum of nature." What America lacked was
what, precisely, Europe had: "an accumulation of history and custom,"
"a complexity of manners and types," all that could form a fund of
suggestion for a novelist." James even went so far as to enumerate "the
absent things in American life," the "items of high civilisation"
which, he felt, were nowhere to be found in his place of birth. He was
less specific about what was present, apart form insisting that "a good
deal remains." What was clear, however, and could be succintly stated
is that he felt compelled, as a novelist, to live in Europe and, as an
American novelist, to dwell on this contrast. As a result, he offered a
series of increasingly sophisticated fictional negotiations between
European culture and American nature, European society and the American
individual, European experience and American innocence. To an extent,
he was transplanting a contrast embedded in American thought, and
especially that of the nineteenth century, to the international arena:
a contrast articulated in the fundamental divisions of the clearing and
the wilderness. But what distinguished this fiction was not merely the
transplantation of content but also the transformation of form. "A
novel is a living thing," James insisted in "The Art of Fiction", "all
one and continuous, like any other organism and in proportion as it
lives will it be found ... that in each of its parts there is something
of each of the other parts." That belief vividly informed his own
practice as a novelist. It stimulatied fictions in which, at best, the
medium is the message, the "moral of the narrative springs from a
"doing" that is subtly intricate and mutually restrained, balanced and
brilliantly nuanced.
In The American, James
explores the contrast between Europe and America through the story of a
protagonist whose name betrays his origins and missions. Christopher
Newman is an American cho reverses the voyage of his namesake
Christopher Columbus and travels from his own, New World to the Old
World of France during the Bourbon period. There, he finds his love for
a Frenchwoman of the nobility frustrated by her family. Jemes draws a
series of sly contrasts between Newman's innocence, candor, and
ignorance (especially about matters of art and social convention) and
the sophistication and cunning of his European hosts. The Europeans reverses this voyage,
in turn, by bringing Europeans to New England. The transatlantic
contrasts multiply and are more complex here, but the fundamental
distinctions remain the same. In response to the news, for instance,
that one of the European visitors is "the wife of a Prince," an older
American character simply responds, "We are all princes here." Daisy Miller focuses the
international contrast via the story of a charming but ingenous
American girl who is destroyed, first socially and then literally, by
her lack of understanding of her new European surroundings. Part of the
exemplary subtlety of the story comes from a symbolic pattern it shares
with The American and The Europeans: contrasting American
"brightness," starkness, and simplicity with European shadows, secrets,
and complexities. Part of it comes from the adept use of a narrator, an
obsrver whose developing interest in Daisy, mingled sympathy and
criticism, affection and astonishment, and developing feelings and
opinions enable the narrative to maintain a delicate balance.
Typically, the story offers not so much a judgment of Daisy and all she
comes to represent, as a series of essays toward a critical
understanding of both, a knowledge felt along the pulses. It nicely
illustrates the remark of T. S. Eliot, meant as a compliment although
it hardly sounds like it, that James had a mind so fine no idea could
penetrate it.
That is even more finally illustrated by the major work of the first
period, and arguably James's greatest novel, The Portrait of a Lady. It is, as
James put it, the story of "a certain young woman affronting her
destiny." Isabel Archer, a penniless orphan living in Albany, New York,
is taken up by her Aunt, Lydia Touchett. She goes to England to stay
with her aunt and uncle and their tubercular son, Ralph. There, she
declines the proposals of both Caspar Goodwood, a rich American, and
Lord Warborton, an English aristocrat. Wealthy now, thanks to an
inheritance from Mr. Touchett arranged for her by Ralph, she then
accepts the proposal of an American expatriate, a widower and
dilettante living in Florence, Gilbert Osmond. She is introduced to
Osmond by another expatriate, Madame Merle, and is impressed by his
taste and refinement. Soon after the marriage, however, she discovers
him to be selfish, sterile and oppressive. She also finds that Osmond's
young daughter, Pansy, is actually the daughter of Madame Merle and
that this was the reason for the woman's introducing her to Osmond and
promoting the marriage. Despite Osmond forbidding her, Isabel leaves
for England when she hears Ralph is dying, and is at his side when he
dies. Despite a last attempt from Caspar Goodwood to persuade Isabel to
go away with him, though, Isabel determines to return to Osmond. And
the novel closes with her accepting her destiny, or perhaps more
accurately the consequences of her choices, and preparing to go back to
a home that is more like a prison. Stated baldly, the story has strong
elements of romance of fairytale, just like The Scarlet Letter: the awakening
of a sleeping beauty, the three suitors, a villain whose "egotism lay
hidden like a serpent in a bank of flowers," a heroine held captive
in "the house of darkness, the house of dumbness, the house of
suffocation." the sick young cousin who observes and admires her from
afar before dying, the voyage of an American Adam—or, rather, Eve—and
their exile from Paradise. But what distinghishes it, in the reading,
is its adherence to the substantial realities of the social life and
the subtle realities of the life of the consciousness. Isabel Archer is
as much like the heroines of, say, Middlemarch
or Daniel Deronda by George
Eliot as she is like Hester Prynne: the imaginative maneuvers of the
book represent as much an encounter between the American and the
European as its story does. It is both of and about a collision of
cultures.
One reason for the subtle but substantial reality of Isabel herself is
that James focuses on her. "Place the center of the subject in the
young woman's own consciousness," James tells us, in the preface, he
told himself when he was writing the book. "Stick to that—for the center." As for the
other characters, he explains, his aim was to "press least hard" on
"the consciousness" of his "heroine's satellites, especially the male,"
so as to "make it an interest contributive only to the greater one.
James wanted to reveal the ful implications of the developing
consciousness of his protagonist. So the reader experiences a lot
through her, and shares the lively animations of her mind on the move
but, in addition, sees her from the outside, through the comments and
often critical commentary of the narrator—and through the observations
of characters like Ralph Touchett. We understand her sense of herself,
her moods and changes, but we also take the measure of "the whole
envelope of circumstances" in which she is implicated.
Characteristically of James, the strategy is part of the debate. That
phrase "the whole envelope of circumstances" is used by Madame Merle,
who has adapted to a European vision sufficiently to believe that self
and circumstance, the human being and his shell, are indivisible.
"One's self—for other people—is one's expression of one's self," she
insists. Isabel disagrees. Subscribing to the American romance of the
self, she believes in freedom as an absolute and the individual as
somehow separable from conditions and circumstances. "Nothing that
belongs to me is any measure of me," she insists; "everything's on the
contrary a limit, a barrier, and a perfectly arbitrary one." James
wryly complicates this debate by intimating that his heroine's profound
belief in herself, her "fixed determination to regard the world as a
place of brightness, of free expansion," may itself spring from
circumstance. She has grown up in a world, the new world of America,
where there have been few forms of authorities, no rigorous or rigidly
enforced social practices, to challenge that belief. But that
complication is further complicated by the clear admiration that
Isabel's "flame-like spirit" inspires in the narrator, observers such
as Ralph Touchett, and the reader. There is candor and honesty here, a
fundamental integrity and capacity for wonder as well as innocence, an
openness that leaves her vulnerable—and, by some measures ast least,
humanly incomplete.
With the characters surrounding Isabel, some are quietly developed, the
reader comes to know them gradually—sometimes for good, as with Ralph
Touchett, and sometimes as with Osmond and Madame Merle, for ill.
Others, like Lydia Touchett, are flatter and deftly summarized when
they are introduced. All, however, contribute to our understanding of
the heroine and the representative character of her transatlantic
encounter. A minor character such as Henrietta Stackpole, for instance,
another young American woman abroad, helps the character place Isabel
further; so do the sisters of Lord Warburton, "the Misses Molyneaux."
Henrietta is self-confidence and independence to the point of bluster:
"Henrietta ... does smell of the future," Ralph observes, "—it almost
knocks one down!" The Misses Molyneaux are compliant and decorous to
the point of vanishing into their surroundings. The character of Isabel
is mapped out using such minor characters as coordinates, in a manner
James had learned from another novelist he admired, Jane Austen. And it
is mapped out, too, in Isabel's perilous voyage between the
possibilities represented by her first two suitors and the alternatives
they vigorously embody: America, with its devotion to individual
initiative, enterprise, and possibility, and Europe, with its adherence
to mannerliness, custom, and tradition, the rich fabric woven out of
the past. Isabel's voyage is a literal one, to begin with, when she
leaves New York for England: landscapes that here, as throughout
James's fiction, have a symbolic as well as a literal application, with
the starkness and simplicity of the one contrasting with the opulence
and grandeur of the other. But it becomes an intensely symbolic one
when Ralph Touchett tries, as he puts it, to put some "wind in her
sails" by arranging for her to receive a bequest from his father.
Isabel, too, tires to put wind in the sails of someone else. She is
drawn to Gilbert Osmond precisely because she believes she can help him
fulfill the requirements of his imagination. With Goodword or Warurton,
she would, in a sense, be embarking on a ship that has already set
sail; comitting her destiny to one that had achieved full definition
beforeshe appeared; she would, perhaps, be resigning herself to the
authority or at least ambience of another. But with Osmond, she
believes, it would be she herself who would enable the voyage, create
the destiny. "He was like a skeptical voyager strolling on the beach
while he waited for the tide, looking seaward yet not putting to sea,"
Isabel observes of the man she eventually marries. "She would launch
his boat for him; she would be his providence; it would be a good thing
to love him." In fact, it is not "a good thing" at all. Osmond, as it
turns out, had just as firm a notion that he would be her providence,
when he married Isabel. "Her mind was to be his," Isabel bitterly
reflects after she has come to know her husband. "—attached to his own
like a small garden-plot to a deer park." What all this adumbrates is a
theme interwoven with the contrast between Europe and America, and dear
to the heart of Hawthorne as much as James: the human use of human
beings. The complex interplay of character focused in the figures of
voyaing reminds us that to declare oneself may be to deny another.To
enable is also to authorize, to will the fate of someone else; the re
is only a thin membrane separating freedom from power and power from
what hawthorne called the unpardonable sin.
James's response to the problem he opens up, as he examines his
characters' attempts to negotiate their freedom, is a dual one, and is
typical in thesense that it involves what happens in The Portrait of a Lady and how it
is written .What happens is that Isabel decides to go back to Gilbert
Osmond. To run away with Goodwood would suggest that Madame Merle had
been right after all, and admission from Isabel that the "envelope" of
her unfortunate circumstances was influential enought to make her evade
the consequences of her own actions with a man she never loved. To
return involves an acceptance of those consequences, and a fulfillment
of a promise made earlier to Pansy, Osmond's daughter, that she would
come back. It maks her victory over circumstance and over the naive
ideal of freedom she had brought with her from America. That ideal had
identified freedom with limitless power, the boundless pursuit of her
own needs. Pursuing it, she married a man who has sought to extinguish
her. Abandoning, or rather refining, it, she now sets freedom as
conditional on knowledge: being clearsighted enough to choose the right
course with reference to all responsibilities and probable
consequences. In choosing to go back, Isabel transcends her
circumstances by accepting them, keeps her word and keeps faith with
herself—accepting her responsibility for her past and future. The
choice
on which the novel ends depends on a subtle balance between self and
circumstance, in that it involves the recognition that expression of
the one properly depends on awarness of the other: that freedom is a
matter of responsible, realistic self-determination. And that same
balance is at work with its narrative texture. James, as he maeant to,
does not yield to the determining nature of circumstance here, although
he admits its irreducible reality. Nor, while emphasizing the power of
consciousness, does he present that power as separate and inviolable,
somehow superior to the circumstance it encounters. What he does, in
his fictional practice, is what he preached in his criticism. He enters
into a complex series of negotiations betwen the "moral" and the "felt
life," the meaningful structures organizing experience and the
contingencies, the fluid processes in which tose structures are
embedded. He assets the authority of authorship, the strength of his
own individual will as writer, but he also accepts tha authority, the
reality of the "living thing," the imaginative experience that
constitutes the story. Not only that, he shows that assertion of the
one depends precisely on acceptance of the other: that, like any other
living organism, the meaning of the novel is its being.
James returned to America in 1882, shortly before the death of his
mother. His father died in the same year, and then in 1883 his younger
brother, Wilky. his sense of attachment to his place of birth was
drastically reduced by these deaths. And the second period of his
writing career, broadly from the middle of the 1880s to 1900, was
marked by an attachment to English settings in much of his fiction. The Princess Cassamassima (1886),
for instance, is set in London and deals with all social classes,
exploring the tension between private sensibility and political belief.
Other works of the period include The
Bostonians (1886), a satirical study of the movement for female
emancipation in New England ("the situation of women," James explained,
"the decline of the sentiment of sex, and the agitation on their
behalf" was the most striking aspect of American life of the time); The Aspern Papers (1888), a
collection of stories, and The
Spoils of Poynton (1897). James made a venture into writing
plays at this time, which proved disastrous. It came to a humiliating
end when his play Guy Domville
was given a riotous reception on its first night in 1895. The venture
did, however, encourage him to develop dramatic techniques for his
fiction. If the first period of James's career could be described in
terms of moral realism, and the third in terms of psychological
realism—although these are, necessarily, labels that do less than full
justice to the sophistication of his art—then the second could be
called a period of dramatic realism. James used careful manipulation of
point of view, elaborate patterning of contrasting episodes and
characters, and a focus on dialogue and dramatic scene to achieve here
what he always sought: "the maximum of intensity," to use his own
words, "with the minimum of strain." The results are powerfully evident
in a novel like What Maisie Knew
(1897) that explores adultery, infidelity, and betrayal. The entire
story, although written in the third person, is told from the point of
view of the perceptive but naive young girl Maisie, who is just 6 years
old when her parents are divorced. The strategy enables James to
achieve economy, intensity, and irony as he combines and implicitly
compares what Maisie sees with what the narrative voice intimates.
Toward the end of his second period, James confirmed his reputation as
a writer of short stories with tales many of which were about writers
and writing. Like "The Lesson fo the Master" (1888), "The Middle Years"
(1893), and "The Figure in the Carpet" (1896). Again, many of these
tales are fitted into life by James's ingenious, inspired use of
narrative viewpoint. In "The Turn of the Screw" (1898), for example,
the entire narrative depends for its intensity of terror on the fact
that everything occurs in the mind of a governess, who desperately
needs corroboration that she is not mad in attributing supernatural
experiences to her young charges and seeing dead people. The reader is
left in doubt, thanks to the possible unreliability of the narrator, as
to whether or not she sees ghosts or hallucinations—and as to whether
this is a Gothic story of evil or a psychological tale about repression
and projection. In tis own modest fashion, "The Turn of the Screw"
prepares the way for the emotional and pychological subtleties, the
sense the reader has of wandering through the labyrinth of the human
mind, that characterize the three major novels of the third and final
period of James's career: The
Ambassadors, written in 1901 and published in 1903, The Wings of the Dove (1902) and The Golden Bowl (1904). In all
three, James returns to the international theme. In The Ambassadors, for instance,
Lambert Strether is sent by a wealthy widow, Mrs. Newsome, to persuade
her son Chad to return to Massachusetts. Gradually, however, he grows
less enthusiastic about his mission, as he becomes more and more
receptive to the charms of England and France. Abandoning his aims, and
with them the prospect of an advantageous marriage to Mrs.
Newsome—which is his promised reward, if he fulfills them—he even
encourages the liaison between Chad and a charming Frenchwoman, Madame
de Vionnet. It would be "the last infamy," he tells Chad, if he forsook
her. "Live all you can," Strether declares to another character, when
he is provoked by a sense of his own tentative life, "it's a mistake
not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as
you have your life. If you haven't had that what have you had?" Nevertheles,
Strether remains detached, conent to observe rather than participate,
eventually returning to his inconsequential life as a widower in
Massachusetts. As he searches fro the reality of Chad's motives, and
the truth of hiw own relationship to life, living, and the conflicting
cultures of America and England, there is speculation, mediatation, but
fundamental irresolution. Europe has its own secrecies—the liaison of
Chad and Madame de Vionnet, he eventually discovers, has been an
intimate one—just as America has its absuridites. Life is for living,
it may be, but not for him. This story of transatlantic encounters
acquires some clarity by an elaborate balancing of scene and character:
there are four major scenes set in a plainly allegorical garden, for
instance, in which knowledge is slowly acquired and, in the course of
the action, Chad and Strether change moral places. But it also acquires
a certain mystery, even opacity from James's determination to follow
the smallest refinement of emotional detail, the slightest nuance of
social gesture—and from a style that, in the service of this pursuit,
often becomes formidably, impenetrably intricate.
In the last few decades of his life, James devoted much of his time to
preparing the New York edition of his novels. He made revisions that
often reflectd his later dedication to a more allusive style. A
reference, in the original version of The
Portrait of a Lady, to the fact that Ralph Touchett had "simply
accepted the situation" of invalid was altered, for instance, to this:
"His serenity was but the array of wild flowers niched in his ruin." He
also wrote eighteen new prefaces for his novels. He traveled widely,
and wrote about his travels in The
American Scene (1907) and Italian
Hours (1909). He published two volumes of autobiography, A Small Boy and Others (1913) and Notes of a Son and Brother (1914);
and a third volume, The Middle Years
appeared posthumously in 1917. Angered by American reluctance to
become involved in World War I, he became a British citizen in 1913.
But, in a sense, as T. S. Eliot was later to put it, it was not the
condition of being English to which he—or, at least, part of
him—aspired bu the condition of being European, "something which no
born European, no person of any European nationality, can become."
James anticipated the direction in which many American writers were to
move in the twentieth century: in his concern with the complex fate of
being an American in an international culture, his concern with the
possibly limited terms of American culture and the fragments that could
perhaps be rescued from the ruins of European tradition, in his growing
concern with the romance and mystery of the consciousness. He
assimilated the romantic tendencies that were part of the pressure of
the age into which he was born, the moral rigor that was a continuing
characteristic of his part of the nation; he also moved, especially in
his later work, toward the modernist conviction that the truth of art
and the truth of life are one and the same. A summative and seminal
writer, James stands at the juncture between two centuries, and
different moments in American writing. He was also, complexly, his own
man. There is no more satisfactory way of summing up that complexity
than the one James himself was probably alluding to when he called his
last fragment of autobiography "The Middle Years." The title is also
that of an earlier story, published in 1895, in which a dying
writer
makes a statement of faith that his creator might well have made for
himself. "We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have,"
the writer declares. "Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our
task. The rest is the madness of art."
Abascal: "Donde España se ha
retirado, la libertad ha desaparecido"
Contra
la cesión a los secesionistas: España
pertenece a todos los españoles—y no debe tolerarse la apropiación
fraccionaria de cada región por los nacionalistas y separatistas.
Discurso de Santi Abascal—el discurso patriótico que NO
hace Mariajo Rajoy, ni ningún líder del PP ni del PSOE—el día de la
Constitución.
Una vez más, repito mi cantinela. No hay que votar al PSOE, ni al PP,
ni por supuesto a ningún nacionalista ni a quien les apoye o pacte con
ellos.
Narrative
perspective and psychological realism: On Henry James's theory of the
novel
Only in the second half of the 19th century do we find a purposive
aesthetic theory of the novel. Flaubert, Maupassant, Henry James and
Zola put forward the view that the novel is a serious form of art,
emphasizing formal construction rather than simple imitation of
reality. Henry James has been called "the best reader of Henry James."
A great deal of his best criticism is found in the prefaces to his
novels, in which he comments on the works and the technique of the
novel.
James' main statement on this subject is his essay "The Art of Fiction"
(1884). He knows that he opens a new era in the English novel:
the novel in the earlier 19th century, he says, was "unselfconscious,"
"pre-theoretical," "naïve." Accordingly, its claims were modest, and it
did not set itself any purposive ideals. It was assumed to be a
"make-believe," a fiction unable to represent the complexity of life.
But this must not be so.
The
only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to
represent life. (662).
In order to do this, the novel must above all change its tone. The
recognition of fictionality, the intrusiveness of 19th century authors
must disappear. There the Victorian novelists gave themselves away:
Certain
accomplished novelists have a habit of giving themselves away which
must often bring tears to the eyes of people who take their fiction
seriously. I was lately struck, in reading over many pages of Antony
Trollope, with his want of discretion in this particular. In a
digression, a parenthesis or an aside he concedes to the reader that he
and his trusting friend are only "making believe". He admits that the
events he narrates have not really happened, and that he can give his
narrative any turn the reader may like best. Such a betrayal of a
sacred office seems to me, I confess, a terrible crime. ("The Art of
Fiction," in Critical Theory since
Plato, ed. Hazard Adams, 662)
James does not want to give himself away. The novelist must speak with
the assurance of a historian. To do otherwise is a "betrayal of a
sacred office"—a religious metaphor which is often used by the
aestheticist propounders of art for art's sake.
As a critic, James discusses above all this sacred office, the activity
of the novelist, but incidentally he develops a formalist theory of the
novel seen as a completed aesthetic object (as the aim of the
novelist). The artist is a central presence in all of James' criticism,
sharply contrasting with his assertion that this presence must not be
felt.
James opposes abstract theoretical analysis of the elements in the
novel. He sees the novel as an organic whole: for him there is no sense
in dividing action from character, or description from dialogue, etc.:
they are all fused as the flesh and the blood in a living being; they
melt into each other:
A
novel is a living thing, all one and continuous, like any other
organism, and in proportion as it lives will it be found, that in each
of the parts there is something of each of the other parts. The critic
who over the closed texture of a finished work shall pretend to trace a
geography of items will mark some frontiers as artificial, I fear, as
any that have been known to history. . . . (666)
You cannot divide, as other critics were doing, a novel of characters
from a novel of incidents. In all good novels, character and incident
define one another. As James says in one of the famous prefaces he
wrote for a later edition of his works,
I
might envy, though I couldn't emulate, the imaginative writer so
constituted as to see his fable first and to make out its agents
afterwards: I could think so little of any fable that didn't need its
agents positively to launch it; I could think so little of any
situation that didn't depend for its interest on the nature of the
persons situated, and thereby on their way of taking it.
And in "The Art of Fiction":
There
are bad novels and good novels, as there are bad pictures and good
pictures, but that is the only distinction in which I see any meanin,
and I can as little imagine speaking of a novel of character as I can
imagine speaking of a picture of character. When one says picture one
says of character, when one says novel one says of incident, and the
terms may be transposed at will. What is character but the
determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of
character? What is either a picture or a novel that is not of
character? (665)
James opposes Walter Besant's reductive definition of the novel as
something ultimately concerned with telling a good story full of
action, as well as Trollope's idea that character is all in the novel,
that the plot is something unimportant, and something which is not
necessarily linked with character. The psychological analysis of the
character and the formal structure of the novel coincide in James: his
novels are at the same time psychological studies and formal
experiments, and the revelation of the character's self is dealt with
through an original formal organization, a careful distribution of the
perception of the action and judgment about the action. The
relationship between action and character is defined as an organic one,
but perhaps it could best be defined as a relation of organic
subordination of action to character. Here James is arguing not only
for an adequate description of the unity of a novel, but also for the
novel of character and psychology against a narrow notion of the novel
of action (vs. Besant's concern with plot):
There
are few things more exciting to me, in short, than a psychological
reason, and yet, I protest, the novel seems to me the most magnificent
form of art . . . . The other arts, in comparison, appear confined and
hampered; the various conditions under which they are exercised are so
rigid and definite. (668)
The novel (unlike drama) can reveal to us the inner life of characters,
and this is the essence of the genre, which otherwise must follow, in
James' opinion, a dramatic ideal of concentration (cf. Aristotle on
tragedy). But the novel is a free form, he says. It has no grammar
which can be defined, no rules that can be taught.
A
novel is in its broadest definition a personal, a direct impression of
life. ("Art" 664).
The intensity of the impression and the execution are the grounds of
its value, and they cannot be defined. They stem directly from the
personal way each novelist sees life. This in some contrast with all we
have said of his criticism of the Victorian novels. His own novels are
thoughtful, concentrated, calculated works of art, while Victorian
novels are "loose, baggy monsters" without technique or design. James
thinks there are no rules, but he also thinks his own way is superior,
his own technique more refined, his own vision more adequate. Still, we
have here a profession of tolerance and catholicity.
It is an irony of fate that the theory of the novel should have
profited so much from James' own analyses of his novels, given the
little faith he has in theoretical definitions and analysis. In his
prefaces, we find some of the most clear and influential statements of
the nineteenth century on point of view and narrative voice, as well as
on action and character.
James makes a distinction between voice and point of view in his
novelistic practice as well as in his theoretical statements. This
distinction comes from his concern with the ability of the novel to
depict experience and psychological life. First-person novel will not
do for this, because James is not looking for a conscious revelation of
the person, or for a kind of novel based on recollection of past
experience, which is what 1st person narrative implies. His novels are
usually written in the 3rd person, which is less "intrusive," more
"dramatic." Where James does otherwise, he makes sure that the result
will be equally dramatic—for instance, using an unreliable narrator in
the main narrative of The Turn of
the Screw. The action should in any case unfold in a transparent
way, without the writer stepping in to make his own comments. We are
shown its development through significant scenes, we are not simply
told. Percy Lubbock will develop in his book The Craft of Fiction (1922) some of
James' insights in this particular.
And there is an ideal way of "showing" in third person narration which
is at once dramatic and psychologically immediate. This is what James
usually calls narration through "centers of consciousness" (preface to
The Portrait of a Lady ), "vessels of sensibility" or "reflectors"
(preface to The Wings of the Dove),
and which we now usually call focalizer characters. The scenes usually
act on a perceiving character, an reflector or focalizer, whose
psychological reaction, the development of his understanding of the
action, helps give the plot an organic unity. This is the role of
Strether in The Ambassadors,
of Maisie in What Maisie Knew.
James does not require, as some of his followers, that there be no
changes of perspective during the narrative; but he does seek to cut
the story into perspectival blocks that are internally coherent. For
instance, in The Wings of the Dove,
the story of Milly Theale is seen mainly through the eyes of two
characters, Merton Densher and Kate Croy, as well as her own. Every
change or apparent incoherence of point of view, James says, has its
aesthetic justification, its dramatic coherence:
There was the "fun", to begin with, of establishing one's succesive
centres- of fixing them so exactly that the portions of the subject
commanded by them as from happy points of view, and accordingly treated
from them, would constitute, so to speak, sufficiently solid blocks of
wrought material, squared to the sharp edge, as to have weight and mass
and carrying power; to make for construction, that is, to conduce to
effect and to provide for beauty....
Do I sometimes in fact forfeit the advantage of that distinctness? Do I
ever abandon one center for another after the former has been
postulated? From the moment we proceed by "centres"—and I have never, I
confess, embraced the logic of any superior process—they must be, each
as a basis, selected and fixed; after which it is that, in the high
interest of economy of treatment, they determine and rule. There is no
economy of treatment without an adopted, a related point of view, and
though I understand, under certain degrees of pressure, a represented
community of vision between several parties to the action when it makes
for concentration, I understand no breaking-up of the register, no
sacrifice of the recording consistency, that doesn't scatter and
weaken.
Just as in Aristotle we found that an action or praxis had to be
treated artistically before it became the plot or mythos, we find in
James a distinction between the "subject" and the "wrought material" or
novel, and in the Formalists we shall find a related opposition between
fabula and siuzhet. A series of rules on the use of point of view
define what is the relationship between the material and the finished
novel. Form and psychology converge: the dramatic form gives us a new
insight into the characters' perception and interiority. We see that
James conceives of these "rules" he formulates on the use of point of
view as organic, internal rules, which spring from the very nature of
the psychological material of the novel. They will be transformed by
many critics in the 20th century into external, a priori rules to
decide on the quality of any novel, irrespective of its internal
economy.
The influence of James's ideas is readily apparent in most
important twentieth-century writers on fictional technique and point of
view : Percy Lubbock (The Craft of
Fiction, 1921), Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren (Understanding Fiction, 1943), Jean
Pouillon (Temps et roman, 1947),
F. K. Stanzel (Typische
Erzählsituationen, 1954), Norman Friedman ("Point of View in
Fiction," 1955); W. C. Booth (The
Rhetoric of Fiction, 1961), Gérard Genette ("Discours du récit",
1972), Mieke Bal (Narratologie,
1977).
James also opposes external rules as to which is to be the aim of
literature:
"The
only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without
incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting"
("Art" 663)
His ideas about the relationship between the work and the world are of
little consequence, contrasting with the heavily moral interest of the
novels themselves. In his theory he does not seem to go beyond a vague
belief in realism and morality. A novel is an impression of life, and
the quality and vividness of this impression is more valuable than the
moral purpose of the novel. James seems to have seen the moral element
in the novels as something which is fused in the total whole, an
artistic ingredient. That is why we may dare to include him among the
believers of Art for Art's sake. The novel is a self-enclosed whole,
isolated from the world of continuous relations; a perfectly finished
object, an autonomous world.
From
The Oxford Companion to American
Literature, by Hart and Leininger:
Samuel
Langhorne Clemens, (1835-1910), born in Florida,
Mo., was the son of a Virginian imbued with the frontier spirit and
grandiose
dreams of easy wealth, who had married in Kentucky and spent the rest
of his
life in a restless watch for profits from land speculation. The family
settled
in Hannibal, Mo. (1839), where Samuel grew up under the influence of
this
attitude, and passsed the adventurous boyhood and youth that he recalls
in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.
After his father's death (1847), he left school
to be apprenticed to a printer, and was soon writing for his brother
Orion's
newspaper. He was a journeyman printer in the East and Middle West
(1853-54),
and in 1856 planned to seek his fortune in South America, but gave up
this idea
to become a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi, a position that he
considered
the most important discipline of his life. When the Civil War began,
the
riverboats ceased operation, and, after a brief trial of soldiering
with a
group of Confederate volunteers, Clemens went to Nevada with his
brother, who
had been appointed secretary to the governor. In Roughing
It he describes the trip west and his subsequent
adventures as a miner and journalist. After he joined the staff of the
Virginia
City Territorial Enterprise (1862) he
adopted the pseudonym Mark Twain, by which he was thereafter known, and
began
his career as a journalistic humorist in the frontier tradition. His
articles
of the time are collected in Mark Twain
of the Enterprise(1957)
During this period he met Artemus Ward and others who encouraged
his work, collaborated with Bret Harte in San Francisco, and wrote "The
Celebrated Jumping Frog" sketch (1865) which won him immediate
recognition. He increased his popularity with letters and lectures
about his
trip to the Sandwich Islands, went east to lecture, published The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
and Other Sketches (1867), and made the tour of the Mediterranean
and the
Holy Land that he describes in The
Innocents Abroad (1869), a humorous narrative that assured his
position as a
leading author and shows his typical American irreverence for the
classic and
the antique. In 1870 Clemens married Olivia Langdon, with whom he
settled in
Hartford, Conn. The effect of this marriage upon his career has been
responsible for two divergent interpretations of his work. Mrs. Clemens
belonged to a genteel, conservative society, and it has been claimed
(mainly by
Van Wyck Brooks) that the puritanical and materialistic surroundings
into which
Clemens was thrust frustrated his potential creative force for fierce
revolt
and satire. Others (principally Bernard De Voto) posit the idea that
Clemens
began as a frontier humorist and storyteller, and that his later work
shows the
unthwarted development of these essential talents.
In Roughing It
(1872) he continues the method of The
Innocents Abroad, seasoning the realistic account of adventure with
humorous exaggerations in his highly personal idiom. Next he
collaborated with
C.D. Warner in The Gilded Age (1873),
a satirical novel of post-Civil War boom times that gave a name to the
era. A Tramp Abroad (1880) is another travel
narrative, this time of a walking trip through the Black Forest and the
Alps.
England during the reign of Edward VI is the scene of The
Prince and the Pauper (1882), while A Connecticut
Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) is a
realistic-satirical fantasy of Arthurian England. During this period,
however,
Clemens was dealing with the background of his own early life in what
are
generally considered the most significant of his characteristically
American
works. In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
(1876) he presents a nostalgic tale of boyish adventure in a
Mississippi town
and the Valley, and in Life on the
Mississippi (1883) and Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn (1884) he celebrates the flowering of Mississippi
Valley
frontier civilization, in terms of its own pungent tall talk and
picaresque
adventure.
External events soon interfered with the even flow of
Clemens's creative activity. During his residence in Hartford, he had
been a
partner in the publishing firm of Charles L. Webster and Company, which
reaped
a fortune through the sale of Grant's Memoirs
and Clemens's own writings, but bad publishing ventures and the
investment of
$200,000 in an unperfected typesetting machine drove him into
bankruptcy
(1894). To discharge his debts he made a lecturing tour of the world,
although
he had come to dislike lecturing, and the record of this tour, Following the Equator (1897) has an
undercurrent of bitterness not found in his earlier travel books.
During this
decade, although he wrote The Tragedy of
Puddn'nhead Wilson (1894) and the Personal
Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896), most of his work is uneven in
quality,
and The American Claimant (1892), Tom
Sawyer Abroad (1894) and Tom Sawyer, Detective
(1896) are feeble
echoes of earlier work. In 1898 he finished paying off his debts, but
his
writings whow that the strain of pessimism he formerly repressed was
now
dominating his mind. The Man That
Corrupted Hadleyburg (1900), What Is
Man? (1906) and The
Mysterious Stranger (1916) demonstrate this attitude. He
continued to travel widely, lectured and wrote articles on contemporary
events
and such controversial works as Christian
Science (1906) and Is Shakespeare
Dead? (1909), but his bitterness was deepened by the loss of his
wife and
two daughters. His pessimism was perhaps no more profound than the
opitimism of
his own Colonel Sellers, but his feeling that it was too mordant for
publication caused him to instruct that certain of his works be
published posthumously.
Since had been engaged in dictating his
autobiography to his secretary, A. B. Paine, who later became the first
Literary Editor of the Mark Twain Estate, and issued a collection of Letters (1917), the authorized biography
(3 vols., 1912), and the Autobiography
(1924). The second editor, Bernard De Voto, edited volumes of materials
from
the papers left by Clemens, including Letters
from the Earth (1963). Drawing on the same sources, the third
editor, Dixon
Wecter, collected The Love Letters of
Mark Twain (1949); and the fourth editor, Henry Nash Smith, edited
with
William M. Gibson, Mark Twain-Howells
Letters (2 vols., 1960). A scholarly edition of his Works
began publication by the University of California Press in
1972, which also began issuing (1967) a scholarly edition of his
previously
unpublished Papers, most of whose
originals are in the University's Bancroft Library.
An important early estimate of his work is My
Mark Twain: Reminiscences and Criticisms
(1910), by his friend and adviser Howells. The prevalent critical
attitude has
come to consider Clemens's most distinctive work as summing up the
tradition of
Western humor and frontier realism. Beginning as a journalist, he
assumed the
method and point of view of popular literature in the U.S., maintaining
the
personal anecdotal style that he used also in his capacity of comic
lecturer.
In travel books, he digresses easily from factual narrative to humorous
exaggeration and burlesque. The novels are episodic or
autobiographical, and
not formed by any larger structural concepts. He wrote in the authentic
native
idiom, exuberantly and irreverently, but underlying the humor was a
vigorous
desire for social justice and a pervasive equalitarian attitude. The
romantic
idealism of Joan of Arc, the bitter
satire of feudal tyranny in A Connecticut
Yankee, the appreciation of human values in Huckleberry
Finn, and the sense of epic sweep in Life on the
Mississippi establish
Clemens's place in American letters as an artist of broad understanding
and
vital, although uneven and sometimes misdirected, achievement.
WORKS
The CelebratedJumping Frog of Calaveras County, sketch
by
Clemens written under his pseudonym Mark Twain, was published in the
New York Saturday Press
(1865) and reprinted as the
title piece of a series of sketches that formed his first book (1867).
Although
his source was an old folk tale that had been in print in California as
early
as 1853, Clemens was catapulted into fame by his version, which tells
of the
jumping frog Dan'l Webster, pet of gambling Jim Smiley, which is
defeated when
a stranger fills its gullet with quail shot while Smiley's attention is
distracted.
The Innocents Abroad; or,
The New Pilgrim's Progress, travel narrative by Clemens, published
in 1869
under his pseudonym Mark Twain. It is based on letters written during
1867 to
the San Francisco Alta California and
the NewYorkTribune and Herald,
describing the tour of the steamship Quaker
City to Europe, Egypt, and the Holy Land. In this autobiographical
account,
Clemens has an opportunity to ridicule foreign sights and manners from
the
point of view of the American democrat, who scorns the sophisticated,
revels in
his own national peculiarities and advantages, and is contemptuously
amused by
anithing with which he is unacquainted. Characteristic passages are
concerned
with the comical difficulties of "innocent" tourists, their
adventures among deceptive guides, inefficient hotels, and
misunderstood
customs; a comparison of Lake Como with Lake Tahoe, to the general
advantage of
the latter; a burlesque account of the ascent of Vesuvius; experiences
of
various Turkish "frauds"; an awestruck meeting with the Russian royal
family; and a naïvely sentimental description of Biblical scenes in
Palestine.
Roughing It,autobiographical narrative by Clemens, published
in 1872 under his pseudonym Mark Twain. He records a journey from St.
Louis
across the plains to Nevada, a visit to the Mormons, and life and
adventures in
Virginia City, San Francisco, and the Sandwich Islands. The book is
based on
Clemens's own experiences during the 1860s, but but facts are left far
behind
in his creation of a picture of the frontier spirit and its lusty
humor. The
entire work is unified by the character of the author and the ways in
shich his
experiences changed him into a representative of the Far West, but
seemingly
little attempt is made to integrate the tall tales, vivid descriptions,
narratives of adventure, and character sketches, except in so far as
all of
them constitute a vigorous, many-sided portrait of the Western frontier.
The Gilded Age: A Tale of To-day,novel by Clemens and
CD.
Warner, published in 1873 but dated 1874. It was dramatized by G.S.
Densmore
(1874), and Clemens revised the play the same year. The theme is that
of
unscrupulous individualism in a world of fantastic speculation and
unstable
values, and the title has become a popular name for the era depicted in
the
book, the boom times of post-Civil War Years, when unbridled
acquisitiveness
dominated the national life.
"Squire" Si Hawkins moves, with his wife and
family, from Tennessee to a primitive Missouri settlement, the current
speculative project of his visionary friend, Colonel Beriah Sellers.
During the
journey, Hawkins adopts two unrelated orphans, Clay and Laura. Ten
years pass,
Sellers's optimism cost Hawkins several fortunes, and the children grow
in
constant expectation of great walth. When the Squire dies, his family
moves to
Sellers's new promotion center, Hawkeye, where Laura is attracted by a
philanderer, Colonel Selby, who abandons her after a mock-marriage.
Hary
Brierly, a New York engineer, collaborates with Sellers in a railroad
land
speculation scheme, which fails, bankrupting them. Brierly falls in
love with
Laura at this time, but Larua, hardened by her experience, considers
her a mere
tool for her advancement. Her beauty impresses Senator Dilworthy, who
invites
her and her foster brother to Washington, and there they and Sellers
are
involved in the intrigues and financial deals of the unscrupulous
senator. When
Selby reappears, Laura resumes her liaison with him, later murdering
him when
he attempts to desert her again. She is acquitted after a spectacular
court
trial, but dies of a heart attack when her career as a lecturer is a
failure. A
subplot is concerned with the love affair fo Philip Sterling, a friend
of
Brierly, with Ruth Bolton, a Quaker girl, who takes up a medical career
but
finally marries him after he successfully exploits her father's
coal-mining
enterprise.
The Adventures of
Tom Sawyer,novel by Clemens, publised in
1876 under his pseudonym Mark Twain. Its classic sequel, Huckleberry
Finn, was followed by the relatively unimportant Tom
Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective.
In thedrowsy Mississippi
River town of St. Petersburg, Mo.,
Tom Sawyer, imaginative and mischievous, and his priggish brother Sid
live with
their simple, kind-hearted aunt Polly. Sid "peaches" on Tom for
playing hooky, and Tom is punished by making to whitewash a fence, but
ingeniously leads his friends to do this job for him by pretending it
is a
privilege. When his sweenheart, Becky Thatcher, is angered because Tom
reveals
that he has previously been in love, he forsakes a temporary effort at
virtue,
plays hooky, and decides to become a pirate or a Robin Hood. With his
boon
companion, Huck Finn, a good-natured, irresponsible river rat, Tom goes
to a
graveyard at midnight to swing a dead cat, an act advised by Huck as a
cure for
warts. They watch Injun Joe, a half-breed criminal, stab the town
doctor to
death and place the knife in the hands of drunken Muff Potter. After
being
further scolded by Aunt Polly, and further spurned by Becky, Tom, with
Huck and
Joe Harper, another good friend, hides on nearby Jackson's Island.
Their
friends believe them drowned, but their funeral service is interrpted
by the
discovery of the "corpses," who are listening from the church
gallery. Tom returns to school, is reconciled with Becky and his aunt,
and
becomes a hero at the trial of Muff Potter, when he reveals Injun Joe's
guilt.
Tom and Becky attend a school picnic, and are lost for several days in
a cave,
where Tom spies Injun Joe. Later the half-breed is found dead, and his
treasure
is divided between Tom and Huck, after which the latter is adopted by
the Widow
Douglas. His only consolation, since he has surrendered his state of
unwashed
happiness, lies in Tom's promise to admit him to his robber gant on the
strength of his social standing.
A Tramp Abroad,travel
narrative by Clemens, published in 1880
under his pseudonym Mark Twain. It is a record of his European tour
(1878) with
Joseph H. Twichell, whom he calls "Harris," and describes their
adventures in Germany, Italy, and Switzerland, chiefly during a walking
tour
through the Black Forest and the Alps. Besides the serious,
journalistic
account of European natural beauties, society, folklore, and history,
including
enthusiastic descriptions of Alpine scenery that do not fail to praise
comparable
descriptions in the US., there are passages ranging from crude face to
tall
tales and typical satire. Thus a retelling of Whymper's conquest of the
Matterhorn is complemented by the author's "ascent of Mont Blanc by
telescope," and a description of ravens in the Black Forest prompts him
to
recount "Baker's Blue-Jay Yarn," concerned with the sense of humour
of California jays. Characteristic humor also appears in Clemns's inept
drawings, purportedly the work of an art studient, and the satirical
passages on
subjets alien to the average American, such as "the awful German
language," Wagnerian opra, and "The Great French Duel."
The Prince and the Pauper,novel by Clemens, published in 1882 under his pseudonym Mark Twain.
Designed to be a children's book, it shows an essentially adult point
of view
in its attacks on the social evils of Tudor England.
PrinceEdward (later Edward
VI) discovers Tom Canty, pauper
boy, to be his exact twin in appearance. When they exchange clothes,
the prince
is by error driven from the court, and the pauper is forced to act the
part of
royalty. Edward finds Tom's family, is mistreated, and runs away with
Sir Miles
Hendon, a disinherited knight, who takes pity on him, thinking his
assertions
of royal birth a sign of madness. In their wanderings, the prince sees
the
cruelty of church and court towards the poor, and learns the suffering
of his
people through such dramatic incidents as the burning of two women
whose only
crime is that of being Baptists. Tom meanwhile is also thought
unbalanced
because of his peculiar behavior; becoming accustomed to his situation,
however, he attempts to act the part of the real prince. On the morning
of his
coronation, Edward gets to Westminster Abbey and proves his idenitity
by
revealing the hiding place of the Great Seal, which Tom did not
recognize after
having taken it to crack some nuts. During his brief reign, Edward
tempers the
harshness of the law with a sense of justice, learned during his
contact with
the common people
Life
on .the Mississippi,autobiographical
narrative by Clemens,
published under his pseudonym Mark Twain (1883). The book opens with a
brief
history of the Mississippi river since its discovery, and Chapters 4 to
22 deal
with Clemens's life as a boy on the river. These chapters, originally
published
in the Atlantic Monthly, give a vivid
account of his participation in the steamboat age, the science of
steamboat
piloting, and the life of the river as seen by the pilot. Chapter 3
also
contains a lively passage written for Huckleberry
Finn but never used in the novel. The second part of the book,
written some
seven years after the first, is an account of Clemens's return to the
river as
a traveler, 21 years after he had been a pilot. During his trip from
St. Louis
to New Orleans, he finds that the glamour of the river has been
destroyed by
railroad competition. Interspersed with his description of the river,
his
accounts of meeting Cable and Joel Chandler Harris, and Horace Bixby,
who first
taught him piloting, are anecdotes of the past, and a vigorous attack
on
Scott's romanticism and its effect on Southern thought. The second part
of the
book lacks the unity of the first, has none of its verve and gusto, and
is more
descriptive and reminiscent.
The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn,novel by Clemens, written under his
pseudonym Mark Twain. A sequel
to Tom Sawyer, it was begun in 1876
and published in 1884, omitting the chapter included in Life
on the Mississippi. Although it carries on the picaresque
story of the characters in Tom Sawyer,
the sequel is a more accomplished and a more serious work of art as
well as a
keener realistic portrayal of regional character and frontier
experience on the
Mississippi.
Narrated by Huck, the sequel begins with its unschooled
hero
under the motherly protection of the Widow Douglas and her sister, Miss
Watson.
When his blackguard father appears to demand the boy's fortune, Huck
tricks him
by transferring the money to Judge Thatcher, but his father kidnaps him
and
imprisons him in a lonely cabin During one of the old man's drunken
spells,
Huck escapes to Jackson's Isalnd, where he meets Miss Watson's runaway
slave,
Jim. They start down the river in a raft, but, after several
adventures, the
raft is hit by a steamboat and the two are separated. Huck swims
ashore, and is
sheltered by the Grangerford family, whose feud with the Shepherdsons
causes
bloodshed. The boy discovers Jim, and they set out again on the raft,
giving
refuge to the "Duke of Bridgewater," itinerant printer and fraud, and
the "Dauphin," "Louis XVIII of France," actor, evangelist,
and temperance faker. At stopping places, the "King" lectures as a
reformed pirate, and they present, as "Kean" and "Garrick,"
dramatic performances culminating in the fraudulent exhibition of the
"Royal Nonesuch." Huck witnesses the murder of a harmless drunkard by
an Arkansas aristocrat, whose contempt discourages a mob of would-be
lynchers. The
rogues learn of the death of Peter Wilks and claim legacies as his
brothers.
Huck interferes in behalf of the three daughters, and the scheme is
foiled by
the arrival of the real brothers. Then he discovers that the "King"
has sold Jim to Mrs. Phelps, Tom Sawyer's Aunt Sally, and at the Phelps
farm he
impersonates Tom in an attempt to rescue Jim. When Tom arrives, he
masqureades
as his brother Sid, and concocts a fantastic scheme to free Jim. In the
"mixed-up and splendid rescue," Tom is accidentally shot, and the
slave is recaptured. While Tom is recuperating he reveals that Miss
Watson has
died, setting Jim free in her will, and that the rescue was necessary
because
he "wanted the adventure of
it." It is also disclosed that Huck's fortune is safe, since his father
is
dead, but he concludes: "I reckon I got to light out for the territory
ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me, and
sivilize me,
and I can't standi it. I been there before."
A Connecticut Yankee in King
Arthur's Court(1889),
realistic-satirical fantasy of Arthurian England by Clemens under his
pseudonym
Mark Twain.
An ingenious Yankee mechanic, knocked unconscious in a
fight, awakens to find himself at Camelot in A.D. 528. Imprisoned by
Sir Kay
the Seneschal and exhibited before the knights of the Roud Table, he is
condemned to death, but saves himself by posing as a magician like
Merlin,
correctly predicting an eclipse, and becoming minister to King Arthur.
He
increases his power by applying 19th-century knowledge of gun-powder,
electricity,
and industrial methods; but when he attempts to better the condition of
the
peasantry he meets opposition from the church, the knights, Merlin, and
the
sorceress Morgan le Fay. He accompanies the king in disguise on an
expedition
among the common people, and when they are captured, they are rescued
by the
Yankee's trained troop of 500 knights on bicycles. His daughter
Hello-Central
becomes ill, and with his wife Alisande (Sandy) he takes her to France.
Back in
England, he finds his work undone, Arthur killed, the land in civil
war.
Gathrring friends in a cave with modern armed defenses, he declares a
republic,
fights off an attack, but is wounded. Merlin, pretending to nurse him,
puts him
asleep until the 19th century.
Tom Sawyer Abroad,short novel by Clemens, published in
1894
under his pseudonym Mark Twain.
As a sequelto
"all them adventures" in the book
bearing his name, Huck Finn tells of further exploits with Tom Sawyer
and Jim,
the former slave, in a story that concerns a balloon voyage to the
Sahara and
Near East, involving a mid-Atlantic storm, encounters with Bedouins and
wild
lions, and a final takeoff for the return home from Mt. Sinai. Tom's
romancing
and knowlede, Huck's common sense, and Jim's superstitions are revealed
by
various incidents.
Tom Sawyer, Detective,story by Clemens, published in
1896
under his pseudonym Mark Twain.
As a finalsequel
to previous adventures, Huck Finn tells of
the remarkable way in which Tom Saywer solves an intricate mystery
involving a
diamond robbery and a false accusation of murder made against his uncle
Silas,
as well as a case of mistaken identity between a real and a supposed
corpse.
The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson,novel by Clemens, published
in 1894 under the pseudonym Mark Twain. It was dramatized by Frank Mayo
(1895).
On the ississippi during the 1830s, at Dawson's Landing,
Mo., lives Percy Driscoll, a prosperous slave owner. On the day his son
Tom is
born, his nearly white slave Roxy gives birth to a son, Chambers, whose
father
is a Virginia gentleman. Since Tom's mother dies when he is only a week
old, he
is raised by Roxy along with Chambers, whose twin he is in appearance.
Roxy,
fearful that hr son may some day be sold down the river, changes the
two
children, and upon the death of Percy, his brother Judge Driscoll
adopts
Chambers, believing him to be Tom. The boy grows up a coward, a snob,
and a
gambler. Even though Roxy tells him that she is his mother, he sells
her to pay
his gambling debts. On escaping, she blackmails him. To obtain money he
robs
the judge and murders him with a knife stolen from Luigi, one of a pair
of
Italian twins with whom the judge once fought a duel. The evidence is
against
the twins, who are defended by David Wilson, an unsuccessful lawyer,
whose
"tragedy" consists in the ridicule that has resulted from his
eccentric originality and iconoclasm; his humor and his interest in
palmistry
and fingerprints cause the people of Dawson's Landing to call him
"Pudd'nhead." Wilson feels secure in his case for the twins, since the
fingerprints on the knife are not those of the accused. One day he
acquires the
fingerprints of the spurious Tom, and with this evidence he is able to
vindicate his methods, and to win at last the admiration of his fellow
townsmen, by saving the twins and convicting Chambers, who is sold down
the
river while the real Tom is restored to his rightful position.
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc,fictional
biography by Clemens, published in 1896. To conceal his
authorhsp, so that the book might be received without bias, Clemens
invented
"The Sieur Louis de Conte," Joan's supposed "page and
secretary," whose work is "freely translated by Jean-François Alden."
The biography follows the known facts in the life of the 15th-century
French
heroine but amplifies them with several fictional characters and
interprets
such documents as those relating to the ecclesiastical trial at Rouen
in the
light of Clemens's lifelong idealistic reverence for "the noble child,
the
most innocent, the most lovely, the most adorable the ages have
produced."
Her traits have been said to resemble those of women in the author's
family.
Other figures, like the comically boastful Paladin and laughing Noël
Rainguesson, are related to characters in his earlier fiction. In
general, the
mood is that of serious, although romanticized, history, but there are
characteristic Clemens touches in the use of European folklore, humor,
and
American tall talk.
Following the Equator,autobiographical narrative by
Clemens,
published in 1897 under his pseudonym Mak Twain. Describing the
Australian
section of his lecture tour around the world (1895) he works up, in a
rather
pedestrian way, second-hand materials concerning the aborigines, early
settlers, and local animals. Although there are witty interludes, vivid
accounts such as the one of the Sepoy Mutiny, and satirical
disquisitions on
the Boer War and imperialistic morality, the book ahs little of the
inspiration
that distinguishes Clemens's other travel accounts. In India, he is
oppressed
by the overpopulation, superstition, plagues, famines, and disasters,
and by
the disillusioned society resigned to the constant repetition of barren
and
meaningless processes, which foreshadoews the pessimism of the books he
wroter
in 1898.
A Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg,story by
Clemens, published under his pseudonym Mark Twain as the
title piece of a collection of essays and fiction (1900).
Hadleyburgis
proud of its disctinction as "the most
honest and upright town in the region round about." A stranger,
offended
in some way by its people, decides to ruin its reputation. He leaves a
sack
with bank cashier Edward Richards that he says contains a fortune in
coins, and
a note announcing that the money is to go to a townsman who once
befriended
him, and who can be identified by a remark he made, which is written on
an
enclosed paper. Nineteen of Hadleyburg's leading men then receive notes
pretending to divulge the remark. Scruples dissolve under this
temptation, and
even the hitherto honest Ricaahrds begins to think he may have made the
remark.
At a town meeting, 18 of the citizens are exposed to ridicule, when the
Rev.
Mr. Burgess reads the note setting forth their claimes to the remark.
Burgess
has lost Richard's note, and the cashier becomes a hero. The victims
pay an
enormous sum to avoid having their names recorded on the lead slugs
that prove
to be the sole contents of the sack, and this amount is given to
Richards as a
reward for his supposed identity. Conscience destroys the health of the
old man
and his wife, who in their dying delirium expose their guilt; thus "the
town was stripped of the last rag of its ancient glory."
What
Is Man?,essay by Clemens based on his paper, "What
Is Happiness?," delivered before the Monday Evening Club of Hartford
(Feb.
1883), rewritten (1898), privately published without the author's name
(1906),
and posthumously collected in What Is
Man? And Other Essays (1917).
A Platonic dialogue between a Young Man and a
disillusioned Old Man, the mouthpiece of the author's pessimistic view
of
mankind, the Old Man considers human beings to be merely mechanisms,
lacking
free will, motivated selfishly by a need for self-approval, and
completely the
products of their environment. In an "Admonition to the Human Race,"
he pleads for the rising of ideals of conduct to a point where the
individual's
satisfaction will coincide with the best interests of the community.
The Mysterious Stranger, story by Clemens, posthumously
published in 1916. It was edited from various manuscripts by A.B.Paine. A new edition (1969) based on a final
manuscript and titled No.44, The
Mysterious Stranger, shows that Paine had silently deleted about
one-quarter of Mark Twain's text, created a new character (The
Astrologer),
alterd the names of other characters, and conflated three manuscript
drafts to
create his own version.
The Paine version is set in the medieval Austrian village
of
Eseldorf, where a mysterious stranger visits young Theodor Fischer and
his
friends Nikolaus and Seppi. He is discovered to be Satan, and sshows
his power
by building a miniature castle that he peoples with clay creatures,
destroying
them almost as soon as he brings them to life. He then exerts his power
on the
villagers, and, when Father Peter is falsely accused of theft by the
Astrologer
and Father Adolf, he confounds the evil and makes the innocent crazy,
since he
says earthly happiness is restricted to the mad. Other "kindness"
includes the drowning of Nikoaus, who would otherwise live as a
cripple. His
total indifference to mankind and its conceptions of good and evil
shocks the
boys' natural moral sense, yet Satan shows that from this moral sense
came
wars, tortures, and inequalities. Finally he departs, and Theodor
realices that
this was a dream, as false as a morality, and as illogical as a God who
tortured men yet commanded them to worship Him.
The versionfirst
published in 1969 is also set in Eseldorf.
To it in 1490, not long after the invention of moveable type, comes a
likable
young printer's devil, called only No. 44, who is actually possessed of
satanic
powers that allow him to master the craft of printing in a few hours.
Single-handedly he speedily produces a Bible and magically summons up
phantasmagoric
people to print inumerable copies. He enjoys playing tricks on the
town's
magician and on the cruel, hypocritical Father Adolf, while he also
travels
back and forth in space and time between 19th-century U.S. and medieval
Europe.
The story of his activities, both diabolical and whimsical, is told by
his
17th-year-old friend August Feldner, a curious person with a split
personality.
August's doppelgänger or "Dream-Self," named Emil Schwarz, has powers
like those of No. 44, and is caught up in similar adventures and
activities.
The fanciful tale compunded of burlesque and satire concludes with the
revelation of No. 44 to August that "Life itself is only a vision, a
dream
. . . ," the creation of"a
God .. who moulds morals . . . and has
none himself . . . who could make good children as easily as bad, yet
preferred
to make bad ones."
Ya le han robado a Álvaro tres bicicletas en este último año, dos en la
Plaza San Francisco y la última esta mañana en el campus, delante de la
caseta del vigilante de seguridad.
Es inútil: no se puede tener bicicleta, o si la tienes, la tienes qu
encerrar en casa. Es una ciudad llena de chorizos, chorizos impunes,
pues lo de "ladrón de bicicletas" es una película italiana, no una
figura penal. Si
denuncias el robo a la policía, archivan el papel y te dicen que la
vayas a buscar al
rastro a los puestos de ventas de bicis, a ver si la encuentras allí.
Igual te la venden barata, pero lo más seguro que esté en otra ciudad,
que la cosa va organizada. Esto
ni se persigue ni se pena ni le interesa a nadie. Si a alguno cogiesen
robando una bicicleta, ni el nombre le tomaba el policía, seguro. Y
así, la cosa se convierte en una industria, una materia prima a
explotar por la canalla—canalla encantadora con sus amigos, no lo dudo,
y benevolentemente ignorada por las autoridades, jueces y penalistas.
Pero un país que funciona así, se va al guano. O mejor dicho, se ha ido
ya.
Con cierto desfase mis artículos subidos al
Social
Science Research Network van apareciendo en las revistas electrónicas
temáticas de esta red, y con cierto desfase los voy descubriendo. Por
ejemplo este artículo sobre Charles Chaplin
como serial killer. "Monsieur
Verdoux: Notas sobre un caso ambiguo" (el
artículo está en español):
From
The
Oxford Companion to American Literature, by Hart and Leininger:
Emily [Elizabeth] Dickinson (1830-86), the daughter of Edward
Dickinson, a prominent lawyer of Amherst, Mass., was educated at
Amherst Academy and for one year at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary,
under mary Lyon. Her life was outwardly eventless, for she lived
quietly at home and for the last 25 years secluded herself from all but
the most intimate friends. Though never married, she cultivated intense
intellectual companionships with several men in succession whom she
quaintly called her tutors. The first was Benjamin F. Newton, a law
student in her father's office, who introduced her to stimulating books
and urged her to take seriously her vocation as poet. Religious
questionings prompted by his early death led to the Rev. Charles
Wadsworth of Philadelphia, whom she met in 1854. She soon came to
regard him as her "dearest earthly friend," and for purposes of poetry
created in his image the "lover" whom she was never to know except in
imagination. From the time of wadsworth's removal to San Francisco, in
the spring of 1862, may be dated her withdrawal from village society
and her increasing preoccupation with poetry. She initiated a literary
correspondence with T. W. Higginson, whom she knew only through his
papers in the Atlantic Monthly,
and his kindly encouragement was a
support to her through years of loneliness. Besides Higginson, the
circle of friends to whom she occasionally showed a few of her poems
included Samuel Bowles, Dr. J.G. Holland, and Helen Hunt Jackson. For
the most part, however, she wrote in secret and guarded her poems even
from her family.
Before her death, she had composed well over 1000 brief lyrics, her
"letter to the world," records of the life about her, of tiny ecstasies
set in motion by mutations of the seasons or by home and garden
incidents, of candid insights into her own states of consciousness, and
of speculations on the timeless mysteries of love and death. Her mind
was charged with paradox, as though her vision, like the eyes of birds,
was focused in opposite directions on the two worlds of material and
immaterial values. She could express feelings of deepest poignancy in
terms of wit. Like Emerson, her preference for the intrinsic and the
essential led her often to a gnomic concision of phrase, but her
artistry in the modulation of simple meters and the delicate management
of imperfect rhymes was greater than his. Her daringly precise
metaphors made her seem to Amy Lowell a precursor of the Imagist
school.
Publication, in Emily Dickinson's unworldly view, formed no part of a
poet's business. Only six of her poems, not counting an early verse
valentine, were printed during her lifetime, and none with her consent.
From the chaotic mass of manuscripts found after her death, some
carefully revised, other carelessly jotted down on odd scraps of
paper, six volumes have been selected: Poems (1890) and Poems: Second Series (1891), edited
by Mabel L. Todd and T. W. Higginson; Poems:
Third Series (1896), edited by Mrs. Todd; The Single Hound (1914), edited by
Emily's niece Martha Dickinson Bianchi; Further Poems (1929) and Unpublished Poems (1936), edited
by Mrs. Bianchi and Alfred Leete Hampson. A collection was issued as Poems: Centenary Edition
(1930). Posthumous publication kept the poems from being presented in
any effective order. Trifling pieces and fragments were included with
major lyrics and the text was often inaccurate, badly punctuated, or
poorly displayed on the page. However, Bolts of Melody
(1945), poems long suppressed because of a family feud, was carefully
edited by Mabel L. Todd and Millicent Bingham, and a complete The Poems of Emily Dickinson
was issued in a scholarly edition (3 vols., 1955), including variant
readings by Thomas H. Johnson, who, in addition to this defi
Estadísticas Mi
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Johnston Forbes-Robertson
(1853-1937) in the role of Hamlet—which he
first played at the age of forty-four, 1897. Seeing this performance is
said to have inspired Shaw to write Caesar
and Cleopatra,
in which Forbes-Robertson eventually played in 1907. Generally
recognized as the inheritor of Irving's mantle, Forbes-Robertson, like
Lewis Waller, had a 'fallback' role, in his case that of the Stranger
in Jerome's mystical melodrama The
Passing of the Third Floor Back—although, perhaps to the envy of
Waller, Forbes-Robertson could count no less on the enduring popularity
of his Hamlet According to
Hesketh Pearson, biographer of The
Last Actor-Managers, Charles Wyndham could similarly rely on
reviving David Garrick, Hare
on A Pair of Spectacles,
Alexander on The Importance of Being Earnest,
Tree on Trilby,
Martin-Harvey on The Only Way, and
Fred Terry on The Scarlet Pimpernel.
Lewis Waller (1860-1915) in The Three Musketeers
(1898). Waller was embarrassed by his reputation as supposedly the
first of the great 'matinee idols': he much preferred Shakespearean or
light comedy roles, but found himself (like several other of the great
actor-managers of the period) inescapably identified with the romantic
leads his fans preferred. ('Will no one', he is said to have pleaded,
'rid me of these turbulent priestesses?') He was also greatly admired
in Booth Tarkington's Monsieur
Beaucaire
(1902), playing the even-tempered Frenchman of the title, whose
exquisite debonaire wit gallantly puts down ill-bred English rivals.
eBook :
Document
ama,
it is surely Toni Morrison (1931-). "For me, in doing
novels about African-Americans," she has declared, "I was trying to
move away from the unstated but overwhelming and dominant context that
was white history and to move it into another one." Her work can, in
fact, be seen as an attempt to write several concentric histories of
the American experience from a distinctively African-American
perspective. A series of fictional interventions in American
historiography, her novels draw what she has called, in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the
Literary Imagination (1992), "the overwhelming presence of black
people in the United States" from the margins of the imagination to the
center of American literature and history. What has been distinctive
about the history of the United States, Morrison has argued, is "its
claim to freedom" and "the presence of the unfree within the heart of
the democratic experiment." This was, and remains, "a nation of people
who decided that their world
view would combine agendas for individual freedom and mechanisms for devastating
racial oppression." As such, it "presents a singular landscape for a
writer." And her aim in mapping that landscape has been twofold. On the
one hand, she has charted a specifically black history, giving voice to the
silence: pointing to the culpability for it of White America's
'failure' to apportion human rights equally, while simultaneously
celebrating that history's achievement and identifying its own
failings. On the other, she maps out a general history of America from
the readjusted perspective, the angle of black experience. As Morrison
has noted in Playing in the Dark,
"Africanism is inextricable from the definition of Americanness—from
its origins on through its integrated or disintegrating
twentieth-century self." The history of black America, over the last
two humdred years and perhaps more, is
the history of America, as she sees it. So what she is pursuing,
reclaiming in imaginative terms, is a history of the whole American
experience.
Dedalus
in A Portrait of the Artist as Young
Man as a man who had in his time been "a medical student, an
oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician, a small
landlord, a small investor, a drinker, a good fellow, a storyteller,
somebody's secretary, something in a distillery, a tax-gatherer, a
bankrupt, and at present a praiser of his own past." The elder Joyce
drifted steadily down the financial and social scale, his family moving
from house to house, each one less genteel and more shabby than the
previous. James Joyce's whole education was Catholic, from the age of
six to the age of nine at Clongowes Wood College and from eleven to
sixteen at Belvedere College, Dublin. Both were Jesuit institutions and
were norJoymal roads to the priesthood. He then studied modern
languages
at University College, Dublin.
The
Red Badge of Courage: An
Episode of the American Civil War,
novel by Stephen Crane, published in 1895. The original manuscript,
containing an added 5000 words (about 10% of the entirety) deleted by
the original publisher, was printed for the first time in 1982. This
psychological study of a soldier's reactions to warfare was written
before Crane had ever seen a battle. His knowledge was at least partly
derived from a popular anthology, Battles
and Leaders of the Civil War. The unnamed battle of the novel
has been identifies as that of Chancellorsville. 
