BRITISH CULTURE AND THE MODERN WORLD

M. KEITH BOOKER

M. Keith Booker

University of Arkansas

CONTENTS

Introduction

The Nineteenth Century and the Birth of the Modern
Modern British Literature Before World War II: From Realism to
Modernism

Exemplary Text: Robert Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists

Exemplary Text: Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Exemplary Text: The Poetry of T. S. Eliot

Exemplary Text: Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Modern Irish Literature: The Search for a New Cultural Identity

Exemplary Text: The Poetry of W. B. Yeats

Exemplary Text: James Joyce, Dubliners

Exemplary Text: James Joyce, “Telemachus,” from Ulysses

Exemplary Text: Brian Friel, Dancing at Lughnasa

The Rise of British Film

Exemplary Text: The Thief of Bagdad

Exemplary Text: The Third Man

The African Postcolonial Novel in English

Exemplary Text: Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

The Indian Postcolonial Novel in English

Exemplary Text: Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

Postmodernism, Multiculturalism and Contemporary British
Literature

Exemplary Text: Zadie Smith, White Teeth

Contemporary British Film

Exemplary Text: The Commitments

Exemplary Text: Trainspotting

Exemplary Text: Shaun of the Dead

Works Cited

INTRODUCTION

The story of world culture and society since the beginning of the twentieth century is a story of the completion of the process of capitalist modernization in the advanced countries of the West, as well as a story of the spread of capitalist modernization to the rest of the globe. This process has proceeded in different ways and at different speeds in different parts of the world, but it has gradually come to impact all parts of the world in one way or another. This volume will focus on the ways in which British culture since 1900 has reflected—and, at the same time, contributed to—the larger process of capitalist modernization. Because the global spread of capitalism is such an important part of that process, the volume will also look at different parts of the globe that have been affected by capitalist modernization in ways that also reflect the dialogue of global culture with British culture. After all, the rapid expansion of the great European colonial empires in the nineteenth century—with the British Empire at the forefront of that expansion—paved the way for capitalist globalization in the twentieth century and beyond. As a result, the story of British culture after 1900 cannot be separated from the story of the British Empire and of the dialogue of British culture with cultures in other parts of the world, just as the cultural histories of many parts of the world since the late nineteenth century are inseparable from the impact of the British Empire on those histories.

If the history of twentieth- and twenty-first-century British culture is inextricable from the history of the completion of the process of capitalist modernization, it is obviously valuable to understand the earlier development of this process as well. This process dates back at least to the fifteenth century, but (especially in terms of culture) the bulk of the cultural revolution that led to the emergence of today’s globalized world occurred in the nineteenth century. The culture of the nineteenth century thus provides crucial background to an understanding of culture beyond 1900, especially in the case of Great Britain, which remained the world’s pacesetter for the process of modernization throughout the nineteenth century. Thus, this volume will begin with a brief overview of British literature and culture in the nineteenth century, emphasizing the ways in which the nineteenth century paved the way for the twentieth and beyond.

Chapter 2 focuses on British literature in the first three decades of the twentieth century, a period of rapid and thoroughly innovation in science, technology, business, and virtually every aspect of daily life. This chapter notes the ways in which British literature responded to this context with a period of dramatic innovation of its own, placing British writers at the forefront of the phenomenon of literary modernism—even as the realism of the nineteenth century remained the dominant paradigm that the sometimes-radical experimental efforts of modernist writers and artists were intended to challenge. Chapter 2 acknowledges the ongoing importance of realism as a mode in modern British literature but focuses especially on the phenomenon of modernism. It also notes the emergence of important new trends in literature produced for popular audiences and in proletarian literature produced specifically by and for the working class. It includes both a survey of these phenomena and four separate sections discussing the ways in which exemplary texts illustrate this phenomenon. These texts include the classic proletarian novel The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists (1914), by Robert Tressell. The other exemplary texts are oriented toward modernism. They begin with the Polish-born Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), a sort of proto-modernist text that is particularly involved with the topic of colonialism. The third exemplary “text” in this chapter is the poetry of T. S. Eliot, an American-born naturalized British poet who was one of the key figures in the phenomenon of literary modernism. Particular attention will be paid to The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915) and The Waste Land (1922), both crucial texts of the modernist movement. As immigrant writers, Conrad and Eliot also both illustrate the ways in which British culture was becoming inherently international at the beginning of the twentieth century. The third exemplary text in this chapter is Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), one of the landmarks of British (and feminist) modernist literature. Woolf’s career illustrates the crucial role played by the fight for women’s rights in the overall process of modernization.

Chapter 3 turns to a consideration of the major role played by Irish literature in the evolution of modern literature as a whole. Ireland was a particularly important part of the story of twentieth-century literature both because it produced such important writers as William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett and because—as Britain’s first and nearest colony—Ireland played a particularly important part in the development of colonialism (and anti-colonial resistance). Exemplary texts discussed at length in this section include the poetry of Yeats (who was extensively involved in the Irish Literary Revival) and the story collection Dubliners (1914), the first book-length work of fiction by Joyce—who is now widely regarded as the greatest literary genius of the twentieth century. Another exemplary text in this chapter is the first chapter of Joyce’s monumental modernist masterpiece Ulysses (1922); included in this section is the full text of Joyce’s first chapter, as well as a significant number of annotations to aid in the reading process. This chapter ends with a fourth exemplary text, Brian Friel’s play Dancing at Lughnasa (1990).

Chapter 4 turns to a consideration of the rise of British film in the first half of the twentieth century and to the ways in which British film came, during this period, to serve many of the functions served by literature in earlier times. This chapter will note the groundbreaking work of Alfred Hitchcock, who would eventually move to America to direct his best-known films there. The primary focus, however, will be on the three directors who came, in the 1940s, to be thought of as the central figures in British film: David Lean, Michael Powell, and Carol Reed, still widely regarded as the greatest directors in British film history. The exemplary texts discussed to accompany this chapter include The Thief of Bagdad (1940), co-directed by Powell and several others, and Reed’s The Third Man (1949), often considered the greatest of all British films.

Chapter 5 shifts attention to the important role played by literature from the former British colonies after the dismantling of the British Empire in the middle of the twentieth century. This chapter will focus on a brief survey of the African postcolonial novel in English, including a discussion of the historical background to the modern African novel, as well as a consideration of some of the basic issues facing postcolonial writers that are not, in general, faced by British writers. The exemplary text discussed in conjunction with this chapter will be Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), often considered the founding text of the modern African novel and a work that served as an inspiration for many subsequent African novelists. Chapter 6 then does many of the same things for the Indian postcolonial novel in English, using Arundhati Roy’s much-acclaimed 1997 novel The God of Small Things as an exemplary text.

Chapter 7 returns to the topic of British literature, picking up where Chapter 2 left off to consider British literature published since the end of World War II. The chapter itself presents a survey of this literature, including an introduction to the topic of postmodernism, followed by a discussion of Zadie Smith’s 2000 novel White Teeth as an exemplary text. Chapter 8 then surveys British film since 1980, followed by a discussion of several exemplary texts, including The Commitments (1991) and Trainspotting (1996), which were adapted from important novels, the first Irish and the second Scottish. The final exemplary text is the zombie comedy film Shaun of the Dead (2004).

Chapter 1

The Nineteenth Century and the Birth of the Modern

The Renaissance and the Birth of the Modern

The “birth” of the modern was a protracted one. In one sense, cultural historians use the term “modern” to describe the period that began with the dramatic social, economic, and cultural transformation that swept the Western world during the first decades of the twentieth century and that continues as a global transformation today—though many would describe today’s period of globalization as “postmodern.” But this specific notion of modernity did not emerge without a long gestation period of historical change that prepared the way for its entry into the world. Indeed, many historians use the notion of the “modern” in a larger sense, to encompass the long slow process of cultural revolution through which the structure of medieval society in Europe (dominated by the twin—and closely aligned—institutions of the Catholic Church and the feudal aristocracy) was swept away, gradually replaced by a new order, dominated by the emergent bourgeois[1] class. This cultural revolution was centrally informed by the Protestant reformation, the rapid transition of the European economic system from a feudal to a capitalist one, and the growing hegemony of modern ideas concerning democracy, humanism, scientific rationalism, and individualism. With key events such as the French Revolution of the late nineteenth century serving as landmarks, this cultural revolution would eventually lead to today’s globalized world.

In this larger sense, the Renaissance period might be said to contain the birth of the modern. In England, the Renaissance began roughly with the beginning of the Tudor dynasty after the end of the War of the Roses in 1485. Tudor rule quickly led to the reign of Henry VIII, who was King of England from 1509 to 1547. A key moment in the birth of modernity occurred when Henry VIII officially announced the coming of the English Reformation by banning the Roman Catholic Church from England and establishing himself as head of the new Protestant Church of England in the early 1530s. Most accounts locate the end of the Renaissance period as corresponding roughly with the end of the rule of King James I in 1625, which was followed by a period of unrest and instability that culminated in the 1688 “Glorious Revolution,” an event that stabilized English politics and society, partly by considerably curtailing the power of the monarchy. In this “revolution,” William III, a Dutch prince, ascended to the British throne, unseating King James II with the support of Parliament. No subsequent British monarch would rule without Parliamentary support, while the Glorious Revolution also led to such documents as the Declaration of Right and the Bill of Rights in 1689 providing key guarantees of democratic freedoms with a distinctively modern tinge.

The Renaissance has long been regarded as a sort of Golden Age for English literature, with Elizabethan and Jacobean drama in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries serving as a centerpiece. By this conventional view, William Shakespeare (1564–1616) has typically emerged as the greatest writer of the English Renaissance. It is certainly the case that Shakespeare’s work can be taken as an early milestone in the growth of a modern mindset in literature, with characters such as Hamlet—who has “that within which passes show”—displaying an interiority and sharply delineated individuality that set them apart from literary characters of earlier periods. We should always remember, however, that the very concept of a “Renaissance” as a rebirth of the cultural energies of classical Greece and Rome was invented largely by bourgeois historians who sought to depict the rise of their class as a positive step forward and as a re-emergence of culture and enlightenment from the Catholic-dominated “Dark Ages” between the fall of Rome and the rise of the Renaissance.[2]

Other literary works of the seventeenth century also stand as key markers of the English road to modernity, including John Milton’s (1608–1674) strongly Protestant Paradise Lost (first published in 1667, then revised in 1674). Of lesser literary magnitude—but perhaps of greater significance as a sign of modernization—is Aphra Behn’s (1640–1689) Oronooko, which was appropriately published in 1688, the year of the Glorious Revolution. Oronooko is important because it marked a significant step toward the evolution of the novel, a genre that, in the eighteenth century, would develop into the most important genre in British literature, partly because it was the genre that most effectively expressed the worldview of the bourgeois class that, by this time, had become for all intents and purposes the ruling class in England.

The Birth of the Novel

The increasing acknowledgement of works such as Oronooko as predecessors to the eighteenth-century novels that had previously been seen as the founding works of the novel as a genre is part of a widespread project of revisionist literary history that has sought, in recent decades, to give due credit to forces outside the conventional narrative of the rise of the novel. Nevertheless, the fundamental importance of eighteenth-century novelists such as Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding to the development of the novel is beyond dispute, and the pioneering work of Ian Watt in The Rise of the Novel (1957) remains a crucial starting point for understanding the crucial interrelationship between the evolution of the novel and the growth of bourgeois power (i.e., capitalist modernization) in England.

Focusing on Defoe, Fielding, and Richardson as the founding authors of the English novel, Watt’s basic goal is to determine the underlying historical conditions that would cause three such pioneering figures to appear all at essentially the same time:

Assuming that the appearance of our first three novelists within a single generation was probably not sheer accident, and that their geniuses could not have created the new form unless the conditions of the time had also been favourable, it attempts to discover what these favourable conditions in the literary and social situation were. (9)

Those conditions, of course, involved the rise of capitalism and the associated rise of scientific ways of observing and describing reality.[3] Watt in particular regards realism as the defining mode of the novel, arguing that “modern realism, of course, begins from the position that truth can be discovered by the individual through his senses” (12). In other words, realism is a literary expression of the epistemological assumptions of the Enlightenment rise of science, based on the notion that the world makes sense and that it can be understood through observation and rational analysis.

Among other things, Watt describes the basic characteristics of the realist novel, demonstrating that the development of these characteristics was driven by the modern capitalist context in which the novel arose in the eighteenth century. These characteristics include the following:

1. The beginnings of an emphasis on originality (a by-product of individualism) that led early novelists to “invent” nontraditional plots rather than simply retelling existing stories (myth, history, legend, or previous literature) as most of their immediate predecessors had done.

2. Plot (i.e. narrative) thus received unprecedented emphasis, accompanied by new ways of perceiving time, accompanied by the rise of notions of historicity as background to novelistic plots.[4]

3. Characters became far more individualized, described in detail both physically and psychologically and acting in the plot as independent agents. The new novel emphasized authentic-sounding accounts of the experience of individuals.

4. The novel featured more detailed and realistic treatments of place than did previous literary forms. The action in novels generally occurs either in real places or in imaginary places that are very much like real places.

5. The novel featured a turn to more referential conceptions of language, including a turn from verse to prose—though the language was also relatively straightforward and journalistic, enabling writers to write more quickly and readers to read more quickly. The simple style of the new novel thus made it possible for novels to be produced and consumed more quickly, leading to greater profits for the new publishing industry.[5]

Watt also usefully discusses the relationship between the birth of the novel and increases in literacy that enabled the rise of a new reading public. Similarly, improvements in printing technology made texts cheaper to produce, making wider distribution of texts possible. Indeed, increases in literacy and increases in print technology reinforced one another, each leading to further increases in the other. Meanwhile, certain sectors of the reading public—especially well-to-do women, who formed a crucial part of the readership of the early novel—had more leisure time available for reading. Indeed, even certain less well-to-do groups (such as servants) began to have more time for reading and higher rates of literacy.

The Business of Literature

It is important to recognize, however, that the reading public in the eighteenth century was still relatively small by modern standards, though large relative to earlier periods when essentially only the aristocracy (and before that only the priesthood) could read. Still, Edmund Burke (1730–1797) estimated that there were only about 80,000 readers in England in the 1790s, out of a population of 6,000,000, making the literacy rate only a bit over 1%. This rate would grow throughout the nineteenth century but would undergo particularly rapid expansion at the end of the century, largely due to educational reforms at that time, reforms that would play an important role in the subsequent evolution of British literature.

Due to the fact that literacy rates remained so low (and purchase prices still remained relatively high), few works sold more than 10,000 copies in the eighteenth century—and most of those were topical pamphlets rather than full-length books. More than half the population of England lived in poverty, short of the bare necessities of life, and books were still somewhat of a luxury, though the growth of capitalism also produced a larger class of wealthy citizens who could afford such luxuries. The novel was thus not really a mass form in the modern sense, though cheaper forms of literature (chapbooks, pamphlets, broadsheets, etc. containing ballads, stories, etc.) were available to a broader audience and helped to contribute to growing literacy rates. Indeed, while the novel remained a thoroughly bourgeois form, it is important to the cultural history of England that the English working class, as outlined by E. P. Thompson in his important work The Making of the English Working Class (1966), had its own vibrant cultural traditions in the nineteenth century.

All-in-all, overall readership was gradually expanding in nineteenth-century England, including expansion into non-traditional groups (women, servants, apprentices), who were more interested in being entertained than in adherence to traditional literary conventions. The need to build this readership—this market—meant that innovations in literature leading up to the twentieth century were not just a matter of artistry and creativity but also a matter of growing a business. For example, by the early nineteenth century, subscription libraries—somewhat like the Netflix model for DVD rentals—were beginning to make books available to more and more people who could not afford to buy them, thus creating an additional income stream for publishers (and, indirectly, authors). Even as late as the end of the nineteenth century, novels were read more by patrons of lending libraries than by purchasers. Subscribers could typically borrow one book at a time per subscription but could simultaneously borrow multiple books by purchasing multiple subscriptions. This led to an industry trend (and to pressure on authors by publishers) to produce longer books that could be published in multiple volumes. Thus, if one wanted to borrow all volumes of the typical Victorian three-part novel at once (to ensure uninterrupted reading of the whole novel), one would have to purchase three subscriptions. And, of course, many nineteenth-century novels were initially published in serial form in relatively inexpensive magazines, further expanding the customer base for the novel. For example, Charles Dickens (1812–1870), the most commercially successful of all Victorian novelists, was so partly due to his frequent publication in magazines: from 1850 to 1859, he even edited his own magazine, Household Words, which reached an extremely wide audience—partly because of its low price.

Realism and Romanticism

Literacy rates would remain far from 100% until new public education programs initiated near the end of the nineteenth century led to dramatic increases in literacy in a relatively short time, just as other dramatic changes were beginning to occur in British society as a whole.[6] Those changes are a crucial part of the story of twentieth-century British literature and culture and will be dealt with in the next chapter. But those changes, while seemingly sudden, had a long background. They were, in fact, the culmination of the transformation in English society that had been underway since the late fifteenth century and that had already gained considerable traction by the time Victoria ascended the throne as Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1835. This ascension, the beginning of the Victorian era in England, can also roughly be regarded as the point at which the realist novel had been established as the most important literary genre in England, which was a crucial moment in the modernization of England and of English literature. Indeed, if the flowering of Romantic poetry in the earlier part of the nineteenth century can be regarded as one last attempt of poetry to assert its primacy over fiction, Romantic poetry can also be taken as a last-ditch literary effort to resist the onward march of modernization—an effort that was doomed both because poetry was increasingly out of step with the spirit of the times and because Romanticism itself, however much it was couched as a valiant defense against the dehumanizing consequences of the growth of scientific rationalism and technological industrialization, was thoroughly permeated by an individualist ideology that was perfectly in tune with the capitalist spirit that drove the growth of science and industry. Romanticism, one might say, was an attack on modernity that was already thoroughly modern itself.

Romanticism, with its glorification and mystification of nature and its emphasis on poets as remarkable individuals overflowing with creative genius[7], was best suited for the production of poetry, though it produced fiction as well, including at least one novel that is still widely taught and read today. That novel would be Frankenstein (1818), by Mary Shelley (1797–1851)—whose husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), was one of the most important Romantic poets. Among other things, Frankenstein is now widely considered to be the first modern science fiction novel, thus giving it an influential place in literary history—though it is, of course, by now impossible to separate the influence of the original novel from that of the numerous pop cultural adaptations it inspired, beginning with James Whale’s 1931 film version. In general, while Romanticism continues to exert a lasting influence (especially in the value we continue to place on artistic originality and creativity), it was never a dominant paradigm, and the mainstream course of British literature continued to be dominated by realism.

That the Renaissance can be taken as the beginning of the modern period is acknowledged by the fact that scholars of Renaissance literature and art have recently begun referring to the Renaissance, not as a separate period, but as the first part of the “Early Modern” period, which extends roughly until the French Revolution ushered in a period of full-blown modernity, followed by the Napoleonic campaigns that brought the modern French ideas that had propelled the revolution to most of the rest of Europe. While generally viewed negatively in Britain at the time, the French Revolution also exerted an important influence on Romanticism, including English Romanticism.

In terms of English literature, the new scheme of periodization now prevalent in academic accounts of literary history would essentially bookend the Early Modern period with the rise of what was formerly called the Renaissance on one end and the eighteenth-century rise of the English novel (and of realism) on the other. In terms of English political history, the Early Modern period might be described as the era in which the bourgeoisie rose to become the dominant class in England and then to consolidate that domination—something that would not occur in much of the rest of Western Europe until the middle of the nineteenth century, with the failed working-class revolutions of 1848 marking the moment of fully-achieved bourgeois dominance in Western Europe—a moment that observers such as Georg Lukács (1885–1971), in his authoritative The Historical Novel, has also seen as a sign that the European bourgeoisie had lost the vitality and zeal for innovation that had driven its rise to power, sending it into a period of conservatism, stodgy conformism, and decline into decadence.[8] Lukács, who was, in his work in the 1930s, one of the first critics to describe the fundamentally bourgeois nature of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel, predictably sees the rise of the novel as driven by the energy of an emergent bourgeois class of merchants and industrialists, while arguing that the subsequent decline of bourgeois vitality was accompanied by a decline in the dynamism of the novel as a genre.

The Country and the City

I will return to Lukács’s narrative of the rise and fall of the bourgeois realist novel later in this volume. For now, I would like to turn to another narrative of literary history that focuses more specifically on nineteenth-century British literature and on the ways in which the evolution of that literature over the course of the century helps to tell the story of the modernization of England during that period. The narrative I have in mind is Raymond Williams’ (1921–1988) The Country and the City (1973), a sweeping history of nineteenth-century British literature (especially the novel) based on the central insight that the evolution of British literature in this century traces the evolution of British society as a whole from a largely agrarian society at the beginning of the century to a modern, urban, industrial society at the end of the century.

One of Williams’ main points is that the notion of a radical twentieth-century modernization sweeping away traditional agrarian forms of life that had held sway for hundreds of years ignores the fact that the demise of these traditional forms was already underway as the nineteenth century began and was quite advanced by the beginning of the twentieth. For example, the shift from the country to the city as a center of both population and power that has been seen as crucial to the transformations of life in the twentieth century was already quite advanced before the twentieth century even began. Perhaps more importantly, for Williams, transformations were underway in every aspect of English life throughout the nineteenth century. Thus, merely to see these changes as a shift from the country to the city is a gross oversimplification that ignores the fact that country life itself was transformed in the course of the century, including a shift in the mode of production from family-based farming to agrarian capitalism. The older gentry that had dominated life through the nineteenth century were also gradually replaced by an agrarian bourgeoisie whose fortunes were not connected to inherited land so much as to the business and commerce of cities such as London, including a growing web of commercial connections that extended around the globe, even in the early parts of the nineteenth century.

In this sense, a crucial early figure in Williams’ history is Jane Austen (1775–1817), whose novels take place almost entirely inside the elegant country homes of the landed gentry and are conventionally thought to be cut off from the currents of history in the outside world. But, as Williams points out, history occurs on country estates as well, and Austen’s world is not a timeless pastoral realm divorced from history. Austen’s novels do not take place in a land of changeless tradition but in a land where change is an integral fact of life, a land of confusion and contradiction and continual appearance of the new within the matrix of the old. The society described in Austen’s novels is, according to Williams, a complex hybrid, “an acquisitive, high bourgeois society at the point of its most evident interlocking with an agrarian capitalism that is itself mediated by inherited titles and by the making of family names” (115).

Of course, the incursion of the modern capitalist world into the English countryside is sometimes dramatized more overtly in the nineteenth-century British novel than in Austen. Thus, both Charlotte Brontë’s (1816–1855) Jane Eyre (1847) and Emily Brontë’s (1818–1848) Wuthering Heights (1847) are set primarily in English country estates. But the plot of Jane Eyre is centrally informed by the presence of Mr. Rochester’s “mad” wife, locked away in the attic after having been brought back to England on one of Rochester’s business trips to the Caribbean. And Wuthering Heights—itself a particularly effective hybrid of realism and Romanticism—is dominated by the dark and mysterious presence of the character Heathcliff, who has come to the country from the shipping city of Liverpool, with its connections to a worldwide web of commerce. And, at one point, Heathcliff disappears back into the larger world, where he makes a fortune within the emerging capitalist system of which he henceforth stands as a glaring reminder in the text.

Explaining Fredric Jameson’s (1934– ) reading in The Political Unconscious of Heathcliff as a “protocapitalist” whose presence in the novel marks the rise of capitalism to dominance in England (128), Adam Roberts notes that, for Jameson,

a reading of Wuthering Heights needs to look at the socioeconomic forces that shaped its composition: in this case the economic dynamic of the early nineteenth century, when industrial and trading capitalism was rising and replacing (disrupting) the older land-based agricultural order” (86–87).

This reading, of course, is entirely in line with the narrative of nineteenth-century English literary history proposed by Williams.

Charles Dickens, Novelist of the City

In other novelists of the nineteenth century (and Williams focuses almost exclusively on the novel as the form that most accurately reflects events in society as a whole), the transformation of life in nineteenth-century Britain is much more obvious than in Austen or the Brontës. For example, Dickens, that great chronicler of London life, is perhaps the most important marker of the urbanization of life in nineteenth-century England, even if he is not particularly good at describing historical change directly. And Dickens is also a chronicler (though a more limited one) of nineteenth-century capitalism. Much commerce occurs within the pages of his novels and numerous characters are shown at work struggling to make their ways in a rapidly expanding (but still precarious) capitalist system within which fortunes can be made or lost in the blink of an eye.

Many critics of Dickens have emphasized his critique of the capitalist system in nineteenth-century England, especially in his sympathetic portrayal of the difficult plight of the working class under that system—which stands out partly because workers are largely absent in so many of the most important British novels of the nineteenth century. Indeed, I is only in nonfiction works—such as Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844—that we can get a truly accurate picture of what life was like for the working poor of England in the mid-nineteenth century. At times, this aspect of Dickens’ work involves a mere acknowledgement of the hardships of the poor. At other times, however, especially in his “industrial novel” Hard Times (1854), he takes a more systemic view of the hardships visited upon the working class in the fictional Coketown by the economic inequalities produced by the emergent capitalist system, as well as by the grim conditions that prevailed in the dark and looming factories that were the key monuments to this system in the Victorian era. But Dickens’ critique of Victorian capitalism went beyond this sympathy for the working class to include explorations of the hazards encountered by the capitalists themselves, as when the losses suffered by Paul Dombey in Dombey and Sons (1948) suggest the tenuous nature of capitalist wealth, while also warning that an excessive concern with profit and wealth can lead to a distortion in human values. Dickens’ concerns about his contemporary society go well beyond the economic, however. For example, his fiction is well-known for its almost obsessive concern with crime and legality, and his critique of the Byzantine complexities of the Victorian legal system is a central element of his work. In Bleak House (1852–53), for example, Dickens produces a vigorous satire on the abuses of the old court of Chancery, centering on the experiences of an ordinary couple, the futile young man Richard Carstone and his amiable and somewhat saintly cousin Ada Clare. Wards of the court as part of a ludicrously interminable estate case, they fall in love and secretly marry. Carstone hopes for a dream life built on a huge inheritance but declines and dies while he waits to receive it. Legal costs, in any case, ultimately absorb the entire estate. Bleak House features a number of other key motifs as well, as when the incessant boredom of Lady Dedlock speaks not just to the idleness of her social group but, in a larger sense, to the mind-numbing boredom created by an entrenched bourgeois society, with its never-ending rules and obsessive concern with morality.[9]

One can perhaps detect here—or, similarly, in the way lawyers, law offices, courtrooms, prisons, and so on pervade the text of Dickens’ later Great Expectations (1860–1861)—a sort of nostalgia for the simpler (and less codified) world of the eighteenth century. But it is also important to note that Dickens’ critique of Victorian bourgeois society, its values, and its institutions is conducted within an extremely limited range. Dickens was a reformer, not a revolutionary. Thus, when the masses attempt to take potentially revolutionary collective action to improve their lot in Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge (1841, largely set during the Gordon Riots of 1780) and A Tale of Two Cities (1859, set before and during the French Revolution), he depicts them essentially as debased savages devoid of human feeling and driven to hysteria and violence by a mob mentality.

Similarly, Franco Moretti comments on the crucial role played by the law in Great Expectations: “The London section of Great Expectations takes place entirely in the realm of the law and ends with the legal confiscation of Pip’s assets” (208). Moretti argues that, in this novel, the legal system reigns supreme over the individual and Dickens essentially endorses this supremacy in a way that is typical of the conservative orientation of the nineteenth-century British novel as a whole: “Due to a unique historical conjunction, the novel was born in England precisely when the ideology of the law reigned supreme. The result was the worst novel of the West, and the boldest culture of justice” (214). For Moretti, then, much like for Lukács, the nineteenth-century British novel loses energy because the capitalist system and its supporting ideology have become so firmly entrenched that the bourgeoisie as a class has lost the dynamic energy that carried it to power, while the authors of the novels have almost completely lost the ability to think beyond that ideology.

It is certainly the case that, whatever their surface content, Dickens’ novels are fundamentally informed by the same bourgeois ideology that drives capitalism, which means that they are by definition incapable of mounting a truly damaging critique of the capitalist system. In her excellent reading of the ideological underpinnings of the nineteenth-century British and Russian realist novels, Isra Daraiseh (concentrating especially on Hard Times) has detailed the ways in which Dickens’ work reflects a powerfully individualist ideology of the kind that is crucial to the bourgeois ideology of capitalism. Overall, Daraiseh is surely right when she concludes that Dickens’ sympathies are ultimately with the bourgeois class and that his warnings about the abuses heaped upon the poor by the capitalist system were not intended to stir the working class to revolution but to improve their condition just enough that no revolution would occur and the capitalist system would thus be preserved.

The Growth of “Popular” Literature

Dickens is certainly an important figure in the mainstream, canonical history of British literature, perhaps exceeded in his talents as a literary artist only by the towering achievements of George Eliot (1819–1880). But his immense popularity and his close attention to the business and marketing aspects of the publishing enterprise also mark him as a crucial forerunner of another strain in British literary history that began to emerge in the second half of the nineteenth century, a strain of popular literature that was less concerned with artistic merit and more concerned with constructing compelling characters and narratives that would appeal to the tastes of an expanding public audience. This new popular strain in Victorian literature was marked by the growing popularity of genre forms (such as science fiction and detective fiction) that have continued to attract a broad audience into the twenty-first century. Dickens’ own Bleak House is a sort of detective novel, for example, while Wilkie Collins (1824–1889) firmly established the detective novel in the English literary market with the success of The Moonstone (1868). Collins was a protegé of Dickens, the latter of whom published detective stories of his own (as well as by other authors) in Household Words. Later, the Sherlock Holmes stories and novels of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle became some of the best-known works of detective fiction of all time, beginning with A Study in Scarlet in 1887. The Holmes stories, like Frankenstein, have remained relevant and well-known, largely because of their pop cultural adaptations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including the extremely popular BBC television series Sherlock (running since 2010) and its American counterpart, Elementary (running since 2012).

Another popular genre that came to the fore in the Victorian era (and that has remained popular to this day) was science fiction. Though Frankenstein might be considered the first science fiction novel, the genre as we know it today was really born in the remarkable string of “scientific romances” written by H. G. Welles (1866–1946) in the second half of the 1890s, including The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898). In the twentieth century, Wells became an important writer of realist novels, as well as an influential historian and utopian thinker. But his greatest importance will always lie in the impetus he gave to what later became the genre of science fiction.

Interestingly, though, the popular genre that had the most commercial success in Victorian England was the colonial adventure story, which featured the high-action exploits of British heroes in various colonial settings throughout the British Empire. And the most successful of the writers of colonial adventures was H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925). Especially well-known for his contributions to the “Lost World” genre (in which adventurers in remote colonial locales discovered previously unknown worlds populated by strange, exotic people and weird animals, previously unknown or thought to be extinct. With much of Africa still largely unexplored, this genre was particularly suited for African settings, as in the hugely popular King Solomon’s Mines (1885), the founding work of the genre (and the first English adventure novel set in Africa). Haggard’s African adventure She (1887), meanwhile, was even more popular, selling 83 million copies, making it one of the best-selling books of all time.

The colonial adventure was particularly suited for the Victorian era, when the British Empire was rapidly expanding. It predictably declined in importance in conjunction with the twentieth-century decline of the empire, though novels such as She and King Solomon’s Mines have had their own twentieth-century film adaptations. Haggard’s most importance presence beyond the nineteenth century, however, has been in the work of others. For example, his novels were an important inspiration for the Tarzan novels of American writer Edgar Rice Burroughs, some of the most successful examples of the emergent popular literature of the early twentieth century and the works—together with their film adaptations—that stand as the best-known examples of American colonial adventure stories. In addition, Allan Quartermain, the protagonist of King Solomon’s Mines, was reportedly the model for Indiana Jones, one of the most popular film characters of all time.

Thomas Hardy and the Death of Rural Tradition

Williams’ narrative of the development of the British novel in conjunction with the evolution of capitalist modernity throughout the nineteenth century concentrates mostly on canonical texts, though he does bring in relevant associated texts, such as Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 and he does ultimately give more attention than most literary histories to working-class novelists such as the Scotsman Lewis Grassic Gibbon (1901–1935), whose trilogy A Scots Quair (1932–1934) is a sort of epic of modernization and urbanization in Scotland. In terms of nineteenth-century British literature, Williams inevitably caps his story with a discussion of the novels of Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), which so effectively dramatizes the passing away of traditional modes of rural life in the course of the nineteenth century. Hardy’s novels were all published between 1871 and 1895, though they are set at various times throughout the nineteenth century. Moreover, while Hardy abandoned novel-writing after Jude the Obscure in 1895 (possibly influenced partly by the harsh criticism this novel received from some circles), he continued writing important poetry essentially until the end of his life. He thus has the distinction of being one of England’s greatest nineteenth-century novelists, while also being one of England’s greatest twentieth-century poets.

But, even in his nineteenth-century novels, Hardy shows a sensibility that is essentially modern. As Daraiseh puts it, noting the deterministic tendencies that so many critics have seen in Hardy’s novels:

If anything, any tendency toward seemingly inevitable tragedy in Hardy’s novels has less in common with the inexorable fate of Greek tragedy or the scientific determinism of French naturalism than with the later works of American film noir—Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past (1947) is a good example—or even neo-noir, as in David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence (2005). (128–29)

Also noting Hardy’s essential modernity, Williams acknowledges the vividness with which Hardy chronicles the landscape of traditional rural England, but declares that, in Hardy, this traditional landscape is always in the process of becoming a thing of the past. Hardy’s rural England, says Williams, is “old in custom and in memory, but old also in a sense that belongs to the new times of conscious education, the oldness of history and indeed of prehistory: the educated consciousness of the facts of change” (Country 197). Indeed, for Williams, Hardy is best understood as a novelist primarily of change: “Within the major novels, in several ways, the experiences of change and of the difficulty of choice are central and even decisive” (197). Hardy’s world is a world in transition, even as he centers his exploration of that transition in “the ordinary processes of life and work,” in the prosaic, day-to-day activities that are crucial to change in the lives of individuals but that seldom feature in the history books as the focal point for narratives of change in a broader sense of sweeping societal transformation (Country 211).

Hardy details the passing away of traditional forms of rural life in his fictional Wessex with a certain sadness that is nevertheless not nostalgic. Hardy has no interest in fantasizing about a return to the old ways: he understands that history moves only forward. Caught up in this sometimes-brutal forward march, Hardy’s characters suffer a great deal. But they never do so because modernization is itself envisioned as a bad thing in general, however unfortunate it might be for specific individuals. In The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Michael Henchard meets his downfall because the times have passed him by, so that he has been supplanted by the more modern-thinking Donald Farfrae. The tragedy here, though, is not that the world changed, but that Henchard didn’t. The town of Casterbridge itself—which has been built over the bones of Roman soldiers–is a reminder of the inevitability of historical change, a fact that Henchard fails to understand or acknowledge. Meanwhile, the tragedies of the protagonists of Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1892) and Jude the Obscure (1895) do not occur, as might at first seem to be the case, because modernization has disrupted older forms of life in which they might have been more comfortable, subsequently allowing them to dream unrealizable dreams that would formerly have been unimaginable. Their stories are tragic because the forces of modernization that have begun to unsettle traditional roles associated with gender and class, respectively, have not yet proceeded far enough to allow Tess and Jude to transcend those older roles entirely.

Among other things, Hardy’s novels show an awareness of the historical contingency of the modern world, an understanding that things have not always been the way they are and that they could have been otherwise. For Williams, this awareness has largely been lost in the world of the twentieth century, where so many take for granted not only the inevitability of modernization and urbanization but the idea of minority ownership of the technologies and resources that are so crucial to these processes. Williams suggests the value of reading postcolonial novels by authors such as Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe (1930–2013) or Kenya’s Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1938– ), who write from areas of the world where modernization is still underway and not so firmly entrenched as to obscure the historical process through which this modernization occurs. In this sense, Williams suggests, postcolonial novels such as Achebe’s Things Fall Apart are much like “English literature of rural change, as late as Hardy” because both Hardy and Achebe understand and represent “the internal tensions” of their transforming societies, with new modes of social organization in the process of supplanting older ones (Country 286).

This suggestion indicates the value of studying British literature and culture within a global perspective, rather than confined within its own bounds. That approach will be taken throughout this volume. I will begin, however, with a specific consideration of British literature in the first decades of the twentieth century, and especially of the phenomenon known as literary “modernism.” Such literature responds directly to the processes of modernization that had evolved throughout the nineteenth century, sweeping away the old and making way for the new, but in ways that were neither easy nor comfortable. Indeed, the modernization of the nineteenth century led, by century’s end, to a sweeping sense of crisis that is already reflected in the work of Hardy and that emerges in a particularly striking way in the works of literary modernism, which respond directly to the transformations of the nineteenth century that Williams describes. But these transformations always already included an element of globalization that should never be ignored, even when discussing only British literature. This twin emphasis on modernization and globalization will remain my focus throughout the remainder of this volume.

NOTES

Chapter 2

Modern British Literature Before World War I: From Realism to Modernism

As the twentieth century began, dramatic changes were afoot in British literature and culture, just as dramatic changes were underway in British society as a whole. This chapter will outline some of the latter changes and then examine the ways in which these changes influenced the production of British literature.

Britain at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century

The triumph of scientific rationalism in the eighteenth century was informed by a utopian optimism concerning the ability of human beings to understand (and eventually change) their world. In England, especially, this intellectual optimism was quickly reinforced by technological advances that led to a nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution that seemed to offer almost unlimited potential for the creation of wealth and for the practical realization of the utopian dreams of the previous century. And all of this occurred within a framework of a new forms of bourgeois historiography that envisioned history as a narrative of continual progress. The future, indeed, seemed bright. The social and intellectual climate of Victorian England at the end of the nineteenth century, however, was strongly informed by a sense that something had gone wrong and that the utopian visions that drove the evolution of English society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were not being matched by actual reality. The new system of industrial capitalism had created great wealth for the select few who owned the factories and other key resources, but it had also created a large urban proletariat[10] who worked long hours under grueling conditions and found themselves mired in poverty regardless of how hard they worked. The conditions under which the working class lived and worked were so harsh that, by many measures, health, nutrition, and other measures of quality of living had actually declined over the course of the nineteenth century. And, to make matters worse, overproduction had driven the capitalist economic system into a deep and lengthy depression in the last decades of the century, leading to massive unemployment and to widespread concerns among the upper classes that revolution might be imminent.

For its own part, the working class responded to these harsh conditions through participation in to an increasingly organized labor movement in England, a key marker of which was the London Dock Workers strike of 1889. Subsequently, the labor and socialist movements in Britain gained considerable power through the 1890s, providing a source of hope for a better life among workers but also causing increased anxieties for the upper classes. Britain’s rulers responded to these anxieties with a variety of strategies designed to alleviate them, though time and again attempts to the crisis in British society only produced new sources of anxiety.

One way in which the ruling class in Britain responded to this crisis was to ramp up expansion of the empire, especially in Africa, beginning with the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, in which Britain and the other major European imperial powers (France, Germany, and Belgium) were joined by a number of other European nations (and the United States) to discuss ways of peacefully dividing up the African content so that competition for territory there would not lead to conflict. The resultant map gave Britain the rights to huge portions of the continent, while the French and Germans got their shares as well. The Congo Free State, a large region in central Africa, was declared the private property of the Belgian Congo Society, to be ruled personally by King Leopold II of Belgium. Lesser powers gained a certain amount of access to trade routes and other resources, and countries such as Portugal, Italy, and Spain were also granted the rights to smaller colonial territories in Africa.

The Berlin Conference was successful in heading off violent conflicts as the various European powers scrambled for footholds in Africa. However, it essentially ignored the fact that the fading Ottoman Empire still claimed the rights to large portions of North Africa, an omission that would become a factor in World War I as the Ottomans joined that conflict in the hope of re-establishing their African territories. Perhaps more importantly, the Berlin Conference often ignored the realities of existing social and political structures in Africa, while paying little or no attention to the rights and wishes of the indigenous populations of the continent. As a result, Britain, in particular, discovered that the subjugation of Africa was to be a difficult one, often requiring extensive military campaigns and brutal forms of political oppression.

Their former confidence in British invincibility and in the inevitability of a global British Empire already shaken by the bloody events surrounding the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the British nevertheless seemed to expect relatively little local resistance almost everywhere they attempted to establish their colonial rule in Africa. In fact, however, the last decades of the nineteenth century were fraught with difficulties for the British conquest of Africa. By the end of the 1870s, Egypt was nominally still a semi-autonomous part of the Ottoman Empire; in practice, however, the regime in Egypt was already a British puppet. In 1881, a charismatic Islamic leader called the Mahdi (essentially the Muslim messiah) was building enough support to cause the British formally to occupy Egypt, making it formally a British protectorate in 1882. The British then moved south to try to quash the Mahdist uprising, only to be met with fierce resistance that culminated in the fall of Khartoum, the most important city in Sudan, to the Mahdi in 1885. The British commander in Khartoum, the celebrated colonial campaigner General Charles George “Chinese” Gordon, was killed in the siege.[11] A long struggle ensued, and the British (via forces commanded by Herbert Kitchener) would not retake Khartoum until the defeat of the Mahdist rebels at the Battle of Omdurman on September 2, 1898.

In the meantime, British colonial forces had met with significant resistance across the continent, from present-day Kenya to present-day Nigeria. Then, just as Sudan had been re-secured, the British found themselves embroiled in another major African colonial campaign as growing hostilities between the British Empire and the Boer settlers in South Africa erupted into all-out war in 1880, resulting in defeat for the British Empire and independence for the Boer Republics of southern Africa. In the Second Boer war, which began in October 1899, the British would finally exert control over South Africa, but at great cost. The overconfident British suffered several initial reversals, then brought Kitchener in to command their forces in 1900. Kitchener was able to defeat the Boers by the end of May in 1902, but only by employing extremely harsh measures, such as destroying Boer farms and crops and confining Boer women and children (over 26,000 of whom died) in the first modern concentration camps in order to put pressure on the Boer guerilla fighters who were hiding out in remote areas. Over 100,000 black Africans who sympathized with the Boers were also imprisoned in camps, where over 20,000 died.

Among other things, the British forces in the Boer War were hampered by the fact that a large percentage of British working-class men were in such bad health from their poor nutrition and squalid living and working conditions that they could not meet the minimum physical standards for service in the British military. As a result, the British army in South Africa had to be supplemented with conscripts from the longtime British colony of Ireland, just as anticolonial sentiment in Ireland was already reaching an all-time high. Indeed, many Irish volunteers fought on the side of the Boers in the war. The conscription of Irish men to serve in a war designed to extend the reach of British colonial domination was understandably treated with considerable resentment in Ireland, all the more so because Irish troops were routinely employed in the most hazardous positions and essentially used as cannon fodder during the war. The British had initially sought to justify their colonization of Africa with a version of what Rudyard Kipling, in a poem written in 1899 (and actually addressed to the United States), called the “white man’s burden,” arguing that more civilized and advanced white Christian nations had not just a right, but a responsibility to colonize the less developed regions of the world in order to bring civilization, enlightenment, and Christianity to the nonwhite peoples of those regions. But this strategy did not serve in the Boer War: the Boers were white Christians, and it was abundantly clear that the British wanted to colonize South Africa for purely economic reasons.

The collapsing economy, falling quality of life, and a never-ending string of crises in the colonies contributed to a growing sense of anxiety in England as the nineteenth century drew to a close. Perhaps, some began to wonder, the Enlightenment vision of uninterrupted progress toward a better and better world was not as pre-ordained as the people of most Western European nations had originally thought. And “pre-ordained” is indeed the correct word. Probably the most important philosophical support for nineteenth-century notions of history-as-progress came from the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel’s (1770–1831) scientific/rational version of divine providence, in which history is seen as an inevitable movement of human civilization toward the realization of a pre-defined ultimate goal that is identified with God’s plan for humanity. Hegel writes: “That world history is governed by an absolute design, that it is a rational process—whose rationality is not that of a particular subject, but a divine and absolute reason—this is a proposition whose truth we must assume (28).

Hegel’s view also provided strong theoretical justification for European colonial expansion, because his view of a divine plan that drives history leads him to the ethnocentric conclusion that, among the world’s cultures, European culture has advanced the farthest toward the realization of God’s plans for human development—and (of course) that, among European cultures, German culture is the most advanced of all. (British thinkers largely adopted Hegel’s model of history but substituted their own countries for Germany as the pinnacle of European civilization.) Conversely, Hegel saw African culture as the least advanced of all of the world’s cultures, as still mired in a childlike primeval primitivity, not as yet having begun the historical progression toward true civilization. This view, of course, provided valuable support to those who wished to find a justification for the European colonization of Africa—and for notions such as Kipling’s idea of a “white man’s burden,” notions that were still being cited well into the twentieth century.

For example, in his 1922 book The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, the renowned British colonial administrator Lord Lugard, while acknowledging that European nations could of course be expected to profit from their African colonies, nevertheless maintains that this colonization also works for the benefit of Africans:

Europe is in Africa for the mutual benefit of her own industrial classes, and of the native races in their progress to a higher plane; … It is the aim and desire of civilised administration to fulfill this dual mandate …. In Africa to-day we are . . . bringing to the dark places of the earth … the torch of culture and progress, while ministering to the material needs of our own civilization. (qtd. in Sicherman 148)

The Hegelian vision of history as inexorable progress provided one of the most important determining forces in European thought in the nineteenth century. Over and over, in one field after another, one finds European thinkers of the time producing models based on a notion of forward temporal movement. For example, the distinctive plot structure of the nineteenth-century realistic novel can be seen as a direct instance of this nineteenth-century notion of history as progress. As J. Hillis Miller points out, “[t]he notions of narrative, of character, and of formal unity in fiction are all congruent with the system of concepts making up the Western idea of history” (“Narrative” 461). In particular, Miller argues that our view of how fictional plots should proceed is thoroughly informed by the Hegelian model of rational history:

The assumptions about history which have been transferred to the traditional conception of the form of fiction . . . include the notions of origin and end (“archeology” and “teleology”); of unity and totality or “totalization”; of underlying “reason” or “ground” of selfhood, consciousness, or “human nature”; of the homogeneity, linearity, and continuity of time; of necessary progress; of “fate,” “destiny,” or “Providence”; of causality; of gradually emerging “meaning”; of representation and truth. (459-60)

Hegel, of course, was not the only important thinker who influenced nineteenth-century visions of history. Karl Marx (1818–1883), for example, adapted Hegel’s dialectical methodology to describe a history that was driven not by abstract principles (as in Hegel), but by material forces. Importantly, this change meant that “men make their own history,” as Marx put it, which is very much in line with the humanist vision of the Enlightenment but which also means that the outcome of history is not pre-ordained. History, for Marx, is driven by certain scientific/rational principles, which means that there are limits on what can happen. What actually will happen, however, is determined by the decisions and actions of human beings within these limits. Those decisions and actions might (and certain could) lead to a better world, but they also might not.

Marx’s scientific vision of human history has much in common with the work of his close contemporary Charles Darwin (1809–1882), working in the same Victorian context. Darwin’s theory of evolution, set forth in the 1859 volume Origin of Species, proposes that plant and animal species evolve by a process of natural selection. For Darwin, however, evolution is a discontinuous and random process. Changes in species occur because of random mutations in individual members of the species. Most mutations are not helpful and will not be passed on widely to future generations. However, if a mutation happens to help the individual organism bearing the mutation to survive in its particular environment, then that mutation will tend to be passed on to future generations simply because the organism will be more likely to live long enough to reproduce. If a mutation is harmful, it will probably not be passed on, because the organism bearing it probably will not live long enough to reproduce. Darwin’s theory applies to all plant and animal species, though what understandably captured the popular European imagination of the time was its implication that even human beings evolved from more primitive species. This idea spurred a number of visions of future evolution, in which various thinkers attempted to imagine the advanced forms that human life might take in the distant future, though these visions did not generally account for the fact that human civilization had advanced to the point where very few mutations would be likely to endow their possessors with an enhanced chance of survival.

Of course, Darwin’s vision also produced a certain amount of anxiety because of its implication that humans were not fundamentally different from other animals and that they had not been specially created by God to rule the planet and ultimately to repopulate a heaven emptied out by the expulsion of Satan and his rebellious angels. Darwin’s model also led to anxieties because, unlike history in Hegel’s philosophy, evolution proceeds by chance and is not determined by some overriding plan. Then again, the nineteenth-century confidence in progress was such that the randomness of Darwinian evolution was virtually ignored in popular accounts. Evolution came instead to be viewed as a process of adaptation in which plants and animals somehow develop characteristics specifically because those characteristics help them to survive: birds need to be able to fly, so they develop wings, and so on. In short, evolution came to be viewed very much as another sort of progress.

Indeed, in the movement known as “social Darwinism,” many models of social progress came (wrongly) to be modeled on Darwin’s theory of evolution. Thinkers such as Herbert Spencer began to argue that human societies advance through a process of natural selection analogous to that attributed to plants and animals by Darwin, presumably assuring that society will gradually progress to more and more efficient and sophisticated states. Predictably, as confidence in the inevitability of progress waned, Darwin’s ideas began (again, inappropriately) to be used to support skepticism toward progress. In particular, the Darwinian vision of progress (with no divine plan to guide its forward movement) also triggered a growing anxiety over the possibility that evolution might somehow reverse itself and begin to proceed backward, with humans then becoming more and more primitive. Even Spencer’s notion of social progress contributed to these anxieties. For Spencer, Victorian England was a unique society because it had the sophistication of advanced, or “industrial” societies, but still maintained the raw energy and drive that he associated with primitive or “militant” societies. But this hybrid vision of Victorian England implied that the Victorians maintained strong vestiges of their primitive past, reinforcing fears that these primitive characteristics might somehow re-emerge and once again become dominant.

Perhaps the central expression of nineteenth-century European anxieties over the possibility of “backward” evolution was Max Nordau’s[12] 1895 book Degeneration, an enormously popular work that helped to fuel the widespread fascination with the concept of “degeneration” (or backward evolution to a primitive state) that swept across Europe in the last years of the nineteenth century. Indeed, as Kershner notes, the concept of degeneration captured the popular imagination of the time perhaps more than any other. Nordau was a student of Cesare Lombroso, the physician and criminalist who had developed the concept of inborn criminal traits, which he believed could be detected through physical examination of would-be criminals, especially of the structures of their skulls. Nordau’s book bears a clear relationship to Lombroso’s work. It purports not only to describe the characteristics of “degenerate” types, but also to elaborate on the opposing characteristics that one might be expected to find in men of genius.

Late Victorian literature is filled with images of degeneration, of which Robert Louis Stevenson’s (1850–1894) The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) is perhaps the classic example. Here, the ultra-civilized and ultra-sophisticated Dr. Henry Jekyll invents a potion that can bring his submerged primitive energies back to the surface, transforming him into the savage and animalistic Mr. Hyde. Eventually, Mr. Hyde (having more raw, natural vitality) takes complete control, forcing Dr. Jekyll to commit suicide in one last desperate act of resistance. This story became a very popular one and was subsequently adapted to film several different times, suggesting that it appeals to something very powerful in the popular imagination.

In addition to Marx and Darwin, several other important late-nineteenth-century thinkers led to fundamental changes in the direction of modern thought. Particularly important were the Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)—whose vision of the human psyche suggested hitherto unexpected depths and complexities—and the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)—whose iconoclastic thought declared the death of God (by which he really meant death of the belief in God) and challenged many of the received ideas about the solidity of Truth that had formerly driven so much of European thought. It is also the case that, as the nineteenth century came to a close, rising levels of education (and rising literacy rates) meant that more and more people would be aware (even if sometimes only vaguely so) of the sweeping intellectual currents stirred by the work of such thinkers as Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, and Freud.

In The Age of Empire (which focuses on the years 1875–1914), Eric Hobsbawm describes the intense sense of crisis that reigned in European society in the last years of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth. More than anything, according to Hobsbawm, this period is marked by an intense sense of “the imminent death of one world and the need for another” (10). This struggle to build a new world took many forms, including the search for new modes of artistic expression that drove the modernist movement. In England, the perceived need to find new ways of dealing with the crisis led to a full decade of Liberal Party rule, from 1905–1915. During this period, the Liberal British government attempted to deal with changing conditions by instituting an entire network of new social programs, including old-age pensions, health and unemployment insurance, child health laws, and more progressive taxation.

However, as Hobsbawm notes, these attempts often led to contradictory results—which is perhaps not surprising, given that the sense of crisis itself was so thoroughly informed by the inherent contradictions within bourgeois society. Indeed, in retrospect, it is easy to see that the successes of British bourgeois society in the nineteenth century were also the sources of the crisis in which it found itself by the last years of the century. The triumph of individualism (a key linchpin of bourgeois ideology) loudly announced that all individuals were equal, even as the capitalist system produced more and more inequality. Further, the declaration that each individual is special and unique (designed among other things to quell any sense of collective solidarity among the working classes, while spurring an ethos of competition) also made each individual feel alienated and alone—and thus unhappy with the system that caused this situation. Similarly, industrialization and the growth of the factory system led to increases in efficiency and productivity, but this very productivity led to the oversupply that nearly capsized the entire system in the last years of the century. Further, efficient factory production requires standardization that contributed to a sense that life was growing increasingly regimented and routine, making many feel that their lives were being forced into dehumanizing, machine-like rhythms, as in the routinization described by the German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920), whose classic study of this phenomenon (known as “rationalization” or “routinization”) was originally published in 1905. In this extremely influential study, Weber argues that the rise of capitalism (accompanied by the rise of Protestantism as a key element of its ideological support) has stripped life of all sense of wonder and magic and of anything and everything that can’t be rationalized, routinized, packaged, and marketed. For Weber, the result is a world devoid of magic, a world in which everything makes sense, everything has a price, and nothing has real value. And, finally, the Victorian faith in progress, even when realized, has the downside of continually distancing the present from the past and leading to a sense instability and of a loss of connection with tradition.[13]

Programs for dealing with the end-of-the century crisis also sometimes led to contradictory results because they themselves were inherently contradictory: designed to achieve better living conditions for the lower classes, they were also designed to blunt political unrest among the masses, thus ensuring the continuation of bourgeois rule. For example, perhaps the two most crucial (and seemingly most progressive) reforms instituted in English society in the last years of the nineteenth century involved the extension of voting rights to working class men[14] and the extension of at least a minimal amount of free public education to working class children. However, this extension of voting rights was largely intended to stave off any potential enthusiasm for revolution (and under pressure from an increasingly organized international labor movement), while the extension of public education programs was enacted partly because the increasingly complex capitalist system needed more educated workers and partly to give the powers-that-be an opportunity to indoctrinate working-class children with bourgeois ideology—thus ensuring that they would grow up to be obedient workers (and to use their new voting rights in ways that were no threat to the bourgeois system).

The spread of public education also led to an immediate increase in literacy, potentially empowering workers—but also potentially making them accessible to the bourgeois print industries, thus furthering their susceptibility to manipulation by bourgeois ideology. In any case, the spread of literacy in the last years of the nineteenth century would have a profound effect on British literature, essentially creating two different strands of literary culture. During most of the nineteenth century, the most respected authors were also the most commercially successful. Virtually all readers of literature were upper-class readers. Now, however, “literary” writers, producing works of what might be called “high” culture, concentrated on writing works for sophisticated audiences, while writers of “popular” literature produced works designed to entertain mass audiences. Moreover, the 1890s also saw the birth of an entirely new form of culture, as film first began to be a viable source of entertainment as well. All of this would lead to dramatic changes in the British cultural landscape as the old century ended and the new one began.

Modernity and Modern British Literature

Changes in culture do not happen suddenly or completely. New emergent forms always begin to appear while the earlier dominant forms still maintain their dominant position. Older forms continue to exist in residual form. At any one time, then, there are at least three different cultural eras in existence at once, as the current prevailing culture is supplemented by the ongoing presence of older forms and the early emergence of new forms that might someday become dominant. This model of simultaneous, interacting cultural elements, elaborated most eloquently by Raymond Williams in Marxism and Literature (121–27), is especially relevant in times of radical change such as the one that occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century, when the bifurcation of British culture into “high” and “popular” forms complicated the situation still further.

In looking at British literature at the beginning of the twentieth century, one can discern both continuity and disruption. For example, amid the split between literary writers and popular writers, Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) remained both a popular writer of colonial adventures and a respected literary author well into the twentieth century, leading to his selection as the first British winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907. Born in India, Kipling used his knowledge of the Indian subcontinent to produce works such as Kim (1901) that were far more sophisticated than the typical colonial adventure.

Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) also sought to be both literary and popular. However, his works were never as popular as Kipling’s, though they would ultimately come to be regarded as having more literary significance. Meanwhile, the most respected novelists in Britain in the first decades of the twentieth century were not the modernist writers who later came to be thought of as the most important forces in the British literary world of the time. Instead, novelists such as Wells, Arnold Bennett (1867–1931), and John Galsworthy (1867–1933)—all of whom were writing in what was essentially a continuation of the spirit of nineteenth-century realism—both gained more mainstream critical respect and sold more books than more experimental “modernist” writers such as Conrad, E. M. Forster (1879–1970), and Virginia Woolf (1882–1941). Indeed, while it was in its heyday (roughly 1900-1930), modernism was never a dominant cultural form, even if subsequent cultural historians would retroactively elevate the modernists to a central position in the evolution of twentieth-century culture—partly because the complexity and formal sophistication of their work could be used to support Cold War arguments that Western literature was aesthetically superior to Soviet literature.

In addition, we should recall that “popular” or “mass” literature in this context means literature produced for consumption by the masses—not literature produced by the masses. Popular literature was generally written by middle class writers and published by many of the same companies that published “high” literature. In short, both “high” and “low” literature were part of the same profit-oriented Culture Industry, an industry in whose interest it was to promote the capitalist system of which it was a crucial part. Most literary histories consider only literature produced by this Culture Industry. However, it is worth at least noting that the English working class has a history, at least since the early nineteenth century, of producing its own alternative, unofficial culture. That culture has focused forms such as newspapers, leaflets, and live performances due to a lack of access to the resources required to produce novels. Published novels written from a genuinely working-class perspective are thus few and far between, but they do exist—and some of them are extraordinary. In a sense, then, there are four strains in the development of modern British literature: the “high,” or conventionally literary realist strain, the “high” modernist strain, the “popular” strain written in perfect accordance with the dominant ideology of the time, and a strain of working-class literature written in opposition to that ideology.

Popular British Literature in the Early Twentieth Century

In general, the popular forms that had arisen in the course of the nineteenth century continued to thrive in the twentieth, sometimes in new and exciting ways. The strain of Gothic fiction that had led from Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), through “female” Gothic works (such as Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800), and Frankenstein), through Bram Stoker’s (1847–1912) Dracula (1897) gained new life in the ghost stories of the medieval scholar M. R. James (1862–1936). Meanwhile, the fantasy tale, which one might consider to have originated in the works of William Morris (1834–1896)—such as The Well at the World’s End (1896)—and George McDonald (1824–1905)—such as Lilith (1895)—would eventually emerge fully formed in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937), followed by his monumental Lord of the Rings trilogy (1954–1955). The pioneering science fiction novels of H. G. Wells did not have many direct successors in the early years of the twentieth century, but they would ultimately be crucial forerunners when the genre took off.[15] The colonial adventure was on the decline in the new century, partly because growing anticolonial agitation in Ireland (Britain’s oldest colony) and India (Britain’s biggest and most important colony) had made the empire seem less romantic. Nevertheless, such works did continue to appear, and Haggard continued to write and publish novels well into the twentieth century, including numerous sequels to King Solomon’s Mines, the last of which, Allan and the Ice-Gods, was published posthumously in 1927. Finally, detective stories and novels such as those pioneered by Doyle took interesting new directions in the early decades of the twentieth century in the work of Agatha Christie (1890–1976), while Barbara Cartland (1901–2000) pioneered a new kind of romance story aimed at women readers seeking escape from the dreariness of their domestic lives.

Writers such as William Hope Hodgson (1877–1918)—as in The House on the Borderland (1908)—produced early-twentieth-century forerunners of the modern horror genre, but it was the ghost story, especially in the hands of James, that emerged in the early part of the twentieth century as the most important form of what would later come to be regarded as “horror” fiction. James drew upon his extensive knowledge as a professional medieval scholar to create effectively Gothic settings for his ghost stories, which were published in a series of collections, beginning with Ghost Stories of an Antiquary in 1904, followed by More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911), A Thin Ghost and Others (1919), and A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories (1925). An omnibus edition, The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James, was published in 1931.James’s stories tend to follow a set formula—but, then again, he invented the formula, which numerous successors have imitated. The stories tend to take place in quiet settings (either in the country or on a university campus); they tend to feature a protagonist modeled on James himself, a sort of gentleman-scholar whose interest in ancient books or other objects inadvertently summons a ghost, which the protagonist must then face using his wits and knowledge as primary weapons.

Some early-twentieth-century fantasy writers were quite explicit in their production of stories designed to enact an escape from the routine of modern life. In Edith Nesbit’s (1858–1924) The Enchanted Castle (1907), for example, three English schoolchildren set out in search of a magical realm free of the effects of modernization. As one of them puts it, “I think magic went out when people began to have steam-engines, and newspapers, and telephones and wireless telegraphing” (10). These children thus inadvertently echo the then-recent work of Weber. This escapist tendency would continue in the work of the writers who ultimately defined the modern genre of British fantasy.

By mid-century, British fantasy fiction had come to be dominated by writers who were suspicious of modernity. Such writers—such as C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) and J.R.R. Tolkien (1892–1973)—were often driven by their own conservative (typically religious) impulse, but it is also the case that the rise of British fantasy in the 1930s and 1940s seems to have been at least partly a reaction against the rise of American science fiction during the same period. Such writers came to associate science fiction with the contamination, or even extinction, of indigenous British cultural traditions by American popular culture—and by American-driven modernization as a whole. Thus, Roger Luckhurst argues that the association of science fiction with “Americanized modernity … is surely part of the reason that the most notable form of writing in England in the wake of the war was the more indigenous form of fantasy” (123). Luckhurst argues that the writing of Lewis and Tolkien, in particular, “responds directly to the condition of modernity in England, and to what they perceived as a disastrous defeat of tradition” (124).

In terms of their suspicions toward modernity, it is probably significant that both Lewis and Tolkien were scholars of medieval literature. Both were also devoted Catholics. Lewis is best known for The Chronicles of Narnia, a series of seven fantasy novels intended primarily for children, written between 1949 and 1954. Considered a classic of children’s literature, this sequence is strongly informed by Christian ideas; the magical world of Narnia is driven by principles that definitely go beyond the physical laws of our own world but operate in fairly strict accordance with the supernatural aspects of Catholicism, up to and including a hero (Aslan) who is a transparent figure of Christ. Moreover, the world of Narnia is viewed through the lens of a group of children who arrive there from our own world, encouraging readers to accept the principles of Narnia (and Christianity) with a childlike innocence (and faith).

Tolkien began the creation of the elaborately detailed imaginary realm of Middle Earth in The Hobbit (1937) but perfected it in the seminal “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, which comprises The Fellowship of the Ring (1954), The Two Towers (1954), and The Return of the King (1955). Here, he creates the magical realm of Middle Earth, drawing upon his upon his extensive knowledge of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Greco-Roman mythologies, as well as Catholicism to create a vivid fantasy realm. The detail with which Tolkien populates his Middle Earth probably accounts for the fact that so many readers have found that work so compelling. Meanwhile, the plot of the trilogy is carefully crafted—based, as Richard Mathews has noted, on the “scriptural pattern of revelation”—to enhance reader involvement and to deliver satisfying resolutions in the end (138). To this day, Tolkien’s work remains highly popular with general readers—buoyed by the vast popular success of Peter Jackson’s film adaptations between 2001 and 2003—though it has long received mixed reviews from critics, many of whom have complained of the blandness of Tolkien’s style, the oversimplicity of his moral vision, and the escapist and unrealistic nature of his nostalgia for earlier, presumably simpler and better times. Nevertheless, his works of fantasy remain the standard against which all such works are still judged today. Indeed, Tom Shippey declares Tolkien to be the most important author of the twentieth century, the principal author responsible for the fact that “the dominant literary mode of the twentieth century has been the fantastic” (vii).

Shippey exaggerates here, and fantasy has not been the dominant literary mode in Britain or elsewhere in the twentieth century—though it has certainly been an extremely important mode. Meanwhile, despite the aversion to the genre noted by Luckhurst, science fiction has continued to be an important mode in British literature ever since the pioneering work of Wells in the 1890s. Indeed, despite his turn to a primarily realist mode of fiction in the twentieth century, Wells himself continued to produce science fiction throughout his career. As opposed to the antiquarianism of Lewis and Tolkien, Wells believed that science and technology, properly guided by socialist political principles, could bring about a better world. However, a utopian outcome was by no means inevitable to Wells, and many of his works—such as When the Sleeper Wakes (1899)—anticipate the important dystopian vein that marked much of British speculative fiction in the twentieth century. Works such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four (1949)—bracketing a variety of anti-fascist dystopias in the 1930s—are certainly among the best known and most influential works of British literature in the last century. On the other hand, works with more distinctively utopian themes have continued to appear as well. One could cite here the fictions produced in the 1930s by the British socialist writer Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950), including Last and First Men (1930) and Star Maker (1937). Here Stapledon envisions the far-future societies in which humanity has evolved to the point of overcoming the negative inclinations (such as selfish individualism) of our own world. Stapledon’s interests are largely philosophical; he deals relatively little with advanced technology or with politics, though his work is informed by a consistent antipathy toward capitalism and fascism.

Stapledon’s novels, like much of the work of Wells, contain important utopian energies in their sense that bigger and better things may await humanity in the far future. The same can be said of the work of Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008), whose work often deals with the notion of the evolution of the human species into a radical new era, typically propelled by the intervention of an advanced alien race that might, in fact, have been overseeing the development of humanity from its very beginnings. This idea is developed in the most detail in this novel Childhood’s End (1953), in which an invasion of alien Overlords helps to propel humanity into a new stage of evolution. This same motif is also crucial to the single work for which Clarke is perhaps best known today, the 1968 science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey, directed by Stanley Kubrik and co-written by Kubrick and Clarke, the latter of whom also wrote a novelization of the film’s story in parallel with the making of the film.

Finally, no consideration of British popular literature in the twentieth century could be complete without an acknowledgement of the importance of detective fiction in British culture. Doyle himself continued to write Sherlock Holmes stories well into the twentieth century, with his last Holmes novel, The Valley of Fear, appearing in serialized form in 1914–1915. The last collection of Holmes stories by Doyle, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, appeared in 1927, gathering stories originally published in Strand magazine from 1921 until 1927. By this time, Christie had established an important presence in British detective fiction, beginning with her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), which introduced the detective Hercule Poirot, who would be featured in many of Christie’s detective novels and stories going forward. Christie’s other major detective figure, Miss Jane Marple, was introduced in the short story collection The Thirteen Problems in 1927. Christie would go on to become one of the most prolific and popular[16] authors of the twentieth century in a career that ultimately included 66 detective novels and 14 story collections, stretching until the end of her life in 1976.

Christie developed a distinctive, formulaic style of refined detective fiction, often featuring upper-class characters and almost always ending as the detective identifies the culprit so that justice can be done and order restored. Her fiction thus constitutes an essentially conservative reassurance that the existing social structure works. Several of Christie’s novels are set in or related to the Middle East (where she spent a considerable amount of time with her archaeologist husband), where they consistently reaffirm the rightness of empire. Christie’s work thus stands in stark contrast to the “hard-boiled” style that became so popular in American detective fiction of the twentieth century, which is often much more cynical about the reliability of existing mechanisms for the distribution of justice. However, while Christie was the dominant British detective-fiction writer of the twentieth century, other styles have also been successful. For example, in the 1930s the leftist literary critic Christopher Caudwell (writing as Christopher St. John Sprigg) wrote harder-edged detective novels sympathetic to the proletarian cause. Similarly, the leftist poet Cecil Day-Lewis (1904–1972) also wrote detective fiction. Writing as Nicholas Blake, Day-Lewis (the father of the distinguished actor Daniel Day-Lewis) began writing detective novels in the 1930s and became one of Britain’s most successful writers of detective fiction in a career that extended into the 1960s, though his politics became more muted in later years. One of his last detective novels, The Sad Variety (1964), even contains a sharp critique of leftist dogmatism and Soviet expansionism.

Working-Class and Leftist Literature

If bourgeois novelists such as Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell called attention to the plight of the English working class in their novels of the mid-nineteenth century, novels later in the century were even more graphic in their detail, though still stopping short of calling for the working class to take collective action to improve their lot. Novels such as George Gissing’s The Nether World (1889) and Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago (1896) attempted to make a middle-class audience aware of the miserable living conditions of the underclasses, especially in London. In addition, writers such as William Edwards Tirebuck, Allen Clarke, and Margaret Harkness (publishing as John Law) produced novels designed to express a genuinely working-class perspective on contemporary social and political issues. For example, Harkness’s first novel, A City Girl (1887) tells, in a fable-like fashion that departs from nineteenth-century conventions of realism, the story of Nelly Ambrose, a young woman who lives in poverty in the tenement in London’s West End. Nelly’s life is hard, but she continues to dream of a better life, though those dreams are never realized in the novel. A City Girl has a special historical importance for leftist aesthetics because it drew the attention of Marx’s associate and frequent co-author, Friedrich Engels, whose critique of the novel (put forth in a letter written to Harkness in 1888), establishes a number of fundamental ideas that have remained influential for Marxist critics and theorists ever since that time (Marx and Engels, Literature and Art 41-43). In the letter, Engels diplomatically praises Harkness for her concentrating on the working class, so long neglected in British literature. However, he concludes that Harkness should have provided more realistic descriptions of the lives of her working-class characters, through “truthful reproduction of typical characters under typical circumstances” (41). He also advises Harkness to try to make her working-class characters less passive and more capable of taking action to improve their lives. In perhaps his most influential suggestion (one that would greatly impact later leftist critics such as Lukács) Engels declares that the great French realist Honoré de Balzac, despite his personal reactionary philosophy, is “a far greater master of realism” than the left-leaning French naturalist novelist Émile Zola, and thus urges Harkness, who was so clearly influenced by Zola, to turn to Balzac as a model instead (42-3). Time and again, in subsequent decades, leftist critics would point to the right-wing Balzac as a crucial role model for leftist novelists.

The last years of the nineteenth century also saw an increase in the production of historical novels from a working-class perspective by writers such as William Hale White (The Revolution in Tanner’s Lane, 1887), James Haslam (The Handloom Weaver’s Daughter, 1904), and E. L. Voynich (The Gadfly, 1897). As modernist innovation became an important force in the British literary world in the first decades of the twentieth century, fiction oriented toward socialism or the working class continued to be produced in a relatively conventional realist mode. However, 1914 saw the posthumous publication (albeit in expurgated form[17]) of Robert Tressell’s (the pen name of Robert Noonan, 1870–1911) highly innovative The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, probably the most vivid literary evocation of working-class experience to that date and a book that would become the single most influential text in British proletarian literature in the twentieth century.

A mysterious figure about whom comparatively little is known, Tressell was Irish by birth, but he lived most of his life in London, punctuated by a stay in South Africa during most of the 1890s, after which he apparently helped to organized the Irish Brigades, which fought alongside the Boers against the British in the war.[18] While in South Africa, Tressell acquired experience in the construction trade that would provide valuable information for the writing of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, though it appears that he held something of a supervisory position in South Africa and did not experience the hardships of most of the characters in his novel. He did, however, labor in more working-class positions after his return to England, which also provided gist for his novel, which includes unprecedented details about the working lives of the proletariat in England.

The 1920s then saw another surge in the production of proletarian literature in Britain, spurred by British social and economic problems in the wake of World War I and inspired partly by the success of the Russian Revolution and the project to build socialism in the Soviet Union. For example, in This Slavery (1925), Ethel Carnie Holdsworth, who herself worked in a Lancashire cotton mill from the age of nine, moves significantly beyond Harkness in the elaboration of a legitimate socialist politics, a difference that can be seen most clearly in the consistently negative depiction of religion (including the Salvation Army with which Harkness was so fascinated) as a tool of capitalist ideological domination.

With the coming of the Great Depression of the 1930s (and with the threat of fascism looming over British society—both internally and externally—during most of that decade), British proletarian literature underwent a veritable explosion of productivity—as did proletarian literature in America and elsewhere.[19] This decade saw the publication of hundreds of proletarian novels, often influenced by trends in the Soviet Union and by the work of Soviet writers such as Maxim Gorky and Mikhail Sholokhov. Special themes of British leftist literature in the 1930s include antifascism in general and the Spanish Civil War in particular, as well as criticisms of British class society and the social and economic inequities of capitalism.[20] Proletarian works were produced in a wide variety of modes and from a significant range of political perspectives. Some of them, such as Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s trilogy, A Scots Quair (1932-1934) employed sophisticated modernist literary strategies that helped them to become accepted as classics of British literature.

During this period, middle-class writers such as Alec Brown (Daughters of Albion (1935), Rex Warner (The Wild Goose Chase, 1937) and Edward Upward (Journey to the Border, 1938) produced works (sometimes in experimental avant-garde forms) that attempted to convey the need for radical social and political change in Britain, while writers such as Walter Greenwood (Love on the Dole, 1933) and Walter Brierley (Means Test Man, 1935) used realist and naturalist strategies to convey working-class experience to a primarily middle-class audience in ways that helped many such books become best-selling popular successes. Meanwhile, writers such as Harold Heslop (Last Cage Down, 1935) and Lewis Jones (Cwmardy, 1937; We Live, 1939) began to make genuine progress toward the development of a legitimately proletarian literature, written by workers for workers, that would break free of the limitations of the bourgeois aesthetic tradition.[21]

The proletarian energies of the 1930s were felt in poetry as well. Indeed, the dominant strain in British poetry in the 1930s tilted strongly toward the political left, as poets such as W. H. Auden (1907–1973) expressed strong political convictions both in their poetry and in their other activities. Auden was the leader of a group of important leftist poets in the 1930s that also included Stephen Spender (1909–1995) and Cecil Day-Lewis, the latter of whom went so far as to join the Communist Party from 1935 to 1938. Auden, for his part, broadcast anti-fascist political messages during the Spanish Civil War, having been convinced that he could contribute more that way than by volunteering to serve on the ground in the war itself. In addition, one of his best-known poems, “Spain, 1937”) (aka “Spain”), written after his visit to Spain in 1937, specifically addresses the Spanish Civil War. In this poem, included below, Auden begins by lauding the coming of modernity and the promise it brought of a better world. He then warns that current events in Spain put that entire legacy in jeopardy. Like T. S. Eliot, Auden sees the modern world in a state of crisis. Unlike Eliot, he does not question modernity itself, but instead locates the true crisis in the threat to the project of modernity that is represented by the rise of fascism in Europe. The poem is an exhortation for advanced democracies such as Britain and the United States to come to the aid of the Spanish Republicans. Alas, no official help was forthcoming, though many on the Left in both Britain and America did volunteer and go to Spain to help the Republican cause. A number of British proletarian and leftist writers were, in fact, killed in Spain, including the young poet John Cornford (1915–1936), the novelist and critic Christopher Caudwell (1907–1937), and the novelist and critic Ralph Fox (1900–1936). In addition, the novelist Lewis Jones (1897–1939) collapsed and died at a young age after working himself to exhaustion agitating in favor of British intervention in Spain.[22]

“Spain, 1937”

W. H. Auden

Yesterday all the past. The language of size

Spreading to China along the trade-routes; the diffusion

Of the counting-frame and the cromlech;

Yesterday the shadow-reckoning in the sunny climates.

Yesterday the assessment of insurance by cards,

The divination of water; yesterday the invention

Of cartwheels and clocks, the taming of

Horses. Yesterday the bustling world of the navigators.

Yesterday the abolition of fairies and giants,

the fortress like a motionless eagle eyeing the valley,

the chapel built in the forest;

Yesterday the carving of angels and alarming gargoyles;

The trial of heretics among the columns of stone;

Yesterday the theological feuds in the taverns

And the miraculous cure at the fountain;

Yesterday the Sabbath of witches; but to-day the struggle

Yesterday the installation of dynamos and turbines,

The construction of railways in the colonial desert;

Yesterday the classic lecture

On the origin of Mankind. But to-day the struggle.

Yesterday the belief in the absolute value of Greek,

The fall of the curtain upon the death of a hero;

Yesterday the prayer to the sunset

And the adoration of madmen. but to-day the struggle.

As the poet whispers, startled among the pines,

Or where the loose waterfall sings compact, or upright

On the crag by the leaning tower:

“O my vision. O send me the luck of the sailor.”

And the investigator peers through his instruments

At the inhuman provinces, the virile bacillus

Or enormous Jupiter finished:

“But the lives of my friends. I inquire. I inquire.”

And the poor in their fireless lodgings, dropping the sheets

Of the evening paper: “Our day is our loss. O show us

History the operator, the

Organiser. Time the refreshing river.”

And the nations combine each cry, invoking the life

That shapes the individual belly and orders

The private nocturnal terror:

“Did you not found the city state of the sponge,

“Raise the vast military empires of the shark

And the tiger, establish the robin’s plucky canton?

Intervene. O descend as a dove or

A furious papa or a mild engineer, but descend.”

And the life, if it answers at all, replied from the heart

And the eyes and the lungs, from the shops and squares of the city

“O no, I am not the mover;

Not to-day; not to you. To you, I’m the

“Yes-man, the bar-companion, the easily-duped;

I am whatever you do. I am your vow to be

Good, your humorous story.

I am your business voice. I am your marriage.

“What’s your proposal? To build the just city? I will.

I agree. Or is it the suicide pact, the romantic

Death? Very well, I accept, for

I am your choice, your decision. Yes, I am Spain.”

Many have heard it on remote peninsulas,

On sleepy plains, in the aberrant fishermen’s islands

Or the corrupt heart of the city.

Have heard and migrated like gulls or the seeds of a flower.

They clung like burrs to the long expresses that lurch

Through the unjust lands, through the night, through the alpine tunnel;

They floated over the oceans;

They walked the passes. All presented their lives.

On that arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot

Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe;

On that tableland scored by rivers,

Our thoughts have bodies; the menacing shapes of our fever

Are precise and alive. For the fears which made us respond

To the medicine ad, and the brochure of winter cruises

Have become invading battalions;

And our faces, the institute-face, the chain-store, the ruin

Are projecting their greed as the firing squad and the bomb.

Madrid is the heart. Our moments of tenderness blossom

As the ambulance and the sandbag;

Our hours of friendship into a people’s army.

To-morrow, perhaps the future. The research on fatigue

And the movements of packers; the gradual exploring of all the

Octaves of radiation;

To-morrow the enlarging of consciousness by diet and breathing.

To-morrow the rediscovery of romantic love,

The photographing of ravens; all the fun under

Liberty’s masterful shadow;

To-morrow the hour of the pageant-master and the musician,

The beautiful roar of the chorus under the dome;

To-morrow the exchanging of tips on the breeding of terriers,

The eager election of chairmen

By the sudden forest of hands. But to-day the struggle.

To-morrow for the young the poets exploding like bombs,

The walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion;

To-morrow the bicycle races

Through the suburbs on summer evenings. But to-day the struggle.

To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death,

The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;

To-day the expending of powers

On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.

To-day the makeshift consolations: the shared cigarette,

The cards in the candlelit barn, and the scraping concert,

The masculine jokes; to-day the

Fumbled and unsatisfactory embrace before hurting.

The stars are dead. The animals will not look.

We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and

History to the defeated

May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon.

Auden, of course, also wrote in a variety of modes other than the purely political. Indeed, by the end of the 1930s, he was beginning to doubt whether art and poetry could have a major political impact, given the power of other forces a work in the modern world. One of Auden’s best-known poems, for example, was “Musée des Beaux Arts,” written in December 1938 while he was in Brussels, Belgium, with his friend, the novelist Christopher Isherwood (1904–1986), himself an important figure in 1930s British culture and one of the first (having spent time in Germany in the early 1930s), to warn of the menace posed by the German Nazis.[23] This poem was inspired by Auden’s viewing, in the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique in Brussels, of a painting entitled “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” then assumed to have been painted by Peter Breughel, though that attribution has since been disputed.

In the painting, the mythical fall of Icarus occurs virtually without notice, while ordinary people, who have enough mundane troubles of their own, simply go about their business without stopping to contemplate this event of such prominence in Western culture. Auden, perhaps thinking back to the horrors of the Spanish Civil War, or perhaps looking forward to the spread of those horrors throughout Europe in World War II, ultimately reminds us that life goes on despite the worst events that can occur. He also notes that events of momentous importance to some might be insignificant to others. Mixing everyday language with a context of myth, high art, and poetry to capture this contrast between the momentous and the mundane, Auden expresses admiration when he notes of the Old Masters such as Breughel, that

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

One of Auden’s most moving poems, written shortly afterward in very much the same mode, was “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” an elegy written on the occasion of the death of the Irish poet William Butler Yeats in January 1939. By this time, Yeats himself had moved to a rightist political position that was almost the opposite of Auden’s. Yet Auden continued to regard Yeats as one of the great poets of the twentieth century and as a major influence not only on his own work, but on modern poetry as a whole. In the poem Auden manages to express grief without becoming maudlin and even pulls off the impressive feat of avoiding a descent into cliché and sentimentality while arguing that while Yeats the man is gone, he will live on in his poems, which march on, unaware that their creator has died: “The death of the poet was kept from his poems.” Those poems, in fact, will continue to change those who read them, while readers will continue to give new life to the poems as well: “The words of a dead man,” Auden writes, “Are modified in the guts of the living.” At the same time, Auden labors under no illusion that poetry of any kind will exercise a dramatic and wide-ranging influence on the world of the future. He thus ends the poem on a note of resignation and regret:

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow

When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.[24]

The Mainstream Realist Tradition

England entered the new century in a mixed state of anticipation and anxiety. When Queen Victoria then died in 1901, it further created a sense that an old era was ending and a new one was beginning. Little wonder, then, that big changes would soon be afoot in British culture. It is worth remembering, though, that much of the culture that was most respected at the time continued to be produced in a relatively conventional mode that was largely an extension of late-Victorian literary style. Dramatists such as George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), who had become Britain’s most prominent dramatist by the end of the nineteenth century, continued to occupy that position for decades into the twentieth.[25] Shaw wrote in a consistently realist mode, though his sympathy for socialist causes often shows up in his work, giving it a distinctly modern tinge. Similarly, Thomas Hardy, who did not begin publishing poetry until 1898, remained a prominent English poet for decades afterward, again writing in a relatively traditional style but also showing the influence of the changing world around him. His 1902 poem “The Man He Killed,” for example, shows a skeptical attitude toward war that reflects popular disillusionment over the recent Boer War as well as Hardy’s own personal attitudes. The poem revolves around the absurdity of a combat situation in which two total strangers, who might in civilian life have become friends, are expected to try to kill one another thanks to forces beyond their control or understanding.

“The Man He Killed”

Thomas Hardy

“Had he and I but met

By some old ancient inn,

We should have sat us down to wet

Right many a nipperkin!

“But ranged as infantry,

And staring face to face,

I shot at him as he at me,

And killed him in his place.

“I shot him dead because —

Because he was my foe,

Just so: my foe of course he was;

That’s clear enough; although

“He thought he’d ‘list, perhaps,

Off-hand like — just as I —

Was out of work — had sold his traps —

No other reason why.

“Yes; quaint and curious war is!

You shoot a fellow down

You’d treat if met where any bar is,

Or help to half-a-crown.”

This poem (along with other war poems by Hardy) stood in stark contrast to most (staunchly jingoistic) British war poetry up to that time and anticipated the harsh depiction of warfare by British World War I poets such as Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967) and Wilfred Owen (1893–1918), whose skeptical attitudes captured the feeling of many that this war was a senseless conflict being fought at huge human cost with no clear reasons behind it. After all, World War I visited unprecedented destruction upon the European continent in a conflict the real motivations behind which were never really all that clear. Poets such as Sassoon and Owen were not particularly inventive in terms of poetic form, but their skeptical attitude toward the war was a distinct rupture in poetic history that captured—more than any of the modernist writers—the traumatic nature of World War I as potentially marking the end of the Enlightenment project. Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum est”[26] is still regarded as one of the greatest and most important war poems ever written.

“Dulce et Decorum Est”

By Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

Poets such as Hardy explored decidedly modern themes but in forms that essentially continued nineteenth-century conventions. Yet the controlled austerity of Hardy’s verse also exerted a strong influence on British poets who came after him, especially Philip Larkin (1922–1985). Some of the most widely respected English novelists of the early twentieth century also wrote in a relatively traditional style but often with very modern attitudes. Wells, for example, turned from his pioneering work in science fiction in the 1890s to write more conventional realist novels, though the highly satirical Tono Bungay (1909) still includes elements of science fiction. Other Wells novels of this period—Anna Veronica (1909), The History of Mr. Polly (1910), The Passionate Friends (1913)—were in a more conventionally realist vein, though they contained strong elements of social satire that reflected Wells’ Fabian socialist views (which he shared with Shaw, among many others).[27] Wells also continued to write speculative fiction as well as non-fiction, becoming a respected socialist and utopian thinker as well as an historian. Works such as A Modern Utopia (1905) and The Shape of Things to Come (1933) outlined his vision for a utopian future. His key historical work The Outline of History (1920) was especially important (and popular) as an account of history for a general audience; this work subtly figured the history as the past that leads to the utopian future imagined in his other work.

Bennett was much more conventional as a novelist, writing only realist novels, though some of his work bordered on naturalism in its focus on the grim details of the often difficult lives of its working-class characters. He wrote in several genres but is best known for his numerous novels, especially those set in the “Five Towns” industrial region of the Staffordshire Potteries, now making the city of Stoke-on-Trent in the West Midlands of England.[28] The latter include Anna of the Five Towns (1902), The Old Wives’ Tale (1908), and a series of four novels collectively known as The Clayhanger Family (1910–1918). Bennett’s 1917 crime novel The Loot of Cities was something of a departure for him, though it is widely considered to be a classic of the genre. Though quite successful during his prime, Bennett suffered significant damage to his reputation as a novelist due to the harsh criticisms leveled against his work by members of the Bloomsbury Group, especially Virginia Woolf, who saw his work as hopelessly old-fashioned.[29] Moreover, Bennett’s clear sympathy for ordinary working people ran against the elitist inclinations of the Bloomsbury Group, who felt that intellectuals had a responsibility to resist the growing influence of the masses in driving cultural production in England and elsewhere. More recently, however, critics such as John Carey, employing a more modern and democratic view, have championed Bennett’s work as a sort of fictional defense of the masses against the onslaught of elitist intellectuals such as the Bloomsbury Group.

Like Bennett, Wells and Galsworthy also came in for criticism from the Bloomsbury Group, though that didn’t stop Galsworthy, perhaps the most conventional of the three as a realist novelist, from becoming the second English writer to win a Nobel Prize in literature in 1932. By far the best-known works of Galsworthy’s career are the three novels and two shorter “interludes” that together detail the history of the fictional Forsyte family, published between 1906 and 1921 and then published together as The Forsyte Saga in 1922. This saga tells the story of a single upper-class British family caught up in the dramatic changes underway in British society as a whole from the late nineteenth century to the beginning of the 1920s. On the other hand, British history here is used primarily as a backdrop for the personal stories of the Forsytes, as the novels maintain the individualist focus of the typical bourgeois novel. 1922, of course, is now remembered as the greatest year of modernist literary production, the year in which both T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses were published. At the time, however, the publication of the omnibus edition of Galsworthy’s Forsyte novels was considered a much more important literary event, Eliot and (especially) Joyce remaining somewhat marginal cultural figures. Now, however, The Forsyte Saga is remembered primarily for its highly successful 1967 BBC television adaptation, while The Waste Land and Ulysses are considered among the greatest monuments of twentieth-century literature.

Literary Modernism

Though marginal at the time it was produced, the modernist works of the first three decades or so of the twentieth century moved to the very center of the British literary canon, especially in American literary studies (and American college classrooms) in the 1950s. Indeed, modernism in general came to the fore in literary studies in conjunction with the rise of the New Criticism as the dominant mode of literary analysis at the same time. Modernism, with its emphasis on style and literary technique, was perfectly suited to the New Criticism, which emphasized the same things. Since that time, however, modernist literature has received a tremendous amount of attention and ways of reading that literature have evolved from the intensely formalist New Critical emphasis of the 1950s to more historically- and politically-based readings in recent decades.

However, the exact nature and ideological orientation of modernism are still being debated—partly because modernism was never a coherent, coordinated project, but a broad and diverse international phenomenon. All modernists responded to a sense that the world was changing so rapidly that older artistic forms were no longer adequate as representations of contemporary reality. But different modernist artists responded in different ways. Politically conservative modernists—such as the American expatriate poets Ezra Pound (1885–1972) and T. S. Eliot (1888–1965)—were horrified by the changes they saw going on around them and felt that modern tendencies toward the democratization were leading to an overall decrease in the quality of culture. Such modernists were largely in accord with the revulsion toward the masses expressed in such works as José Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses (1930), which viewed the rise of mass culture as a form of debased mob rule and longingly looked back to the earlier status of a sophisticated intellectual elite as the arbiters of modern thought and culture. Eliot and Pound, who were close friends and associates, responded by producing complex, esoteric poetry that resisted the turn toward popular literature and was thus accessible only to an educated elite. Other modernists, though, were not so sure that the collapse of the traditional culture was necessarily a bad thing. Woolf came from a privileged, upper-class English background and had her own elitist tendencies. It was, in fact, Clive Bell’s Civilization (1928), which begins with a letter of dedication to Woolf, that probably did more than any other single work to create the image of modernism—and especially the Bloomsbury Group—as snobbishly elitist.[30] However, Woolf also found that her status as a woman nevertheless placed severe limitations on her rights and opportunities, and she aimed much of her writing at gender-based inequalities in British society. The Irishman James Joyce (1882–1941) was born a colonial subject, regarded as inherently inferior by Ireland’s British colonial masters. Both Woolf and Joyce seemed to regard the breakdown of older cultural forms as a potential opportunity to develop new cultural forms that might help to win more equitable treatment for women and for the Irish, respectively. Thus, when they developed new experimental forms of writing, the point was not to exclude the masses but to break free of literary forms that had worked in complicity with the traditional power structures that had held women and the Irish in subaltern positions for hundreds of years.

Whatever the goals of the artists, however, virtually all observers have agreed (though the details vary) that modernist literature was highly experimental and highly oriented toward producing something new that responded to the new modern world in which the artists suddenly found themselves. In one of the earliest attempts to develop a coherent retrospective description of the characteristics of modernist literature, Maurice Beebe, writing in 1974, acknowledges the difficulty of getting a comprehensive hold on such a large and diverse phenomenon, and instead opts try to characterize a single work that he feels best represents the spirit of modernism. That work was Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses, which Beebe feels displays four “cardinal points” that might be used to describe modernism as a whole:

(1) formalism and the importance of structure and design;

(2) an attitude of detachment and non-commitment that can generally be labeled as irony;

(3) use of myth not as a discipline for belief or subject of interpretation, but as an arbitrary means of ordering art;

(4) reflexivity and the concern of art with its own creation and composition

Beebe’s characterization Ulysses is typical of its time, when the judgment of the American New Critics that Ulysses was a work much concerned with form and language and little concerned with politics and history ruled supreme. The championing of Ulysses—and of the work of other modernist novelists, such as the American William Faulkner (1897–1962)—by the New Critics was crucial to the canonization of modernist literature in the 1950s, the same decade in which the New Criticism became enshrined as the “official” mode of literary analysis in college classes all over America. But the insistence of the New Critics that modernist works were divorced from historical and political reality, ensconcing themselves instead in an isolated aesthetic realm, also did a great disservice to the works of many modernist artists—including an artist such as Joyce, whose works are so energized by his spirited critique of the maiming of Ireland by the British Empire and the Catholic Church. Beebe’s vision of Joyce’s “attitude of detachment” is thus highly questionable. Indeed, Beebe (writing at the time before the rise of postcolonial studies as an important force in both British and American academia) virtually ignores Joyce’s Irishness and essentially treats him as a British writer, something that was also common at the time. That a writer from such a marginal background—a writer who was once considered a pornographer—would emerge in Beebe’s vision as the central modernist literary artist also speaks to the power of the revisionary treatment of modernism spurred by the New Criticism (and the Cold War) in the 1950s.

The Dutch critic Douwe Fokkema presents a later and somewhat more sophisticated list of the central “conventions” of modernism, including:

(1) the presentation of the text as not being definite or complete;

(2) epistemological doubt with respect to the possibility of representing and explaining reality;

(3) metalingual scepsis as to the possibility of expressing adequately whatever knowledge about the world one thinks to have found;

(4) respect for the idiosyncrasies of the reader, or the idea that reading is a private affair upon which even the writer should not intrude.

There are, in fact, many such characterizations, most of which are positive—in line with the prevailing view that literary modernism represented the pinnacle of aesthetic achievement in modern literature. Marxist critics, however, were suspicious of modernism as a mere self-indulgent reflection of bourgeois decadence, produced by artists who had retreated from the social world into their own aesthetic realms. In his important essay “The Ideology of Modernism,” Lukács (still considering Joyce as a key example) grants that modernist texts can contain a great deal of naturalistic detail, a suggestion with which any reader of Ulysses would have to agree. The problem with modernism for Lukács is that these details are intended not as a representation of typical elements of reality; instead, they are mere allegorical stand-ins for abstract ideas: “Modernist literature thus replaces concrete typicality with abstract particularity” (43).

Modernism, for Lukács is marked by three central weaknesses:

(1) Estrangement from reality—abstraction and narcissism. According to Lukács, “Joyce uses Dublin, Kafka and Musil the Hapsburg Monarchy, as the locus of their masterpieces. But the locus they lovingly depict is little more than a backcloth; it is not basic to their artistic intention” (21).

(2) Subjectivity and individualism. For Lukács, the focus on the inner minds of characters (which often amounts to a focus on the inner minds of pathological characters—something Lukács compares to the preoccupations of Freudian psychoanalysis) is a weakness that diverts attention from the outer social world.

(3) A general emphasis on the pathological. For Lukács, a fascination with the bizarre and the abnormal in modernist literature means that this literature loses touch with the lives of ordinary people.

Interestingly, attitudes toward modernist literature among bourgeois and Marxist critics began to reverse polarities in the 1960s, partly because the rise of a new postmodernist form of literature (see Chapter 7) produced new perspectives on literary history, while the oppositional political movements of the 1960s produced new ideas about what constituted resistance to dominant ideas. Now, bourgeois critics such as the Egyptian American critic Ihab Hassan, one of the first important critics to call attention to postmodernism as a literary phenomenon, began to see modernism in a more negative light as a conservative form of literature that lacked the subversive energies they associated with the new postmodernist literature. When Hassan attempts to characterize postmodernism in his landmark essay “POSTmodernISM,” he does so largely by seeing postmodernism as an extension of modernism, but with more democratic and revolutionary energies—in keeping with the 1960s context in which Hassan was working at the time. For Hassan, both modernism and postmodernism are informed by the following characteristics:

(1) urbanism

(2) technologism (including reactions to technology like Bergsonian time and dissociation of sensibility)

(3) dehumanization (essentially an end to the old realism, affecting the sense of the self—style takes over: let life and the masses fend for themselves)

(4) primitivism (use of archetypes and the return of Dionysus)

(5) eroticism

(6) antinomianism (iconoclasm, schism, excess, movement toward apocalypse)

(7) experimentalism

In this essay, Hassan’s principal interest is in postmodernism, but he still discusses it in terms of these “rubrics” developed from modernism, concluding that a central difference between the two movements has to do with the questions of order and authority:

whereas Modernism created its own forms of Authority, precisely because the center no longer held, Postmodernism has tended toward Anarchy, in deeper complicity with things falling apart . . . the Authority of Modernism . . . rests on intense, elitist, self-generated orders in times of crisis, of which the Hemingway Code is perhaps the starkest exemplar, and Eliot’s Tradition or Yeats’ Mythology is a more devious kind. (29)

Subsequent critics of postmodernism have often moved in this same direction, pointing out the elitism of modernism and criticizing its lack of engagement with historical reality. Andreas Huyssen, for example, has criticized modernism as an elitist form designed to preserve a distinction between high and low art that is essentially class-based. For him, postmodernist literature bridges that gap, refusing to privilege what has traditionally been regarded as high culture over the more popular forms that have arisen in the twentieth century. On the other hand, according to Fredric Jameson, America’s most important Marxist critic at the end of the twentieth century and the most important theorist of postmodernism, such criticisms of modernism fail to place the movement in its proper historical perspective. For Jameson, it is not modernism, but postmodernism that is the ultimate artistic reflection of bourgeois ideology. Postmodernism is the kind of art that arises when the historical process of capitalist modernization is essentially complete; modernism, on the other hand, appears at a time when this process is still underway. Modernism, for Jameson, continues to reflect vestiges of older forms of social organization, deriving energy from “the coexistence of realities from radically different moments of history” (Postmodernism 307). The sense of the new in modernism is so intense because the old still exists to provide contrasts; in the age of postmodernism, everything is new, so that, in a sense, nothing is, the very category of the new having lost any real meaning. Modernism, according to Jameson, is driven by the “myth of producing a radically new Utopian space capable of transforming the world itself (Postmodernism 104), while postmodernism simply accepts the world as it is and contains virtually no utopian energies whatsoever. Moreover, Jameson argues that the various forms of modernism, however variable, share an unmitigated hostility toward the capitalist market, while the various forms of postmodernism, which can be equally variable, share an affirmation of that market (Postmodernism 304–05). Even modernism’s notorious subjectivism, for Jameson, has a strong utopian component, suggesting the possibility of an impending transformation of the self from the older bourgeois model. Postmodernism, in short, announces the ultimate triumph of capitalist modernization, while modernism functions as a last-ditch attempt at resistance against the growing hegemony of capitalism and of bourgeois ideology, driven by the belief that there are alternatives, thanks to the surviving energies of the Second International[31] (Postmodernism 313).

Many accounts of modern literary history are built upon a narrative of movement from the dominance of realism in the nineteenth century, through the challenges to realism offered by modernism, to the eventual emergence of postmodernism. However, as Jameson’s discussions of literary history emphasize, modernism differs from both realism and postmodernism because it was never a dominant form during its initial run; it was instead a marginal form opposed to a still dominant realism. From this point of view, postmodernism can be seen as what modernism is when it becomes dominant, losing its oppositional energies and becoming thoroughly conscripted as what Jameson calls “the logic of late capitalism.”

However one sees modernism, it is clear that the modernist movement responded to a number of historical, cultural, and intellectual phenomena (from Marx to Freud, from the Indian Rebellion of 1857 to the Russian Revolution of 1917) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, all of which contributed to an intense sense of a need for innovation in the arts. All in all, modernist artists reacted (sometimes positively, sometimes negatively, sometimes ambivalently) to the secularization, alienation, reification, routinization, and globalization of the modern world. They produced new forms of art that might be described, in my view, as having the following characteristics, especially where literature is concerned:

(1) a sense of intense social, political, and cultural crisis

(2) a complex relation to the literary tradition

(3) formal complexity and experimentalism (including intense self-consciousness and focus on art as the subject of art)

(4) exploration of the nature of human subjectivity (suggesting a sense that subjectivity is in crisis).

British Modernist Literature

Poets such as T. S. Eliot were among the most important British modernists. However, it has been noted that modernist fiction, because of the emphasis on form and literary technique, often functioned liked poetry.[32] It is perhaps for this reason that the best-known works of modernist literature in Britain are primarily fiction, which in some ways assumed the role formerly played by poetry. British novelists such as Conrad, Forster, Woolf, D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930), Ford Madox Ford (1873–1939), and Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) produced works of lasting significance that are still read and studied today.

Conrad might best be considered a sort of proto-modernist who began to move in modernist directions before the modernist movement itself was fully underway.[33]Conrad was born in the Russian-ruled Ukraine (as Jozef Korzeniowski) to an aristocratic family of Polish nationalists who were active in efforts to gain Polish independence from the Russian Empire. His family moved to Warsaw when Conrad was only three years old; because of his father’s subsequent political activities there, the family was soon exiled by the Russian authorities to a frigid area north of Moscow. By 1863 they were allowed to move back to an area of the Ukraine where the climate was more moderate, but Conrad’s mother nevertheless died of tuberculosis in 1865. In 1867, Conrad moved with his father to an Austrian-ruled area of Poland. After his father died in 1869, Conrad led a difficult existence until he was sent by his uncle to Marseille in France to become a sailor. He was already at this time fluent in French (in addition to his native Polish), and he had read widely as a boy, including books of adventure that must have made a life at sea seem appealing. He served for the next four years in the French Merchant Marine, then for nearly sixteen years in the British Merchant Marine. Over half of that time was spent at sea, and his travels provided much material for his later writing. Conrad became a British citizen in 1886 and retired from sailing in 1894, partly because of poor health and partly because the failing economy made it more and more difficult to secure positions on ships.

Conrad had dreamed of being a writer from a young age. His first novel, Almayer’s Folly (1895), is set among the Dutch colonies in Maritime Southeast Asia and draws directly upon his own travels there. An Outcast of the Islands (1896) had a similar setting. The story “An Outpost of Progress” (1897) moves to the Belgian-ruled region of the Congo, which Conrad had also visited during his sailing career. That same year, The Nigger of the Narcissus became his first truly successful novel. It details the voyage of the sailing ship Narcissus from Bombay to London, made more difficult by unrest in the crew and by a ferocious gale encountered at sea. This novel was described by Henry James as “the very finest and strongest picture of the sea and sea life that our language possesses.” It was followed in 1899 by the serial publication of Heart of Darkness, Conrad’s first true masterpiece and one of the exemplary texts discussed at length at the end of this chapter. (It would not be published all together in one place until it was included in Youth and Other Stories in 1902.) 1900 saw the publication of Lord Jim, another important text that showed some of the same strain between tendencies toward popular adventure writing and modernist-style literary experimentalism that marks Heart of Darkness.

By this time, Conrad was a well-established literary figure, and each of his published novels was considered a literary event—though none of them were genuinely big sellers, perhaps because their modernist tendencies did not appeal to a broad audience. Nostromo (1904) is a political adventure set in the fictional (and tellingly named) “Costaguana,” a postcolonial Latin American country that has nominally gained its independence from European rule but continues to be dominated by foreign “material interests.” This novel showed a growing sophistication in Conrad’s treatment of issues related to colonialism, though his next novel would be a darkly comic political satire set back in London. The Secret Agent (1907) deals with the activities of a group anarchists (inspired by a Russian agent who actually wants to discredit anarchists) who are trying to blow up the Greenwich Observatory, a key emblem of British imperial power—symbolically somewhat like the World Trade Towers that were bombed in New York in 2001. Among other things, this novel is one of the most prominent examples of Conrad’s tendency to portray Russians negatively throughout his career. Under Western Eyes (1911) centers on a group of exiled Russian anarchists and portrays Russians in a similarly negative light.

Chance (1913) essentially marked a new phase in Conrad’s writing career. His greatest commercial success, it was also less inventive than the novels that preceded it, suggesting that Conrad had already passed his zenith as a creative artist. Narrated by Charles Marlow (who also appears as a narrator figure in both Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, Chance centers on Flora de Barral, Conrad’s most fully realized female character, but is otherwise unremarkable. Victory (1915) and Rescue (1920) are similarly professional efforts that contain little in the way of innovation—except perhaps for a tendency to draw upon a widening array of literary predecessors.

Though his critical reputation has fluctuated over the years, Conrad now seems firmly established in the Western literary canon, despite the belief by some critics (see the discussion of Heart of Darkness below) that his depiction of Europe’s colonial subjects can at time border on downright racism. Much of the reason for the ongoing interest in his work has to do with the way his concern with form and style prefigured modernism, while much of it also has to do with his intense engagement with public issues of his day, especially colonialism.

Another relatively early arrival on the modernist scene was E. M. Forster (1879-1970), who showed a talent for literary innovation as early as his first novel Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), a tragi-comedy surrounding the marriage of a British woman, Lilia Herriton, to an Italian dentist, Gino Carella. The resultant dialogue between England and Italy would show up several times in Forster’s career. His next novel, The Longest Journey (1907), focuses on the attempts of the sensitive, but lame, Rickie Elliot to become a writer. Rickie’s aestheticism and physical weakness are contrasted with the health and pagan energies of his half-brother, Stephen, raising a number of issues related to class and to the great modernist theme of alienation. Forster then returned to Italy in 1908, clearly contrasting Italian vitality with British repression in A Room with a View. Here, a young English woman, Lucy Honeychurch, discovers love in Venice with George Emerson and escapes the suffocating attentions of the tellingly-named bourgeois Cecil Vyse.

Howards End (1910) is perhaps Forster’s first truly great novel, and one that captures some of the tensions in a British society in the throes of all-out modernization. Here, the confusing blur of constant change that is London is contrasted with the more peaceful and slow-paced life at Howards End, while issues related to class and to culture are crucial to the text. Maurice, written 1913, is a gay bildungsroman detailing the growing love between Maurice Hall and the earthy gamekeeper Alec Scudder. Growing out of Forster’s own status as a closeted gay man, it was published posthumously in 1971, withheld until after his death at Forster’s own request. A Passage to India (1924) deals with a number of key issues in the long relationship between England and India and is one of the great novels of the colonial experience. In 1927, Forster turned to criticism with Aspects of the Novel (1927), and he spent the final decades of his life devoted to teaching and criticism, rather than to novel writing.

The son of a Nottinghamshire coal miner and of a former teacher forced into factory work by financial circumstances, D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) was very unusual among the major modernist writers in having a working-class background. He did, however, receive a college education that allowed him to begin a career as a schoolteacher, though he soon turned to writing full-time. His first novel, The White Peacock, was published in 1910. Perhaps less formally adventurous than some other modernists, Lawrence was at the forefront of modernist innovation in the frank portrayal of sexuality. In exploring that realm, he was also among the modernists who was most strongly and directly influenced by the work of Sigmund Freud. He was also perhaps the single modernist author who could most directly be seen as an heir to the legacy of Romanticism, a legacy toward which many modernists were quite skeptical.

Sons and Lovers (1913), one of Lawrence’s most important works, is a somewhat autobiographical study of the attempts of young Paul Morel to transcend his own working-class roots through intellectual endeavor. Lawrence’s next novel, The Rainbow (1915), was seized by the police and declared obscene, thus beginning the encounters with censorship that would plague much of his career. For example, Women in Love (the sequel to The Rainbow) was completed in 1916 but not published in 1920 because of its controversial sexual content. This novel continues the story of the Brangwen sisters, Ursula and Gudrun, as they cope with the tribulations of modernity in a Midlands colliery town. Lady Chatterley’s Lover, meanwhile, remains perhaps Lawrence’s most notorious novel for its battles with censorship. It was originally published in 1928, then seized and banned for more than thirty years until the publication was approved in a landmark censorship trial that opened the way for the publication of a number of sexually-explicit texts.

Lawrence also ran afoul of the British authorities during World War I when he and his German wife were accused of working to aid the German side during the war, leading to harassment that made their lives in England quite difficult. They left England soon after the war and wandered about the world, settling most extensively in New Mexico in the American Southwest and in Northern Italy, near Florence. While in the U.S. Lawrence wrote Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), a landmark discussion of its topic that drew new attention to American literature and especially to the work of Herman Melville, whose critical reputation at that time had been in decline. Long suffering from ill health, Lawrence died in France at the age of forty-four.

In retrospect, the most important of all British modernist novelists was probably Virginia Woolf, though she was among the last of them to receive major critical attention—due to precisely the sort of gender discrimination that was the target of much of her writing. However, as feminist literary criticism rose to prominence amid the Women’s Movement of the 1960s, Woolf became a key figure for many feminist critics and is probably now second only to Joyce in the modernist pantheon—both for the brilliance of her writing and for her championing of more liberal attitudes toward gender.

Woolf’s first few novels show the beginnings of her development as a writer who sensitively explores the inner lives of her characters, especially her women characters. The Voyage Out (1915) and Night and Day (1919), though, are relatively conventional when compared with her later novels. Jacob’s Room (1922), heavily influenced by Woolf’s emotional memories of the death of her brother Thoby in 1906, deals specifically with the life and death (in World War I) of young Jacob Flanders—and thus is one of the modernist works that directly reacts to the war. It was the beginning of Woolf’s major phase as a writer.

Woolf then proceeded to write a string of remarkable and innovative modernist works. In Mrs. Dalloway (1925) she reaches the height of her powers as a modernist novelist and as a practitioner of the technique of stream of consciousness[34] as she attempts to show her readers the inner workings of the minds of her characters. The same can be said for To the Lighthouse (1927), which is also a representative modernist work in its concern with the process of artistic creation. Woolf then topped off her novels of the 1920s with Orlando (1928), a fascinating mock biography of a young Elizabethan man who lives into the twentieth century, experiencing a change in gender along the way. Though it received little serious attention when published, Orlando has become an important text for feminist critics in recent years; it anticipates later literary phenomena such as magical realism, while its play with history might be seen as an anticipation of postmodernism.

The Waves (1931) is perhaps Woolf’s most intensely lyrical, poetic, and experimental work, a sort of extended prose poem that explores the inner thoughts of a group of friends who attempt to find viable identities for themselves amid the turmoil of the modern world. Flush (1933), a mock biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel, is a relatively minor work but one that still manages to touch on important gender issues. It was followed by The Years (1937), a relatively conventional realistic novel that traces the history of the Pargiter family from 1880 to 1936. Woolf then returned to experimental form with Between the Acts (1941), built around a village pageant that seeks to present a sweeping panorama of English history.

In addition to her fiction, Woolf was important as a member of the Bloomsbury Group and as a writer of various kinds of nonfiction. Her diaries have been published in various forms, for example, and her extended essay (actually the text from two lectures) A Room of One’s Own (1929), dealing with the special difficulties faced by women writers in a literary tradition dominated by males, has become a leading manifesto for feminist critics. Three Guineas (1938) continues Room’s exploration of feminist issues. Woolf’s critical essays—such as the important “Modern Fiction” (1921), which helped to shape the modernist movement in important ways—have appeared in a variety of collections, including The Common Reader (1925), The Second Common Reader (1932), and The Death of the Moth (published posthumously in 1942).

Finally, of note among lesser British modernist novelists are Ford and Lewis. Ford was important not only for his own writing but for his relationships with and support of other writers, both personally and as the editor of the journals The English Review and The Transatlantic Review. He was particularly close with Conrad, with whom he co-authored three novels, including the science fiction novel The Inheritors (1901), which deals, among other things, with the inability of the British aristocracy to cope with the onslaught of modernity. But Ford’s own novels, including The Good Soldier (1915) and the four novels of the Parade’s End tetralogy (1924–28), are of considerable merit in their own right. As a measure of anti-German feeling in England in the wake of World War I, it might be noted that Ford changed his last name from the Germanic “Hueffer” soon after the war. Meanwhile, born in the same year as both Joyce and Woolf, Lewis was a talented writer and painter whose reputation declined after his rightest sympathies led him to support Hitler and the British Fascist Party during the 1930s. Nevertheless, novels such as Tarr (1918) and The Apes of God (1930) are nevertheless important for their technical virtuosity and must be considered in any assessment of the overall achievements of British literary modernism.

By the 1930s, with an economic depression in full swing and war with Nazi Germany looming on the horizon, British culture as a whole turned to a more direct engagement with contemporary events and away from modernist experimentalism. The period of “high” modernism in literature was over by the beginning of the war, though the innovations of the modernists would continue to exercise an important influence on writers of the decades after the war. Modernist innovations in literature and the visual arts were also important inspirations for British filmmakers; eclipsed by Hollywood film in the 1930s in terms of global popularity, British filmmakers would nevertheless play an important role in British culture going forward, often occupying the kinds of roles once occupied by novelists.

NOTES

EXEMPLARY TEXT:

ROBERT TRESSELL, THE RAGGED-TROUSERED PHILANTHROPISTS (1914)[1]

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is one of the founding texts of modern British working-class fiction and is still considered one of the most important examples of the genre. The book is particularly effective in its vivid depiction of British working-class life, made all the more striking by the fact that Tressell himself (born in Ireland as Robert Noonan), had himself experienced working-class life first hand, though he also held management positions at various times. Indeed, Brian Mayne calls the book “the first realistic novel of working-class life by a member of the working classes” (73). And Tressell’s own working-class perspective comes through not only at the level of content (though he clearly knows more about the actual experiences of workers than do most novelists), but also in the form and style of his book. As Raymond Williams argues, “there is no finer representation, anywhere in English writing, of a certain rough-edged, mocking, give-and-take conversation between workmen and mates” (254). Moreover, as Wim Neetens points out, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists conducts an extensive subversion of the tradition of bourgeois fiction, succeeding in negating “the dictates of the literary market place by being intelligent without being trivial, oppositional without being marginal, instructive without being patronising or dull” (88). According to Neetens, the book is thus an excellent “example of how through constructing for itself unorthodox cultural conditions a text may become a vital part of a popular political consciousness on the side of the opposition” (81).

Or, as Williams puts it, in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Tressell sought to break “with precisely the inherited assumptions of what it was to write a novel, and to write a good, competent novel” (242). Tressell’s most important violation of the accepted decorum of the bourgeois novel, of course, is to make his work an avowedly political tract. David Smith (positively) stresses the fact that The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is “fundamentally a work of propaganda” (28). He notes that Tressell draws upon a wide variety of socialist thinkers in the development of his own political vision and argues that “part of his appeal lies in his very unsectarian willingness to borrow from various strands of Socialist ideology” (28). But Smith also insists that the book is “both a masterpiece of polemic and also an extremely good novel” (30). And Smith is right to conclude that the real power of the book lies in its vivid (and sympathetic, though not idealized) evocation of the lives of British workers. These workers, Smith notes, come alive in both their “comic and tragic aspects,” and their experience is related with a dignity and to an extent unrivaled in works such as those of Charles Kingsley, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Dickens, who occasionally show the horrors of sweatshops and factories, but who represent workers themselves in little or no detail and who establish no organic connection between workers and their work (33).

Given the strong prejudice against political statement in literature that has long informed the tradition of bourgeois aesthetics, it is perhaps a wonder that Tressell’s book has survived at all. Indeed, the continued survival and even popularity of Tressell’s text, despite the fact that it has seldom received serious critical attention from scholars in the official academy, is a remarkable story in itself. The informal dissemination of information about Tressell’s book—and of the book itself—is itself one of the most interesting phenomena in the modern history of British working-class culture. The textual history of the book is interesting as well. First published in a greatly condensed version three years after Tressell’s death, the book was reissued in an even shorter “abridged” edition in 1918. It was not published in a full edition (based on Tressell’s handwritten manuscript, newly rediscovered in 1946) until 1955 by Lawrence and Wishart, largely through the efforts of their editor, F. C. Ball, whose own book, One of the Damned, provides a number of details concerning the publication history of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and the life of the rather mysterious Tressell. Since that time, the reputation and popularity of the book have constantly grown, even during the dark years of the Cold War, when conditions were hardly advantageous.[35]

Tressell’s own preface to the book begins by stating that his intention in writing it was “to present, in the form of an interesting story, a faithful picture of working-class life—more especially of those engaged in the Building trades—in a small town in the south of England” (11). The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists succeeds admirably in this task. It relates in great detail the lives of building-trades workers, especially house painters, in the fictional town of Mugsborough, including their experiences on the job, in their private homes with their families, and in various public activities in their community. But the book goes beyond mere representation of everyday life among workers to develop a detailed and systematic theoretical explanation for why their lives are the way they are. As Tressell goes on to state in his preface, “I wished to describe the relations existing between the workmen and their employers, the attitude and feelings of these two classes towards each other” (11). The book succeeds in this task as well, in the process presenting both a sweeping indictment of the capitalist system and a sort of beginning course on socialism as a potential alternative. In doing so, the book addresses a number of important social and political issues that have remained fundamental to British working-class fiction ever since.

As a book written about workers by one who has actually worked, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists presents the process of work as a craft and as a social interaction with an immediacy that is unsurpassed in any literary representation of the working class. However, Williams points out that the book gains its unique power from the fact that Tressell is writing from a perspective that is very much within the working class and simultaneously outside a typical working-class position, given Tressell’s wide reading and experience. Tressell is thus able to undergird his representation of working-class life with a sophisticated theoretical framework. For example, his workers are skilled craftsmen who take pride in doing a good job, but they are constantly pressured to do slipshod work so that their endlessly greedy bosses can make higher profits. The book thus suggests the tendency of capitalism to devalue genuine craftsmanship and to reduce the real quality of life in the interest of purely economic advancement. In addition, the insatiable thirst for profit that drives the capitalist system reduces the workers themselves to profit-making tools, treated not as human beings, but as commodities, ruthlessly exploited on the job and often unemployed (with little in the way of social services) when business is slow.

The protagonist, Frank Owen, is a highly intelligent, self-educated sign painter who provides the central point of view from which Tressell observes the complex workings of the capitalist system. Owen observes abundance of production all around him, while he and his fellow workers live in abysmal poverty: “He saw that the people who enjoyed abundance of the things that are made by work, were the people who did Nothing: and that the others, who lived in want or died of hunger, were the people who worked” (16). Such observations run throughout the book and are reinforced with detailed introductory explications of socialist theory, centered in the two great teaching chapters, “The Oblong” and “The Great Oration,” which, together, serve as a sort of introduction to socialism, helping to make the book, as Peter Miles puts it, “a self-contained kit for the dissemination of ideas” (10).

Much of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, meanwhile, is devoted to a depiction of the cultural practices by which the capitalist system maintains its hegemony by blinding the workers to their own exploitation. Religion, for example, comes in for particular criticism as an opiate of the masses in a way that recalls Marx’s famous observation, but that also resembles the diagnoses of religion as a mind-numbing force that appear in the works of Tressell contemporaries such as James Joyce and Arnold Bennett. Where Tressell differs from these writers in his clear understanding of the participation of religion in a class-oriented economic system. One working-class character, for example, observes, “As for all this religious business, it’s just a money-making dodge. It’s the parson’s trade, just the same as painting is ours, only there’s no work attached to it and the pay’s a bloody sight better than ours is” (153). Similarly, in a way that anticipates later Marxist thinkers such as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Tressell identifies popular culture, in the form of devices such as the Daily Obscurer newspaper, as a major factor in the workers’ lack of understanding of the true nature of the capitalist system and of their antagonism toward socialism as an alien force supposedly contrary to their interests.

Tressell’s book attempts to engage these cultural forces head-on and to provide an alternative cultural voice, both as a cultural artifact in its own right and in the ways Owen and his fellow socialist, Barrington, attempt to counter the hegemony of bourgeois ideology by winning their fellow workers over to their ideas through extended rational argumentation. The difficulty of these efforts is indicated in the title itself, which refers to the way that most of the workers in the book, despite their own conditions of poverty and deprivation, are willing to work so diligently in order to support their rich bosses, who do little or no real work at all. Indeed, Tressell’s depiction of the ignorance and stubbornness with which most of his workers continue to support the existing system comes very close to the depiction of workers as “irredeemably incapable of improving their conditions” that is often found in reactionary literature (Williams 249).

But Tressell successfully negotiates this pitfall by building into his book a profound respect for workers and their work. He also lightens his criticism of them with a liberal dose of humor. Thus, Smith, placing the book in a number of literary traditions, notes that it particularly recalls the English humorous tradition of Fielding, Swift, Shaw, Wells, and especially Dickens (36). Ronald Paul, meanwhile, notes how the book participates in an early-twentieth-century surge in leftist fiction from around the world, but that it stands apart from the works of contemporaries such as Gorky, Nexö, and Jack London in its effective use of humor (247). Tressell’s humor, sometimes bitingly sarcastic, sometimes warmly affectionate, is in fact one of characteristics of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists that has made the text so popular for so long.

Despite its sometimes pessimistic-sounding presentation of the difficulty of convincing workers of the value of socialism, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists maintains a consistent underlying tone of optimism. As the book ends, Owen, sick with tuberculosis and in desperate need of money, is suddenly saved when Barrington (who turns out to be a rich man who has been working just to observe working-class conditions) supplies him with the needed cash. Sudden changes for the better, this motif seems to say, are possible. And the book then ends on a note of utopian optimism, anticipating the coming triumph of socialism as “the light that will shine upon the world wide Fatherland and illumine the gilded domes and glittering pinnacles of the beautiful cities of the future, where men shall dwell together in true brotherhood and goodwill and joy. The Golden Light that will be diffused throughout all the happy world from the rays of the risen sun of Socialism” (630).

NOTE

EXEMPLARY TEXT:

JOSEPH CONRAD, HEART OF DARKNESS (1899)[2]

For such a short text, Heart of Darkness addresses a surprising number of important issues of its day, many of which have remained relevant into our own time. The novella has also shown an ability to support an unusually broad range of critical approaches. For example, psychoanalytic critics have sometimes been fascinated by the way in which Marlow’s journey up the Congo River in Heart of Darkness can be seen as a sort of trip into the Freudian unconscious mind.[36] Feminist critics, meanwhile, have been seriously disturbed by Marlow’s imperious attitude toward women in the book, wondering how this attitude might reflect Conrad’s own, not to mention that of late-Victorian society as a whole.[37] However, in recent decades, the most extensive critical attention to Heart of Darkness has focused on what is, in fact, the central topic of the text itself: colonialism (and associated topics, such as racism). Indeed, charges that this important canonical text might be thoroughly racist has spurred ongoing debates, not only about Heart of Darkness, but about canonical literature as a whole.

Heart of Darkness, it should be pointed out, never mentions Belgium or the Congo by name. In context, however, it is clear that Marlow’s destination in Africa is the Belgian Congo, which Conrad himself had visited in 1890. No reader in 1899 would have been likely to see Marlow’s trip in any other way. Indeed, Heart of Darkness was, at the time of its initial publication part of an extensive public discussion about the Belgian Congo in the British media. As noted above, Britain had its share of troubles (and committed its share of atrocities) in the colonization of its part of Africa. One strategy used by the British to quell growing unrest at home over their colonial misadventures in Africa was to divert attention from those misadventures by making a cause célèbre of the gruesome atrocities being committed in the Congo by forces under the control of Leopold II. In an attempt to extract the maximum profits from resources such as Congolese rubber plantations, Leopold’s forces employed what amounted to slave labor, treating their Congolese workers with the utmost cruelty, routinely meting out horrific punishments such as the hacking off of limbs for workers whose efforts were deemed unacceptable in one way or another. The British press gave extensive coverage to the atrocities being committed in the Congo; among those commenting on the situation in letters to the editor was an aspiring novelist by the name of Joseph Conrad, who also responded to the situation in the Congo in Heart of Darkness.

British concerns over the brutalization was such that in 1903 the British government had instructed Roger Casement, its consul in the French-ruled part of the Congo, to investigate the situation in the Belgian Congo and to report back to Parliament. When Casement returned, he brought such stories of horror that it caused a public outcry, and Casement himself headed a campaign to demand an amelioration of current European practices in the Congo.[38] One of the British citizens who supported (though somewhat half-heartedly) Casement’s efforts was Joseph Conrad, who contributed a letter for publication in which he decried the situation in the Congo. In the letter, Conrad points out that

in 1903, seventy five years or so after the abolition of the slave trade (because it was cruel) there exists in Africa a Congo State, created by the act of European powers where ruthless, systematic cruelty towards the blacks is the basis of administration, and bad faith towards all the other states the basis of commercial policy. (qtd. in Hawkins, “Joseph Conrad” 70)

Conrad had, in fact, maintained an interest in the Congo since his own trip there in 1890. In 1901, for example, he had published (along with Ford Madox Ford) a novel entitled The Inheritors that was largely a satire of Leopold’s rule in the Congo. But Conrad’s most famous and enduring comment on the Belgian Congo appears in Heart of Darkness, in which Charlie Marlow is openly critical of much of the European activity that he observes in Africa, and especially of the brutal treatment of many of the Africans by their European masters. Moreover, many of Marlow’s comments seem openly critical of the imperial project as a whole, as when he argues that the “conquest of the earth,” which consists mostly of “the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much” (7). Indeed, he describes this conquest as little more than “robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale” (7).

On the other hand, Marlow’s attitude is not quite so anti-colonial as it might first appear. For one thing, his characterization of imperialism as robbery and murder strictly applies only to the Roman imperial conquest of England two thousand years earlier. In fact, he specifically contrasts Roman imperialism with its later British variety, arguing that the efficiency of British colonial administration, informed as it is by a central “idea” of bringing enlightenment to the “dark places” of the earth might actually bring benefits to colonized peoples. Meanwhile, Marlow’s criticism of contemporary practices in the Congo applies to Belgian colonialism, not British, and even then his criticism pertains to specific abuses and not to the basic fact of European rule in the Congo. Marlow’s attitude, in short, leaves a great deal of room for interpretation, especially as we know from other sources that Marlow’s complex attitude toward imperialism and colonialism seems to mirror Conrad’s own ambivalence.

Interpreting many aspects of Heart of Darkness (as with much of Conrad’s writing) is complicated by this ambivalence and by his use of literary techniques that tend to make final and definitive interpretations impossible, leaving in place an interpretive uncertainty that would come to be a hallmark of modernist literary texts. In the case of Heart of Darkness, the most important source of this uncertainty is the rhetorical structure of the book. A quick read through the book might lead one to think that the story we are reading is being narrated to use by Marlow. However, a closer look at the text makes us realize that Marlow tells his story not directly to us but to a group of listeners aboard a “cruising yawl” (a two-masted sailing craft), the “Nellie,” which is moored in the Thames, the ultimately hub of Britain’s maritime trading empire. The listeners on the Nellie are identified not by name, but by occupation, including individuals designated as “The Director of Companies,” “The Lawyer,” “The Accountant,” and a fourth listener, who is entirely unidentified. The identified listeners thus occupy important positions within the capitalist structure of contemporary Britain and function as essentially allegorical representations of the capitalist enterprise. Meanwhile, the unidentified listener is actually the frame narrator who relates Marlow’s tale to us indirectly.

In short, the character about whom we know the least is the one on whom we are totally reliant for all information received in the story. We can perhaps assume that the narrator fits in with the other listeners (who seem to be his friends), which means that he would occupy a higher class position than does the rather working class Marlow. In fact, these differences might account for the several instances we see of tensions between Marlow and his listeners, as when the narrator subtly undermines Marlow’s authority with a variety of slyly subversive comments. For example, as Marlow begins his tale, the narrator bids us farewell with an ironic aside, noting that he and his comrades “knew we were fated . . . to hear about one of Marlow’s inconclusive experiences” (7). Meanwhile, Marlow himself shows a certain animosity toward his audience when he notes (or, at least, the narrator tells us that he notes) that they, with their comfortable bourgeois lives, could not possibly understand what he experienced in Africa. Thus, when a member of his audience sighs, indicating skepticism toward Marlow’s story, Marlow responds angrily: “Absurd! . . . Here you all are, each moored with two good addresses, like a hulk with two anchors, a butcher round one corner, a policeman round another, excellent appetites, and temperature normal—you hear—normal from year’s end to year’s end” (54).

He then goes on to argue that his audience cannot possibly understand Kurtz:

How could you—with solid pavement under your feet, surrounded by kind neighbours ready to cheer you on or fall on you, stepping delicately between the butcher and the policeman, in the holy terror of scandal and gallows and lunatic asylums—how can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man’s untrammelled feet may take him into by the way of solitude—utter solitude without a policeman” (55–56)

Thus, the story that we actually hear is being related to us indirectly by someone who, according to Marlow, can’t possibly understand it, making it difficult to know how much the information we get from the narrator is to be trusted. Of course, it is the narrator himself who relays this information to us, and we cannot be sure how much possible hostilities between Marlow and the narrator might affect the accuracy of the narrator’s account of what Marlow said.

To complicate matters even further, Marlow also calls into question his own effectiveness as a narrator by expressing his frustration at his inability to explain clearly what happened to him in Africa. For example, he notes the difficulty of finding the “inner truth” when one has to attend to so many surface details, at the same time taking another slap at his listeners, causing one of them to snap back at him:

“But I felt it all the same; I felt often its mysterious stillness watching me at my monkey tricks, just as it watches you fellows performing on your respective tight-ropes for—what is it? half-a-crown a tumble—”

“Try to be civil, Marlow,” growled a voice. (38–39)

Marlow himself suggests that even he might not truly understand what happened in Africa, because the truth of that experience lies far beneath what can be observed on the surface. “The essentials of this affair,” he suggests, “lay deep under the surface, beyond my reach and beyond my powers of meddling” (44). In this since, he displays an awareness of the kind of “depth epistemology” that often drives much modernist art—a belief that the truth lies beneath the surface and can be revealed only by determined and patient excavation—as in Freudian psychoanalysis, based on the notion that the true reasons behind neuroses generally lie hidden within the unconscious mind.

Marlow also shows a typically modernist concern when he suggests that language itself might be inadequate to convey what he has felt and seen in Africa. Indeed, one of the main reasons why modernist writers felt that they needed to explore new modes of expression was because of the perceived inability of conventional denotative language adequately to convey the truth of human experience, especially in a modern world in which alienation is a common experience, with individuals feeling isolated from one another and from the world around them. At one point, while trying to describe Kurtz to his listeners on the Nellie, Marlow asks,

Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream—making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation. … No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence—that which makes its truth, its meaning, its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream—alone. (30)

To an extent, Marlow’s project here can be taken as expressing some of Conrad’s own sense of the problems he faced as a writer, recalling the often-quoted statement of purpose in the famous preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus: “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see” (xlix).[39]

To make matters worse, there are many hints in the text that Marlow cannot always be relied upon to relate his experiences honestly and accurately, even if he could. At one point, Marlow fervently declares his hatred of lying:

You know I hate, detest, and can’t bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appalls me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies—which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world—what I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do. (30)

Yet Marlow then immediately admits that he intentionally misled the agent at the Central Station by letting them think he had powerful connections in the Company: “I became in an instant as much of a pretence as the rest of the bewitched pilgrims” (30).[40]

The rhetorical structure of Heart of Darkness thus introduces a radical uncertainty that poses special interpretative dilemmas, but interpretations of Conrad are consistently complicated by such uncertainties—and by his seeming ambivalence and the presence of seemingly contradictory attitudes within his texts. Indeed, perhaps the most frequent critical observation made about the fiction of Conrad in general involves the way his work displays a consistent ambivalence toward almost all of the major issues it addresses. Benita Parry, for example, notes that Conrad’s work both undermines and supports the ideology of imperialism. Fredric Jameson, meanwhile, argues that Conrad’s work includes many of the characteristics of both the sophisticated texts of modernism and the entertainment-oriented texts of popular culture. For Jameson this doubleness has to do with Conrad’s historical location at a crucial point when modern culture itself was splitting into the currents of high culture and popular culture that I mentioned above. For Jameson, then, the notorious doubleness of Conrad’s writing arises from the “coexistence of all these distinct but as yet imperfectly differentiated cultural ‘spaces’” (Political Unconscious 208). Jameson focuses especially on Lord Jim, a novel that consists of two separate parts, the first of which is a modernist meditation (on the part of Marlow) that is dismissive of popular romance narratives, and the second of which is precisely such a narrative. In Heart of Darkness, however, the modes are thoroughly more intermixed, as Conrad strives both to tell a rollicking romance narrative and to present a nuanced literary exploration of the nature of truth and reality both at the same time.

Jameson’s attribution of Conrad’s ambivalence to his historical moment (rather than to his personal psychology, as have some critics) suggests that a close consideration of Conrad’s historical context should be extremely useful to better understand his work. For example, the treatment of Africa in Heart of Darkness is quite typical of European discourses about Africa at the turn of the century. The important late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century black thinker E. W. Blyden (an important influence on later African thinkers like Kwame Nkrumah and Léopold Senghor and one of the forerunners of the Négritude movement in twentieth-century black literature) frequently complained that European scholars commenting on Africa did so from the position of a fundamental misunderstanding of the differences between Africa and Europe. In his 1888 book Christianity, Islam, and the Negro Race, for example, Blyden pointed out the tendency of Europeans to see Africans as undeveloped, even infantile, versions of themselves:

The mistake which Europeans often make in considering questions of Negro improvement and the future of Africa, is in supposing that the Negro is the European in embryo—in the undeveloped stage—and that when, by and by, he shall enjoy the advantages of civilization and culture, he will become like the European; in other words, that the Negro is on the same line of progress, in the same groove, with the European, but infinitely in the rear. (276)

Blyden was accurate in his description of European scholarship. For example, in a recent study R. H. Lyons notes the consistency with which nineteenth-century European commentators regarded blacks as inferior to whites, quite often comparing the two along the lines of children versus adults:

Though they did disagree among themselves about which European ‘races’ were inferior to others, Western racial commentators generally agreed that Blacks were inferior to whites in moral fiber, cultural attainment, and mental ability; the African was, to many eyes, the child in the family of man, modern man in embryo. (86-7)

Indeed, as V. Y. Mudimbe notes, an entire array of nineteenth-century European discourses on Africa (often drawing upon a Hegelian perception of history for support) quite consistently tended to envision Africa as radically separated from Europe in terms of temporal development. European writers in fields like botany, anthropology, and phrenology “attempted to prove that in Africa the physical environment, the flora and fauna, as well as the people, represent relics of a remote age of antiquity” (107). Powerful currents in nineteenth-century European thought, including a fascination with evolution, history, and social progress all tended to envision the course of both nature and society as an ongoing forward movement in time. Moreover, such models tended to be global in scope, treating Africa and Europe as part of the same process, with Europe simply being farther along on the temporal scale. Africa, in fact, came to be treated as the locus of primitivity in virtually all areas, thus serving as a sort of anchor point against which the progressive development of Europe could be measured.

These kinds of narratives are typical of the remarkable emphasis on the notion of progress that characterized so much European thought in the nineteenth century. On the other hand, the late Victorians were ambivalent toward even their most cherished notions. As Ian Watt noted some time ago, Conrad’s work is powerfully informed by a growing skepticism toward the notion of limitless progress. For example, Watt notes that the pessimistic tone of Heart of Darkness

is largely reflecting the much bleaker and more threatening ideological perspective on human life which followed from new developments in physical science, in evolutionary theory, and in political life, during the last half of the nineteenth century. (Conrad 151)

In particular, the Darwinian vision of progress (with no divine plan to assure its forward movement) also triggered a growing anxiety over the possibility that evolution might somehow reverse itself and begin to proceed backward, with humans then becoming more and more primitive. Thinkers such as Spencer even began to wonder if whole societies could evolve backwards.

Perhaps the central expression of nineteenth-century European anxieties over the possibility of “backward” evolution came in the form of the discourse of degeneration, discussed above in relation to the work of thinkers such as Max Nordau and his mentor, Cesare Lombroso, whose work is quite relevant to Heart of Darkness. For example, while he does not mention him by name, Conrad directly alludes to Lombroso early in the text when he has Marlow encounter a doctor in Brussels who is fascinated by Lombroso’s theories and who asks Marlow if he can measure his skull (12). Moreover, Conrad’s depiction of Kurtz would seem to be a classic example of degeneration. Beginning with a sense of his civilizing mission that corresponds very closely to that espoused by Lord Lugard, Kurtz apparently descends into savagery once the primitive aspects of his nature are reactivated by his contact with the African jungle. Indeed, as Susan Navarette points out, the physical appearance of the huge Kurtz, with his “lofty frontal bone” seems to match Nordau’s description of the degenerate criminal type almost exactly, as do certain elements of Kurtz’s behavior (309 n.21). On the other hand, Conrad (with his typical ambivalence) clearly does not intend Kurtz as a simple demonstration of the theories of Lombroso and Nordau. Marlow seems to present the doctor who wishes to examine him as a rather ridiculous figure. Moreover, Kurtz the “degenerate” is also described as a “universal genius.” He is, as Ian Glenn points out, an intellectual and an artist. The depiction of Kurtz thus challenges the beliefs of Lombroso and Nordau that good and evil characteristics can be simply distinguished by physical measurement. But it is also true that Nordau himself describes the way in which what Lombroso saw as “genius” might actually be evidence of “neurotic degeneration.” In short, Nordau to an extent already undermines the genius-degenerate opposition, thus showing his own form of ambivalence.

Similarly, Brian Shaffer points out that Conrad’s opposition between Europe and Africa in Heart of Darkness clearly echoes Spencer’s contrast between primitive and advanced societies. But, as Shaffer notes, Conrad again complicates this opposition by attributing the book’s greatest savagery to “sophisticated” Europeans. Thus “Conrad’s African fictions inquire into Spencer’s typology of civilization, both incorporating and criticizing it, both absorbing its rubrics and parodying its resolutions” (54). Meanwhile, the dialogues with Lombroso, Nordau, and Spencer in Heart of Darkness form only a small part of the remarkable ability of Conrad’s text to address so many of the central concerns of its day.

Marlow, for example, consistently characterizes Africa as primitive, much in the mode that Blyden and Mudimbe have seen as typical of European discourses about Africa. The African jungle is the “primeval forest” (29); traveling up the Congo is like going “back to the earliest beginnings of the world” (38); and the “cannibals” in Marlow’s crew “still belonged to the beginnings of time” (46). And Kurtz’s atrocities are clearly attributed to his return to primeval ways, to “the awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts” (76). Moreover, in light of the descriptions by Blyden and Lyons of the way Europeans of the time tended to see Africans as primitive and undeveloped versions of themselves, it is perhaps not surprising that Marlow sees Africans in much the same way. The comments of Blyden and Lyons also shed new light on Marlow’s acknowledgment of a “remote kinship” with black Africans and a “suspicion of their not being inhuman” (40). After all, to Marlow the remoteness of this kinship resides precisely in the fact that the Africans are remote from the Europeans in time and development. Marlow sees the black Africans as embodying a primeval truth of the human condition, a truth “stripped of the cloak of time” that still lies at the heart of the existence of the contemporary white European, but that is now buried beneath the many layers of civilization that Europe has accumulated over those two thousand years (41). But Marlow’s point is not that the Africans are equally capable of developing an advanced civilization. Rather, he shows a typical turn-of-the-century European anxiety over the possibility of degeneration and suggests that European civilization is all that prevents Europeans from reverting to the condition of savages. His depiction of Africans as primitive versions of Europeans reveals an ideological bias in which the European perspective is always maintained as primary. Africans are not granted a genuine Otherness, an independent existence. Rather, they are merely primitive versions of Europeans. Marlow asks his listeners to understand not the Africans, but themselves, and his reminder of the fundamental similarities between the Europeans and the Africans is not a call for tolerance or better understanding. It is in fact a call for distance, a suggestion that those layers of civilization be maintained at all costs in order to ward off the threat of a descent into savagery which hovers over us all and to which Kurtz succumbed.

Marlow, then, would seem to accept the Hegelian notion of history as progress, with Europeans accompanying a position of superior development relative to Africans. On the other hand, Heart of Darkness dramatically demonstrates the racist and imperialist ideology that lies at the heart of Hegelian history—and of progressive historicism in general. In particular, Heart of Darkness undermines such teleological notions of history by its suggestion that the culmination of European history is not divine order, but the diabolical Kurtz. As Marlow puts it, “All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz” (56). And Marlow’s own “inconclusive” narrative would seem radically to undermine the kinds of plot structures to which teleological history naturally leads. Indeed, while the quest structure of Conrad’s basic plot seems highly teleological, the ultimate failure of Marlow’s quest for truth conflicts with the notion of history as smooth progression toward a predefined goal. Meanwhile, Conrad’s modernist technique, with its interruptions, its hesitancies, and its unresolvable ambiguities, assures that his text can never reach a stable conclusion of the kind implied by Hegelian history and typically enacted in nineteenth-century realist narratives.

Conrad criticism was, in fact, long dominated by discussions of his modernist literary strategies. More recent discussions, however, have focused more on his engagement with contemporary issues, especially racism and colonialism. This change in direction is very much in tune with the turn toward more socially- and politically-based approaches in literary criticism as a whole. However, Heart of Darkness is a special case in that the dominant wave of critical concern over the text since the 1970s was triggered by one specific lecture on the novella by the distinguished African novelist Chinua Achebe, the author of Things Fall Apart (1958, a novel that will be discussed as an exemplary text in Chapter 5. In this lecture, delivered in 1975 and published in 1977 as “An Image of Africa,”[41] Achebe pulls no punches that Heart of Darkness is centrally informed by a conventional European desire to “set Africa up as a foil to Europe, as a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar, in comparison with which Europe’s own state of spiritual grace will be manifest” (251–2). Achebe goes on to declare Heart of Darkness to be an overtly racist text and to support his argument with specific examples in which Africans are depicted in terms of conventional racist stereotypes. For example, despite Marlow’s occasional expressions of sentimental sympathy with the Africans he sees being beaten and starved by their European masters, the fact remains that this sympathy is extremely condescending and that the Africans themselves are consistently described as “cannibals,” “niggers,” and “savages,” who are little more than animals. Marlow’s description of the fireman on his steamer (the one African with whom he seems to have the most “sympathy”) is telling:

And between whiles I had to look after the savage who was my fireman. He was an improved specimen; he could fire up a vertical boiler. He was there below me and, upon my word, to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in breeches and a feather hat walking on his hind legs. A few months training had done for that really fine chap. He squinted at the steam-gauge and at the water-gauge with an evident effort of intrepidity—and he had filed is teeth, too, the poor devil, and the wool of his pate shaved into queer patterns, and three ornamental scars on each of his cheeks. He ought to have been clapping his hands and stamping his feet on the bank, instead of which he was hard at work, a thrall to strange witchcraft, full of improving knowledge. (41)

Achebe concludes from such passages that “Joseph Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist” (257) and that Heart of Darkness is an “offensive and deplorable book”: “I am talking about a book which parades in the most vulgar fashion prejudices and insults from which a section of mankind has suffered untold agonies and atrocities in the past and continues to do so in many ways and many places today” (259).

Achebe is particularly concerned about what he sees as the racism of Heart of Darkness because of canonical status of Conrad’s book, which is one of the most frequently taught texts in English courses in universities all over America. Especially in the mid-1970s, Heart of Darkness was typically taught as a great work of literature, with little interrogation of its potentially problematic depiction of Africa and Africans. Achebe felt that academia was essentially endorsing the book without paying attention to what the book actually said.

It might be noted that, in his initial lecture Achebe called for the removal of Heart of Darkness from college syllabi. This call, however, had more to do with the non-critical way in which the book was being taught than with the potential value of the book as a teaching tool that might illuminate the racist ideas that lay behind colonialism as a whole. In later years, Achebe himself frequently taught Heart of Darkness in his courses at Bard College, often as an introductory text in courses on African literature, using it as an example of the racist and colonialist legacies to which African literature was responding. Many instructors, in fact, now teach Heart of Darkness in conjunction with Achebe’s criticism of it, and sometimes even alongside Achebe’s own novels, a practice which has been described and recommended, for example, by Gerald Graff (25-33).

In any case, many critics followed Achebe’s initial lead, have explored the potential racist and colonialist biases of Heart of Darkness. The Indian critic Frances Singh supports Achebe by arguing that, despite the seeming critique of colonialism embedded in much of Marlow’s narration, the most fundamental metaphor of the text, the “heart of darkness” of the title, suggests intonations of evil and savagery that the text associates not with the atrocities committed by Europeans against Africans, but with the Africans themselves. For Singh, Marlow’s anti-colonialist rhetoric is seriously undermined by his seeming inability to regard Africans as fully human: “He may sympathize with the plight of blacks, he may be disgusted by the effects of economic colonialism, but because he has no desire to understand or appreciate people of any culture other than his own, he is not emancipated from the mentality of a colonizer” (272).

However, other critics have come to the defense of Conrad and his text. For one thing, they point out that no text can be understood apart from its historical context and that Conrad’s attitude toward African blacks, while probably racist by the standards of the twenty-first century, was if anything unusually sympathetic by the standards of the time in which it was written. Even Singh grants that the limitations of Conrad’s vision were not especially reactionary or racist in the context of turn-of-the century England (280). But Singh argues that we must nevertheless face the fact that his text is nevertheless racially and culturally biased. It is especially crucial to recognize such biases in a text like Heart of Darkness that is well established in the Western literary canon, a canon that supposedly contains the greatest expressions of the greatest thoughts of our cultural heritage. In this sense, that Heart of Darkness is not unusually racist for its time only serves to call attention to the element of racism that is central to the Western cultural tradition, though the racism of Heart of Darkness also calls into question the notion that works of great literature transcend their time and express timeless truths.

It should be noted, though, that other critics have examined Heart of Darkness and concluded that, on balance, Conrad’s attitude is actually antiracist and anticolonialist. In his essay “The Issue of Racism in Heart of Darkness” Hunt Hawkins reviews the numerous attempts that have been made to defend Conrad against charges of racism. He admits that Conrad’s depiction of Africans does not show a very subtle or profound understanding of them. Indeed, Conrad’s descriptions of Africans read almost like a catalog of superficial stereotypes. But, Hawkins argues that Heart of Darkness can potentially be defended on this score because it is not really about Africans in the first place. It is about Europeans, who simply happen to be in Africa. Hawkins, however, grants that this European focus does not in itself excuse Conrad’s dehumanizing descriptions of Africans. Indeed, Achebe regards Conrad’s use of Africa as a stage setting for European adventure and his reduction of Africa “to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind” as particularly offensive elements of the text (257).

Hawkins then goes on to produce a problematic argument that Conrad’s attitude is partially defensible on the basis of the fact that European atrocities in the Congo were no worse than the atrocities that were already being committed there among the Africans themselves. According to Hawkins, while the European colonial intrusions into Africa no doubt shattered the existing African tribal society, the fact is that this life was hardly ideal in the first place. Hawkins then cites contemporary European sources to the effect that “cannibalism and human sacrifice were rife” in the Congo region during the time Conrad was there, and that Conrad may have been influenced by this situation during his own trip to Africa, though Hawkins grants that there is no actual evidence that Conrad observed any incidences of either cannibalism or human sacrifice (“Issue” 164-6).

The problem with this defense, of course, is that it requires one to accept precisely the characterization of Africans as savage that Achebe and others have found so offensive in Conrad’s work. In point of fact, European accounts of the savagery and cannibalism of Africans in the late nineteenth century appear to have been greatly exaggerated, if not fabricated outright. Patrick Parrinder thus notes that there is no evidence to support Conrad’s description of Africans at several points in Heart of Darkness as devil worshippers, even if that characterization was typical of Europeans fantasies about Africans at the time. Indeed, Parrinder suggests that African religions of the time, viewed objectively, were no more savage or fetishistic than Christianity itself (98-9). Meanwhile, Parrinder grants that Conrad’s emphasis on cannibalism in Heart of Darkness was typical of European discourse about Africa at the time. But Parrinder also points out that European reports of African cannibalism were highly unreliable and seldom (if ever) based on confirmed evidence. Indeed, he notes that there were very few reports of cannibalism in central Africa during the four centuries of European contact with the region prior to the late nineteenth century, when a belief in the cannibalistic tendencies of Africans suddenly became extremely convenient as European missionaries fanned out across the continent in search of converts and European powers scrambled to gain control of their share of what only then came to be known as the “dark” continent. The characterization of Africans as cannibals (and thus as primitives in need of salvation) during this period helped to make the European loss of life in “civilizing” the continent seem worthwhile, while at the same time justifying European rule of Africa by demonstrating the superiority of Europeans to their primitive African counterparts. Finally, Parrinder notes that there were instances in which human flesh was used as a source of food in the Congo in the late nineteenth century—but only because the Belgians and competing Arab conquerors were engaged in an all-out war for control of the region, a war the devastating effects of which led to widespread starvation and to desperate acts of cannibalism on both sides (91-2). Indeed, it is interesting that Conrad suppresses from his narrative any mention of the hostilities between the Belgians and the Arabs. In fact, Conrad does not mention the presence of Arabs at all, an omission made more curious by Conrad’s focus on Arabs in novels like Almayer’s Folly and An Outcast of the Islands. The effacement of Arabs from Heart of Darkness, according to Patrick Brantlinger, “has the effect of sharpening the light-and-dark dichotomies, the staple of racism; … Furthermore, because of the omission of the Arabs Conrad treats cannibalism not as a result of war but as an everyday custom of the Congolese” (263).

Hawkins also defends Heart of Darkness on the basis of his reading of the text as a “powerful indictment of imperialism” (“Issue” 166). Here Hawkins focuses on the depiction of Kurtz in the text, arguing that the brutalities committed by Kurtz are not in fact attributed in the text to his having been corrupted by his contact with the “evil practices of the Africans.” Instead, for Hawkins, Kurtz represents the corruption brought to Africa from Europe. Hawkins then claims that Marlow’s harshest descriptions of Africans have to do not with their own indigenous practices, but with their cooperation with Kurtz and his specifically European form of evil. Hawkins then cites (and endorses) the suggestion by the Guyanese postcolonial novelist Wilson Harris (in direct response to Achebe) that Heart of Darkness is first and foremost an indictment of European liberalism itself. He regards the book as a “frontier novel” that points the way to more positive and productive literary representations of the Third World, even though Conrad himself does not cross this frontier and achieve these representations (263). And this defense of Conrad is potentially a good one, though it should also be pointed out that most readers have found Marlow’s attribution of Kurtz’s savagery to his having “gone native” quite clear. He describes Kurtz, for example, as having “taken a high seat amongst the devils of the land” (55).

Hawkins also suggests that Conrad can be defended on the simple basis that his representations of Africans are often quite positive, though the only examples Hawkins can produce are Marlow’s description of “Kurtz’s mistress” as “superb . . . magnificent . . . stately” (70); his characterization of a group of blacks paddling a boat off the shore of Africa as working with “vitality” and “energy” (15); and his description of the “cannibals” in his crew as “fine fellows . . . men one could work with” (39). Hawkins further argues that Marlow, in the course of his journey, overcomes some of his initial prejudices against Africans and in fact performs acts of kindness to them such as offering a biscuit to the dying man in the “grove of death” (21). Unfortunately, these examples are rather weak. Marlow’s description of the “superb” African woman includes “savage” and “ominous” in addition to the adjectives cited by Hawkins, and it is clear that she serves in the text as an image of animal-like feminine sexual energy—and threat. Meanwhile, Marlow also describes the “dignified” boat-rowers as having “faces like grotesque masks” and as being visible from a distance because of the glistening whites of their eyeballs—in short, in the stock terms of the racist tradition. Meanwhile, Marlow’s description of his “cannibals” as “fine fellows” is clearly ironic, and the very fact that Conrad calls attention to their cannibalism is another example of his own acceptance of European racist stereotypes about Africa. Finally, Marlow’s “charity” to the dying man in the grove of death is precisely the sort of kindness he might have bestowed upon a dying dog. In this very passage, in fact, he describes Africans in specifically dehumanizing ways: they are “black shadows,” “moribund shapes,” and “bundles of acute angles.” And the man to whom he gives his biscuit is described in stereotypically racist terms as being of uncertain age (“with them it’s hard to tell”) and as wearing a pathetic string around his neck which Marlow interprets as some sort of magical charm (18–19).

Hawkins’s final defense of Conrad is that Conrad himself openly and strongly opposed racism. To support this point, however, Hawkins must turn to Conrad’s Malayan novels, where the black-and-white racial dichotomies are less clear than in Africa. In these novels, Hawkins concludes, Conrad shows scorn for Europeans who claim racial superiority over Asians, matching this scorn with a “sympathy and respect for Malayans” (“Issue” 169). However, as Humphries points out, Conrad’s critique of “self-satisfied Western superiority” in these novels is accompanied by a consideration of the European presence in Asia as not merely justified, but entirely natural. In particular, Hawkins lists several portrayals of “admirable” Malayan characters in these novels, including the woman Jewel, the half-white native mistress of the title character of Lord Jim. Yet Jewel functions in that text as little more than a prop for Jim’s romance-like rise to power in distant Patusan. She is, in fact, a typical European fantasy of the obedient and sexually suppliant Oriental woman, perhaps made more acceptable by her admixture of European blood. Jewel is so subservient to Jim that she even begins to resemble him physically:

She lived so completely in his contemplation that she had acquired something of his outward aspect, something that recalled him in her movements, in the way she stretched her arm, turned her head, directed her glances. Her vigilant affection had an intensity that made it almost perceptible to the senses. (210)

Finally, Humphries notes that Conrad’s positive representations of Malays are largely intended to set them apart from Arabs, who are consistently portrayed as the sinister and conniving villains of the books, using many of the same stereotypes that Edward Said has identified in his book Orientalism (119).

Hawkins ultimately concludes that Conrad may not have

been able to break entirely free from the racial biases and epithets of his age. But we should recognize his special status as one of the few writers of his period who struggled with the issue of race, and we should appreciate the remarkable fair-mindedness he achieved” (“Issue” 169).

However, it is highly debatable that Conrad’s “fair-mindedness” was really so “remarkable.” Thus, while Conrad’s focus on issues like imperialism and racism makes his book important as a cultural document, it also makes it crucial for us as readers to approach his text with caution and suspicion rather than with the reverence sometimes accorded canonical texts. As Parrinder puts it,

That it took an “Africanist” narrative, sensationally and unforgettably misrepresenting the history, geography and ethnography of the Congo, to set the scene for his vision of universal horror suggests that we now need to say (though we can only say it with Conradian irony) that Heart of Darkness is no idol of ours. (99)

NOTES

EXEMPLARY TEXT:

THE POETRY OF T. S. ELIOT

Born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1888, Thomas Stearns Eliot moved to England in 1914 at the age of twenty-five and lived there until his death in 1965. Eliot became a a British citizen in 1927. By that time, he had become a prominent figure on the British cultural scene and one of the central figures in British modernism. A staunch conservative, Eliot believed strongly in upholding social and cultural traditions, something he felt that the modern world, racing headlong toward technological modernization and putting more and more emphasis on capitalist efficiency, had failed to do, leaving the modern world adrift, with no moral compass. This left Eliot with a dilemma: he was a great admirer of much of the culture of the past (though his tastes could be outside the mainstream, as when he preferred the Metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century to the Romantics), but he also felt that most older culture had been rendered somewhat irrelevant by the sweeping changes that the world had undergone in recent years. He responded by producing some of the most formally innovative and influential poetry of the twentieth century, though his poetry looked thematically to the past, decrying the modern world as dehumanizing and bereft of true meaning. Together with his friend and ally Ezra Pound, another expatriate American poet living in Europe to help shape the modernist movement, among other things using his position as an editor at Faber and Faber Publishers (where he worked from 1925 until his death) to help other aspiring poets—including W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Ted Hughes—publish their work with the press.

Many of Eliot’s own poems are among the most important works of literary modernism, but two stand at the very center of the modernist movement. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” first published in 1915, was the poem that put Eliot on the map, announcing the arrival of a major new talent—and of a major new mode of poetic expression. This poem, with its unconventional meter and clever allusions to previous works of literary, already shows the development of some of Eliot’s key poetic strategies, while its central (and decidedly modernist) theme of the alienated state of individuals in a modern world devoid of traditional social structures would remain crucial to his work throughout the rest of his career. Then, in 1922, Eliot would publish a longer, more complex, and more sophisticated poem that would become very possibly the most important single poem in the entire modernist movement. One might argue, in fact, that The Waste Land was the most important poem of the twentieth century.

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Eliot’s first professionally published poem, appeared in 1915, five years after Eliot began writing it—and only then at the instigation of Ezra Pound, who was much impressed by this new poetic voice. The poem perplexed many readers when it was first published, but it is now considered a classic of modernist irony, beginning with its title: Prufrock neither gives nor receives love in the poem, and his life is devoid of the music of romance. It is also a poem that is entirely contained within an urban space, as is much modernist literature. The nature that was so dear to the Romantic poets has been entirely effaced from the world of the poem, leaving only dirty and hostile city streets, though vague echoes of a longing for nature remain. And yet, the interiors of the city offer no sanctuary from these streets. They are merely rooms inhabited by strangers, barren and empty, no matter how filled with meaningless trinkets. The poem is thus also a classic modernist expression of the experience of alienation, of the feeling of never being at home anywhere in the world, never truly communicating with any of the other people one encounters in that world, always suspecting that somehow those people are less lost than you are.

The poem is rhetorically vague. Is Prufrock merely thinking to himself? Is he talking to someone else? A mixture of the two? Despite such confusion, despite the Italian epigraph, despite the literary allusions, despite the sometimes vague and abstract phrasing, “Prufrock” seems a relatively straightforward poem. And, on one level, it is. Prufrock is a lonely, alienated, middle-aged man looking for love but not expecting to find it. But this simplest level of the poem has, for some readers pointed toward higher levels in which Prufrock conducts a critique of Edwardian society or attempts to solve important philosophical questions. Indeed, various interpreters have found many different things in the poem in the more than a century since it was first published. Close readings of Eliot’s grammar and syntax are legion, as are explications of the poem’s numerous allusions, from the obvious to the obscure. William Malcuit, for example, sees it as a rather political poem that represents a rejection of individualist liberalism—and especially of liberalism as expressed in the American poetic tradition represented by Walt Whitman. For Malcuit this rejection essentially clears the ideological decks for the young Eliot (who was only twenty-two when he started writing the poem), opening the way for his move to a more right-wing position later in his career. David Trotter sees “Prufrock” as a poem largely about technology—as driven partly by Eliot’s rejection of the new medium of cinema, whose technological basis he found dehumanizing. On the other hand, Trotter sees The Waste Land as a sign of Eliot’s growing acceptance of the new medium.

But let’s do a more straightforward, basic reading of the poem, section by section. It begins in a way that immediately suggests Eliot’s concern that, as the levels of education among the lower classes were rising, so too were the levels of education among more sophisticated modern readers falling. Further, he felt that, in order to appeal to the vast new readership made available by rising literacy levels, literature was all too often lowering its standards in order to be accessible to these new readers. Eliot’s response was to refuse to compromise and to refuse to lower his own level of discourse to that of the new literary marketplace. In a famous essay on the metaphysical poets, Eliot himself explained the difficulty and complexity of his poetry in terms of the complexities of modern life:

Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must 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. (Eliot 65)

In this mode, Eliot thus begins “Prufrock” (in a mode that some might find pretentious and elitist) with an epigraph from Dante’s Inferno (Canto XXVII, lines 61–66), unapologetically left in the original medieval Italian, which (as Eliot was of course well aware) few of the poem’s modern readers could actually understand.[42] That, of course, was partly the point:

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma percioche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

The presence of these lines makes an important statement, even if one has no idea where the lines come from or what they mean. Moreover, recognizing that the lines come from Dante, a key forerunner of the Italian Renaissance, makes it clear that they look back to a time when Western culture, in the view of Eliot (and many others) was about to experience a period of explosive growth into one of its richest periods—as opposed to the early twentieth century, when Eliot felt that most people were no longer equipped to appreciate the glories of the Renaissance and the period that followed it. (This of course ignores the fact that most people during the Renaissance and after were also not really equipped to appreciate the glories of Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, and the like, either.) In any case, the actual content of the epigraph illuminates the following poem quite usefully, providing a suggestion of just how much one might miss by forgetting the classics. In English, this epigraph can be translated as follows:

If I but thought that I were responding

To one who might someday return to the world,

This flaming tongue would cease to flicker.

But from these depths, no one has yet

To return alive, so, if this is true,

I can answer without fear of suffering shame.

These lines suggest the reticence with which Prufrock, the speaker in the poem itself, is about to share his inner feelings with us. One of the most striking exemplars of the central modernist theme of alienation, Prufrock is extremely hesitant to reach out to others, feeling that there is little chance he will be able to make himself understood, both because of what he regards as his unique individual peculiarities and because of the inherent limitations in language itself. The poem proper then begins with what seems like a conventionally poetic Romantic invitation, perhaps issued to a lover:

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

It then proceeds with a sudden shift that undermines this poetic beginning and yanks us forcefully back into a tawdry modern world with there is no place for the poetry of past eras. Indeed, the poet John Berryman has stated that modern poetry begins with the third line of “Prufrock.” Of course, sudden changes of tone often occur in “Prufrock,” a poem that, as Anne Stillman notes, often “hovers between the whimsical and the menacing” (49). Prufrock at several points in the coming poem will gesture toward a conventional form, as when he occasional experiments with rhyme. But it never sticks. This world is fallen, dystopian. It is not an exciting, hustling, bustling modern world, but an old, tired, broken modern world. It is also clearly urban, making its setting a typical one for modernist literature:

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question …

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”

Let us go and make our visit.

Meanwhile, Prufrock imagines a group of women in a room, chatting pretentiously of a Renaissance artist of whose works they likely have little or no real understanding or appreciation. These women will reappear many times, images of a feminine threat that is often found in Eliot’s poetry, reminders here of Prufrock’s infelicity in dealing with his women and of the status of women in his mind as mysterious, foreign, and inscrutable:

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

Prufrock then makes another gesture toward a conventional poetic mode, personifying the “yellow fog” (suggesting that the air in the city is polluted)[43] as a sort of cat-like animal—anticipating the fact that cats would often recur in Eliot’s poetry[44]:

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,

Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,

Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,

And seeing that it was a soft October night,

Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

Unfortunately, the modern world cannot sustain such poetic flights, and Prufrock immediately slips back into a mode of hesitation and anxiety, worrying about preparing a face to present as he goes out into a world of strangers, a process that acquires a dark tint due to the mention of murder:

And indeed there will be time[45]

For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,

Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days[46] of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Prufrock then slips back into the second person mode with which he began the poem, as if he is addressing someone he knows, but remaining in a mode of radical indecision as he anticipates a simple moment like tea time as a momentous event that must be extensively planned and thought out:

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

All the while, those mysterious women are still trying to impress each other with their knowledge of Renaissance art:

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

Then, Prufrock seems to be anticipating a potential romantic encounter, though—feeling inadequate and terrified of rejection—he anticipates the encounter with little relish, feeling that his balding head and unimpressive physique might expose him to rejection and scorn. So he wonders if he dares make an overture, as if to do so would be a momentous undertaking that might disturb the universe. Surely, though, he here speaks with self-deprecating irony: he knows that his social interactions are of little concern to the universe and mocks himself for fretting so extensively over a potential event that is of no true import in the larger scheme of things:

And indeed there will be time

To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”

Time to turn back and descend the stair,

With a bald spot in the middle of my hair —

(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)

My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,

My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin —

(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

Try as he might to heroize his efforts, Prufrock feels that he is a prosaic figure in a prosaic world. He is not a conquering knight, but an ordinary man who lives in a routinized world where life is measured out as if in coffee spoons:

For I have known them all already, known them all:

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I know the voices dying with a dying fall

Beneath the music from a farther room.

So how should I presume?

Still contemplating his potential social encounter, Prufrock is obviously terrified of the scrutiny to which he might be exposed, self-consciously imagining all those eyes that might be looking at him like an entomological specimen pinned to a wall. It is, after all, scientific observation that has tamed the world and stripped it of magic, making human subjects like himself into objects. But he is also afraid of all those “I’s”—all those other subjects that might, being so different from himself (especially if they are women), also objectify him:

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—

The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,

And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,

When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,

Then how should I begin

To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?

And how should I presume?

Here, Prufrock inserts what might be taken as a bit of a boast—he has actually had his share of experience with women, or so he claims, but it never really amounted to much (perhaps because he seems to objectify women into collections of body parts and bits of clothing and jewelry):

And I have known the arms already, known them all—

Arms that are braceleted and white and bare

(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)

Is it perfume from a dress

That makes me so digress?

Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.

And should I then presume?

And how should I begin?

He then proposes an alternative formulation, envisioning his past romantic adventures in the most mundane way possible, stripping them of all romance:

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets

And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes

Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? …

Finally, in exasperation, Prufrock concludes that he might have been better off to be some primitive sea creature living on the floor of the ocean (and thus free of all the social games and maneuvers that, for him, make up human interactions:

I should have been a pair of ragged claws

Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

Having reached a seeming low point, Prufrock returns to his theme of anticipating a possible upcoming encounter, wondering if he will have the courage to go through with making a romantic advance (or if it even matters). Far from being a mythical hero, he is somehow so unimportant that his adventures can hardly constitute more than a joke on the cosmic scale of things:

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!

Smoothed by long fingers,

Asleep … tired … or it malingers,

Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.

Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,

Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,

Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a

platter,

I am no prophet — and here’s no great matter;

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,

And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,

And in short, I was afraid.

Moreover, continues Prufrock, again poking a bit of fun at his tendency to make mountains out of social molehills, would it really be worth risking the embarrassment of making an overture, only to have his courageous gesture rebuffed as a mere miscalculation:

And would it have been worth it, after all,

After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,

Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,

Would it have been worth while,

To have bitten off the matter with a smile,

To have squeezed the universe into a ball[47]

To roll it towards some overwhelming question,

To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,

Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—

If one, settling a pillow by her head

Should say: “That is not what I meant at all;

That is not it, at all.”

Prufrock continues his attempt to explain his predicament and why he is so worried about his upcoming encounter but finds that language simply does not serve him. He ends up simply repeating his concern that he has perhaps misread the situation:

And would it have been worth it, after all,

Would it have been worth while,

After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,

After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the

floor—

And this, and so much more?—

It is impossible to say just what I mean!

But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:

Would it have been worth while

If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,

And turning toward the window, should say:

”That is not it at all,

That is not what I meant, at all.”

Prufrock now turns to literary allusions to produce another self-deprecating suggesting that he is no one special. He is no protagonist of a grand drama, like Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Were he in a play, he would merely be a member of the supporting cast. Perhaps he would be an advisor, but possibly such a bad one that he would border on being the king’s fool:

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;[48]

Am an attendant lord, one that will do

To swell a progress, start a scene or two,

Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,

Deferential, glad to be of use,

Politic, cautious, and meticulous;

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;

At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—

Almost, at times, the Fool.

Alas, concludes Prufrock, he is growing old. If he has achieved nothing special at this point, he is not likely to do so. It is perhaps time for him to stop even fantasizing about doing great things. Perhaps eating a peach is about as big a challenge as he is likely to overcome. No romance will be coming his way; no mermaids, those images of exotic romance, will be singing to him:

I grow old … I grow old …

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

The Waste Land

“Prufrock” has become accepted as a masterpiece, as one of the most important milestones on the road to modernism. But The Waste Land, published a mere seven years later, is perhaps the most important work of modernist poetry fully achieved. It is again a work filled with irony, in this case largely because it is a truly great poem one of whose major themes is the impossibility of producing great poetry in a fallen modern world. It deals with many of the same issues as “Prufrock,” but it is far more complex and difficult, far nastier and more bitter about the state of the world. Yet it retains an occasional twinkle of humor. Indeed, some of the poem’s initial readers were so baffled by it that they thought the whole poem must be some sort of elaborate joke.

Like “Prufrock,” The Waste Land begins with an epigraph from a literary classic. In this case, however, Eliot goes the earlier poem one better by quoting a passage that is in both Latin and Greek, making it seem even more pretentious to some modern readers, but also providing a baseline against which to compare modern culture. Perhaps, he seems to be saying, the Renaissance did represent an attempt to return to the heights of classical civilization, but by now this attempt has failed miserably. In this case, the quote is from the Satyricon, a late first century forerunner of the modern novel, written by Petronius (27–66), now commonly identified by scholars as an example of Menippean satire. Menippean satire is an unstructured, unruly form—named for the third-century BC poet Menippus, none of whose writings survive, but who is remembered in the writings of his follower, the poet Lucian (125–180). This form of satire, which has received new critical attention in recent decades—largely due to its exploration by the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) in his analysis of the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881)—employs a wide range of styles and registers, ranging from the supernatural to the profane. Menippean satire, in fact, has much in common with The Waste Land itself. Indeed, Max Nänny invokes Bakhtin’s work to argue that T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land can be located within the tradition of Menippean satire or, more generally, within the tradition of carnival (534). Indeed, Nänny sees the trend toward carnivalization, led by Joyce and Eliot, to be one of the major aspects of the entire modernist movement:

The chief modernist works, Joyce’s Ulysses, Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Pound’s Cantos as well as so much post-modern writing may hence be seen as literary expressions of a pervasive carnivalization of 20th century consciousness and culture, expressions whose strongly ludic character demands an active participation in their carnivalesque games. (534-5)

However, whereas Bakhtin associates Menippean satire with the rollicking, bawdy, life-affirming energies of the carnivalesque[49], The Waste Land generally has a more somber, even elegiac tone. Thus, Calvin Bedient argues that The Waste Land is not carnivalesque in the Bakhtinian sense, but actually anti-carnivalesque:

The Waste Land is never really, and is finally far from being, carnivalesque; instead, it arranges the appearance of a riot of tones and images and languages with the cold cunning of a Hieronymo and with no less an intention than to silence the pretensions of language and literature once and for all. (8)

“Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi

in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σίβνλλα τί ϴέλεις; respondebat illa: άπο ϴανεΐν ϴέλω.”

The content of this epigraph is also extremely relevant to the poem that follows. It translates as “I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a cage, and when the boys said to her: “Sibyl, what do you want?” she answered: “I want to die.” As related in the Satyricon, the Sibyl at Cumae was a prophetess so beautiful that the god Apollo offered to grant her any wish if she would only become his lover. She responding by asking to live for as many years as there were grains in a handful of dust (i.e., virtually forever). Apollo granted her wish, but still she refused to become his lover. Later, she discovered that, while Apollo had given her great longevity he had not given her eternal youth. Each year she grew older, more shrunken frail, and decrepit. After hundreds of years, her only wish was to die, but she could not. She can thus be taken as a symbol of the decaying condition of modern culture, living on in what essentially amounts to a state of living death. Hugh Kenner has noted that this epigraph is also appropriate given that the Sibyl was renowned for the obscure and fragmentary nature of her prophecies, which required considerable decoding, much like The Waste Land itself (Invisible 159).

The poem then moves to a dedication to Ezra Pound (the Italian translates to “the better craftsman”), which both acknowledges Pound’s own gifts as a poet and thanks him for his editing suggestions during the composition of The Waste Land, which in fact went through an elaborate process of revision before publication. One of the things with which Eliot asked Pound’s advice was in helping him avoid being too derivative of Joyce’s Ulysses, some of the chapters of which were appearing in serial form Eliot was so impressed by Joyce’s novel (which he saw as similar in spirit and technique to The Waste Land) that he was afraid he would be excessively influenced by it.[50] Pound did, in fact, suggest several changes to make the poem less like certain passages in Ulysses.

FOR EZRA POUND

il miglior fabbro

The Waste Land itself has five titled sections, labeled with Roman numerals, which gives it a seemingly formal structure that is ironically opposed to the chaos of much of the poem itself. It is as if Eliot is dramatizing his attempt to impose order, an attempt that he knows is doomed given the state of the modern world. It should also be noted that, in addition to these sections, Eliot also supplied a number of footnotes to the text, presumably to aid readers in understanding the poem, though some have wondered if these footnotes are actually intended as a joke, as a parody of the kind of annotations that scholars often supply for poems—and that I am supplying here for The Waste Land. Indeed, the footnotes are suspiciously unhelpful in many ways, though Eliot’s opening note, providing a sort of general gloss on the poem, does seem useful, even if the ending seems a bit tongue-in-cheek:

Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie. L Weston’s book on the Grail legend: From Ritual to Romance (Macmillan). Indeed, so deeply am I indebted, Miss Weston’s book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much better than my notes can do; and I recommend it (apart from the great interest of the book itself) to any who think such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble. To another work of anthropology I am indebted in general, one which has influenced our generation profoundly; I mean The Golden Bough; I have used especially the two volumes Adonis, Attis, Osiris. Anyone who is acquainted with these works will immediately recognise in the poem certain references to vegetation ceremonies.

Written by the Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer (1854–1941), The Golden Bough was initially published in a two-volume edition in 1890, then as three volumes in 1900. It appeared as a massive twelve-volume edition over the period 1906–1915, then as an abridged edition in 1922 (one that omitted Frazer’s discussion of Christianity as simply one among many other magical religions). It was indeed a landmark work, widely influential on many writers and thinkers. In the book, Frazer compiles information about various religions through history and concludes that religions in general originated as fertility cults that centered on the worship of a sacred king, who was often ultimately sacrificed for the good of the community. A typical sacred king might be sacrificed in the autumn and then reborn in the spring. For Frazer, the history of religious thought involves a gradual evolution from such magical beginnings toward an ultimate rejection of magic in favor of scientific rationality. Perhaps the most important of these scared king myths for Eliot was the Fisher King myth, as described by Weston. The Fisher King is typically wounded and crippled, and the lands he rules are generally blighted in parallel with his wounded condition. In later Christianized versions of the myth, the king is healed by various techniques involving the power of Christ. Many have seen The Waste Land as a sort of vague retelling of the Fisher King myth.

The first section of the poem itself is entitled “The Burial of the Dead,” after the Anglican burial service, a title that sets the mood of the poem going forward. It then begins very much like “Prufrock,” by feinting toward a conventional poetic beginning, then quickly undermining any notions that this will be a conventional work of poetry. The first lines directly recall the beginning of Chaucer’s Prologue to The Canterbury Tales—and thus point virtually back to the beginnings of English poetry. However, whereas Chaucer’s lines set the tone for a whole poetic tradition in which April is envisioned as a glorious month of renewal and rebirth via the coming of spring, Eliot presents a sour reversal of this notion, suggesting that April simply brings false hopes that life is about to get better, hopes that soon will be dashed. Meanwhile, in its first stanza, The Waste Land already descends into chaos (echoing Eliot’s view of the state of the modern world) by introducing obscure fragments from modern life that seem to have little to do with the first few lines. In any case, this first stanza already serves as a warning of the fact that, as Lawrence Rainey notes, we should not attempt “to endow the poem with the kinds of coherence we expect from more ordinary texts” (72–73).

Chaucer

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote

The droughte of March hath perced to the roote

And bathed every veyne in swich licour

Of which vertu engendred is the flour.

I. The Burial of the Dead

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers.

Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee

With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,

And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,

And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.

Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.

And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke’s,

My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,

And I was frightened. He said, Marie,

Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.

In the mountains, there you feel free.

I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.[51]

We already seem to have multiple, seemingly disembodied, voices sounding in this first stanza, leaping into the text as if from nowhere. It might help us to understand this technique to know that Eliot originally intended (but was talked out of it by Pound) to call the poem “He Do the Police in Different Voices,” after a character in Charles Dickens’ last novel Our Mutual Friend (1864–1865) who likes to read aloud from the newspaper, imitating the voices of various individuals as he does so. “Sloppy is a beautiful reader of the newspaper,” says the widow Higden. “He do the police in different voices.”

The next stanza then largely functions to set up the wasteland motif by describing a rocky, barren landscape, devoid of water, the sun beating down brutally. Mixing these images with references to love and romance suggests the sterility of sexual passion in the modern world. Moreover, its evocation of a “heap of broken images” suggests Eliot’s vision of the fragmented and fallen nature of Western culture in the early twentieth century:[52]

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,[53]

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,[54]

And the dry stone no sound of water. Only

There is shadow under this red rock,

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.[55]

Frisch weht der Wind

Der Heimat zu

Mein Irisch Kind,

Wo weilest du?[56]

“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;

“They called me the hyacinth girl.”

—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,

Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not

Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither

Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,

Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

Oed’ und leer das Meer.[57]

Eliot now begins a new stanza with one of the sudden shifts that are typical of The Waste Land, moving from an opera about a legendary passion to the debased realm of a hack fortune teller. Faint echoes of Shakespeare punctuate her reading of a pack of Tarot cards, suggesting the vestiges of a once-great culture that still linger but that no longer have the stature they once had, just as Madame Sosostris herself represents what we have left of magic in a modern routinized world:

Madame Sosostris,[58] famous clairvoyante,

Had a bad cold, nevertheless

Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,

With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,

Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,

(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)[59]

Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,

The lady of situations.

Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,

And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,

Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,

Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find

The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.

I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.

Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,

Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:

One must be so careful these days.[60]

Eliot next turns to perhaps the most famous of his many evocations of urban settings, this time picturing London as a ghostly city peopled by the walking dead, suggesting the way in which the spiritual poverty of modern life has reduced the citizenry to an army of zombies. Of course, as the stanza proceeds it wanders from its initial fantasmagoric image to more prosaic ones and then to macabre images of a buried corpse in danger of being dug up by a dog. It then ends with a sudden return to Baudelaire:

Unreal City,[61]

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,

To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours

With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: “Stetson!

“You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!

“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,

“Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?

“Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?

“Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,

“Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!

“You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”[62]

Eliot now shifts registers once again as he begins the second section of the poem in a modern setting in which a women sits at her dressing table surrounded by makeup and perfume. It’s a rather misogynistic passage that seems hostile to women and the tricks they use to present a false image of themselves to the world. Eliot’s notes suggest that the beginning of this section echoes a description of Cleopatra in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Cleopatra has often been used in Western culture as a key (Orientalist) figure of the mysterious sexual wiles of the exotic Eastern woman. The second half of the first stanza then suddenly turns to the story (related most famously in Ovid’s Metamorphosis) of Philomela, a princess in Greek myth who was raped by her brother-in-law, King Tereus of Thrace, who then cut out her tongue so that she could not report the deed. The story gets darker from there, but a crucial part is that Philomela was ultimately transformed into a nightingale, whose song compensated for her lack of speech as a human.

II. A Game of Chess

The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,[63]

Glowed on the marble, where the glass

Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines

From which a golden Cupidon peeped out

(Another hid his eyes behind his wing)

Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra

Reflecting light upon the table as

The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it,

From satin cases poured in rich profusion;

In vials of ivory and coloured glass

Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes,

Unguent, powdered, or liquid—troubled, confused

And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air

That freshened from the window, these ascended

In fattening the prolonged candle-flames,

Flung their smoke into the laquearia,

Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.

Huge sea-wood fed with copper

Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone,

In which sad light a carvéd dolphin swam.

Above the antique mantel was displayed

As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene

The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king[64]

So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale

Filled all the desert with inviolable voice

And still she cried, and still the world pursues,

“Jug Jug” to dirty ears.[65]

And other withered stumps of time

Were told upon the walls; staring forms

Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed.

Footsteps shuffled on the stair.

Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair

Spread out in fiery points

Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.

The poem then switches gears for another brief stanza, jumping from the world of myth back to a contemporary scene in which a woman apparently complains of the lack of communication between herself and someone, probably her husband:

“My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me.

“Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.

“What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?

“I never know what you are thinking. Think.”

Then an inserted two-line stanza, seems to float in from nowhere—or perhaps from the third part of the poem, to which Eliot’s note refers us. (The rat imagery, with its obvious abjec associations, recurs there.) More scattered images, often with resonances of death—including another reference to the drowning in The Tempest—follow. Then a sudden snippet from contemporary popular music drifts into the poem, contrasting the modern, cheap commercial appropriation of Shakespeare with the greatness of Shakespeare himself. The stanza then ends with what seems to be a scene in a bar between two women, one of whom has just induced an abortion via pills as she awaits the return of her husband Albert from military service. Marriage in The Waste Land is consistently portrayed as empty and sterile:

I think we are in rats’ alley

Where the dead men lost their bones.

“What is that noise?”

The wind under the door.

“What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?”

Nothing again nothing.

“Do

“You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember

“Nothing?”

I remember

Those are pearls that were his eyes.

“Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?”

But

O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag—[66]

It’s so elegant

So intelligent

“What shall I do now? What shall I do?”

“I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street

“With my hair down, so. What shall we do tomorrow?

“What shall we ever do?”

The hot water at ten.

And if it rains, a closed car at four.

And we shall play a game of chess,

Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.

When Lil’s husband got demobbed, I said—

I didn’t mince my words, I said to her myself,

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME[67]

Now Albert’s coming back, make yourself a bit smart.

He’ll want to know what you done with that money he gave you

To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.

You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set,

He said, I swear, I can’t bear to look at you.

And no more can’t I, I said, and think of poor Albert,

He’s been in the army four years, he wants a good time,

And if you don’t give it him, there’s others will, I said.

Oh is there, she said. Something o’ that, I said.

Then I’ll know who to thank, she said, and give me a straight look.

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME

If you don’t like it you can get on with it, I said.

Others can pick and choose if you can’t.

But if Albert makes off, it won’t be for lack of telling.

You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique.

(And her only thirty-one.)

I can’t help it, she said, pulling a long face,

It’s them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.

(She’s had five already, and nearly died of young George.)

The chemist said it would be all right, but I’ve never been the same.

You are a proper fool, I said.

Well, if Albert won’t leave you alone, there it is, I said,

What you get married for if you don’t want children?

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME

Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon,

And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot—

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME

Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight.

Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight.

Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.[68]

Eliot now shifts gears once again as he moves into the third section of the poem, which takes its title from a sermon delivered by Buddha against the fires of lust and other destructive passions. This section continues to mix the high with the low, the sacred with the profane, the past with the present. It also becomes increasingly fragmented, as bits and pieces from earlier parts of the poem begin to reappear, out of nowhere. Meanwhile, an opening echo of Spenser’s Prothalamion contrasts what Eliot sees as the lost greatness of the Elizabethan era with a modern era in which the once-romantic Thames is now strewn with garbage:

III. The Fire Sermon

The river’s tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf

Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind

Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.

Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.[69]

The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,

Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends

Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.

And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors;

Departed, have left no addresses.

By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept . . .

Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,

Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.

But at my back in a cold blast I hear[70]

The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.

A rat crept softly through the vegetation

Dragging its slimy belly on the bank

While I was fishing in the dull canal

On a winter evening round behind the gashouse

Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck

And on the king my father’s death before him.[71]

White bodies naked on the low damp ground

And bones cast in a little low dry garret,

Rattled by the rat’s foot only, year to year.

But at my back from time to time I hear[72]

The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring

Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring.

O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter

And on her daughter

They wash their feet in soda water

Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole!

Twit twit twit

Jug jug jug jug jug jug

So rudely forc’d.

Tereu

Unreal City

Under the brown fog of a winter noon

Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant

Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants

C.i.f. London: documents at sight,[73]

Asked me in demotic French

To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel[74]

Followed by a weekend at the Metropole.[75]

As the poem reaches its midpoint, Eliot introduces the figure of Tiresias, a blind seer who plays an important role in Greek mythology. Eliot introduces Tiresias with a footnote suggesting that he is a key figure in The Waste Land as well, calling him “the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest. Eliot then cites a long passage from Ovid (in Latin, without translation) that supposedly makes clear the significance of Tiresias. Basically, the passage makes clear the breadth of Tiresias’s vision by noting that he is a man who once spent seven years magically transformed into a woman, giving him a view of life from both gender positions. He has also been given supernatural insights (including the ability to see the future) by the god Jove as compensation for having lost his normal sight via a curse issued by Jove’s wife, Juno. Sultan notes that the central position occupied by Tiresias in the poem is quite a literal one, given that he is first mentioned in line 218, the exact center of the poem. For Sultan this might have been by design, an example of Eliot’s playfulness in the poem (64).

At the violet hour, when the eyes and back

Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits

Like a taxi throbbing waiting,

I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,

Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see

At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives

Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,

The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights

Her stove, and lays out food in tins.

Out of the window perilously spread

Her drying combinations touched by the sun’s last rays,

On the divan are piled (at night her bed)

Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.

I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs

Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest—

I too awaited the expected guest.

He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,

A small house agent’s clerk, with one bold stare,

One of the low on whom assurance sits

As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.

The time is now propitious, as he guesses,[76]

The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,

Endeavours to engage her in caresses

Which still are unreproved, if undesired.

Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;

Exploring hands encounter no defence;

His vanity requires no response,

And makes a welcome of indifference.

(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all

Enacted on this same divan or bed;

I who have sat by Thebes below the wall

And walked among the lowest of the dead.)

Bestows one final patronising kiss,

And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit . . .

She turns and looks a moment in the glass,

Hardly aware of her departed lover;

Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:

“Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.”[77]

When lovely woman stoops to folly and

Paces about her room again, alone,

She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,

And puts a record on the gramophone.

“This music crept by me upon the waters”

And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street.

O City city, I can sometimes hear

Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,

The pleasant whining of a mandoline

And a clatter and a chatter from within

Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls

Of Magnus Martyr hold

Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.

The river sweats[78]

Oil and tar

The barges drift

With the turning tide

Red sails

Wide

To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.

The barges wash

Drifting logs

Down Greenwich reach

Past the Isle of Dogs.

Weialala leia

Wallala leialala

Elizabeth and Leicester

Beating oars

The stern was formed

A gilded shell

Red and gold

The brisk swell

Rippled both shores

Southwest wind

Carried down stream

The peal of bells

White towers

Weialala leia

Wallala leialala

“Trams and dusty trees.

Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew

Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees

Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.”

“My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart

Under my feet. After the event

He wept. He promised a ‘new start.’

I made no comment. What should I resent?”

“On Margate Sands.

I can connect

Nothing with nothing.

The broken fingernails of dirty hands.

My people humble people who expect

Nothing.”

la la

To Carthage then I came[79]

Burning burning burning burning[80]

O Lord Thou pluckest me out[81]

O Lord Thou pluckest

Burning

In keeping with his focus on contrasts in the poem, Eliot suddenly turns from fire to water in the fourth (and shortest) part of the poem—though images of drowning have circulated throughout the poem. Several critics have noted that there is a strong tradition of poetry about death by drowning, including Milton’s Lycidas (1638). And, of course, “Prufrock” ends with a reference to drowning.

IV. Death by Water

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,

Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell

And the profit and loss.

A current under sea

Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell

He passed the stages of his age and youth

Entering the whirlpool.

Gentile or Jew

O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,

Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

There has been much critical disagreement about what to make of the fifth and final book of The Waste Land. On the one hand, it seems to represent a turn toward a more positive and hopeful vision. On the other hand, it is not clear how much of this vision might be ironic. In the first parts of this section, much of the imagery of droughts and of nightmarish horror that have been sprinkled through the earlier parts of the poem reappears. Then a thunderstorm seems to bring rain and a promise of renewal.

V. What the Thunder Said

After the torchlight red on sweaty faces

After the frosty silence in the gardens

After the agony in stony places

The shouting and the crying

Prison and palace and reverberation

Of thunder of spring over distant mountains

He who was living is now dead

We who were living are now dying

With a little patience

Here is no water but only rock

Rock and no water and the sandy road

The road winding above among the mountains

Which are mountains of rock without water

If there were water we should stop and drink

Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think

Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand

If there were only water amongst the rock

Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit

Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit

There is not even silence in the mountains

But dry sterile thunder without rain

There is not even solitude in the mountains

But red sullen faces sneer and snarl

From doors of mudcracked houses

If there were water

And no rock

If there were rock

And also water

And water

A spring

A pool among the rock

If there were the sound of water only

Not the cicada

And dry grass singing

But sound of water over a rock

Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees

Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop

But there is no water

Who is the third who walks always beside you?[82]

When I count, there are only you and I together

But when I look ahead up the white road

There is always another one walking beside you

Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded

I do not know whether a man or a woman

—But who is that on the other side of you?

What is that sound high in the air

Murmur of maternal lamentation

Who are those hooded hordes swarming

Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth

Ringed by the flat horizon only

What is the city over the mountains

Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air

Falling towers

Jerusalem Athens Alexandria

Vienna London

Unreal

A woman drew her long black hair out tight

And fiddled whisper music on those strings

And bats with baby faces in the violet light

Whistled, and beat their wings

And crawled head downward down a blackened wall

And upside down in air were towers

Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours

And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.

In this decayed hole among the mountains

In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing

Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel

There is the empty chapel, only the wind’s home.

It has no windows, and the door swings,

Dry bones can harm no one.

Only a cock stood on the rooftree

Co co rico co co rico

In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust

Bringing rain

Having already sprinkled his poem with Christian and Buddhist imagery, Eliot now invokes the River Ganges in India, sacred to the Hindu religion. He also refers to the Upanishads, a collection of philosophical statements that is central to Hinduism, though some of its concepts are shared with Buddhism as well.

Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves

Waited for rain, while the black clouds

Gathered far distant, over Himavant.

The jungle crouched, humped in silence.

Then spoke the thunder

Datta: what have we given?[83]

My friend, blood shaking my heart

The awful daring of a moment’s surrender

Which an age of prudence can never retract

By this, and this only, we have existed

Which is not to be found in our obituaries

Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider

Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor

In our empty rooms

Dayadhvam: I have heard the key

Turn in the door once and turn once only

We think of the key, each in his prison

Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison

Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours

Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus

Damyata: The boat responded

Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar

The sea was calm, your heart would have responded

Gaily, when invited, beating obedient

To controlling hands

The poem seems to end on a hopeful note, but continuing images of destruction fragmentation, and ruin suggest that the problems identified earlier in the poem might not really have been solved.

I sat upon the shore

Fishing, with the arid plain behind me

Shall I at least set my lands in order?

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down

Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina[84]

Quando fiam uti chelidon[85]—O swallow swallow

Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie

These fragments I have shored against my ruins

Why then Ile fit you.[86] Hieronymo’s mad againe.

Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

Shantih shantih shantih

Eliot thus ends his poem with the thrice repeated “Shantih”—the peace which passeth understanding—which is repeated thusly to mark the formal end to an Upanishad (a Hindu philosophical text). It is by no means clear, however, that this peace has been achieved in the poem, so that this invocation might simply mean that Hinduism, like Christianity and Buddhism, is becoming irrelevant in a modern secular world.

NOTES

EXEMPLARY TEXT:

VIRGINIA WOOLF, TO THE LIGHTHOUSE (1927)

In her essay “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown,” Virginia Woolf presents one of her most famous arguments for the development of a new kind of art and literature in the modern age. Here, she declares that “in or about December, 1910, human character changed.” As a result of this character shift, she goes one, relations between ‘‘masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children’’ all understandably changed. Moreover, she notes, ‘‘when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics and literature.’’ Much of her subsequent career can then be seen as her attempt to follow her own observation to its logical conclusion by trying to write new forms of literature that are appropriate to this newly changed world.

From this point of view, it might be significant that the action of To the Lighthouse, possibly Woolf’s most important novel, begins shortly before the date cited in her essay as the beginning of the modern age and then extends roughly ten years beyond it, thus encompassing the first decade of this new age. Of all of Woolf’s novels, To the Lighthouse has received the most—and the most positive—critical commentary. F. R. Leavis, a prominent critic not typically over-fond of Woolf’s writing, placed it alongside Ulysses and The Waste Land as the three finest expressions of the literary consciousness of their time. Partly based on Woolf’s own experience growing up in a late-Victorian family with a prominent patriarch, To the Lighthouse is both a profound philosophical exploration of the nature of time and memory and a detailed satirical takedown of the patriarchal values of late Victorian society, values that Woolf saw were alive and well even in the late 1920s. Woolf herself had sometimes criticized others for writing fiction in an autobiographical mode, and as she conceived of To the Lighthouse she wondered if it could even be called a novel, given its roots in her own life. Lucio Ruotolo, for example, discusses the way in which the book is, among other things, part of Woolf’s attempt to deal with the sense of a void left in her life by the premature death of her mother when Virginia was still a young teen. Yet, in a 2015 BBC poll of book critics outside the UK, To the Lighthouse was listed as the second greatest British novel of all time, surpassed only by George Eliot’s Middlemarch.

There are many reasons why To the Lighthouse is rated so highly, despite the fact that it is a novel almost devoid of any real plot. Indeed, its ability to function so effectively virtually without the support of any real action is one of the things that marks it as a modernist classic. But it is also a feminist classic, a classic example of philosophical fiction, and a classic example of the transformation of real-life experience into fiction[87]. To the Lighthouse is a carefully crafted and meticulously structured novel that introduces us to a number of different characters and to their attitudes about a variety of issues, ranging from art, to class, to gender. Meanwhile, as with much modernist fiction, World War I hovers in the background of the novel and has a major impact on the characters, even as very little is said directly about it.

“The Window”

To the Lighthouse is divided into three segments. The first segment, “The Window,” is set in September in about 1909 or 1910, on the Isle of Skye, the largest and northernmost of the major islands in the Inner Hebrides Group off the West Coast of Scotland. Here, the Ramsay family (which includes the parents and eight children) are hosting a number of guests on the island at their summer home, which is modeled on Talland House in St. Ives, Cornwall, which Woolf’s family regularly rented as a retreat during the first decade of Woolf’s life. In fact, Mrs. Ramsay has invited so many guests that the house can’t hold them, so that some of them have to take lodgings in town, spending their days at the Ramsay’s retreat. Much of this section is merely designed to introduce us to the characters, and it in fact might largely be described as a series of character sketches, though these sketches contain a great deal of loaded commentary about their contemporary society.

Mr. Ramsay, loosely based on Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, is a moderately well-known philosophy professor who has authored a number of academic works on his areas of expertise (though only the first of these appears to have been an important contribution).[88] Mrs. Ramsay, based on Woolf’s mother, is a long-suffering soul who struggles to hold things together and provide a peaceful environment in which Mr. Ramsay can do his oh-so-important work. Ramsay is a rather pompous and domineering figure, though he is also insecure and constantly in need of reassurance, especially from Mrs. Ramsay, who provides it in abundance. Ramsay is devoted to his work to the point of distraction, making him seem absent-minded and emotionally distant from his large family. Much of the “action” of this first segment, for example, deals with the hope of six-year-old James Ramsay that the family will be able to travel to a nearby island on the next day to visit a lighthouse.[89] The nurturing Mrs. Ramsay tries to be supportive and to assure James that the trip might well be possible, despite the threat of bad weather. Mr. Ramsay merely scoffs and coldly announces that he sees no chance that the weather will allow the trip. Ramsay is not one to mince his words to try to protect the feelings of others, even (or perhaps especially) his own children. He deals in truths and expects his pronouncements to be taken as such:

What he said was true. It was always true. He was incapable of untruth; never tampered with a fact; never altered a disagreeable word to suit the pleasure or convenience of any mortal being, least of all his own children, who, sprung from his loins, should be aware from childhood that life is difficult; facts uncompromising; and the passage to that fabled land where our brightest hopes are extinguished, our frail barks founder in darkness (here Mr. Ramsay would straighten his back and narrow his little blue eyes upon the horizon), one that needs, above all, courage, truth, and the power to endure. (3–4)

As it happens, Ramsay is, in fact, correct, and the trip to the lighthouse does not come off—at least not until the third section of the novel, ten years later. Meanwhile, James’s violently Oedipal reaction to Ramsay’s pronouncement makes it clear that he has encountered such coldness from his distant father before and that he resents it immensely:

Had there been an axe handy, or a poker, any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father’s breast and killed him, there and then, James would have seized it. Such were the extremes of emotion that Mr. Ramsay excited in his children’s breasts by his mere presence; standing, as now, lean as a knife, narrow as the blade of one, grinning sarcastically, not only with the pleasure of disillusioning his son and casting ridicule upon his wife, who was ten thousand times better in every way than he was (James thought), but also with some secret conceit at his own accuracy of judgement. (3)

The Ramsay family dynamic is thus made clear in the first few pages of the book, as Mrs. Ramsay takes care of her husband and children and essentially shields them from one another. She clearly relishes the role; it is the one for which she has been prepared all her life as an upper-middle-class Victorian woman. Thus, when one of her guests, the poet Augustus Carmichael, resists her nurturing, she is disappointed and feels that he is probably hostile to her because of his bad experience with marriage. At the time of Part I of the book, Carmichael is a little-known poet, though his work gains popularity during the war. There is, of course, a touch of vanity in Mrs. Ramsay’s sense of rejection by him: she is accustomed to having men like her and trust her and proud that husband’s well-known acquaintances sometimes confide in her. She is also aware that men are aware of her great beauty:

She bore about with her, she could not help knowing it, the torch of her beauty; she carried it erect into any room that she entered; and after all, veil it as she might, and shrink from the monotony of bearing that it imposed on her, her beauty was apparent. She had been admired. She had been loved. She had entered rooms where mourners sat. Tears had flown in her presence. Men, and women too, letting go to the multiplicity of things, had allowed themselves with her the relief of simplicity. (30)

Among other things, Mrs. Ramsay is fiercely protective of her guests and will not abide having anything negative said about them. This attitude even includes the rather unlikeable Charles Tansley, an aspiring academic who is a student and great admirer of Mr. Ramsay. Tansley is a man from a lower-class background—his father is a shopkeeper with ten children, and he is descended from fishermen and lighthouse keepers. Further, Tansley proudly claims to have been self-supporting since the age of thirteen, so he has been handed very few advantages that he did not himself earn. On the other hand, he is now a doctoral student at work on his dissertation and headed for an academic appointment, so he has already to some extent been divorced from his working-class roots. Tansley, in short, is essentially in a precariously “unclassed” position, not fully welcome in th upper classes, but no longer at home in the lower ones. Zwerdling notes some of Tansley’s anxieties over his class position:

Born into poverty, ambitious, self-educated, determined to enter the leisured and affluent world of the Ramsays by force if necessary, he sees Mrs. Ramsay as a kind of deus ex machina who brings the balm of her own generous nature to heal the wounded creatures struggling below. (23)[90]

That he is treated rather harshly in the novel is indicative of a weakness that sometimes occurs in Woolf’s writing—lack of sympathy for those who have not had the advantages of her own privileged background. Mrs. Ramsay, though, takes it upon herself to befriend Tansley when it seems no one else will, especially her own children, who find him revolting and like to mockingly refer to him as “the atheist” (something that might actually help win Mrs. Ramsay’s sympathy because she has her own doubts about the existence of God). Among other things, Tansley clearly has special anxieties because of his class background, which is reflected in his attitude toward women, which can be quite hostile, but which is clearly related to his class anxieties as well. His complex attitudes are clearly shown in the dinner party scene late in “The Window.” Here, the middle-class men around the table attempt to espouse sympathy for the working class, but Tansley, given his background, is able to speak with more authority, even if the heated nature of his discourse violates the usually polite decorum of Edwardian dinner parties. But, as Simpson notes, the effectiveness of his political critique of the upper classes is undermined by his own clear desire to escape his working-class background and join those upper classes and by his “aspiration to belong to the masculinist educational establishment that keeps class and gender hierarchies in place.” Further, he entangles those two forms of hierarchy in that “his criticism of middle-class social conventions, which he disparages as feminine and sees as detrimental to male intellectual achievement, echo those of the other middle-class men around the table” (Simpson 115).

Tansley’s overall attitude toward women is most clearly seen in the moment in which he teases the aspiring painter Lily Briscoe by whispering to her as he works on a painting, “Women can’t paint, women can’t write.” For her part, Lily is quite sure he doesn’t really mean it, but the taunt follows her throughout the rest of the book. On the other hand, when Tansley and Mrs. Ramsay walk into town and back early in the book, he feels proud to be seen with such a woman, because (even at fifty years old and after eight children), she is still quite beautiful, which he thinks will reflect well on him. In this sense, his reaction to being seen with her is indicative of the way men have so often used women as decorations to shore up their own egos. One suspects, however, that Tansley’s pride in being seen with her also has to do with her more elevated class background, which, again, will disguise his own humble origins and make him appear to fit in with the Ramsays’ class.

However, as Kathryn Simpson notes, the portrayal of class in To the Lighthouse (and elsewhere in Woolf’s work) is actually quite complex, partly because Woolf herself was conscious of a certain class snobbery that she was never able fully to overcome—and with which she was never herself fully comfortable. Simpson argues that Woolf’s writings are often elitist, but also “reveal an acute understanding of the material and ideological forces impacting on all aspects of experience and opportunity, including the interconnectedness of selfhood and social class” (110). Moreover, Simpson argues that Woolf’s representation of class in To the Lighthouse must be read with a certain eye toward irony. For example, while the plan of Mrs. Ramsay to deliver a motley collection of “whatever she could find lying about” to the “poor fellows” working at the lighthouse (13) seems highly condescending, Simpson argues that Woolf is well aware of this fact and that she is here seeking to “turn a critical light on her own class, exposing to scrutiny its smug security and ruthlessness (113).

For her part, Mrs. Ramsay finds Tansley rather unlikeable, but she suffers his attitudes gladly, feeling that he is much in need of her support—and she loves being supportive. The virtual embodiment of the Victorian “Angel of the House,”[91] she not only feels that it is her duty to take care of her husband and children, but she feels instinctively protective toward males in general, especially young ones who are just beginning to make their way in the world, a world that, as Englishmen, they will be expected to dominate:

Indeed, she had the whole of the other sex under her protection; for reasons she could not explain, for their chivalry and valour, for the fact that they negotiated treaties, ruled India, controlled finance; finally for an attitude towards herself which no woman could fail to feel or to find agreeable, something trustful, childlike, reverential; which an old woman could take from a young man without loss of dignity, and woe betide the girl—pray Heaven it was none of her daughters!—who did not feel the worth of it, and all that it implied, to the marrow of her bones! (5)

Mrs. Ramsay has fully internalized the Victorian notion that being a wife should be a woman’s highest aspiration and that marriage in itself is an absolute good. She reveres her husband, even as she recognizes his weaknesses and need for her support. Providing such support, for Mrs. Ramsay, is the best thing a woman can do. She cannot, for example, wait to see her beautiful eldest daughter Prue become a bride, and she is quite pleased to see romance bloom (with a little nudge from Mrs. Ramsay herself) between two of her guests, the good-hearted Paul Rayley, and the pretty, but scatter-brained Minta Doyle. Mrs. Ramsay also hopes to play matchmaker for Lily Briscoe, who serves as the focal point of the novel’s numerous ruminations on the nature of art and the creative process. Ramsay hopes to match Lily with the childless widower William Bankes, a botanist and family friend with whom Lily strikes up an immediate friendship, despite the fact that, at 60, he is old enough to be the father of the 33-year-old Lily.

At the same time, Mrs. Ramsay is perfectly well aware that her attitudes are a bit old-fashioned amid the sweeping changes that are afoot in the world. She understands that her daughters are a new generation and realizes that their lives might be very different from her own:

her daughters, Prue, Nancy, Rose—could sport with infidel ideas which they had brewed for themselves of a life different from hers; in Paris, perhaps; a wilder life; not always taking care of some man or other; for there was in all their minds a mute questioning of deference and chivalry, of the Bank of England and the Indian Empire, of ringed fingers and lace, though to them all there was something in this of the essence of beauty, which called out the manliness in their girlish hearts, and made them, as they sat at table beneath their mother’s eyes, honour her strange severity, her extreme courtesy, like a queen’s raising from the mud to wash a beggar’s dirty foot. (5)

For her part, Lily is already on her way to being a very different sort of woman than her host, even though she admires Mrs. Ramsay greatly and sometimes wishes she could be like her. Lily is fond of Bankes and much impressed by his kindness and insight, and she is not entirely opposed to the idea of a match with him—or to becoming the center of a thriving family like Mrs. Ramsay. No doubt, were this a conventional Victorian novel, Lily and Bankes would have wed and their wedding would have been considered a positive outcome. But this is the early twentieth century, and Lily has something within her that strives to be more than a wife and mother. Like Woolf, Lily is, first and foremost, an artist and can ultimately find fulfillment only through her art. Meanwhile, Lily also recognizes that Mrs. Ramsay represents Bankes’ ideal of a woman, an ideal Lily cannot ever achieve.

Among other things, in a version of the key modernist theme of alienation, Lily seems to experience the possibility of a close relationship as an ultimate threat to her own selfhood. At one point, Lily leans her head against Mrs. Ramsay’s knee, hoping somehow to absorb “knowledge and wisdom” but feels that nothing happens: “How then, she had asked herself, did one know one thing or another about people, sealed as they were?” (37). Even Mrs. Ramsay, ideal wife, feels a gulf between herself and her husband, a sense that she can never be truly honest with him and still maintain her role. She thus feels that

it was painful to be reminded of the inadequacy of human relationships, that the most perfect was flawed, and could not bear the examination which, loving her husband, with her instinct for truth, she turned upon it; when it was painful to feel herself convicted of unworthiness, and impeded in her proper function by these lies, these exaggerations. (29)

Lily, like Mrs. Ramsay, tries to be nice to Tansley (not an easy task in any case) but feels hopelessly alienated from him: “She would never know him. He would never know her. Human relations were all like that, she thought, and the worst (if it had not been for Mr. Bankes) were between men and women” (67). Ultimately, despite her fondness for Bankes, Lily experiences the possibility of love (and especially marriage) as more of a threat than a promise. Thus, rather than feel envious of Minta Doyle after her engagement to Paul Rayley, she is happy that she herself remains unattached. She “was thankful. For at any rate, she said to herself, catching sight of the salt cellar on the pattern, she need not marry, thank Heaven: she need not undergo that degradation. She was saved from that dilution” (74). Later, Lily paints and muses on the marriage of Paul and Minta and imagines a fictional scenario in which the marriage has turned out rather badly, she thinks: “And this, Lily thought, taking the green paint on her brush, this making up scenes about them, is what we call ‘knowing’ people, ‘thinking’ of then, ‘being fond’ of them!” (129). No one ever really knows anyone: we just make up fictions about knowing them that stand in for knowledge.

For Lily, true knowledge can only come via the act of artistic creation. In the first section of the novel, Lily struggles uncertainly to find an approach that appropriately expresses her vision as an artist. She attempts to execute a painting that features Mrs. Ramsay, partly as an expression of her admiration, but simply cannot put her feelings on canvas. Some of this difficulty might arise from an unconscious realization that Mrs. Ramsay is not really a viable role model for her, but most of Lily’s difficulty in the initial part of the novel seems to be that she is attempting to find a mode of painting that goes beyond the conventional representational style of Victorian realist painting, a style that is not appropriate either to Lily’s personal sensibilities or to the modern world in which she lives. She has, however, yet to discover such a mode that works for her.

“Time Passes”

The haunting second section of To the Lighthouse, “Time Passes,” is the most experimental and unconventional of the three sections. It consists primarily of poetic meditations on the passing of time and of descriptions of objects (both natural and manmade), free of any human presence. The section has an almost postapocalyptic feel, as if it takes place after the near-extinction of the human race. The principal “character” is the Ramsay summer house, largely abandoned except for the occasional ministrations of the caretaker, Mrs. McNab. Mrs. McNab is, indeed, the actual working-class character of whom we see the most, and she is depicted as a positive force in many ways, though her depiction is also rife with working-class stereotypes. Thus, Simpson notes that she is paradoxically depicted as “inane and uncouth as well as a powerful, vital force” (116). Except for the brief opening segment of this section, the appearances of the characters we have come to know in “The Window” are confined to brief, coldly objective announcements within brackets. These announcements can be quite jarring. The third segment, for example, contains a poetic description of a stormy night (and a suggestion of how one night follows another in the course of a human life), then ends with this bracketed passage: “[Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.]” (95)

Early in segment 6, we find a poetic evocation of spring, including a bracketed passage announcing the marriage of Prue Ramsay, who makes a beautiful bride. But the promise of new life brought both by the coming of spring and by Prue’s marriage turns out to be false, much as in the beginning of The Waste Land. Spring becomes summer (though in a vague and metaphorical way that means years might have passed), and we are given the following bracketed announcement: “[Prue Ramsay died that summer in some illness connected with childbirth, which was indeed a tragedy, people said, everything, they said, had promised so well]” (98). Soon afterward, amid suggestions of dark occurrences that disrupt the flow of nature, we get news of still more deaths, this time in World War I, which had haunted Woolf’s fiction since Jacob’s Room (1922): “[A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in France, among them Andrew Ramsay, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous] (99).

A bracketed suggestion soon afterward that the war seems to have increased the market for Carmichael’s poetry (100) is surely not meant to lighten the effects of the deaths that have just been reported; instead, Carmichael’s good fortune makes these deaths seem even more horrifying by contrast, providing a sort of memento mori that reminds us all that we must die, but that the world will go on perfectly well without us. However, because of World War I, death was especially ever-present during the period covered by the “Time Passes” section of To the Lighthouse—”but everyone had lost someone these years,” muses Mrs. McNab, while thinking about the deaths in the Ramsay family, then adding the more down-to-earth complaint that, during the war, “prices had gone up shamefully, and didn’t come down again neither” (101). Meanwhile, time continues to March onward, the war ends, and Mrs. McNab receives word that the family might again be returning to the house, so she brings in extra help to try to get the decaying dwelling back in shape for human habitation. The surviving members of the family return, with Carmichael and Lily Briscoe among them.

“The Lighthouse”

As the third section begins, many of the original characters return to the island house and complete some of the unfinished business of the first section. Mrs. Ramsay is, of course, not present, but her absence in a sense dominates this section. Meanwhile, Mr. Ramsay and two of his surviving children (including James) finally undertake the trip out to the lighthouse—with the bonus that James finally wins the approval of his stern father, who praises him for his skill in sailing their craft out to the lighthouse. Lily, meanwhile, finally finishes her painting, with Augustus Carmichael looking on. This completed painting is, in fact, the real culmination of the novel, as Lily finally hits on an abstract style that is congruent with her artistic vision, that he she able to produce the kind of painting that she feels truly represents the way she sees the world:

Quickly, as if she were recalled by something over there, she turned to her canvas. There it was—her picture. Yes, with all its greens and blues, its lines running up and across, its attempt at something. It would be hung in the attics, she thought; it would be destroyed. But what did that matter? she asked herself, taking up her brush again. She looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision. (154)

Lily has, in short, become a modernist, successfully turning her back on realist painting in much the same way that Woolf had been forced to turn away from the tradition of realist fiction in order to achieve her vision as a writer.

Woolf’s own views on this topic are well-captured in her important essay “Modern Fiction,” written in 1919, shortly before her own turn to a more modernist mode of writing with Jacob’s Room. Here Woolf evokes a “new realism” that goes beyond the mimetic work of traditional realists such as Wells, Bennett, and Galsworthy, who have failed in the task of producing a new fiction for the new age:

Mr. Wells, Mr. Bennett, and Mr. Galsworthy have excited so many hopes and disappointed them so persistently that our gratitude largely takes the form of thanking them for having shown us what they might have done but have not done. (208)

Their failure, she goes on, comes from the fact that they are “materialists” concerned with representing the physical aspects of reality rather than the more important spiritual ones:

It is because they are concerned not with the spirit but with the body that they have disappointed us, and left us with the feeling that the sooner English fiction turns its back upon them, as politely as may be, and marches, if only into the desert, the better for its soul” (209).

These writers, she concludes “write of unimportant things; … they spend immense skill and immense industry making the trivial and transitory appear the true and the enduring” (210).

However, more innovative writers (she singles out James Joyce, even before Ulysses, as the most notable) portray more important aspects of reality, focusing especially on “the dark places of psychology” (215). Finally, in the essay’s most famous passage, she concludes that modern writers like Joyce capture the true essence of reality at a more profound level than can be achieved by ordinary mimetic realism, because

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; but a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? (212-3)

The portrayal of Lily in To the Lighthouse can be taken as a statement in favor of this “new realism” (i.e., modernism) as opposed to conventional realism—just as To the Lighthouse itself might be Woolf’s most successful execution of her own aesthetic advice. Meanwhile, Lily’s portrayal in To the Lighthouse also makes some fundamental statements about art in general that move beyond this realism-modernism opposition. Even after she develops an artistic technique that effectively expresses her vision, she realizes that her approach might not be a popular one. But she also concludes (in what might be taken as a rather elitist gesture) that this cannot be her concern. It matters not that the painting might well be put away in an attic or even destroyed. What matters, she concludes, is the act of artistic creation. One might compare here the artist Gulley Jimson (Alec Guiness), who labors with a whole team of artists to paint a gigantic mural on a wall of an abandoned church in the 1958 film adaptation of Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth (1944), one of the key British “artist” novels. In the film (though the novel ends differently), just as the mural is completed, a demolition crew arrives to tear down the building. But Jimson himself hops aboard and drives the lead bulldozer himself, gleefully destroying his own creation. Like Lily, he has achieved his vision, so it doesn’t matter if it is torn down. It is the process, not the product, that is of paramount importance in art—though one could, of course, debate this conclusion.

The climax of To the Lighthouse thus delivers important messages about the nature of art in general and about the role of the female artist, who is here able to find fulfillment completely apart from the traditional Victorian resources of husband and family. At the same time, the novel has also delivered a number of important statements about class and gender in general, as I have indicated above. Perhaps the one issue of central importance to modern British literature (and to this volume in particular) is the relationship between Britain and its empire, which would seem here to be almost ignored—other than Mrs. Ramsay’s occasional reminders that British men need lots of feminine support because they bear the heavy task of ruling an empire. Indeed, as Seshagiri notes, “Of Woolf’s major novels, To the Lighthouse is the least explicitly “about” race or Empire” (95). After all, imperialism is often a key topic in Woolf’s writing and thinking. Characters in her novels often travel to India or other eastern locales. Her late volume of essays Three Guineas is extensively critical of British imperialism, for example, and her husband, Leonard Woolf, himself a former colonial administrator, became a strong opponent of empire (and advocate for socialism) in his own writing. Woolf herself, meanwhile, had extensive connections to India. Her paternal grandfather, Sir James Stephen (1789–1859) served for more than a decade as the British “under-secretary of state for the colonies” and was one of the architects of Victoria’s empire. Her mother, Julia Stephen (née Jackson), was born in Calcutta.

A closer look, however, shows that the fact of empire might be a more important presence in To the Lighthouse than is immediately obvious. For example, the very fact that To the Lighthouse features a privileged English family vacationing in Scotland already has colonial resonances, given the historical relationship between England and Scotland.[92] Second of all, the Ramsays’ home is filled with artifacts that carry resonances of empire, such as the family tea set discovered by Mrs. McNab in Section 2. After all, both tea and chinaware were originally imported from the Orient before they became staples of middle-class British life. Thus, as Urmila Seshagiri puts it, “Tea—imported, transplanted, and imposed as social ritual—signifies the hybrid, culturally divided quality of Englishness” (99).

Of course, To the Lighthouse does not specifically indicate the Asian origins of tea, just as it fails to acknowledge the existence of the workers in the colonies, whose labor is so important to making possible the luxurious lifestyle of the Ramsays. Seshagiri, though, sees very positive connotations in the fact that Lily Briscoe, emblem of a new form of British feminism, as well as a new form of British art, is explicitly associated with the Orient via her frequently-mentioned “Chinese eyes.” These eyes, of course, presumably help Lily to achieve an artistic vision that is outside the white British mainstream, which, by extension, is associated with conservative adherence to the realist tradition. Seshagiri grants that there is an Orientalist dimension to Woolf’s description of Lily. However, Seshagiri (like most critics) seems to associate the notion of Orientalism with the formulations of Edward Said—which involve an element of fascination with the East, but an even larger sense of Western superiority to, or even revulsion toward the East. For Seshagiri, though, Woolf’s association of Lily the artist with the Orient is an almost entirely positive one and can thus be taken as an example of the sort of Orientalism that Booker and Daraiseh refer to as “consumerist Orientalism,” in which the element of fascination is stronger than the element of revulsion, as opposed to what they refer to as Said’s “colonialist Orientalism.”

Seshagiri also provides an especially useful discussion of the ways in which Woolf’s depiction of Lily can be linked to the aesthetic theories of Woolf’s Bloomsbury associate Roger Fry would seem to be particularly relevant. In his 1920 essay collection Vision and Form, Fry argues that Western art is sometimes too intellectual and that non-Western, nonrepresentational art can sometimes be more powerful as a way of expressing certain feelings and impressions. Fry is particularly interested in “primitive” African art (which he praises, though in highly racist terms), but notes that the “civilized” art of China and Japan can sometimes capture some of the emotional power of primitive art.[93] That the portrayal of Lily might be Woolf’s way of endorsing Fry’s suggestions might be indicated in the way Lily is repeatedly described in the novel as having “Chinese eyes,” a description that also furthers her status as a sort of outsider among the other characters in the novel (even though there is certainly no indication that Lily is meant to be literally Chinese).[94] Moreover, by making Lily a practitioner of her own modernist aesthetic theories, Woolf distances her own work from the realist tradition by aligning it with nonwestern aesthetics. At the same time, by employing a consumerist form of Orientalism (which is still problematic in terms of its appropriation of Eastern motifs) Woolf subtly aligns herself against colonialism and with the colonized Other.

NOTES

Chapter 3

Modern Irish Literature:

The Search for a New Cultural Identity

Historical Background

Ireland found itself in an odd position as the nineteenth century approached its end and Europe prepared to move into the new century, its leading powers the colonial masters of vast stretches of the rest of the world. While parts of Eastern Europe found themselves in subaltern positions relative to the still largely medieval reigning powers of the Austro-Hungarian, Russian Empires, and even Ottoman Empires, they were not truly colonies—and in any case those empires were all historical relics that were about to be swept away by World War I. Ireland, on the other hand, was the only European political entity that was genuinely a colony in a modern sense. It was, in fact, England’s oldest colony—and the place where Britain had learned to be a colonial power, beginning all the way back in the thirteenth century, when Pope Adrian IV granted overlordship of Ireland to Henry II of England, followed by a period of roughly a century during which the English solidified their rule.

The English-Irish relationship later became caught up in the battle between Protestantism and Catholicism in England. With Protestantism triumphant in England and with a Catholic majority in Ireland, this conflict naturally led to considerably tensions between the Irish and their English rulers. Three Irish rebellions were brutally suppressed during the reign of Elizabeth I. Another rebellion, begun in 1641, led to the Irish Confederate Wars, part of a larger conflict that involved Scotland as well. Here, upstart Irish Catholic forces were eventually crushed with special brutality in 1649-1650 by English armies under the leadership of Oliver Cromwell, fresh off of his leading role in the English Civil Wars. Hundreds of thousands were killed in Ireland during this conflict, in which some historians have described Cromwell’s anti-Catholic tactics as near-genocidal.

One of the key moments in the history of Irish defeats at the hands of the British also involved Scotland as well. After the Catholic King James II of England was deposed in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, James and his followers mounted a Catholic army with the hope of regaining the throne and returning England to Catholic rule. James was Scottish by heritage and had many Scottish followers, but Ireland was a particular stronghold, due to the strength of Catholicism there, where Catholic armies had established almost total control after the Glorious Revolution. For his part, the new staunchly Protestant King William III of England (the former Prince of Orange of Holland and James’s nephew/son-in-law) sought to consolidate his power by putting a quick end to the Catholic threat. This situation came to a head when the armies of James and William faced off in the decisive Battle of the Boyne in 1690. A Catholic victory could have helped return James to the thrones of England and Scotland, with Ireland potentially winning independence as a reward for Irish support of James’s cause.

Unfortunately, for the Irish, William’s Protestant armies won a decisive victory, partly because, due to the complicated politics on continental Europe at the time, the Catholic Pope Alexander VIII in Rome backed William’s Protestant forces. In short, even when fighting on their home turf for Catholic power with the support of the recently-deposed King of England, events still conspired to lead to an Irish defeat. Two days later, William’s army marched triumphantly into Dublin, occupying the Irish capital. The Battle of the Boyne is still commemorated each year on July 12 (on a holiday known simply as “The Twelfth”) by loyalists in both Scotland and (especially) Northern Ireland as a great historic victory for the cause of British Protestant power. A Battle of the Boyne commemoration ceremony in Edinburgh plays an important (comic) role in the 2017 film T2 Trainspotting, in which the (Scottish) central characters infiltrate the ceremony and then rob the participants of their credit cards, subsequently using them to withdraw money from ATMs, which is made easier by the fact that most of them seem to have set their PINs as “1690,” the year of the original battle, suggesting that their devotion to this three-hundred-year-old event is ridiculous.

Over the years, various “Penal Laws” were instituted by the English with a special eye toward limiting Catholic power in Ireland. These laws banned Catholic education and limited Catholic ability to own and inherit property, hold leases, or conduct businesses, essentially making Catholics second-class citizens. Animosity between the Irish and their English rulers was exacerbated by the Scottish-English Act of Union (1706–1707) that joined England (which had already incorporated Wales) and Scotland as the single political entity of Great Britain, placing Scotland nominally in a partnership with Britain, but leaving the Irish in an essentially colonial position. Meanwhile, with the Enlightenment in full swing, talk of liberty and equality was in the air, but the Irish were feeling increasingly left out. By the last decade of the eighteenth century, the success of the American Revolution and then the French Revolution suggested that liberty sometimes had to be won by violence. In 1798, the Irish, led by Wolfe Tone, mounted an armed attempt to expel their British rulers from the island, with the hope of support from the French. The French, in fact, did launch a fleet of ships intent on an invasion of Ireland, but (in another case of historical bad luck for the Irish) bad weather at sea prevented most of the French ships from arriving in Ireland, and the rebellion was crushed by British armies.

In 1801, another Act of Union officially added Ireland to Great Britain to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Many in Ireland, however, felt that they had essentially been coerced into joining the union, which was in any case an uneven arrangement that left Great Britain with all the real power and Ireland still in what was in reality a colonial position. For the entire nineteenth century, widespread animosity toward British rule (especially among Catholics) was rampant in Ireland, exacerbated by events such as the Potato Famine of 1845–1849, in which hundreds of thousands of Irish people starved, with Britain providing little aid (and in fact continuing to import food from Ireland). Many others emigrated, especially to the U.S., where 1.6 million Irish immigrants arrived between 1847 and 1854. All in all, the Irish population fell from 8.5 million in 1845 to 6.5 million in 1851. Of those remaining, many held a special grudge against their British rulers, and anti-British sentiment ran high in Ireland by the last decade of the nineteenth century, during which the general economic state of Ireland had declined, with Dublin experiencing special deterioration that left large parts of the city in states of advanced decay by the end of the century.

It was little wonder, then, that a vibrant Irish Nationalist movement began to gain political traction in Ireland in the last decades of the nineteenth century. This movement, to an extent, grew out of the growing political power of those who supported Irish independence from Britain. A form of limited independence, known as “Home Rule” (in which the Irish would control most of their own affairs, though the British would still be in charge of military and foreign relations) became particularly popular and seemed at times close to approval in the British Parliament. The movement for Home Rule was spearheaded by the charismatic Irish political leader Charles Stewart Parnell (1846–1891) but collapsed when Parnell became involved in a scandal due to the fact that it was discovered that he had long been living with another man’s wife—a woman who was long estranged from her husband but could not get a divorce because divorce was forbidden for Irish Catholics at the time. Parnell was even denounced from the pulpit in Catholic Churches all over Ireland, causing many in Ireland to feel that they had once again been betrayed by the Church, loyalty to which had set them at odds with the British to begin with.

With political solutions continuing to fall short, the Irish Nationalist movement began increasingly to concentrate on culture, especially as many felt that the English had ruled Ireland so long that the Irish were beginning to lose any sense of a cultural identity apart from the legacy of British colonial rule. Efforts to revive the Irish language (which had become virtually extinct after centuries of English rule) made little headway, but the attempt to step up the production of genuinely Irish literature met with considerable success, in what came variously to be known as the Irish Literary Renaissance or the Irish Literary Revival. On the other hand, it should be pointed out that the Irish had been identified with the British for so long that, even after this revival and the emergence of such anticolonial Irish literary giants as William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) and James Joyce (1882–1941), Irish literature was long considered simply to be a subset of “British” literature, especially outside of Ireland, where authors such as Yeats and Joyce were typically included in college courses on British literature, with relatively little emphasis on their anti-British inclinations.

It was only with the rise of postcolonial literary studies in the 1980s that modern Irish literature came to be considered to be a phenomenon in its own right, best studied as a form of postcolonial literature, understandable within the same theoretical frameworks as African or Caribbean postcolonial literature. Thus, the important Irish critic Declan Kiberd has pointed out that “the history of independent Ireland bears a remarkable similarity … to the phases charted by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth” (Inventing 551–52). Similarly, David Lloyd suggests that Ireland has largely conformed to the model of bourgeois nationalism presented by Fanon (Anomalous 7).[95] My readings of Irish literature in this volume will be conducted from this postcolonial perspective, which seems a logical choice given that so much of modern Irish literature drew its energies from the Revival and other forms of anticolonial resistance.[96]

This Revival itself was boosted by the efforts of the young Yeats to collect and publish indigenous Irish folk tales and myths, providing material on which Irish writers could draw that was independent of British cultural traditions. In 1888, for example, Yeats published Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, while in 1893 he published The Celtic Twilight, which collected traditional stories from the rural West of Ireland. The latter was successful enough that the Irish Literary Revival has often been known by the alternative name of The Celtic Twilight. It also helped to launch Yeats as Ireland’s most important poet, ending with his poem “Into the Twilight,” which draws on the material and themes of the rest of the book and attempts to create a sense of Ireland as a mystical land that transcends the centuries of British rule.

Into the Twilight

By William Butler Yeats

Out-worn heart, in a time out-worn,

Come clear of the nets of wrong and right;

Laugh, heart, again in the gray twilight;

Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.

Thy mother Eire is always young,

Dew ever shining and twilight gray,

Though hope fall from thee or love decay

Burning in fires of a slanderous tongue.

Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill,

For there the mystical brotherhood

Of hollow wood and the hilly wood

And the changing moon work out their will.

And God stands winding his lonely horn;

And Time and World are ever in flight,

And love is less kind than the gray twilight,

And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn.

Here, we see an intentionally old-fashioned style that seeks to look back to the days before British rule in Ireland, though this kind of move clearly flew in the face of the emerging modernist movement as time moved forward. Yeats, however, would turn out to be an extremely versatile and durable poet who would himself eventually become a leading modernist and would remain at the forefront of Irish poetry until his death. Some of the most important poems of his career will be presented as an “Exemplary Text” at the end of this chapter.

Yeats was also an important dramatist, and his play Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), which deals with the 1798 rebellion, is still considered a classic of Irish drama. In fact, the Irish Revival had particular success in the realm of drama, especially after the opening of the Abbey Theatre (also known as the National Theatre of Ireland) in Dublin in 1904. Here, the Irish established a vibrant theatrical scene, introducing the works of Irish dramatists. Yeats himself wrote drama, as did his friend Lady Gregory (1852–1932), while both Yeats and Lady Gregory were among the founders of the Abbey Theatre. But the two most important playwrights to emerge from this scene were probably the left-leaning Seán O’Casey (1880-1964), who specialized in writing about urban working-class topics, and John Millington Synge (1871-1909), who specialized in writing about the rural Irish peasantry. Synge would thus seem to be especially resonant with the Irish Nationalist attempt to draw upon Irish folk customs as a source of literary inspiration, which is one reason why both Yeats and Lady Gregory were enthusiastic supporters of his work. On the other hand, the details of his work were sometimes controversial. Indeed, his reputation today rests primarily on The Playboy of the Western World, which premiered at the Abbey Theatre in 1907, triggering riots by incensed theatre-goers who believed that the content of the play was a morally offensive affront to the Irish people. Nevertheless, though Synge died young (of cancer), his work established plays of Irish peasant life as the mainstay of the Abbey Theatre well into the 1950s. Other plays by Synge include In the Shadow of the Glen (1903), Riders to the Sea (1904), and The Well of the Saints (1905). O’Casey’s urban-oriented, socialist-slanted plays were a different matter, and he did not emerge as a major dramatist until the 1920s, after the establishment of Home Rule. However, his work ultimately became more important than Synge’s, partly for its extensive engagement with the history of the Irish fight for independence in the first decades of the twentieth century, a fight that, in fact, was quite an eventful one.

One of the crucial events in the movement toward independence occurred with the founding of the Sinn Féan (“Ourselves”) political party by Arthur Griffith in 1905. Taking an avowedly Nationalist approach, Sinn Féan quickly gained followers and became a focal point for Irish Nationalist Political activity. Meanwhile, the international workers’ movement that had begun with the Second International came to Ireland in August 1913 when workers in Dublin began a widespread labor action that eventually led to 20,000 workers—led by socialists James Larkin (1876–1947) and James Connolly (1868–1916)—going out on strike against roughly 300 different employers. In response, the employers locked out the striking workers and brought in strikebreakers from Britain and other parts of Ireland to replace them. Employers hired thugs to intimidate the striking workers with violence; the workers responded by organizing the paramilitary Irish Citizen Army to defend themselves. The Dublin Lock-out ended when many of the workers, their families starving, agreed to return to work, though many of the leaders of the strike were blacklisted and not allowed back to work. Much bitterness ensued and many workers were radicalized, becoming more devoted than ever to the notion that workers had a fundamental right to unionize.

The radicalism spurred by the Dublin Lock-out provided important energies to the Easter Rising of 1916, when organized labor was at the forefront of the uprising, along with members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), a secret nationalist organization that had been founded in 1858. A number of Sinn Féan members also took part in the Rising, though the party itself did not directly support the action. This armed insurrection began on Easter Monday, 24 April 1916, and lasted for six days, during which Irish rebels seized and held several key locations around Dublin, including, most notably, the General Post Office. The actual insurrection was spearheaded by members of the Irish Volunteers (led by poet and Irish language advocate Patrick Pearse, 1879–1916) and the Irish Citizen Army[97] (led by Connolly, with Larkin away in America seeking to organize workers there at the time). 200 women of the Cumann na mBan organization also participated in the uprising. There were minor actions in other parts of Ireland as well, but the insurrection never coalesced into a general revolt, partly because of miscommunication among rebels across the island, leaving the rebels in Dublin largely isolated.

That the Rising occurred in the midst of World War I was no accident: the Irish rebels hoped that the British military would be preoccupied with the war against Germany and that the Germans would provide support to the rebels—which they did, to a minor extent, by supplying arms via their negotiations with former British colonial officer Roger Casement, now a committed Irish Nationalist and a militant opponent of colonialism (thanks to the colonialist atrocities he had observed as a British agent in the Belgian Congo). The rebels, however, miscalculated badly, and the British put down the insurrection in less than a week with a massive show of firepower. Estimates vary, but around 500 people died as a result of the fighting, though over half of those were noncombatants, the majority of whom were killed as collateral damage by British assaults (including artillery bombardments) of rebel positions. Over 3,000 Irish prisoners were taken by the British after the rebel surrender, and nearly 2,000 were sent to internment camps for extended periods, including Griffith, who (like many of those who were arrested) was not actually involved in the uprising. Most of the leaders of the Rising were summarily executed by firing squad after hasty courts martial, including Pearse, Connolly, and John McBride (the estranged husband of actress and activist Maud Gonne (1866–1953), the longtime object of Yeats’s romantic affections). Casement was arrested and tried in London, then hanged. One of the leaders of the Rising, Éamon de Valera (1882–1975), escaped execution, largely because he was an American citizen (born in New York City). De Valera would go on to become the most important political figure in Ireland over the next half century.

After the Rising, much of the city of Dublin was in ruins, ravaged by fires and British artillery. And many of the most effective leaders of the Irish cause lay dead. Connolly was an especially important loss, depriving the anticolonial movement in Ireland of an important socialist figure who might have helped to take postcolonial Ireland in a very different direction. Connolly was a sophisticated thinker who knew that the situation in Ireland was far more than a simple case of Britain dominating Ireland; it was also a case of capitalist inequality and of the rich dominating the poor. In a mode that strikingly anticipates the work of Fanon, Connolly recognized that nationalist liberation from colonial rule was but a first step and that true liberation in Ireland would require that this nationalist revolution be followed by a socialist one. He stated the situation quite clearly as early as 1897 in his pamphlet “Socialism and Nationalism”:

If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organisation of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain.

England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs.

England would still rule you to your ruin, even while your lips offered hypocritical homage at the shrine of that Freedom whose cause you had betrayed.

Nationalism without Socialism—without a reorganisation of society on the basis of a broader and more developed form of that common property which underlay the social structure of Ancient Erin – is only national recreancy. (Connolly 8)[98]

The Easter Rising, though not a direct success in its own right, did a great deal to galvanize Irish hatred of the British, especially after the post-uprising executions and the subsequent circulation of reports of British atrocities committed during the Rising itself. Yeats memorialized the event in his poem “Easter, 1916,” but, more importantly, the event led directly to a dramatic increase in support for Sinn Féan, which swept the 1918 elections to represent Ireland in the British Parliament, after which the members refused to take their seats in Westminster and instead established the Dáil Eireann and proclaimed an Irish republic. This quickly led to the founding of the Irish Republican Army (IRA, formed by members of the Irish Volunteers), which began a campaign of guerrilla actions against the British and their supporters in what came to be known as the Irish War of Independence, or the Anglo-Irish War (1919–1921). This conflict ended with a negotiated peace that included a modified form of Home Rule for Ireland with the founding of the Irish Free State in January, 1922. Many of the Irish insurgents, however, were dissatisfied with the terms of the peace, triggering a Civil War between supporters of the Free State (led by Michael Collins) and rebels who wanted still more autonomy for Ireland, led by de Valera.[99] The Free State forces prevailed, largely because they had the support of the British, but much bitterness remained in both sides after the official end of the civil war in May 1923.

All of these events were addressed in a trilogy of plays (known collectively as the “Dublin Trilogy”) written by O’Casey immediately after the events. The Shadow of a Gunman (1923) is set during the Irish War of Independence. Juno and the Paycock (1924, adapted to film by Alfred Hitchcock in 1930) is set during the Irish Civil War. And The Plough and the Stars (1926) is a sort of prequel that looks back to the Easter Rising. Other important plays by O’Casey include The Silver Tassie (1927)—an anti-imperialist play set during World War I—and The End of the Beginning (1937)—an unusual departure for O’Casey in that it is a comedy set in rural Ireland. 1937 was also the year of the adoption of a new Irish constitution that terminated all British sovereignty in Ireland (now under the leadership of de Valera as Taoiseach, or Prime Minister), except for Northern Ireland, which remained (and still remains) a part of the United Kingdom. By 1948, the bulk of Ireland had become the Republic of Ireland, cutting ties with Great Britain and even withdrawing from the British Commonwealth.

Unfortunately, while the Irish fight for independence had employed a great deal of radical rhetoric and enjoyed the support of a number of socialists and trade unionists, independence for Ireland under de Valera’s leadership did not lead to the kind of emancipation for which many had hoped. Indeed, largely due to the powerful influence exercised by the Catholic Church, which continued to impose its morally conservative views on the new nation, the Irish regime was in many ways more repressive than British colonial rule had been. It did not help that de Valera himself had drifted considerably to the right in his own political views.

While all of this was going on, the Irishman James Joyce (writing primarily in Paris, having permanently emigrated from Ireland in 1904) had established himself as perhaps the leading figure, not just in modern Irish literature, but in modern literature as a whole. Sympathetic with the Irish desire to become independent of British rule but unsympathetic to many of the specific attitudes of the Irish Nationalist movement (and to nationalism in general), the young Joyce was something of an outsider to the Irish Revival. Indeed, his work, often openly anti-Catholic and groundbreaking in its frank treatment of sexual themes, was initially considered shocking (to the point of being banned) in Ireland.

In 1904, when Joyce was still only twenty-two years old, he published three stories— “The Sisters,” “Eveline,” and “After the Race”) in a rather obscure weekly publication called The Irish Homestead. By the next year he had written nine more stories, conceiving of the twelve stories together as a collection to be called Dubliners. By the time this collection had been accepted by prominent London publisher Grant Richards and shipped off to the printer, Joyce had added still another story, “Two Gallants.” The printer, afraid of liability under England’s strict obscenity laws, informed Richards that the stories contained obscenities and couldn’t be printed. Thus began a difficult journey that would see Dubliners eventually grow to fifteen stories, including “The Dead,” by far the longest story in the collection and one that differs substantially from the others in the collection in style and tone. By the time Dubliners was finally published in 1914, Joyce had published a volume of poetry—Chamber Music (1907) and had worked extensively on a semi-autobiographical novel he intended to entitle Stephen Hero, before abandoning it in frustration. By 1914, though, he was already at work on another version of the novel, eventually published in 1916 as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Portrait was even more different from the relatively conventional Stephen Hero than “The Dead” was from the earlier Dubliners stories, though some observers have seen the transition between the earlier stories and “The Dead” as part of the same process as the transition from Stephen Hero to Portrait. That process was nothing more than the birth of Joyce as a modernist author, which some might equate to the birth of genuinely modernist literature as a whole. “Dubliners” will be discussed as an Exemplary Text at the end of this chapter. Portrait is a modernist masterpiece that employs a variety of styles and narrative strategies to tell the story of the development of Stephen Dedalus from a young child to a promising young poet who feels that he must leave Ireland to achieve his potential as an artist—as did Joyce.

Portrait’s ironic treatment of Stephen (who sometimes comes off as insufferably pompous and pretentious), its critical attitude toward the Catholic Church (which shackles Stephen’s mind and impedes his development as an artist, even after he has disavowed religious belief), and its masterful use of stylistic devices such as indirect free style and stream-of-consciousness mark it as a landmark text. It is still one of the most admired novels of the twentieth century—and one of the novels that is most widely taught in college classes. However, it pales in comparison with Joyce’s next novel, the monumental Ulysses (1922), widely regarded as the greatest novel of the twentieth century and perhaps the greatest ever written. It is probably the single most important monument produced by literary modernism and has remained the standard against which all innovative novels have been measured for nearly a century now.

Ulysses is such a rich novel that it has been greatly admired even by critics who have ignored large portions of its achievement. For example, the novel was seen by the New Critics as a masterpiece of style and form, even though they ignored its extensive social and political commentary. And it is certainly the case that the eighteen chapters of the novel, written in a variety of different styles and even based on fundamentally different ideas about how fiction is supposed to be constructed, represent a virtual encyclopedia of modernist stylistic experimentation. But the content of the novel is encyclopedic as well, and the novel evokes a particular place and time (Dublin on June 16, 1904) perhaps more vividly than any other novel before or since, even though so much of the novel’s action takes place inside the minds of its characters. More recent critics have come better to appreciate the political power of the novel’s engagement both with other cultural texts and with the material world, though critics are still unpacking the complex interactions between the novel’s stylistic experiments and its political commentary.[100] Joyce once predicted that critics would be working to understand his novel for hundreds of years and it now appears that he might have been correct.

Ulysses was not always so highly appreciated. Initial readers, having never seen anything like it, were often frustrated and perplexed. Aided by a century of critical exposition—and by a century of reading novels that have been influenced by Ulysses—today’s readers find the novel much more accessible. Some also initially saw the book as pornographic—again because it was so unprecedented in the frankness with which it dealt with sexual themes. For example, after its initial publication (by a French press that specialized in pornography), Ulysses was effectively banned from the United States. Copies shipped into the country were seized and burned by Post Office. The book was not, in fact, legally allowed into the country until a 1934 court ruling declared it not to be pornographic—partly because it was so hard to read that it couldn’t possibly be very titillating. Much of Joyce’s writing was effectively banned in Ireland itself until the 1960s, though—by the 1990s—this situation had changed so much that Joyce’s image was featured on the Irish ten-pound note and the Joyce industry had become a key element of Irish tourism. An annoted version of the first chapter of Ulysses is included as an exemplary text associated with this chapter.

Ulysses, despite its difficulties, is an easy read compared with Joyce’s next (and last) novel, Finnegans Wake (1939). Possibly the most difficult novel ever written, Finnegans Wake breaks apart language itself, building sentences from bits and pieces of information gleaned from a variety of sources in literature, myth, popular culture, and real life. It even constructs its own portmanteau words from bits and pieces of words drawn from dozens of different languages. Some have seen Finnegans Wake as pretentious and pointless, arguing that no one could possibly read it. Others have seen it as a brilliant experimental exercise that reveals the normally invisible processes through all texts are constructed and making important points about the nature if language itself. It was, for example, an important influence on the French deconstructionist philosopher of language Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), as was Ulysses.

Joyce’s influence on subsequent writers has been so monumental that it is almost impossible to measure—his influence is so broad and so extensive that it has even sometimes reached authors who have not even read his work (but who have read the work of others who were influenced by him). In Ireland, his most direct influence was on another expatriate writer, the young Samuel Beckett (1906–1989), who also lived most of his adult life outside of Ireland and who idolized Joyce as he began his own career as a writer. Educated at Trinity College, Dublin, Beckett moved to Paris, were to took a job as a lecturer in English at the École Normale Supérieure. While there, he was introduced to Joyce, beginning a long friendship during which, among other things, he served as Joyce’s volunteer secretary during the composition of Finnegans Wake, as Joyce’s failing eyesight necessitated help with the book. Yet Beckett himself would eventually become a major force in modern literature in his own right. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969, becoming the third Irish writer to be so honored, joining Yeats and Shaw (an Irish-born dramatist who lived and worked mostly in England and is still widely thought of as a British writer more than an Irish one).

Beckett’s own early writing (in English) shows the clear influence of Joyce. The story collection More Pricks than Kicks (1934), the novel Murphy (1938), and the novel Watt (published in 1953, but written during World War II while Beckett was in hiding in France, on the run from the German Nazis) all show a strong Joycean influence. Of these, Watt, in particular, is an interesting work, but Beckett did not begin to fulfill his potential as a writer until he found his own voice, turning to black, absurdist comedy written in a minimalist mode that is almost the opposite of Joyce’s encyclopedic approach. Indeed, Watt can be seen as a sort of transition to Beckett’s later style: a self-parodic text, it undermines its own use of rationalist language and epistemology and looks forward to the minimalism and absurdism of Beckett’s later work.[101]

Writing in this mode, Beckett produced his most important achievement as a fiction writer in the so-called French trilogy, which includes Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951), and The Unnamable (1960). These highly experimental novels were all written in French (but were translated into English versions by Beckett himself). They thus indicate Beckett’s highly unusual status as a bi-lingual writer whose greatest achievements were written in his second language. In this sense, only his close contemporary Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) is comparable in the annals of world literature—and even Nabokov could not ultimately match Beckett’s versatility, because it was ultimately not as a fiction writer, but as a dramatist, that Beckett made his most important contributions.

Beckett’s absurdist comedy Waiting for Godot (written 1948–1949 but not performed on stage until 1953) has some claim to being the most important play of the twentieth century. Its Paris premiere was a sensation that made Beckett an international star and the leader of the theater of the absurd movement, powerfully influencing many subsequent dramatists. Perhaps more than any other single literary work, Waiting for Godot captured the changed perception of the nature of reality that was sweeping a Europe still reeling from the horrors of World War II. Endgame (first performed 1957) was also an important success. Like Waiting for Godot, Endgame seems at first to take place in an absurdist world that has little to do with reality, yet it also comments in important ways on the real world—in this case on the sense of possible impending doom brought about by the nuclear fears of the Cold War. It also, however, has broader significance and is still frequently performed around the world.

As Beckett’s career proceeded, his plays tended to become shorter, more minimalist, and more experimental, as if he were seeking to eliminate one element after another from his works in an attempt to find the bare minimum of elements that must remain present in order for a literary text still to be able to function. In Krapp’s Last Tape (1958), the shabby, aged title character attempts to recover the past by listening to recordings of his younger days; in Happy Days (1961), Winnie, the principal character, is buried to her waist in a mound but still powerfully attached to the meager possessions that surround her. Both plays are important and well known. Other, later, plays were more radical. Breath (1969) lasts only 30 seconds and consists only of a pile of rubbish, a breath, and a cry, but no real characters, events, or even dialogue. Not I (1973) is a brief monologue in which only the mouth of the speaker is illuminated and visible.

Beckett pursued this path of successive minimalization in his fiction as well, including late “novels,” such as Imagination Dead Imagination (1965), The Lost Ones (1970), Company (1980), Ill Seen Ill Said (1981), and Worstword Ho (1983). Of these, Company and Worstward Ho were written in English, then translated into French. The others, like most of Beckett’s late work, were written in French, then translated into English. All are minimalist texts (Imagination Dead Imagine is approximately six pages long), and all—at first glance—appear virtually meaningless. A close look, however, reveals that these texts have much to say about literature, language, and the nature of human existence. The Lost Ones, for example, provides a lesson in reading, warning readers not to seek complete mastery of the texts they read, especially literary ones: “This enigmatic text seems specifically designed to defeat totalizing epistemological readings, yet it also invites such readings by tantalizing readers with the potential for recuperation according to a variety of schemes” (Booker, Literature and Domination 142).

Despite his direct relationship with Joyce, Beckett’s ultimate move in an entirely different direction means that the Irish writer who was most directly the heir to Joyce was not Beckett, but Flann O’Brien (the pen name of Brian O’Nolan, 1911–1966)—though O’Brien was also one of the first important Irish writers to complain about the frustrations of having to write in Joyce’s shadow. One might, actually, see O’Brien’s work as informed by a combination of Joyce’s stylistic exuberance and Beckett’s darkly comic vision. In any case, it is by now a commonplace to think of Joyce, Beckett, and O’Brien as the three great figures of modern Irish fiction.

O’Brien’s first novel, At Swim-Two-Birds (published in 1939, and thus in the same year as Joyce’s last novel), is a major classic of modern Irish literature. Marked by an extreme literary playfulness, At Swim-Two Birds (like Finnegans Wake) has sometimes been seen as an important precursor of postmodernist fiction, rather than as a late example of modernism. It is a raucous, unruly text that self-consciously breaks all of the rules of realist fiction. It is, indeed, constructed according to the advice offered early in the book by its narrator, who declares that, as a genre, “the novel should be a self-evident sham to which the reader could at will adjust the degree of his credulity” (33).

O’Brien followed At Swim-Two-Birds (which draws significantly on Irish mythology, though in an irreverent way) with An Béal Bocht (1941), making him probably the most important Irish writer to have written a novel in the Irish language. Published under the pseudonym “Myles na gCopaleen” (which he also used in the columns he wrote for the Irish Times), An Béal Bocht did not appear in English translation (by Patrick C. Power) until 1973 but has probably ultimately had more readers in English than in Irish. It is a wildly funny (but extremely dark) tale that “explores the cultural domination of Ireland that results from the imposition of the English language on the Irish people, but it also explores the complicity of the Irish in their own oppression in ways that suggest possibilities of successful resistance” (Booker, Flann O’Brien 6).

O’Brien’s next novel, The Third Policeman, was initially rejected by publishers and did not appear until 1967, after the author’s death. A complex philosophical novel often compared to the work of Franz Kafka, The Third Policeman is nevertheless also quite funny. It joins At Swim-Two-Birds as the two O’Brien works that have enjoyed the most enduring readership and critical attention. O’Brien’s other two novels are perhaps lesser works, but the mock bildungsroman The Hard Life: An Exegesis of Squalor (1961) is well worth a read and was very popular upon its initial publication. Set in Dublin between 1890 and 1910, it essentially returns to the Dublin made famous by Joyce, and in fact rivals Joyce in its “overwhelming evocation of squalor” in its depiction of Dublin during this era (Clissmann 273). It is also quite funny, which can certainly also be said of The Dalkey Archive (1964), which among other things features an irreverently-treated James Joyce as a character, though one of the other characters delivers a surprisingly accurate description of Joyce’s work:

I consider his poetry meretricious and mannered. But I have an admiration for all his other work, for his dexterity and resource in handling language, for his precision, for his subtlety in conveying the image of Dublin and her people, for his accuracy is setting down speech authentically, and for his enormous humour. (111)

Roughly contemporaneous with the work of O’Brien was that of Brendan Behan (1923–1964). Though Behan is perhaps best remembered for his 1958 autobiographical work Borstal Boy, he also made important contributions as a playwright, continuing especially in the tradition of O’Casey. Borstal Boy relates, in first person, the experiences of the young Behan in the period 1939–1942, during which he, at age sixteen, was arrested in Liverpool as an Irish Republican Army terrorist, then imprisoned and eventually sent to a juvenile detention institution, or “Borstal.” Though based in fact, the book reads very much like a novel and one can probably assume that many of the events in the book are fictionalized to an extent. Given the context of the book, it is not surprising that Behan’s narrative provides important commentary on colonialism and the postcolonial condition, the continuing British presence in Northern Ireland serving as a particularly overt example of the neocolonial condition in which European rulers maintain influence and power in their former colonies well after the moment of ostensible independence. But the treatment of these issues in Borstal Boy is distinctive for its focus on class rather than nationality and for its clear suggestion that the working classes of England and Ireland have a great deal in common and that both are the exploited victims of the British ruling classes.

Not long after the deaths of figures such as Behan and O’Brien represented something of an end to an era in Irish literature, Ireland entered a thirty-year-long period of sectarian violence known as “The Troubles.” The Troubles had a long history and represented the culmination of animosities that had been building in Ireland between Catholics and Protestants for years, though many date the beginning of the Troubles as the civil rights march that occurred in Derry, Northern Ireland, on October 5, 1968, when marchers were confronted by the Royal Ulster Constabulary and not allowed to march in favor of Catholic rights in Northern Ireland. From there, tensions continually increased until Sunday January 30, 1972, when thirteen unarmed civilians were shot and killed by British paratroopers during another civil rights march in Derry—in the event that came to be known in Ireland as Bloody Sunday. Soon, the situation escalated into a state of near-warfare in Northern Ireland, as nationalist paramilitary groups such as the IRA clashed with unionist paramilitary groups such as the Ulster Volunteer Force, as well as the British Army and the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Acts of violence spread to England and the Republic of Ireland as well, ultimately leading to more than 3,000 people (mostly civilians) being killed in various bombings and other attacks. The Good Friday Agreement of April 10, 1998, officially brought the fighting to an end, though occasional violence has occurred even since then.

As of this writing, Northern Ireland remains a part of the United Kingdom and the Protestant majority there appears to be content with that arrangement, while Catholic residents of Northern Ireland continue to struggle for equal rights. The Republic of Ireland, meanwhile, has recently experienced a period of rapid economic growth spurred by its membership in the European Union. Indeed, the Irish economy from roughly the mid-1990s to 2008 (when Ireland was caught in the global recession) has been referred to as the “Celtic Tiger” because of its rapid and aggressive growth, which took Ireland from being one of the poorest countries in Europe to being one of the richest (in terms of per capita income). Even in 2018 when the effects of 2008 are still being felt to an extent, the nominal Gross Domestic Product per capita in Ireland (according to the International Monetary Fund) was over $70,000, making it by that measure the fourth wealthiest country in the world, well ahead of the that in United States and nearly twice that of the United Kingdom. Ireland has also undergone a period of great political liberalization in recent decades, spurred by a continuing decline in political power on the part of the Catholic Church. For example, despite the objections of the Church, divorce has been legal in Ireland (under certain circumstances) since 1996. In 2015, same-sex marriage was approved in Ireland by a popular referendum. In September 2018, a constitutional provision forbidding abortion was repealed, and the government is currently working on legislation to allow abortion during the first twelve weeks of pregnancy.

Meanwhile, in recent years Irish literature has continued to enjoy a prominent place on the world cultural stage. Looking back to the Abbey Theatre (which was re-opened in a modern facility in 1966 after the original building burned in 1951), Irish drama has remained strong in the hands of figures such as Tom Murphy (1935–2018) and Frank McGuiness (1953– ). However, the most important Irish playwright of the past half century is probably Brian Friel (1929–2015), a writer from Northern Ireland who has sometimes been described as a sort of Irish Chekhov. Friel was closely associated with the Field Day Theatre Company, which Friel founded with actor Stephen Rea. The Field Day Company has produced numerous plays in Northern Ireland, beginning with Friel’s play Translations in 1980, centering their work in Derry, the focal point of so much violence during the Troubles. Their mission is to create a vibrant Northern Irish theatre that seeks to heal the sectarian rifts that have torn Ireland apart over the years—though their political orientation is largely republican and anticolonial. They have published numerous politically oriented cultural pamphlets, including those by prominent American cultural theorists Fredric Jameson and Edward Said.[102] In 1990, they published the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, edited by Seamus Deane. Among other things, this anthology seeks to differentiate Irish literature from British literature. That same year, Friel’s important play Dancing at Lughnasa (another Exemplary Text at the end of this chapter) premiered at the Abbey Theatre, establishing an important contact between the Field Day project and the Abbey Theatre tradition.

The most important Irish poet of the past half-century was also associated with the Field Day Theatre Company, whose board of directors he joined in 1981. Seamus Heaney (1939–2013), the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995, was also from Northern Ireland, though he split much of the time of his adult life between Dublin and the United States. He preferred to be considered an Irish poet, rather than a British one and once famously refused to have his work included in an anthology of British poetry, explaining his position with a snappy bit of poetry:

Be advised my passport’s green,

No glass of ours was ever raised

To toast the Queen.

However, Heaney, a Catholic and an Irish Nationalist who also declined an offer to become the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, was not radically anti-British by Irish standards. He served for a time as Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, for example, and he was generally a voice for peace amid the Troubles that wracked Ireland, even if his nationalist sympathies were clear. He sometimes seemed reluctant to write political poetry, though, and some of his best remembered work—such as his much-admired translation of Beowulf (2000)—is not openly political but instead addresses general issues.[103] For example, his well-known poem “Blackberry-Picking” (first published in 1966 in the book Death of a Naturalist, his first published collection) metaphorically captures the broad experience of growing older and discovering that the world, in reality, is not the way we once thought it was. It celebrates the exuberance and optimism of childhood, then contrasts that with the disappointments of adulthood as the sweet dreams of youth turn sour.[104]

Another well-known Heaney poem, “Digging” (also from Death of a Naturalist)is subtly political in the way Heaney, the son and grandson of Northern Irish farmers, expresses his respect for and sense of solidarity with his working-class roots. He recalls the work of his father and grandfather digging the soil and then suggests that writing the poetry is his own form of digging, comparing his work with a pen to the spadework of his forebears. Writing poetry, the poem implies, is no more important or elevated than the humble work done by his father and grandfather. At the same time, the poem proclaims, writing poetry is still an honorable form of labor, one of which he clearly hopes his working-class ancestors would be proud to see him do.[105]

Irish fiction has also experienced something of a resurgence in recent years, especially in the work of John Banville (1945– ) and Roddy Doyle (1958– ), two writers who have received considerable global attention. Banville, writing in a sophisticated, sometimes metafictional style that has been compared with the work of Nabokov, has received the greater critical acclaim of the two; his novel The Book of Evidence (1989) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize,[106] an award that was eventually won by his novel The Seas (2005). As of this writing, he has published eighteen literary novels under his own name, as well as a number of crime novels under the pseudonym “Benjamin Black.” Doyle won the Booker Prize for his rather serious 1993 novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, though he is best known for his “Barrytown Trilogy” of highly-entertaining comic novels, comprising The Commitments (1987), The Snapper (1990), and The Van (1991). All three have been adapted to film, with the film version of The Commitments (1991), directed by British director Alan Parker, being named the 38^th greatest British film of all time in a 1999 poll by the British Film Institute. Doyle is also the author of the “Last Roundup Trilogy” of historical novels that follows protagonist Henry Smart through various events ranging from participation in the Easter Rising in A Star Called Henry (1999) to work decades later as a Hollywood screenwriter in The Dead Republic (2010).

NOTES

EXEMPLARY TEXT:

THE POETRY OF WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

When William Butler Yeats won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923, he became the first Irish writer to be so honored. And it was an honor well-deserved. Not only had Yeats by this time established himself as one of the world’s greatest poets (though much of his greatest poetry had yet to be written), but much of his poetry was overtly political, written in support of the cause of Irish independence or other related causes. Beginning with his early phase that drew upon Irish mythology to romanticize the Irish past and rural Ireland as a whole, Yeats had by this time already moved into a more modern, urban phase that demonstrated his tremendous range as a poet. And all of this after he had sacrificed much of the first decade of the twentieth century in helping to found the Irish National Theatre, taking much of his time and energy away from the writing of poetry.

“The Lake Isle of Innisfree” (1888)

Probably the best known of Yeats’s early romantic poems is “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” in which the poet imagines moving, Thoreau-like to a peaceful Irish lakeside cabin, free of the hustle and bustle of the modern world:

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

Who Goes with Fergus? (1893)

The emphasis on Irish mythology that informs so much of Yeats’s early poetry can be found in the poem “Who Goes with Fergus?” This poem actually first appeared as a song within Yeats’s 1892 play The Countess Cathleen. In James Joyce’s Ulysses, we learn that Stephen Dedalus sang this song to his dying mother.In the poem, the poet employs the romantic image of the mythical Irish poet-king Fergus (who supposedly thrived around the time of Alexander the Great) to evoke a magical, otherworldly kingdom, free of the mundane cares of this one. That this kingdom is indisputably meant to be Irish also subtly points toward the possibility of an Irish realm free of British rule.

Who Goes with Fergus?

Who will go drive with Fergus now,

And pierce the deep wood’s woven shade,

And dance upon the level shore?

Young man, lift up your russet brow,

And lift your tender eyelids, maid,

And brood on hopes and fear no more.

And no more turn aside and brood

Upon love’s bitter mystery;

For Fergus rules the brazen cars,

And rules the shadows of the wood,

And the white breast of the dim sea

And all dishevelled wandering stars.

“When You Are Old” (1892)

During this same early period in his career as a poet, Yeats met and fell in love with the English heiress and actress Maud Gonne, who had become a strong sympathizer with the Irish Nationalist cause (her family had some Irish background). Gonne, in fact, was much stronger and more militant in her nationalism than was Yeats himself, which caused considerable tension between them. Yeats’ attempts to win over Gonne (and his frustration at the failure of those attempts) produced some of the most enduring love poetry of the time. Indeed, Gonne is said to have claimed that one of the reasons she refused Yeats’ multiple proposals of marriage was because the unrequited nature of his love for her inspired him to write such great poetry. One of his earliest classic “Maud Gonne” poems, “When You Are Old,” already establishes the tone of frustration that would mark all of his poems to her, predicting that their love will remain unrequited but that someday she might regret that she spurned all of his advances. Despite the numerous admirers of her beauty, only, he, Yeats claims, loves her for her soul, a fact that she might recognize when she is old and looking back on her life. What might have been a puerile cliché turned, in the hands of Yeats, into a poetic masterpiece.

When You Are Old

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true,

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,

Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

“September 1913” (1913)

One of the key markers of Yeats’ evolution from his early roots as a poet of rural romanticism to a modern political poet was the poem “September 1913,” written in support of the striking workers in the Dublin Lock-out. The poem excoriates Dublin’s businessmen for their greed in trying to squeeze every cent of profit out of their businesses by mistreating their workers. Among other things, the poem rejects the Irish fascination with the past, something that had been central to Yeats’ own work in his early years as a poet. But the bitterness and violence of the lock-out—together with the squalid, oppressive conditions that led to the strike in the first place—remind us that, as the poem says, “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, / It’s with O’Leary in his grave.” The “O’Leary” to whom Yeats refers, incidentally, is John O’Leary (1830–1907), a key leader in the nineteenth-century fight for Irish independence and an early leader of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. In 1865, his political activities led to his conviction on a charge of “treason felony” and to a sentence of twenty years of penal servitude, five years of which were served in English prisons, followed by fifteen years of exile, mostly in Paris, with some time also spent in the United States. In 1885 O’Leary returned to Ireland and became active in the nationalist cause there, associating with younger nationalists such as Yeats and Maud Gonne. O’Leary is also mentioned in Yeats’ poem “Beautiful Lofty Things.”

Among others mentioned in the poem, Edward Fitzgerald (1763–1798) died of wounds received while resisting arrest on charges of treason related to the 1798 Irish rebellion, while Wolfe Tone (1763–1798) was the leader of that rebellion, during which he was captured, dying sixteen days later under suspicious circumstances. Robert Emmet (1778–1803) led an abortive subsequent rebellion in 1803, after which he was captured and executed—hanged until dead, then beheaded. All (especially Tone and Emmet) are well-known figures in the list of Irish martyrs who have given their lives in the cause of Irish independence, but Yeats here suggests that the world of 1913 is different from the world of previous centuries and that the Irish should perhaps move on to deal with present ills (such as economic inequality) rather than spending all their energies celebrating past martyrs. Indeed, the poem anticipates (though in a more somber mode) Joyce’s later mockery of Irish hero-worship in the “Cyclops” chapter of Ulysses. Here, Joyce presents a barroom full of drunken Irish Nationalists who attempt to claim a long list of diverse figures (including Buddha, Cleopatra, Muhammed, Dante, Shakespeare, Benjamin Franklin, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Beethoven) as examples of the heroic Irish past (12.176–99).[107]

“September 1913” is written in relatively straightforward language and is structured in the simple form of eight-line stanzas, each consisting of a rhymed quatrain. It thus eschews romantic language just as it turns away from romantic reveries about the past. The deaths of men such as Fitzgerald, Emmet, and Tone in the cause of Irish independence were not the stuff of romance, but the stuff of politics, something Yeats fears the Irish have forgotten in the rush to romanticize their deaths. He thus ends the poem with a stanza complaining about the Irish penchant for turning bloody deaths into romantic reveries of a kind that might more properly be dedicated to the effect of “some woman’s yellow hair” on some smitten lover.[108]

September 1913

What need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone;
For men were born to pray and save;
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.

Yet they were of a different kind,
The names that stilled your childish play,
They have gone about the world like wind,
But little time had they to pray
For whom the hangman’s rope was spun,
And what, God help us, could they save?
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.

Was it for this the wild geese spread
The grey wing upon every tide;
For this that all that blood was shed,
For this Edward Fitzgerald died,
And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,
All that delirium of the brave?
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.

Yet could we turn the years again,
And call those exiles as they were
In all their loneliness and pain,
You’d cry “Some woman’s yellow hair
Has maddened every mother’s son”:
They weighed so lightly what they gave.
But let them be, they’re dead and gone,
They’re with O’Leary in the grave.

“Easter, 1916” (1916)

Yeats responded to the Easter Rising with the poem “Easter, 1916,” in which he acknowledges that an event he had not initially supported has had a profound effect on him, very much capturing (in advance) the profound impact the Rising (unpopular and unsuccessful when it first occurred) would ultimately have on Irish history. Yeats’s own ambivalence about the event can be seen in the fact that he did not publish the poem until 1921, though he wrote it shortly after the Rising. The poem is elegant and restrained, yet confused and uncertain about just how to regard the rebellion; it thus expressed what a great many people in Ireland felt at the time. Yeats, of course, had a special connection to the event, having personally known some of the participants through his activities in support of the republican cause. The second stanza, of course, is particularly personal, as he recalls Constance “Countess” Markievicz (1868–1927), a key Irish political figure whom Yeats had known since she was a teenager. Markievicz was arrested and sentenced to death after the Rising, but the sentence was commuted because she was a woman. She would go on to become the first woman elected to the British House of Commons in 1918, though she (like all of the other Irish members) refused to take her seat. Later, she became the Minister of Labor in the post-civil-war Irish government.[109] Yeats also refers to the school teacher Patrick Pearse and to Pearse’s associate Thomas McDonagh, himself a teacher, poet and playwright. The “drunken, vainglorious lout” to whom he refers is, of course, John MacBride, the estranged husband of Maud Gonne, whom Yeats resented both for marrying Gonne and for subsequently mistreating her. Such personal touches give the poem a special poignance, humanizing the rebellion, as does the listing of the executed leaders in the closing stanza. Yeats’ final musing in that stanza over whether their deaths were ultimately for nothing, because perhaps the British would have followed through on their earlier promises and granted freedom to Ireland, would, of course, be answered by history. It took a war of independence and a subsequent civil war before Ireland would finally begin to move beyond British control.

Easter, 1916

I have met them at close of day

Coming with vivid faces

From counter or desk among grey

Eighteenth-century houses.

I have passed with a nod of the head

Or polite meaningless words,

Or have lingered awhile and said

Polite meaningless words,

And thought before I had done

Of a mocking tale or a gibe

To please a companion

Around the fire at the club,

Being certain that they and I

But lived where motley is worn:

All changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

That woman’s days were spent

In ignorant good-will,

Her nights in argument

Until her voice grew shrill.

What voice more sweet than hers

When, young and beautiful,

She rode to harriers?

This man had kept a school

And rode our wingèd horse;

This other his helper and friend

Was coming into his force;

He might have won fame in the end,

So sensitive his nature seemed,

So daring and sweet his thought.

This other man I had dreamed

A drunken, vainglorious lout.

He had done most bitter wrong

To some who are near my heart,

Yet I number him in the song;

He, too, has resigned his part

In the casual comedy;

He, too, has been changed in his turn,

Transformed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

Hearts with one purpose alone

Through summer and winter seem

Enchanted to a stone

To trouble the living stream.

The horse that comes from the road,

The rider, the birds that range

From cloud to tumbling cloud,

Minute by minute they change;

A shadow of cloud on the stream

Changes minute by minute;

A horse-hoof slides on the brim,

And a horse plashes within it;

The long-legged moor-hens dive,

And hens to moor-cocks call;

Minute by minute they live:

The stone’s in the midst of all.

Too long a sacrifice

Can make a stone of the heart.

O when may it suffice?

That is Heaven’s part, our part

To murmur name upon name,

As a mother names her child

When sleep at last has come

On limbs that had run wild.

What is it but nightfall?

No, no, not night but death;

Was it needless death after all?

For England may keep faith

For all that is done and said.

We know their dream; enough

To know they dreamed and are dead;

And what if excess of love

Bewildered them till they died?

I write it out in a verse—

MacDonagh and MacBride

And Connolly and Pearse

Now and in time to be,

Wherever green is worn,

Are changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

“No Second Troy” (1916)

The “terrible beauty” of which Yeats speaks in “Easter, 1916” would turn out to be an invigorated anticolonial movement in Ireland that would eventually lead to independence—but only at great cost. The Easter Rising also marked a turning point in Yeats’s personal life. With Maud Gonne now a widow, Yeats issued one final marriage proposal to her, though apparently he was just going through the motions and did not expect (and perhaps did not even hope for) a positive response. The response was indeed negative, after which Yeats, now past fifty, turned to Gonne’s twenty-one-year-old daughter Iseult, to whom he proposed in 1917 (and again in 1918). Those proposals were also refused. In the meantime, Yeats had written a sort of poetic farewell to Maud. “No Second Troy” is a rather bitter farewell that once again notes Maud’s legendary beauty (made legendary partly by Yeats himself) but describes her as a destructive force, resembling in that sense another great beauty, Helen of Troy, whose behavior caused the ancient city of Troy to be destroyed. The comparison grows directly from Yeats’s personal experience with Maud, but it also marks a tendency during this period for Yeats to draw upon classical analogies to enliven his poetry.

No Second Troy

Why should I blame her that she filled my days

With misery, or that she would of late

Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,

Or hurled the little streets upon the great,

Had they but courage equal to desire?

What could have made her peaceful with a mind

That nobleness made simple as a fire,

With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind

That is not natural in an age like this,

Being high and solitary and most stern?

Why, what could she have done, being what she is?

Was there another Troy for her to burn?

“The Second Coming” (1919)

Yeats also draws upon classical precedents of a sort in “The Second Coming,” widely regarded as one of the central poetic expressions of the intense sense of crisis that informs so much modernist literature. Here, however, Yeats draws on the Christian notion of the second coming of Christ, rather than on Greek or Roman precedents, to express his sense of the possible approach of an apocalyptic event. In many ways, this poem simply expresses a typical modernist sense that human history, in the wake of World War I, might have been approaching a crucial turning point, the current order on the brink of collapse and a new (possibly ominous) order about to begin. In an Irish context, it is worth remembering that the poem was written at a time when the Irish War of Independence was just underway, so that this sense of crisis was particularly tangible. At the same time, both the feel of this poem and some of its imagery draw upon Yeats’s particular interest in mysticism and the occult, studies in which had led him to conclude that human history unwinds in cycles of about two thousand years, one of which (which began with the birth of Christ) was coming to an end.

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

“Leda and the Swan” (1923)

One of the clearest uses of classical mythology occurs in the poem “Leda and the Swan,” which is also related to his vision of cyclical history. Here, in the very traditional form of a Petrarchan sonnet Yeats recounts a story directly from Greek mythology, in which the god Zeus takes the form of a swan and rapes the human woman Leda. The story has taken various forms over time, but, in one of the standard versions, the rape directly leads to Leda giving birth to Helen and Polydeuces, while at the same time giving birth to the human children (via her husband Tyndareus, King of Sparta) Castor and Clytemnestra. In telling the story of the rape, Yeats alludes to the way it ultimately led to the fall of Troy (thanks to Helen’s role in the event), as well as to the death of Agamemnon, in most versions killed by Clytemnestra. Since Clytemnestra was supposedly the daughter of Tyndareus, the poem thus implies that Clytemnestra’s killing of Agamemnon might have somehow been related to trauma she experienced during the rape. The poem then closes with one of the rhetorical questions that Yeats so favored during this period, wondering whether Leda might have taken on some of Zeus’s godlike knowledge and power as a result of the encounter.

The poem clearly depicts the rape of Leda as a sort of turning point in history and thus possibly as the beginning of the two-thousand-year cycle that “The Second Coming” suggests might have been ushered in by the birth of Christ. It is clear, in this shift of mythological referents, that Yeats does not mean for either attribution to be taken literally; each simply symbolizes the notion that history runs in cycles, landmark events initiating each new cycle. One is, of course, also free to give the poem a more contemporary political reading, seeing Leda as a symbol of Ireland and the swan/Zeus as a symbol of England and the British Empire, whose rule in Ireland had so recently ended, beginning another sort of new era.

Leda and the Swan

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still

Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed

By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,

He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push

The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?

And how can body, laid in that white rush,

But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there

The broken wall, the burning roof and tower

And Agamemnon dead. Being so caught up,

So mastered by the brute blood of the air,

Did she put on his knowledge with his power

Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

“Among School Children” (1926)

In 1926, while he was a member of the Irish Senate, Yeats toured a Monetessori school in Ireland as part of his official duties. He recorded his impressions of the school and its students in a poem expands beyond these impressions to include another guest appearance by Maud Gonne, whom he imagines (in Stanzas II-IV) as a child the age of the children he sees in the school. This thought then leads him into a meditation in aging (especially his own), envisioning himself (as he would at several points in his later poetry) as a “comfortable kind of old scarecrow … Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.” Along the way, he compares the inevitable disappointments that mothers experience from their children to the inevitable disappointments that nuns experience from their religion.[110] The poem then ends with a meditation on the relationship between art and the artists who produce it, closing with the famous line “How can you tell the dancer from the dance?,” which suggest the perfect achievement of an aesthetic vision, the poet at one with his poem.

Among School Children

I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;

A kind old nun in a white hood replies;

The children learn to cipher and to sing,

To study reading-books and history,

To cut and sew, be neat in everything

In the best modern way—the children’s eyes

In momentary wonder stare upon

A sixty-year-old smiling public man.

I dream of a Ledaean body, bent

Above a sinking fire, a tale that she

Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event

That changed some childish day to tragedy—

Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent

Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,

Or else, to alter Plato’s parable,

Into the yolk and white of the one shell.

III

And thinking of that fit of grief or rage

I look upon one child or t’other there

And wonder if she stood so at that age—

For even daughters of the swan can share

Something of every paddler’s heritage—

And had that colour upon cheek or hair,

And thereupon my heart is driven wild:

She stands before me as a living child.

Her present image floats into the mind—

Did Quattrocento finger fashion it

Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind

And took a mess of shadows for its meat?

And I though never of Ledaean kind

Had pretty plumage once—enough of that,

Better to smile on all that smile, and show

There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.

What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap

Honey of generation had betrayed,

And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape

As recollection or the drug decide,

Would think her son, did she but see that shape

With sixty or more winters on its head,

A compensation for the pang of his birth,

Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?

Plato thought nature but a spume that plays

Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;

Solider Aristotle played the taws

Upon the bottom of a king of kings;

World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras

Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings

What a star sang and careless Muses heard:

Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.

VII

Both nuns and mothers worship images,

But those the candles light are not as those

That animate a mother’s reveries,

But keep a marble or a bronze repose.

And yet they too break hearts—O Presences

That passion, piety or affection knows,

And that all heavenly glory symbolise—

O self-born mockers of man’s enterprise;

VIII

Labour is blossoming or dancing where

The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,

Nor beauty born out of its own despair,

Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.

O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,

Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

“Sailing to Byzantium” (1928)

Plagued by declining health, Yeats retired from public politics after six years in the Irish Senate. He remained very active as a poet, however, devoting much of his final poetry to expressions of his acceptance of the aging process itself, which he often addressed with good humor. But he remained interested in other topics as well, including the process of poetry. A poem from 1928, “Sailing to Byzantium,” involves both aging and poetry, and is built around Yeats’s (somewhat Orientalist) vision of the ancient city of Byzantium (capital of the eastern branch of the Roman Empire, now known as Istanbul) as a utopian space where all aspects of human life were fused into a single, harmonious whole. Byzantium, in short, becomes a sort of image of poetry itself, a city where the visions of poets can be achieved. They cannot, however, be achieved easily, even there, and the journey to Byzantium (that is, poetic success) is not an easy one, especially for an aging poet like Yeats, now in his mid-60s.

Sailing to Byzantium

That is no country for old men. The young

In one another’s arms, birds in the trees,

—Those dying generations—at their song,

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress,

Nor is there singing school but studying

Monuments of its own magnificence;

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

To the holy city of Byzantium.

III

O sages standing in God’s holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing-masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

“The Circus Animals’ Desertion” (1939)

One of Yeats’s final poems begins with an expression of frustration at a period he had recently experienced in which he found that his poetic inspiration was beginning to leave him. The poem then turns into a retrospective on his own life and career, with another reference to Maud Gonne and to the way “fanaticism and hate” nearly consumed her. Finally, Yeats realizes that all the inspirations for his lofty poetry came from worldly sources, from his own humanity. His inspiration failing, he then has no choice but simply to be a human and to settle into the “foul rag and bone shop of the heart,” whence all his earlier inspiration came. There is, of course, a tremendous irony in the poem: it (in this sense resembling The Waste Land) is a brilliant poetic masterpiece about Yeats having lost the ability to produce brilliant poetic masterpieces.

The Circus Animals’ Desertion

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,

I sought it daily for six weeks or so.

Maybe at last being but a broken man

I must be satisfied with my heart, although

Winter and summer till old age began

My circus animals were all on show,

Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,

Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.

What can I but enumerate old themes,

First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose

Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,

Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose,

Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems,

That might adorn old songs or courtly shows;

But what cared I that set him on to ride,

I, starved for the bosom of his fairy bride.

And then a counter-truth filled out its play,

`The Countess Cathleen’ was the name I gave it,

She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away

But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it.

I thought my dear must her own soul destroy

So did fanaticism and hate enslave it,

And this brought forth a dream and soon enough

This dream itself had all my thought and love.

And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread

Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;

Heart mysteries there, and yet when all is said

It was the dream itself enchanted me:

Character isolated by a deed

To engross the present and dominate memory.

Players and painted stage took all my love

And not those things that they were emblems of.

III

Those masterful images because complete

Grew in pure mind but out of what began?

A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,

Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,

Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut

Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone

I must lie down where all the ladders start

In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

NOTES

EXEMPLARY TEXT:

JAMES JOYCE, DUBLINERS (1914)

The barren city described with such scrupulous meanness in Dubliners is clearly a reflection not only of life in turn-of-the-century Ireland, but also of a quite general early modernist vision of urban decay. As such, Joyce’s Dublin has much in common with the sepulchral city of Conrad and the unreal Baudelarian city of Eliot.[111] But whereas Eliot’s London seems plagued by a lack of any structure that can give meaning to life, Joyce’s Dublin, like the world of Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot, is plagued by a paralyzing overabundance of structure. Dubliners can be read as a sort of plural Bildungsroman in which the characters in the various stories attempt to explore their own creative self-constitution, only to find that in general the options open to them have already been strictly prescribed by the pre-existing discourses and institutions which hold Dublin in an inescapable death-grip. Self-constitution in Dubliners is thus not creative at all, and the various characters find themselves doomed to repeat the past selves that already haunt the city’s crowded yet desolate streets. Or, as Declan Kiberd puts it, all of the Dubliners stories can be taken as explorations of the ways in which the Irish quest for freedom is doomed as long as it “couches itself in the forms and languages of the enemy” and continues to “insist on confining its definitions to the categories designed by the colonizer” (Inventing 330). Joyce’s depiction of the paralysis of Dublin thus makes the important point that the breakdown in authority in the modern world does not necessarily correspond to a breakdown in traditional structures of power. Rather, those structures simply go on operating under their own momentum, even without the legitimating authority of some transcendent originating center. The people of Dublin no longer really believe in the political, religious, and social discourses that entrap them, but that entrapment remains just as firm nevertheless.

Joyce introduces this motif in the very first story of Dubliners with the depiction in “The Sisters” of a young boy-narrator who is faced by a decided lack of effective authority figures with whom to identify in his attempts at self-constitution. The anonymous narrator lives with his aunt and uncle, presaging the general state of affairs in Dubliners, in which parents (especially fathers) are consistently absent, feckless, brutal, or otherwise ineffective as models for their children. In the unexplained absence of his parents, the boy in “The Sisters” turns to the priest Father Flynn as an exemplar. Flynn takes the boy under his wing and attempts to educate him in the arcana of the Church, while the boy begins to develop visions of transcending the numbing tedium of Dublin through a career in the priesthood, a career that might take him to foreign and exotic climes. But turning to the Church to escape the oppression of Dublin is like going to the desert to escape thirst. Father Flynn himself demonstrates the futility of this escape as he babbles and drools in the throes of a fatal ailment of a suspicious and possibly venereal nature. He is a figure of the modern breakdown of authority who quite literally breaks down.

Yet this failure of authority leaves the boy anything but free to constitute himself in unrestricted ways. The fallen Father Flynn and his broken chalice may represent the failure of Catholicism to maintain its authority as a discourse of truth—the chalice, after all, “contained nothing” (17). Yet the Church maintains its power nevertheless, ordering the daily lives of Dubliners as much as ever, even though they now have no real hope that their obedience to the Church will lead to salvation. The characters in “The Sisters”—and in all of the Dubliners stories—seem unable to perform any act whatsoever that has not already been strictly defined for them by the Church or some other institution or convention.

After Flynn dies, the boy and his aunt go to view the body. Then the visitors are offered sherry and crackers by Flynn’s sisters in an obvious re-enactment of the Eucharist—a fact to which the participants, conditioned to mechanical enactment of Church-defined rituals, are totally blind (15). Then the women sit about and speak in funereal clichés (“Ah, well, he’s gone to a better world”), so thoroughly entrapped in pre-existing discourses that they can find nothing new to say. And, of course, the adult participants in this conversation remain totally oblivious to the obvious way in which the madness of Father Flynn, “sitting up by himself in the dark in his confession-box, wide-awake and laughing-like softly to himself,” suggests a madness at the heart of Catholicism itself. This madness “made them think there was something gone wrong with him” (18), but (despite the intimations of simony in the text) never for one moment does anyone make the interpretive leap to conclude that perhaps there was something gone wrong with the institution he served and the society it so dominated.

The second Dubliners story, “An Encounter,” also features an anonymous boy-narrator. This boy may or may not be the same as the one in “The Sisters,” but it hardly matters, since all boys in Dublin would be exposed to the same oppressive limitations on their attempts at self-constitution. In this story, the boy and his friend Mahony at least make an attempt to escape the restrictive society around them. The two boys plan a day of “miching” from school in which they will act out fantasies deriving from adventure stories of the American West and other “chronicles of disorder” that they have been reading. But conditions in Dublin are far different from those described in the idealized world of popular fiction, and the boys’ romantic visions soon run up against a rather sordid reality. Instead of swashbuckling pirates and swaggering cowboys, they meet a “queer old josser” who introduces them to the shadowy world of sexual perversion.

The radical disjunction between the adventure envisioned by the boys and the reality they meet demonstrates the difficulty of constituting oneself in new and creative ways while trapped within the stultifying environment of Dublin. And the sadomasochistic nature of the preoccupations of the old josser strongly emphasizes the dynamic of domination and submission that so thoroughly informs Dublin society. The old man is virtually transported into ecstasy at the thought of whipping young boys:

He said that when boys were that kind they ought to be whipped and well whipped. When a boy was rough and unruly there was nothing would do him any good but a good sound whipping. … And if a boy had a girl for a sweetheart and told lies about it then he would give him such a whipping as no boy ever got in this world. He said that there was nothing in this world he would like so well as that. He described to me how he would whip such a boy as if he were unfolding some elaborate mystery. (27)

Per his usual practice, Joyce is careful to link this scene of sadomasochistic oppression to religion, with the repeated mention of “this world” (implying another world elsewhere) and of whipping as an “elaborate mystery.”

In “Araby” a third anonymous boy-narrator relates his own initiation into adolescent sexuality, a sexuality that will (this being Dublin) lead not to liberation but to an even greater sense of oppression. The boy lives in a house formerly occupied by a now-deceased priest, perhaps Father Flynn, perhaps not—there are plenty of priests in Dublin. Echoes of the dead priest remain in the house, including books that he once owned (several literary works of marginal quality) and a rusty bicycle-pump found under some bushes near the “central apple-tree” in the “wild garden” of the back yard (29). This Edenic imagery, invaded by the foreign image of the rusty pump, signals that “Araby,” like “An Encounter,” will be another of Joyce’s many narratives of a fall from primal innocence, narratives that will culminate in the emphasis on the myth of the Fall in Finnegans Wake.

As the story proceeds, the narrator contracts a youthful fascination with “Mangan’s sister” and begins to develop romantic visions of himself as a knight in shining armor who will win her hand with his heroics. These exotic images are further reinforced by the coming of Araby, an Orientalist bazaar that promises relief from the tedium of life in Dublin with the hints of forbidden sexuality embodied in its “Eastern enchantment” (32). Such displays were common throughout the Western world at the beginning of the twentieth century, when a burgeoning consumer capitalism sought images that were useful in marketing products, often finding “Eastern” motifs quite useful in this regard. William Leach, in a study of the rise of consumer capitalism in the U.S., concludes that “perhaps the most popular of all merchandising themes in the years before World War I was the oriental theme, fashion from the bottom up, as it were, not, as with much of Paris couture, from the top down” (Land 104). Fashion based on Oriental (especially Middle Eastern) themes had, according to Leach, a hint of something “luxurious,” but also “impermissible,” certainly exotic and perhaps a bit risqué, imbued with implied sexual energies.[112]

Mangan’s sister, unfortunately, cannot attend the bazaar, and as is usually the case in Joyce’s Dublin the limiting factor is religion—she must attend a retreat at her convent that week. So the narrator, seeing an opportunity, promises to try to bring her something from the bazaar, apparently envisioning himself as a sort of crusading knight going off to bring back plunder from the East to please his fair maiden. After difficulties with an uncle the drunkenness of whom illustrates a prime reason why Dubliners are so easily dominated by forces that they do not respect or believe in, the boy does indeed attend the bazaar. But he arrives late, finds most of the stalls closed, and anyhow must spend most of his money just to get in. Inside he finds the same banality that informs Dublin at large, turning away in shame from a booth whose denizens display the English accents that are a telltale signal of imperialistic oppression throughout Joyce’s work. The boy buys nothing for Mangan’s sister, and the grand visions engendered by his budding sexuality suddenly turn on him, overwhelming him in the darkened hall with a sense of the hopelessness of such fantasies in a Dublin so thoroughly inscribed within the quotidian: “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger” (35)

Importantly, it is not (as is often suggested) sexuality itself that causes the boy’s shame. Rather, it is the realization that his recent attempts at heroic self-envisionment were doomed to failure. The roles available to Dubliners are already predetermined by the structure of English/Catholic domination of Dublin society, with its impotent array of drunken uncles who are powerless to resist that domination. None of these roles include that of a Grail Knight.

If the adolescent boy narrator is unable to convert his newfound sexual energies into an heroic selfhood amidst the constraints of life of Dublin, matters are even worse for the city’s women. After all, unlike Mangan’s sister, the boy at least attends the bazaar, however disappointing it might be. Similarly, in “Eveline” the intensely limited nature of the roles available to women in Dublin is emphasized through the depiction of the title character, a young woman who lives alone with her violent, drunken father, who totally dominates her life. Like so many characters in Dubliners, Eveline develops fantasies of escape, fantasies that are in her case spurred by attending a light opera, The Bohemian Girl. The boys of the earlier stories identify with and hope to emulate certain heroic models, but the girl Eveline has no such models available. In The Bohemian Girl, it is not the girl who is heroic, but Thaddeus, the noble exile who saves her.[113] So Eveline likewise waits for a male savior, in particular the somewhat questionable Frank, a sailor who has recently come ashore in Dublin.

Eveline’s visions of transcendent escape parallel those of the boys in the earlier stories quite directly. She will escape to exotic Buenos Ayres, where she will find true love and happiness. But, importantly, she is unable to develop an heroic image of herself, depending instead on Frank to supply the heroism required to effect her salvation:

Escape! She must escape! Frank would save her. He would give her life, perhaps love, too. But she wanted to live. Why should she be unhappy? She had a right to happiness. Frank would take her in his arms, fold her in his arms. He would save her. (40)

As a young woman in Dublin, Eveline cannot act; she can only react. In the end, she turns away from Frank and remains with her father, but of course it makes little difference. Thoroughly trapped as an object within male fantasies and unable to establish any vision of her own selfhood outside those fantasies, Eveline will be equally dominated whether she stays or goes. So she remains within the dominion of her father, despite her loss of any belief that he merits such loyalty, just as Joyce’s Dubliners all remain inscribed within discourses of power that have no real justification.

In “After the Race” Jimmy Doyle attempts to construct a positive self-image through association with exotic foreign comrades such as the Frenchman Ségouin, the Hungarian Villona, the French-Canadian Rivière, the Englishman Routh, and the American Farley. Doyle has access to such circles because he is wealthier and better-educated than most Dubliners, but he is merely taken advantage of by his worldly acquaintances, who induce him to invest the greater part of his fortune in their racing car and then top off that exploitation by cleaning him out in a card game at the end of the story. As such, the story stands as a fairly straightforward depiction of the ongoing economic exploitation of Ireland by foreign powers. But its more important point has to do with the way in which the “gratefully oppressed” (42) Irish seem to encourage their own oppression. Thus, Jimmy pathetically welcomes his own exploitation just for the chance of association with such exalted comrades, an association that gives him an opportunity to enhance his own self-image in a way that is unavailable via indigenous Irish models.

If the Irish men find it difficult to locate native ideal images to whom they can look up for use in their own constitution, there is one group upon whom they can look down, thus enhancing their senses of self through feelings of superiority. That group, of course, is Irish women, the one group Irish men can dominate, as indicated in “Eveline.” This motif becomes even more clear in “Two Gallants,” where the cad Corley develops fantasies of power and dominance through his ability to manipulate the slavey, while Lenehan experiences a similar, though vicarious, satisfaction through watching Corley at work. Moreover, Ireland itself is consistently figured as feminine in Dubliners, so that when Corley uses his domination of the slavey to extract payment his action mirrors the way in which the masculine England extracts payment from the feminine Ireland. Indeed, as with the boy in “Araby” and with Jimmy Doyle, the payment to Corley emphasizes the specifically economic nature of the oppression suffered by the Irish people in general.

This economic theme is given a new twist in “The Boarding House,” where the institution of marriage is depicted as a purely economic arrangement. Joyce felt that marriage was a principal means through which the Church exerted its hegemony over the lives of the Irish people, and marriage comes under particular attack in the book as a stultifying habit that has lost its spiritual basis. As Foucault notes in his description of the rise of marriage in social importance during the time of the Roman Empire, the relationship of a man to his wife came to be regarded as a model of respectful relationship with the Other:

In the conjugal bond that so strongly marks the existence of each person, the spouse, as privileged partner, must be treated as a being identical to oneself and as an element with whom one forms a substantial identity. . . . The woman as spouse is valorized . . . as the other par excellence. (Foucault, Care 163-4)

For Foucault this respectful treatment of one’s wife is part of the technologies of the self through which one develops a suitable selfhood of one’s own. And though the rise of Christianity initiated numerous changes in the role of marriage, the spousal relation remained the epitome of mutual intersubjective relation in Western society. The degraded condition of marriage in Dubliners, where conjugal partners show an almost total lack of mutual affection, respect, or communication, thus stands not only as an image of the degraded form of religious institutions in general, but as a sign of the way in which self-constitution through mutual intersubjective relation almost invariably fails in Dublin. The Dublin citizenry is so accustomed to a society structured around domination and submission that they can only interact with one another on a similar basis.

Mrs. Mooney in “The Boarding House” has suffered an extremely negative experience with marriage. The drunken, violent Mr. Mooney is so bad that his wife and daughter are forced to live apart from him, though—as Catholics—the Mooneys cannot of course divorce, and indeed Mrs. Mooney is only able to effect a separation from her husband with the approval of a priest. But, inscribed within traditional discourses like most Dubliners, Mrs. Mooney unquestioningly accepts marriage as a desirable institution. Despite her own bad experience, one of Mrs. Mooney’s principal goals in life is to marry off her daughter Polly.

When Polly becomes involved in a romantic liaison with Bob Doran, this marriage plot finds its likely object—especially since Doran is employed and makes a good salary. Doran is a boarder who lives in the house run by Mrs. Mooney. He is a practicing Catholic but has no real faith in Catholicism. A former free-thinker, Doran adopts Catholicism for the purely practical reason that it allows him to acquire and maintain a job in a firm headed by a Catholic, emphasizing the economic nature of the Church’s power over Ireland. And it is also largely to keep this job that Doran knows he will have to submit to Mrs. Mooney’s demand that he marry her “dishonored” daughter, thus avoiding a scandal. The Church makes its own direct contribution in forcing Doran into marriage as well. In line with Foucault’s suggestion in the first volume of The History of Sexuality that the nineteenth-century Church employed confession as a prime means of manipulating the sexual behavior of its constituents, Doran confesses his dalliance with Polly and is pushed toward marrying her as an act of contrition:

The recollection of his confession of the night before was a cause of acute pain to him; the priest had drawn out every ridiculous detail of the affair and in the end had so magnified his sin that he was almost thankful at being afforded a loophole of reparation. (65)

Despite this sense that marriage will relieve him of the burden of his “sins,” Doran nevertheless feels that he is losing his freedom as an individual: “Once you are married you are done for,” his instinct tells him (66). But it is Polly who is constrained even more thoroughly by the institution of marriage than is her future husband. Anticipating the link between religion and venality in “Grace,” “The Boarding House” shows marriage itself as a form of prostitution, with Mrs. Mooney playing the role of procuress in the marketing of her own daughter. Indeed, the young men residing in the boarding house refer to Mrs. Mooney as “The Madam,” and Mrs. Mooney views her daughter’s relationship with Doran in highly economic terms, with marriage being viewed as a direct alternative to a monetary settlement:

Some mothers would be content to patch up such an affair for a sum of money; she had known cases of it. But she would not do so. For her only one reparation could make up for the loss of her daughter’s honour: marriage. (65)

Polly herself, a clear descendent of Shakespeare’s Ophelia, is so thoroughly inscribed within the conventions of Dublin society that she is unable to see that she is being marketed like a prostitute. Like Eveline Hill’s, Polly’s alternatives are subjugation to a domineering parent and subjugation to a husband who will probably feel so trapped in the marriage that he treats her badly. Either way she is positioned as an object within the desires of others, having little hope of independently constituting herself as a subject in her own right. In fact, her alternatives are so strictly determined by others that she has difficulty even imagining the future. As Mrs. Mooney confronts Doran downstairs, Polly waits upstairs and attempts to fantasize about her future life. Unfortunately, she finds that her mind simply goes blank until at last her mother calls to her and hands her over to her new proprietor at the end of the story. The trapped Mrs. Mooney engineers the entrapment of both Polly and Bob Doran, illustrating the vicious circle through which the Dubliners themselves encourage their own oppression by turning on one another.

Little Chandler in “A Little Cloud” feels oppressed by life in general and by his wife in particular. His friend Ignatius Gallaher refers to being married as putting one’s head in a sack (81), a model of marriage as a trap that echoes the more literal trap into which Bob Doran falls in “The Boarding House.” And Gallaher himself echoes the depiction in the previous story of marriage as a purely economic arrangement by suggesting that if he ever marries it will be not for love, but for money: “If it ever occurs, you may bet your bottom dollar there’ll be no mooning and spooning about it. I mean to marry money. She’ll have a good fat account at the bank or she won’t do for me” (81).

Gallaher’s attitude suggests that perhaps he has not escaped the mentality of Dublin, even though he has moved away and become (according to Little Chandler) “a brilliant figure on the London Press” (71). As a result, Gallaher serves as an equivocal model for Little Chandler’s own fantasies of power and capability. While he envies Gallaher’s escape from Ireland and apparent freedom, Little Chandler finds his friend somewhat disappointing as an exemplar, especially in the way that Gallaher’s vulgarity conflicts with Little Chandler’s own aestheticist notions.

Indeed, it is in the realm of poetry that Little Chandler finds the greatest potential for inspiring his own creative self-constitution beyond the banality of Dublin. Little Chandler is a great reader of poetry, but in keeping with the sterile nature of marital relations in Dublin, he finds that he is unable to share the poetry he loves with his wife. He also fancies himself as a budding poet who will someday express something great. Unfortunately, he has no idea what that something might be. Instead, his fantasies focus entirely on stylistic and formal matters as he visualizes his future fame:

The English critics, perhaps, would recognise him as one of the Celtic school by reason of the melancholy tone of his poems; besides that, he would put in allusions. He began to invent sentences and phrases from the notices which his book would get. Mr Chandler has the gift of easy and graceful verse. . . . A wistful sadness pervades these poems. . . . The Celtic note. (74)[114]

Later, when Little Chandler sits with his infant son, he attempts to escape the feeling of entrapment in his domestic situation by continuing his fantasies of becoming a poet and by reading lines from his hero, Lord Byron.

But Little Chandler’s escapist view of literature is ineffective: it is not engaged with the reality of his condition but is sealed off in a private aesthetic world—just as Little Chandler keeps his love of poetry private and sealed off from his wife. He is brought back to earth by the crying of his child, to which he reacts angrily, causing the child to sob more violently. At this point, the boy’s mother returns and takes him into her arms, accusing Little Chandler of inadequacy as a father, an indictment which he himself appears to endorse with a blush and guilty tears of his own.

Little Chandler’s attempt to take out his own frustrations on his son foreshadow Farrington’s treatment of his own son in “Counterparts.” In this story the copyist Farrington is humiliated at work by his boss Mr. Alleyne, ignored by the cool woman in Mulligan’s Pub, then defeated at arm wrestling by the acrobat Weathers. He then goes home, his self-image damaged by all these indignities, and takes out his frustrations by beating his son, who is small and weak enough to let Farrington be dominant for once.

As is usually the case in Joyce’s work, Farrington’s story has very specific political implications. In particular, all three of Farrington’s central tormentors are linked to England—Mr. Alleyne has a “North of Ireland” accent, with its hints of Protestantism and British sympathies; the woman has a “London” accent; and Weathers is a member of a visiting troupe of British acrobats. Indeed, the arm wrestling match with Weathers is specifically couched as a contest between England and Ireland, with the Irishman Farrington called on “to uphold the national honour” (95). Ireland, of course, loses, and Farrington’s resultant abuse of his son becomes a powerful commentary on the way in which Ireland has reacted to British domination by turning on her own, as in the case of Parnell, that Irish hero who was betrayed by the constituency he sought to serve.

In “Clay” we are presented with a heroine, Maria, who is not married, but whose life is still sterile and empty. Maria comforts herself with illusions of her own independence and capability, convincing herself that it is only by choice that she is not wed or living with loving friends. But Maria’s highly mediated interpretation of the world and its events seems consistently at odds with reality, and she winds up a pathetic figure, the butt of cruel jokes that she is too deluded even to understand. Maria at least makes an attempt at creative self-constitution, but like Little Chandler’s forays into literature, her attempts are divorced from reality and thus unable to achieve any significant improvement in the conditions of her life.

James Duffy, in “A Painful Case,” is a sort of companion figure to Maria in that he, too, comforts himself with delusory images of his own autonomy and independence of any need for intersubjective succor. He lives alone out in the Dublin suburb of Chapelizod “because he wished to live as far as possible from the city of which he was a citizen” (107), and the interactions he uses in his own efforts at self-constitution are not with other people, but with his own possessions, which he carefully selects to reflect his personality:

He himself had bought every article of furniture in the room: a black iron bedstead, an iron washstand, four cane chairs, a clothes-rack, a coal-scuttle, a fender and irons and a square table on which lay a double desk. (107)

Duffy, like Little Chandler, involves himself in literary pursuits, such as translating Hauptmann’s Michael Kramer. And like Little Chandler he fantasizes about his life as it might be viewed as a biographer:

He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a predicate in the past tense. (109)

However, unlike Little Chandler, Duffy has no plans to publish his own writings, since he feels that he is too superior to lower himself to the standards of the mob to whom such writings would be marketed. He sees himself as a noble, solitary hero amidst the common rabble of Dublin, and fantasizes about committing some transgression such as robbing a bank to show his disdain for the rules of ordinary society.

But Duffy, a reader of Nietzsche, is more a bitter Nietzschean slave ruled by ressentiment than a defiant Nietzschean hero. And despite his protestations of independence, when he meets Emily Sinico he finds that her apparent admiration for him greatly buoys his self-image. He expounds to his new friend on a variety of topics, building his confidence as he goes: “Sometimes he caught himself listening to the sound of his own voice. He thought that in her eyes he would ascend to an angelic stature” (111). But Duffy’s narcissistic fascination with his own voice demonstrates the way in which he is unable to relate to others, including Emily Sinico: “as he attached the fervent nature of his companion more and more closely to him, he heard the strange impersonal voice which he recognised as his own, insisting on the soul’s incurable loneliness” (111).

Indeed, “A Painful Case” is one of the more powerful dramatizations of the failure of intersubjective relationship in all of Dubliners. Emily Sinico is married, but like most married Dubliners, she has little communication with her spouse, so she turns to Duffy, though on an intellectual basis, at least at first. But Duffy, terrified and disgusted by the intense intersubjective union implied by sex, turns her away when he begins to suspect that she desires a sexual relationship with him. As Duffy cynically summarizes the state of intersubjectivity in Dublin,

Love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse. (112)

The rejected Emily Sinico becomes a lonely and pathetic figure who eventually commits suicide. Reading of her death, Duffy is revolted that he could have once befriended someone who could display such weakness. If his relationship with her had once exalted him, now he feels that it degrades him. Then he begins to experience guilt and to feel that he had “sentenced her to ignominy, a death of shame” (117). But many factors contributed to Emily’s death, and Duffy’s estimation of his own role seems highly inflated, in keeping with his usual megalomaniacal fantasies. In the end he returns to his solitary and empty life, a perfect mirror of the Dublin to which he thinks himself so superior.

At one point, Duffy’s fantasies of rebellion had led him to a participation in politics as a member of the Irish Socialist Party, where “he had felt himself a unique figure amidst a score of sober workmen lit by an inefficient oil-lamp” (110-1). This brief but unsatisfactory political experience leads him to believe that “[n]o social revolution . . . would be likely to strike Dublin for some centuries” (111). The decayed condition of Dublin’s political parties mirrors the way in which all of the city’s traditional structures of authority have become sterile, even while maintaining their ability to control the lives of the local citizenry. In “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” we are introduced to a number of characters, most of whom are canvassers working in the interests of Richard Tierney, a candidate for election to the municipal council of Dublin. These characters run the gamut of political opinion, but none of them shows the slightest hint of ideological dedication to their candidate. Instead, they are working strictly for payment in money and (of course) liquor. As Mat O’Connor grumbles when they have difficulty getting Tierney to come across with their wages, “How does he expect us to work for him if he won’t stump up?” (123).

The canvassers in “Ivy Day” in fact have so little faith in Tierney that they suspect that they might not be paid at all. Meanwhile, the setting of the story on Ivy Day, the anniversary of the death of Charles Stewart Parnell sets up a sharp contrast between the degraded condition of contemporary politics, represented by “Tricky Dicky” Tierney and his cronies, and the past glories of Parnell. The talk of the men gathered in the committee room gradually turns to Parnell as the story proceeds. It becomes clear, however, that even Parnell has lost his efficacy as an image of Irish nobility and independence. “We all respect him now that he’s dead and gone,” says O’Connor (132), and dead and gone he is. His name no longer carries its former force, and when the loyal Parnellite Hynes recites his poem “The Death of Parnell” it becomes clear that Parnell has now been safely circumscribed within such sentimental fictions. The conservative Orangeman Crofton can agree that Hynes’ poem is “a very fine piece of writing” because Parnell no longer poses any real political threat (135). Joyce’s Dubliners are sadly lacking in the kind of heroes who can inspire them to move beyond the stereotypical roles assigned to them by their stagnant society.

Hynes’ poem is one of many instances in Dubliners of the sterility of art as a resource for creative self-constitution within the context of Dublin life. In “A Mother” we see a suggestion that art in Dublin, like marriage and religion, has become just another form of prostitution. When Kathleen Kearney is engaged to play piano in a concert, the poor house leads her concerned mother to demand payment in advance. The resulting debate between Mrs. Kearney and the organizers of the concert makes it clear that Kathleen is playing not for the love of music, but strictly for cash—a commodity that is the main interest of the concert organizers as well. Moreover, the concert is being held to raise funds for the “Eire Abu Society,” a group organized in support of the Irish revival, so that the artistic simony of Mrs. Kearney and the lack of attendance at the concert show the lack of dedication of Dubliners to such movements.

Mrs. Kearney, like so many characters in Dubliners, reinforces her own self-constitution largely through visions of her superiority over her fellow citizens, as when she mocks to herself the flat accents of the members of the concert committee. When she was young she felt herself too good to marry any of the young men who courted her, then she eventually married Mr. Kearney to quiet talk about her independence. Mr. Kearney is a weak and ineffectual figure whom Mrs. Kearney clearly dominates, just as she dominates and exploits her daughter. His wife takes him along for support at the concert because “she appreciated his abstract value as a male” (141). But he turns out to be utterly of no use in the ensuing squabble, a scene which illustrates the way in which Dubliners consistently work against, rather than with one another in seeking to achieve their goals.

The simoniacal condition of art and patriotism in “A Mother” leads back to the theme that began the book, and the degraded form of religious authority in Dublin is particularly emphasized in the next story, “Grace.” Tom Kernan, the story’s central figure, is a former Protestant who converted to Catholicism upon his marriage to a Catholic woman, but who appears (like Bob Doran) to have no particular devotion to his new religion and doubts the efficacy of Catholic ritual, that “magic-lantern business” (171). He is fond of “giving side-thrusts at Catholicism” (157), but social pressures induce him to live his life nominally as a Catholic. Mrs. Kernan herself regards religion as a mechanical adherence to routine that gives order to life, if not meaning:

Religion for her was a habit . . . Her beliefs were not extravagant. She believed steadily in the Sacred Heart as the most generally useful of all Catholic devotions and approved of the sacraments. Her faith was bounded by her kitchen but, if she was put to it, she could believe also in the banshee and in the Holy Ghost. (157-8)

This same practical attitude toward religion informs the behavior of the other characters in “Grace” as well. As Kernan lies in bed recuperating from a fall taken under the influence of alcohol, that ubiquitous Irish curse, several friends visit him in an attempt to encourage his reformation through religion. But even while on this devout mission, the visitors spend most of their time drinking and undercutting Church authority. As they down stout and whiskey, they discuss various priests who give unconventional sermons or who espouse unorthodox theology. And when Kernan suggests that Protestants and Catholics hold the same fundamental beliefs, the men agree, though Martin Cunningham reminds them that “our religion is the religion, the old, original faith” (166). Kernan quickly agrees, but the implication seems clear—Catholicism is accepted as the only valid religion not because of its superior spiritual authority, but simply out of long habit.

This suggestion is reinforced soon afterward when the talk turns to popes, those ultimate figures of human religious authority. Kernan mentions

that some popes have apparently not been “up to the knocker” (168). Cunningham admits that some popes have been “bad lots,” but then mentions the “astonishing” fact that, by definition, the pope is infallible in religious matters, so that “not one of them ever preached ex cathedra a word of false doctrine.”

In short, the pope’s word is to be accepted as binding even if the pope himself is a disreputable and untrustworthy figure, mirroring the way in which Catholicism holds its power over Ireland irregardless of its own legitimacy as a spiritual model. This point is then made even more clear when Cunningham relates (somewhat inaccurately) the debate in the Vatican Council at which the doctrine of papal infallibility was officially confirmed. According to Cunningham two stalwarts held out against the doctrine, the Irishman John MacHale and the German Cardinal Dowling. But the pope, in a masterpiece of circular logic, ends the debate by simply declaring papal infallibility a Church doctrine, which must be correct because he is the pope and therefore infallible. Dowling, representing a country with a tradition of resistance to papal authority, leaves the Church in defiance. But MacHale, representing a country with a tradition of blind obedience to the Church regardless of true belief, immediately surrenders despite his personal disagreement: “he submitted the moment the Pope spoke” (170).

This suggestion that the Church in Ireland has become a locus not of spiritual values, but of mere political and secular power, is dramatized most vividly at the close of the story. The men convince Kernan to attend a Church meeting as part of their attempt to reform him. At the meeting, they are addressed by one Father Purdon, whom Joyce subtly names after Dublin’s most notorious street of prostitution. And the name is highly appropriate. True to the theme of simony that runs so strongly throughout Dubliners, Purdon is a sort of priestly prostitute who hooks his clientele of businessmen by telling them what they want to hear, reassuring them that God understands that they must deal with their worldly affairs in addition to religious ones. Purdon characterizes himself as a “spiritual accountant,” anticipating that heavenly cash register to be later envisioned by Stephen Dedalus in Portrait (174). It is okay to live in the world of secular affairs, says Purdon, as long as one sets one’s accounts right with God—an activity that no doubt entails the giving of considerable contributions to the Church.

Despite its degraded condition, the Church still maintains its power over the everyday lives of Dubliners, as demonstrated by the fact that Tom Kernan is forced to convert to Catholicism in order to marry the woman of his choice. But the institution of marriage is even more oppressive to Mrs. Kernan (who, significantly, is given no other name in the story.) Seduced by a conventional narrative of romantic love, the future Mrs. Kernan found Tom a gallant figure during their courtship and entertained blissful visions of their married life to come. But the new bride very quickly begins to feel stifled, finding the marriage first “irksome” and then “unbearable” (156). She manages to survive by devoting her life to her children when they come along, and she remains a loyal wife despite her own feelings of entrapment in the relationship. Like most Dubliners, she is unable to transcend strictly stereotypical narratives of the way life is supposed to be; she even maintains her romantic illusions about marriage, and “she still hurried to the chapel door whenever a wedding was reported” to view the bridal pair (156).

The kind of romantic fantasies informing Mrs. Kernan’s view of marriage become especially prominent in “The Dead,” where the culminating exchange between Gabriel and Gretta Conroy is prepared by similar fantasies. Both spouses spend the time leading to this final scene immersed in romantic visions, but (in keeping with the usual failure of conjugal communication in Dubliners) each partner is lost in a separate narrative that is not shared by the other. Gabriel entertains romanticized memories of his past with Gretta, while Gretta remembers her distant encounter with the long-dead Michael Furey. But neither of these fantasies has very much to do with reality—Gretta is not so entirely circumscribed within his fantasies as Gabriel would like to believe, and Gretta’s belief that Michael Furey died of love for her is just as suspect as James Duffy’s belief that Emily Sinico died for him.

At the same time, “The Dead”contains significantly more wordplay and verbal energy than do the earlier Dubliners stories. From the very first sentence—”Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet”—the language of the story is infused with irony. Lily, after all, is still on her feet and so has not literally been run off them. It also contains substantially more humor, much of it at the expense of the somewhat puffed-up Gabriel, who in this sense is something of a forerunner to Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. Still, even the story’s most comical moment—as in the tale of the “never-to-be-forgotten Johnny”—can make serious points. Johnny is an Irish horse who walks in circles around a statue of King Billy (the British King William III, famous for his victory over the Irish in the Battle of the Boyne in 1690), much as the Dubliners of the book in general tend to circle endlessly without getting anywhere, caught in the gravitational grip of British (and Catholic) power.

Clearly, the fantasies of both Gabriel and Gretta are ineffective in helping them to break out of such circles and to transcend the conditions of life in Dublin, because both fantasies are so unrealistic. As Vincent Pecora notes, “Gretta fabricates the ‘legend’ of Michael Furey, just as surely as Gabriel has fabricated his ‘secret life’ with Gretta” (241). Yet when Gabriel learns in the end of the story of Gretta’s past relationship with Michael Furey, it would seem that here is a real opportunity for communication between the two spouses and for a new engagement with reality. If nothing else, Gabriel learns that Gretta has an existence and a life apart from his and that she does not exist merely for the purposes of shoring up his own self-image.

Indeed, this ending scene has often been read in precisely this way. Brown suggests that Gabriel’s “discovery that his wife is a stranger to him is a real contact with another subjectivity” (98). Thus, Gabriel can move beyond his own solipsistic concerns and toward a genuine involvement with others. If so, he will have an opportunity to experience intersubjective relationship in a productive way that is not available in any of the earlier Dubliners stories. To Brown, Gabriel in the final scene of the story learns that “[j]ust as the idea of a separate ego or identity is an illusion, so too is the notion of an external and self-contained world. The self is in the world and the world is in the self” (100).

But a close reading of Gabriel’s supposed epiphany at the end of the story shows that his sense of fading ego arises not from an acceptance of the world but from a turning away from it, from a desire to join the romanticized world of the Michael Furey and his fellow dead:

Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. … His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling. (223)

Rather than facing reality Gabriel simply exchanges his fantasy for Gretta’s more powerful one, envisioning himself in the role of sacrificial hero formerly occupied by Michael Furey.

Gabriel Conroy remains at the end of “The Dead” as thoroughly inscribed within conventional narratives as ever. And, importantly, the narrative within which he envisions himself is (for Joyce) one that has contributed powerfully to the oppressive conditions of life in Dublin. The Irish penchant for self-sacrifice is particularly related to the tradition of Christianity, and indeed Michael Furey is specifically surrounded by images associated with Christ at the end of “The Dead,” as when we are told that the snow in the churchyard where he was buried “lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns” (223-4). Gabriel’s identification of himself with Furey as a sacrificial hero thus mirrors the movement through which Christianity has imposed an ideology of sacrifice on Ireland, an ideology that contributes to the domination of Ireland by foreign forces. Pecora discusses Joyce’s skepticism toward the tradition of the self-sacrificial hero in his treatment of Gabriel, noting that “Gabriel might be one of the bloodiest impostors of all, caught within the whole structure of a heroism … derived from the life of Christ” (237).[115]

It would seem, then, that none of the characters in Dubliners offer successful examples of a creative kind of self-constitution that will allow them to escape the strictly predefined roles that Dublin society imposes upon them. But the situation may not be hopeless. Joyce does gesture toward such an example in the style of the text itself. His own fiction (unlike the fictions created by the various characters in Dubliners) is intensely engaged with reality so that it has an opportunity to impact that reality in productive ways. Moreover, the consistent use of free indirect style in the book results in a dialogic interaction among the voices of various characters and narrators that embodies the kind of mutual intersubjective exchange that the characters themselves fail to establish in their lives.[116] This dialogic fusion of voices occurs most completely in “The Dead,” and especially in the final scene where the voice of the narrator becomes virtually indistinguishable from that of Gabriel Conroy. Moreover, the lyrical style of “The Dead” represents a significant departure from the style of scrupulous meanness informing the other stories, suggesting the beginnings of an awakening from paralysis. In this sense, then, the final Dubliners story does in fact represent a potential move toward a solution to the lack of meaningful intersubjective relationship afflicting the populace of Dublin.

MacCabe discusses the way in which the complex voicing of Dubliners results in a rich mixture of discourses, no one of which occupies a privileged position. As a result, the reader is given a great deal of freedom to determine her own attitude toward the stories:

These stories function as collections of stereotypes without any discourse that will contain or resolve them. The narrative, in its refusal of a discourse which will explain everything, resists the reduction of the various discourses to one discourse shared by author and reader. (30)

In short, Dubliners refuses to manipulate its readers into strictly defined subjective positions, allowing them to explore alternative positions precisely in the way that the characters in the book are unable to do.

Finally, it should be remembered that “The Dead” is much more complex, energetic, and even comical than the earlier stories in Dubliners. As a result, if the character of the stories get nowhere, Joyce himself, through his writing, embodies the possibility of moving beyond the meanness of Dublin and into richer, more utopian territory. That he would continue on this trajectory in his later works reinforces this phenomenon, making Dubliners a text that is ultimately much more hopeful than any of the actual stories it contains.

All of Joyce’s texts demand an extraordinary amount of effort on the part of the reader, but in the same movement they cede to the reader a remarkable portion of the power to produce meaning normally associated with the role of the author. Despite his sometime-reputation as the great master of modernist fiction, Joyce himself eschews authorial mastery, constructing texts that are open to widely differing interpretations. The process of reading a Joycean text, then, is a creative exploration, and one must develop one’s own position as a reader, serving as an example of the very kind of creative activity that is involved in constituting oneself as a subject in the world.

NOTES

EXEMPLARY TEXT:

JAMES JOYCE, “Telemachus”—from ULYSSES (1922)

One of the hallmarks of Ulysses is the intricate interconnectedness of its different parts. At the same time, each of the eighteen chapters has a character of its own and stands apart more than do the individuals chapters of any other novel. Each has been given a title by scholars based on its relationship to Homer’s Odyssey, and much scholarship on Ulysses actually addresses individualchapters rather than the entire book. As the first chapter begins, it is the morning of June 16, 1904, a Thursday. Young poet Stephen Dedalus (age 22) has been back in Ireland for nearly a year, having returned from Paris due to the serious illness of his mother, who died soon afterward. He is still in mourning eleven months later. We know Stephen already if we follow Joyce, because he is the protagonist of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), which tracks his development from early childhood until his departure for France at the end of the novel. With housing scarce in Dublin, Stephen and his friend Buck Mulligan (joined by the Englishman Haines, who is in Ireland to study Irish culture) are living in the Dublin suburb of Sandycove in a Martello Tower, one of the short, round, squat towers that were built by the British at various points around their empire as coastal fortifications—largely to guard against French invasions, given the level of tensions between the British and postrevolutionary France. These tensions, in fact, led to an uprising in Ireland in 1798, aided by a planned French invasion, but the invasion was mostly aborted due to bad weather at sea. The uprising subsequently collapsed. The British colonial domination of Ireland is thus established as important background to the text from the very beginning. At the same time, the setting is quite realistic. Joyce’s friend Oliver St. John Gogarty once rented a Martello Tower, and Joyce stayed there with him for a time. The tower in which Joyce stayed (and which inspired the tower in which Stephen is staying) is now maintained as a museum in modern-day Dublin. Many aspects of Stephen’s character and experience are based on those of Joyce, though Joyce views him with irony as he looks back from the standpoint of a much more mature man and artist. As the chapter begins, Mulligan is preparing to begin his morning shave on the flat top of the tower, a procedure that he undertakes in parody of the Catholic mass. He calls Stephen to come up and join him.

* Stately, plump Buck Mulligan[3] came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft[4] and intoned:

—Introibo ad altare Dei.[5]

Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called out coarsely:

—Come up, Kinch![6] Come up, you fearful jesuit![7]

Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest.[8] He faced about and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding land and the awaking mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat and shaking his head. Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking gurgling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak.

Buck Mulligan peeped an instant under the mirror and then covered the bowl smartly.

—Back to barracks! he said sternly.

He added in a preacher’s tone:

—For this, O dearly beloved, is the genuine christine[9]: body and soul and blood and ouns.[10] Slow music, please. Shut your eyes, gents. One moment. A little trouble about those white corpuscles.[11] Silence, all.

He peered sideways up and gave a long slow whistle of call, then paused awhile in rapt attention, his even white teeth glistening here and there with gold points. Chrysostomos.[12] Two strong shrill whistles answered through the calm.[13]

—Thanks, old chap, he cried briskly. That will do nicely. Switch off the current, will you?[14]

He skipped off the gunrest and looked gravely at his watcher, gathering about his legs the loose folds of his gown. The plump shadowed face and sullen oval jowl recalled a prelate, patron of arts in the middle ages.[15] A pleasant smile broke quietly over his lips.

—The mockery of it! he said gaily. Your absurd name, an ancient Greek![16]

He pointed his finger in friendly jest and went over to the parapet, laughing to himself. Stephen Dedalus stepped up, followed him wearily halfway and sat down on the edge of the gunrest, watching him still as he propped his mirror on the parapet, dipped the brush in the bowl and lathered cheeks and neck.

Buck Mulligan’s gay voice went on.

—My name is absurd too: Malachi Mulligan, two dactyls.[17] But it has a Hellenic ring, hasn’t it?[18] Tripping and sunny like the buck himself. We must go to Athens. Will you come if I can get the aunt to fork out twenty quid?

He laid the brush aside and, laughing with delight, cried:

—Will he come? The jejune jesuit!

Ceasing, he began to shave with care.

—Tell me, Mulligan, Stephen said quietly.

—Yes, my love?

—How long is Haines going to stay in this tower?[19]

Buck Mulligan showed a shaven cheek over his right shoulder.

—God, isn’t he dreadful? he said frankly. A ponderous Saxon. He thinks you’re not a gentleman. God, these bloody English! Bursting with money and indigestion. Because he comes from Oxford. You know, Dedalus, you have the real Oxford manner. He can’t make you out. O, my name for you is the best: Kinch, the knife-blade. He shaved warily over his chin.

—He was raving all night about a black panther, Stephen said. Where is his guncase?

—A woful lunatic! Mulligan said. Were you in a funk?

—I was, Stephen said with energy and growing fear. Out here in the dark with a man I don’t know raving and moaning to himself about shooting a black panther. You saved men from drowning. I’m not a hero, however. If he stays on here I am off.

Buck Mulligan frowned at the lather on his razorblade. He hopped down from his perch and began to search his trouser pockets hastily.

—Scutter! he cried thickly.

He came over to the gunrest and, thrusting a hand into Stephen’s upper pocket, said:

—Lend us a loan of your noserag to wipe my razor.

Stephen suffered him to pull out and hold up on show by its corner a dirty crumpled handkerchief. Buck Mulligan wiped the razorblade neatly. Then, gazing over the handkerchief, he said:

—The bard’s noserag! A new art colour for our Irish poets: snotgreen. You can almost taste it, can’t you?[20]

He mounted to the parapet again and gazed out over Dublin bay, his fair oakpale hair stirring slightly.

—God! he said quietly. Isn’t the sea what Algy[21] calls it: a great sweet mother?[22] The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea[23]. Epi oinopa ponton.[24] Ah, Dedalus, the Greeks! I must teach you. You must read them in the original. Thalatta! Thalatta![25] She is our great sweet mother. Come and look.

Stephen stood up and went over to the parapet. Leaning on it he looked down on the water and on the mailboat clearing the harbourmouth of Kingstown[26].

—Our mighty mother![27] Buck Mulligan said.

He turned abruptly his grey searching eyes from the sea to Stephen’s face.

—The aunt thinks you killed your mother, he said. That’s why she won’t let me have anything to do with you.[28]

—Someone killed her, Stephen said gloomily.[29]

—You could have knelt down, damn it, Kinch, when your dying mother asked you, Buck Mulligan said. I’m hyperborean[30] as much as you. But to think of your mother begging you with her last breath to kneel down and pray for her. And you refused. There is something sinister in you …

He broke off and lathered again lightly his farther cheek. A tolerant smile curled his lips.

—But a lovely mummer![31] he murmured to himself. Kinch, the loveliest mummer of them all!

He shaved evenly and with care, in silence, seriously.

Stephen, an elbow rested on the jagged granite, leaned his palm against his brow and gazed at the fraying edge of his shiny black coat-sleeve. Pain, that was not yet the pain of love,[32] fretted his heart. Silently, in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes. Across the threadbare cuffedge he saw the sea hailed as a great sweet mother by the wellfed voice beside him. The ring of bay and skyline held a dull green mass of liquid. A bowl of white china had stood beside her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting.

Buck Mulligan wiped again his razorblade.

—Ah, poor dogsbody![33] he said in a kind voice. I must give you a shirt and a few noserags. How are the secondhand breeks?

—They fit well enough, Stephen answered.

Buck Mulligan attacked the hollow beneath his underlip.

—The mockery of it, he said contentedly. Secondleg they should be. God knows what poxy bowsy left them off. I have a lovely pair with a hairstripe, grey. You’ll look spiffing in them. I’m not joking, Kinch. You look damn well when you’re dressed.

—Thanks, Stephen said. I can’t wear them if they are grey.[34]

—He can’t wear them, Buck Mulligan told his face in the mirror. Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can’t wear grey trousers.[35]

He folded his razor neatly and with stroking palps of fingers felt the smooth skin.

Stephen turned his gaze from the sea and to the plump face with its smokeblue mobile eyes.

—That fellow I was with in the Ship[36] last night, said Buck Mulligan, says you have g.p.i. He’s up in Dottyville with Connolly Norman. General paralysis of the insane![37]

He swept the mirror a half circle in the air to flash the tidings abroad in sunlight now radiant on the sea. His curling shaven lips laughed and the edges of his white glittering teeth. Laughter seized all his strong wellknit trunk.

—Look at yourself, he said, you dreadful bard!

Stephen bent forward and peered at the mirror held out to him, cleft by a crooked crack. Hair on end. As he and others see me. Who chose this face for me? This dogsbody to rid of vermin.[38] It asks me too.

—I pinched it out of the skivvy’s[39] room, Buck Mulligan said. It does her all right. The aunt always keeps plainlooking servants for Malachi. Lead him not into temptation.[40] And her name is Ursula.[41]

Laughing again, he brought the mirror away from Stephen’s peering eyes.

—The rage of Caliban at not seeing his face in a mirror, he said. If Wilde were only alive to see you![42]

Drawing back and pointing, Stephen said with bitterness:

—It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked looking-glass of a servant.[43]

Buck Mulligan suddenly linked his arm in Stephen’s and walked with him round the tower, his razor and mirror clacking in the pocket where he had thrust them.

—It’s not fair to tease you like that, Kinch, is it? he said kindly. God knows you have more spirit than any of them.

Parried again. He fears the lancet of my art as I fear that of his. The cold steelpen.

—Cracked lookingglass of a servant! Tell that to the oxy chap[44] downstairs and touch him for a guinea. He’s stinking with money and thinks you’re not a gentleman. His old fellow made his tin by selling jalap to Zulus or some bloody swindle or other.[45] God, Kinch, if you and I could only work together we might do something for the island. Hellenise it.[46]

Cranly’s arm. His arm.[47]

—And to think of your having to beg from these swine. I’m the only one that knows what you are. Why don’t you trust me more? What have you up your nose against me? Is it Haines? If he makes any noise here I’ll bring down Seymour and we’ll give him a ragging worse than they gave Clive Kempthorpe.[48]

Young shouts of moneyed voices in Clive Kempthorpe’s rooms. Palefaces: they hold their ribs with laughter, one clasping another. O, I shall expire! Break the news to her gently,[49] Aubrey! I shall die! With slit ribbons of his shirt whipping the air he hops and hobbles round the

table, with trousers down at heels, chased by Ades of Magdalen[50] with the tailor’s shears. A scared calf’s face gilded with marmalade. I don’t want to be debagged![51] Don’t you play the giddy ox with me!

Shouts from the open window startling evening in the quadrangle. A deaf gardener, aproned, masked with Matthew Arnold’s[52] face, pushes his mower on the sombre lawn watching narrowly the dancing motes of grasshalms.[53]

To ourselves … new paganism … omphalos.[54]

—Let him stay, Stephen said. There’s nothing wrong with him except at night.

—Then what is it? Buck Mulligan asked impatiently. Cough it up. I’m quite frank with you. What have you against me now?

They halted, looking towards the blunt cape of Bray Head[55] that lay on the water like the snout of a sleeping whale. Stephen freed his arm quietly.

—Do you wish me to tell you? he asked.

—Yes, what is it? Buck Mulligan answered. I don’t remember anything.

He looked in Stephen’s face as he spoke. A light wind passed his brow, fanning softly his fair uncombed hair and stirring silver points of anxiety in his eyes.

Stephen, depressed by his own voice, said:

—Do you remember the first day I went to your house after my mother’s death?

Buck Mulligan frowned quickly and said:

—What? Where? I can’t remember anything. I remember only ideas and

sensations.[56] Why? What happened in the name of God?

—You were making tea, Stephen said, and went across the landing to get more hot water. Your mother and some visitor came out of the drawingroom. She asked you who was in your room.

—Yes? Buck Mulligan said. What did I say? I forget.

—You said, Stephen answered, O, it’s only Dedalus whose mother is beastly dead.

A flush which made him seem younger and more engaging rose to Buck Mulligan’s cheek.

—Did I say that? he asked. Well? What harm is that?

He shook his constraint from him nervously.

—And what is death, he asked, your mother’s or yours or my own? You saw only your mother die. I see them pop off every day in the Mater[57] and Richmond[58] and cut up into tripes in the dissectingroom. It’s a beastly thing and nothing else. It simply doesn’t matter. You wouldn’t kneel down to pray for your mother on her deathbed when she asked you. Why? Because you have the cursed jesuit strain in you, only it’s injected the wrong way[59]. To me it’s all a mockery and beastly. Her cerebral lobes are not functioning.[60] She calls the doctor sir Peter Teazle[61] and picks buttercups off the quilt. Humour her till it’s over. You crossed her last wish in death and yet you sulk with me because I don’t whinge like some hired mute from Lalouette’s.[62] Absurd! I suppose I did say it. I didn’t mean to offend the memory of your mother.

He had spoken himself into boldness. Stephen, shielding the gaping wounds which the words had left in his heart,[63] said very coldly:

—I am not thinking of the offence to my mother.

—Of what then? Buck Mulligan asked.

—Of the offence to me, Stephen answered.

Buck Mulligan swung round on his heel.

—O, an impossible person! he exclaimed.

He walked off quickly round the parapet. Stephen stood at his post, gazing over the calm sea towards the headland. Sea and headland now grew dim. Pulses were beating in his eyes, veiling their sight, and he felt the fever of his cheeks.

A voice within the tower called loudly:

—Are you up there, Mulligan?

—I’m coming, Buck Mulligan answered.

He turned towards Stephen and said:

—Look at the sea. What does it care about offences? Chuck Loyola,[64] Kinch, and come on down. The Sassenach[65] wants his morning rashers.[66]

His head halted again for a moment at the top of the staircase, level with the roof:

—Don’t mope over it all day, he said. I’m inconsequent. Give up the moody brooding.

His head vanished but the drone of his descending voice boomed out of the stairhead:

—And no more turn aside and brood

Upon love’s bitter mystery

For Fergus rules the brazen cars.[67]

Woodshadows[68] floated silently by through the morning peace from the stairhead seaward where he gazed. Inshore and farther out the mirror of water whitened, spurned by lightshod hurrying feet. White breast of the dim sea.[69] The twining stresses, two by two. A hand plucking the harpstrings, merging their twining chords. Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the dim tide.[70]

A cloud began to cover the sun slowly, wholly, shadowing the bay in deeper green. It lay beneath him, a bowl of bitter waters. Fergus’ song: I sang it alone in the house, holding down the long dark chords. Her door was open: she wanted to hear my music. Silent with awe and pity I went to her bedside. She was crying in her wretched bed. For those words, Stephen: love’s bitter mystery.

Where now?

Her secrets: old featherfans, tasselled dancecards, powdered with musk, a gaud of amber beads in her locked drawer.[71] A birdcage hung in the sunny window of her house when she was a girl. She heard old Royce[72] sing in the pantomime[73] of Turko the Terrible[74] and laughed with others when he sang:

I am the boy

That can enjoy

Invisibility.[75]

Phantasmal mirth, folded away: muskperfumed.

And no more turn aside and brood.[76]

Folded away in the memory of nature with her toys.[77] Memories beset his brooding brain. Her glass of water from the kitchen tap when she had approached the sacrament. A cored apple, filled with brown sugar, roasting for her at the hob on a dark autumn evening. Her shapely fingernails reddened by the blood of squashed lice from the children’s shirts.

In a dream, silently, she had come to him, her wasted body within its loose graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, bent over him with mute secret words, a faint odour of wetted ashes.

Her glazing eyes, staring out of death, to shake and bend my soul. On me alone. The ghostcandle to light her agony. Ghostly light on the tortured face.[78] Her hoarse loud breath rattling in horror, while all prayed on their knees. Her eyes on me to strike me down. Liliata rutilantium te confessorum turma circumdet: iubilantium te virginum chorus excipiat.[79]

Ghoul! Chewer of corpses![80]

No, mother! Let me be and let me live.

—Kinch ahoy!

Buck Mulligan’s voice sang from within the tower. It came nearer up the staircase, calling again. Stephen, still trembling at his soul’s cry, heard warm running sunlight[81] and in the air behind him friendly words.

—Dedalus, come down, like a good mosey. Breakfast is ready. Haines is apologising for waking us last night. It’s all right.

—I’m coming, Stephen said, turning.

—Do, for Jesus’ sake, Buck Mulligan said. For my sake and for all our sakes.

His head disappeared and reappeared.

—I told him your symbol of Irish art. He says it’s very clever. Touch him for a quid, will you? A guinea, I mean.[82]

—I get paid this morning, Stephen said.[83]

—The school kip?[84] Buck Mulligan said. How much? Four quid? Lend us one.

—If you want it, Stephen said.

—Four shining sovereigns, Buck Mulligan cried with delight. We’ll have a glorious drunk to astonish the druidy druids. Four omnipotent sovereigns.[85]

He flung up his hands and tramped down the stone stairs, singing out oftune with a Cockney accent:[86]

—O, won’t we have a merry time,

Drinking whisky, beer and wine!

On coronation,

Coronation day!

O, won’t we have a merry time

On coronation day![87]

Warm sunshine merrying over the sea. The nickel shavingbowl shone, forgotten, on the parapet. Why should I bring it down? Or leave it there all day, forgotten friendship?

He went over to it, held it in his hands awhile, feeling its coolness, smelling the clammy slaver[88] of the lather in which the brush was stuck. So I carried the boat of incense then at Clongowes.[89] I am another now and yet the same.[90] A servant too.[91] A server of a servant.

In the gloomy domed livingroom of the tower Buck Mulligan’s gowned form moved briskly to and fro about the hearth, hiding and revealing its yellow glow. Two shafts of soft daylight fell across the flagged floor from the high barbacans:[92] and at the meeting of their rays a cloud of coalsmoke and fumes of fried grease floated, turning.[93]

—We’ll be choked, Buck Mulligan said. Haines, open that door, will you?[94]

Stephen laid the shavingbowl on the locker. A tall figure rose from the hammock where it had been sitting, went to the doorway and pulled open the inner doors.

—Have you the key? a voice asked.

—Dedalus has it, Buck Mulligan said. Janey Mack,[95] I’m choked!

He howled, without looking up from the fire:

—Kinch!

—It’s in the lock, Stephen said, coming forward.

The key scraped round harshly twice and, when the heavy door had been set ajar, welcome light and bright air entered. Haines stood at the doorway, looking out. Stephen haled his upended valise to the table and sat down to wait. Buck Mulligan tossed the fry on to the dish beside him. Then he carried the dish and a large teapot over to the table, set them down heavily and sighed with relief.

—I’m melting, he said, as the candle remarked when[96] … But, hush! Not a word more on that subject! Kinch, wake up! Bread, butter, honey. Haines, come in. The grub is ready. Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts. Where’s the sugar? O, jay[97], there’s no milk.

Stephen fetched the loaf and the pot of honey and the buttercooler from the locker. Buck Mulligan sat down in a sudden pet.[98]

—What sort of a kip is this? he said. I told her to come after eight.

—We can drink it black, Stephen said thirstily. There’s a lemon in the locker.

—O, damn you and your Paris fads! Buck Mulligan said. I want Sandycove milk.

Haines came in from the doorway and said quietly:

—That woman is coming up with the milk.

—The blessings of God on you! Buck Mulligan cried, jumping up from his chair. Sit down. Pour out the tea there. The sugar is in the bag. Here, I can’t go fumbling at the damned eggs.

He hacked through the fry on the dish and slapped it out on three plates, saying:

—In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti.[99]

Haines sat down to pour out the tea.

—I’m giving you two lumps each, he said. But, I say, Mulligan, you do make strong tea, don’t you?

Buck Mulligan, hewing thick slices from the loaf, said in an old woman’s wheedling voice:

—When I makes tea I makes tea, as old mother Grogan said. And when I makes water I makes water.[100]

—By Jove, it is tea, Haines said.

Buck Mulligan went on hewing and wheedling:

—So I do, Mrs Cahill, says she. Begob, ma’am, says Mrs Cahill, God send you don’t make them in the one pot.

He lunged towards his messmates in turn a thick slice of bread, impaled on his knife.

—That’s folk, he said very earnestly, for your book, Haines. Five lines of text and ten pages of notes about the folk and the fishgods of Dundrum. Printed by the weird sisters in the year of the big wind.[101]

He turned to Stephen and asked in a fine puzzled voice, lifting his brows:

—Can you recall, brother, is mother Grogan’s tea and water pot spoken of in the Mabinogion or is it in the Upanishads?[102]

—I doubt it, said Stephen gravely.

—Do you now? Buck Mulligan said in the same tone. Your reasons, pray?

—I fancy, Stephen said as he ate, it did not exist in or out of the Mabinogion. Mother Grogan was, one imagines, a kinswoman of Mary Ann.[103]

Buck Mulligan’s face smiled with delight.

—Charming! he said in a finical sweet voice, showing his white teeth and blinking his eyes pleasantly. Do you think she was? Quite charming!

Then, suddenly overclouding all his features, he growled in a hoarsened rasping voice as he hewed again vigorously at the loaf:

—For old Mary Ann

She doesn’t care a damn.

But, hising up her petticoats …[104]

He crammed his mouth with fry and munched and droned.

The doorway was darkened by an entering form.

—The milk, sir!

—Come in, ma’am, Mulligan said. Kinch, get the jug.

An old woman came forward and stood by Stephen’s elbow.

—That’s a lovely morning, sir, she said. Glory be to God.

—To whom? Mulligan said, glancing at her. Ah, to be sure!

Stephen reached back and took the milkjug from the locker.

—The islanders, Mulligan said to Haines casually, speak frequently of the collector of prepuces.[105]

—How much, sir? asked the old woman.

—A quart, Stephen said.

He watched her pour into the measure and thence into the jug rich white milk, not hers. Old shrunken paps. She poured again a measureful and a tilly. Old and secret she had entered from a morning world, maybe a messenger. She praised the goodness of the milk, pouring it out.

Crouching by a patient cow at daybreak in the lush field, a witch on her toadstool, her wrinkled fingers quick at the squirting dugs. They lowed about her whom they knew, dewsilky cattle. Silk of the kine and poor old woman, names given her in old times. A wandering crone, lowly form of an immortal serving her conqueror and her gay betrayer, their common cuckquean, a messenger from the secret morning. To serve or to upbraid, whether he could not tell: but scorned to beg her favour.[106]

—It is indeed, ma’am, Buck Mulligan said, pouring milk into their cups.

—Taste it, sir, she said.

He drank at her bidding.

—If we could live on good food like that, he said to her somewhat loudly, we wouldn’t have the country full of rotten teeth and rotten guts. Living in a bogswamp, eating cheap food and the streets paved with dust, horsedung and consumptives’ spits.

—Are you a medical student, sir? the old woman asked.[107]

—I am, ma’am, Buck Mulligan answered.

—Look at that now, she said.

Stephen listened in scornful silence. She bows her old head to a voice that speaks to her loudly, her bonesetter, her medicineman: me she slights. To the voice that will shrive and oil for the grave all there is of her but her woman’s unclean loins, of man’s flesh made not in God’s likeness, the serpent’s prey. And to the loud voice that now bids her be silent with wondering unsteady eyes.[108]

—Do you understand what he says? Stephen asked her.

—Is it French you are talking, sir? the old woman said to Haines.

Haines spoke to her again a longer speech, confidently.

—Irish, Buck Mulligan said. Is there Gaelic on you?

—I thought it was Irish, she said, by the sound of it. Are you from the west[109], sir?

—I am an Englishman, Haines answered.

—He’s English, Buck Mulligan said, and he thinks we ought to speak Irish

in Ireland.

—Sure we ought to, the old woman said, and I’m ashamed I don’t speak the language myself. I’m told it’s a grand language by them that knows.[110]

—Grand is no name for it, said Buck Mulligan. Wonderful entirely. Fill us out some more tea, Kinch. Would you like a cup, ma’am?

—No, thank you, sir, the old woman said, slipping the ring of the milkcan on her forearm and about to go.

Haines said to her:

—Have you your bill? We had better pay her, Mulligan, hadn’t we?

Stephen filled again the three cups.

—Bill, sir? she said, halting. Well, it’s seven mornings a pint at twopence is seven twos is a shilling and twopence over and these three mornings a quart at fourpence is three quarts is a shilling. That’s a shilling and one and two is two and two, sir.[111]

Buck Mulligan sighed and, having filled his mouth with a crust thickly buttered on both sides, stretched forth his legs and began to search his trouser pockets.

—Pay up and look pleasant, Haines said to him, smiling.

Stephen filled a third cup, a spoonful of tea colouring faintly the thick rich milk. Buck Mulligan brought up a florin,[112] twisted it round in his fingers and cried:

—A miracle!

He passed it along the table towards the old woman, saying:

—Ask nothing more of me, sweet. All I can give you I give.[113]

Stephen laid the coin in her uneager hand.

—We’ll owe twopence, he said.

—Time enough, sir, she said, taking the coin. Time enough. Good morning,

sir.

She curtseyed and went out, followed by Buck Mulligan’s tender chant:

—Heart of my heart, were it more,

More would be laid at your feet.[114]

He turned to Stephen and said:

—Seriously, Dedalus. I’m stony.[115] Hurry out to your school kip and bring us back some money. Today the bards must drink and junket. Ireland expects that every man this day will do his duty.[116]

—That reminds me, Haines said, rising, that I have to visit your

national library today.

—Our swim first, Buck Mulligan said.

He turned to Stephen and asked blandly:

—Is this the day for your monthly wash, Kinch?[117]

Then he said to Haines:

—The unclean bard makes a point of washing once a month.

—All Ireland is washed by the gulfstream, Stephen said as he let honey trickle over a slice of the loaf.

Haines from the corner where he was knotting easily a scarf about the

loose collar of his tennis shirt spoke:

—I intend to make a collection of your sayings if you will let me.[118]

Speaking to me. They wash and tub and scrub. Agenbite of inwit.[119] Conscience. Yet here’s a spot.[120]

—That one about the cracked lookingglass of a servant being the symbol of Irish art is deuced good.

Buck Mulligan kicked Stephen’s foot under the table and said with warmth of tone:

—Wait till you hear him on Hamlet, Haines.[121]

—Well, I mean it, Haines said, still speaking to Stephen. I was just thinking of it when that poor old creature came in.

—Would I make any money by it? Stephen asked.

Haines laughed and, as he took his soft grey hat from the holdfast of the hammock, said:

—I don’t know, I’m sure.

He strolled out to the doorway. Buck Mulligan bent across to Stephen and said with coarse vigour:

—You put your hoof in it now. What did you say that for?

—Well? Stephen said. The problem is to get money[122]. From whom? From the

milkwoman or from him. It’s a toss up, I think.

—I blow him out about you, Buck Mulligan said, and then you come along with your lousy leer and your gloomy jesuit jibes.

—I see little hope, Stephen said, from her or from him.

Buck Mulligan sighed tragically and laid his hand on Stephen’s arm.

—From me, Kinch, he said.

In a suddenly changed tone he added:

—To tell you the God’s truth I think you’re right. Damn all else theyare good for. Why don’t you play them as I do? To hell with them all. Let us get out of the kip.

He stood up, gravely ungirdled and disrobed himself of his gown, saying resignedly:

—Mulligan is stripped of his garments.[123]

He emptied his pockets on to the table.

—There’s your snotrag, he said.

And putting on his stiff collar and rebellious tie he spoke to them, chiding them, and to his dangling watchchain. His hands plunged and rummaged in his trunk while he called for a clean handkerchief. God, we’ll simply have to dress the character. I want puce gloves and green

boots. Contradiction. Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. [124] Mercurial Malachi. A limp black missile flew out of his talking hands.

—And there’s your Latin quarter hat, he said.[125]

Stephen picked it up and put it on. Haines called to them from the doorway:

—Are you coming, you fellows?

—I’m ready, Buck Mulligan answered, going towards the door. Come out, Kinch. You have eaten all we left, I suppose. Resigned he passed out with grave words and gait, saying, wellnigh with sorrow:

—And going forth he met Butterly.[126]

Stephen, taking his ashplant[127] from its leaningplace, followed them out and, as they went down the ladder, pulled to the slow iron door and locked it. He put the huge key in his inner pocket.

At the foot of the ladder Buck Mulligan asked:

—Did you bring the key?

—I have it, Stephen said, preceding them.

He walked on. Behind him he heard Buck Mulligan club with his heavy bathtowel the leader shoots of ferns or grasses.

—Down, sir! How dare you, sir!

Haines asked:

—Do you pay rent for this tower?

—Twelve quid, Buck Mulligan said.

—To the secretary of state for war, Stephen added over his shoulder.[128]

They halted while Haines surveyed the tower and said at last:

—Rather bleak in wintertime, I should say. Martello you call it?

—Billy Pitt[129] had them built, Buck Mulligan said, when the French were on the sea. But ours is the omphalos.[130]

—What is your idea of Hamlet? Haines asked Stephen.

—No, no, Buck Mulligan shouted in pain. I’m not equal to Thomas Aquinas[131] and the fifty-five reasons he has made out to prop it up. Wait till I have a few pints in me first.

He turned to Stephen, saying, as he pulled down neatly the peaks of his

primrose waistcoat:

—You couldn’t manage it under three pints, Kinch, could you?

—It has waited so long, Stephen said listlessly, it can wait longer.

—You pique my curiosity, Haines said amiably. Is it some paradox?

—Pooh! Buck Mulligan said. We have grown out of Wilde[132] and paradoxes. It’s quite simple. He proves by algebra that Hamlet’s grandson is Shakespeare’s grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father.[133]

—What? Haines said, beginning to point at Stephen. He himself?

Buck Mulligan slung his towel stolewise round his neck and, bending in loose laughter, said to Stephen’s ear:

—O, shade of Kinch the elder! Japhet in search of a father![134]

—We’re always tired in the morning, Stephen said to Haines. And it is rather long to tell.

Buck Mulligan, walking forward again, raised his hands.

—The sacred pint alone can unbind the tongue of Dedalus, he said.

—I mean to say, Haines explained to Stephen as they followed, this tower and these cliffs here remind me somehow of Elsinore[135]. That beetles o’er his base into the sea, isn’t it?[136]

Buck Mulligan turned suddenly for an instant towards Stephen but did not speak. In the bright silent instant Stephen saw his own image in cheap dusty mourning between their gay attires.

—It’s a wonderful tale, Haines said, bringing them to halt again.

Eyes, pale as the sea the wind had freshened, paler, firm and prudent. The seas’ ruler, he gazed southward over the bay, empty save for the smokeplume of the mailboat vague on the bright skyline and a sail tacking by the Muglins.[137]

—I read a theological interpretation of it somewhere, he said bemused. The Father and the Son idea. The Son striving to be atoned with the Father.

Buck Mulligan at once put on a blithe broadly smiling face. He looked at them, his wellshaped mouth open happily, his eyes, from which he had suddenly withdrawn all shrewd sense, blinking with mad gaiety. He moved a doll’s head to and fro, the brims of his Panama hat quivering, and began to chant in a quiet happy foolish voice:

—I’m the queerest young fellow that ever you heard.

My mother’s a jew, my father’s a bird.

With Joseph the joiner I cannot agree.

So here’s to disciples and Calvary.[138]

He held up a forefinger of warning.

—If anyone thinks that I amn’t divine

He’ll get no free drinks when I’m making the wine

But have to drink water and wish it were plain

That I make when the wine becomes water again.[139]

He tugged swiftly at Stephen’s ashplant in farewell and, running forward to a brow of the cliff, fluttered his hands at his sides like fins or wings of one about to rise in the air, and chanted:

—Goodbye, now, goodbye! Write down all I said

And tell Tom, Dick and Harry I rose from the dead.

What’s bred in the bone cannot fail me to fly

And Olivet’s[140] breezy … goodbye, now, goodbye![141]

He capered before them down towards the forty-foot hole, fluttering his winglike hands, leaping nimbly, Mercury’s hat quivering in the fresh wind that bore back to them his brief birdsweet cries.

Haines, who had been laughing guardedly, walked on beside Stephen and said:

—We oughtn’t to laugh, I suppose. He’s rather blasphemous. I’m not a believer myself, that is to say. Still his gaiety takes the harm out of it somehow, doesn’t it? What did he call it? Joseph the Joiner?

—The ballad of joking Jesus, Stephen answered.

—O, Haines said, you have heard it before?

—Three times a day, after meals, Stephen said drily.[142]

—You’re not a believer, are you? Haines asked. I mean, a believer in the narrow sense of the word. Creation from nothing and miracles and a personal God.

—There’s only one sense of the word, it seems to me, Stephen said.[143]

Haines stopped to take out a smooth silver case in which twinkled a green stone. He sprang it open with his thumb and offered it.

—Thank you, Stephen said, taking a cigarette.

Haines helped himself and snapped the case to. He put it back in his sidepocket and took from his waistcoatpocket a nickel tinderbox, sprang it open too, and, having lit his cigarette, held the flaming spunk towards Stephen in the shell of his hands.

—Yes, of course, he said, as they went on again. Either you believe or you don’t, isn’t it? Personally I couldn’t stomach that idea of a personal God. You don’t stand for that, I suppose?

—You behold in me, Stephen said with grim displeasure, a horrible example of free thought.[144]

He walked on, waiting to be spoken to, trailing his ashplant by his side. Its ferrule[145] followed lightly on the path, squealing at his heels. My familiar[146], after me, calling, Steeeeeeeeeeeephen! A wavering line along the path. They will walk on it tonight, coming here in the dark. He wants that key. It is mine. I paid the rent. Now I eat his salt bread.[147] Give him the key too. All. He will ask for it. That was in his eyes.

—After all, Haines began …

Stephen turned and saw that the cold gaze which had measured him was not all unkind.

—After all, I should think you are able to free yourself. You are your own master, it seems to me.

—I am a servant of two masters, Stephen said, an English and an Italian.[148]

—Italian? Haines said.

A crazy queen, old and jealous. Kneel down before me.

—And a third, Stephen said, there is who wants me for odd jobs.

—Italian? Haines said again. What do you mean?

—The imperial British state, Stephen answered, his colour rising, and the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church.

Haines detached from his underlip some fibres of tobacco before he spoke.

—I can quite understand that, he said calmly. An Irishman must think like that, I daresay. We feel in England that we have treated you rather unfairly. It seems history is to blame.[149]

The proud potent titles clanged over Stephen’s memory the triumph of their brazen bells: et unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam ecclesiam:[150] the slow growth and change of rite and dogma like his own rare thoughts, a chemistry of stars. Symbol of the apostles in the mass for pope Marcellus,[151] the voices blended, singing alone loud in affirmation: and behind their chant the vigilant angel of the church militant disarmed and menaced her heresiarchs. A horde of heresies fleeing with mitres awry: Photius[152] and the brood of mockers of whom Mulligan was one,[153] and Arius[154], warring his life long upon the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father, and Valentine[155], spurning Christ’s terrene body, and the subtle African heresiarch Sabellius[156] who held that the Father was Himself His own Son. Words Mulligan had spoken a moment since in mockery to the stranger. Idle mockery. The void awaits surely all them that weave the wind: a menace, a disarming and a worsting from those embattled angels of the church, Michael’s[157] host, who defend her ever in the hour of conflict with their lances and their shields.[158]

Hear, hear! Prolonged applause. Zut! Nom de Dieu![159]

—Of course I’m a Britisher, Haines’s voice said, and I feel as one. I don’t want to see my country fall into the hands of German jews either. That’s our national problem, I’m afraid, just now.[160]

Two men stood at the verge of the cliff, watching: businessman, boatman.

—She’s making for Bullock harbour.[161]

The boatman nodded towards the north of the bay with some disdain.

—There’s five fathoms out there, he said. It’ll be swept up that way when the tide comes in about one. It’s nine days today.

The man that was drowned. A sail veering about the blank bay waiting for a swollen bundle to bob up, roll over to the sun a puffy face, saltwhite. Here I am.[162]

They followed the winding path down to the creek. Buck Mulligan stood on a stone, in shirtsleeves, his unclipped tie rippling over his shoulder. A young man clinging to a spur of rock near him, moved slowly frogwise his green legs in the deep jelly of the water.

—Is the brother with you, Malachi?

—Down in Westmeath. With the Bannons.

—Still there? I got a card from Bannon[163]. Says he found a sweet young thing down there. Photo girl he calls her.[164]

—Snapshot, eh? Brief exposure.

Buck Mulligan sat down to unlace his boots. An elderly man shot up near the spur of rock a blowing red face. He scrambled up by the stones, water glistening on his pate and on its garland of grey hair, water rilling over his chest and paunch and spilling jets out of his black sagging loincloth.

Buck Mulligan made way for him to scramble past and, glancing at Haines and Stephen, crossed himself piously[165] with his thumbnail at brow and lips and breastbone.

—Seymour’s back in town, the young man said, grasping again his spur of rock. Chucked medicine and going in for the army.[166]

—Ah, go to God! Buck Mulligan said.

—Going over next week to stew.[167] You know that red Carlisle girl, Lily?[168]

—Yes.

—Spooning with him last night on the pier. The father is rotto[169] with money.

—Is she up the pole?[170]

—Better ask Seymour that.

—Seymour a bleeding officer! Buck Mulligan said.

He nodded to himself as he drew off his trousers and stood up, saying tritely:

—Redheaded women buck like goats.[171]

He broke off in alarm, feeling his side under his flapping shirt.

—My twelfth rib is gone, he cried. I’m the Übermensch.[172] Toothless Kinch and I, the supermen.

He struggled out of his shirt and flung it behind him to where his clothes lay.

—Are you going in here, Malachi?

—Yes. Make room in the bed.

The young man shoved himself backward through the water and reached the middle of the creek in two long clean strokes. Haines sat down on a stone, smoking.

—Are you not coming in? Buck Mulligan asked.

—Later on, Haines said. Not on my breakfast.

Stephen turned away.

—I’m going, Mulligan, he said.

—Give us that key, Kinch, Buck Mulligan said, to keep my chemise flat.

Stephen handed him the key. Buck Mulligan laid it across his heaped clothes.

—And twopence[173], he said, for a pint. Throw it there.

Stephen threw two pennies on the soft heap. Dressing, undressing. Buck Mulligan erect, with joined hands before him, said solemnly:

—He who stealeth from the poor lendeth to the Lord. Thus spake Zarathustra.[174]

His plump body plunged.

—We’ll see you again, Haines said, turning as Stephen walked up the path and smiling at wild Irish.[175]

Horn of a bull, hoof of a horse, smile of a Saxon.[176]

—The Ship, Buck Mulligan cried. Half twelve.[177]

—Good, Stephen said.

He walked along the upwardcurving path.

Liliata rutilantium.

Turma circumdet.

Iubilantium te virginum.[178]

The priest’s grey nimbus in a niche where he dressed discreetly. I will not sleep here tonight. Home also I cannot go.[179]

A voice, sweettoned and sustained, called to him from the sea. Turning the curve he waved his hand. It called again. A sleek brown head, a seal’s, far out on the water, round.[180]

Usurper.[181]

EXEMPLARY TEXT:

BRIAN FRIEL, DANCING AT LUGHNASA (1990)

First staged at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, a venue closely associated with the Irish Nationalist movement, Dancing at Lughnasa can be taken as a gesture of reconciliation and solidarity on the part of playwright Brian Friel, whose work has typically been associated with the Field Day Theatre of Northern Ireland. Further, the action of the play takes place in the complex environment of County Donegal, which is the northernmost county in Ireland, but which is part of the Republic of Ireland, not a part of Northern Ireland, which is to its east.[117] Dancing at Lughnasa is a nimble and innovative bit of modern stagecraft that soon also enjoyed successful runs in London and New York. Clearly, many of the themes with which the play deals—love, memory, loss, and the conflict between tradition and modernity—are of broad interest. However, it is also an extremely Irish work that is strongly rooted in the events of Irish history and can only be fully understood within the context of that history.

Dancing at Lughnasa is a “memory play”—a term coined by American dramatist Tennessee Williams to describe his 1944 play The Glass Menagerie. In essence, the events depicted on stage take place only in the mind of the narrator, Michael Evans, who is recalling (from some unspecified moment in the future, when Michael is an adult) a moment from his childhood in rural Ireland in August, 1936, when he was seven years old. The adult Michael, who is seen on stage, occasionally comments on the events to the audience, including filling them in on details concerning what will happen to the various characters after the time dramatized in the play. He also speaks the part of the child Michael, who is never actually seen on stage by the audience but is clearly present to the other characters, who speak to him as if he were there, while the adult narrator supplies the voice of the boy speaking to the other characters.[118]

As in much modern drama (Waiting for Godot, by the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, is probably the leading example), very little of consequence actually occurs within play. Instead, the (non)events of the play are used to comment on a broader context, in this case the very specific historical context of 1936 Ireland. In addition, the narration supplied by Michael complicates this situation still further by supplying information about events not actually dramatized on stage. The play is set in the Mundy household, where five sisters—Kate, Maggie, Agnes, Rose, and Chris—struggle to get by during hard economic times. Michael, Chris’s son, lives with them. In a situation that would be considered highly scandalous in a 1930s Ireland in the grip of a strict and repressive Catholic theocracy, Michael was born out of wedlock. His father, Gerry Evans, is a somewhat irresponsible young Welshman who drops by only occasionally (including twice during the play) and barely knows the boy, though he maintains a rather flirtatious relationship with Chris, much to the disapproval of her sisters, especially the rather righteous Kate. The Mundy household has also been recently augmented by the arrival of their older brother, Father Jack, a Catholic priest whose respected position in the Church has provided some protection for the household, despite the presence of an unwed mother and her son. Jack, a former chaplain in the British Army in East Africa during World War I, had actually been in East Africa as a Catholic missionary since before the war, returning to his work in a leper colony in the village of Ryanga in colonial Uganda after the war and staying there until just before the events of the play. He seems to be in a state of great confusion as the play begins, though his failing memory seems to be improving, as is the malaria he contracted in Africa. He has been sent back to Ireland by the Church for unspecified reasons that might be related to his health but that are probably more related to the fact that he seems to have abandoned his Catholic faith; rather than attempting to convert the local Africans to Catholicism, he seems himself to have been largely converted to African customs (and even religion).

Colonialism and Politics in Dancing at Lughnasa

Dancing at Lughnasa takes place in postcolonial Ireland, the majority of which is, in 1936, an independent state free of British rule. However, as Patrick Mason emphasizes, independence has hardly equated to liberation for the Irish people, who are now in the grip of a repressive regime headed by Eamon de Valera that borrows many of its attitudes and tactics from the fascists in continental Europe, justifying and enforcing them with the support of a Catholic Church eager to maintain its power over the lives of the Irish people. The play evokes an Irish past that predates British rule and of the possibilities that this past contains energies that might be of use in the present. Those energies have, however, been largely suppressed: “If Lughnasa speaks to us of an Ireland that was, and of the tantalizing possibility of transcendence beyond words, it also speaks to us of the tyrannies of the De Valera dispensation” (Mason 45).

The Catholic Mundy household is one with nationalist sympathies, despite Jack’s former service in the British military. In one of the few direct mentions of the colonial past in the play, Michael’s narration informs us that Jack’s service is, in fact, never spoken of in the household, given that Kate “had been involved locally in the War of Independence” (8). The Mundys as a whole, then, are presumably pleased to be free of British rule. However, independence from British rule has not, as of 1936, brought anything like economic prosperity to Ireland—though of course all of the capitalist economies of the West were mired in a deep economic Depression at the time, with the exception of Nazi Germany and, to a lesser extent, fascist Italy, which were beginning to experience an economic boom. This economic upswing was no doubt one of the reasons why many in Ireland (including the poet William Butler Yeats, otherwise a staunch opponent of de Valera’s Catholic-dominated regime) found the extreme policies of the fascists to be attractive—one of the key reasons why Ireland did not join the Allies in the war against fascism in World War II. In any case, economic hardship is very much a part of daily life in the Mundy household, as the sisters struggle to put food on the table and to keep clothes on their backs from one day to the next. Agnes and Rose work at home making hand-knitted gloves, which they sell in the nearby town of Ballybeg. The principal household income comes from the work of Kate, the eldest sister, who works as a teacher in the nearby National School, which is, of course, run by the Catholic Church. We learn in the play that she will eventually lose her position in the school, with a hint that the loss is because Father Jack’s fall from grace with the Church no longer provides protection from the disapproval of the Mundy household due to the presence of Michael, but now instead provides still another source of scandal.

This information provides a direct suggestion of the repressive nature of life in Ireland during the Catholic-dominated 1930s. Meanwhile, this repression is also subtly linked to fascism.Early in the play, Rose bursts spontaneously into song, singing

Will you come to Abyssinia, will you come?

Bring your own cup and saucer and a bun …

Mussolini will be there with his airplanes in the air,

Will you come to Abyssinia, will you come? (3)

Rose here, though she is herself only vaguely aware of the actual events involved, is referring to the invasion of Ethiopia by fascist Italy (under the leadership of Benito Mussolini) in October of 1935. This invasion resulted in the Second Italo-Abyssinian War, which was a war of pure colonial conquest on the part of the Italians and a major prelude to World War II.

Maggie, hearing Rose, constructs her own impromptu version of the song, with the same tune:

Will you vote for De Valera, will you vote?

If you don’t we’ll be like Gandhi with his goat. (4)

Maggie’s seemingly innocent and silly song is, in fact, one of the play’s most telling moments. For one thing, Maggie seems completely unaware that, by converting Rose’s song about Mussolini into a song about de Valera, she is suggesting that the two are parallel figures, thus associating de Valera not only with fascism but with Italy’s colonialist invasion of Ethiopia. Thus, while she seems to want to figure de Valera in her song as a figure of opposition to colonialism, she in fact does just the opposite.

The key to unpacking Maggie’s two-line song resides in the second line, which refers to famed Indian anti-colonial activist Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948), perhaps the single most prominent figure in the entire history of resistance to British colonial rule. Gandhi was known for his fondness for goat’s milk and sometimes carried a goat with him on his travels in order to have access to fresh milk. However, this fact alone does not seem to explain this line in Maggie’s song. To understand that line, one needs to be aware of the 1932 American “Looney Tunes” cartoon “I Love a Parade,” which takes its title from the 1931 American song of the same title. The cartoon is built around a circus and presents a series of comical versions of various acts, many of them overtly racist—as when one of the acts on display, “Jo Jo the Wild Man” is a clear caricature of the supposed savagery of native Africans. The most relevant “act” in the circus, however, is the one presented in the cartoon as “The Skinny Man from India,” who is obviously a caricature of Gandhi, accompanied by a barrage of Orientalist stereotypes. “Gandhi” sits in a version of his typical garb (often described in the West as a “diaper”) playing a stereotypical Indian snake charmer’s flute. Instead of a snake, however, he is accompanied by a goat, which merrily dances a version of an Indian belly dance as Gandhi plays.

Reading Maggie’s song within the context of this cartoon casts a great deal of light on its significance. In a classic case of misrecognition and misunderstanding, Maggie appears to regard Gandhi and his dancing goat as the antithesis of what the Irish should seek to be; silly and ineffectual in his opposition to British colonial rule in India, he might as well be idly playing music for his dancing goat. De Valera, on the other hand, is presented by Maggie as the antithesis of Gandhi, as a strong anticolonial (and now postcolonial) leader whom Irish voters should continue to support because of the role he played in winning Irish independence from British rule. From the point of view of 1936 Donegal County, it is easy to see how Maggie would feel this way. But Friel, from the point of view of 1990 Ireland, could no doubt see that she has it exactly backward. By 1947, Gandhi’s campaign of nonviolent resistance to British rule (which later became the inspiration for the tactics employed by Dr. Martin Luther King in the American civil rights movement of the 1960s) had been so successful that India had won full independence, while in 1936 an Ireland freed of domination by the British Empire via years of violence now found itself thoroughly in the grip of a Catholic theocracy.

Within the context of the play, the cartoon’s musical “Gandhi” and his dancing goat (while offensively presented as figures of derisive fun in the cartoon and while having almost nothing to do with the ascetic Gandhi of the real world) clearly represent forces of liveliness and vitality that parallel the moment in the play when the sisters all dance, freeing energies that are normally repressed in their Catholic culture. The somber de Valera, of course, is the chief figure working in opposition to these energies in 1936 Ireland. Once again, then, Maggie inadvertently aligns herself against her own best interests—with the allegorical suggestion that the Irish people have long had a history of doing much the same thing.

Meanwhile, the Second Italo-Abyssinian War (1936–1939) was almost exactly contemporaneous with the Spanish Civil War, that other great prelude to World War II, in which the Spanish fascist forces were strongly backed by the German Nazis and Italian fascists, who thus rehearsed the expansionist policies that would ultimately ravage the European continent. Interestingly, the Spanish Civil War also plays an important role in Dancing at Lughnasa, where we learn that Gerry has just decided to sign up to join the International Brigade of volunteers and to travel to Spain to fight against fascism. It’s a noble gesture, but one gets the sense that, for Gerry, it is something of a lark and that he really doesn’t know what he’s getting into. He is only vaguely aware of the actual political situation in Spain, for example, and has decided to sign up based on a vague sense that the republicans are the good guys and the fascists the bad guys, though he is unable to articulate why he thinks that is the case. The stodgy and pious Kate, of course, disapproves of his decision, noting that “it’s a sorry day for Ireland when we send young men off to Spain to fight for godless Communism” (52). Perhaps without realizing it, the ultra-Catholic Kate here provides a reminder of the fact that the Catholic Church was strongly aligned with the fascists in Spain, especially after republican-instituted reforms there began to challenge the traditional power of the church, which resembled the power that the church was exerting in de Valera’s Ireland.

The fact that Father Jack has spent a quarter of a century in East Africa also carries political resonances, serving as a reminder of the presence of British colonial rule there during that period. Meanwhile, his positive vision of the indigenous culture of traditional African societies serves as a subtle reminder that, within the context of the British Empire, the Irish have historically played the role of the colonized Other and thus in many ways have more in common with the seemingly foreign Ugandans whom Jack has met in Africa than with the British rulers who brought Jack there in the first place. Moreover, while traditional African culture has survived and still seems able to exert a strong influence, traditional Irish culture, in the wake of centuries of English domination, has largely been destroyed.

Traditional Irish culture in the play is represented primarily by the pagan ritual of Lughnasa (or Lughnasadh) an annual fertility festival dedicated to Lugh, the Celtic god of the sun and fertility. The festival, though it no longer carries the ritual importance it once did, is still celebrated even today. In fact, a Lughnasa festival is underway near Ballybeg at the time Michael recalls in the play and provides important background to the action of the play. The Mundys are a nominally pious Catholic family and so do not participate in the raucous festival. In fact, Kate expresses absolute contempt for the festival and its participants: “And they’re savages. I know those people from the back hills! … Savages—that’s what they are! And what pagan practices they have are no concern of ours—none whatever! It’s a sorry day to hear talk like that in a Christian home, a Catholic home!” (17). Interestingly enough, however, the activities of the Mundys parallel those of the festival to a surprising extent, which involves a number of activities (such as dancing and blackberry-picking) in which the Mundys engage in the play, even as they nominally reject the festival. The festival, while archaic in many ways, is tied to basic human needs and desires that are being repressed in modern Catholic Ireland.

Tradition and Modernity

Like much modern literature, Dancing at Lughnasa pivots around an opposition between tradition and modernity. Unlike much modern literature, however, the play presents this opposition as being far more complicated than a simple polar opposition. The crucial emblem of modernity in the play is the newly-acquired Marconi radio set that is one of few luxuries owned by the sisters. It does bring some brightness into their grim lives by piping music into a house otherwise free of entertainments. The household was, in the summer of 1936, “obsessed” with the radio, as Michael notes in his opening narration (1). We also learn, from Gerry, that 1936 Ireland is “gramophone crazy,” indicating the extent to which technologically-generated music is sweeping the country (28). Indeed, the sisters, over Kate’s objection, even name the set “Marconi,”[119] though Rose would prefer to name it “Lugh,” suggesting that she sees little difference between the modern energies produced by the radio and the pagan energies of the Lughnasa festival. In a more judgmental way, Kate makes the same connection. When Maggie starts to sing “The Isle of Capri,”[120] Kate scoffs, “If you knew your prayers as well as you know the words of those aul pagan songs!” (35). She thus lumps the quite contemporary song “The Isle of Capri” in with the kind of ancient pagan music that one might expect to hear at the Lughnasa festival.

Not all of the music broadcast on the radio in the play is new. In fact, the most important impact of the radio on the play occurs in an early moment in which a bit of traditional Irish fiddle music, “The Mason’s Apron,” begins to play, sending all five sisters (even Kate) into a joyous frenzy of raucous dancing. As an inserted commentary[121] notes,

With this loud music, this pounding beat, this shouting—calling—singing, this parodic reel, there is a sense of order being consciously subverted, of the women consciously and crudely caricaturing themselves, indeed of near-hysteria being induced. (22)

Noting that Lugh has affinities with Dionysus, the Greek god of winemaking, fertility, ritual madness, and religious ecstasy, Robert Tracy sees this as a Dionysian moment that links the dancing of the sisters to the pagan energies of the Lughnasa festival, and thus to those of ancient Greek culture. Indeed, Tracy suggests that Dancing at Lughnasa is, in fact, “a partial adaptation of Euripides Bacchae” (406). Unfortunately, this eruption of energy into the otherwise austere lives of the sisters is short-lived. The radio set suddenly goes dead, and the dancing stops, leading a frustrated Chris to declare that the set is “bloody useless” (22). Kate, meanwhile, chides Chris for her “corner-boy language” (22). After a momentary eruption of carnivalesque energies, things have returned to normal in the Mundy household.

It is also normal, apparently, for the Mundys’ unreliable radio set to malfunction; the characters struggle with it throughout the play, able to receive broadcasts only intermittently. The implication seems to be clear: modernity has come to Ireland, but only in a partial and degraded way. Modern technology does offer some improvements to the lives of the Mundys, but their marginal position in relation to this technology means that these improvements will be meager at best. The marginal modernity of 1936 Ireland also helps to explain the play’s deconstruction of the opposition between the ancient pagan culture represented by the Lughnasa festival (and by the dance engaged in by the five sisters) and the modern culture represented by the music beamed into the Mundy home via radio. In an Ireland that can’t seem to let go of the past, antiquity is still part of the present; an Ireland that is not fully modernized is not prepared to receive the popular culture of the present day as something fundamentally different from the pagan culture of the past.

One effect of innovations such as the radio is that the Mundys have an increased awareness of and sense of connection to the world outside of County Donegal, though from what we see in the play, this exposure consists primarily of music of various kinds. Even this connection has important broader implications, however. At one point, for example, the temperamental set suddenly spews out a few seconds of “The British Grenadier,” a traditional British military song, thus providing a reminder of the colonial past. Much of the music with which the characters are familiar seems to be American, providing a reminder of the way in which American music is beginning to exert more and more of a presence around the globe, especially in Ireland, with its extensive cultural connections to America given the legacy of Irish immigration there.

The most prominent example of American music in the play is the song “Anything Goes,” the title song of a 1934 Broadway musical by Cole Porter, perhaps the most important American songwriter of the 1930s. It comes on the radio late in the play, and then Gerry sings along as he convinces Agnes to dance with him. It’s a transgressive dance, given Gerry’s relationship with Chris, and Chris clearly isn’t pleased. When Gerry invites Chris to replace Agnes as his partner, she refuses. When Maggie steps in instead, Chris angrily switches off the radio, which has now become a source of discord among the sisters.

It is clear, as he sings along, that Gerry knows the song well, which is perhaps not all that surprising given that he travels around quite a bit (and given that he is now working as a gramophone salesman). But is also clear, given that the song is playing on Irish radio, that American songs such as “Anything Goes” have become a part of the day-to-day culture of 1930s Ireland, suggesting the extent to which American popular culture is already beginning to circulate internationally. It is, however, a very American song, filled with contemporary materials, beginning with a reference to the Puritans and their landing on Plymouth rock. But it is also a song about modernity and about how the Puritans would be shocked if they could see the America of the 1930s. Now, says the song, ‘‘Stead of landing on Plymouth Rock, / Plymouth Rock would land on them.”[122]

The song goes on to describe a litany of new transgressive developments in American culture, including the following lines that are sung by Gerry:

In olden days, a glimpse of stocking

Was looked on as something shocking.

…

Anything goes.

Good authors, too, who once knew better words

Now only use four-letter words

Writing prose.

Anything goes.

If driving fast cars you like,

If low bars you like,

If old hymns you like,

If bare limbs you like,

If Mae West you like,

Or me undressed you like,

Why, nobody will oppose.

When ev’ry night the set that’s smart is in-

Truding in nudist parties in

Studios,

Anything goes.

The actual song includes many more details, including references to the Great Depression and to the way in which it has caused a topsy-turvy world in which the once-wealthy are now poor, adding to the chaos of modernity. As the song puts it,

The world has gone mad today

And good’s bad today,

And black’s white today,

And day’s night today.

Mostly, though, the song is a catalog of examples of the decline of traditional morals in the modern world, leading to an acceptance of public nudity, obscenity in literature (the song was written in the same year that Ulysses was finally allowed into the U.S.), and risqué films— such as those featuring the actress Mae West, who had just had her biggest screen hit, the telling-titled I’m No Angel (1933) the year before the song was written. West is a perfect image for the message of the song. Her work in film, radio, and other media was highly controversial; it drew considerable protests but also made her by 1936 the highest-paid woman in America, earning more than any other American except the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst (Jill Watts 206). West’s success, despite numerous scandals, indicated that American society was becoming less Puritanical and more accepting of new modes of expression, especially with regard to sexuality, which is very much the subject of “Anything Goes.” In addition to her films and work in other media, West was known for the convention-defying nature of her personal life. For example, When the Hollywood apartment building in which she lived in 1935 banned her African American boyfriend from entering the premises, she responded to this racist action by buying the building so that he could enter freely (Jill Watts 207).

A few moments later, Gerry reprises the song, without radio accompaniment, this time performing it in imitation of Charlie Chaplin’s famous “Tramp” character (though Chaplin is not mentioned in the song), further strengthening the ties between the American film industry and the moral situation described in the song, at the same time (because of Chaplin’s English roots) providing a reminder that the situation described in the song is a global one, not limited to America, though it might be most advanced there. In this sense, it is worth noting that the song also mentions movie magnate Sam Goldwyn and his attempts to mold imported Ukrainian actress Anna Sten into an American film star, further indicating the beginnings of globalization in the film industry.[123]

Importantly, while expressing a certain amount of mock outrage at the decline of moral values in the modern world, “Anything Goes” is a lively and humorous song that is ultimately meant more as a parody of conservative moral outrage than as a cry of protest against the decline in modern morality. Conservative moral outrage was, of course, the order of the day in de Valera’s 1930s Ireland, so this song, with its subtext of endorsing the new moral order of modernity, can be taken as an implicit critique of the moral conservatism of 1930s Ireland, a conservatism that was preventing Ireland from fully entering the modern world. The behavior of the sisters, as when they attempt to enact good conservative Catholic values but find themselves drawn to the Dionysian energies of song and dance, suggests that the moral repression of the de Valera regime (with its strict censorship laws and its outlawing of contraception) is contrary to nature and ultimately unhealthy.

It is, of course, telling that the free-spirited Gerry—who is not Irish—seems to be the character in the play who most fully accepts the new moral order. And the fact that he is depicted as being somewhat immature and irresponsible suggests that there is a definite downside to this new order. There is, nevertheless, an inevitability to the triumph of modernity. Despite the repressive practices of the de Valera regime, modernity (via media such as the radio) nevertheless leaks in, and attempts to build a conservative Catholic state based on traditional Catholic moral principles, enforced by the rule of law, were clearly doomed to fail, while in the meantime providing numerous obstacles to the modernization of Ireland.

Indeed, the play implies that one effect of de Valera’s social policies was to ensure that only the worst aspects of modernity would intrude into Ireland in full force.In one of the flashforwards provided by Michael in his narration, we learn that the opening of a modern glove factory in Ireland has deprived Agnes and Rose of the income they had made from knitting gloves, because they cannot possibly compete with the less expensive products produced by the factory. As Michael puts it in his narration, “The Industrial Revolution had finally caught up with Ballybeg” (59). This event, combined with Kate’s loss of her job as a schoolteacher, propels Agnes and Rose into dire circumstances, indeed. Michael’s retrospective narration informs us that, by the beginning of the 1960s, they had moved to London in search of work, then struggled in various menial jobs while living in parks and on the streets, until Agnes was dead of exposure and Rose was dying in a hospice. Chris, meanwhile, is forced to take a job in the factory and works there for the remainder of her life, hating every minute. In fact, while the 1930s were a time of great hardship for the Mundys, it is a time that Michael recalls fondly as the moment before all the life left the household. His narration clearly portrays the 1930s as an opportunity missed, as a time when things might have gone in a different direction but instead went in a bad direction indeed—for the Mundys and for Ireland.

Dancing at Lughnasa was written and originally staged in a 1990 Ireland that had still not recovered from the missed opportunities of the 1930s and that was still struggling with many of the economic and political problems that plague its characters. Indeed, one of the chief implications of the play is that the Irish, while bemoaning the loss of the past, never seem to get beyond it. One of the great ironies of the play, however, is that it was produced in an Ireland that was on the verge of tremendous changes that would finally propel Ireland fully into the modern world, creating in Ireland one of the highest standards of living in the entire world and producing political reforms that would finally take Ireland beyond the repression of the past. The success of these changes seems to bear out Friel’s indictment of the 1930s, even as Ireland continues to face important problems, such as the partition of the country.

NOTES

Chapter 4

The Rise of British Film

Given that Great Britain was on the cutting edge of modernity throughout the nineteenth century, it should come as no surprise that the British were, at least initially, very much at the forefront of the rise of a new, very modern, technology-dependence cultural medium that merged in the last years of the nineteenth century. That medium, of course, was film. While most film histories place French and American innovators at the center of the early development of technologies for making and displaying films, it should be remembered by the first ever moving picture was shot in Leeds, England, in 1888, though it was shot by a French artist, Louis Le Prince. Indeed, the British film industry was quickly eclipsed by the French. By 1898 the leading British studio, Gaumont British Picture Corp, was actually a subsidiary of the French Gaumont Film Company. On the other hand, the first color film was also shot in England, in 1902. That same year saw the founding of Ealing Studios, which is still in existence today, making it the world’s oldest film studio. Then, partly due to the damaging effects of World War I in Britain and France, and partly due to the especially dynamic nature of the emergent consumer capitalism of early-twentieth-century America, both the French and the British film industries were eclipsed by Hollywood in the 1920s. Meanwhile, in that same decade, German and Soviet filmmakers took the lead in developing the art of filmmaking, though American filmmakers such as Buster Keaton (1895–1966) and Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977) took the lead in developing the art of entertainment in filmmaking.

Of course, Chaplin was English by birth, and his career indicates the way in which the film industry was highly international from its very beginnings. Based on his birthplace, one could argue that Chaplin was the greatest British filmmaker of all time, though Chaplin is known primarily for the silent films he made in America, where he began and spent most of his career—as well as for American sound films such as Modern Times (1936) and The Great Dictator (1940). Similarly, the first great director actually to make films in England, Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980), would also ultimately move to America and become more famous for the films he made there. Still, Hitchcock produced a formidable body of work before leaving England, including a number of silent films. His silent film The Lodger (1927), in fact, is widely considered to be among the greatest British silent films. Meanwhile, Hitchcock was a genuine pioneer of British sound film. His 1929 film Blackmail can be considered the first British sound film, and many of his films of the 1930s were similarly groundbreaking. His thrillers The 39 Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938) are among the most highly-respected British films of the 1930s and already show many of the elements of the Hitchcockian style that he would later perfect in America. Of course, Hitchcock’s British films of the 1930s were already influenced by American culture, in both style and content. For example, in Hitchcock’s 1936 Sabotage (an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent), characters watch the comic murderous violence of Disney’s cartoon short Who Killed Cock Robin? as a commentary on the content of the Hitchcock film and the Conrad novel.

Despite Hitchcock’s departure—and despite the tremendously damaging impact of World War II on British society, the British film industry truly blossomed in the 1940s, as the trio of directors widely regarded as Britain’s finest—David Lean, Michael Powell, and Carol Reed—all hit their strides at about the same time. Lean, for example, tops all directors with seven films appearing on the British Film Institute’s 1999 list of the greatest British films of the twentieth century. Of these, four—Brief Encounter (1945, No. 2 on the list), Great Expectations (1946, No. 5), Oliver Twist (1948, No. 46), and In Which We Serve (1942, No. 92, co-directed with Noel Coward)—were made in the 1940s. Other Lean films on the list include epic war films that both won Lean Academy Awards for Best Director: The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957, No. 11, set in World War II ) the lavish World War I epic Lawrence of Arabia (1962, No.3, set amid the Arab Revolt of World war I). Lean’s Doctor Zhivago (1965), an epic adaptation of a Russian novel, also placed on the BFI list (at No. 27), furthering Lean’s reputation for making large-scale epic films in the latter part of his career. Lean was still making important films as late as 1984, when his adaptation of E. M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India won numerous awards, including Oscar nominations for Best Picture and Best Director.[124]

Carol Reed (1906–1976) directed only two films on the BFI list of top British films, but his 1949 postwar noir drama The Third Man (discussed as an exemplary text at the end of this chapter) has the distinction of placing first on the list. Drawing heavily in the American film noir (and featuring a performance by Orson Welles, a leading American noir actor and director), The Third Man also adds its own distinctive touches while conducting a subtle examination of international intervention in postwar Europe. Reed’s 1968 musical Oliver! (an adaptation of the classic novel by Charles Dickens) placed at No. 77 on the BFI list and won Oscar for Best Director, as well as winning the Oscar for Best Picture. Other notable films by Reed include Odd Man Out (1947), winner of the first BAFTA[125] Award for Best Film and a film that addresses the intersectarian violence that has long troubled Northern Ireland, and The Fallen Idol (1948), which gained Reed an Oscar nomination for Best Director.[126]

Michael Powell (1905–1990) was perhaps the most visually innovative of the great British film directors of the 1940s, known especially for his groundbreaking use of color and for his inventive special effects. Among the most inventive of these was the 1940 Orientalist fantasy The Thief of Bagdad, which Powell made in conjunction with several others under conditions made difficult by World War II. This film featured a number of technical innovations, including the first major use of the blue-screen process. It is discussed as an exemplary text at the end of this chapter. Among Powell’s films included on the BFI Top 100 list are four from the 1940s, including The Red Shoes (1948, No. 9), A Matter of Life and Death (1946, No. 20), Black Narcissus (1947, No. 44), and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943, No. 45). All of these were co-directed with Powell’s frequent collaborator, the Hungarian-born Emeric Pressburger (1902–1988). Working together as “The Archers,” Powell and Pressburger directed a total of 19 films together.[127] Powell also directed the 1960s thriller Peeping Tom, which has much in common with Hitchcock’s contemporaneous film Psycho. However, whereas Psycho was a major success, Peeping Tim met with a near-disastrous reception that seriously damaged Powell’s career. Critics have come around in the past half century or so, however, and Peeping Tom is now a highly regarded film. It came in at No. 78 on the BFI list of the top 100 British films. Also notable among Powell’s film’s is The Tales of Hoffmann (1951, co-directed with Pressburger). Derived from Jacques Offenbach’s 1881 opera of the same title (which was itself adapted from the fiction of T.A. Hoffmann, who is himself the protagonist in both adaptations). An elaborate musical spectacle, The Tales of Hoffmann remains, even today, one of the most mesmerizing visual and aural displays ever put on film.

In the 1950s, the British film industry continue to produce strong output, even though it was increasingly outstripped by Hollywood, with its far greater financial resources. Indeed, it was largely because of these resources that so many of Britain’s greatest talents (among both actors and directors) worked mostly in America during this decade—the one, after all. In which Hitchcock produced the bulk of his greatest work. In one interesting reversal, the American director Alexander MacKendrick worked mostly at Ealing Studios during the 1950s, directing such important films as Whisky Galore! (1949), The Man in the White Suit (1951), and The Ladykillers (1955), all of which appear on the BFI Top 100 list. MacKendrick did, however, return to America to direct Sweet Smell of Success (1957), possibly his best-remembered film. Meanwhile, because of the repressive political climate in the U.S. in the 1950s, numerous left-leaning figures who were blacklisted from the Hollywood film industry moved to Britain to continue their careers there in the 1950s. Among the most prominent of these was Carl Foreman, writer of the Western classic High Noon (1951), who became an especially prominent figure in the British film industry. Meanwhile, the important noir director Joseph Losey, moved to England and lived and worked in England until his death in 1984, in the meantime making two films that are included on the BFI Top 100 list: The Servant (1963, No. 22) and The Go-Between (1970, No. 57). Others blacklisted in America who came to Britain to work in the film industry included writer Donald Ogden Stewart, who had won an Oscar for the screenplay for The Philadelphia Story (1941); Adrian Scott, who had produced the noir classics Murder, My Sweet (1944) and Crossfire (1947); and former Orson Welles protegé Cy Endfield, who moved to Britain in 1953 and lived there until his death in 1995. And, of course, Chaplin and Welles, perhaps the two greatest geniuses in the history of American film, both spent most of the 1950s in Europe. Effectively exiled from the U.S. for his political beliefs in 1952, Chaplin took up residence in Switzerland for the remainder of his life, though he made one film during this period—A King in New York (1957)—in his native Britain, the only film he would make there. After appearing as an actor in The Third Man in 1949, Welles spent most of the next decade in Europe, working largely in Britain, including a starring role in a British radio drama based on his character from The Third Man, The Adventures of Harry Lime (1951–1952). He also directed two BBC television series in the 1950s, as well as working on several film projects in various European locations.

The 1960s were a time of resurgence for British popular culture. Led by popular bands such as The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, British music for a time stole the limelight from American music, becoming the most important trendsetters in rock ‘n’ roll, that most American of art forms. The mod revolution brought British fashion to the forefront as well, and British television also saw a particularly rich period, especially in the production of Cold War–related series such as The Avengers (1961–1969) and The Prisoner (1967–1968), which became popular as well. Of course, the best-known product of British Cold War culture was the wildly popular James Bond (who first appeared on film in Dr. No in 1962, with Scottish actor Sean Connery in the lead role) helping to fuel a resurgence in the popularity of British film as well. Indeed, with twenty-six entries on the list, the 1960s are represented by more films on the BFI Top 100 list than any other. These films include Dr. No but also include several important films that pointed in new aesthetic directions. Many had a decidedly political edge, and the early-1960s films of the “British New Wave” were heavily influenced both by the French New Wave in film and by “kitchen sink realism” of the “Angry Young Men” of 1950s British literature (see Chapter 7). The work of Tony Richardson (1928–1991) emerged particularly directly from that of the “angry young men.” His Look Back in Anger (1959) is an adaptation of the 1956 play of the same title by John Osborne, a leading member of the “Angry Young Men.” A Taste of Honey (1961, No. 56 on the BFI list) was also an example of the gritty depiction of working-class life that was typical of kitchen sink realism, while Richardson’s film The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962, No. 61) was based on a short story by Alan Sillitoe, who also scripted the film. But Richardson was a versatile director who made many sorts of films. His highly regarded Tom Jones (1963, No. 51), scripted by Osborne based on Henry Fielding’s classic eighteenth-century novel, captures much of the exuberance of that original text, while enriching its class-oriented satire. His later film The Hotel New Hampshire (1984), based on a novel by the American writer John Irving, was a joint U.K.-U.S.-Canadian production that has become something of a cult classic over the years.

Director Lindsay Anderson made several important political films during this period, including This Sporting Life (1963, No. 52), scripted by David Storey based on his own 1960 working-class novel; if … (1968, No. 12), a satire of Britain’s private boarding school culture; and O Lucky Man! (1973), an anti-capitalist allegory. The most important British political filmmaker to emerge from the 1960s, however, was undoubtedly Ken Loach (1936– ), whose early film Kes (1969), based on a working-class novel by Barry Hines, was ranked at No. 7 on the BFI list. Loach would go on to become the most important British political filmmaker of all time, producing an impressive string of films over the next half century. Other than Kes, however, his most important and successful films did not appear until the 1990s. His work from Hidden Agenda (1990) onward will be discussed in Chapter 8.

Perhaps the most interesting British film director to emerge in the 1970s was Nicholas Roeg (1928– ), a former cinematographer whose eccentric and visual style can be taken as a marker of the coming of postmodernism to British film. Roeg began his directorial career with Performance (1970), which he co-directed with Donald Cammell. Performance is a gangster film that features Mick Jagger in a key role as a reclusive rock star; it was both controversial and unpopular upon its initial release, though it has become something of a cult favorite. It was ranked No. 48 in the BFI Top 100 poll and No. 7 in a 2018 poll by Time Out magazine. Roeg’s second film, Walkabout (1971), was a British-Australian co-production, set in the Australian Outback. Another box-office failure, Walkabout was greeted enthusiastically by critics and is still considered a masterpiece. Though it did not appear on the BFI Top 100 list (no doubt partly because it is often considered an Australian film), it was listed at No. 61 in the Time Out poll. The horror thriller Don’t Look Now (1973) was an even bigger success. Marked by highly inventive visuals and a fragmented narrative structure, this film was controversial (particularly for one notorious sex scene) on its first release but is now highly respected. It is listed as the eighth greatest British film in the BFI Top 100 poll and is, in fact, ranked in the Time Out poll as the greatest British film of all time. Roeg continued his innovative exploration of genre film with the highly unusual, surreal science fiction tale The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), starring rock icon David Bowie as a visitor from another planet who crash lands on earth. Another cult classic, The Man Who Fell to Earth maintains a core following of devoted fans, despite its strong early 1970s feel.

Rolling Stone magazine ranked The Man Who Fell to Earth the second best science fiction film of the 1970s, behind only Alien (1979), a U.S.-U.K. co-production helmed by British director Ridley Scott. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of British film from this point forward was an increasingly tendency toward globalization, with British writers, directors, and actors working extensively in films made both in Britain and abroad, especially in America and often in British-American co-productions. Other forms of internationalization were at work as well, as when the increasingly multicultural nature of contemporary Britain became more and more visible in British film. For example, one of the leading films of the 1980s was Stephen Frears’ My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), scripted by Hanif Kureishi (the son of a Pakistani father and a British mother), focuses on relationships between Pakistani immigrants and white English citizens of London. The phenomena of globalization and multiculturalization and their impact of recent British literature, will be discussed in Chapter 7. The same phenomenon with regard to film, along with other recent developments in British film, will be discussed in Chapter 8.

NOTES

EXEMPLARY TEXT:

PRODUCER ALEXANDER KORDA AND VARIOUS DIRECTORS, THE THIEF OF BAGDAD (1940)

The Thief of Bagdad is one of British cinema’s most magical films, something like a British answer to The Wizard of Oz, made in America just one year earlier. It is very much a collaborative effort, with different scenes shot in different locations and with different directors, including Michael Powell, one of the most important directors in British film history. But this film is held together by the vision of its producer, Alexander Korda, who managed to coordinate all of the different parts into a smoothly functioning whole. Using what were then state-of-the-art special effects and what was at the time one of the most effective uses of color in the history of film[128], The Thief of Bagdad uses modern technology to create a truly magical world, one in which young viewers, in particular, could completely lose themselves, mesmerized by the story and by the stunning visuals with which the story is presented. On the other hand, viewed through twenty-first century eyes, The Thief of Bagdad is a problematic film because its magical setting is superimposed over the real-world Middle East, with most of the action taking place in real cities (Baghdad and Basra) located in modern-day Iraq. And these real-world settings are made magical via the use of a panoply of traditional Orientalist images of a kind that were long used to support the domination of the Middle East by Britain and other Western powers. On the other hand, the film appropriates a number of images from Eastern cultures in a mode that is not as much as a prop for colonial exploitation as it is simply a means of entertaining Western audiences and increasing its box-office appeal.

The basic story of The Thief of Bagdad surrounds the efforts of the Grand Vizier (and evil magician) Jaffar (Conrad Veidt) to usurp the throne in Baghdad from Ahmad (John Justin) the rightful ruler, while at the same time stealing away Ahmad’s true love, the Princess (June Duprez). Most of the plot involves Jaffar’s initial success and the subsequent efforts of Ahmad and his sidekick, the young thief Abu (Sabu), to fight their way through various exotic obstacles (sometimes with the help of a giant genie) to win back Ahmad’s throne and to rescue the Princess from Jaffar so that she can join him. It’s a rollicking adventure, filled with exotica. And its magical texture is such that, even twenty-first-century audiences, accustomed to much more sophisticated computer-enhanced special effects, are able to suspend their disbelief and enjoy the story.

This storywill seem familiar to many American viewers, largely because the popular Disney animated film Aladdin (1992) was largely inspired by The Thief of Bagdad. In addition, this story itself has been committed directly to film several times, beginning with the 1924 American silent film classic of the same title, in which silent-screen legend Douglas Fairbanks plays Ahmed, the swashbuckling thief of the title—and also wins the hand of the Princess, thus combining the roles played by Ahmad and Abu in the 1940 film. Versions of the same story were also adapted to film in various countries in 1952, 1961, and 1978, suggesting the lasting appeal of the story.

The story itself originates in the Arabian Nights (also known as One Thousand and One Nights), a well-known collection of folk tales that forms a key part of the cultural traditions of the Middle East—though the settings of the stories range throughout the Eastern world. Compiled over a period of several centuries in various languages by various people in various parts of the Middle East, One Thousand and One Nights is held together by a frame story involving a king, Shahryār, who rules lands ranging through India and China. Disappointed by his unfaithful wife (whom he has had executed), Shahryār adopts a misogynistic attitude toward all women. Seeking revenge against all women, he marries a series of virgins (procured by his vizier), then has each of them executed the morning after the wedding night, thus assuring that they can never be unfaithful to him. When the supply of available virgins eventually runs out, Scheherazade, the daughter of Shahryār’s vizier, offers herself as the next bride. She then endeavors to prevent her execution by telling the king an entrancing story each night, but always leaving the story unfinished so that the king will keep her alive until the next night so he can hear the conclusion. She then starts a new story each night, for a series of 1001 nights, until the king finally falls in love with her and makes her his permanent queen.

Arabian Nights, which compiles Scheherazade’s stories,was first translated into French in the early eighteenth century and into English in the 1880s, though translations were complicated by the fact that the work is a loose collection of tales that accumulated over time, so that there is no definitive original edition. The first English translations were also complicated by the fact that some of the sexual imagery of the tales was considered offensive to the conservative sensibilities of Victorian England, so that the translations either had to be bowdlerized or published in special editions for private subscribers only, thus avoiding the strict obscenity laws of the time. Nevertheless, One Thousand and One Nights has maintained an important place in Western culture since its first translations—partly because the stories are so compelling and partly because the exotic nature of the stories was so perfectly suited for conscription by a European Orientalist discourse that already though it knew everything worth knowing about the Middle East.

The term “Orientalism” these days is closely associated with the work of the eminent scholar Edward Said, whose 1978 book of that title extensively documents the ways in which Western (especially French and British) scholars, writers, and artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries came to describe the Middle East through a consistent series of stereotypes designed to demonstrate the superiority of the West to the East and to define the West through opposition to an inferior East. Easterners, according to the discourse of Orientalism, were lazy, illogical, and given to fits of passion; Westerners, on the other hand, were hard-working, rational, and responsible. The East (viewed as a homogenous realm that included essentially everything but Western Europe and its direct cultural spinoffs, such as North America and Australia) was mired in ancient beliefs, resistant to change, yet also in a state of decay, having reached its peak centuries ago but now having slid into decadence and moral and political weakness. The West, in contrast, was vibrant, democratic, open to progress.

The Orientalist discourse described by Said is closely aligned with the phenomenon of colonialism. Indeed, for Said, the existence of this discourse was a crucial part of the mindset that made colonialism possible in the first place. Colonialism, after all, centrally depends upon a sharp sense of polar opposition between the colonizer and the colonized, with the colonizer assuming an innate superiority, which the colonized are supposed to recognize. However, despite the element of contempt that is built into Orientalist attitudes toward the East, there is also an element of fascination. Because of the licentiousness of the East, there is a possibility of exotic sexual experience there that simply cannot be imagined in the West, and Oriental women (whether they be brazen courtesans, undulating belly dancers, or coyly veiled virgins) know sexual secrets that no Western woman would dare to know. There also potential treasures to be found in the East that are unrivaled by anything in the West. Finally, there is danger and violence in the East, but the very lack of order there also means that there are adventures to had, obstacles to be overcome, opportunities for a Western man to prove his worth and his superiority.

The Thief of Bagdad includes a panoply of standard Orientalist images, including camels and elephants, cruel beheadings, magical treasures, mysterious women in harems, exotic castles with minarets, a number of magical contraptions, the giant genie, and the treacherous villain. The film is a visually impressive spectacle that puts a great deal of emphasis on the way things look in order to build a magical, exotic atmosphere. It also thematizes this emphasis on the visual by calling attention to the motif of looking within the film. As the film begins, for example, we see a ship arriving at the docks, a giant eye painted on its bow. Then we immediately see a cut to the face of Jaffar, arriving on the ship, his mouth and nose covered so that we see only the sinister, piercing glare of his eyes. Indeed, Jaffar’s magical powers seem to emanate from his eyes, and many shots throughout the film emphasize his and other characters’ eyes—as in the shot of Ahmad’s widening, smitten eyes when he first sees the Princess. Later, Jaffar will exert his dominion over Ahmad by rendering him blind, while Sabu is able to locate and ultimately save Ahmad by consulting the “All-Seeing Eye,” which he acquires in a daring theft.

Alan S. Weber details some of the Orientalist inclinations of The Thief of Bagdad, as well as Powell’s later Black Narcissus (1947), concluding that, in these films Powell “presents an unproblematic and traditional British Orientalism replete with 19th century notions of the East as sensual, feminine and exotic” (103). And Weber is right to recognize the Orientalism of these films, even if he (wrongly) seems to want to attribute all of the Orientalism of The Thief of Bagdad to Powell, treating the film as if it were solely the product of Powell’s imagination, when in fact his role in conceiving the film was clearly secondary to that of Korda. But Weber is also wrong to see the Orientalism of this film as a mere extension of traditional nineteenth-century Orientalism.

The Thief of Bagdad certainly presents the East as a mysterious, sensuous, exotic realm, with is consistent with traditional Orientalism. However, the film’s attitude toward the East is not a simple one. There are certainly hints in the film of Oriental cruelty and treachery, but even Jaffar (partly thanks to the performance of Veidt) has a sympathetic, even tragic side: he is portrayed as loving the Princess but as lacking the power (despite his skills as a sorcerer) to make her love him in return. Meanwhile, it is certainly the case that The Thief of Bagdad is directly related to the colonial adventure narratives that are described elsewhere in this volume and that had been such a popular part of British culture since the late nineteenth century. In general, however, the film partakes less of the “colonialist” form of Orientalism described by Said and more of the newer form of “consumerist” Orientalism recently described by Booker and Daraiseh.

Appearing in conjunction with (and as part of) the rise of consumer capitalism all over the Western world (but especially in Britain and the United States) at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, this new form of Orientalism again appropriates Eastern culture for the use of the West, but now does so in order to use exotic Oriental imagery, not as a tool of colonial domination, but as a tool of consumerist marketing. William Leach, in his impressive study Land of Desire, notes the rise of consumer capitalism in the U.S. at the beginning of the twentieth century. Describing the rapid spread of new marketing techniques as part of this phenomenon he notes that “perhaps the most popular of all merchandising themes in the years before World War I was the oriental theme, fashion from the bottom up, as it were, not, as with much of Paris couture, from the top down” (104). Leach notes that fashion based on Oriental (especially Middle Eastern) styles had an attractive hint of something “luxurious,” but also “impermissible,” certainly exotic and perhaps a bit risqué. And this phenomenon of employing Oriental motifs went far beyond clothing to include circuses, world’s fairs, movies, live theater, fiction, and even public parks. These themes were attractive to Americans because they suggested an air of something vital and energetic and mysterious that the increasingly routinized and commodified lifeworld of individuals under capitalism sorely lacked.

As Booker and Daraiseh note, these Orientalist marketing schemes spilled over into popular culture in a variety of ways but gained particular energy from the early-twentieth-century emergence of film as a major medium. Films such as the 1924 version of The Thief of Bagdad clearly partake of many of the same energies that drove not only the colonial adventure narrative, but a variety of other popular genres of the period. From crime stories to ghost stories, these genres allowed readers to experience worlds that contained elements of the strange and the mysterious and the dangerous that were simply lacking in the modern capitalist world. Just as Western consumers enjoyed wearing exotic, Eastern-inspired clothing or smoking Turkish cigarettes, so too did reading escapist stories (or watching them on film) allow them to feel that, at least for a short time, they were escaping the boredom and banality of day-to-day capitalist routine.

In the case of The Thief of Bagdad, of course, the contrast between fantasy and reality is complicated by the fact that the exotic world it contrasts to a dreary England still suffering from economic Depression while tottering on the brink of war with Nazi Germany[129] is not a fantasy realm located nebulously “somewhere over the rainbow” but a fantasy realm supposedly based on the real Middle East. As the result, the fantasy is tainted by a legacy of racism and colonial domination that has done a great deal of damage to the people of the Middle East, and this legacy should certainly not be ignored when considering the overall implications of the film.

On one level, The Thief of Bagdad can be seen as an innocent romp designed to entertain children and perhaps to help insulate them from the troubles of a world going to war. But, viewed through the legacy of empire, The Thief of Bagdad becomes a colonialist fantasy that revels in the thought that, somewhere in the world, there exist exotic, magical realms where one can escape the tedium (and endless bureaucratic routine) of Europe. Granted, the film is an unconventional colonial adventure in that it features no English or other European characters, so that the principals are all nominally “Oriental.” However, it is also the case that the two central lovers, Ahmad and the Princess, are fair-skinned, with European features. They are, after all, played by British actors, and they speak perfect British English. The villain, Jaffar (played by the German actor Veidt), looks darker and more sinister and speaks with a slightly foreign accent. On the other hand, Abu (played by the Indian actor Sabu) is darker still and speaks heavily accented English.

Mohja Kahf reads The Thief of Bagdad as a battle between the Western man Ahmad and the Eastern man Jaffar over the body of the nameless Princess. There certainly is some of that in the film, and the Princess’s passivity certainly calls for some gender-based analysis. Kahf is also certainly right to point out that the film erases the reality and history of the Middle East in presenting it as a timeless, magical realm. But Kahf’s analysis is flawed by her own elision of the historical context of the film, which she treats as an American film, ignoring its British origin and the whole history of British colonialism that comes with it. Moreover, the politics of the film are not as simple (or as gender-centered) as Kahf sees them. After all, the real battle in the film is not between Ahmad and Jaffar at all, but between Abu and Jaffar. Ahmad is almost as passive in the film as is the Princess; he and the Princess are virtually observers in this film, and the real action is carried by Jaffar and Abu—Veidt and Sabu, in fact, received top billing in the film. The Princess, in this film, is a place-holder, a sort of fairy-tale maguffin. She is beautiful but virtually sexless. The real object of desire is not the Princess’s body but Abu’s loyalty. Though Kahf virtually ignores Abu in her analysis, he is the real center of the film. Not only is he a figure with whom child viewers can to some extent identify, but he is also the loyal colonial subject of British colonial dreams, those dreams being the true subject of this film. He is thus the true object of colonial desire in the film, not the Princess (who is, in any case, coded as Western and white in the film, not as an exotic Muslim woman as Kahf sees her).

Given the historical situation at the time of the production of the film, one is also tempted to see The Thief of Bagdad as carrying a subtly anti-German message. After all, while he is in many ways a conventional Oriental villain, Jaffar is played by a fiercely anti-Nazi German actor who had been driven from Germany by the rise of Hitler.[130] It is clear that he can be read as a figure of the dangers of Nazi expansionism, which threatened at the time to deprive Britain of its colonies, just as Jaffar deprives Ahmad of his throne in Bagdad. Meanwhile, Abu, by thwarting (and eventually killing) Jaffar via his loyal defense of Ahmad, becomes a fantasy figure of Britain’s loyal colonial subjects rising up to defend their British masters from the German usurper. Clever, resourceful, and heroic though he may be, Abu remains the subject (through much of the film he has been transformed into a dog by Jaffar) and Ahmad remains the master. That Abu is also a child (and a thief) carries strong reminders of the Orientalist stereotyping that informed the colonial mindset, in which colonial subjects were expected to be both childlike and larcenous. The fact that he is played by an Indian actor, rather than an Arab, suggests an attempt to appeal to British audiences who were accustomed to thinking of Indians as their most important colonial subjects (though, in good Orientalist fashion, many in the audience also probably saw little distinction between Indians and Arabs). Indeed, much of the film’s imagery seems more Indian than Arabic, and Abu (with the aid of a flying genie and a flying carpet) does seem to travel to locations far from Baghdad in the course of the film.[131]

The irrepressible (and somewhat impish) Abu might remind some viewers of Mowgli, the protagonist of Kipling’s 1894 story collection The Jungle Book. Indeed, Sabu would play Mowgli in the 1942 British film adaptation of The Jungle Book (also produced by Alexander Korda). But American viewers might also be reminded of Huck Finn, one of the best-known characters in all of American literature—and one, who, like Abu is more interested in fun adventures than in becoming a responsible citizen of the civilized world. One might recall that, at the end of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Huck sets out for the Indian territories (which played a somewhat similar role in nineteenth-century American culture to the one played by the colonies for the British) to avoid getting adopted and civilized. Similarly, once Ahmad is restored to his throne, with the Princess in line to be his queen, he proposes to send Abu to the finest schools so that he can receive the education needed eventually to make him the new Grand Vizier. In response, Abu frantically hops back on his magic carpet and flies away as the film ends, not wishing to trade the exotic land of adventure that he has explored in the film for the routinized (almost English) world that seems to await him with Ahmad.

To understand the contrast between drab England and the colorful, magical Middle East of The Thief of Bagdad, it is again useful to compare the film to the Wizard of Oz, which contrasts the dreary colorlessness of Depression-era Kansas with the brilliant colors, exciting adventures, and spectacular riches to be found in the land of Oz. The Wizard of Oz carries very different (and very American)political resonances. Here, Oz is largely a consumerist fantasy, rather than an Orientalist one, with the Emerald City standing as a shining citadel of capitalist wealth, though in this sense it should also be added that the 1939 film differs substantially (due the different historical circumstances in which it was produced) from the novel on which it was based, L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). As Leach notes, this novel was written just as American consumer capitalism was gaining steam, and it clearly partakes of the energies of that phenomenon, taking a basic fairy-tale structure, then modernizing and Americanizing it to express the new spirit of consumerism that was sweeping the U.S. at the time. The Wizard himself, for example, is a sort of promoter figure, a “broker of other people’s dreams” (253).

Importantly, Baum’s novel was the first of a series of novels in which Oz is stipulated to be real—and to be much preferable to Kansas, which Dorothy eventually abandons to live permanently in Oz. Kansas thus serves as an emblem of traditional agrarian life set in stark opposition to the modern consumerist world of Oz, and the novel clearly regards Oz as the superior of the two alternatives. In the film, however, Oz is imaginary, ephemeral, the stuff of dreams, a get-rich-quick land where one’s existence can never be secure. It thus emphasizes the precariousness of a capitalist system that can lead to things like economic depressions. Here, the more solid, dependable, and down-to-earth Kansas is clearly preferable. The film’s no-place-like-home message counsels Americans, inured to hardship after a decade of Depression, to be patient, to eschew the dream of quick riches (represented by Oz) in favor of an ethic of hard work and determination (represented by Kansas). Stay in your place, don’t rock the boat, keep your nose to the grindstone, and whatever other conservative clichés might apply.

And yet, everything in the film’s sumptuous visuals of Oz seems to privilege that magical land and to make it seem infinitely more attractive than the colorless Kansas. The lure of consumerism shines through in the film regardless of the efforts of the filmmakers to suppress it. This same contradiction would seem to be at work in The Thief of Bagdad, as well. No matter how much the film might be built on an Orientalist foundation that insists on the ultimate superiority of Britain, the richness of its visuals still acts to make the East seem extremely attractive as an alternative. Part of this comes from the inherent contradictions of Orientalist logic, with its combination of horror and fascination toward the East. Similarly, the contradictions in The Wizard of Oz arise partly from the inherent contradictions that lie at the heart of capitalism—with its insistence on equality for all amid a competitive ethos that insists on the fairness of some being very, very rich, while others are very, very poor.

In the case of The Thief of Bagdad, however, the central contradiction arises primarily from the fact that two different forms of Orientalism are simultaneously at work in the film.A strain of traditional colonialist Orientalism certainly still exists in the film—though, oddly, more in the characterization of Abu as a loyal servant than in the presentation of the Middle East as a spectacle of sensuous Technicolor riches. The latter is primarily a matter of the more modern consumerist form of Orientalism, designed not so much to support the colonization of the East as to appropriate recognizable, romanticized Eastern images to entertain Western audiences and enrich the Western film industry. As Booker and Daraiseh note, both forms of Orientalism include elements of both horror and fascination; colonialist Orientalism, however, emphasizes the horror, while consumerist Orientalism emphasizes the fascination.

The Thief of Bagdad, then, is a particularly rich film—both in its lavish visuals and in its extensive, but complex, thematic implications. A glorious adventure that strongly appeals to the sense of wonder in its principal intended audience of young viewers, it also has serious things to say to older viewers and even to advanced students and professional scholars of British culture and of film in general. It is an important cultural marker of its time that clearly reflects the mood of Britain on the eve of World War II. But it is also a landmark in the history of filmmaking that clearly anticipates the growing importance of special effects in the films of subsequent decades.

Notes

EXEMPLARY TEXT:

THE THIRD MAN: DIR. CAROL REED (1949)[182]

Set in occupied Vienna just after the end of World War II, The Third Man is an intensely atmospheric film that effectively uses its setting to enhance the air of evil and corruption that pervades the entire piece, very much in the mode of the American noir films that it so closely resembles. The war-torn Vienna of the film is in many ways the central character. Shot mostly at night and largely in ruins, the former imperial capital of Austria-Hungary is, in fact, depicted as a broken shadow of its former splendid self, and in more ways than one. Not only has it been extensively damaged by the war in a material sense, but it is also steeped in moral decay, clearly a city in spiritual as well as physical ruin, a kind of specter of the feudal past struggling to cope with the capitalist present. In particular, it is a sort of confused and contested space, a long-established city that has suddenly become a lawless frontier town, with various forces vying to best take advantage of the opportunities offered by this situation. Placing the film within the context of the contemporaneous fiction of screenwriter Graham Greene, Mitchell Brown the film enacts Greene’s vision of

international law, humanitarianism, and justice as being inevitably corrupted by the political realities of interstate spaces, which is to say zones that lie between states and therefore fall outside clear jurisdiction and governance. Greene’s postwar internationalism, as represented by crime-ridden Vienna in The Third Man, dramatizes the parallel status shared by the refugee and the rogue: to be a truly international subject is to be at once liable to encroach upon the rights of others as well as to have one’s own rights encroached upon. (197)

Capitalism is, in many ways, at the core of the film. In the opening scenes, we are introduced to a Vienna in which the supply of almost all commodities relies on black market distribution and in which almost all of the citizens participate in the black market. An early shot of a floating corpse, however, reminds us of the potential fate of those who dabble in this market and helps to set the tone for the entire film. The actual plot of the film then begins as American novelist Holly Martins (played by Joseph Cotten), a writer of pulp Westerns, comes to Vienna to assume a job offered him there doing publicity work for a “medical charity” run by his old friend, the American Harry Lime (Orson Welles). On his arrival, however, Martins is told that Lime has just been killed in a street accident. When Martins subsequently attends the burial, he meets the British military policeman Major Calloway (Trevor Howard), who informs him that Lime had been the mastermind behind the blackest of black market schemes. Lime and his ring, Calloway claims, were stealing penicillin from local hospitals, then diluting it and selling it at huge profits on the black market. But the diluted drug was ineffective, resulting in horrible suffering and gruesome deaths for those who were treated with it.

Martins, a sort of American naif abroad, is at first incredulous and decides to seek evidence of Lime’s innocence so that he can exonerate his friend. In the process, he meets (and eventually falls in love with) Lime’s former girlfriend, the beautiful Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli). He also meets a weirdly sinister cast of Lime’s former associates in Vienna, including Baron Kurtz (wonderfully played by Ernst Deutsch as a sort of degenerate vampire and figure of the decline of the European aristocracy), Dr. Winkel (played by Erich Ponto in a clearly Naziesque mode), and the sleazy Romanian Popescu (Siegfried Breuer). The more evidence Martins collects (especially from the porter of the building in which Lime had lived), the more suspicious appear the circumstances surrounding Lime’s death. Then the porter is killed, and Martins becomes convinced that Lime was murdered, perhaps by the same shadowy forces that did away with the porter. In the meantime, however, Calloway has convinced him that Lime really was trafficking in tainted penicillin, so he concludes that the murder represented a kind of justice.[132]

Unable to get Anna (who is still mourning Harry’s death) to respond to his romantic advances, Martins decides to leave Vienna. Then comes the film’s most memorable moment, as Martins spots a figure apparently watching him from a darkened doorway. Martins approaches the doorway, complaining loudly about being under constant surveillance, causing a neighbor to turn on a light, which falls perfectly on the cherubic-sinister face of Welles/Lime, illuminated as pure white against the black background of the doorway. But Lime runs away and seems to vanish into nowhere, leaving the befuddled Martins alone in the street. Martins reports the sighting to Calloway, who exhumes Lime’s coffin, finding in it the body of a local hospital orderly who had been involved in Lime’s scheme. Martins manages to meet with Lime, who informs him that he is hiding out in the Soviet sector of the city, protected by the Russians in return for his cooperation.

After this meeting, Martins decides not to help the British police capture Lime. However, the Russians have by now discovered (apparently from Lime) that Anna is not Austrian, but Czech, and they plan (for reasons unspecified in the film, which seems to assume that Russians simply do such things as a matter of course) to force her to return to Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia. That, presumably, would be a fate worse than death, so Martins finally agrees to work with Calloway in return for the latter’s promise to help Anna escape from the Russians. Martins arranges a meeting with Lime, and Calloway stakes out the meeting, leading to the film’s memorable chase sequence through the sewers beneath the city (which oddly seem better lighted and certainly in better repair than the streets and buildings above), resulting finally in Lime’s shooting death at the hands of Martins. The film then repeats Lime’s burial, after which Calloway is to take Martins to the airport to return to America. Instead, however, Martins stays behind to try to help Anna, leaving both their futures uncertain as they stand together against the receding background of a lane lined by severely trimmed, leafless trees.

The Third Man is certainly a British film, made by a British company with a British director and screenwriter—the accomplished novelist Graham Greene.[133] Moreover, it is decidedly British in its outlook, presenting the British Calloway as a paragon of virtue and capability, while Americans are either bumbling innocents or vicious capitalists, Austrians are decadent blood-suckers, and Russians are so obviously horrid that their evils need not be specified. On the other hand, The Third Man is in many ways a quintessential example of the film noir, that decidedly American genre, with its detective-story plot amid an air of decadence and evil, weird shadows cast by expressionist lighting, and out-of-kilter camera angles. The film does, however, go beyond the typical film noir in its modernist techniques, especially in its haunting sound track of mostly cheerful zither music, completely out of whack with the look and content of the film. This disjunction creates a sort of Brechtian alienation effect that greatly enhances the film’s pervasive (and bizarre) air of a world out of joint. Indeed, The Third Man is ultimately an impressive fusion of the popular film noir thriller and the high art film. As Naremore puts it, The Third Man “is one of the best and most representative films of a period when a certain kind of high art had fully entered public consciousness and when European sobriety and American enertainment sometimes worked in tandem” (80).

Still, the film has strong connections with American culture. For one thing, Lime’s evil black market scheme can obviously be taken as a comment on the especially predatory nature of American capitalism (which turns out in this film to have roughly the same moral content, or lack thereof, as Russian communism, as opposed to the genuine morality of British culture). Similarly, the film’s depiction of the pulp novels produced by Martins can be taken as a comment on the debased nature of American culture, a comment enhanced when Martins attempts to give a lecture before a British-run cultural group in Vienna, where he demonstrates that he is virtually illiterate and knows essentially nothing about literature. Finally, Welles’s role in the project (and he dominates the film, despite not appearing until it is two-thirds over) can be taken as a signal of his endorsement of the film’s criticisms of American culture. After all, it is worth recalling that Welles’s participation in The Third Man marked the beginning of a self-imposed exile of several years, during which Welles remained in Europe to escape not only the Hollywood studio system, but the congressional anti-communist witch-hunts of the time.

NOTES

Chapter 5

The African Postcolonial Novel in English[183]

Due to the extensive presence of British colonial rule in Africa, a great deal of the postcolonial literature of Africa is written in English. That literature itself has been a rich component of global culture since the beginnings of decolonization in the 1950s. African writers have made important contributions to both drama and poetry. For example, Nigeria’s Wole Soyinka (1934– ), who became Africa’s first winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986, is known first and foremost as a dramatist. But Soyinka is also a respected novelist, and Africa’s most important contributions to global culture in English have been made in the realm of fiction. Indeed, beginning with the massive success of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), the African novel has been a particularly vital force in world literature, though there have also been lively debates in Africa about whether English is the most effective language for the expression of African themes, given that it is the language of the colonial conquerors who did so much damage to the natural evolution of African culture.

The areas along the northern coast of Africa were conquered by invading Muslim armies beginning in the seventh century, and most of the area was eventually incorporated into the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century. Most of South Africa was colonized by Dutch settlers in the eighteenth century, though Cape Town came under the control of the British at the end of the eighteenth century. Egypt was invaded by French armies led by Napoleon at the end of the eighteenth century, though he was unable to secure full control of the region, which remained context territory throughout most of the nineteenth century as the French, British, and Ottomans all vied for control of an area that was of special importance both for its strategic location and for its rich cultural heritage, dating back to the time of the pharaohs.

Most of the rest of Africa remained little known to Europeans, though slave traders had penetrated much of the continent and several coastal cities had been established as key points for both European and Arab slave traders. Then, with most European capitalist economies in a state of crisis in the late nineteenth century, European colonial powers turned their sights on Africa as a possible target of colonial expansion and economic opportunity. In order to avoid conflict over this expansion into Africa, the major European colonial powers met at the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 to devise a plan to divide up the continent among themselves. Much of this plan was developed with little knowledge of or concern for the needs and desires of the African people, and the resultant divisions often split traditional African communities into separate colonies or combined traditionally antagonistic communities into the same colonies, thus creating the seeds of problems that have plagued Africa until this day.

The British and French emerged from the conference with the largest share of African territories, though it took decades of brutal warfare for the British to secure their control over many of the territories that had been opened to them in the Berlin Conference. After colonization, the British pursued a number of policies to enforce their control, including the establishment of extensive educational systems operated in English. They also sought to suppress native cultures whenever they were perceived to be a threat to British hegemony and to instill in their colonial subjects a sense of the superiority of British culture, using modified versions that had earlier been developed in India, where the works of Shakespeare became the center of a massive cultural education project.[134] Meanwhile, this project was furthered by the fact that most of Britain’s sub-Saharan colonies were established among cultures that were entirely oral in nature and had no written literature—or even written language—of their own.[135]

As a result of this background, most former British colonies in Africa emerged into independence, after the decolonization process of the 1950s, with an educated class that had been trained mostly in English, exposed mostly to British literature, and bombarded with propagandistic declarations of the inferiority of their own native languages and cultures to their British counterparts. In addition, the new African nations had no indigenous cultural identities of their own, apart from what had been imposed on them by their British conquerors. There is no Nigerian ethnicity, no Nigerian language, no Nigerian culture or religion. The new nation of Nigeria was, in fact, composed of numerous ethnic groups who spoke many different languages and had a variety of different cultural backgrounds. Similar situations prevailed all over Africa, though the local situation was, of course, different in each case. One thing that the new postcolonial nations had in common was the need to establish a sense of postcolonial national cultural identity among their own people, as well as the need to present this new identity to a world that was accustomed to accepting stereotypes about African savagery and primitivity. Literature, especially the novel, came to play a key part in both of these projects. In the meantime, both projects were complicated by a legacy of Western literary works (such as Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) that represented Africa and Africans in inaccurate, offensive, and stereotypical ways.

Reading Postcolonial African Literature

While the usefulness of studying African and other postcolonial literatures has been well established, it is important to recognize that that African novels arise from a cultural and historical perspective that differs substantially from that of British or other Western novels. We can learn a great deal about African culture and history by studying African literature, just as we can learn a great deal about British culture and history by studying British literature. But African literature is still literature, and we should not forget that it has an aesthetic dimension that goes well beyond the simple presentation of information. Meanwhile, having granted the African novel an aesthetic dimension, Western readers must avoid the temptation merely to judge African novels by our own aesthetic standards, thus valuing most the African novels that are most similar to the best European or American novels. Moreover, while this statement seems obvious, avoiding this pitfall is not easy for Western readers, who have been brought up in a culture that still reflects the universalizing tendencies of Enlightenment thought and of bourgeois ideology. Jameson notes the universalizing tendency of bourgeois aesthetics when he comments on the way the “restricted code” of bourgeois aesthetic values comes to be regarded as universal at the moment of the firm establishment of capitalism in Europe, when the bourgeoisie begins to feel that “its private experience is for a time that of the world itself” (Signatures 169).

One reason it is valuable for Western readers to study African literature is because a sensitive reading of that literature makes it quite obvious that the different social and historical background of African literature leads to artistic criteria and conventions that differ from those of Europe or America. African literature thus provides an important demonstration that art cannot be separated from the social world and that aesthetic criteria are not universal and timeless, but arise in response to specific historical conditions and developments. As Achebe angrily suggested in a lecture on the relationship between art and society in the postcolonial world, the close connection between literature and politics in that world makes it clear that “art for art’s sake is just another piece of deodorised dogshit” (Morning, 29).

One of the most important tasks facing Western readers is to appreciate the inherent hybridity of the African novel, which derives both from the Western literary tradition and from African oral traditions, while at the same time being both aesthetically sophisticated and politically engaged. Moreover, it is one thing to acknowledge that the African novel incorporates both African and European literary traditions; it is quite another to resist the temptation to lean too far in one direction or another in appreciating this hybridity. It is crucial for Western readers to understand that the African novel differs from European and American ones both in its sociohistorical background and in the aesthetic conventions that it employs. At the same time, Western readers should resist the tendency to think of the African novel as an exotic alien artifact that has little or nothing in common with European or American novels. As Jameson points out in an influential (and controversial) essay on “Third-World” literature, Western critics who discuss such literature find themselves torn between a tendency toward “orientalism”—in which the critics emphasize the radical difference of the Third-World culture from his own First-World culture—and a tendency toward “universalism”—in which difference is effaced and the cultural values of Western Europe and North America are assumed to apply worldwide (Jameson, “Third-World” 77). Jameson further notes that any critical attempt to respect the otherness of Third-World culture is always in danger of descending into a negative orientalism that converts that culture into an alien and exotic curiosity, though Jameson himself opts to emphasize the difference between First- and Third-World literatures in order to call attention to the things we, as First-World readers, might learn from Third-World literature.

If Western critics of African literature must always attempt to negotiate a path between undesirable alternatives, it is also the case that similar alternatives have long been central to the cultural climate in Africa. As the Caribbean-African intellectual Frantz Fanon has emphasized, the colonial situation is fundamentally informed by a stark, Manichean opposition between the colonizer and the colonized (Fanon 41). This opposition inherently tends to lead to extremist attitudes. Drawing upon the ideas of both Jameson and Fanon, Abdul JanMohamed argues that a writer from colonial societies like those in Africa is caught in a double bind: if he rejects European culture and tries to draw upon indigenous cultural traditions in his work, he is seen as a primitive savage; if he attempts to emulate European culture he is seen as a “vacant imitator without a culture of his own” (Manichean 5).

Western readers of African literature should appreciate this predicament faced by the African writer. In addition, there are certain basic issues the careful consideration of which can do a great deal to help Western readers to read African literature effectively. These include an understanding of the fact that postcolonial African literature reacts not only against the decades of European political rule in Africa, but against a long legacy of negative representations of Africa and Africans in European and American writing. It is also important for Western readers to understand that many questions that seem to have simple answers in Western literature are not so simple in Africa. The very choice of a language in which to write can, for an African writer, be a highly political act. In addition, African writers have a problematic relationship to literary genres (like the novel) that are primarily European in their origin. Finally, the nature of African history requires that African writers have a fundamentally different relation to history than do European writers.

Language and the African Novel

JanMohamed appropriately observes that “the African writer’s very decision to use English as his medium is engulfed by ironies, paradoxes, and contradictions” (“Sophisticated” 20). Indeed, that African writers who continue to work in the languages of their former colonial rulers risk the perpetuation of colonialist ideas (especially ideas involving the cultural and linguistic superiority of Europe) should be clear. But the factors involved in the use of European languages by African writers are actually far more complicated than is immediately obvious. As a whole, fewer Africans are literate in any given African language than in English or French. African writers can thus reach a larger African reading audience in European languages and can meanwhile reach a Western audience as well. The economics of the publishing industry thus create great pressures for the use of European languages. At the same time, most Africans are not literate in Western languages either, so that the primary African audience for African novelists who write in European languages is precisely that educated elite which has been most thoroughly educated in the kinds of Western cultural traditions that the novelists are often seeking to challenge or overcome.

Further, JanMohamed notes in the essay just cited that European and African languages quite often operate on fundamentally different premises. In particular, European culture from the Renaissance forward is primarily of a written nature, and European languages reflect this fact. Most traditional African culture, however, is oral in nature, and most African languages did not have written forms before the arrival of colonialism. The very act of writing is to a certain extent a European activity, though it is certainly not the case that there are not traditions of written culture in Africa. Still, African writers from Tutuola onward have attempted to deal with the conflict between oral and written cultural forms in a number of ways, most obviously through the incorporation of materials from African oral culture into their written texts.[136] JanMohamed, for example, argues that in novels such as Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God Achebe manages a “syncretic” combination of written and oral cultural energies (“Sophisticated” 36).[137]

Achebe, like Tutuola, wrote his novels in English. Moreover, as he explains in the essay “The African Writer and the English Language,” Achebe felt that the English language had become a part of his African cultural heritage: “I have been given the English language,” he writes, “and I intend to use it” (Morning 102). At the same time, Achebe sees the necessity of developing a new kind of English that goes beyond the limitations of the imperial past: “I feel that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit new African surroundings (103).

The “new English” cited by Achebe often involves, among other things, an attempt to express the “feel” of oral culture in written texts. In this sense, Achebe’s attitude resembles that expressed by the British-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie in his influential article “The Empire Writes Back.” Rushdie is very clearly a great lover of the English language, noting in this article that “I don’t think there’s another language large or flexible enough to include so many different realities.” However, in this same article he also shows a profound appreciation for the historicity and political embeddedness of language, arguing that the vestiges of empire are still to be found in the “cadences” of the English language itself. On the other hand, he sees the political charge that inheres in language to be potentially energizing. Citing the great Irish writers Joyce, Beckett, and O’Brien as predecessors, Rushdie argues that much “vitality and excitement” can be derived from attempts to “decolonize” the English language. In this vein, Rushdie acknowledges the work of African writers such as Achebe and Kenya’s Ngũgĩ, who are resisting the history of imperialism that inheres within the language not only by “busily forging English into new shapes” but by placing politics at the very centre of their art” (“Empire” 8)

Many African writers have been less confident than Achebe or Rushdie that English can adequately express the realities of African life. Both Nigeria’s Soyinka and and Ghana’s Ayi Kwei Armah (1939– ), who themselves write in English, have suggested that African writers should begin to work toward the eventual development of a panAfrican literary language, perhaps Swahili. Senegal’s Ousmane Sembène (1923–2007), meanwhile, wrote his novels in French, but devoted much energy the making of films rather than novels, thus extending the accessibility of his work to a wider African audience, especially given that many of his films primarily employ his native Wolof language. Similarly, Ngũgĩ, having made a worldwide reputation as an English-language novelist, has written a number of plays in Gikuyu, thus making his work available to Gikuyu peasants and workers who do not know English or cannot read. Indeed, though identified by Rushdie as a leading “decolonizer” of English, Ngũgĩ has since eschewed the use of English in his writing, preferring to write his later original texts in his native Gikuyu. Ngũgĩ is quite adamant in texts like Decolonising the Mind about the responsibility of African writers to reject the languages inherited from their former imperial oppressors. Language, he argues, is central to one’s cultural identity, and Africans will never be able to establish a strong sense of self as long as they continue to express their deepest thoughts in European languages (4).

American readers are, by and large, limited to reading African novels in English. Thus, even Ngũgĩ’s Gikuyu-language novels are generally accessible to us only in English translation. We should, however, ask ourselves whether such translations do not, in fact, have a very different status than African novels written originally in English. In any case, we should strive not to take language for granted and to recognize the numerous important social and political issues that are at stake in the use of European language by African writers.

Genre and the African Novel

Many readers given little thought to a writer’s choice of literary genre. Still, it is clear that different genres tend to become popular in different societies and at different points in history. Thus, numerous writers in late-sixteenth-century England began to write sequences of sonnets at roughly the same time. Such phenomena are partly a matter of conscious fashion: writers naturally tend to work in forms that they themselves have enjoyed reading, and there is also a natural tendency to choose forms that are likely to be well received by readers. For example, we now know that even a writer such as Shakespeare, often regarded as a sort of universal genius whose work transcends such matters, made many of his artistic decisions in a conscious effort to produce plays that would draw a large and congenial audience in Elizabethan London. It has long been noticed that Shakespeare’s career moves through various phases in which he concentrates on romantic comedies in his early work, on dark tragedies in the middle of his career, and on seemingly whimsical fantasies as his career draws to a close. Critics have often attempted to relate these changes to developments in Shakespeare’s personal life, but a broader perspective shows that many of Shakespeare’s contemporaries went through similar phases and that the evolution of Shakespeare’s writing to a large extent simply follows changing fashions on the Elizabethan stage.

One cannot, however, attribute changes in dominant literary modes simply to fashion. If nothing else, there must be reasons why certain things are fashionable at certain times. Many recent critics and theorists of literature have noted that this is especially the case with fundamental factors like choice of genre. Jameson notes the social function of genre, pointing out that “genres are essentially literary institutions, or social contracts between a writer and a specific public, whose function is to specify the proper use of a particular cultural artifact” (Political Unconscious 106). In other words, when a writer chooses to work in a particular genre, he or she announces an intention to address certain specific expectations on the part of a specific audience of readers. Moreover, Jameson argues that generic expectations and conventions reflect social and political forces at work in the world at large. In short, genre is ultimately a political and historical phenomenon, and changing fashion in genre can be taken as indications of more fundamental changes in the social world. “Genre,” writes Jameson, “is essentially a socio-symbolic message” (141).

Because societies are complex and multiple phenomena, the question of genre is complex as well. In particular, Jameson notes that genre theory must always do more than merely account for the dominance of certain genres at certain times: it must account for the simultaneous availability of other generic forms as well. There may be certain specific historical reasons why the sonnet sequence would be popular in Elizabethan England, but Elizabethan writers worked in numerous other forms as well. In this sense, the novel for Jameson becomes a special genre because its “eclecticism” simultaneously shows the impact of a variety of different available social messages (Political Unconscious 143). Here Jameson’s work recalls that of the Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin, perhaps the most influential of all modern theorists of the novel. For Bakhtin, one of the most important characteristics of the novel is its generic multiplicity, its ability to incorporate and make use of the conventions normally associated with any number of other genres, even ones that are not usually considered literary. Thus, a novel can incorporate poems, songs, letters, sermons, diary entries, newspaper articles, and so on, and yet still be regarded as a novel.

Bakhtin’s vision of the novel is quite broad and includes forms dating back to ancient Greece in the tradition of the novel. Most historians of the novel, however, regard it as a relatively modern form that essentially came into being with the rise of the bourgeoisie to power in Europe. Indeed, it is by now quite conventional to regard the novel as the quintessential bourgeois genre, as the genre in which the European bourgeoisie most effectively express their particular view of the world. At the same time, it is also the case that this description probably holds true only for the great realist novels of the nineteenth century and that many modern European novels actually challenge the premises upon which such novels are based. It is also the case that the novel has been one of the most important genres in which postcolonial writers from Africa and elsewhere have attempted to assert their independence from European cultural domination. The very choice of the novel as a genre, like the choice to write in European languages such as English, is a complex and highly political one for African writers. For example, if African cultural traditions are primarily oral, it follows that African writers must to a certain extent draw upon European literary traditions in their own work. And this is especially the case given that most African writers themselves have had Western educations, either in colonial schools in Africa or in European and American schools and universities. As Appiah notes,

Postcoloniality is the condition of what we might ungenerously call a comprador intelligentsia: of a relatively small, Western-style, Western-trained, group of writers and thinkers who mediate the trade in cultural commodities of world capitalism at the periphery. In the West they are known through the Africa they offer; their compatriots know them both through the West they present to Africa and through an Africa they have invented for the world, for each other, and for Africa. (149).

This phenomenon is closely involved in the question of genre. Timothy Brennan thus warns that, in the Third World, the novel has typically been the genre of a Western-educated elite:

Almost inevitably it has been the form through which a thin, foreign-educated stratum (however sensitive or committed to domestic political interests) has communicated to metropolitan reading publics, often in translation. (56)

No matter how important it may be to understand and appreciate that African novels are African, it is also important to recognize that they are still novels, which means that they have certain relationships to the Western novelistic tradition, even if African novels draw upon a number of African cultural traditions that are outside the Western novelistic tradition. But if the novel is the generic embodiment of the process through which written culture replaced oral culture as the dominant form in Europe, then the use of the novel is obviously problematic for African writers who seek to preserve, rather than supplant African oral cultural traditions. Not only is the novel as a genre generally considered European in origin, but this origin is closely associated with the rise of capitalism in Europe, an historical process that also led eventually to the European colonization of Africa, making the novel in many ways the central literary expression not only of European bourgeois ideology, but of European colonialist ideology as well.

Postcolonial African novelists are thus to some extent working in a genre that is foreign—and even hostile—to their cultural context. On the other hand, one should also consider here Bakhtin’s influential vision of the novel as a genre that has an almost infinite flexibility and that, because of its ability to establish a close and direct contact with the contemporary world around it, can change shape and adapt to almost any conditions. According to Bakhtin, rather than functioning according to rigidly defined principles, the novel by its very nature challenges its own principles and thereby remains ever new, ever in touch with contemporary reality. In order to maintain this dynamic adaptive ability, the novel must continually challenge predefined notions of what it should be. It is therefore an inherently antiauthoritarian genre, “a genre that is ever questing, ever examining itself and subjecting its established forms to review. Such, indeed, is the only possibility open to a genre that structures itself in a zone of direct contact with developing reality” (39). The novel as a genre is “both critical and self-critical, one fated to revise the fundamental concepts of literariness and poeticalness dominant at the time” (10).

In short, the novel for Bakhtin is an ever-evolving genre because the best novels, drawing energies derived from their historical context, always challenge and go beyond the conventions established by previous novels. From this point of view, the novel is the ideal genre for postcolonial literature, which, in its engagement with the European literary tradition, represents not the smooth continuation of European conventions, but instead entails a direct challenge to a tradition that often worked in direct complicity with the European colonial domination of Africa. Moreover, drawing upon the work of Bakhtin, Brennan has argued that the novel is especially important as a postcolonial genre not only because of its inherently “composite” nature, but also because of the close historical involvement of the novel in the rise of nationalism in Europe. The nationalist orientation of the novel thus potentially makes it the ideal genre for postcolonial writers who are seeking to contribute to the development of new national cultural identities.

Sometimes African novels mount quite direct and explicit challenges not only to the Western novelistic tradition, but to specific novels. For example, Achebe’s first two novels (Things Fall Apart, first published in 1958, and No Longer at Ease, first published in 1960) were both written at least partially as responses to British novels about Africa (especially Joyce Cary’s Mr. Johnson), which were often ostensibly sympathetic to Africans, but which nevertheless continued colonialist stereotypes of Africans as lazy, irresponsible, irrational, and excessively emotional. More generally, African novels as a whole are faced with the task of overcoming a general complex of negative stereotypes about the social and cultural inferiority of Africa and Africans that were promulgated through a variety of European texts (both literary and “scientific”) during the colonial period.

In any case, if theorists such as Jameson and Bakhtin argue that the European novel is an inherently complex, hybrid genre, then it is clear that an African novel is even more so. Moreover, the hybridity of the African novel is a complex phenomenon that involves more than a simple additive combination of cultural perspectives. This hybridity often involves complex dialogues—and sometimes violent confrontations—between African and European cultures. To understand these dialogues, we need to understand certain aspects of the historical relationship between Africa and the West that have important consequences for the relationship between African novelists and their Western predecessors (and contemporaries). At the same time, studies of the African novel can potentially add a great deal to our understanding of African history, especially with regard to the relationship between Africa and Europe.

The South African Novel in English

Because of its history of earlier European colonization, South Africa has a somewhat different literary history than the rest of sub-Saharan Africa—though it is also the case that British colonization in South Africa occurred no earlier than in other sub-Saharan British colonies. Still, by the time British control was secured after the Second Boer War of 1899–1902, there was already an established system of education and written culture in southern Africa, which facilitated the development of an indigenous literature there. Indeed, On the other hand, the history of South African printed literature goes back to the early years of the twentieth century, during which there were a surprising number of works published in indigenous languages, especially Sotho and Zulu. Many of these early works were produced by presses controlled by missionaries working in the area and are little more than religious tracts, though some have genuine literary merit. The most prominent of the latter is Thomas Mofolo’s Sotho-language novel Chaka (submitted for publication as early as 1910, but first published in 1925), which continues to receive extensive critical attention even today. Indeed, since the publication of Daniel Kunene’s new English translation of the book in 1981, Chaka has achieved an expanded readership and a growing presence in critical discussions of South African literature. Among other things, Mofolo’s book, based on the story of an early nineteenth-century Zulu king, can be taken as an early attempt to recover elements of the African past that have been suppressed in colonialist histories, thus initiating the project of cultural recovery that would become one of the major projects of later African literature.[138]

In 1931, the Statute of Westminster granted South Africa full independence from British colonial rule, though this act was hardly one of liberation for the nation’s majority black population, who remained in an essentially colonial condition relative to the ruling white minority. In the system known as “Apartheid,” the black minority was segregated from the white minority and denied all access to genuine political and economic power. Indeed, the early history of the new “republic” was blighted by this phenomenon, which also strongly affected the country’s literary history—as most leading South African writers (until the end of Apartheid with the election of Nelson Mandela in 1994 as the first president of post-apartheid South Africa in the first genuinely free elections in the country’s history) felt they had to use their writing to speak out against the brutality and injustice of this extreme system of prejudice.[139] Thus, while much African literature is dominated by the topic of colonialism and its aftermath, the literature of South Africa is more concerned with Apartheid.

One of the important founding figures of black South African literature in English wrote largely to oppose the system of Apartheid—though his politics forced him to leave South Africa in 1939 and to live his life abroad. Peter Abrahams (1919–2017) worked as a seaman for two years, then settled in London, where he married an English woman and became an editor of the Communist Party organ Daily Worker. Abrahams’s first two novels, Song of the City (1945) and Mine Boy (1946), are overtly Marxist in focus on class-based oppression under industrial capitalism (which, in South Africa as in the United States, is inseparable from racial oppression). Abrahams’s third novel, The Path of Thunder (1948) examines the possibility of interracial love, and, taken together, his first three novels are ultimately hopeful in their sense that white South Africans might learn to overcome their traditional habit of racial hatred, leading to better conditions for all in South Africa. Wild Conquest (1950) is a historical novel that attempts to locate the roots of Apartheid in the early history of encounters with the indigenous Matabele people on the part of Afrikaner settlers during their “Great Trek” into the interior of South Africa in the 1830s and 1840s. One of Abrahams’s most important works is his 1954 autobiography, Tell Freedom, the first published autobiography by a black South African. The 1956 novel A Wreath for Udomo is also especially important in the way its treatment of the destructive effects of colonialism (even after decolonization) anticipates the works of later writers. Abrahams settled in Jamaica in 1956 and lived there for the rest of his life. There, he wrote such works as This Island Now (1966), a critique of neocolonialism in an island nation modeled on Haiti and Jamaica; and A Night of Their Own (1965) and The View from Coyaba (1985), which employ South African and Jamaican settings, respectively, to explore the role of the writer in the liberation of the black race.

Abrahams adhered to a relatively conventional Western prose style, though some of the South African writers influenced by him have drawn upon indigenous oral traditions to move in new stylistic directions. Es’kia Mphahlele is another important early figure in the development of a black South African literature. Perhaps his most important single work is his autobiography, Down Second Avenue (1959), which joins Abrahams’s Tell Freedom as perhaps the two most important South African works in that genre. Mphahlele is also the author of two novels, The Wanderers (which was published in 1971 and which helped Mphahlele earn his doctorate at the University of Denver in the United States) and Chirundu (1979). But Mphahlele’s most important contributions to South African fiction may be in the genre of the short story, both for his own work in the genre and for his work with the important literary magazine Drum, which became one of the major forces in the development of South African literature. Mphalele’s short story collections include The Living and the Dead (1961), In Corner B (1967), The Unbroken Song (1981), and Renewal Time (1988). Mphalele is also an important critic, known for volumes of commentary such as The African Image (1962) and Voices in the Whirlwind (1972) and for his emphatic positions stands, as in his vigorous opposition to the ideology of the Négritude[140] movement and for his skepticism toward the ultimate ability of literature written in English to contribute to the development of a genuinely African cultural identity that goes beyond British cultural domination.

One of the direct heirs of Abrahams’ political tradition in South African literature was Alex La Guma (1924–1985), perhaps the most important of all nonwhite South African novelists during the Apartheid era. As Abdul JanMohamed puts it, “The life and fiction of Alex La Guma perfectly illustrate the predicament of nonwhites in South Africa and the effects of apartheid on their lives” (225). La Guma was born and raised in the District Six, the notorious “colored”[141] ghetto of Cape Town, where he experienced first hand the tribulations of South Africa’s poor and oppressed. The son of Communist parents, La Guma was also exposed him to leftist politics at an early age, and by 1948 (at the age of 23) he had joined South Africa’s Communist Party, which would be outlawed two years later, forcing La Guma into a particularly marginal position in South African society. In the 1950s his active involvement in trade union politics led to his harassment and detention by the authorities on several occasions; he was eventually forced to leave the country for England in 1966. By this time he had established a considerable international reputation as a writer, both for his short stories and for the novels A Walk in the Night (1962) and And a Three-fold Cord (1964). The Stone Country (published in 1967) was also written while he was still in South Africa, though it was published after his departure. These novels combine an uncompromising description of the squalor of life in South Africa’s urban slums with a strong commitment to the possibility of radical political change. La Guma’s novels written in exile, In the Fog of the Seasons’ End (1972) and Time of the Butcherbird (1979), continue this passionate political commitment and concern for the plight of those whom Fanon called “the wretched of the earth.”

La Guma’s novels are all informed by a sophisticated Marxist understanding of the problems of South African society and of the steps that will be necessary for the ultimate solution of those problems. They are also distinctive in their journalistic style, which is reminiscent of the works of American naturalist writers such as Frank Norris and Theodor Dreiser, but for which the closest American analog is probably the proletarian fiction produced by 1930s writers such as Mike Gold, Jack Conroy, and James T. Farrell. La Guma himself characterized his work as socialist realism, thus indicating the crucial influence of Soviet writers such as on his work. La Guma’s dialogical relationship with a number of international literary movements parallels his extensive international reputation, though it is typical of conditions in the South Africa of the apartheid years that his works, banned in that country, were virtually unknown there until the 1980s.

While La Guma’s journalistic realism, directly influenced by the Soviet socialist realism of writers such as Maxim Gorky (1868–1936), Fyodor Gladkov (1883–1958), and Mikhail Sholokhov (1905–1984) is typical of the dominant mode of black South African fiction, poets such as Sipho Sepamla (1932–2007) and Mongane Wally Serote (1944– ) have also written novels the styles of which show the clear influence of their poetic backgrounds. Also of note among recent South African novels is Lewis Nkosi’s Mating Birds (1986), a blistering indictment of the crippling effects of apartheid on personal relationships in South Africa. This novel, in its focus on an aspiring writer who is in a South African prison awaiting execution, participates in a tradition of prison novels that has, not surprisingly, been a prominent aspect of South African literature. Important earlier examples of the prison genre include D. M. Zwelonke’s Robben Island (1973) and Moses Dlamanini’s Robben Island, Hell-Hole (1983), while prison and jail experiences also figure prominently in many of La Guma’s works. Nkosi’s novel shows a large degree of sophistication, which might be expected given that its author has taught African literature in universities around the world and is the author of numerous works of literary criticism, including the important Tasks and Masks: Themes and Styles of African Literature (1981).

Among black South African writers who have taken South African literature into the post-Apartheid period is Zakes Mda (1948– ), who first gained recognition with his initial novel Ways of Dying (1995), which deals with the difficulties facing South Africa in trying to build a democratic society in the wake of the trauma of Apartheid. Also notable is Heart of Redness (2000), which moves back and forth between the present time and a key moment in the tensions between white settlers and Xhosa tribesmen in the mid-nineteenth century. Mda has also written poetry and plays and has been active in the African Writers Trust, which seeks to bring together writers from the African diaspora around the world.

Black South African women writers have been more active in the short story than in the novel, though at least one nonwhite woman from South Africa, Bessie Head (1937–1986), became, in a career cut short by her premature death, one of Africa’s leading women novelists. It is indicative of conditions in Apartheid South Africa that all of Head’s novels were written in exile, in Botswana, where most of her fiction is also set. Her first novel, When Rain Clouds Gather (1969) is, like so many African novels, a story of conflict between modern and traditional societies. The book takes on special political force, however, by the fact that modern ideas are brought to the rural Botswanan village of Golema Mmidi not by white colonizers from Europe, but by political exiles fleeing from the Apartheid regime in South Africa. Indeed, the book’s major English character, Gilbert Balfour, is a positive figure, an agricultural expert who tries to help the poor villagers modernize their farming methods and thus decrease their poverty.

In Maru (1971), Head continues her focus on Botswanan village life, but considerably increases the sophistication of her fictional technique. The novel is a complex, multi-layered narrative that employs a basic love-story plot (revolving around the competition of two men, Maru and Moleka, for the affections of the same woman, Margaret) to explore the psychic consequences of African social phenomenon such as tribalism, racism (among different groups of blacks), and the oppression of women. The major characters all have allegorical significance as representatives of social, racial, and gender positions in the book’s exploration of traditional African prejudices in relation to these positions. The book makes some important positive points about Botswanan village society, though its final affirmation of individual desire as opposed to the demands of social conventions would appear to be more in line with European individualism than with African socialistic traditions, but the book nevertheless makes some important points about Botswanan village society.

A Question of Power (1974), Head’s best-known novel, is a frighteningly intense and partly autobiographical exploration of psychological instability in the context of Botswanan village life. The protagonist, Elizabeth (who seems directly modeled on Head herself) is a colored South African woman in exile in Botswana who must battle to find a stable sense of identity in the midst of a mental breakdown that is complicated by her social position as an exile and by her situation as a woman in a strongly male-dominated society. Head’s style in the novel powerfully evokes Elizabeth’s simultaneous experience of mental illness and social marginalization, and it is clear in the book that Elizabeth’s nightmarish psychic pain and fragmentation represent both Head’s own personal experiences and the larger social damage wrought in South Africa by the insane policy of apartheid. The book ends, however, on a positive (if somewhat forced) note, with a suggestion of the healing power of individual love, though the book also indicates the positive potential of communal activities such as cooperative gardening for the production of food.

Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind (1981) is a historical novel that relates the history of Botswana from 1880 to 1970 through a compilation of oral accounts supplied to her in interviews with the real inhabitants of the village of Serowe. The book is thus one of the more interesting among numerous African experiments in the blending of written and oral narrative. Head’s last novel, A Bewitched Crossroad: An African Saga (1984), also focuses on themes in Botswanan history, mingling fact and fiction in an ambitious attempt to tell the story of Botswana from a human perspective. Head’s short stories, many of which are collected in the volumes The Collector of Treasures and Other Botswana Tales (1977) and Tales of Tenderness and Power (1987), are also important.

South Africa’s most internationally acclaimed novelist is the white woman Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014), who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991. Gordimer follows in a long tradition of white South African women novelists that goes back to the late nineteenth century in the work of Olive Schreiner (1855–1920, whose Story of an African Farm, first published in 1883, is still read today. Gordimer herself is unquestionably the most important white South-African woman novelist of the past several decades, and her combination of deft literary technique with an uncompromising sense of social responsibility stands as a model for novelists worldwide.

Gordimer’s first few novels, including The Lying Days (1953), A World of Strangers (1958), and Occasion for Loving (1960)—described by JanMohamed as works of Gordimer’s “bourgeois phase” (88)—treat conditions in South Africa in a mode of relatively light satire. For JanMohamed, however, novels such as The Late Bourgeois World (1966), A Guest of Honour (1970), and The Conservationist (1974) indicate transition into a “postbourgeois” phase in which Gordimer’s growing sense of outrage at social and political conditions in South Africa bring her to a more and more urgent criticism of those conditions. The Conservationist, which was the first novel by an African writer to win the prestigious Booker Prize. It can also be taken as beginning Gordimer’s recognition as a major novelist on the world scene, though it can also be regarded as the culmination of Gordimer’s early career, with its tendency toward a lyrical style and a focus on the subjective experiences of individual characters within the context of the racism and oppression that define the basic conditions of life in apartheid South Africa.

By the time of Burger’s Daughter (1979) and July’s People (1981), Gordimer’s work takes on a substantially more public and overtly political dimension. These works, which JanMohamed considers the beginning of the “revolutionary” phase in Gordimer’s writing, suggest that the intolerable conditions in South Africa are leading inevitably to an explosion and that individuals have an obligation to take political action amid the growing crisis. This same sense of an urgent need for political commitment can also be found in A Sport of Nature (1987) and My Son’s Story (1990). Gordimer’s first post-Apartheid novel, None to Accompany Me (1994) focuses on the chaotic attempts to establish a new South Africa in the wake of Apartheid. She would go on to write four more post-Apartheid novels, though much of her last work turns back to more personal stories—as in The Pickup (2001), which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for the Best Book from Africa. She also published numerous influential volumes of short stories and essays.

The tradition of white men’s writing in South Africa goes back for some time as well, though there was a particularly rich growth in this tradition in the early years after the official establishment of Apartheid in 1948. Works in English such as Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country (1948), Dan Jacobson’s Evidence of Love (1960), and Jack Cope’s The Dawn Came Twice (1969) typically mix a commitment to liberal values with a critique of Apartheid, though generally with a growing sense of pessimism. By far the most important white male novelist writing in English in South Africa in the past few decades was J. M. Coetzee (1940– ), the winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. who has combined a self-consciously postmodern and experimental literary style with an intense concern with the evils of Apartheid to produce an impressive body of novels marked both by technical sophistication (perhaps showing the influence of his doctorate in literature from the University of Texas and his long-time role as professor of literature at the University of Cape Town) and powerful and disturbing content (showing the impact of South African political and social reality). Coetzee’s novels begin with the 1974 Dusklands, a parody of colonialist discourse reminiscent of the work of postmodern European writers such as Samuel Beckett and Vladimir Nabokov, and In the Heart of the Country (1977), a stream-of-consciousness exploration of the master-slave mentality of South African society.

Coetzee’s best-known novel is probably the 1980 Waiting for the Barbarians, which combines starkly realistic descriptions of violence with almost surrealistic scenes of symbolic imagery to comment upon the phenomenon of imperialism in general and apartheid in particular. Meanwhile, he became the second African writer to win the Booker Prize with the 1983 novel The Life and Times of Michael K, which marks an increasing turn toward metafictional explorations of the nature of fiction and its role in the world. The Kafkaesque Michael K employs experimental modes of writing reminiscent of much twentieth-century European literature to explore themes of official oppression versus individual freedom that have distinctly South African (anticolonial, anti-Apartheid) resonances. Foe (1986) is even more self-consciously literary, drawing upon the plots of Daniel Defoe’s eighteenth-century novels Robinson Crusoe and Roxana to construct a profound philosophical fiction that explores both the nature of artistic creation and the impact on such creation of political oppression. Age of Iron (1990) similarly explores the impact of social marginalization on the writer, while The Master of Petersburg (1994), Coetzee’s first post-Apartheid novel, continues his engagement with the European literary tradition with a fictional recreation of the life of the nineteenth-century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace (1999) won him his second Booker Prize, making him the first author to win that award multiple times (though two other authors have done it since). Coetzee relocated to Australia in 2002 and became an Australian citizen in 2006. His last few novels have focused largely on Australian themes, beginning with Elizabeth Costello (2003), about an aging Australian novelist who once authored a retelling of Joyce’s Ulysses from the point of view of Molly Bloom, the wife of Joyce’s most prominent character. Costello, incidentally, is also the main character in The Lives of Animals (1999), a novella promoting animal rights. Costello also features prominently in the novel Slow Man (2005) As of this writing, Coetzee’s most recent novels are The Childhood of Jesus (2013) and The Schooldays of Jesus (2017), an unusual pair of abstractly allegorical novels about strangers seeking a home in a strange land.

The West African Novel in English

Writers from West African countries such as Nigeria and Ghana have been especially important in the development of the African novel, partly because the former is the most populous country in Africa, while the latter was the first African colony to achieve independence from British rule. The areas now occupied by Nigeria and Ghana also had particularly rich histories in the precolonial era and maintained a certain connection to their traditional cultural heritage through the years of colonization. For example, Nigerian novelists can draw upon an especially strong tradition of oral storytelling that had already led to the publication of certain traditional African narratives in the area even before the advent of what might properly be considered the beginnings of the Nigerian novel in English. Thus, Amos Tutuola (1920–1997), often considered the first African novelist in English, is preceded not only by the rich tradition of Yoruba oral folk tales but by the work of D. O. Fagunwa, whose Yoruba narratives were published as early as 1938.

Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard, first published (by the well-known British publisher Faber and Faber) in 1952, is often considered the beginning of the West African Anglophone novel. This book, firmly rooted in the Yoruba folk tradition, relates the fantastic adventures of its narrator, an inveterate drinker of palm wine, who travels to the Land of the Dead in an attempt to retrieve his recent deceased palm-wine tapster, the only one capable of tapping palm wine to the drinkard’s satisfaction. Tutuola’s book was a major success upon its publication, though there is some disagreement over whether his works can properly be considered novels. In any case, Tutuola can be seen as a sort of bridge between traditional African oral narratives and the more conventionally literary African novels that began to be published soon after his work first appeared. Obiechina notes that Tutuola seems to have a unique ability to “assimilate elements peculiar to the oral tradition with elements peculiar to the literary tradition: in other words, to impose a literary organization upon essentially oral narrative material” (50).

If Tutuola is best considered a transitional writer, Chinua Achebe is typically considered to be the founding figure of the modern African novel and even of modern African literature as a whole. Simon Gikandi, in his excellent study of Achebe’s novels, discusses at some length the reasons why Achebe has been seen as such a seminal figure in the growth of African literature, even though he in fact had a number of important predecessors. Gikandi concludes that Achebe’s importance lies in the fact that his work was a genuine breakthrough in its direct confrontation with the cultural traditions of colonialism, in its ability

to evolve narrative procedures through which the colonial language, which was previously intended to designate and reproduce the colonial ideology, now evokes new forms of expression, proffers new oppositional discourse (Gikandi 4).

In particular, argues Gikandi, Achebe is able to use the colonial language of English and the Western genre of the novel to mount a powerful challenge to the myth of European cultural superiority, thereby recovering elements of African experience that have been effaced by colonialism and producing a viable sense of an alternative African cultural identity. “I want to insist,” writes Gikandi, “that Achebe was possibly the first African writer to be self-conscious about his role as an African writer, to confront the linguistic and historical problems of African writing in a colonial situation, and to situate writing within a larger body of regional and global knowledge about Africa” (5-6).

Whatever the reasons, it is certainly the case that Achebe has been an inspirational figure for the generation of African writers who followed him, not only in West Africa, but in the entire continent. Things Fall Apart, first published in 1958, remains the best-known and most widely read African novel more than half a century after its initial publication, and all of Achebe’s novels have received considerable attention from readers and critics. Achebe’s status as a role model for other African writers thus arises both because the impressive quality of his novels provides important aesthetic models for an African writing practice and because his commercial and critical success have encouraged Africans to write for publication and publishers to publish the works of African writers. In addition, his numerous critical and theoretical statements on his own writing and on African literature as a whole have done a great deal to establish the standards and conventions within which African novelists work.

Achebe’s individual importance and influence may, in fact, be one of the reasons why West African novels (especially Nigerian ones) have been so prominent in the development of the genre in Africa. On the other hand, as Obiechina points out in his influential study of a number of early West African novels, there are also important social and historical reasons why the novel would develop in a particularly rich way in this area. Obiechina emphasizes throughout his study that the “peculiarities” of the West African novel are “clearly determined by the West African cultural tradition and environment” (Culture 3). He then illustrates this point with readings of a number of specific novels, focusing especially on the works of Achebe, but also providing significant discussions of other Nigerian novels, including Timothy Mofolorunso Aluko’s One Man One Wife (1959), Cyprian Ekwensi’s Jagua Nana (1961), Nkem Nwankwo’s Danda (1964), Gabriel Okara’s The Voice (1964), Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters (1965), and Elechi Amadi’s The Concubine (1966). The Ghanaian Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1969) is also an important text in Obiechina’s study. All of these novels can now rightfully be regarded as classics of African literature, and together they illustrate many of the important trends in the early development of the West African novel.

One early West African novel that illustrates the inadequacy of Western concepts for understanding African novels is the Ghanaian Kofi Awoonor’s poetic novel This Earth, My Brother (1971), though the leading work in this vein might be Soyinka’s The Interpreters, which employs an array of literary devices usually associated with Western modernism (or even postmodernism), but which draws in important ways on African sources as well. Meanwhile, the complex, fragmented narrative structure of The Interpreters serves an important mimetic function, reinforcing the book’s content to create a vivid picture of the chaotic and confusing conditions that inform life in postcolonial Nigeria. The book focuses on the educated elite of Soyinka’s generation, who attempt to use their Western education to provide links between Nigeria and the West, often only to find themselves caught in the middle and alienated from both cultures. Soyinka employs a similar complexity in narrative form in his later novel Season of Anomy (1973), a dystopian fiction informed by graphic violence and abject imagery that grow directly out of the experience of the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970). Both books draw upon African oral traditions in important ways, but it is probably fair to say that Soyinka, more than most African writers, has absorbed the lessons of modern Western literature and put them to good use in his African work. This is especially the case in his drama, which shows an intimate connection with the African tradition oral performances, but which also conducts extensive intertextual dialogues with Western dramatists such as Bertolt Brecht and Samuel Beckett. It is, in fact, his drama for which Soyinka is best known and which is most responsible for his winning of the Nobel Prize.

The West African writer whose satirical vision most closely resembles that of Soyinka may be Armah, whose first three novels—beginning with the now-classic The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born—together constitute one of the most scathing critiques of postcolonial African society ever produced. Writing from a distinctive political perspective strongly influenced by the work of Frantz Fanon, Armah indicts postcolonial Ghanaian society for its failure to live up to the utopian dreams of the movement toward independence and its descent into corruption and moral decay under the impact of the dazzling lure of Western capital and commodities. Armah’s sophisticated novels, which combine substantial influences from African oral culture with impressive technical mastery of Western novelistic forms and devices, represent one of the most important contributions to the development of the West African novel as a hybrid of African and European cultural forces. Moreover, if The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born can be taken as a paradigm of the satirical treatment of postcolonial society in African fiction, later Armah novels such as Two Thousand Seasons (1973) and The Healers (1979) represent important contributions to the development of the African historical novel and to the African attempt to generate, through literature, a positive vision of the African past that escapes the stereotypes of colonialist histories of Africa.

Obiechina discusses no women writers in his survey of the West African novel through the 1960s, though there were in fact several important novels written by West African women by that time. And this omission is indicative of the lack of serious and sensitive critical attention from which African women writers suffered in the early years of independence. Most important among these early women novelists are the Nigerians Flora Nwapa (1931–1993) and Buchi Emecheta (1944–2017) and the Ghanaian Ama Ata Aidoo (1942– ), all of whom have produced works that are worthy of standing with those of Achebe, Ekwensi, Nwankwo, Soyinka, and Amadi as early classics of the West African novel.

Nwapa’s Efuru, published in 1966, was the first English-language novel to be published by a West African woman. If nothing else, the book constituted a breakthrough in the access of women writers to publication. It was, for example, the first work by a woman to be published in Heinemann’s African Writers Series, the major market for African novelists from the late 1950s to the late 1980s. The title character of Efuru (set in the late 1940s and early 1950s) is a strong, independent woman (modeled on the women of Nwapa’s own Oguta, an important trading town in eastern Nigeria) who triumphs over marital difficulties to establish a meaningful life of community service. Nwapa herself also triumphed over difficulties, overcoming the early rejection of her work by male critics to attain a reputation as the “mother” of West African women’s fiction. While her second novel, Idu (1970), resembles Efuru in its focus on traditional Igbo life, Nwapa’s later novels, Never Again (1975), One is Enough (1981), and Women Are Different (1986), concentrate on the experiences of women in modern Nigeria. Nwapa’s work thus has a scope that rivals that of any African male writer, and her writing well deserves the increased critical attention it has received in recent years.

Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy was copyrighted in 1966—before the publication of Efuru—but was not published until 1977. In the intervening years, Aidoo established a significant reputation as a dramatist, poet, and short-story writer. Our Sister Killjoy, with its poetic treatment of neocolonialism from a feminine perspective, is an important addition to the African postcolonial tradition of satirical writing. Moreover, the novel—set primarily in Germany and England—marks an expansion in the scope of the West African novel, which had previously tended to be set in West Africa itself. Aidoo’s treatment of feminist concerns from a decidedly African perspective also indicates the substantial ways in which the problems and concerns of African women sometimes differ from those of Western women and thus serves as a warning against the uncritical application of Western feminist criteria to African literature and society.

The internationalism of Our Sister Killjoy is also a hallmark of the writing of Emecheta, perhaps the most successful of all West African women writers. Emecheta’s first two novels, In the Ditch (1972) and Second-Class Citizen (1974), are set in London and derive from the author’s own experiences as a member of the African immigrant community there. Later Emecheta novels such as The Bride Price (1976) and The Slave Girl (1977) focus on the lives of women in traditional Igbo society, while Emecheta’s best-known novel, The Joys of Motherhood (1979), features a female protagonist who is caught between the traditional values of her native village and the modern values of urban Lagos, where most of the novel’s action takes place. More recently, Emecheta has written novels on the Nigerian Civil War, on the special problems of the educated elite in postcolonial Nigeria, and on the plight of a poor Caribbean woman living in the immigrant community of London. Emecheta’s concern with the travails of postcolonial Nigeria and with the conflict between the traditional values of rural Nigeria and the modern values inherited from the European colonial intrusion into Nigeria parallels that of male writers such as Achebi and Ekwensi, but her distinctively feminine focus makes her work an important contribution to the West-African novel that provides insights unavailable in the works of such male writers.

While there is a certain continuity in all of these early works by West African writers, Jonathan Peters has suggested in a useful historical survey (1993) of West Africa English-language fiction that Tutuola, Achebe, Ekwensi, and Okara join other writers such as William Conton, Onuora Nzekwu, Timothy Aluko, and Obi Egbuna in what might be considered the “first wave” of West African fiction writing, a group of texts in which “a limited number of themes emphasized either colonialism and its clash with autochthonous cultures or village life” (Peters 23). For Peters, then, the second wave of West African fiction deals with the problems of postcolonial corruption and disillusionment. This wave was ushered in by Soyinka’s The Interpreters and includes texts such as Achebe’s A Man of the People (1966), Amadi’s The Concubine, Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, Fragments (1970), and Why Are We So Blest? (1972), and Kole Omotoso’s The Combat (1972), as well as the works of women writers such as Nwapa, Aidoo, and Emecheta.

More recent West-African fiction, in Peters’s scheme, can then be considered a third wave of texts that deal with a wide variety of social, political, and historical issues, but that are tied together by a number of common themes, including a turn toward writing clearly for an African, rather than a Western audience. As with any contemporary literary movement, the most important texts of this wave have yet to be clearly established, especially as recent African writing in general is marked by a dramatic increase in the sheer number of texts that are being produced. Of course, many of the major figures of the earlier decades of West-African writing continued to work in this third wave as well, and texts such as Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah (1987), Amadi’s Estrangement, Nwapa’s Women Are Different, Emecheta’s The Family (1990), and Aidoo’s Changes (1992) are clearly among the most important novels to have been produced by West-African writers in the past decade. But a number of important new voices have emerged in that decade as well. Among these are numerous writers of popular fiction such as fantasies and detective thrillers, a development that indicates the rising readership for fiction among the West African population. Moreover, an awareness of this readership has led writers such as the Ghanaian Amu Djoleto to pursue many of the same themes as other West African writers but in a more accessible style reminiscent of popular literature. Also tending toward greater accessibility for a newly literate African audience (and toward rejection of the criteria of complexity and ambiguity often invoked by Western literary critics) are a number of new political novels by writers such as Kole Omotoso and Festus Iyayi, who write from an avowedly socialist perspective. On the other hand, works such as The Man Who Came in From the Back of Beyond and The Sympathetic Undertaker and Other Dreams (both 1991) by the Ghanaian Biyi Bandele-Thomas tend toward fantasy and absurdism. Probably the leading figure in this vein, however, is the Nigerian Ben Okri (1959– ), whose extremely complex and difficult novels have received considerable praise among Western critics. Okri’s The Famished Road (1991), for example, became the first novel by a black African writer to win the Booker Prize, with Okri (at 32) becoming the youngest winner of the prize. This novel was followed by Songs of Enchantment (1993) and Infinite Riches (1998) to constitute a trilogy of novels narrated by the spirit-child Azaro in a complex mode that combines postmodernist literary play with magical realism and Yoruba folk traditions, taking place largely in the spirit world but also addressing conditions in an African nation that strongly resembles Nigeria. Azaro himself becomes very much what Fredric Jameson would call a “national allegory” as his childhood adventures closely parallel the tribulations encountered during the growth of the young Nigerian nation. The trilogy is uncompromising in its critique of the violence and corruption of modern Nigerian society, but it ends with a vision of a better future and with a call to “redream” the world. In his highly sophisticated literary style and in his rich intertextual relationship with the literature and culture of societies around the globe, Okri’s work indicates a new internationalism in West African fiction, even as his work draws heavily upon distinctively Nigerian narrative traditions and maintains a vivid contact with Nigerian reality.

In recent years, Nigerian women writers have also gained increasing international recognition. Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie (1977– ) has established a strong reputation as a leader among a new generation of young African writers now attracting new readers to African literature, both in Africa and abroad. Her novels Purple Hibiscus (2003, winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book), Half of a Yellow Sun (2006, winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction and the basis of a 2103 film adaptation), and Americanah (2013, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction) have all been well received. She is also the author of the short story collection The Thing Around Your Neck (2009, nominated for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book from Africa), and the book-length essay We Should All Be Feminists (2014) She has spent much of her adult life in the United States, where she attended several different universities and received some prestigious grants, such as a MacArthur Fellowship (the so-called Genius Grant) in 2008. She now splits her time between Nigeria and the U.S. and is active in feminist causes as well as continuing her writing career.

Adichie is indicative of increasing cultural exchanges between Africa and the U.S. (with Britain becoming less central to Anglophone Africa’s dialogue with the West). It has, for example, become increasingly common for African writers ti be educated in the U.S. in reent years (Zimbabwe’s promising NoViolet Bulawayo is another example). Nnedi Okorafor (1974– ), meanwhile, is an example of an African American writer who has maintained strong ties to African culture. Though Okorafor was born in the U.S., she is of Igbo descent, and both her parents are from Nigeria. Okorafor herself has spent considerable time in Nigeria, and much of her fiction deals with African cultural themes. She writes both for young adults and adults, mostly in fantasy and science fiction (and often merging the two). Her novel Who Fears Death (2011) won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel, and her young adult novel Akata Witch (2011) was also well received. Binti (2015) won both the Hugo[142] and the Nebula Awards for Best Novella; it was eventually joined by Binti: Home (2017) and Binti: The Night Masquerade (2018) to form a trilogy.

The East African Novel in English

Despite the dominance of West African writers in the development of the Anglophone African novel, some of the most important examples of the modern African novel have emerged from East Africa, especially in the works of the Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who stands with figures such as Achebe, Soyinka, and Sembène as the true giants of modern African literature. Ngũgĩ wrote his first novel, The River Between, in 1961, but he became particularly determined to pursue a career in writing after attending the African Writers’ Conference in Kampala in 1962 and realizing there that East African writers constituted an insignificant presence at this conference.

The River Between, a meditation on the conflict between traditional and modern values in the Gikuyu society of colonial Kenya, was not published until 1965. Ngũgĩ’s first published novel (and the first modern novel to be published by an East African writer) was thus Weep Not, Child, written in 1962 but published in 1964. Both of these first two novels are set in colonial Kenya and detail the sometimes devastating impact of British colonial domination on the traditional societies of Kenya. Weep Not, Child focuses particularly on the so-called Mau Mau rebellion against British rule in Kenya from 1952 to 1956, thus becoming the first of a number of novels that would eventually focus on that crucial conflict, including Ngũgĩ’s own A Grain of Wheat (1967). Indeed, the Mau Mau period is a major concern of East African fiction, especially from Kenya, though the treatment of the Mau Mau movement varies considerably in the works of different writers. For example, Charles Mangua’s A Tail in the Mouth (1972), while it is highly critical of the “home guards” (the Kenyan troops who sided with the British to suppress the rebellion), can by and large be read as a satirical treatment of the Mau Mau freedom fighters. The book might thus be seen as a parodic response to Ngũgĩ’s positive vision of those fighters as paradigms of anticolonial resistance, though it can also be argued that Ngũgĩ’s understanding of the Mau Mau in this way did not fully congeal until his turn toward a more radical vision in the later novels Petals of Blood (1977), Caitaani Mutharaba-ini (1980, Devil on the Cross, 1982), and Matigari ma Njiruugi (1986, Matigari 1987). Meja Mwangi’s (1948– ) novels Carcase for Hounds (1974) and Taste of Death (1975) are more ambivalent, depicting the suffering of both the freedom fighters and their opponents. Mwangi’s Mau Mau novels show a basic sympathy with the goals of the Mau Mau movement, but sometimes veer dangerously close to a repetition of colonialist myths of the Mau Mau as primitive savages driven by blood lust. The same might also be said for Godwin Wachira’s Ordeal in the Forest (1968), which combines a biting critique of colonialism (especially through its depiction of the racist British officer Major Cook) with a seeming acceptance of a number of colonialist stereotypes about Africans. Meanwhile, the story collection Potent Ash (1968), by Leonard Kibera and Sam Kahiga, and the novel Voices in the Dark (1970), by Kibera, are also sympathetic to the Mau Mau cause, but focus on the nightmarish conditions in Kenya brought about by the rebellion and on the deplorable social and political conditions in the postcolonial Kenya to which the rebellion indirectly led. Charity Waciuma’s Daughter of Mumbi (1969), on the other hand, is far more consistent in its support for the Mau Mau cause through a depiction of the justice of their opposition to conditions in colonial Kenya.

Ngũgĩ, focusing on the neocolonial exploitation of Kenya by international capitalism and on the complicity of the postcolonial Kenyan regime in this exploitation, has continued to this writing to be East Africa’s most important writer. Petals of Blood is perhaps the Ngũgĩ novel that makes the most extensive and sophisticated use of narrative techniques learned from European models. Caitaani Mutharaba-ini, on the other hand, marked a major change in direction for Ngũgĩ, being written not only in Gikuyu rather than English, but drawing extensively upon the traditions of Gikuyu oral narrative in its style and structure. It also shows an intensified concern with the plight of women in postcolonial Kenyan society. Matigari continues in this vein, drawing upon folk traditions and supernatural imagery to make Ngũgĩ’s most radical statement in favor of revolutionary change in postcolonial Kenya.

Many of Ngũgĩ’s efforts after the publication of Matigari were devoted to encouraging younger African writers to write in Gikuyu or other African languages. He would not, in fact, publish another novel for nearly two decades, until the appearance of the massive Mũrogi wa Kagogo in 2004 (translated into English by the author as Wizard of the Crow in 2006). A dystopian satire that is both riotously funny and bitterly polemical in its indictment of postcolonial African corruption and oppression. Using motifs derived from a variety of storytelling traditions, both African and Western, Ngũgĩ constructs here what some critics have considered to be his masterpiece.

Ngũgĩ’s debut as a published writer was soon followed by that of Kenya’s Grace Ogot (1930–2015), whose The Promised Land (1966) became the first East African novel by a woman writer and the first novel to be published by Nairobi’s East Africa Publishing House, which would become a major force in the development of East African literature. The Promised Land, like The River Between, focuses on the impact on traditional village society of modern values derived from the colonial presence in Kenya. Writing in both Luo and English, Ogot would go on to develop a strong reputation as a short-story writer, particularly for the stories published in the collections Land Without Thunder (1968), The Other Woman (1976), and The Island of Tears (1980). All of Ogot’s work shows a passionate concern for the plight of women in East African society. She has continued to be a popular writer in Kenya, despite the fact that her work has received relatively little critical attention in the West. In 1980, she published a second novel in English, The Graduate, which focuses on the political disempowerment of women in postcolonial Kenya. Perhaps more significantly, Ogot produced a number of works in the Luo language in the 1980s, perhaps following the lead of Ngũgĩ. These works, including Ber Wat (1981), Aloo Kod Apul-Apul (1981), and Miaha (1983, The Strange Bride, 1989) have found a substantial readership in Kenya and have done a great deal to advance the notion of writing in African, as opposed to European, languages. In 2018, her widower (a prominent Kenyan historian) spearheaded the posthumous publication of three additional novels by her: Simbi Nyaima: The Lake that Sank, The Royal Bead, and Princess Nyilaak.

Among other women writers who have been important in East Africa is Waciuma, who (in addition to writing Daughter of Mumbi) has been a leader in the production of children’s literature in Kenya. Another noteworthy Kenyan woman writer is Rebeka Njau, whose Ripples in the Pool (1978) contrasts the nature-oriented wisdom of a traditional medicine man with the coldly scientific approach to medicine (and the world) imported from the West. Njau employs poetic language and supernatural imagery to evoke the traumatic effect on the Kenyan peasantry of the dispossession of their land in the colonial period, an effect that continues to have ramifications well into the postcolonial era. A second novel, The Scared Seed (2003), deals more directly with the plight of abused women in Kenya but also adds magical elements. Njau has also written short stories and a play, showing an ability (typical among African women writers) to work in multiple genres.

If Njau’s approach in Ripples in the Pool anticipates the turn toward fantastic imagery in Ngũgĩ’s Matigari (or even the rise of magical realism in the works of African writers such as Ben Okri), writers such as Mwangi moved toward more and more direct descriptions of reality. Indeed, Neil Lazarus has identified the naturalistic style developed by Mwangi, his fellow Kenyan Thomas Akare, and the Zimbabwean Dambudzo Marechera in the last part of the twentieth century as one of the most important developments in politically-engaged African literature since 1970 (209). In addition to his two Mau Mau novels in the mid-1970s, Mwangi has published a number of novels that focus on the plight of the urban poor in postcolonial Nairobi, including Kill Me Quick! (1973), Going Down River Road (1976), and The Cockroach Dance (1979). Mwangi’s work is particularly distinctive for its description of the poor in their own idiom. His latest novel, Weapon of Hunger (1989) continues his social concern in its vivid treatment of civil war as an emblem of the moral and political chaos that have marked much of postcolonial African history.

Mwangi’s novels, partly because of their use of vernacular language, have been extremely popular in Kenya, which developed a lively tradition of commercially-successful popular literature in the latter part of the twentieth century. Mangua’s Son of Woman (1971) is generally acknowledged as the founding text of this trend, in which crime stories and spy thrillers—both heavily influenced by Western models—have been particularly popular. But it is David Maillu (1939– ) who is the undisputed king of Kenyan popular literature, both because of his own writings and because of his founding of Comb Books (and later of Maillu Publishing House), one of the major publishers of popular novels in East Africa. Maillu’s numerous works have often been judged inferior in quality by critics, either because of his overt didacticism or because of his lack of mastery of literary technique. On the other hand, Emmanuel Ngara has argued that Maillu’s work deserves more serious critical attention and that the social vision embodied in his works constitutes a profound literary expression of the social problems facing postcolonial Africa (Ngara 1985, 55). Focusing on My Dear Bottle (1973) and After 4:30 (1974), Ngara demonstrates Maillu’s intense concern with the plight of women and of the working class in Kenya, though Ngara acknowledges Maillu’s stylistic limitations and grants that Maillu’s success as a political writer is compromised by his lack of a fully articulated socialist vision. Ngara concludes that Maillu “may with some justification be condemned as a `pornographic jester,’ but his style should not obscure the fact that he raises questions capable of pricking the consciences of those in positions of power and authority” (58).

Maillu’s work continued to be popular in the 1990s, and his novel Broken Drum (1991) won the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature. However, by the 1990s he had turned more and more to the production of children’s books. Of course, the turn to crime thrillers and other forms of “entertainment” literature in the 1970s can also be attributed to the fact that increasingly oppressive political conditions in Kenya made it unsafe for writers to treat contemporary reality in more profound ways. Ngũgĩ himself, because of the uncompromising political engagement of his writing, was detained in prison for nearly a year in the late 1970s and then forced into exile in the late 1980s. As of this writing, he still lives in the United States. Meanwhile, there was a notable decline in the political engagement of Kenyan fiction after Ngũgĩ’s exile.

The work of the Somali writer Nuruddin Farah (1945– ), considered by many a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, is also worthy of note in any account of East African Anglophone literature, even if Farah’s Somali culture draws upon a number of traditions (especially Islamic ones) that are outside those that are central to most Anglophone African writers. Farah’s complex and sophisticated novels combine important influences from the strong tradition of Somali oral poetry with an impressive mastery of the literary techniques of Western modernism to produce some of the most noteworthy works of modern East African literature. Among other things, Farah’s consistent focus on gender issues has gained him a reputation as one of the most “feminist” of all African male writers. Farah’s first novel, From a Crooked Rib (1970) is set in the colonial Somalia of the 1950s and focuses on the tribulations of its protagonist Ebla, an illiterate Somali woman who attempts to escape her treatment as the property of men. However, most of Farah’s work concentrates on the postcolonial period. A Naked Needle (1976) focuses in an impressionistic fashion on the experiences of the young man Koschin, a scholar of the work of James Joyce and an inhabitant of Mogasdishu in the confusing years following the 1969 military coup that placed Somalia under the rule of General Muhammed Siyad Barre.

Farah’s most substantial work to date is the trilogy Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship, which consists of the volumes Sweet and Sour Milk (1979), Sardines (1981), and Close Sesame (1983). These volumes are extremely literary, including allusions to a wide range of other texts from a variety of disciplines and employing an extensive array of experimental techniques of narration reminiscent of Western modernism. But the political engagement of Farah’s fiction is unquestionable. All three volumes are set in a fictional dystopian Somalia of the 1970s ruled by a fictional “General” who is quite obviously based on the real Siyad Barre. Farah’s critical commentary on oppressive conditions in his native Somalia (from which he was forced into exile and in which his works were banned) is thus quite direct. All in all, Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship is one of the most sophisticated literary works in the global dystopian tradition.

One of the themes of Farah’s trilogy is the impact of Soviet support for Siyad Barre on oppressive conditions in Somalia in the 1970s. In Maps (1986), however, Farah demonstrates that Siyad Barre’s later switch to the American side in the Cold War did little to alleviate conditions in Somalia. Maps also employs an even more inventive narrative style than its predecessors, moving from the realm of modernism into that of postmodernism. Its protagonist Askar, meanwhile, is another example of “national allegory” in African fiction, and it is clear that his experiences are in a sense representative of those of postcolonial Somalia as a whole. Farah’s literary production continued unabated (though in exile) amid the tumultuous conditions in Somalia in the 1990s. Maps was followed by Gifts (1993) and Secrets (1998) to constitute the “Blood in the Sun” trilogy. Still another trilogy, “Past Imperfect,” comprises the novels Links (2004), Knots (2007), and Crossbones (2011).

NOTES

EXEMPLARY TEXT:

CHINUA ACHEBE, THINGS FALL APART (1958)[184]

Things Fall Apart, Achebe’s first novel, was published in 1958, becoming the inaugural text in the Heinemann African Writers Series and one of the founding texts of modern African literature. It is almost certainly the African novel that is most often read by Western readers and most often taught in British and American classrooms. Not only is it a staple of college courses in African literature, but it is also widely taught in courses in world literature. It is also frequently taught in courses on African culture, society, and history as an introduction to the workings of a precolonial African community. As a result, Achebe’s book is very frequently the first African novel to be encountered by its Western readers, and rightfully so. Not only is the book one of the earliest important African novels, but it exemplifies a great number of the fundamental issues that typically face Western readers of African novels. For most readers the most memorable part of the book is its vivid evocation of Igbo society at the time of the first major incursions of British colonialism into the Igbo lands at the beginning of the twentieth century. Achebe has made it clear that his principal purpose in the book was to provide African readers with a realistic depiction of their precolonial past, free of the distortions and stereotypes imposed upon that past in European accounts. It also details (as the title of the novel indicates) the destruction of traditional Igbo society due to the incursions of their British colonial conquerors.

It is also valuable, when contemplating Things Fall Apart, to be aware that it is the first volume of a trilogy, which also includes the novels No Longer at Ease (1960) and Arrow of God (1964). In fact, the novels we now know as Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease were initially conceived as a single novel, narrating the colonial history of the Igbos in Nigeria. Thus, while Things Fall Apart tells the story of the initial impact of British colonization in traditional Igbo society, No Longer at Ease takes this narrative later into the colonial period, describing the tensions in a 1950s Nigerian society moving toward independence from British rule. Arrow of God, set in the 1920s, describes a colonial Nigeria in which many Igbo villagers continue to adhere to relatively traditional Igbo religious and cultural practices, but are very much aware that British control of Nigeria is firm and that they must learn to deal with the consequences of this alien rule. That the three novels of the trilogy do not appear in chronological order can be taken as a challenge to the Western notion of linear history. Margaret Turner, for example, argues that “Chinua Achebe’s trilogy, Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God, and No Longer at Ease, refutes Western standards of literature and Western ideology, in this case Hegel’s universal and homogeneous state, by showing that both constitute aspects of the new colonialism” (32).

It might also be noted that Achebe’s fourth novel, A Man of the People (1966), essentially continues this historical narrative into the postcolonial period, conducting a critique of postcolonial corruption, though in this case in an unnamed African country, rather than specifically in Nigeria. The formally intricate Anthills of the Savannah (1987) is an even more abstract and allegorical tale; set in the fictional West African country of Kangan, it details political corruption and repression in the country in a dystopian vein that mixes Western and African storytelling styles, though it ends on a hopeful note. Achebe’s five novels can be seen as constituting a single historical narrative, while also suggesting that historical narratives can be constructed and interpreted in a variety of ways.

Things Fall Apart itself can be divided into three basic segments set in different stages of the colonization of the Igbo lands of Nigeria. The initial section, spanning the first thirteen chapters, is largely concerned with provided readers of the vivid picture of the traditional way of life enjoyed by the inhabitants of an Igbo village before the incursion of the British. Focusing on the village of Iguedo, one of the eight confederated villages collectively known as Umuofia, this section of the book provides an account of the daily social, economic, political, family, and spiritual lives of the villagers, seen largely through an account of the character and activities of the protagonist, Okonkwo. As this part of the book ends, Okonkwo’s old rusty gun explodes during the funeral ceremonies for Ezeulu, a prominent villager, killing the sixteen-year-old son of the deceased man. As a result of this event, Okonkwo and his family are exiled for seven years to the village of Mbanta, the traditional home of the family of Okonkwo’s mother. The second part of the book concerns this exile, during which both the British colonial administration and Christian missionaries make significant headway in displacing the traditional way of life in Umuofia. In chapter 20, Okonkwo returns to Umuofia, beginning the third and final part of the novel, in which he helps to lead a futile and ill-fated attempt to resist this cultural destruction, leading to his death by suicide.

In the first section of Things Fall Apart, the villagers of Umuofia live in a well-ordered society, with intricate social customs that are clearly designed to work for the benefit of the community as a whole. In contrast to colonialist notions that Africans lived in primitive savagery before Europeans brought “civilization,” the villagers in Achebe’s book live in a society

in which life is rounded and intricate and sensitively in correspondence with a range of human impulses. It admits both the aristocratic and the democratic principles. It is a life lived by a dignified clan of equals who meet together in an Athenian way. (Walsh 49).

Achebe’s reminders that precolonial African societies functioned in such sophisticated ways are, of course, valuable to both African and Western readers. On the other hand, the detailed depiction of the workings of Igbo society in Things Fall Apart makes the book particularly prone to the kind of Western anthropological readings that have sometimes prevented African novels from receiving serious critical attention as literature rather than simply as documentation of African cultural practices.[143] However, Things Fall Apart is a rich and complex novel that provides far more than an anthropological account of life in a traditional Igbo village. Moreover, even the account of Igbo life in the first part of the book is constructed in a highly literary fashion, as Achebe manages to provide an amazing number of details about traditional Igbo life in an extremely subtle and inobtrusive way that never interferes with the ongoing narrative. Indeed, most readers of the book are probably unaware that they have been given as many details about the customs and practices of Umuofia as they actually have.

For example, we learn in the very first paragraph of Things Fall Apart that Okonkwo, the protagonist, is a well-known figure in Umuofia because of his many personal achievements, beginning, at age eighteen, when he won a wrestling match against Amalinze the Cat, a famous champion. Wrestling matches are mentioned at several other points in the book as well, gradually making it clear that these matches have an important social function in the Igbo society of Umuofia. Yet at no point does Achebe’s narrator deliver anything like an extended discourse on wrestling as a social institution. In a similarly subtle way, Achebe provides numerous details regarding Igbo religion and cosmology, the domestic lives of Igbo families, and the political culture of Umuofia, all integrated within the narrative and without lengthy discursive passages.

The various details about Igbo village life and culture that we receive in the first part of the book are almost always provided as an integral part of the ongoing narration. For example, chapter 2 begins as the men of Umuofia are summoned to a group meeting by the town crier. We then learn that this meeting has been called in response to the recent killing of a woman from Umuofia in the neighboring village of Mbaino. The subsequent response to this crisis—the Umuofians follow the “normal course of action” in such situations—allows Achebe to tell us a great deal about the workings of the society of Umuofia, which turn out to be quite orderly and to proceed in accordance with well-established rules. Moreover, while the infuriated villagers of Umuofia regard the killing as an abomination and as an affront to their entire society, the response is designed to avoid an all-out conflict between Mbaino and Umuofia, seeking not revenge but justice. As a result of the subsequently negotiated peaceful solution, a young virgin from Mbaino is sent to Umuofia as a replacement wife to the dead woman’s husband. Meanwhile, as further retribution for the killing, Ikemefuna, a fifteen-year-old boy from Mbaino, is also sent to Umuofia, apparently to bear the brunt of the punishment for the crime. However, even here the clan of Umuofia responds slowly and carefully, waiting for a clear direction from Agbala, the Oracle of the Hills and Caves, before deciding the boy’s punishment.

In the meantime, Ikemefuna lives with Okonkwo for three years and becomes like a member of the family, growing especially close to Okonkwo’s eldest son, Nwoye. Ultimately, the oracle decrees that Ikemefuna must be killed as a sacrifice to atone for the crime, thus restoring the natural order of things. Indeed, there is a great deal of emphasis in Things Fall Apart on the tendency of the Igbo citizens of Umuofia to seek order and balance in all of their dealings, a characteristic that makes the subsequent destruction of this balance by the impact of British colonialism and Christian evangelism all the more damaging and traumatic. Meanwhile, Achebe uses the story of Ikemefuna not only to provide a number of details about Igbo law and cosmology but also to further the plot of the novel and the characterization of the protagonist. Okonkwo, as a leader of Umuofia, knows that he must abide by this decision that the boy be killed. However, always anxious to demonstrate his strength and courage, Okonkwo does far more than simply accept the fact that Ikemefuna must die. Although warned by the elder Ogbuefi Ezeudu not to participate in the killing, Okonkwo, “afraid of being thought weak,” himself strikes the fatal blow, cutting the boy down with his machete (61). Ironically, Okonkwo, in seeking strictly to meet his society’s standards of admirable conduct, performs a deed that is considered to be reprehensible by many in that society, including his good friend Obierika, who is horrified by Okonkwo’s participation in Ikemefuna’s killing, even though he himself regards that killing to be justified. “If the Oracle said that my son should be killed,” Obierika tells Okonkwo, “I would neither dispute it nor be the one to do it” (67).

The episode of the killing of Ikemefuna is a pivotal one in Things Fall Apart for a number of reasons. For one thing, this sacrifice dramatizes aspects of Igbo society that seem harsh, cruel, or even savage by modern European standards and thus illustrates Achebe’s determination to provide a realistic description of traditional Igbo society and his refusal to romanticize that society in order to impress a Western audience. As Oladele Taiwo puts it, “Besides the strengths in tribal society he gives the weaknesses. We therefore have a true and complete picture in which the whole background is fully realised” (112). It is important to recognize, however, that the killing of Ikemefuna, however startling by Western standards, does not necessarily demonstrate a weakness in Igbo society. This act has, from the Igbo point of view, a genuine justification. Michael Valdez Moses thus notes that the ritualistic killing of Ikemefuna (who had nothing to do with the original crime) “is cruel and violates liberal norms of justice” but points out that this sacrifice “does serve to prevent a war between the two clans and therefore helps to ensure the long-term security of both villages.” This action, for Moses, “suggests not the absence of ethical standards among the Igbo people, but the existence of a strict premodern morality that values the welfare of the clan and tribe above that of the individual” (115). In this way, the episode serves not only to provide a striking illustration of Okonkwo’s personality, but to make an important point about the differences between Igbo social values (which place the good of the community above that of any single individual) and Western liberal standards of individualism.

On the other hand, Things Fall Apart makes it clear that the Igbo society of Umuofia is, in fact, much more individualistic than are many of the traditional societies of Africa. This individualism is figured in a number of ways, most obviously in the consistent focus on Okonkwo as the book’s single central protagonist. Okonkwo himself is a proud and individualistic man, so much so that many in the clan are disturbed by his singleminded determination and by his brusqueness in dealing with others. Indeed, Okonkwo’s excessive individualism is no doubt a key to his ultimate downfall in the book, a motif that, by extension, potentially suggests that the individualism of the Igbos made their society more susceptible to Western intrusions and thus contributed to the quick downfall of their traditional ways once the British arrived in the area.

The lengthiest digression from the main narrative of Things Fall Apart probably occurs in chapter 11 when Okonkwo’s second wife, Ekwefi tells the story of “The Tortoise and the Birds” to her daughter, Ezinma. This episode combines with other references to storytelling in the text to indicate the importance of oral narrative as an element of daily Igbo life. However, even this story is not really as much of a digression as it first appears, because the implications of this particular story resonate with and reinforce the rest of the narrative. For one thing, the self-centered Tortoise can obviously be read as an allegorization of Okonkwo, the downfall of the Tortoise in the story anticipating the eventual downfall of Okonkwo. At the same time, the allegory of this parable is quite complex, and the Tortoise also functions, among other things, as an emblem of the rapacious European intruders who come to the Igbolands, destroying the traditional societies there.

Indeed, the formal strategies employed by Things Fall Apart are so complex and sophisticated that they do recall the works of Western modernism, though the aesthetics of the novel are basically realistic, supplemented by elements derived from Igbo oral narrative traditions. As a result of this complexity, Western critics are in danger of falling into old habits of formalist reading and thereby of failing to do justice to the important social and political content of Achebe’s book. Indeed, such readings, by circumscribing Achebe’s book within European aesthetic traditions, are in danger of perpetuating precisely the colonialist gestures that the book is designed to oppose. Things Fall Apart thus provides an excellent example of the special problems that must be faced by Western readers in approaching the African novel; it illustrates particularly well Achebe’s warning that the European critic of African literature “must cultivate the habit of humility appropriate to his limited experience of the African world and be purged of the superiority and arrogance which history so insidiously makes him heir to” (Morning 8).

Readers and critics of Achebe’s novel must not only pay close and careful attention to both the style and the content of the book, but also to the intricate relationships between them. The content of the first part of the book is striking for its depiction of the workings of traditional Igbo society. Meanwhile, the style and structure of the entire book are striking for the way in which they incorporate elements of Igbo oral cultural traditions. Any number of critics have remarked the sophisticated extent to which Achebe has been able to weave traditional oral forms into his written text, asin his deft use of the trickster tale of the Tortoise and the Birds. Indeed, Iyasere notes that much of the complexity of Achebe’s narrative technique arises from his effective use of strategies derived from Igbo oral culture. Similarly, JanMohamed, while emphasizing the fundamental differences between oral and written, or chirographic, cultures, concludes that Things Fall Apart manages to achieve an impressive combination of the two modes and to remain “delicately poised at the transition from the epic (oral) to the novel (chirographic)” (Manichean 34).

The very existence of Achebe’s text as a written, bound book places it in dialogue with the Western novelistic tradition, even as it draws heavily upon Igbo oral traditions for its style and content. Moreover, it is important to note that Achebe wrote the book in direct reaction to the demeaning and objectionable depictions of Africans in European novels such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Joyce Cary’s Mr. Johnson. Innes extensively discusses the way in which Achebe not only responds to Cary’s stereotypical vision of Africans, but also shows that Cary’s “African” figure Mr. Johnson is a purely European creation many of whose characteristics (such as his individual isolation and lack of contact with family or relatives) are almost unimaginable from an African point of view (Innes 21-41). In keeping with the book’s integration of style with content, of atmosphere with narrative, and of written with oral forms, Things Fall Apart is itself a complex cultural hybrid that is a product not simply of the Igbo cultural traditions it so vividly portrays, but of the encounter between those traditions and the culture of the West.

On the other hand, Achebe’s book is in some ways a striking demonstration of Frantz Fanon’s observation that “the colonial world is a Manichean world” (Fanon 41). In the book, European and African societies come together in a mode of radical difference. The resulting encounter between the two cultures (in an atmosphere of almost total mutual lack of understanding) leads to cataclysmic results for Africa, which is no match for Europe in terms of military and economic power. Of course, depictions of Africans and African society as strange and incomprehensible to Westerners can be found in any number of examples of European Africanist discourse, including literary works like Heart of Darkness. One of the most valuable aspects of Things Fall Apart, for Western readers at least, is its presentation of the estrangement between European and African cultural traditions from an African perspective, thus reminding us that there are two sides to this story of encounter between alien cultures. Achebe presents Igbo society in a way that makes its workings seem perfectly natural and comprehensible, carefully weaving not just Igbo customs, but even Igbo words into his narrative in a way that makes them accessible to Western readers. Meanwhile, the Europeans of Achebe’s book are depicted as peculiar, incomprehensible, and even vaguely ridiculous—as when a white missionary has his translator speak to the people of the village Mbanta in Igbo, not realizing that the translator speaks a different dialect from the audience, causing his words to seem strange (and sometimes comical). The translator thus continually says “my buttocks” whenever he means to say “myself” (144). Meanwhile, among the people of Umuofia, leprosy is politely referred to as “the white skin,” leading one villager jokingly to compare the newly arrived white Europeans to lepers (74).[144] Such reversals from the norm of British literature (in which the British are depicted as normally and Africans or Indians as deviations, comically struggling with the English language or English customs) make a powerful statement about the importance of point of view in confrontations between foreign cultures and thoroughly undermine the Western tendency to think of our values as absolute and universal.

On the other hand, Things Fall Apart establishes numerous points of contact between European and African cultures, and Achebe is careful to avoid depicting African society as totally foreign to Western sensibilities. For example, any number of critics have observed the parallels between Achebe’s story of Okonkwo and ancient Greece tragedy. Moses notes the “strikingly Homeric quality” of the book and compares Okonkwo to Homer’s Achilles (110). Okonkwo also sometimes resembles Oedipus, as when he is banished from Umuofia for the accidental killing of a fellow clansman, thus recalling Oedipus’s punishment for the inadvertent murder of his own father. In this vein, Rhonda Cobham argues that Achebe has chosen to present “those aspects of Igbo traditional society that best coincide with Western-Christian social values,” thereby establishing a worldview that is not limited to the precolonial past but that speaks to the postcolonial present as well (98). As Achebe himself has put it, a point that is “fundamental and essential to the appreciation of African issues by Americans” is that “Africans are people in the same way that Americans, Europeans, Asians, and others are people” (“Teaching” 21).

The crucial issue in this regard is, of course, the book’s characterization, and Achebe does an excellent job of presenting characters whose humanity Western readers can recognize, though it is also true, as Florence Stratton points out, that the complex characters of the book tend to be male, while the female characters are depicted in vague and superficial ways (29). Okonkwo’s wives have virtually no identities outside their domestic roles. For example, his first wife is not even identified by name in the book, but is simply referred to as “Nwoye’s mother.” His daughter Ezinma is probably the strongest female character, yet she is repeatedly presented as being so because she has a number of masculine characteristics. Moreover, she essentially disappears late in the narrative, having determined to pursue a conventional role as wife and mother.

The ultra-masculine Okonkwo, meanwhile, dominates the text, though it is also the case that Achebe’s clearly presents Okonkwo’s rejection of all thing that he regards as “feminine” as extreme and destructive. In the initial section of the book, we are introduced not only to a number of general aspects of life in Umuofia, but to the background and characteristics of Okonkwo, whose excessive quest for masculine strength is clearly motivated by his shame at the perceived feminine weakness of his father, Unoka, a talented musician whose irresponsibility and aversion to hard work had left him poor and in debt, eventually to die as an outcast. In contrast, Okonkwo has worked extremely hard to overcome this legacy, rising from his humble beginnings to a position of prominence in his village. This section also provides a number of details about Okonkwo’s family life. We learn, for example, that he has three wives and eight children. We also learn something of the texture of the everyday life in Okonkwo’s household, which consists of a compound that includes Okonkwo’s own private hut and separate huts for each wife and her children.

We are told that Okonkwo rules this household “with a heavy hand,” and the first part of Things Fall Apart presents not only fairly extensive descriptions of his sometimes harsh treatment of his wives and children, but also detailed background on the causes behind his rather authoritarian personality (13). Okonkwo’s major motivation (and the principal reason for his domineering behavior) is his determination to succeed where Unoka (whom he regards as cowardly and effeminate) failed. Okonkwo thus goes out of his way to behave in what he considers to be a staunchly masculine manner and to demonstrate his strength in every way possible. This strength, however, arises from a kind of weakness. “His whole life,” the narrator tells us, “was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and weakness. … It was the fear of himself, lest he should be found to resemble his father” (13).

Much of the description of Igbo society in Achebe’s book focuses on the presentation of the crucial role played in that society by communal activities such as the Week of Peace and the Feast of the New Yam, making it clear that Okonkwo’s extreme individualism and self-reliance are something of an aberration in this society. And many of the book’s more dramatic scenes (such as the killing of Ikemefuna or Okonkwo’s exile from Umuofia after the accidental killing of the son of Ezeudu in the midst of the communal ritual of the latter’s funeral) are built around confrontations between the good of the community and what Westerners would regard as the “rights” of individuals. But this aspect of Achebe’s book is built into the text in more profound ways as well. For example, C. L. Innes notes that the narrative voice of the text is itself a sort of amalgam of traditional Igbo voices, in contrast to modern Western expectations that the narrator of a story will be a distinct individual (32).

The characterization of Okonkwo is a crucial part of the book’s central focus on the relationship between the individual and the community in Igbo society. Among other things, it is clear that Okonkwo can, to a certain extent, function as an allegorical stand-in for traditional Igbo society as a whole. Any number of critics have noted this aspect of the book, as when Walsh sees Okonkwo’s downfall as a marker of the destruction of traditional Igbo society “because of the way in which the fundamental predicament of the society is lived through his life” (52). JanMohamed, working from a perspective specifically influenced by Jameson’s work, follows Walsh in suggesting that Achebe makes “his heroes the embodiments of the fundamental structures and values of their cultures” (Manichean 161). On the other hand, the relationship between Okonkwo and his society is complex and problematic. It comes as no surprise, then, that the implications of the relationship between Okonkwo and his society have been the object of considerable critical disagreement. Eustace Palmer, for one, agrees that Okonkwo is “the personification of his society’s values.” Thus, “if he is plagued by a fear of failure and of weakness it is because his society puts such a premium on success” (Palmer 53). For Palmer, then, Okonkwo’s ultimate tragedy results from weaknesses that are the direct result of flaws in Igbo society itself. For other critics, Okonkwo’s fall results not from the characteristics of Igbo society, but from the destruction of this society by British colonialism. Killam thus agrees that Okonkwo consolidates “the values most admired by Ibo peoples,” but concludes that his fall occurs because colonialism disrupts these values and not from shortcomings in the values themselves (16).

Killam’s reading is clearly more consonant with the overall theme of Things Fall Apart than is Palmer’s. For one thing, Palmer (though himself an African) obviously reads the text from a purely Western, individualistic perspective. From this point of view, which privileges strong individuals who are willing to oppose conventional opinion, it is clearly a flaw for an individual to embody the mainstream values of his culture. On the other hand, Killam’s reading does not fully acknowledge the extent to which Okonkwo, through his excessive determination to be strong and “masculine,” already seems headed for trouble even before Umuofia is aware of the British presence. Several times he breaks fundamental rules of his society and then must be punished, culminating in his banishment from Umuofia at the end of the first part of the book, though it is also the case that his most common mistakes occur when he follows the rules of his society too literally and too strictly, as when he strikes the fatal blow in the slaying of Ikemefuna. Many critics thus argue that Okonkwo’s fall occurs not because he embodies the values of his society, but precisely because he deviates from his society’s norms of conduct. Biodun Jeyifo, for example, argues that Okonkwo is “doomed because of his rigid, superficial understanding—really misrecognition—of his culture” (Jeyifo 58). Similarly, Carroll believes that Okonkwo’s successes are largely achieved through an inflexible focus on his goals, a focus that eventually sets him at odds with a society “remarkable for its flexibility” (41). Finally, critics such as Ravenscroft and Ojinmah note that the Igbo society depicted by Achebe is characterized by a careful balancing of opposing values (particularly of masculine and feminine principles), while Okonkwo focuses strictly on the masculine side of this personality and thus fails to achieve this balance (Ravenscroft 13; Ojinmah 15–16).

Such gendered readings of Okonkwo’s characteristics are central to many critical discussions of Things Fall Apart. For example, much of JanMohamed’s discussion of Okonkwo’s typicality focuses on the way Okonkwo “becomes an emblem of the masculine values of Igbo culture.” But JanMohamed emphasizes that the culture itself balances masculine with feminine values. Thus, Okonkwo’s rejection of the feminine aspects of his culture makes him seem “rigid, harsh, and unfeeling in his pursuit of virility” (Manichean 164). Innes, meanwhile, grants that Okonkwo’s tendency to categorize various activities as either masculine or feminine is typical of traditional Igbo society, but again pointing out that Okonkwo has less respect for feminine values than does his society as a whole (25–26). Several feminist critics, however, have pointed out that the society itself, at least as depicted by Achebe, is heavily oriented toward a respect for masculinity. While some value is placed on feminine virtues and activities, the values labeled by the society as masculine are consistently valued more highly than those labeled as feminine. In addition, the power structure of Igbo society, while decentered and in many ways democratic, is entirely dominated by males. Okonkwo’s domination of his household thus becomes a sort of microcosm of the domination of the society as a whole by patriarchal figures.

It is certainly the case that the political leaders of Umuofia in Things Fall Apart are all male, though it is also true that women such as Chielo, the priestess of Agbala, sometimes occupy important ceremonial and social positions. Still, the male political leaders of Umuofia are often shown exercising power directly over women, just as Okonkwo exerts power over his wives. In one of the book’s key demonstrations of the workings of justice in Umuofia, the village elders meet to adjudicate a marital dispute in which the woman Mgbafo has fled the household of her husband, Uzowulu, because he has repeatedly beaten her (sometimes severely) for nine years. The legal proceedings are restricted to males, and no women (including Mgbafo) are allowed inside the hut where they occur. Indeed, we are told that no woman has ever participated in such proceedings and that women know better than even to ask questions about them (88). In the proceedings, Uzowulu presents his case, asking that Mgbafo be ordered to return to him. Then, Mgbafo’s brother argues that she should be allowed to remain with him and her other brothers apart from her abusive husband. The elders (some of whom seem to regard the case as too trivial to be worthy of their attention) order Uzowulu to offer a pot of wine to Mgbafo’s brothers in restitution. They then order the brothers to return Mgbafo to her husband. They even refuse even to cast blame on the abusive husband, though the latter occurs not so much because they regard him as blameless as because they see their role as one of restoring the peace rather than casting blame.

One might also argue that Achebe’s masculination of Igbo society represents an anticolonial gesture that reverses the colonialist tendency to feminize colonial societies and colonial subjects. Stratton acknowledges this possible interpretation, noting that the narratives of colonialist writers such as Cary, Conrad, H. Rider Haggard do indeed tend to feminize Africans in their fictional depictions of them. On the other hand, Stratton believes that Achebe may undermine colonialist racial stereotypes only at the expense of perpetuating gender stereotypes (37). One could, of course, argue that Achebe is simply being realistic in his depiction of Igbo power relations, but Stratton is probably correct that he could have done more to question these relations in terms of gender. After all, Achebe does an excellent job of deconstructing the hierarchical relationship between the races in colonial Africa, and Stratton is probably justified in suggesting that, while Achebe effectively dismantles “racial romances” such as Cary’s Mr. Johnson, he does little to prevent his book from becoming a sort of “gender romance” (36). Indeed, Achebe’s book sometimes suggests that one of the negative effects of colonialism was its disruption of the clear hierarchy of gender relations in Umuofia. For example, when the men of the village discuss the strange customs of some of their neighbors, Okonkwo mentions that some tribes are so peculiar that they consider children the property of their mothers rather than their fathers, as in any properly patriarchal society. His friend Machi responds that such a practice would be as inconceivable as a situation in which “the woman lies on top of the man when they are making the children.” Obierika then directly links this reversal of gender roles to the arrival of Europeans, who have lately been rumored to have been seen in the area. He suggests that such a sexual inversion would be “like the story of white men who, they say, are white like this piece of chalk” (74).[145]

It may also be significant in this regard that Okonkwo, when exiled from Umuofia in Part Two of Things Fall Apart, is sent to the home of his mother’s family as punishment. And it is precisely while he is in this locale, which for Okonkwo has clearly feminine resonances, that European culture makes its first significant intrusions into traditional Igbo life. Indeed, in Okonkwo’s absence, Umuofia becomes a stronghold of Christian missionary activity, as well as a focal point of British colonial control. In this part of the book, the inroads made by Christian missionaries into traditional Igbo society increasingly contribute to the breakdown in traditional values that Okonkwo has long defended and cherished. To make matters worse, one of the converts won by the missionaries in this section of the book is Okonkwo’s own son Nwoye, whom Okonkwo thus comes to regard as degenerate and effeminate—that is, as a throwback to his grandfather Unoka. Thus, in another potential reversal of colonialist stereotypes, European Christianity is linked to femininity, while traditional Igbo beliefs are figured as masculine.

In one sense, this part of the book, in which Okonkwo must endure seven years of separation from his beloved Umuofia, ends on a high note. As Okonkwo prepares to return home, he hosts an elaborate feast to thank his kinsmen in Mbanta for their kindness during his years of exile there. This communal event presents traditional Igbo society at its best, but it is undermined by the reader’s recognition that this way of life is already being eroded by the incursions of Christianity and Western individualism. One of the elders of the clan thus ends the feast on a sad note, thanking Okonkwo for his hospitality, but gloomily acknowledging that the younger generations of Igbos are already losing their appreciation for the traditional bonds of kinship:

You do not know what it is to speak with one voice. And what is the result? An abominable religion has settled among you. A man can now leave his father and his brothers. He can curse the gods of his fathers and his ancestors, like a hunter’s dog that suddenly goes mad and turns on his master. I fear for you; I fear for the clan. (167).

The obvious accuracy of this somber prediction adds a tragic irony to Okonkwo’s attempts in the final part of the book to rebuild his life in Umuofia and to regain his status as a leader of the community there. For the traditional life of the community itself is already doomed, and in this part of the book the Christian missionaries are joined by soldiers and bureaucrats as British colonial rule begins to be firmly established in Nigeria. This process culminates in Okonkwo’s impulsive killing of a messenger sent by the British in order to break up a meeting of the leaders of Umuofia, who are trying to decide upon a response to the recent detention and abuse of several elders of the community, including Okonkwo himself, by the British District Commissioner. The Commissioner then arrives with soldiers to arrest Okonkwo, only to find that the latter (in a final, radical violation of Igbo tradition, which forbid suicide) has hanged himself. Okonkwo, in a final example of the breakdown of Igbo communal life as a result of British colonialism, dies alone—and in a manner so repugnant to his fellow villagers that they are not allowed by tradition to bury him. That task must fall to the British, as does the task of recording Okonkwo’s story. The Commissioner concludes that Okonkwo’s story should make interesting reading, and thus might be worthy of a chapter, or at least a paragraph in the book he himself is writing. This book, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger, serves as an emblem of the Africanist discourse Achebe seeks to overcome with Things Fall Apart, which itself tells the story of Okonkwo in an alternative African voice.

Achebe’s novel stands as a direct refutation of Africanist discourse like the commissioner’s Pacification report and makes it clear that the coming of European colonialism to Africa brought not civilization, but chaos and destruction. The depiction of the British colonial administration in the third part of Things Fall Apart combines with the portrayal of the missionary Smith (far more strident and uncompromising than his predecessor Brown) to make Achebe’s book both a vivid evocation of traditional Igbo life and a sharp critique of the European colonialism that shattered this life. Ernest Emenyonu calls attention to the latter aspect of Achebe’s project when he argues that, “no matter how couched in proverbs, images and innuendoes, the intense virulence of Achebe’s indictment of colonial diplomatic tactlessness and absurd human high-handedness cannot be lost on the perceptive reader” (83–84). Again, however, this critical side of Achebe’s project is achieved through a variety of complex strategies and goes well beyond mere diatribes or simple description of the damage done by British colonialism to Igbo society. By situating itself in opposition to the depiction of relationships between Africa and Europe that appears in European texts such as Heart of Darkness or Mr. Johnson, Things Fall Apart opens a complex literary dialogue that challenges not only the content of such texts, but fundamental rationalist, individualist, and historicist assumptions upon which those texts are constructed.

Still, Achebe’s treatment of the impact of the twin forces of colonialism and Christianity on Igbo society is far from simplistic. Just as he points out certain negative aspects of traditional Igbo society (such as the killing of twins and the treatment of certain members of the community—the osu—as total outcasts), so too does he suggest potentially positive developments related to the cessation of these negative practices due to the coming of Christianity and European civilization. Ultimately, however, Things Fall Apart demonstrates that even the negative aspects of Igbo society were part of an organic whole and that the disruptions brought about by the removal of these aspects led to a collapse of the entire social structure. The book thus raises a number of profound questions not only about the nature and function of literature, but about the nature of human societies and human cultural practices and the extent to which different aspects of a given society are interwoven in complex and interdependent ways. In this sense, it not only looks back to the past but points toward the future, making an important contribution to the development of a viable postcolonial Nigerian cultural identity that moves beyond the legacy of the colonial past.

NOTES

Chapter 6

The Indian Postcolonial Novel in English

The Indian postcolonial novel occupies a very different position in relation to British culture than does the African postcolonial novel. For one thing, the colonial relationship between Britain and India was far longer and more complex than the relationship between Britain and Africa. For another thing, India had a rich tradition of written literature even before the arrival of British colonizers. Postcolonial Indian literature draws upon that tradition, giving it dimensions that are unavailable to most postcolonial African writers.[146] India itself is also far different from Africa, consisting as it does of a single large country with a population roughly equivalent to that of the entire African continent. But India is also a very diverse country, both culturally and linguistically. As a result, Indian literature written after India attained independence in 1947 tends to be less dominated by the colonial experience and less concerned with establishing a dialog with British literature than is postcolonial African literature. In addition, most postcolonial Indian literature is not written in the English language, though there is a significant body of Anglophone Indian literature. Despite all these differences, many of the critical and theoretical issues discussed in the previous chapter with regard to African literature (including the questions about language), and the reader of this chapter is encouraged to review that one before moving forward with this one.

India had a long and rich history of intercultural encounters even before the initial arrival of the British there. The long British encounter with India dates back to the beginning of the seventeenth century and was solidified by the establishment of permanent coastal trading outposts in India by the British East India Company[147] around the beginning of the eighteenth century, just as the Mughal Empire[148] that had ruled much of India in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was beginning to fragment. Actually, the East India Company had received its initial charter from Queen Elizabeth I all the way back in 1600. They immediately began exploring trade opportunities in India, where they had already been preceded by Dutch and Portuguese traders. As the Mughal Empire began to fall apart, the British East India Company and the French East India Company both saw opportunities to expand their power on the Indian subcontinent. Clashes between these two companies and with indigenous Indian forces in the eighteenth century eventually saw the British East India Company emerge by the second half of that century as the leading force in India, maintaining a private army there (made up mostly of India recruits trained and commanded by British officers) by the beginning of the nineteenth century that was twice the size of the standing British army and assuming a significant number of political and administrative functions in India that went well beyond trade.

By the time of the Indian War of Independence in 1857 (known in Britain at the time as the “Mutiny”), the East India Company had been the leading power in India for roughly 100 years. In this event, large numbers of Indian soldiers serving in the private armies of the East India Company rebelled against their British masters. Meanwhile, despite the fact that Indian brutality and violence during the Mutiny would become one of the favorite motifs of sensationalist British popular culture for decades to come, the British response was far from romantic or merely literary. And, despite the fact that this rebellion has come to be seen by Indian historians as a war of independence, it actually led to a solidification of British rule in India for decades to come. The armies of the East India Company put down the rebellion with overwhelming force and spectacular violence—favorite punishments for captured rebels included hangings and beheadings, as well as strapping prisoners across the mouths of cannon, which were then fired, blowing the hapless victim to bits. Perhaps more importantly, the rebellion (and the Company’s response to the rebellion) led the British government to remove control of India from the Company and to assume direct colonial rule in 1858. Queen Victoria officially took the title of “Empress of India” in 1876. Given the circumstances under which direct British government rule in India was initiated, it should come as no surprise that that rule remained largely militaristic in nature until the end of the nineteenth century or that British rule remained highly autocratic throughout the remainder of the colonial era.

The Indian War of Independence had a profound effect on the British psyche, spurring a wave of racist hatred against Indians and inserting a huge wedge of doubt into the formerly confident British vision that their empire would likely last forever. The rebellion also exerted a powerful effect on British literature, which saw an outpouring of lurid fictional accounts of the event that became a virtual genre unto itself.[149] Indeed, India loomed large in British fiction for the next century, with this fiction often being informed by a strong sense of anxiety over Indian resistance to British rule. After all, India was a far different situation than Ireland, and the British could not have possibly hoped to put down a general Indian uprising by force as they had done so many times in Ireland.[150]

It is certainly the case that anticolonial resistance in India, while momentarily put into disarray by the events of the War of Independence, would soon once again begin gathering steam. British responses to Indian resistance often remained violent. On April 13, 1919, for example, British troops under the command of Colonel Reginald Dyer opened fire on a crowd of peaceful Indian protestors, killing hundreds in what came to be known as the Jallianwallah Bagh Massacre (aka the Amritsar Massacre). Such events only increased the animosity of the general Indian population toward their British rulers and made it clear, in retrospect, that British rule was by this time doomed to be short-lived. Opposition to the British remained largely peaceful, however, largely due to the efforts of Indian resistance leader Mahatma Gandhi to keep it that way, though resistance did begin to become more violent just before World War II. By the end of that war, a Britain exhausted and depleted by the war no longer had either the will or the resources to maintain control of India. On July 18, 1947, Parliament passed the Indian Independence Act, which provided for the creation of India as an independent dominion within the British Commonwealth, while also creating Pakistan as a separate dominion, including a Western branch (what is now Pakistan) and an Eastern branch (what is now Bangladesh). The British, having long employed a “divide-and-conquer” strategy that depended on maintaining animosity between Muslims and Hindus in India, felt that it was important to establish Pakistan as a separate Muslim dominion in order to preserve the peace.

In the event, however, Britain’s hasty departure from India (Indian independence went into effect only four weeks after the Independence Act, on August 15), led to chaos and widespread violence. Over two million people were killed in the days following independence and partition, as large groups of Muslims attempted to move across India to reach Pakistan, often clashing with Hindus along the way. The Partition riots of 1947 have become an important motif in Indian and Pakistani postcolonial literature, providing the major impetus for English-language works such as Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan (1956) and Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India (1988). In addition, Manohar Malgonkar’s Anglophone historical novel A Bend in the Ganges (1964) narrates the last years of British rule in India, beginning with the growing violence of Indian resistance to the British before World War II, moving through the impact of the war, and culminating in the Partition riots.

Far and away, however, the best-known English-language novel that deals with the birth of India and Pakistan is Midnight’s Children (1981), by Salman Rushdie (1947– ). Midnight’s Children is a complex, dynamic novel that attempts to capture the richness and strangeness of modern Indian history by narrating, in a magical realist mode, the last decades of British rule and the first decades of independence. Winning near-universal critical acclaim, Midnight’s Children won both the Booker Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and made Rushdie (born in Bombay to Indian Muslim parents in the last months of British rule but resident in Britain since the age of fourteen) a major figure on the British literary scene.

Rushdie’s third novel, Shame (1983), which relates the early history of Pakistan, shows much of the same energetic prose and comic inventiveness as Midnight’s Children, though Rushdie’s reputation continued to rest primarily on Midnight’s Children until the publication, in 1988, of The Satanic Verses, which triggered one of the great literary controversies of the twentieth century and sent Rushdie into hiding after a barrage of death threats from conservative Muslims (who regarded the book as blasphemous)—including an official 1989 fatwa from Iran’s then-ruler, the Ayatollah Khomeini, ordering Rushdie’s death.This event curtailed Rushdie’s output as a writer for some time, but it also made him one of the most famous writers in the world.

Both Shame and The Satanic Verses were short-listed for the Booker Prize, though neither won. Rushdie’s reputation was then further solidified in 1993, when Midnight’s Children was awarded a special “Booker of Bookers” award as the greatest of the winners of the Booker Prize in its first twenty-five years in existence. The stature of that novel was again affirmed in 2008, when it was named the greatest of the Booker Prize winners in the first 40 years of the prize. In the meantime, Rushdie’s first novel in seven years (other than the children’s novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories in 1990), The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), was also short-listed for the Booker. By this time, Rushdie had established himself as an internationally known author who was receiving more critical attention than virtually any other living author.[151]

The fatwa against Rushdie was officially lifted in 1998, and he gradually assumed a more public life. In 2000, he moved to America, where he has lived ever since and where he now has citizenship. While serving as a Distinguished Writer in Residence, first at Emory University and now at New York University, Rushdie has continued to be productive, publishing a string of novels that includes The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999), Fury (2001), Shalimar the Clown (2005), The Enchantress of Florence (2008), Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (2015), and The Golden House (2017). All are accomplished novels, marked by Rushdie’s customary wit and verbal energy, while maintaining contact with important issues of the day. All are successful, though none are as consequential or groundbreaking as Midnight’s Children or The Satanic Verses.

Among other things, Rushdie—by virtue of becoming so well known around the world—has brought new attention to Anglophone Indian literature, which had previously not been all that widely read in the West. Rushdie himself has emerged as a sort of unofficial global ambassador for Indian literature and has commented widely on other Indian writers, especially Anglophone ones. In addition, the critical and commercial success of Midnight’s Children can be credited with playing a key role in the recent growth of English-language novels coming from Indian writers (many of them, like Rushdie, in diaspora), with a variety of Indian Anglophone writers sometimes being grouped (fairly or not) under the rubric of “Rushdie’s children” to indicate the pathbreaking importance of Rushdie’s most important novel.

Some of Rushdie’s children have relatively little in common with Rushdie in terms of style and technique. For example, Rohinton Mistry (born in Bombay in 1952 but a resident of Canada since 1975) writes in a realist mode reminiscent of the great nineteenth century realists, such as Balzac. Mistry has written only three novels, all set in India: Such a Long Journey (1991), A Fine Balance (1995), and Family Matters (2002), but all are much respected and he has won numerous awards. Vikram Seth (born in Calcutta in 1952 but now splitting his time between England and India) has also gotten considerable critical attention. His first novel, The Golden Gate (1986) is written in verse after the manner of Alexander Pushkin’s (1799–1837) Russian verse novel Evgeny Onegin (1833), and Seth in fact has written a considerable amount of poetry. His second novel, A Suitable Boy (1993), set in India just after independence, has the distinction of being one of the longest novels ever written.

Perhaps the member of Rushdie’s children who was most obviously influenced by Rushdie is Shashi Tharoor, who was born in London in 1956 and who has gone on to become a prominent Indian diplomat and politician. Tharoor’s first novel, the playful and hilarious The Great Indian Novel (1989), has been seen as a sort of Hindu version of Midnight’s Children. It retells the story of the Mahabarata within the context of the years before and after independence in India.His next novel, Show Business (1992), is a send-up of Bollywood cinema, while his novel Riot (2001) is a more serious examination of the dangers of religious sectarianism in India. All of Tharoor’s novels, however, are postmodern in their style and technique.

All of Tharoor’s novels have been highly popular in India. However, the member of Rushdie’s children who has gained the most attention worldwide is Arundhati Roy (1961– ), whose novel The God of Small Things became an international sensation after its publication in 1997. Winner of the Booker Prize in that year, this novel thus became the first novel by an Indian-born writer after Midnight’s Children to win that award. It is discussed in detail as an Exemplary Text at the end of this chapter. The huge success of The God of Small Things (published in the year that was the 50^th anniversary of Indian independence) was a boon to Indian Anglophone literature in general, and Indian authors have won the Booker Prize twice more since. These additional winners include The Inheritance of Loss (2006), by Kiran Desai (1971– ), whose mother, Anita Desai (1937– ), is also a prominent Indian novelist, herself short-listed for the Booker Prize on three different occasions, though she has never won the award. Much of The Inheritance of Loss is set in the United States, where it also won the National Book Critics’ Circle Fiction Award. Kiran Desai was educated at Bennington College and Columbia University and has lived most of her adult life in the U.S. Her work, like Rushdie’s, captures important aspects of the diasporic nature of life in the postcolonial world. Meanwhile, just two years after Desai, Aruvind Adiga (1974– ) won the Booker Prize for his first novel, The White Tiger (2008). This novel also portrays a globalized world, though it focuses on class differences within India. Adiga, like Desai, was educated partly at Columbia; he also spent considerable time living in Australia, though he now lives back in India.

Rushdie, of course, still overshadows all of his “children” in terms of his prominence in the West. In addition, the “Rushdie’s children” label, however clever, lumps together too many very different writers into a single category, while drawing attention away from important English-language writers—especially predecessors such as Mulk Raj Anand (1905–2004), Manohar Malgonkar (1913–2010), and even the great R. K. Narayan (1906–2001)—who are difficult to link directly to Rushdie. India’s only Nobel laureate in literature, the poet, artist, and musician Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913) also has little connection to Rushdie’s work.[152] Still, Rushdie’s success has actually drawn new readers (and renewed critical attention) to some Indian Anglophone writers who came before him, including such figures as G. V. Desani (1909–2000) and Raja Rao (1908–2006), who have retrospectively come to be regarded as Rushdie’s forebears.

Meanwhile, Rushdie’s self-appointed role as spokesman for Indian literature to the West has also drawn additional attention to that literature, though Rushdie’s tendency to focus almost exclusively on Anglophone Indian literature has sometimes been seen as a serous distortion of the true situation in Indian literature. For example, Rushdie’s survey of postcolonial Indian literature (published in The New Yorker to mark the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Indian independence) drew considerable criticism when it brashly announced his opinion that

The prose writing—both fiction and nonfiction—created in this period by Indian writers working in English is proving to be a stronger and more important body of work than most of what has been produced in the eighteen “recognized” languages of India, the so-called “vernacular languages,” during the same time; and, indeed, this new, and still burgeoning, “Indo-Anglian” literature represents perhaps the most valuable contribution India has yet made to the world of books. The True Indian literature of the first postcolonial half century has been made in the language the British left behind. (50)

To make matters potentially worse, Rushdie then republished this article as the introduction to an anthology of Indian literature, Mirrorwork: 50 Years of Indian Writing, 1947–1997, that he edited with Elizabeth West. This anthology, which purports to cover Indian literature, without reference to language, includes only one item that was not written in English and is in danger of creating the impression that most Indian literature is in English.

Rushdie, of course, has a vested interest here, given that he himself writes in English. And it is also the case that he is well aware of all the arguments that for Indian writers to write in English simply perpetuates the damage done to Indian culture by British colonization. And surely this danger only becomes more pressing if one elevates Anglophone Indian literature above literature written in India’s indigenous languages. Nevertheless, Rushdie is surely correct about the prominence of Anglophone Indian literature if one is talking only about audiences outside of India, especially as most Indian literature written in other languages has never been translated into English. Still, those of us who have little access to Indian literature other than that which is written in English should remain cognizant of the fact that Anglophone literature is a minority literature in India, as opposed to its dominant position in the former British colonies of Africa. That such a minority literature has produced such an impressive body of work

NOTES

EXEMPLARY TEXT

ARUNDHATI ROY: THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS (1997)

Arundhati Roy’s debut novel, The God of Small Things (1997), was one of the global sensations of late-twentieth-century literature. Not only did it win considerable critical acclaim (and the Booker Prize), but it was also a major international bestseller. The book has its detractors (as all books do), but it has justifiably been praised as a major literary event that, among other things, brought important attention to the Kerala region of southern India, where Roy grew up and which has been underrepresented in Indian literature, especially In the English-language Indian literature that is widely known in the West. The book has also been lauded for the richness of its engagement with a variety of complex cultural and historical issues, as well as for its deft use of the English language as a tool for Indian cultural expression and for its complex, multi-layered, carefully constructed narrative form. Any number of critics have, in fact, commented on the impressive formal structure of the novel. But The God of Small Things is also a very political novel, as one might expect of Roy, who would spend the next twenty years after the publication of the novel engaged in intense political activism. However, whereas the structure of the novel is well-planned, delicately balanced, and beautifully coherent, the political message of the novel is a bit less well thought out.

The Context of the Novel: Kerala and the Modern World

The God of Small Things is primarily a family drama that focuses on the private lives on one rather affluent Indian family, living in the village of Ayemenem, near the town of Kottayam, fairly near the city of Cochin (now Kochi), in the state of Kerala. The key characters of the drama are the fraternal twins Estha and Rahel, who are seven years old in 1969, when the novel’s most important events take place. Their mother Ammu is also a crucial character, as are Ammu’s brother Chacko, her parents, Shri Benaan John Ipe (“Pappachi”) and Soshamma Ipe (“Mammachi”)[153], and her aunt, Baby Kochamma (real name Navomi Ipe). Pappachi is a domineering, patriarchal figure who takes out his frustrations by beating his wife and daughter, until the adult Chacko puts a stop to it. He has, however, died by the time of the events of 1969, causing Chacko to quit his job as college teacher in Madras and move back to Ayemenem. For her part, Mammachi struggles to find meaning in her life by founding her own small business, which the Western-educated Chacko commandeers after his move back to the village. Then, despite his vague communist sympathies, he makes the business into what he hopes will be a growing capitalist enterprise, “Paradise Pickles & Preserves.” Unfortunately, Chacko overextends himself and really has no idea how to operate the business efficiently; he eventually runs it into the ground, then flees Kerala, emigrating to Canada in the wake of the devastating death of his daughter, Sophie Mol.

The ultimate failure of the business is, in fact, one in a long line of disappointments for this family. Pappachi, who had served as an “Imperial Entomologist” at the Pusa Institute during colonial days, had once discovered a new species of moth, but failed to have it recognized and named after him. The legacy of “Pappachi’s moth” subsequently haunts the family as an image of embittering failure. Baby Kochamma and Pappachi are the children of the Reverend E. John Ipe, a prominent Syrian Christian clergyman in Kerala, but Baby Kochamma converted (permanently) to Roman Catholicism after falling in love with Father Mulligan, a young Irish monk spending a year in India. Mulligan ends up staying in India permanently, but of course Baby Kochamma’s love for him is unrequited, though she pines for him until the end of her days. Her loss in love is made even more bitter by the fact that Father Mulligan ultimately gives up Catholicism, but then (Instead of turning to Baby Kochamma) he becomes a Hindu holy man devoted to worship of the god Vishnu, much to her disgust[154]). For her part, Ammu rebels against her parents by marrying a Hindu man in Calcutta, the assistant manager of a tea estate near the city. However, her husband turns out to be an alcoholic and a wastrel. By the time the twins are two years old, he is unable to work at all. In response, the English manager of the estate, Mr. Hollick (who has a long history of dalliances with women who work on the estate), proposes that Ammu’s husband can keep his job if he sends the beautiful Ammu to be “looked after” by Hollick. When the husband agrees to the deal, the infuriated Ammu leaves him and takes the twins with her back to Ayemenem to live with her parents. There, she does the best she can to raise them, hampered by her own resentment toward them and with little help from her family—Pappachi, for example, doesn’t believe her story about Mr. Hollick, because he is such an Anglophile that he “didn’t believe that an Englishman, any Englishman, would covet another man’s wife” (42).

At times The God of Small Things reads like the story of an ideal childhood—in which Rahel and Estha happily play in the pastoral surroundings of Ayemenem, buoyed by their unique connection to one another. However, even a cursory look at their family and its background reveals that they have had a troubled life from the very beginning and that it is only their special connection to each other that allows them to survive the network of dysfunctional adults that surrounds them. Even then, they (especially Estha) live difficult, damaged lives. The traumatic events that unfold in 1969 are not, therefore, a sudden disruption in a perfect world, but the culmination of a series of misfortunes that have plagued them since even before they were born (in difficult circumstances during the Sino-Indian War of 1962[155]).

Also crucial to the story is the Untouchable carpenter Velutha, who befriends young Rahel and Estha and becomes the lover of Ammu, an almost unthinkably transgressive act, given their relative statuses in Indian society. Velutha is clearly intended as Roy’s critique of Indian caste society; a gifted woodworker, he also has an amazing facility with machinery, and it is only his maintenance efforts that keep the pickle factory going at all. He is also gentle and supportive with the twins, unlike any of the other adults they have ever encountered. A sleekly handsome young man, he is also a tender lover to Ammu, who has not experienced much tenderness in her life. When Ammu dreams, she dreams of him as “the god of small things,” thus the title of the book. Velutha is, in short, a paragon, possibly the most admirable character in the novel—and thus a strong argument against treatment as individuals as inherently inferior simply because of their birth caste. However, one could argue that Roy goes too far and that his idealized depiction is a weakness in the realism of the novel, which might have addressed the problem of Untouchability more effectively in other ways, especially given the setting in Kerala, with its strong history of radical politics.

Kerala, a state located on the southwestern coast of India with a population of more than 33 million people, is a very special region within India that differs substantially from many regions that are better known in the West. Indeed, at least for Western readers, one of the most important accomplishments of The God of Small Things is to provide reminders of the diversity of Indian culture and society, reminders that are especially important given the frequent tendency in the West to think of India merely in terms of well-established Orientalist stereotypes. Approximately 80% of the population of India are Hindus, and Western ideas about India often focus on Hinduism and the culture that surrounds it. In Kerala, on the other hand, only slightly more than half the population is Hindu. As in the rest of India, there is a substantial Muslim minority (27%, nearly twice that of India as a whole); however, Kerala also features a much larger Christian minority than is found in India as a whole (18% vs. 2%). There are, in addition, a variety of Christian denominations, of which Roman Catholic and Syrian Christian (a variant of the Eastern Orthodox Church) are the largest. Kerala is culturally diverse, with numerous influences from a variety of cultures, both Eastern and Western. At the same time, despite this unusual religious and cultural diversity, Kerala is (by Indian standards) unusually homogeneous in terms of language and ethnicity. India has no national language, though the official language of the government (and the most widely spoken language) is Hindi, which is the first language of about one-third of the population (over 400,000,000 people). There are 22 different “scheduled” languages officially recognized in the Indian constitution, of which Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, and Urdu have the most native speakers. English is widely used for business, education, and other purposes all over India, partly because of the lack of a common national language. English is also widely used for such purposes in Kerala, but the official language of the state is Malayalam, the native language of approximately 97% of the state’s population; almost all of these belong to the Malayali ethnic group.

Malayalam, a language of Dravidian origin, is recognized as both one of the 22 scheduled languages of modern India and as one of India’s six “classical” languages—languages with a particularly long and rich cultural heritage and literary tradition. Kerala does have a number of rich cultural traditions. One of the most important of these is the kathakali dance, which also features prominently in The God of Small Things. One of many Hindu dance traditions in India, kathakali is a distinctive form that is practiced primarily in Kerala. It is a narrative form of dance, in which the dancers (generally all-male) perform well-known stories that are made distinctive because of variations in the performance itself, as well as in the colorful makeup, costumes, and masks that are typical of the form.

Finally, despite the crucial importance of the setting of the novel in Kerala, it should also be emphasized that Kerala is not depicted as some sort of exotic enclave, cut off from the rest of the world. For example, the novel mentions the recent transformation of Kerala due to new construction financed by the influx of funds sent back home by Keralan workers employed as “nurses, masons, wire-benders and bank clerks” in oil-rich Arab states of the Gulf region, where a large portion of labor is performed by workers imported from India and elsewhere (14). These Arab oil states, of course, are themselves an integral part of the global capitalist system. Meanwhile, the key events of the text are set in motion when Rahel and Estha are driven by their uncle Chacko from Ayemenem to Cochin, along with their mother Ammu and their great aunt Baby Kochamma. In Cochin, a thriving city, they are to meet Sophie Mol and her mother, Chacko’s former (English) wife Margaret, who are coming from England for a visit, which they hope will help them recover from the trauma of the recent death (by auto accident) of Margaret’s second husband. That Chacko has spent considerable time in England (where he received an Oxford education as a Rhodes Scholar, in addition to marrying an English woman), suggests the extensive connections of this family with the world at large, and particularly with England. For her part, Rahel eventually grows up and is educated at the University of Rochester in America, after which she marries and eventually divorces an American, before returning to Ayemenem.

The God of Small Things also reminds us that the Western Culture Industry was already becoming a global enterprise as early as 1969. The characters in the book are already well-acquainted with the products of this industry. Indeed, driving to Cochin (in Chacko’s American car) the day before the arrival of Margaret and Sophie Mol, most of the family goes that night to see The Sound of Music (for the third time) at the Abhilash Talkies, which “advertising itself as the first cinema in Kerala with a 70mm Cinemascope screen,” is clearly an elite Indian cinema, with all the state-of-the-art trappings that might be found in cinemas anywhere (90). It’s an exciting outing for the two children, who seem to find it magical. It’s also a last moment of family togetherness, when even the irascible Baby Kochamma seems to be getting along with the others. The outing, however, will be the beginning of family tragedy, the moment when the childhoods of Rahel and Estha will start to unravel in horrifying ways.

When Chacko (though himself something of an Anglophile) complains that going to see The Sound of Music is “an extended exercise in Anglophilia,” Ammu responds that “the whole world goes to see The Sound of Music. It’s a World Hit” (54). Chacko is a bit off the mark, of course, given that The Sound of Music is an American film, not a British one, even though its principal actors are British (playing Austrian characters). But the very fact that he mistakes the film for an example of British culture is itself a sign of the growing globalization of the film industry. And Ammu’s point is exactly on the mark. After its release in the United States in 1965, the film quickly spread around the globe, becoming (at the time time) the top grossing film in history overall as well as the top grossing film of all time in nearly 30 different countries. The film was thus a key moment in the globalization of film marketing.

The Sound of Music is a heartwarming tale of a family that rediscovers love, then sticks together to triumph over adversity (and Nazis). As such, it stands in sharp contrast to The God of Small Things, which is a heartbreaking tale about a family that falls apart and is essentially destroyed by tragedy. This overall contrast is also brought home locally, in the visit of the family to see the film in Cochin, during which Estha repairs to the lobby, only to be sexually molested by the “Orangedrink Lemondrink Man” who works behind the concession counter. One week later, on the night of “the Terror,” Estha and Rahel’s cousin Sophie Mol will be drowned and their good friend Velutha will be brutally beaten to death by police after Estha is coerced into false testimony against him.

The fact that the tragedies of the book begin in this Western-style theater as the family attends an American movie with British stars suggests that the impact of the West on India has been less than salubrious. The destruction of Mammachi’s small, family business when Chacko attempts to apply Western technologies and management styles makes a similar suggestion. No doubt these suggestions are intentional, and it is not without relevance that much of Roy’s political activism has been aimed at opposing the intrusion of globalization into India.

A similar suggestion is made in the portrayal of the kathakali dance in The God of Small Things, where this ancient and once revered form has been reduced largely to the status of a commodity, streamlined and stripped-down into a shadow of its former self, all for the entertainment of foreign tourists.Roy thus treats us to a vision of a tourist hotel that regales its guests with “truncated kathakali performance”—shortened versions that cater to the “small attention spans” of the guests: “So ancient stories were collapsed and amputated. Six-hour classics were slashed to twenty-minute cameos” (121). These mangled performances, meanwhile, are merely background; hotel guests play in the pool or lounge beside it, barely heeding the once-venerable stories that are being played out in this commodified form.

Roy clearly presents these truncated kathakali performances as instances of modernity robbing Kerala of once sacred traditions. Importantly, however, she recognizes that the culprit is neither the British nor the Americans, but capitalism itself. Indeed, if (by the 1990s) the hotel has appropriated this ancient cultural form as light poolside entertainment, it is also the case that Indians themselves had begun to commodify their own culture decades before. In particular, as Chacko attempts to expand the market for the products of Mammachi’s pickle factory, he designs new, colorful labels for their products that feature kathakali dancers, who are also featured on billboards advertising those products, on the theory that “regional flavor would stand them in good stead when they entered the Overseas Market.” Ammu, however, clearly speaks for Roy when she concludes that “the billboards made them look ridiculous. Like a traveling circus” (46).

At the same time, however, The God of Small Things is a complex novel, and Roy is far too sophisticated a writer to depict India as a once-idyllic paradise ruined by Western intervention. The impact of the West on India is not a mere one-way case of cultural imperialism. It is part of the complex network of transnational flows that define today’s global culture. Thus, if Roy’s novel constantly reminds us of the powerful influence of Western literature, film, and television in India, it also reminds us that this flow goes in both directions. As Mullaney notes, “the repackaging of kathakali” illustrates “the role of India in sending as well as receiving culture in these transactions” (53). And, of course, The God of Small Things itself, as an international bestseller, is perhaps its own best example of the export of Indian culture to the rest of the world.

Roy is also careful to note that India’s complex social problems cannot merely be attributed to the negative impact of colonization and other outside interventions. In one crucial passage, Roy notes that the tragedy she is about to relate could be seen as having its beginnings in Sophie Mol’s arrival in Kerala. It is true, she notes, “that a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes” (32). But, she notes, it would be equally correct to say that this tragedy began thousands of years earlier, long before the initial arrival of the British in India, that it has roots in India’s own thousands-of-years-old cultural traditions, that “it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much.” (32).

These “Love Laws,” as they feature in this text, are closely related to the tradition of Hindu caste society in India. Caste systems of various sorts exist in societies around the world, but the Indian cast system is derived from specific texts dating back to approximately 1000 years before Christ. The main castes consist of Brahmins (highly respected teachers, scholars and priests), Kshatriyas (warriors and nobles), Vaishyas (farmers, traders and skilled workers of various kinds) and Shudras (manual laborers and service workers). Unlike the capitalist class system, the caste system is rigidly fixed; one belongs to a particular caste by birth and cannot change castes. The system has evolved and become more complex over time and is encoded in Indian law, though actual practice is often based more on long-standing socio-cultural traditions than on legal requirements. In particular, the system has evolved to include a fifth category of “untouchables,” or “dalits” (though the preferred terms is now “Scheduled Castes”) who rank below any of the formal castes and were traditionally considered unclean and unworthy of most normal activities, though Indian law now protects them from discrimination. In 1997 (the year The God of Small Things was published), India elected its first Scheduled Caste president, K. R. Narayanan. But prejudices persist, as the novel dramatizes in the figure of Velutha, a gifted and virtuous young man who is nevertheless denied respect (and most opportunities) because of his caste.[156]

The caste system is particularly controversial in Kerala, both because the state is less dominated by Hindu practices than is most of India and because the Communist Party (which generally rejects the notion of caste altogether and has fought against the caste system since the 1930s) has a particularly strong position in Kerala. For example, Keralan communist leader E.M.S. Namboodiripad (1909–1908) was popularly elected as Kerala’s first Chief Minister from 1957 to 1959, after the state had been formed by the States Reorganisation Act of November, 1956. Namboodiripad began as a member of the Communist Party of India (CPI) but became a leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist)—CPI(M)—after the CPI split into two different parties in 1964. He again served as Chief Minister from 1967 to 1969, and his CPI(M) government would have been in power during the crucial 1969 events related in The God of Small Things. It is a marker of the power of caste prejudices in India that they remain strong in the novel, even in Communist Kerala and even among the Christian Ipe family. Communism experienced a low point in popularity in Kerala in the 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, but has since seen a resurgence in support. As of 2018, a CPI(M) government is again in power in Kerala, having been elected in 2016.

The Structure of The God of Small Things

Perhaps the aspect of The God of Small Things that critics have commented upon most widely is its complex, nonlinear narrative form. The crucial events of the narrative take place during one two-week period in 1969—and particularly on one crucial December night. However, much of the book takes place in the early 1990s, as key characters look back on and remember those earlier events. Indeed, while there is a certain regularity in the variation of these two time settings, the two different periods featured in the novel are in fact interwoven in highly complex ways. Critics have suggested a variety of analogies to try to describe the narrative structure of the book, the most common of which is architecture, inspired both by the fact that Roy had originally trained to be an architect and by her own encouragement of such architectural analogies. In one interview, she described her construction of the narrative as being very like the construction of a complex building:

It really was like designing a building. … It was really a search for coherence—design coherence—in the way that every last detail of a building—its doors and windows, its structural components—have, or at least ought to have, an aesthetic, stylistic integrity, a clear indication that they belong to each other, as must a book. (Abraham 90–91)

Another model for the book’s narrative is provided by Roy within the book itself, in her description of the kathakali dance.

The secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. … In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again. (218)

The structure of these kathakali narratives thus clearly resembles that of The God of Small Things, which continually reveals the outcome of events before those events are actually narrated in detail and which is constructed in such a convoluted manner that one could virtually start reading at any point in the text and still enjoy the narrative. As Mullaney puts it, “This sense of being mesmerized by the performances of stories one already becomes the basis for the construction of The God of Small Things,” in which readers constantly have the sense that they are reading a story they already know (56).

Roopika Risam, while providing a useful survey of the suggestions of other critics including those who have adopted architectural metaphors), also provides her own suggestion, arguing that the complexly interwoven strands of Roy’s narrative operate very much like neural memory networks—a suggestion that is particularly interesting given the important role played by memory in the narrative itself. This metaphor nicely captures the complicated, web-like nature of the narrative structure, in which events are frequently mentioned before they have actually been introduced, creating an extensive network of anticipations and reflections that works quite effectively. At the same time, in addition to the interwoven time frames of the narrative and to the heavy use of both foreshadowing and flashbacks, Roy also holds her narrative together with a series of simple, paired oppositions that are themselves almost architectural in nature.

Apparent polar oppositions in the book include such pairings as India vs. England, Touchable vs. Untouchable, tradition vs. modernity, male vs. female, and so on. One of the key oppositions in the novel is particularly architectural, in that it includes actual buildings in the opposition between the houses of Kari Saipu (aka, the “History House”) and the Ayemenem House of the Ipes. One thinks here of the opposition between Thrushcross Grange (as the locus of polite, bourgeois values) and Wuthering Heights (as the locus of the subversive values represented by Heathcliff) in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). In Brontë this opposition is so stark that Gilbert and Gubar have associated it with a Miltonian opposition between heaven (the Grange) and hell (the Heights) (189). In the case of The God of Small Things, the Ipe house to an extent represents India and the present, while the History House represents Britain and the colonial past.

However, in this case the polar opposition between Britain and India, past and present, clearly breaks down, indicating the way in which simple dualistic structures are inadequate to the complexities of Indian culture (or of this novel). Kari Saipu is described as the “Black Sahib[157]. The Englishman who had ‘gone native.’ Who spoke Malayalam and wore mundus[158]. Ayemenem’s own Kurtz, Ayemenem his private Heart of Darkness” (51). References to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in fact proliferate throughout the text, as do many other literary and cultural references. Meanwhile, if the film’s British house is saturated with Indian culture, the Indian house is inhabited by the Anglophile Ipes—and is eventually colonized by American television, as Baby Kochamma and her longtime servant, Kochu Maria, the last remaining residents of the house, are reduced to spending all of their time watching (mostly American) television programming, such as soap operas and professional wrestling, captured by their satellite dish. Kipling claimed that “East is East and West is West / And never the twain shall meet.” The God of Small Things proves him wrong.

Of course, the most important duality in The God of Small Things is composed of the twins Rahel and Estha, who ultimately complicate the whole structure of polar oppositions because of the way the opposition between them tends to collapse. As children, they think of themselves as a joined entity, as a “we” more than a “you and I,” memories and impressions seemingly floating freely between them without the need for verbal communication. They share everything and do everything together. Among other things, their identities as children challenge strict gender binaries, and they have very little sense that some things are appropriate for Estha because he is a boy and others are appropriate for Rahel because she is a girl. This deconstruction of gender oppositions is played out most obviously in the scene in which Rahel, Estha, and Sophie Mol all dress like “Hindu ladies” to pay a visit to Velutha, who plays along and hosts them graciously, allowing them to paint his fingernails (181). Meanwhile, when the children watch The Sound of Music, Estha identifies with the female lead (played by Julie Andrews), while Rahel identifies with the male lead (played by Christopher Plummer).And, of course, Estha is feminized in his traumatic encounter with the “Orangedrink Lemondrink Man” while at the theater.

The final deconstruction of the dual opposition between Rahel and Estha occurs late in the novel, when the twins, both feeling shattered by the experiences of the night of the Terror, turn to one another for solace. In one of the moments of the novel that caused it to be described by some in India as obscene, the two twins unite sexuality. The moment, though, is almost more spiritual than erotic, clearly more a gesture of healing than of lust. It is a merging of two halves of the same broken person, a rebuilding of the unique bond that had united the twins in childhood and that the events of their troubled lives had broken.

Politics and History in The God of Small Things

Though it concentrates on the private stories of the members of a single family, The God of Small Things is a highly political novel that addresses many of the concerns that Roy has since addressed as a political activist. I have already noted above some of the concerns that the novel expresses concerning the impact of capitalist globalization on Kerala. Another key, related, concern is environmentalism. For example, the local landscape in Ayemenem is dominated by the Meenachal River, bringer of life to the region—though this river also becomes the bringer of death to Sophie Mol. And this alternative, darker figuration of the river is closely related to Roy’s environmental concerns. For the river, like so many things in India, has been transformed by the impact of modern capitalism. By the 1990s, it “smelled of shit and pesticides bought with World Bank loans. Most of the fish had died. The ones that survived suffered from fin-rot and had broken out in boils” (14). Indeed, the river is not what it once was: “But now its teeth were drawn, its spirit spent. It was just a slow, sludging green ribbon lawn that ferried fetid garbage to the sea. Bright plastic bags blew across its viscous, weedy surface like subtropical flying flowers” (119).

Again, however, the situation is not a simple one. The World Bank is a major force in the globalization of capitalism, and the pesticides are certainly a product of modernity. But the river is polluted both by modern industrialization and by traditional Indian practices. In addition to the pesticides and the plastic bags, we are told that “clean mothers washed clothes and pots in unadulterated factory effluents” (119). Yet the shit smell apparently comes from more traditional Indian sources:

Children hung their bottoms over the edge and defecated directly onto the squelchy, sucking mud of the exposed riverbed. The smaller ones left their dribbling mustard streaks to find their own way down. Eventually, by evening, the river would rouse itself to accept the day’s offerings and sludge off to the sea, leaving wavy lines of thick white scum in its wake. (119)

While Roy is highly critical of the impact of capitalist modernization on Kerala, she clearly does not recommend a return to pre-modern ways as an alternative. If nothing else, the population of India is now so large that practices that might have been viable hundreds of years ago could now no longer work.

The problem is that Roy doesn’t propose any other viable alternatives, either. The God of Small Things, like so many books before it, seems to want to suggest transgressive sexual behavior as the main mode of resistance both to capitalist appropriation and traditionalist mind-manacling. There are, however, two problems with this approach. First, as the prominent Indian Marxist critic Aijaz Ahmad points out, Roy’s depiction of transgressive sexuality—despite charges of pornography that have been leveled against it—is not really all that shocking. We’ve seen it all before, in texts such as D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover. Second, it might also be pointed out that theorists such as Michel Foucault (especially in the introductory volume of The History of Sexuality) have argued, transgressive sexual conduct is not necessarily subversive in a political sense. In fact, it might well be that all it really does is divert energies from genuine pubic political action into private conduct that does nothing to alter systemic abuses. After all, it is hard to see how the transgressive pairings of Velutha and Ammu and of Rahel and Estha could really achieve anything politically.[159]

The most important alternative to capitalism that has been proposed, of course, is socialism, and it might well be that Roy’s anti-socialism/anticommunism is a key to her inability to envision an alternative to capitalism. Ahmad’s critique of the novel, in fact, is aimed specifically at Roy’s obvious antipathy toward communism (especially in the context of Kerala, where the Communist Party is a genuine alternative) as an important failure of her vision in The God of Small Things. Like most critics, Ahmad is extremely impressed by Roy’s technical achievement. Indeed, he begins his essay by noting that “in The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy may well have written the most accomplished, the most moving novel by an Indian author in English” (111).

For Ahmad, however, The God of Small Things is perhaps a bit overwritten, striving a bit too hard for literary modes of expression. Still, despite having drawn so extensively on modernist, magical realist, and cinematic modes of representation, the novel, for Ahmad, remains impressively realist in its orientation, especially in its representation of private family experience. However, when it comes to her representation of the rich tradition of communism in Kerala, Ahmad finds that this realism breaks down. Granting that Roy’s anticommunism was fashionable in India at the time the book was written[160], Ahmad concludes that “judging from the novel, she has neither a feel for Communist politics nor perhaps rudimentary knowledge of it” (112).

Ahmad takes particular exception to Roy’s portrayal of Namboodiripad, who is mentioned at several points in the novel, though he doesn’t figure directly in the action as a character. Namboodiripad is a much respected, even revered figure in Kerala, a man regarded as a true champion of the people. Yet, in The God of Small Things, Roy’s mentions of Namboodiripad are almost dripping with sarcasm and contempt, belonging, as Ahmad puts it, “in the realm of libel and defamation”. He is described by Roy as “Chacko’s hero, … the flamboyant Brahmin high priest of Marxism in Kerala” (64). Roy’s narrator tells us that Chacko, in fact, studied Namboodiripad’s writing on how to achieve a peaceful transition to socialism in Kerala with “an adolescent’s obsessive diligence and an ardent fan’s unquestioning approval,” thus repeating, without any sort of critical examination, key elements of Cold War anticommunist propaganda—that its followers are immature and slavishly devoted, its leaders buoyed by a cult of personality. Further, she immediately follows this mention of Nampoodiripad’s plan for a peaceful transition by stating, “Unfortunately, before the year was out, the Peaceful part of the Peaceful Transition came to an end” (65). Granted, the narrator admits that the discord was “fueled by the Congress Party and the Church,” rather than Namboodiripad (65); however, she then provides a brief history of Namboodiripad’s two terms in office in Kerala that clearly presents Namboodiripad as an ineffective leader, while ignoring his considerable accomplishments. Multiple times in the text his name is mentioned with the designation “Soviet Stooge, Running Dog,” indicating the derogatory names that were applied to Namboodiripad by his more radical Maoist critics, without context or explanation.

Perhaps Roy’s most unfair shot at Namboodiripad is in her portrayal of the 5-star tourist hotel (the “Heritage Hotel”) that springs up near the town of Kottayam just across the river from Ayemenem and the Ipe house—the same hotel that features truncated kathakali dances to entertain guests. In a spectacular display of colonial nostalgia, the hotel is constructed with a renovated version of Kari Saipu’s old house as its centerpiece, surrounded by a collection of smaller, wooden houses from the colonial era that the hotel company has purchased in various locations, then moved to Ayemenem to create an air of authenticity, providing “toy histories for rich tourists to play in” (120). It seems a bizarre project, especially when we learn that one of the transplanted houses had been the ancestral home of Namboodiripad (which functions as the hotel dining room, with actual communists serving as waiters), a fact that the “Hotel People” openly advertises, thus commodifying the communist leader, converting him into a sort of tourist attraction, and basically making him appear ridiculous: “So there it was then, History and Literature enlisted by commerce. Kurtz and Karl Marx joining palms to greet rich guests as they stepped off the boat” (120).

This hotel motif might make some important points about the ways in which Indian culture has been deployed by the tourism industry, and it is certainly true that capitalism tends to commodify everything in its path, converting everything it touches into a potential source of profit. However, Roy’s focus on Heart of Darkness and Namboodiripad is off the mark. Tourism has mostly focused on an exoticized Orientalist India, represented by gurus, holi[161], elephants, and the Taj Mahal. As Ahmad points out, no such hotel featuring Namboodiripad’s ancestral home (which was nowhere near the setting of the hotel) ever existed, and one doubts that very many rich, Western tourists would know (or care) who he was or would find his name much of a draw.

Within the world of The God of Small Things, the main representative of communism isK.N.M. Pillai, head of the local Communist Party in Ayemenem. Pillai is a corrupt, self-serving caricature who seems to have little real devotion to communist ideals but merely sees the party as a potential tool for the pursuit of his own personal ambitions. He is also a man so completely lacking in integrity that, according to Ahmad, his depiction “borders on the burlesque.” On the crucial night when Sophie Mol is drowned, Pillai refuses to protect Velutha from being murdered by the police, then afterward attempts to make political capital out of Velutha’s death. Granted, unscrupulous politicians can be found everywhere, but Roy’s use of Pillai to suggest the degeneration of communism in Kerala into empty sloganeering (“Progress of the Revolution. Annihilation of the Class Enemy. Comprador capitalist”[162]) (272) is part of an extended diatribe against Marxism that runs throughout the novel and that bears little relation to the realities of life in Kerala.

The closest Roy comes to capturing the actual texture of communist political activism occurs in her depiction of a communist march that delays the progress of the Ipe family as they travel to Cochin to pick up Margaret and Sophie Mol. As Ahmad notes, Roy does a good job of representing the reaction of the family (especially Baby Kochamma) to this communist rally. Both appalled and terrified, Baby Kochamma reacts with to the marchers with absolute horror and disgust, making clear the very real gulf that exists between classes in this society, in which the usual class inequalities brought about by capitalism are exacerbated by the legacies of both colonialism and the Hindu caste system. Ahmad notes, though, that the marchers themselves are portrayed as “an indistinct mass, except for the figure of Velutha,” who is apparently among them, though his identification is a bit unclear. Thus, Roy is able to portray with convincing detail the feelings of only one side of this class divide. In addition, she suggests that the march is driven by “Naxalite” energies, exaggerating the extent to which the 1967 peasant rebellion in the village of Naxalbari, influenced subsequent communist activity in Kerala. The Naxalites took their main ideological inspiration from China’s Mao Zedong, then still serving as the Chairman of the Communist Party of China. Given that Maoist China and India had recently been at war, many in India viewed this alignment with Mao with disdain, and the Naxalites had a reputation for having a particularly radical and militant Marxist vision. Associating Kerala’s communists with the Naxalites is thus a subtle (and unfair) way of undermining them.

All in all, The God of Small Things is an important book and an impressive work of literary art, even if it falls short as a political statement or representation of the real political situation in Kerala, partly because Roy’s antipathy to communism makes it impossible for her to paint a fair picture of Keralan politics. It does, however, effectively and powerfully present Roy’s view of the world depicted in the book, which is perhaps all a work of fiction can be expected to do. It is our responsibility as readers to try to appreciate the book on its own aesthetic terms but to challenge and interrogate its characterization of political realities about which we, as Western readers, might have dangerously little knowledge and thus might be seriously misled if we take the book’s portrayals at face value.

NOTES

Chapter 7

Postmodernism, Multiculturalism and Contemporary British Literature

Just as critical discussions of British literature in the first decades of the twentieth century have come to be dominated by the topic of modernism, so too have discussions of literature and culture in the last decades of the twentieth century and first decades of the twenty-first century come to be dominated by the topic of postmodernism. This chapter will present a basic description of the phenomenon of postmodernism and of the ways in which it differs from postmodernism. It will also discuss some of the important works of British literature that can be best understood within the context of postmodernism. However, it will begin by discussing the basic aspects of British history since World War II that have been crucial to the development of British literature since World War II. It will then turn to a discussion of certain trends in British literature since 1945 that are not best understood within the context of postmodernism, before turning, finally, to a discussion of postmodernist British literature.

British History Since World War II

History generally proceeds through processes of slow and gradual development, though there are certainly are distinct and specific landmarks along the way. For example, one could argue that the dismantling of the British Empire has seeds that go back as far as the American Revolution, which occurred before the empire in its modern form had even been built. But the key landmark that locates the beginning of the end of the modern British Empire occurred when the British pulled out of India on August 15, 1947. This event marked a new stage in the history of Great Britain, a stage in which the British were forced to come to terms with their diminishing influence in the world and to seek new forms of national cultural identity that were not crucially dependent on the fact of empire. As the process of decolonization proceeded apace through most of the rest of the empire in the 1950s and 1960s, this experience of redefinition was only intensified and made more complicated by the geopolitical situation in the Cold War. Indeed, as the British pulled out of one colony after another, one of their chief concerns was to try to ensure that the new nations that emerged from these colonies would not fall under the sway of Soviet Union (which had the strong advantage of having long been opposed to colonialism) but would instead remain within the democratic bloc of the West. That the latter came increasingly to be dominated by the United States, with Great Britain merely in a backup role, was also something with which the British had to come to terms.

It was, in fact, at the urging of the Americans that the British proceeded slowly with decolonization after the massive carnage caused by their rapid pullout from India. The Americans, with good reason, felt that a rapid withdrawal from most of the remaining colonies would be in danger of leaving pro-Soviet forces in control there, given that the most effective anticolonial forces had often been led by socialists with strong ties to the Soviet Union. So the British (often with financial support from America) undertook the project of trying to train a new pro-Western leadership to take charge in the colonies after independence. Many in the colonies, however, were dissatisfied with this approach, and the years after Indian independence were marked by considerable strife, even as the British sought a gradual and peaceful process of decolonization.

In Asia, a string of defeats at the hands of the Japanese during World War II had destroyed once and for all the notion of British invincibility. Thus, in the face of the decolonization of India, Britain’s nearby Malayan colonies began to demand immediate independence. When these demands were not met, the allied forces of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) and the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA), their troops already battled-hardened in the struggle to win freedom from Japanese occupation during the war, launched a guerrilla campaign designed to drive out the British, who had returned to the colony after the Japanese were finally defeated. The resultant conflict—which the British called the “Malayan Emergency” and which the Malayans called the “Anti-British National Liberation War”—lasted from 1948 until 1960. It has widely been seen as a precursor to the subsequent American intervention in Vietnam. Harsh measures taken by the British, including the forced incarceration of half a million Malays to relocation camps (to prevent them from providing support to the rebels, who never numbered more than perhaps 7,000–8,000 fighters), did little to win sympathy for British colonial rule among the general population, though the fact that most of the insurgents were ethnic Chinese did help the British among the Malay population. Massacres, tortures, and beheadings became common British tactics in the course of the conflict. The British ultimately prevailed, though their numerous violations of the Geneva Convention did little to bring credit to the victors.

During roughly the same period, the British also faced an anticolonial insurgency in Kenya, in the conflict that came to be known as the Mau Mau Uprising (1952–1964). Here, the British employed many of the same tactics that had been developed to put down the rebellion in Malaysian and ultimately emerged victorious in the military conflict. These tactics, however, left a bitter taste in the mouths of many Kenyans and did little to prop up the wavering sense of British propriety back home or the flagging reputation of the British around the globe.

The capture of Mau Mau leader Dedan Kimathi on October 21, 1956 (he was subsequently executed on Feburary 18, 1957) turned the tide in favor of the British in Kenya. However, on October 29, 1956 (only eight days after the capture of Kimathi), a chain of events would begin that dealt a crippling blow to the international prestige of the British. On this date, Israeli forces (through prior agreement with the British and French) invaded the Egyptian Sinai near the Suez Canal. On November 5, British and French paratroopers landed in the area and seized control of the canal, which had long been under British protection but which had been nationalized and seized by the Egyptian government of President Gamal Abdel Nasser. The resultant crisis led both the United States and the Soviet Union (which were engaged in a fierce competition for influence in the region) to demand that the British and French withdraw. British prestige was dealt a mortal blow, and British Prime Minister Anthony Eden was forced to resign. Most historians regard the Suez Crisis as the end of Britain’s status as a genuine international superpower.

Soon afterward, the British were faced with what seemed to be an additional crisis (though it might perhaps have better been regarded as an opportunity) when their attempts to retain influence in their former colonies led to such strategies as the establishment of the British Commonwealth[163] and the institution of such policies as free immigration from Commonwealth nations to the United Kingdom. Though the roots of the Commonwealth go back to the Balfour Declaration of 1926, the Commonwealth was constituted in the basic form that still exists today in 1949—in what was clearly an attempt to build a bulwark against the global spread of communism in the wake of the unraveling of the British Empire. But many in Britain envisioned their island sinking, as a result of the free immigration policies, beneath the weight of a massive wave of dark-skinned immigrants in a sort of reverse colonization, accompanied by waves of mass violence. Perhaps the most famous statement on the matter was contained in the notorious and sensationalist “Rivers of Blood” speech given by Member of Parliament Enoch Powell (1912–1998) in Birmingham on April 20, 1968. Here, Powell decried Britain’s liberal immigration policies (especially with respect to the Commonwealth). In the speech, Powell proclaimed that the British must put a stop to such free immigration for teir own survival. In the speech’s most famous passage, Powell began with an allusion to the Roman poet Virgil, then moved to a reference to the racial and unrest that were sweeping the United States at the time, then to a suggestion that Britain’s racial problems would soon be as bad as America’s if something wasn’t done to quell the current tide of immigration:

As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber[164] foaming with much blood’.[165] That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the 20th century. Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now. Whether there will be the public will to demand and obtain that action, I do not know. All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.

Powell’s speech brought pre-existing fears on the part of many in Britain to the surface and stirred considerable popular opposition to the proposed 1968 Race Relations Bill (which made it illegal to refuse housing or work to anyone on the grounds of their ethnicity), though the fill passed nevertheless.

Powell’s speech and the reaction to it revealed a number of ongoing racial tensions in British society, and many have felt that his speech was a key factor in the surprise electoral victory of the Conservative Party in the 1970 Parliamentary elections. And this victory was but the forerunner to the much more important Conservative victory of 1979, a victory that made Margaret Thatcher Britain’s first woman Prime Minister, an office she would hold until 1990, thus becoming the longest-serving British Prime Minister of the twentieth century. Thatcher’s staunchly pro-business policies (paralleling those of the contemporaneous Reagan administration in America) presaged the wave of neoliberalism that would eventually sweep the globe by the early years of the twenty-first century. Thatcher’s attitudes and policies were also not particularly hospitable to immigrants (she at times expressed sympathy for Powell’s views even if she regretted the colorful way he had stated them), but the tide of history was toward a more multicultural Britain, and that tendency has continued to this day. In fact, much of the most interesting literature to have been produced in Britain in the past half-century—especially beginning with the work of Salman Rushdie (discussed in the last chapter)—has specifically been aimed at exploring the immigrant experience in Britain, as well as the impact on British society of the increasingly multiracial and multicultural nature of Britain as a nation.

Postwar British Literature

Postwar British literature got off to a fast start with the publication of George Orwell’s (1903–1950) Animal Farm on August 17, 1945 (just months after the surrender of Nazi Germany and actually two weeks before the surrender of Japan in the Pacific). Animal Farm is an allegorical commentary on the tendency of revolutions to lead not to utopian reform, but to dystopian oppression. As such, it resembles a number of dystopian works, particularly We (which first appeared as an English translation, in 1924), by the Russian writer Evgeny Zamyatin (1884–1937). Indeed, the most direct target of Orwell’s satire is the descent of the utopian hopes of the Bolshevik Revolution into the tyranny of Stalinism, making the book a sort of look back at the events warned against in Zamyatin’s dystopian classic. But Orwell’s most important contribution to dystopian fiction came four years later, with the publication of Nineteen Eighty-four, which would go on to be one of the most widely read books of the twentieth century. One of the central works of modern dystopian fiction, Nineteen Eighty-four details a grim dystopian future society in which most people live in gray, lifeless poverty with no hope of improving their conditions. All political power resides in the hands of a totalitarian regime that employs extensive programs of surveillance and propaganda to control the minds of individuals but has no qualms about using more brutal and violent means as well. This novel was again widely interpreted as a critique of the Stalinist Soviet Union and was extensively employed in the West as a tool of anti-Soviet propaganda, even though Orwell himself insisted that the book was aimed equally at the Soviet Union and at postwar conditions in the West, especially his own Britain.

Conditions in Britain certainly came under considerable criticism in British literature moving into the 1950s, a time of considerable crisis for British society. For example, in the midst of all of the political troubles of the postwar years, in the realm of culture the British had to come to terms with the fact that Hollywood film had already outstripped the British film industry in terms of its global popularity even before World War II. Indeed, by the end of the 1930s, British colonial subjects all over the world were watching the glossy products of American cinema, the impressive nature of which made it all the harder for the British to maintain the aura of cultural superiority in which they had long attempted to wrap their colonial power. Indeed, by the 1950s, American cinema was becoming increasingly dominant even in Britain itself, where the popular music scene also came more and more to be dominated by the imported products of America’s new rock ‘n’ roll culture.[166]

Perhaps it is no surprise that British literature in the 1950s often took a dark turn. Indeed, one of the best-known and most widely-read British novels of the 1950s is dark indeed. William Golding’s (1911–1993) Lord of the Flies (1954) deals with a group of British boys who, stranded on a deserted island, revert to primitive savagery. It has universal implications about human nature vs. human societies and has been widely read in both Britain and the U.S. and stands as a modern classic. Golding would later explore some of the same themes in his Booker Prize–winning Rites of Passage (1980), the first entry in his To the Ends of the Earth trilogy.

Golding sought for universality in his work, but there was at least one important movement in British literature in the 1950s that was more specifically British and that had virtually no counterpart (and little readership) in the United States, where the level of anti-communist hysteria was such that there was little place for the working-class-oriented kind of literature produced by Britain’s “Angry Young Men,” a group of young British writers who took their name from promotions for John Osborne’s 1956 play Look Back in Anger. Osborne’s play expressed strong dissatisfaction with the British status quo and outrage toward the tendency of British society to ignore the problems of its neediest citizens. Its success helped to inspire a new wave of writing by working-class writers who, in subsequent years, produced a string of important works that made a lasting impact on British culture.

In addition to Osborne, several other Angry Young Men worked largely in drama, the most important of whom was Harold Pinter (1930–2008). Pinter’s second play, The Birthday Party (1958) was not successful upon its initial stage presentation but went on to become one of the most important works of British drama in the second half of the twentieth century. It was a central work among his earlier “comedies of menace,” which also included the more complex and ambiguous The Homecoming (1965), another classic. These early plays have an absurdist tinge and show the influence of such literary predecessors as Franz Kafka (1883–1924) and Samuel Beckett. In his middle period, Pinter wrote important “memory plays,” such as No Man’s Land (1975) and Betrayal (1978), forerunners of such later memory plays as Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), an exemplary text in Chapter 3 of this volume. In his later years as a playwright, Pinter concentrated on more political plays that often focused on critiques of human rights abuses by those in power in the contemporary world.

Pinter was also one of the most important British screenwriters of the second half of the twentieth century, beginning with a series of collaborations with the American director Joseph Losey, driven to work in Britain because of the repressive political climate in the U.S. Pinter’s screenplays for Losey include The Servant (1963), Accident (1967), and The Go-Between (1971), all of which were adapted from novels. Pinter also wrote screenplays for film adaptations of a number of his own stage plays, including The Caretaker (1963), directed by Clive Donner; The Birthday Party (1968), directed by William Friedkin; The Homecoming (1973), directed by Peter Hall; and Betrayal (1983), directed by David Jones. One of Pinter’s most important screenplays was the highly clever and complex screen adaptation of John Fowles’ novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), directed by Karel Reisz. That screenplay, as was the one for Betrayal, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Screenplay, though Pinter never won that award. Pinter also worked extensively as a director and actor. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005 and remains, as of this writing, the only English-born writer to have won that award since Golding won it in 1983. On the other hand, in a marker of the increasingly international flavor of English writing, three foreign-born English writers have won the Nobel in the twenty-first century, including V. S. Naipaul (2001, born in Trinidad and Tobago), Doris Lessing (2007, born in Iran and raised in what is now Zimbabwe), and Kazuo Ishiguro (2017, born in Japan).

Pinter was the foremost among a gifted group of British playwrights who produced work in the latter part of the twentieth century, including the Czech-born Tom Stoppard (1937– ), whose 1966 absurdist tragicomedy Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is a modern classic. An existentialist riff on Hamlet, this play was adapted to film in 1990, with Stoppard as the writer and director.[167] Stoppard’s plays often have a strongly political edge, focusing on themes of human rights, censorship, and abuse of power. He is also an important screenwriter, having written or co-written a number of important films, including Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985) and John Madden’s Shakespeare in Love (1998), the latter of which won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Also of special note among British playwrights of the second half of the twentieth century are Edward Bond (1934– ), a politically-committed leftist dramatist (also associated with the Angry Young Men) whose 1965 play Saved was a landmark in the battle against theater censorship in Britain. Bond’s Lear (1971), a socialist update of Shakespeare’s King Lear,is also of particular importance. Caryl Churchill (1938– ), whose often experimental plays focus on feminist issues, is the most important woman playwright of this generation. Her best-known plays are Cloud Nine (1979) and Top Girls (1982).

The Angry Young Men were never a particularly unified movement with a coherent set of ideas but instead expressed a range of perspectives that were united by an often bitter resentment over what they saw as Britain’s failed promise, as well as the hypocritical arrogance of the British upper-classes. Many of the leading works produced by this group were sympathetic portrayals of the hardships faced by the working class, often by writers who had experienced those hardships themselves. Many of these novels were also later adapted to film, forming a key element of the British New Wave in cinema. Key novelists in the group included Alan Sillitoe (1928–2010), whose novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) was adapted to film by Karel Reisz in 1960 and whose short story The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1959) was adapted to film by Tony Richardson in 1962. David Storey (1933–2017) produced important work as a novelist, playwright, and screenwriter, including the script for Lindsay Anderson’s 1963 film adaptation of his 1960s novel This Sporting Life. Storey later won the Booker Prize in 1976 for his novel Saville, thus becoming the first working-class writer to win that prestigious honor. Saville essentially deals with the growth and maturation of protagonist Colin Saville, a bright young working-class man who uses his intelligence and education to escape the pits in which his miner father works. As David Craig describes it, the book is “something like the complete history of the working-class child who changes class via schooling, told with the detailed lifelike fullness of classic naturalism” (134). As such, it participates in a long tradition of British working-class fiction that goes back at least to D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. However, Storey shows more respect for working-class life than does Lawrence, and it is clear that for him Saville’s escape from the working-class is far from an unequivocal blessing. Indeed, Saville experiences a radical alienation that can be attributed largely to his estrangement from his family and their working-class culture, leaving him a man without a class. Or, as another character in the book puts it, he is “alienated from his class, and with nowhere to go” (439).

This tradition of working-class writing continued with the work of Barry Hines (1939–2016), whose 1968 novel A Kestrel for a Knave was made into a highly successful film (entitled Kes, co-written by Hines) by Ken Loach one year later. Hines also wrote the script for Loach’s 1981 film Looks and Smiles, based on the novel by Hines. That film won the Best Contemporary Screenplay award at the Cannes Film Festival. Hines was also a noted author of television scripts, including the script for the noted postapocalyptic TV drama Threads (1984), which explored the stark horrors that might be brought about by a nuclear war.

Not all members of the Angry Young Men were strictly working class; some, in fact, occupied positions of considerable privilege, however. Perhaps the leading novelist among the Angry Young Men of the 1950s was Kingsley Amis (1922–1995), who came from a relatively modest middle-class background but was able, through a series of scholarships, to complete an Oxford education and to begin a career as a university lecturer in English. That work no doubt helped to inspire Amis’s first novel, the hugely successful Lucky Jim (1954), which features a university lecturer but also manages, in a comic mode, to capture much of the spirit of Britain in the 1950s. Known both for the discipline of his work regime and the indiscipline of his personal life, Amis produced a number of works in a number of genres. As a critic, for example, he was a champion of the James Bond phenomenon. Amis was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for the novels Ending Up (1974) and Jake’s Thing (1978); he won the prize for The Old Devils in 1986. Though once a member of the Communist Party, Amis turned more and more to the Right after the mid-1960s and was often accused of misogyny and anti-Semitism in his writing.

Prior to Lucky Jim, Amis had worked primarily as a poet, and it is also clear that the title character of his first novel is at least partly based on Amis’s close friend, the poet Philip Larkin (1922–1985). Amis and Larkin were key members of the group of 1950s English poets collectively known as The Movement. Writing anti-romantic verse that was simple and straightforward, but controlled, the Movement poets reflected a sense of Britain’s diminished status as a global power. Of these poets, Larkin is the one whose reputation has best survived. He had already published one book of poetry and two novels when he came to prominence in 1955 with the publication of his second collection of poems, The Less Deceived. This volume was followed by additional important collections, including The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974), the latter of which contains what is perhaps Larkin’s best-known poem, “This Be the Verse,” the full text of which can be found at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48419/this-be-the-verse. Here, Larkin employs his characteristically nasty wit to decry the damage parents do to their children (“They fuck you up, your mum and dad”), but then reminds his readers that these parents’ parents also damaged them in turn, and so on. His final advice? “Get out as early as you can, / And don’t have any kids yourself.”

In 2008, The Times ranked Larkin first on its list of the fifty greatest British writers since 1945, just ahead of Orwell and Golding. In fourth place was a slightly younger poet, Ted Hughes (1930–1948), who also came to be known as a member of the Movement. In America, Hughes is also particularly well known as the husband of American poet Sylvia Plath (1932–1963), whom he married on June 16, 1956. The couple chose the date in honor of James Joyce’s Ulysses, which is set on June 16 (otherwise known as Bloomsday). The marriage was a rocky one, though, and ended, first in their separation, then with Plath’s suicide. Hughes became the British Poet Laureate in 1984, after the position was declined by Larkin. Hughes remained in that capacity until his death in 1998. He left behind a large volume of poetry, including the 1998 collection Birthday Letters, much of which deals with his relationship with Plath. His Collected Poems, published in 2003, run more than 1,300 pages. He was also well-known as an author of children’s books. His children’s science fiction novel The Iron Man (1968), originally written to comfort his children in the wake of Plath’s suicide, is itself a classic of children’s literature, as well as the basis for the highly successful American film adaptation, The Iron Giant (1999, directed by Brad Bird).

Science fiction in general played a key role in British literature in the 1960s. Amis, for example, not only wrote science fiction but also authored an important earlier critical study of the genre New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction (1960), based on lectures he gave at Princeton University and emphasizing the dystopian aspects of the genre. Still, after the foundational work of H. G. Welles in the 1890s, that genre had come to be dominated by American writers, with the only truly major British science fiction author of the immediate postwar years being Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008), who stands with Americans Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein as the three leading figures of the Golden Age of Science Fiction. Clarke got his start immediately after the war, when his first professional science fiction stories were published in the American pulp magazine Astounding Science-Fiction in 1946. In 1948, he wrote the story “The Sentinel,” which would later inspire the 1968 science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey, the screenplay for which was written by Clarke in collaboration with American director Stanley Kubrick, though the film was made almost entirely in England, where Kubrick lived at the time. Clarke also wrote a novelization of the story in parallel with the production of the film, which would grow into the series 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), 2010: Odyssey Two (1982), 2061: Odyssey Three (1987), and 3001: The Final Odyssey (1997). This series is typical of Clarke’s fiction, much of which involves encounters between humans and more technologically-advanced aliens, often in ways that trigger a transformative evolutionary leap in the human species. The early novels Childhood’s End (1953) and The City and the Stars (1956) address this theme as well. Important later novels by Clarke include Rendezvous with Rama (1973) and The Fountains of Paradise (1979).

Moving into the 1960s, however, both British and American science fiction, in tune with the social upheavals of the decade, were seeking a way to become more relevant to the real world around them and more respectable in a literary sense. These twin goals led to revolutionary changes in science fiction writing, collectively known as science fiction’s New Wave, taking the genre in important new directions in the 1960s and 1970s. New Wave science fiction is characterized by an attempt both to explore more complex and mature subject matter (including sexuality and drug use, as well as social issues such as racism) and to convey that subject matter in a more sophisticated literary style. It was also characterized by a return to prominence of British sf writers, and one could argue that the leading force behind the movement was the British magazine New Worlds, edited by British science fiction and fantasy writer Michael Moorcock(1939– ) from 1964 until 1971, and then from 1976 to 1996. In New Worlds, young British sf writers such as Brian Aldiss (1925–2017), J. G. Ballard (1930–2009), John Brunner (1934–1995), and M. John Harrison (1945– ) found a place to publish sophisticated sf stories that would never have been welcome in the earlier pulps. All also subsequently became important novelists, with Ballard’s strange, postmodern visions of postapocalyptic landscapes and Brunner’s dystopian tales being particularly important.

New Worlds also published rising American sf authors such as Samuel R. Delany, Thomas Disch, Harlan Ellison, Ursula K. Le Guin, Robert Silverberg, and Norman Spinrad, indicating the increasingly transatlantic nature of sf in English. Indeed, one American counterpart to New Worlds, edited by Judith Merril, was a New Wave anthology entitled England Swings SF (1968), which acknowledged a British influence, much as American rock music was being influenced by the “British invasion” of the time.[168]

Harrison, who served as the editor of New Worlds during Moorcock’s hiatus, rose to prominence as an author with the “Viriconium”sequence of fantasy novels and stories, published between 1971 and 1984. This sequence presents a new form of fantasy that is very much opposed to the dominant Tolkien-Lewis tradition. Harrison’s complex, intellectual, and highly literary fictions are primarily set not in an idealized rural past, but in a teeming and decaying city of the far future. They set the stage for important new anti-Tolkien trends in British fantasy that would eventually come to full fruition in works such as Philip Pullman’s (1946– ) His Dark Materials trilogy (1995–2000) and in the novels of China Miéville (1972– ), especially beginning with Perdido Street Station (2000), the first volume in his “Bas-Lag” trilogy, all three volumes of which were nominated for the Hugo Award[169]. Miéville, whose works straddle the boundary between science fiction and fantasy, has become one of the most awarded authors of the twenty-first century. For example, his novels The City & The City (2009) and Embassytown (2011) both won the Hugo Award for Best Novel. Miéville was the key figure in the so-called British Boom, a wave of impressive new British writers in fantasy and science fiction that began at the end of the twentieth century and is still going strong after two decades.

Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

To a large extent, the dominant trend in British fiction (as in all Western fiction) from the 1970s forward can be encompassed within the rubric of “postmodernism,” though that term itself is complex and has been widely contested. It is clear, however, that many observers, in the 1960s and 1970s, noted that a new form of cultural production seemed to be emerging. Many also noted that the formal characteristics of this new cultural form—its self-conscious experimentalism, its violations of the conventions of realism—resembled those of modernism. Thus, this new phenomenon came to be called “postmodernism,” indicating both its similarities to modernism and the fact that it seemed aware of its belatedness—as opposed to the modernist sense of seeking to do something new. In any case, postmodernism occurred under very different historical circumstances than did modernism and seemed to take a different—less serious, more playful—attitude toward its own project.

Actually, the phenomenon of postmodernism in its contemporary sense was first noticed (and named) in the 1950s in relation to architecture, where the turn to a new style of production was immediately obvious. Modernist architecture—the so-called “international style”—was marked by simplicity and practicality, by the kinds of stark, rectangular forms to be found in the conventional skyscrapers that sprang up around the world in the early and middle part of the twentieth century and in phenomena such as the “Bauhaus” architecture in Germany and the designs of Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) in America. However, while Wright’s designs employed many of the efficient, economical aspects of modernist architecture, his insistence on developing designs that were in harmony with the natural environment and with the natural inclinations of human beings acknowledged some of the dehumanizing limitations of modernist architecture. These limitations, by the 1950s, led to the development of new forms of architecture that were less rigidly functional and more ornamental, combining aspects of different architectural styles from different historical periods.

This new, self-consciously eclectic form of architecture came to be recognized as a genuine departure, especially as theorized by architect Robert Venturi, who countered the telling dictum of the important modernist architect Mies van der Rohe (1866–1969) that “less is more” with his own declaration that “less is a bore.” Venturi’s principal theorization of this new form of architecture is contained in his influential 1972 book (co-authored with his wife Denise Scott Brown and with Steven Izenour) Leaving Las Vegas.

Venturi and his associates correctly surmised that something was happening here in contemporary architecture though what it was wasn’t exactly clear. It was Charles Jencks, with Language of Post-modern Architecture (1977) who for the first time clearly articulated these new developments within the context of what he called postmodernism. Though Jencks was at first hesitant to apply the term “postmodernism” in a positive sense (preferring terms such as “radical eclecticism”), he soon adopted postmodernism as a positive designation, revising his book a year later to include a vision of the postmodern as a new kind of “double-coding,” in which architecture could employ both modern and historical aspects in a single structure.

Meanwhile, by the time the work of architects such as Venturi and Jencks was published, other observers were beginning to detect similar developments outside of architecture. The recognition of postmodernism as a new literary phenomenon was spearheaded by the Egyptian-born American critic Ihab Hassan (1925–2015), who, in a series of critical works, attempted to describe the new phenomenon. Clearly influenced by the carnivalesque, anti-authoritarian energies of the oppositional political movements of the 1960s, Hassan saw postmodernism as a radical, subversive tendency through which literature could challenge both the cultural and the political status quo. As noted in Chapter 2 of this volume, he saw modernism and postmodernism as employing many of the same aesthetic strategies, but for vastly different purposes, with postmodernism becoming a sort of ultra-modernism that was more daring than modernism and that overcame the conservative limitations of mainstream modernism. Modernism ultimately emerges in the view of Hassan (and many others) as a conservative, elitist movement, while postmodernism emerges as a brash challenge to the very values that modernism supports. In works such as the essay “POSTmodernISM” (1971) and the volumes The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature (1971), The Right Promethean Fire: Imagination, Science, and Cultural Change (1980), and The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture (1987), Hassan outlined his influential theory of the subversive nature of postmodernist literature. However, by the end of the 1980s, his enthusiasm for the revolutionary possibilities of the movement seemed to have waned.

Meanwhile, in France, Jean-François Lyotard (1924–1998), especially in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), gave the theorization of postmodernism a more philosophical turn. Envisioning postmodernism as a challenge to the rationalist principles of the Enlightenment, Lyotard saw it as being particularly informed by a strong skepticism toward grand “totalizing metanarratives,” which he explicitly associated with authoritarian structures of power. As opposed to this totalizing tendency, Lyotard (here and elsewhere in his work) celebrated the tendency toward fragmentation in postmodernist art and literature as an anti-authoritarian gesture.

The critical literature on postmodernism is vast and diverse. Much of it, like Lyotard, envisions postmodernism as a radical new cultural challenge to authority, though few have been able to articulate exactly what this new art really does to change the social and political status quo. Indeed, Perry Anderson convincing argues in his careful examination of the origins of the historical concept of postmodernity that the work of theorists such as Hassan, Lyotard, and Jencks (and even the ostensible leftist Jürgen Habermas), while ostensibly viewing postmodernism as emancipatory, is thoroughly underwritten (and undermined) by a thinly-disguised, Cold War–informed polemic against Marxism and socialism. Indeed, the grand metanarratives decried by Lyotard and other postmodern champions of fragmentation are, for Anderson, simply coded stand-ins for the Marxist model of history. Thus, despite their seeming diversity (and its overt celebration of diversity) Anderson sees in most earlier theorizations of postmodernism and postmodernity a strange ideological consistency in their aversion to the central principles of classical Marxism:

The idea of the postmodern, as it took hold in this conjuncture, was in one way or another an appanage of the Right. Hassan, lauding play and indeterminacy as hallmarks of the postmodern, made no secret of his aversion to the sensibility that was their antithesis: the iron yoke of the Left. Jencks celebrated the passing of the modern as the liberation of consumer choice, a quietus to planning in a world where painters could trade as freely and globally as bankers. For Lyotard the very parameters of the new condition were set by the discrediting of socialism as the last grand narrative—ultimate version of an emancipation that no longer held meaning. Habermas, resisting allegiance to the postmodern, from a position still on the Left, nevertheless conceded the idea to the Right, construing it as a figure of neo-conservatism. Common to all was a subscription to the principles of what Lyotard—once the most radical—called liberal democracy, as the unsurpassable horizon of the time. There could be nothing but capitalism. The postmodern was a sentence on alternative illusions. (45–46).

In short, the liberation driven by postmodernism is merely the false freedom of the “free” market, as captured by alternative suggestion by Mark Fisher that a better term for postmodernism might be “capitalist realism,” underwritten by the notion of the famous Thatcherite slogan that “there is no alternative” to capitalism.

Anderson cites with approval the theorization of postmodernism by the American Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson, which sees postmodernism not as a radical, subversive gesture, but just the opposite. For Jameson, postmodernism is the direct expression of the “cultural logic of late capitalism.” It is the artistic form that arises when capitalist modernization nears completion and when commodification has engulfed virtually everything, including art and culture. Jameson’s vision of postmodernism, developed throughout the 1980s, is summed up in his 1991 book Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, where he outlines what he sees as the important formal characteristics of postmodernist art and (more importantly) suggests the ways in which those characteristics relate to larger trends in the globalized world of late capitalism. Jameson’s book still stands as the single most important theoretical analysis of postmodernism as a cultural phenomenon.

For Jameson, the most important compositional strategy of postmodernist art and literature is pastiche, by which he means the borrowing of styles and motifs from the art and literature of the past. These borrowings, however, are carried out without any attempt to engage the original source in critical dialogue. Moreover, they ignore the fact that these originals were produced in a different historical context, so that the strategies used within them might mean something completely different than what they mean in the contemporary world. Styles and motifs borrowed from different cultures and (particularly, as emphasized by Jameson) from different time periods can be freely intermixed within the same postmodernist work, which tends to give postmodernist works a markedly ahistorical quality, with little or no sense of the historical process. Indeed, this loss of historical sense is a crucial characteristic of postmodernist literature for Jameson. It encompasses not just an inability to envision the past as a different time that led to the present by specific historical processes, but also an inability to imagine historical processes that lead to a future that is fundamentally different from the present. In short, postmodernist art is particularly lacking in the kind of utopian energies through which art, in the past, has helped to inspire social and political change.

Jameson also emphasizes that postmodernist artists employ this technique of pastiche because they are incapable of developing and maintaining the kind of distinct, individual styles that marked the work of the great modernist artists. Indeed, as noted in Chapter 2 of this volume, Jameson is consistently positive in his figuration of modernism as a sort of last wave of artistic resistance to the growing hegemony of capitalism in the modern world. Postmodernism, then, is the art that appears after this resistance has collapsed, leaving capitalism free to advance without opposition from this art, which, among other things, leads to a radical fragmentation of experience—both because of the tendency of capitalism to compartmentalize various phenomena for more efficient management and because the emphasis on innovation and expansion in capitalism lends an ephemeral quality to all aspects of existence. Importantly, Jameson relates the lack of distinct individual styles among postmodernist artists to the fact that they themselves lack the kind of stable, continuous identity that is needed to anchor such a style.

The psychic fragmentation that Jameson sees as central to the lives of individuals under late capitalism is also directly related to the formal fragmentation that he sees as crucial to postmodernism art. In postmodernist literature, in particular, narratives, characters, and even language itself tend to be fragmented and unstable, in dramatic opposition to the stable, autonomous characters and linear, rational narratives that are typical of realist literature. Importantly, however, while modernist literature is also often formally fragmented, this fragmentation is enlisted in a battle against the ideology of realism, which is essentially the same as the ideology of capitalism in its classic stage. In the postmodern era, however, the ideology of capitalism has become powerful and versatile enough to encompass both realism and anti-realism, leaving literature no position from which to mount a subversive assault on capitalism unless it arises from a cultural position that is distinctly outside the capitalist norm. By this view, much postcolonial literature would qualify as a sort of pocket of resistance to the global spread of capitalism, as might marginalized Western literatures such as gay or lesbian literature.

Postmodernism, Multiculturalism, and British Literature

One can detect many of the formal characteristics of postmodernism in British literature as early as something like Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928), with its disavowal of realism and historical logic. One could, however, argue that the challenges to gender conventions within Orlando place it more within the orbit of modernism—or at least within one of those localized pockets of resistance to late capitalism described by Jameson. Meanwhile, a great deal of the literature produced in Britain since the 1960s matches Jameson’s descriptions of postmodernism quite well, though often with particularly British intonations, as when Jean Rhys’s[170] (1890–1979) The Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) engages in a complex intertextual dialogue with Charlotte Brontë’s (1816–1855) Jane Eyre (1847). Indeed, while Wide Sargasso Sea employs a relatively straightforward mode of narration, it is clearly set in a world that represents, not the real world, but the fictional world of Jane Eyre, aligning it with postmodernism.

Transgressions of the boundary between fiction and reality also occur in such texts as The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), by John Fowles (1926–2005), which, on one level, is an historical novel set during the Victorian period; on another level, however, it is a complex metafictional[171] construct that comments on the ways in which texts (especially Victorian novels) are constructed. Fowles would also go on to produce other works of postmodernist fiction, including The Magus (1973) and A Maggot (1985). Ultimately, however, The French Lietenant’s Woman is his most important work. As I myself have noted elsewhere, this novel “provides striking demonstrations of how both sexuality and textuality lead to irreducible ambiguities in interpretation” (Techniques 102). And it achieves these effects largely by setting the two genres that inform it—realistic fiction and metafiction—against one another:

As a Victorian novel, the book demands that the reader suspend disbelief and agree to pretend that the words in the text represent real events. As a metafictional novel, the book demands that the reader suspend belief and participate in the rhetorical games involved in producing the text, agreeing not to be taken in by the seductive lure of the narrative. (Techniques 123).

The Victorian period has, in fact, often been mined for material by contemporary British writers. For example, A. S. Byatt’s (1936– ) Booker Prize–winning Possession (1990) cleverly blends stories concerning two contemporary scholars of Victorian literature with another plot line set in the Victorian period itself. And Alan Moore’s (1953) The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series (1999–2007), which features heroes drawn from well-known works of Victorian fiction (such as Allan Quatermain and Sherlock Holmes) was one of the highlights of graphic fiction around the turn of the twenty-first century.

Often working in a similar mode of updating materials from the past is Angela Carter (1940–1992), who has produced works clearly informed by postmodernist textual strategies but that, like the work of Woolf, have feminist energies that set them apart from much postmodernist fiction. She is perhaps best known for The Bloody Chamber (1979), a series of modern retellings of classic fairy tales and folk tales, with a strong feminist message. Perhaps her most clearly postmodernist text is the novel Nights at the Circus (1984), co-winner (along with Ballard’s Empire of the Sun)of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, one of Britain’s oldest literary awards. Like The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Nights at the Circus employs a number of strategies to undermine any attempt at a final, authoritative interpretation of the text, while challenging conventional gender roles along the way—though Carter’s novel has a much more powerful feminist slant than does Fowles’.

The work of Salman Rushdie (discussed in more detail in Chapter 6) announced the full-blown amalgamation of postmodernist technique with British multiculturalism. The combination, of course, is not surprising: one of the key characteristics of postmodernism, according to Jameson, is its tendency toward globalization, in keeping with the increasingly global nature of late capitalism itself. Indeed, though it deals explicitly with Indian history, including the experience of colonization and decolonization, Midnight’s Children (1981) is an almost paradigmatic postmodernist text. I have, in fact, argued elsewhere that it is far better considered a postmodernist novel than a postcolonial one, largely because of its almost total lack of any genuine subversive challenge to capitalism (and because it even includes thinly veiled assaults on socialism).[172] Whatever its political charge, though, Rushdie has proved an important influence on the British writers who came after him and has definitely contributed to making contemporary British literature more multicultural.

Hanif Kureishi (1954– ), an English-born writer of mixed English and Pakistani descent, has been particularly influential in the growth of multicultural British literature as well. The son of a Pakistani father who went to the same exclusive prep school in India as did Rushdie, Kureishi is also a writer whose work sometimes resembles Rushdie’s, especially in its creative and often amusing use of images from popular culture. His highly successful first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia (1990, winner of the Whitbread Award for best first novel), is a highly postmodern evocation of contemporary multicultural London, infused with elements of contemporary popular culture. This novel was adapted to television in a BBC series for which David Bowie provided the soundtrack. Kureishi’s novel Intimacy (1998) was adapted to film by Patrice Chéreau in 2001. Kureishi himself is as well known as a screenwriter as he is as a novelist. His scripts for My Beautiful Laundrette (1985, directed by Stephen Frears) and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987, also directed by Frears) were both highly successful. In addition, Kureishi both wrote and directed the 1991 feature film London Kills Me, a dark-but-comic story about homeless drug addicts that is a clear forerunner to Trainspotting (1996), which is an exemplary text in the next chapter.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, British fiction received another infusion of multicultural energy in the early work of Zadie Smith (1975– ), the London-born daughter of an English father and a Jamaican mother, who burst on the scene with the publication of the much-heralded novel White Teeth in 2000. White Teeth is a vivid evocation of multicultural London that features characters from a wide variety of cultural and ethnic backgrounds. A best-seller that was also a hit with critics, it won both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and the Whitbread Award for best first novel. It is discussed in detail as an exemplary text at the end of this chapter. Her second novel, The Autograph Man (2002), sold well, but was less well received by critics than White Teeth had been. Smith then made something of a critical comeback with her novel On Beauty (2005), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. NW (2012), Smith’s most formally complex and experimental novel, and Swing Time (2016), which draws heavily upon classical Hollywood musicals, also met with extensive critical approval, and Smith remains a major voice in British fiction, though she spends much of her time in New York, where she has been a tenured faculty member at New York University since 2010.

The Bangladesh-born Monica Ali (1967– ) also received critical acclaim with the publication of her first novel, Brick Lane (2003), which focuses on the Bangladeshi immigrant community in London. Some in that community (and some outsiders) criticized the description of the Bangladeshi immigrant community in the book as inauthentic and stereotypical, noting that Ali, the daughter of a Bangladeshi father and an English mother, had lived in England since the age of three and did not live in the kind of immigrant enclave described in the novel. Others, including Rushdie, defended Ali, and the novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; a 2016 poll by the BBC of critics outside the United Kingdom ranked it the 29^th greatest British novel of all time, thus placing it seventeen slots ahead of Midnight’s Children and only four slots behind White Teeth. Brick Lane was also successfully adapted to film by Sarah Gavron in 2007. Ali has since authored three additional novels, showing considerable versatility. These include Alentejo Blue (2006), set in a small village in Portugal that finds itself a part of an increasingly global world; In the Kitchen (2009), which follows the multi-ethnic kitchen staff of a large hotel in the midst of sweeping social changes; and Untold Story (2011), which imagines the life of Princess Diana had she not been killed in a car crash in 1997.

Finally, no survey of recent fiction from the United Kingdom would be complete without a mention of the important work that has come out of Scotland in recent years, especially beginning with the publication of Alasdair Gray’s (1934– ) Lanark in 1981. A complex combination of realism, fantasy, and science fiction, Lanark also employs a number of classic examples of postmodernist textual play. It mixes a variety of genres, modes, and styles, and is composed of four books, in the order 3, 1, 2, 4, indicating the fragmentation of its narrative. Also a painter, poet, and playwright, Gray has authored a number of additional novels as well, including Poor Things (1992), which won both the Whitbread Novel Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize.

Among other things, Gray’s work has exercised an important influence on his fellow Glasgow writer James Kelman (1946– ), who has extended Gray’s sometime use of working-class Glaswegian dialect into an artform of its own. In so doing, Kelman has established a reputation throughout his career for representation of the experience of working-class Scotsmen with energy, humor, and humanity. This is particularly the case in the Booker Prize–winning How Late It Was, How Late, an outburst of profane working-class energy that is narrated through a mixture of internal monologue and indirect free style, presenting all of the events from the perspective of the protagonist, thirty-eight-year-old Sammy Samuels. In that sense, it does not seem very different from any number of modern novels, beginning with James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. However, the downtrodden, working-class Sammy differs dramatically from the tormented artists and intellectuals typical of the modernist novel. While he has some skill and experience in the construction trade, he spends most of his time unemployed within the context of the depressed economy of contemporary Glasgow. Moreover, he has spent eleven of the past eighteen years in prison for crimes committed in an attempt simply to get by. To make matters worse, as the book begins, Sammy awakes from a weekend binge immediately to become involved in an altercation with the police that leaves him not only badly beaten but entirely blind.

Sammy’s blindness only furthers his alienation from the world around him, creating an estranged perspective that has been compared with the perspectives of characters from modern absurdist writers such as Beckett and Kafka. However, Sammy’s resolutely working-class perspective and (especially) his language set him strongly apart from such characters—too strongly for some critics (including Kingsley Amis), who found the language of the novel excessively obscene. As one character in the book itself tells Sammy, cautioning him about his language and exaggerating very little, “every second word’s fuck” (238). Indeed, the “obscenity” of the book’s earthy language was the center of considerable controversy when How Late It Was, How Late was awarded the Booker Prize, though it is hard to see how the book could have represented Sammy’s perspective so convincingly without employing the language he would be likely to use.

Kelman’s earlier novel, A Disaffection (1989), was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. Among his other novels, Kieron Smith, Boy (2008), a story of growing up in urban Glasgow, won the Saltire Society’s Book of the Year and the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year, the two biggest literary awards in Scotland. Kelman is also noted for his political activism in support of working-class causes. Numerous book-length academic studies of his work have now been published.

Kelman’s use of dialect has been cited by the Edinburgh-based Scottish writer Irvine Welsh (1958– ) as an important influence. Welsh burst on the British literary scene in 1993 with the publication of his first novel, Trainspotting. A seriocomic tale of the misadventures of a group of Edinburgh heroin addicts, Trainspotting has since achieved cult status for both its style and its content. It was adapted to a highly successful film in 1996 by Danny Boyle. One of the highlights of 1990s British cinema, that film is discussed as an exemplary text at the end of the following chapter. Among Welsh’s numerous other novels is Porno (2002), a sequel to Trainspotting, and Skagboys (2012), a prequel.

These Scottish novelists—along with such writers as Ishiguro, Smith, and Ali—demonstrate the intensely multicultural nature of British fiction in the past three decades. Writers from more conventionally central cultural positions continue to thrive as well, including Martin Amis (1949– ), the son of Kingsley Amis, whose work has been a particularly strong influence on Smith. Amis’s opinions have often been controversial, but his fiction—in such novels as Money (1984) and London Fields (1989)—has provided some of the leading examples of British postmodernist fiction. Amis’s close contemporary Julian Barnes (1946– ) has also been particularly successful (and particularly postmodern) in such works as the Booker Prize–winning The Sense of an Ending (2011) and three novels that were shortlisted for the Booker— Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), England, England (1998), and Arthur & George (2005). All in all, British fiction seems to be in good hands as we move forward into the twenty-first century.

NOTES

EXEMPLARY TEXT

ZADIE SMITH: WHITE TEETH (2000)

British literature moved into the twenty-first century with the publication of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, which remains to this writing the most feted text of twenty-first-century British literature. White Teeth is a sort of epic of late-twentieth-century multicultural Britain, a central literary monument to the mongrel nature of British culture and society in the postimperial era. It’s a sprawling, energetic, rambunctious novel built on many influences and drawing on many genres; it contains many styles and many narratives, exhibiting a plural nature that is typical of much postmodernist fiction—but that is also much like contemporary Britain itself. The “British” characters of the book, Londoners all, have roots that span the globe, from Jamaica, to England, to Bangladesh. And appropriately so: in the post-imperial era, of course, England itself has roots all over the globe. As Alsana Begum, one of the Londoners in the book with Bangladeshi roots, points out (after reading in an encyclopedia about the multicultural history of Bangladesh itself),“You go back and back and back and it’s still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe. Do you think anybody is English? Really English? It’s a fairy tale!” (196). Despite her explosive temper, Alsana is at times something of a voice of reason and practicality in the text; somewhat marginal to the main plot, she nevertheless plays an important rule in constantly bringing her husband, Samad Iqbal, himself given to flights of romantic and religious excess, back to earth. And her reminder here of the mongrel nature of all cultures at this point in history can be taken as a crucial statement of the central message of the book as a whole.

White Teeth employs a shambling, nonlinear narrative structure, though its events can generally be sorted into roughly chronological order. Most of the actual narrative occurs between the middle of the 1970s and the end of the 1990s, thus covering the final quarter of the twentieth century. However, occurrences of crucial importance to the narrative begin with the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and extend through events such as the Kingston, Jamaica, earthquake of 1907, to the final days of World War II, then on to the end of the twentieth century. The Indian rebellion is important because Samad, perhaps the single most important character in the narrative, derives so much of his personal sense of identity from the claim that his great-grandfather, Mangal Pandey, was the instigator of the Indian Rebellion. The book acknowledges that Pandey’s actual role in the rebellion has been questioned and that he has often been maligned by Western historians, but to Samad he is a great hero and being descended from him is probably the one personal characteristic of which Samad is most proud.

What we know of Pandey in White Teeth, however, emanates almost entirely from the mind of Samad, whose claims of Pandey’s greatness are not necessarily taken seriously even by other members of his own family. Meanwhile, Samad’s purported descent from Pandey is paralleled in the text by the story of the family background of Clara Jones (née Bowden), who is the daughter of Hortense Bowden, a woman who is herself stipulated to have been born in a church in Kingston, Jamaica, during the cataclysmic Kingston earthquake of 1907. The daughter of a black Jamaican teenager and a (white) British colonial officer, Captain Charlie Durham, Hortense was apparently born in a Kingston Catholic church just as her mother, though nine-months-pregnant, was about to be raped by a drunken British colonial businessman and would-be religious reformer, Sir Edmund Glennard. The earthquake then erupted, the church collapsed, and Sir Edmund, in a fateful act of poetic justice, was crushed beneath a falling statue of the Virgin Mary. Hortense, however, was delivered alive and well amid the chaos and rubble that surrounded her.

All of these details provide background to the main plot of the book in a manner that is indicated by the epigraph that appears in the book’s frontmatter:

What is past is prologue.

Inscription in Washington, D.C., museum

This inscription does indeed appear on a statue located outside the National Archives Building in Washington. But it originates in Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611), perhaps the first great literary work to focus on the expansion of England into a colonial power. The phrase has been used widely ever since as an indication of the way in which past events determine the conditions under which present events unfold—which is, of course, precisely why it appears outside the National Archives Building. It’s a highly appropriate epigraph for White Teeth, in which the past hovers over the present lives of so many of the characters and provides so much important background to their current experiences. And it serves as an announcement up-front that history will be important in this novel (as it so often is not in the novels of the postmodern era). But why the attribution to an American “museum” instead of to Shakespeare? Smith—with her degree in English literature from Cambridge and her Generation Xer’s ability to use Google—could not possibly be unaware of the Shakespearean origins of her epigraph, so one must assume that this epigraph serves the dual purpose of reminding us of the importance of the past while also suggesting that some of us need to get beyond our reverence for the heroes of the past (like Shakespeare, one-time icon of British imperial majesty) and move forward without slavish devotion to past traditions.

Of course, the biggest historical prologue that hovers over the text of White Teeth is the experience of empire—and of subsequent imperial decline. Thus one Arab Londoner in the text scoffs at the English penchant for statuary featuring their heroes from the past, making those statues sound like the one of Ozymandias made famous by Shelley: “They have no faith, the English. They believe in what men make, but what men make crumbles. Look at their empire. This is all they have. Charles II Street and South Africa House and a lot of stupid-looking stone men on stone horses. The sun rises and sets on it in twelve hours, no trouble. This is what is left” (417). Meanwhile, one aspect of this decline—one that, in a sense, hovers over all post-imperial British culture, is the sense of having been supplanted by the United States as a global power. In White Teeth, this sense is expressed most clearly in the description of the aftermath of the 1907 Kingston earthquake, when the most effective aid to the devastated British colony is supplied, not by the British themselves, but by the Americans. When Durham returns to Kingston to view the damage, he realizes that “It is the Americans, not the British, who have the resources to pledge serious aid, three warships full of provisions presently snaking down the coast from Cuba. It is an American publicity coup that the British government does not relish, and like his fellow Englishmen, Durham cannot help but feel a certain wounded pride. He still thinks of the land as his” (300). He even experiences a certain offense that the Americans feel authorized to enter Jamaica without asking his permission. Among other things, this passage provides a reminder that, in the complex process of global modernization, the Americans were already making great strides toward overtaking the British as early as 1907, when the process of rapid modernization underway in Britain was underway at an even more accelerated pace in America. By World War II, many British colonies in the Caribbean were occupied by American soldiers, sent to protect against German invasion, with the British military stretched too thin to provide such protection. And, of course, by this time inhabitants of British colonies all over the world (and of Britain itself) had become accustomed to viewing imported American films, often with a sense that the American films they saw were superior to the British ones, thus driving another nail in the coffin of British superiority.

Clara ultimately immigrates with her mother to Britain and becomes the wife of one Archie Jones, an extraordinarily ordinary Englishman whom she meets on New Year’s Day, 1975, just after he has attempted to kill himself in the wake of the breakdown of his first marriage. New Year’s Days in general play an important role in White Teeth, signifying new beginnings.This particular date in 1975, however, was also predicted (wrongly) by the Jehovah’s Witnesses (a religion counting Hortense and Clara as members) to be the day of the Biblical end of the world. Archie, more than twice Clara’s age, is Samad’s best friend, the two having first met when they were members of a tank crew in the waning days of World War II, their mutual adventures having included the capture and apparent execution of a Nazi doctor—though we will eventually learn that Archie had failed to execute the doctor, having flipped a coin to determine the doctor’s fate. Samad and Archie are then reunited when Samad immigrates to England with the much younger Alsana, whom he has recently wed in an arranged marriage.

Much of White Teeth then details the interactions of these two families as they build lives in North London, Archie working at a print shop (where he is in charge of folding) and Samad (despite his high intelligence and university education) working as a waiter in an Indian restaurant. The Joneses have a daughter, Irie, while Samad and Alsana have two sons, Magid and Millat, identical twins with completely different personalities and inclinations. Much of the story simply entails the day-to-day experiences of these two families as they live their lives the best they can in the complex environment that is multicultural Britain. Samad, for example, spends much of his time struggling to be what he regards as a good Muslim in a modern secular society that often conflicts with the demands of his religion. Those demands also conflict with the demands of the flesh, and Samad (who has almost no sexual relationship with Alana) spends much of his time trying to resist his penchant for masturbation, only to have his frustrated libido eventually drive him into an affair with his sons’ young, very pretty, very white, very English music teacher, Poppy Burt-Jones. When the boys spot him on an outing with Poppy, Samad is so horrified that he not only ends the affair but decides he must send his boys back to Bangladesh to receive a proper Muslim upbringing, free of the secular lures of modern London. Unfortunately, he concludes that he can only afford to send back one son, so he ultimately makes the choice to send Millat, the mores studious of the two, back to the land of his ancestors, a decision he makes without the knowledge of Alsana, who never forgives him.

White Teeth in general does not cast Samad’s actions here in a very positive light, both because Samad seems to be acting more out of his own guilt at his inability to control his sexual impulses and because the text seems skeptical of any such attempt to idealize the place of one’s origins. Later in the text, Irie becomes fascinated by her ancestral homeland in Jamaica, in a way that Smith (who herself has roots in Jamaica through her mother) clearly finds problematic: “No fictions, no myths, no tangled webs—this is how Irie imagined her homeland. Because homeland is one of the magical fantasy words like unicorn and soul and infinity that have now passed into the language. And the particular magic of homeland, its particular spell over Irie, was that it sounded like a beginning. The beginningest of beginnings. Like the first morning of Eden and the day after apocalypse. A blank page” (332).

White Teeth as a whole is also skeptical of Samad’s reverence for tradition, as when a narrative voice in the text, responding to this reverence, issues a warning against such slavish devotion to the past that is very much in keeping with the overall spirit of White Teeth, even if this narrator canoe be identified as the authoritative voice of the text—or, for that matter, identified at all:[173]

If religion is the opiate of the people, tradition is an even more sinister analgesic, simply because it rarely appears sinister. If religion is a tight band, a throbbing vein, and a needle, tradition is a far homelier concoction: poppy seeds ground into tea; a sweet cocoa drink laced with cocaine; the kind of thing your grandmother might have made. (161)

Religion, according to this statement, is overt and strident, as obvious and blatant as the shooting up of heroine. Tradition is stealthier, often doing its work invisibly by subtle appeals to common sense and good manners. The suspicion toward tradition (which amounts to an endorsement of modernization and change) that is embodied in this statement seems even more clear when one considers that the statement is made in the midst of an anecdote about how the queen of Thailand once fell off a boat and was allowed to drown because tradition dictated that she not be touched by anyone, thus preventing anyone from saving her.

This does not, of course, mean that the modern West is without its own problems. For example, despite its energetic portrayal of a complex multicultural Britain, White Teeth also acknowledges that the mixture of races and cultures that constitutes contemporary England has not occurred in some sort of idealized utopia but in a real world where some very ugly forms of racism still exist. For example, the book acknowledges Enoch Powell’s notorious 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech, the memory still haunts England’s immigrant community, as when Alsana recalls the speech by “E-knock someoneoranother,” filled with “rivers of blood silly-billy nonsense,” after which the Iqbals had been forced take refuge in their basement as white anti-immigrant rioters tore their way through Whitechaple breaking windows (52).

Even in the 1980s, virulent racism can still be found in London. At one point, Millat, Magid, and Irie—on their way to carry out a school project designed to help elderly shut-ins—find themselves grumbled about by a “disgruntled old age pensioner,” who delivers a clichéd pronouncement that such people as these brown children “should all go back to their own … “ (137, Smith’s emphasis and ellipsis). Such ideas, though, are clearly identified in the text as outdated, ready to be consigned to the dustbin of history: “But this, the oldest sentence in the world, found itself stifled by the ringing of bells and the stamping of feet, until it retreated under the seats with the chewing gum” (137).

The three children then have an even more alarming encounter with racism when they arrive at their destination, where they hope to deliver some free food to one Mr. J. P. Hamilton, an elderly former British soldier. After first trying to shoo them away, Mr. Hamilton eventually invites the children in, though he assures them that he cannot eat the food they have brought him because of his bad teeth. He then lectures them on dental hygiene but tops the lecture off with a shockingly racist anecdote about the potential disadvantages of having clean, shiny, white teeth. When he fought in the Congo in World War II, he tells the children, he faced adversaries who were black Africans recruited by the Germans, made visible in the darkness of the jungle only by the whiteness of their teeth, which made them easy targets (144). A stunned Irie begins to cry, while Millat responds that his father fought in the war for England. But Mr. Hamilton assures him that he must be mistaken, because “there were certainly no wogs” in the British army. The children flee, while the addle-brained Hamilton, clearly not in full possession of his faculties, prattles on.

The moment will retrospectively turn out to be an important one in Millat’s growing experience of prejudice as a brown-skinned Muslim in Britain. Meanwhile, in addition to such examples of overt racism, White Teeth also outlines a possibly more insidious form of racism through its portrayal of the Chalfen family, an affluent and seemingly liberal-minded group with “good genes,” clearly influenced by the “hippie” counter-culture of the 1960s but thoroughly devoted to modern scientific rationality. The family patriarch is world-class geneticist Marcus Chalfen, a secular Jew, while his wife Joyce is a lapsed Catholic who conducts her own experiments in the family garden and writes popular books related to horticulture. They, in fact, practice no religion other than a belief in doing things a certain, logical “Chalfenist” way. Indeed, their frequent references to their family philosophy of Chalfenism indicate a clear sense of superiority to and separateness from ordinary mortals, an attitude that perhaps enables Marcus’s experiments with genetics, which to some might come close to trying to play god.

As special as the Chalfens might think themselves to be, however, they are not immune to the intergenerational conflict that is an important motif in White Teeth. Much of this conflict is part of the book’s exploration of the immigrant experience: after all, if the parents in a family grow up in, say, Bangladesh, while their children grow up in London, it would seem likely that the normal “generation gap” would be exacerbated, the two generations having literally grown up in different worlds. On the other hand, the pace of change by the second half of the twentieth century is such that one might argue that children always grow up in a world different from the one in which their parents grew up. Writing about her observations in the late 1960s and through most of the 1970s (about the same time, in short, when Hortense, Clara, and the Iqbals were immigrating to Britain), the eminent anthropologist Margaret Mead marveled not only at the increasing rate of change in the modern world, but also at the way that change was leading to a convergence of global cultures. For her, modern culture changes so rapidly that only the very young are living in their own culture; by the time they reach adulthood, they will already be living in a culture that is foreign to the one they grew up in:

Today, everyone born and bred before World War II is an immigrant in time—as his colonizing forebears were in space—struggling to grapple with the unfamiliar conditions of life in a new era. Like all immigrants and pioneers, these immigrants in time are the bearers of older cultures. The difference today is that they are represented in all the cultures of the world. (70–71)

This last point seems especially crucial for a book like White Teeth, which is fundamentally about a convergence of different cultures, in this case, about people from different cultures literally converging in North London.“It is as if,” Mead notes, “all around the world, people were converging on identical immigration posts, each with its identifying sign: ‘You are now about to enter the post–World War II world’” (70). For Mead, then, all of the people of the world, “whether they are sophisticated French intellectuals or members of a remote New Guinea tribe, landbound peasants in Haiti or nuclear physicists, have certain characteristics in common” (71).

Smith, though, is very much aware that, however intermixed cultures might be in the age of late capitalism, globalization does not for a moment mean that life is literally the same for everyone everywhere. Huge gaps remain between the way life is lived in the relatively safe, clean, prosperous metropolitan centers and in parts of the world where life is far more precarious, far more a matter of a struggle to survive from one day to the next. Essentially extending the comparison between the safe, routine comforts of England and the dangers of Africa made by Marlow in Heart of Darkness, Alsana at one point muses on the same difference between modern England and her native Bangladesh:

You could divide the whole of humanity into two distinct camps, as far as she was concerned, simply by asking them to complete a very simple questionnaire … (a) Are the skies you sleep under likely to open up for weeks on end? (b) Is the ground you walk on likely to tremble and spit? (c) Is there a chance … that the ominous mountain casting a midday shadow over your home might one day erupt with no rhyme or reason? (175)

For Alsana, in short, the different camps of humanity are separated not so much by differences in culture or religion as by whether the earth itself is likely to kill you at any moment, without warning:

People who live on solid ground, underneath safe skies, know nothing of this; they are like the English POWs in Dresden who continued to pour tea and dress for dinner, even as the alarms went off, even as the city became a towering ball of fire. Born of a green and pleasant land, a temperate land, the English have a basic inability to conceive of disaster, even when it is man-made. (176)

In general, though, Smith would appear to read the global cultural situation in very much the same way as Mead. Smith also seems to understand the implications of Mead’s arguments about generational change as well. Thus, in her depiction of the Chalfens, Smith complicates the rather obvious observation about generation gaps in immigrant families by depicting a similar gap even in the Chalfen family, seemingly a haven of continuity and stability in a changing world. Indeed, White Teeth reverses the typical dichotomy between a modern Western world driven by change and a more traditional world outside the metropolitan center by noting the continuity in the Chalfen clan, which can (with supposed confidence) trace its ancestry back into the seventeenth century, a fact for which Irie expresses both admiration and envy, though Marcus, geneticist that he is, dismisses the notion that his family goes back further than hers (while at the same time subtly claiming a sort of superiority): “Nonsensical statement,” he says. “We all go back as far as each other. It’s just that the Chalfens have always written things down” (280).

As it turns out, if Samad has good reason to worry about his sons growing up in a world so different from that of their forebears, so too does young Joshua Chalfen grow up to differ dramatically from his parents. While Marcus spends his time tinkering with the DNA of animals and Joyce spends her time trying to find ways to get plants to do her bidding, Joshua rejects this sort of interference with nature and in fact becomes an animal-rights activist, working to oppose precisely the sort of work that his father is doing in genetics (and that his mother implicitly endorses with her parallel work in horticulture). Just as Millat ultimately joins KEVIN (“Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation) to protest what he sees as objectionable trends in modern Britain, Joshua joins FATE (“Fighting Animal Torture and Exploitation”), which turns out to be an equally ineffectual group, even if they at least have a better acronym.

Indeed, one might argue that a key weakness of White Teeth is its skepticism toward political activity, both in the ways it depicts groups such as KEVIN and FATE as ultimately achieving nothing and in the ways it suggests that the political commitment of activists such as Millat and Joshua might arise less from well-thought-out analysis and more from personal, perhaps Freudian, grudges. Almost all actual political activity in the book is depicted as vaguely ridiculous, while the book’s seeming endorsement of progressive change also tends to suggest that such change happens automatically, without human intervention, somewhat like evolution.

In a similar vein, the progressive school that Joshua, Millat, Magid, and Irie all attend functions as an example of a futile attempt at social engineering through institutional intervention. It is devoted to multiculturalism to the point of absurdity, ultimately observing so many holidays from so many cultures that virtually every day is a holiday of some sort. And yet, when push comes to shove, the school can still display an underlying racism. One of the most telling sequences in White Teeth occurs when Joshua, Millat, and Irie are all rounded up in an operation designed to counteract the epidemic of marijuana-smoking that seems to have swept through their oh-so-liberal school. Being this liberal, the school reacts with what it thinks is a certain tolerance, assigning all four children to meet periodically at the home of the Chalfens, because the Chalfens (being who they are) will be good influences on all of them. Joshua, of course, already lives with the Chalfens, so what this decision really means is that Joshua receives no real punishment, while the three brown-skinned children are assigned to spend time with the white, educated, cultured Chalfens in the hope that some of their greater civilization will rub off on the children.

White Teeth has been compared by critics with the work of numerous predecessors, from Dickens to Salman Rushdie. Indeed, Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is probably the single book with which it has been compared most often—perhaps because of certain similarities in style and energy and subject matter, though probably also because her publisher openly marketed Smith as the “next Salman Rushdie.”[174] It also probably didn’t hurt that Rushdie himself essentially invited such comparisons by writing a glowing blurb for the back cover of the book when it was first published. “An astonishingly assured début,” wrote Rushdie, “funny and serious … I was delighted.”[175]

White Teeth, in fact, contains a number of multicultural comic constructions that are somewhat reminiscent of the work of Rushdie. Archie and Samad, for example, generally hang out at a pub called O’Connell’s Poolroom, which, we are assured is “neither Irish nor a poolroom” (153). The name, in fact, has simply been carried over by its current Arab proprietors from the previous Irish one, and the décor is now a tangled mixture of inherited Irish elements and added Arab elements. Meanwhile, this hybrid establishment is run by an Arab Muslim family all of the male members of which are named “Abdul,”—”to teach them the vanity of assuming higher status than any other man” (155). This lesson, of course, also leads to considerable confusion in communication, so each of the Abduls also adopts and English name to distinguish himself from all the other Abduls, leaving them with labels such as “Abdul-Mickey” and “Abdul-Colin.”

Squires suggests that the greatest influence of Rushdie on Smith is probably “linguistic” (16), and it is certainly the case that Smith’s language in the book is rich and varied, paralleling the multicultural nature of the society it portrays. It clearly participates in the project of “decolonizing” the English language that Rushdie has famously described in his well-known article “The Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance,” in which he applauds the efforts of postcolonial writers to bend and shape the English language to their own ends, thus taking an already rich language and enriching it further: “I don’t think there’s another language large or flexible enough to include so many different realities,” declares Rushdie.

Smith seizes on this inherent ability of the English language to represent a variety of cultural positions and uses it to reflect the richly multicultural texture of contemporary Britain.[176] But White Teeth resembles Rushdie’s work in other important ways as well—perhaps most crucially in its comic view of the human condition and in its attempt include a wide variety of points of view, without pronouncing any of them to be authoritative. This anti-authoritarian approach is particularly inhospitable to religious fundamentalism, so it is not surprising that KEVIN does not come off well in the text. Samad’s own battles with his religion are also a source of considerable comedy in the book, though there is nothing of the fundamental challenge to the premises of Islam that one finds in The Satanic Verses. One also detects no hints of Islamophobia in White Teeth, despite the fact that it includes the would-be “terrorists” of KEVIN, a comically bumbling group, somewhat reminiscent of the anarchists in Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907).

Millat’s radicalization, in another link to Rushdie, is furthered by the publication of The Satanic Verses, a book he does not read but nevertheless finds deeply insulting to himself and to his religion—another, in fact, in a long line of insults. So he participates in a book-burning demonstration in Bradford with a group of friends in an action that clearly serves as a direct predecessor to the founding of KEVIN. For his own part, Samad is also offended by the book (which he also hasn’t read), though Alsana scoffs at his righteous indignation, given that “he does not even know what the bloody book is about” (194). Samad retorts that he knows enough to realize that the publication of the book is a crucial turning point in the history of Muslims in Britain. Alsana is then horrified as they watch television news coverage of the demonstration in Bradford to see Millat on her screen participating in the book burning. Infuriated, she decides to teach him a lesson by gathering up all of the Western secular materials he has accumulated (including video tapes of his beloved gangster films) and burning them in a bonfire in the backyard, hoping to make a point about the ridiculousness of the burning of The Satanic Verses.

The Jones family also has a strong dose of religion in its background. Though she has rejected the religion by the time she marries Archie, Clara was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness by Hortense, who remains committed to the religion to the end of the book. If anything, the Witnesses are treated even more comically in the book than is Islam, their penchant for periodically predicting the End of Days, only to have the world go on as before, becoming a sort of running joke in the text. Their marginal status is also signaled by the fact that, in the book’s climactic scene, they remain on the outside looking in, demonstrating and handing out pamphlets, and generally being ignored by everyone, despite their self-seriousness.

That scene involves the culmination of the last portion of the book, in which the genre (as sometimes happens in Rushdie as well) shifts to what is essentially science fiction, with at least some connections to real science.[177] This plot involves the work of the geneticist Chalfen to produce a genetically-engineered mouse (dubbed “FutureMouseÓ“) whose very DNA is so carefully constructed that all chance and uncertainty is removed from its life cycle.[178] Chalfen, driven by a scientific rage for order, clearly hopes eventually to be able to apply the same principles to human beings, a project that concerns Samad greatly—especially after Magid, the son he had sent back to Bangladesh to become a good Muslim, instead becomes an atheist and an associate of Chalfen, just as the son who stayed in sinful Britain has become a fundamentalist Muslim. It is apparently not so easy to engineer, or even predict, the lives of others. As Samad puts it to Magid (ignoring the irony of the fact that he himself has tried so hard to control the lives of others, especially Magid), this attempt to control the course of human lives is downright blasphemy:

“Marcus Chalfen has no right. No right to do as he does. It is not his business. It is God’s business. If you meddle with a creature, the very nature of a creature, even if it is a mouse, you walk into the arena that is God’s creation. You infer that the wonder of God’s creation can be improved upon. It cannot. Marcus Chalfen presumes. He expects to be worshipped when the only thing in the universe that warrants worship is Allah.” (376, Smith’s emphases)

White Teeth, of course, is a book that embraces the messiness of existence, so it comes as no surprise that Chalfen’s project leads not to order but to chaos, just as Samad’s plans to engineer the lives of his sons have backfired. Chalfen plans a major announcement of his project, adding showmanship to his science by unveiling the FutureMouseÓ at a large gathering on New Year’s Eve, December 31, 1992, attended by most of the book’s major characters. Thus begins the public display of a life engineered to pass through several predictable milestones and then to end on approximately December 31, 1999, thus coinciding with what has popularly been regarded as the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of a new millennium. But KEVIN’s operatives, with Millat playing the key role of assassin, have infiltrated the crowd, planning (apparently) to kill Chalfen. Meanwhile, sons being sons, Joshua Chalfen also attends the event with a group of FATE protestors who hope to disrupt the proceedings—while the Jehovah’s Witnesses protest ineffectually outside in the cold.

Millat, who has learned his moves as a militant Islamic hit-man mostly by watching American gangster films, fingers the hand-gun he has just acquired in order to assassinate Marcus Chalfen. He has never held a gun before, but he realizes that it feels oddly familiar, because he has seen so many guns in movies, television shows, and video games. In today’s world, children are exposed to so many images of so many things that “there aren’t any alien objects or events anymore, just as there aren’t any sacred ones. It’s all so familiar. It’s all on TV. So handling the cold metal, feeling it next to his skin that first time, it was easy” (436). In other words, in the media-saturated environment of the late twentieth century, the routinization of modern life described by Weber has been extended to include the familiarization of all sorts of experiences because we have seen them so many times in movies and on television. However, as the big moment approaches, Millat finds that it seems less and less easy, though he still thinks of the moment in images mediated by his experience of television. Instead of comfortable and familiar, the gun in his pocket suddenly “feels like someone put a fucking cartoon anvil in there—now he sees the great difference between TV and life, and it kicks him in the groin” (436).

Chaos ensues. Just as Millat is about to kill Chalfen, the scientist announces that the real credit for his research goes to his mentor, Dr. Marc-Pierre Perret, whom Archie suddenly recognizes as the Nazi doctor he let live back at the end of World War II.[179] Archie, meanwhile, has also seen enough TV to know exactly what it means when he sees Millat reaching for the gun. He hurls himself between Millat and the stage and finds himself taking the bullet that Millat fires, though by this time it is not clear whether he is firing at Chalfen or Perret. Meanwhile, the glass case enclosing the special mouse is shattered, and the mouse escapes, skittering away into parts unknown. Chalfen’s quest for total control of the life of the FutureMouseÓ thus fails utterly, and we never learn whether the experiment would have worked in any case.

White Teeth, in fact, ends with a swirl of uncertainties, in keeping with its general embrace of disorder. After the shooting of Archie, the authorities are never able definitively to identify the would-be assassin because Magid and Millat are so identical in appearance. On the other hand, the entire book has reminded us that, despite being genetically identical, they are two very different people, with very different characteristics. Their whole lives provide a thorough deconstruction of the notion of genetic determinism in human beings. Meanwhile, one thing they share is an attraction to Irie. Both, in fact, have sex with her on the same day shortly before the end of the book, and she becomes pregnant by one of them on that day. As the book ends, however, it is clear that no one will ever be able to determine the identity of the father, because the two brothers have absolutely identical DNA.

Such uncertainty, in the worldview endorsed by White Teeth, is probably a good thing. The book then leaps ahead on its last page to a mock ending that pokes a bit of fun at those who would want to be able to predict the future and wrap up all plot lines. We get a quick look at an idealized and imaginary version of December 31, 1999, with still no word on the fate of the mouse. Meanwhile, on this fateful date (at least in the “tall tale” world of this mock ending), the unthinkable occurs: Abdul-Mickey opens the doors of O’Connell’s Poolroom to women for the first time. Alsana, Samad, Clara, and Archie all attend, while we learn that Irie and Joshua, now lovers, are on a beach in Jamaica with Irie’s daughter, the latter being described as liberated by the fact of not knowing the identity of her father—thus presumably freeing her from at least some of the problematics of patriarchy. “But surely,” the narrator tells us, “to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to speed the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future perfect. And, as Archie knows, it’s not like that. It’s never been like that” (448). The book’s last sentences then shift back to the real final scene of the book, in which a wounded Archie, back on New Year’s Eve, 1992, is pleased to see the FutureMouseÓ escaping into an air vent, off to meet adventures Marcus Chalfen could never have foreseen.

NOTES

Chapter 8

Contemporary British Film (1980–2018)

Perhaps the biggest trend in British film in the past few decades has been its participation in the increasing globalization of the film industry, with writers, directors, actors, and money freely flowing across national boundaries and often making it difficult to associate particular films with any one national origin. Still, many films from 1980 onward have maintained a distinctively British feel. Some of these involved continuities from early years, such as the ongoing career of director Ken Loach or the increasing spread of the Monty Python group of television comedians into film. In addition, British films won the Academy Award for Best Picture in both 1981 (Chariots of Fire, directed by Hugh Hudson) and 1982 (Gandhi, directed by Richard Attenborough). This success spurred a string of commercially successful British films, some of them with unusually large budgets by British standards, such as David Lean’s A Passage to India (1984).But directors such as Derek Jarman (1942–1994) and Peter Greenaway (1942– ) also broke new ground in experimental “arthouse” films, indicating the range and versatility of the British film industry as it approached the end of its first century. By the twenty-first century, though, the top talent in British film was freely floating back and forth between Britain and Hollywood.

The films emanating from the Python group, beginning with their own Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979), and Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983) have included a number of comic classics. Members of the Monty Python comedy troupe also went on the star in such films as John Cleese’s hit A Fish Called Wanda (1988, directed by Charles Chrichton), which also featured Michael Palin, who himself starred in the food-rationing comedy A Private Function (1984). The most successful director among the Python group is its only American member, Terry Gilliam, who directed such quirky, cult-hit fantasy films as Time Bandits (1981, a British production) and Brazil (1985, a joint American-British production) in the 1980s. Gilliam’s films, while showing some of the trademark zany Python humor, also feature strikingly original visuals that reside well within the realm of the postmodern.

More avant-garde version of postmodernism can be found in the films of Greenaway and Jarman, the latter of whom initially came to prominence as a set designer, first for stage plays, and then for films such as Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971). His own breakthrough as a feature-film director came with Sebastiane (1976), one of the first British films to portray gay sexuality in a positive light. Jarman also campaigned extensively in favor of gay rights and for AIDS awareness. Jarman’s punk-rock film Juiblee (1978) has become a cult hit. His own daring adaptation of The Tempest (1979) drew mixed reactions from Shakespearean critics and scholars. It did help Jarman to gain the recognition that helped him get his masterwork, Caravaggio (1986) on film and into theaters, partly with funding from the British Film Institute. Based on the life of Italian Baroque painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), this film employs a number of postmodernist techniques, including the anachronistic introduction of elements from the late twentieth century unto the Renaissance setting of the film. It also features actress Tilda Swinton in her first film role.

Greenaway, who had trained as a painter and brought a painterly sensibility to his films, the lush visuals of which are often far more important than character and narrative. The 1980s were a particularly rich decade for Greenaway, who produced a sequence of visually striking works that included The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982), A Zed & Two Noughts (1985), The Belly of an Architect (1987), and Drowning by Numbers (1988). The decade was then topped off with The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989), which became an arthouse sensation and Greenaway’s most successful film, though its focus on nudity, scatology, and cannibalism made it highly controversial as well. The 1990s were only slightly less productive, beginning with Prospero’s Books (1991), an extravagant retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Other Greenaway films of the 1990s included The Baby of Mâcon (1993), The Pillow Book (1996), and 8½ Women (1999). The first of these was again highly controversial, partly because of its harshly negative treatment of religion and partly because of what many critics saw as its beautifully filmed but unremittingly unpleasant imagery, including the on-screen dismemberment of a baby. (No babies were actually harmed in the making of the film.) In the twenty-first century, Greenaway (who now lives in Amsterdam) moved beyond conventional cinema altogether, producing a variety of highly experimental multimedia and performance-based works.

On the other end of the artistic spectrum (but also outside the mainstream of British commercial films) were the gritty, realistic films of Loach, whose continuing career featured such politically-charged films as Hidden Agenda (1990, about British state terrorism during the Northern Irish Troubles), Riff-Raff (1991, a portrayal of working-class life in London), Raining Stones (1993, about a working-class man driven to disastrous choices in the effort to get funds to buy his daughter a First Communion dress), My Name is Joe (1998, about a struggling working-class alcoholic in Glasgow) and Land and Freedom (1995, about an unemployed British worker who decides to travel to Spain to fight for the republican side in the Spanish Civil War). Loach has continued to make highly respected films that address important historical and political issues well into the twenty-first century, including The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2006, set in the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War).

While Loach’s films generally adhere to the conventions of realism , even mainstream British film in the 1980s and beyond (like British literature) often moved in postmodernist directions, frequently under the influence of American models. Guy Ritchie (1968– ), for example, directed several stylish thrillers that were clearly influenced by Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994), including Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998), Snatch (2000), and Revolver (2005). All three, incidentally, feature British actor Jason Statham in key roles, and Statham has become one of the leading action stars of international cinema with those films and several entries in the Transporter, Crank, and The Fast & the Furious franchises.

The career of British director Mike Figgis (1948) has largely concentrated on experimental films, though he has shown an ability to work in commercial genres as well. He has also made both American and British films. He first drew widespread attention with the neo-noir British thriller Stormy Monday (1988), which got considerable mileage out of a relatively low budget and looked back on film noir in a mode of postmodern nostalgia. In 1995, he wrote and directed the American film Leaving Las Vegas, a commercial success that gained Figgis Oscar nominations for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay. In 2000 Figgis wrote and directed the American Timecode, a complex experimental exploration of the kind of formal fragmentation that Jameson associates with postmodernism. The joint British-Italian Hotel (2001) is another experimental film whose narrative is based on the experiences of a British film crew trying to make a film adaptation of John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (1613) in modern-day Italy.

Since David Lean’s successful Dickens adaptations Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948), British directors have had special success with literary adaptations. Perhaps the most successful British-directed film of the 1990s was the American-produced Shakespeare in Love (1998), directed by John Madden (1949– ) and co-written by Tom Stoppard. Winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture and the BAFTA Award for Best Film, Shakespeare in Love is an original story, but grows out of the life and work of William Shakespeare. More direct adaptations, especially of novels, have also been central to British cinema in recent decades. The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), directed by Karel Riesz and scripted by Harold Pinter based on John Fowles’ 1969 novel, is one of the most clever and complex of these adaptations. Meanwhile, in addition to A Passage to India, E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View and Howards End were adapted to film in 1986 and 1992, respectively. The first of these was a British-produced film, while the second was an international co-production. Both won Best Director Oscar nominations for their American director, James Ivory, whose films (made with his partner, the Indian-born Ismail Merchant) have often focused on British material.

In one of the more imaginative adaptations of British novels to film, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando was successfully filmed by Sally Potter in 1992. Film adaptations of nineteenth-century British novels have enjoyed a resurgence as well, including several based on the novels of Jane Austen. Slightly earlier, Roman Polanski demonstrated the considerable potential for film adaptations that still reside in nineteenth-century British novels when he made Tess (1979), a lavish British-French adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Other landmark adaptations include British film adaptations of novels that came from writers who hailed from outside of England. The Commitments (1991), directed by English director Alan Parker (1944– ), is based on the 1987 Irish novel by Roddy Doyle, who co-wrote the screenplay. Trainspotting (1996), directed by English director Danny Boyle (1956– ), is based on the 1993 novel by the Scottish writer Irvine Welsh. Both of these two films are discussed as exemplary texts at the end of this chapter.

Boyle, incidentally, would go on to become one of the most successful British directors of the years following Trainspotting, directing a wide variety of interesting films. The 2002 British zombie film 28 Days Later, for example, was a landmark in horror film that put a whole new twist on the zombie genre by introducing a new kind of fast-moving, ultra-violent zombies that differed substantially from the slow, shambling zombies that had previously dominated zombie films. Boyle’s 2008 film Slumdog Millionaire (a joint U.S.-U.K. production about a contestant on the Indian version of the global game-show franchise Who Want to be a Millionaire?) is arguably the most successful British film of the twenty-first century, winning the Oscar for both Best picture and Best Director, as well as six other categories. It also won seven BAFTA film awards, including those for Best Director and Best Film.

A number of important British directors have had great commercial success directing films that were primarily produced in America in the last few decades. Ridley Scott (1937– ), for example, burst on the scene with the science fiction-horror hybrid Alien (1979) the science fiction classic (inflected through both cyberpunk and film noir) Blade Runner (1982). In 1984, he directed the now-famous Apple commercial (based on the imagery of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four) that premiered during Super Bowl to announce the debut of the Macintosh computer. Since that time, he has had a number of commercial successes in film Thelma & Louise (1991), an important milestone in American cinema, and Gladiator (2000), a joint British-American production that was a huge commercial hit that also won the Oscar for Best Picture and the BAFTA Award for Best Film.

British director Christopher Nolan (1970– ) has also had great international success, beginning especially with the American thriller Memento (2000), a key dramatization of postmodern psychic fragmentation. He then moved into top-level commercial success with a trilogy of films based on the DC Comics character Batman (aka “The Dark Knight”) Batman Begins (2005), The Dark Knight (2008) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012), which also broke new technical ground in their use of special effects (and featured British actor Christian Bale as the ultra-American Batman). The 2010 science fiction mind-twister Inception (a British-American co-production) also uses state-of-the-art special effects in pursuing one of the most convoluted plots in film history. In 2017, Nolan write and directed the World War II epic Dunkirk (an international co-production involving several countries), which was nominated for the Oscar for Best Motion Picture and the BAFTA for Best Film, while Nolan himself was nominated for Best Director in both the Oscars and the BAFTAs. None of those nominations led to wins, but Nolan remains one of the most commercially and critically successful directors in world cinema.

In recent years, Hollywood films have continued to dominate even the BAFTA film awards, though a U.S.-U.K. co-production, 12 Years A Slave (about slavery in the American South, but directed by British director Steve McQueen) did win the Best Film award in 2013. It also won the American Academy Award for Best Motion Picture. McQueen (1969– ), a former video artist, made his feature-film debut with Hunger (2008), about the prison hunger strike of Irish political prisoner Bobby Sands that occurred in 1981; McQueen’s film Shame (2011) is a drama about sex addiction. McQueen has continued to be a particularly bright star in the British cinema world; his most recent film, Widows (2018), is an effective heist film that challenges conventional gender expectations of the genre.

McQueen’s ongoing work demonstrates both the continuing richness of British film—and the continuing blurring of the boundary between British film and the films of other countries, especially the United States. New incentives in the 1990s, for example, enticed American producers to increase investment in big-budget films made in England, including films such as Interview with the Vampire (1994), which was directed by the Irish director Neil Jordan. Jordan has also had considerable success (more in the U.S. than in the U.K.) with Irish-themed films such as The Crying Game (1992) and The Butcher Boy (1997). Other U.S.-backed films made in the U.K. in the 1990s include Mission: Impossible (1996), Saving Private Ryan (1998), Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace (1999) and The Mummy (1999).

British film—like all of British culture—has continued to become more and more multicultural as well. McQueen himself is of Trinidadian and Grenadian descent. The Irish director Neil Jordan has had considerable Gurinder Chadha’s Bhaji on the Beach (1993) gives much-needed attention to the lives of British women of Asian descent, and was directed by a woman who was born in the British colony of Kenya to a family of Asian descent. Women remain, however, underrepresented in the director’s chairs of British film, though Carine Adler’s Under the Skin (1997) is well worth a look. The Scottish woman director Lynne Ramsay has also gained considerable attention for psychological horror dramas such as Morvern Callar (2002, British), We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011, a British-American co-production), and You Were Never Really Here (2017, a British-French co-production). Finally, Andrea Arnold has continued the Loach tradition of social realist dramas with women-oriented films such as Red Road (2006) and Fish Tank (2009), while contributing to the rich legacy of British novel adaptations with her version of Wuthering Heights in 2011.

Finally, no survey of recent British film (or of recent British culture in general) would be complete without a mention of the Harry Potter franchise, based on the series of seven Young Adult fantasy novels by J. K. Rowling that became one of the biggest commercial successes in publishing history. The film adaptations of the novels have been hugely successful as well, beginning with Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001, released in the U.S. as Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone). The series altogether consists of eight films (the adaptation of the seventh novel—Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows—was released in two separate parts), all of which were British-American co-productions, produced and distributed by the American Warner Brothers Studio, but filmed in the U.K. The success of these films was a boost to the entire British film industry; for example, several companies involved in generating the special effects for the series are now much in demand to provide effects for studios around the world.

EXEMPLARY TEXT

THE COMMITMENTS (1991): DIRECTOR ALAN PARKER

Roddy Doyle’s 1987 novel The Commitments was a huge success that launched its author on a major literary career, partly because of its hip, postmodern use of popular culture as its literary material. But the book also captures the texture of life in a working-class Dublin that was fighting for its economic survival in the years before the Irish economic boom of the 1990s made Ireland one of the world’s wealthiest nations. The novel features an impoverished Dublin that still bears the stamp of centuries of British colonial domination. Its characters are young Irish men and women who have few career opportunities and who are still struggling to find a sense of their own cultural identity, even after more than half a century of independence from British rule. Unfortunately, in The Commitments, the main source of that “independent” identity is music imported from America, which raises the question of just how independent and authentically Irish this identity might be.

Doyle’s novel was a big success on its own terms, ultimately becoming the first volume in Doyle’s “Barrytown Trilogy” of novels, after it was joined by The Snapper (1990), and The Van (1991). Meanwhile, Doyle would return to this milieu in 2013 with a fourth entry, The Guts, which is a sequel to The Commitments but set a quarter of a century later.Meanwhile, given the central emphasis on music in The Commitments, it was also a novel that seemed custom-designed for a film adaptation, so that the music could actually be heard. Indeed, the film contains dozens of songs (mostly American soul music), including those performed by the eponymous band.The result was a rousing success, though the film received a more positive response in Ireland and Britain than in the United States. It won the BAFTA awards for Best Film, Best Direction, and Best Adapted Screenplay,[180] for example, while in the U.S. it scored a Golden Globe nomination for Best Motion Picture—Comedy or Musical and an Oscar nomination for Best Film Editing, but won neither. The film has by now become something of a cult favorite and was listed in the 1999 BFI poll of top British films as the 38^th best British film of all time. In Ireland, the film was so admired that images of four of the characters from the film appeared on an Irish postage stamp in 1996.The film adaptation is largely true to the novel; most changes seem to have been made to make some aspects of the film relate better to an American audience.

The film version of The Commitments begins with a series of scenes that establish the look and feel of the setting in the working-class neighborhoods on the northside of late 1980s Dublin. The areas of the cities we see here look decidedly run-down and impoverished: very Third World. (In one scene, when Jimmy goes to collect his unemployment check and is chided for still not having a job, he simply responds, “We’re a Third World country. What can you do?”) In the first scene, young hustler Jimmy Rabbitte (Robert Arkins) walks through a street market, hoping to sell a few items. The seedy-looking wares of the market are supplemented by the musical performances of buskers—performing a combination of Irish folk songs and American pop songs. The scene then shifts to a wedding party, where an awful cover band is also performing American pop music. Within the first few minutes of the film, then, it has already been established that the film will take place in working-class Dublin (or it would be, if there was any work, as one character puts it) and that American music will be central to the action.

That action involves the efforts of the members of the wedding party cover band to become a success—toward which they convince the streetwise Jimmy to become their manager. In return, Jimmy insists that the band reconstitute its membership, change its name, and (perhaps most important) change its musical style. Their music, he insists, should reflect their working-class identities; it should speak the authentic language of the streets they come from. It should be real and visceral; it should be about “struggle and sex,” not “mushy, shite love songs.” It should, in short, be “Dublin soul” music. The problem with this plan is that Jimmy’s conception of “Dublin soul” turns out to be exactly the same as the American soul music of the kind produced by Detroit’s famed Motown record company. For Jimmy, it would seem that the key to musical authenticity is to find the right predecessor to copy.

When Jimmy posts an ad for new band members, there follows a hilarious string of candidates who come to his door to audition, though the auditions actually begin with Jimmy’s own father (played by Colm Meaney, who at the time was also playing engineer Miles O’Brien on Star Trek: The Next Generation). As soon as he learns that Jimmy is seeking new band members, he launches into his rendition of Elvis Presley’s 1961 hit “Can’t Help Falling in Love.” Jimmy cuts him off, pointing out that “Elvis is not soul,” but Mr. Rabbitte simply responds that “Elvis is God.” Jimmy still isn’t interested, though it isn’t because of his dad’s lack of originality. After all, Jimmy’s central question to all of the ragtag stream of musicians who come to him to audition is “Who are your influences?” In many cases the answer is obvious, just by looking, but the group as a whole are nicely representative of the musical texture of late-1980s Dublin. Irish performers U2 and Sinead O’Connor are among these influences, for example, and the candidates also include an Irish fiddler and an uilleann piper.[181] Some of those who audition are influenced by British performers like Boy George, but the prevailing musical influences are American, ranging from folk singers such as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez to generic hard rockers.

One Zydeco band performs the song “Elvis was a Cajun” in its audition, causing Mr. Rabbitte to respond with horror: “That’s fuckin’ blasphemy!” he declares, continuing his earlier “Elvis Is God” theme. Importantly, the Rabbitte home is decorated with a large color portrait of Pope John Paul II, indicating the family’s Catholic loyalties. In such a household, one might think the Pope would be exceeded in reverence paid only by God himself. Indeed, above the pope’s portrait, hangs another—a portrait of Elvis Presley, Mr. Rabbitte’s true God. The literary referent here, as I point out in my essay “Late Capitalism Comes to Dublin,” would seem to be that moment in the opening chapter of Ulysses in which Stephen Dedalus declares that he, as an Irishman, is the servant of two masters, one British and one Italian, referring to the British Empire and the Catholic Church (27). Given that Elvis was widely referred to as “The King” during his heyday, the connection seems clear: Ireland still has two masters, but now the Catholic Church is joined by American popular culture. The Dubliners of the film seem to have finally escaped British political and cultural domination only to find itself firmly in the grip of American cultural and economic power.

One could indeed read The Commitments as an exploration of the cultural domination of Ireland by America, though neither the film nor the novel really comments on this topic directly, instead merely portraying the American-dominated fabric of contemporary Irish culture and leaving it to readers and audiences to draw their own conclusions about what this means. We might, however, note that this topic comes up again and again in Doyle’s fiction, as I have pointed out:

All of Doyle’s fictions point in one way or another to the importance of American popular culture in modern Dublin. The characters of The Snapper spend a great deal of their leisure time watching television programming that is dominated by American products like MTV; the major action of The Van involves the efforts of Jimmy, Sr., and his friend Bimbo to start up their own fast food business, hoping to compete directly with existing fish-and-chip shops, but also hoping to outstrip American fast-food chains such as McDonald’s. (“Late Capitalism Comes to Dublin 33)

This ongoing emphasis suggests that Doyle, at least, takes this topic very seriously. However, as I go on to point out in that essay, what is really at stake here is not the domination of Ireland by American culture but the domination of America and Ireland both by the same multinational late capitalist culture.[182]

In any case, this motif, introduced early in the film, already leads us to expect that things are not going to turn out well for the band. Indeed, the overall plot arc of the film is very much like a story from Dubliners, in which characters are constantly seeking creative ways out of the morass of life in Dublin, only to fail in the end. Still, the band does have its moments in the film. The auditions don’t yield much (except laughs for viewers of the film), but, surprisingly enough, Jimmy actually manages to round up a talented group of singers and musicians on his own, partly by assuring them that, once they are in a band, they will be immensely popular with women, who will be “throwin’ their knickers on the stage.” Indeed, Jimmy continually emphasizes the centrality of sex to their music. He even recruits three backup girl singers to add sex appeal, highlighted by local sex symbol Imelda Quirke (Angeline Ball), who turns out to be a fine singer, but who was clearly recruited to the band primarily for her sex appeal. Other members of the “Commitment-ettes” include Natalie Murphy (Maria Doyle, herself an accomplished professional singer) and Bernie McGloughlin (Bronagh Gallagher). Other key members of the band include guitarist Outspan Foster (Glen Hansard) and bassist Derek Scully

(Ken McCluskey) from the original band, joined by saxophonist Dean Fay (Félim Gormley), pianist Steven Clifford (Michael Aherne), and drummer Billy Mooney (Dick Massey). The band also manages to sign up trumpet player Joey “The Lips” Fagan (Johnny Murphy), who purports to have considerable experience in the music business, having supposedly jammed with blues legend B. B. King, not to mention such soulful greats as Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Martha Reeves, Sam Cooke, Joe Tex, The Four Tops, Stevie Wonder, Wilson Pickett, and Otis Redding. He even claims to have recorded the trumpet part on the 1967 classic “All You Need Is Love,” by the Beatles, one of the few non-soul acts of which Jimmy appears to approve. Jimmy is a bit skeptical of these credentials (especially after Joey claims to have been sent by God—via a Baptist minister in Harlem—to play with the band), but the man can play, and his presence definitely adds zest to the band’s music. But the real star of the band is burly lead singer Deco Cuffe (Andrew Strong[183]), who can belt out Motown soul with the best of them, though his hard drinking and unruly behavior often cause problems.

To give the band an idea of the kind of showmanship he’s going for, Jimmy shows them a tape of a performance by American singer James Brown, the legendary “Godfather of Soul.” The band members seem largely unfamiliar with Brown’s work—after all, he had been at the peak of his popularity from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, when they were still children. Watching the tape, Dean wonders if their band might be “a little white” to perform that kind of music with that kind of flair. “Do you not get it, lads?” responds Jimmy, enthusiastically. “The Irish are the blacks of Europe, and Dubliners are the blacks of Ireland. And the northside Dubliners are the blacks of Dublin.”[184] “So,” he concludes, quoting a well-known 1968 song by James Brown, “say it once, say it loud. I’m black, and I’m proud.”

Jimmy here might be a little too caught up in his admiration for African American culture, but he actually makes a rather astute point about the historical marginalization of Ireland with respect to the rest of Europe and about the tendency of many in Ireland to look down on Dubliners as somehow less authentically Irish than those who live on the rest of the island. And, of course, the working-class northside of Dublin is definitely less affluent than the southside. Jimmy also makes an excellent point about the racial status of the Irish. After all, L. Perry Curtis has convincingly demonstrated that many of the stereotypes that underlie modern racism (including those often applied to African Americans) were originally developed as part of a British Victorian discourse about Ireland that was designed to emphasize the racial superiority of the British to the Irish. Similarly, Theodor Allen, in The Invention of the White Race, traces the close historical parallels between the treatment of African Americans in the U.S. and the British figuration of the Irish as racial inferiors. Among other things, Allen shows that Irish immigrants in America, regarded as white and thus freed of the stigma of racial inferiority that had suffered under British rule, have historically tended to reinforce their own whiteness by adopting racist attitudes toward African Americans. The Irish have thus seen both sides of the racial divide, demonstrating just how artificial and socially constructed that divide really is.

One could argue, of course, that the radical changes in the Irish economy since the making of The Commitments might render Jimmy’s characterization of northside Dubliners as the ultimate underclass inappropriate, while also rendering its portrayal of impoverished conditions in Dublin as anachronistic and irrelevant. But one could also argue just the opposite: that it is important to remember how recently Ireland was a poor and economically backward country and how quickly that all changed, thus making sure that the Irish continue to move in the right direction, while also providing hope to other depressed areas that they might be able to learn something from the Irish example and reverse their own misfortunes.

In any case, lack of funds both propels many of the band’s members to seek a career in music and makes an important contribution to the band’s ultimate undoing as the members start to get restless when the anticipated financial rewards do not materialize. Other sources of dissension arise as well, including the fact that everyone hates Deco and the fact that Joey sleeps, one by one, with all of the backup singers. Thus, both the camaraderie and the sexual energies that are supposed to drive the band turn out to be sources of turmoil.

In one of the film’s most amusing ongoing gags, Jimmy (clearly bitten by the fame bug) conducts mock interviews with himself, as if in preparation for the day when real interviewers will want to talk with him. Amusing or not, this motif also calls into question Jimmy’s stated political objectives, and one wonders about the depth of his commitment to seeing the band become an authentic voice of working-class cultural expression. While emphasizing the sexual energies of soul music, he also emphasizes its working-class energies. “Soul is the rhythm of sex,” he says, “and it’s the rhythm of the factory, too. The working man’s rhythm. Sex in the factory.” One wonders, though, whether he is just spouting slogans here. He seems to have no clearly defined political agenda and mainly simply wants to be famous (and perhaps rich), suggesting that the ideology of capitalism he claims to oppose is much more difficult to surmount than he might have imagined.

Adopting (at Joey’s suggestion) the name “The Commitments,” to emphasize the supposed political engagement of their music, the band undertakes a series of local engagements, with preparation that seems to consist more of listening to American soul music than of actual rehearsal. As Jimmy tells Deco, he should study James Brown for the growls, Otis Redding for the moans, Smokey Robinson for the whines, and Aretha Franklin for “the whole lot put together.”[185] Despite a few mishaps (and a predictable amount of mayhem), the main outcome of these engagements is that the band is actually quite good—almost shockingly good, given the way it was constituted. Indeed, it is clearly the quality and seeming authenticity of these performances that have made The Commitments such an enduring film with such a devoted core following of fans. The band (with help from some additional musicians) ultimately released two successful soundtrack albums (selling over ten million copies worldwide), including recordings of a number of songs that are not even on the film’s actual soundtrack. A Commitments tribute band (called “The Stars from The Commitments”) featuring Mooney and McCluskey has toured and performed widely, even appearing with such soul legends as B. B. King, James Brown, and Wilson Pickett, all of whom figure in the film.[186] In 2010 Strong and Arkins, along with several other cast members, joined that band for a reunion tour that helped raise money for the Irish Cancer Society.

Within the film, though, things become particularly acrimonious at the band’s last performance, as the band members literally come to blows, partly because of the disappointment that occurs after Joey supposedly arranges for Wilson Pickett to attend the performance, but then Pickett doesn’t show. Joey tries to put a philosophical spin on the band’s failure, arguing that a rise to stardom would have been too predictable, whereas their ultimate demise is more poetic. At least, he argues, the experience has raised the horizons of the band members and led them to strive for more in life rather than simply accepting their conditions as hopeless. Jimmy rejects this utopian vision of their experience and walks away, believing Joey to be a fraud. Then, as the film draws to a close, a car bearing Wilson Pickett arrives at the club, having been delayed. Apparently, Joey was for real. Jimmy walks into the night, contemplating all that has happened. Then, in the final scenes, Jimmy again interviews himself, revealing what happened to the band members after the band broke up, including his announcement of proud news from Joey’s mother that he has sent her a postcard from America revealing he is now touring with Joe Tex. However, as Jimmy points out, Joe Tex died in 1982, leaving Joey’s exact stature in the music business still a bit uncertain.

Jimmy then ends his final interview by asking himself what he has learned from his experience with The Commitments. He responds merely by quoting lines from the 1967 megahit “Whiter Shade of Pale,” by the British rock group Procol Harum (part of which Jimmy and Steven had sung together earlier in the film). It’s an odd choice for an anthem, though, given Jimmy’s earlier emphasis on blackness, and the lines he quotes don’t make a great deal of sense in context. Indeed, he immediately asks himself what the lines mean here. “I’m fucked if I know,” he replies to himself, ending the film on an appropriately ironic, open-ended note that again recalls the endings of most of the stories in Dubliners.[187]

NOTES

EXEMPLARY TEXT

TRAINSPOTTING (1996): DIRECTOR DANNY BOYLE

Released in 1996, Trainspotting quickly became one of the key events in British culture of the 1990s. For one thing, it proved that British film could still compete with Hollywood in term of hipness and broad appeal. Indeed, as Murray Smith notes, the film overtly draws upon a number of American cinematic traditions, from Orson Welles to Quentin Tarantino (9). Coming out of contexts that might have produced either high-brow art cinema or hard-boiled social realism, Trainspotting incorporates elements of both but ultimately projects a pop cultural sensibility that seems custom-designed to draw a large audience, suggesting important new hybrid directions for subsequent British films. Trainspotting was also a springboard for the careers of several participants who would go on to become major players in the British film industry. Its English director, Danny Boyle, had previously directed only one feature film, though that film, the crime comedy Shallow Grave, had been a substantial success, giving Boyle enough clout in the world of British film to be able get the much more controversial Trainspotting into production. Trainspotting would then propel Boyle into a major film career that would include an Academy Award for Best Director for Slumdog Millionaire (1998), a film that also won seven other Academy Awards, including for Best Picture. Shallow Grave also introduced the film-going public to a young Scottish actor by the name of Ewan McGregor, who would go on to become the star of Trainspotting and then to become a major Hollywood star in a wide variety of roles. But Trainspotting was perhaps most important for its groundbreaking subject matter, which called attention to a number of important social issues, while presenting its exploration of those issues in a highly amusing and entertaining package.

Some critics, in fact, felt that Trainspotting was a bit too entertaining and comical in its treatment of the important problem of heroin addiction among the disaffected youth of Edinburgh, Scotland, making heroin addiction seem a bit too much fun, if not downright romantic. But then similar complaints had been lodged against Irvine Welsh’s 1993 novel of the same title, upon which the film was based. However, neither the film nor the novel come anywhere close to recommending heroin addiction, while both works are in fact about far broader issues, just using heroin addiction as a starting point from which to move into a commentary on these issues.

The film version of Trainspotting begins with a series of scenes from the lives of the circle of junkies who are the film’s major characters, narrated in voiceover by McGregor’s character, Mark Renton. Renton and his friends are shown running from police, playing soccer, and then shooting up, while he narrates by providing a sarcastic rendition of the empty, conformist bourgeois advice that has been foisted on them all their lives—but that had reached a crescendo in the late 1980s (when the film is set) during the latter years of Margaret Thatcher’s reign as Britain’s conservative Prime Minister. Renton’s voiceover, taken almost verbatim from the novel (though it appears slightly more than halfway through the novel, rather than at the beginning) makes his attitude clear:

Choose life, Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed-interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisure wear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on the couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all. Pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats that you’ve spawned to replace yourselves. Choose your future. Choose life.[188]

Renton is then shown passed out on the dirty floor of a squalid room, while his narration continues with a declaration that he has decided not to choose these things. He has decided, instead, to choose heroin.

As this speech makes clear, Trainspotting is a highly verbal film, with much of its verbiage taken almost directly from Welsh’s novel. Renton remains the focal point of the film throughout, though other members of his group of heroin-users are important as well. Almost all are played by virtually unknown actors who would subsequently go on to stardom, making Trainspotting one of the greatest launching pads for acting careers in British film history. Peter Mullan—who would go on to great success as an actor, director, and leftist political activist—plays Swanney (aka “Mother Superior,” because of the length of his drug habit) the elder statesman among the junkies and a sometime dealer who supplies advice and drugs to the rest of the group. Jonny Lee Miller—who would achieve mainstream success as an actor in American television shows, especially as Sherlock Holmes in the series Elementary (2012– )—plays “Sick Boy,” so-called because of the general perversity of his attitudes. And Ewen Bremner—who had played Renton in the stage adaptation of Trainspotting—plays the good-natured, but hapless Spud. Also notable among their group of “mates” is Robert Carlyle, who plays the sadistic Francis Begbie, who seems almost like an escapee from A Clockwork Orange. Carlyle, who would achieve major success in The Full Monty in 1997, makes clear that Begbie (who refuses to put filth like heroin into his system, preferring alcohol and violence as his drugs of choice) is at least as far from being able to function normally in society as are any of the junkies. Finally, Trainspotting was also the debut film performance of the fine Scottish actress Kelly Macdonald, who plays Renton’s underage (but not so innocent) schoolgirl love interest, Diane Coulston.

Renton and his friends are not political. They are not educated or sophisticated. But they are smart enough to know that there is something missing in this litany of bourgeois dreams that they have been told to strive for all their lives. And herein lies the true message, the true heart, of Trainspotting. While the film presents graphic details concerning the lives of heroin addicts, making clear the many horrors and degradations to which addicts are driven to feed their desperate need for drugs, it also makes clear that the fault for their predicament cannot be laid entirely at their own feet. At least part of the fault, both the novel and the film make clear, lies with a society that gives its young people nothing more meaningful to strive for than the temporary pleasures of drugs—though the film also makes particularly clear that those pleasures can be considerable. In another of his monologues drawn almost directly from the novel, Renton explains the ways this pleasure motivates heroin users:

People think it’s about misery and desperation and death and all that shite, which is not to be ignored. But what they forget is the pleasure of it. Otherwise we wouldn’t do it. After all, we’re not fucking stupid. At least we’re not that fucking stupid. Take the best orgasm you’ve ever had, multiply it by a thousand, and you’re still nowhere near it.

Among other things, Renton goes on to point out, junkies have simplified lives because they are concerned with only one thing—scoring more junk. Sober people, on the other hand, have all sorts of responsibilities and concerns to worry about.

Of course, scoring drugs is not necessarily a simple matter, either, and the junkies work virtually full time on a variety of schemes to steal or otherwise acquire the money to buy heroin, or even to acquire substitute drugs by running a variety of scams to score gear (directly or indirectly) via the legitimate channels of the National Health Service. Almost any drug that gets them high at all will do in a pinch, though nothing, of course, ultimately substitutes for heroin, their true love. Renton is particularly dismissive of the methodone that he is given at one point as part of an official anti-addiction problem, feeling that it only makes his craving for heroin worse. Indeed, one of the strongest messages delivered by the film is the completely inadequate and ineffectual nature of such official programs—or of unofficial programs, such as the help provided by Renton’s well-meaning parents, who are clearly at a loss in attempting to help with the struggles of their wayward son.

One of the key elements that identifies Trainspotting as a postmodernist film is its engagement with contemporary popular culture. Some of this engagement occurs in its use (sometimes ironic) of contemporary popular music on the soundtrack, as when Iggy Pop’s well-known “Lust for Life” plays during the opening sequence. The lyrics of this upbeat song perfectly complement Renton’s opening narration about choosing life (or not), but the fact that the song is performed by a singer who has had his own problems with heroin addiction provides a subtle reminder that such addiction has been a far bigger part of recent Western culture that we sometimes like to admit. Lou Reed’s well-known 1972 song “Perfect Day” (which had been a hit on the British charts in 1995 when re-recorded by Duran Duran) also plays an important role in the soundtrack. Ostensibly a romantic ballad, “Perfect Day” has been widely interpreted as an ode to heroin, and it certainly functions that way in Trainspotting. Lou Reed and Iggy Pop[189] also play prominent roles in the discussions about popular music among the film’s characters, and together their presence in the film complicates our view of heroin and suggests the existence of a vibrant popular culture surrounding it and other drugs. At the same time, one could also argue that the presence of such figures suggests the way in which the characters of the film live in a world saturated by pop cultural images that glamorize and romanticize drug use and the film in this sense (despite criticisms in some circles that it does the same thing) would potentially seem to be highly critical of such images, which make the widespread use of drugs such as heroin almost inevitable.[190]

Another running motif in the film is Sick Boy’s fascination with James Bond films (a motif missing from the novel, though Bond is mentioned in passing there), especially those featuring Edinburgh native Sean Connery, probably the biggest Scottish film star of all time. Sick Boy frequently lectures the other junkies on the relative merits of various Bond films (and Bond girls), as well as on the particular greatness of Connery as an actor. He describes Connery as a “muscular actor” with as much screen presence as Hollywood legends such as Gary Cooper or Burt Lancaster, “but combined with a sly wit to make him a formidable romantic lead—and closer, in that respect, to Cary Grant.” Connery’s Scottishness is certainly key to his role in the film, but in many ways the referent here is the oh-so-British Bond, fantasy image of British capability and sophistication in the post-imperial age of decline in global British power. While one might think that Connery would be an excellent role model for young Scottish men hoping to succeed in life, the film subtly suggests that he is just the opposite. Because of his identification with Bond, a figure of impossible and unattainable skill and savoir faire, Connery actually serves as an example of what the young junkies in Trainspotting can never hope to become, leaving them with no recourse but to fall back on drug-related heroes like Lou Reed and Iggy Pop. Thus, Sick Boy at one point describes actress Ursula Andress, “the quintessential Bond girl,” as “the embodiment, right, of his superiority to us: beautiful, exotic, highly sexual—yet totally unavailable to anyone apart from him.” Sick Boy then goes on to suggest that if such a woman would “shag one punter from Edinburgh, she’s shag the while fucking lot of us.” But, of course, she wouldn’t. Connery might be from Edinburgh, but Bond is a cosmopolitan figure, a citizen of the world and a nostalgic icon of British imperial power.[191]

One of the greatest drawbacks of the drug life, Renton notes, is having to endure the sanctimonious lectures of all the non-junkies one meets on the evils (and stupidity) of shooting heroin. However, occasionally, even Renton swears off drugs and declares that he will never do them again. Early in the film, he barricades himself in a room with an array of supplies, preparing to ride out his withdrawal from heroin. The supplies include a bottle of valium stolen from his mother, who is “in her own domestic and socially acceptable way, also a drug addict.” The suggestion here of the hypocrisy of a society that would express such horror at heroin addiction, while implicitly endorsing a variety of other addictions (to drugs or otherwise) is quite clear.[192]

Of course, Renton’s dedication to going straight is somewhat called into question by the fact that he begins his withdrawal by trying to score one last hit. Unfortunately, his emergency dealer, Mikey Forrester (played by Welsh), is in short supply, and can only offer him a couple of opium suppositories. This begins one of the sequences in the film that most effectively makes clear the depths to which addicts are willing to sink to feed their habits. Though not thrilled, Renton accepts the suppositories, inserting them immediately. Unfortunately, before the casing of the suppositories can melt to allow the drug to enter his system, Renton has a violent attack of diarrhea due to coming down off of his last hit of heroin. Desperate, he flees to the first bathroom he can find, which turns out to be the “worst toilet in Scotland,” or perhaps anywhere. He staggers through the disgusting room, stepping through pools of filthy liquid, and then makes it to a shockingly filthy clogged toilet, of which he frantically makes use, only to realize that he has jettisoned the suppositories into the filth. Gagging, but not willing to relinquish the drugs, he digs into the toilet, feeling around for the suppositories in the murk within. Then, in a surreal scene that suggests the uneasy hold that addicts have on reality, we see Renton literally plunge into the foul toilet, emerging into an underground world of clean, pure water, where he is able to locate the suppositories, nestled on the bottom. Triumphant, he retrieves them and swims back to the surface, climbing from the toilet and re-entering the real world, drugs safely in hand.[193]

If this moment is the comic height of the film’s exploration of the squalor of junkie life, the tragic height surely occurs in the moment a bit later in the film when one of the junkies, Allison (Susan Vidler), in the midst of a heroin-induced stupor along with her friends, discovers that her infant daughter, who has been living with the group in the squalid house where they shoot up together, is dead in her crib. The film does not make clear whether the death was due to a common crib death or due to neglect because no one was caring for the infant, but the gruesome sight of the dead baby is a chilling one indeed—for us and for the junkies, especially Allison and Sick Boy, who is (we now learn) the baby’s father. Granted, Renton seems relatively unaffected, though later, when his parents lock him in his room to try to force him into sobriety, his consequent hallucinations are dominated by horrifying images of the baby, crawling about on the ceiling, its head spinning on its neck like the young girl’s in The Exorcist. In any case, the junkies (including Allison and Sick Boy) predictably respond to the baby’s death by doing more heroin.

During one of Renton’s periodic attempts at withdrawal, Sick Boy also decides to go off of heroin, just to show how easily he can do it—thereby diminishing the heroism of Renton’s own struggle. Meanwhile, he lectures Renton on his (not very profound) unified theory of human life, in which everyone, no matter how great, eventually enters a period of decline in which they lose any greatness they once had. His central example, of course, is Sean Connery, whose post-Bond career is, for Sick Boy, one that is primarily a sad postscript to his formerly great achievements. Thus, he points out, “The Name of the Rose is merely a blip on an otherwise uninterrupted downward trajectory.” When Renton suggests that The Untouchables was also a notable late Connery film, Sick Boy scoffs, declaring that “that means fuck-all” and that Connery’s Best Supporting Actor Oscar for that film was “a sympathy vote,” based on memories of earlier achievements and not on Connery’s performance in this particular film.

Heroin does, in the film, promote a certain sense of community among its users, who have a common focus in the drug that dominates their lives. Indeed, the film’s junkies clearly constitute a sort of subculture of the kind discussed by Dick Hebdige, in which disaffected youth, feeling excluded from the mainstream culture, express their identities by developing a distinct cultural style of their own. On the other hand, Hebdige, focusing especially on British punk culture, argues that even the most radical subcultures have a tendency to be appropriated by the mainstream, becoming simply another sort of commodity: “Youth cultural styles may begin by offering symbolic challenges, but they must inevitably end by establishing new sets of conventions; by creating new commodities, new industries, or rejuvenating old ones” (96). In short, the very countercultural forces that were originally meant to oppose the dehumanizing and spiritually impoverishing power of the system of capitalist commodification themselves tend to be co-opted by that system and to become a part of it.

The drug-based subculture of Trainspotting seems almost designed to resist this sort of appropriation by building itself on a basis so far outside the Thatcherite mainstream that it cannot possibly be incorporated within the capitalist mainstream. Thatcher was fond of saying that there was no alternative to her conservative, austerity-driven policies, but these junkies have produced something that is clearly other to Thatcherite society, however self-destructive it might be. This alternative, though, is not meant to present itself as a direct challenge to the status quo; it is merely an announcement, on the part of its members that they choose opt out on the status quo, rejecting mainstream society and depending on their own internal camaraderie for social support.

This camaraderie is, at times, one of the more interesting features of the film, though the film also ultimately suggests that the junkies are more devoted to the drug itself than they are to their fellow users. As a result, being a member of their community has some serious drawbacks, especially for those who are not fully members of the community or who are trying to break free of it. Thus, junkies who are trying to give up the drug tend to get drawn back in by their association with other junkies. And those who are not users, but fraternize with users, have a tendency ultimately to become users themselves. Through the first part of the film, the group of junkies includes as a marginal member the clean-cut, athletic, non-drug-taking Tommy MacKenzie (Kevin McKidd). But Tommy and the other members of the group have very different interests. At one point, Tommy takes his junky mates on an outing into the Scottish moors, to enjoy the healthy air and natural beauty—and to feel proud of being citizens of a country as beautiful as Scotland. The others aren’t impressed, though, as Renton makes abundantly clear in a bitter speech that is actually part of the scene, rather than a voiceover:[194]

It’s shite being Scottish. We’re the lowest of the low. The scum of the fucking earth. The most wretched, miserable, servile, pathetic trash that was ever shat into civilization. Some people hate the English. I don’t. They’re just wankers. We, on the other hand, are colonized by wankers! Can’t even find a decent culture to be colonized by. We’re ruled by effete arseholes!

Renton here captures much of the complex historico-political relationship between England and Scotland, one that has typically found Scotland in a subaltern position, subdued by wars with England into what has in many ways resembled a colonial relationship. Indeed, while Scotland has been a part of the United Kingdom since the Act of Union of 1706–1707, the participation of Scotland in that union was essentially forced upon them as the result of military defeats at the hands of English armies.[195] As John Robertson has noted, “The experience of defeat, followed by enforced union, changed forever the relationship of each country to England . . . never again could the Scots deceive themselves that the English lacked the will or the means to conquer them” (qtd. in Nairn, 198).

Thus, while Scotland’s history is littered with boasting pronouncements of heroic Scottish resistance to British rule—the ludicrous 1995 American film Braveheart, which tells (in distorted, anachronistic, and hyper-romantic form) the story of medieval Scottish hero William Wallace, captures the spirit of these pronouncements—Trainspotting is little interested in such pronouncements. Indeed, coming out just a year after Braveheart, Trainspotting might be seen as a sort of rejoinder to that bit of inflated cinematic rhetoric, except that the film version of Trainspotting doesn’t really seem much interested in engaging with such issues. The novel, however, is concerned with issues such as nationalism and postcolonialism, a fact to which I will return later in this essay.

Meanwhile, it is fairly predictable that hanging out with the junkies will lead to no good for Tommy. After his girlfriend breaks up with him when he loses possession of the sex tape they made (because Renton stole it), Tommy is so forlorn that he himself takes to heroin, leading directly to his infection with HIV via a contaminated needle. In fact, the junkies in general seem rather cavalier about such things as sanitary needles, and it comes rather as a surprise when Renton has an HIV test and comes up clear of the virus. He himself is clearly surprised, and the dodging of this bullet helps to inspire another of his attempts to get off of heroin—in this case by getting away from the environment that got him onto heroin in the first place and moving to London, hoping that the hustle and bustle of the big city will help him to get off to a fresh start.

For a time, Renton seems to be succeeding in London, where he works as an agent helping to rent out posh flats to affluent customers. It’s a whole different world, but London is only 400 miles from Edinburgh, so perhaps it is no surprise that his old life soon comes crashing in on him. Just as things seem to be going well for Renton, Begbie shows up in London on the run from the law in Edinburgh, where he is wanted for armed robbery. So he crashes with Renton and generally makes Renton’s life miserable. As if that weren’t bad enough, Sick Boy, now operating as a pimp and pusher, shows up to stay with Renton as well, while he is working on some “business” connections in London.

Just as things are becoming unbearable, word comes that Tommy has died back in Edinburgh, and the three head back there for his funeral. Trainspotting being what it is, even Tommy’s death has a comically tragic side to it, as we learn that, with his immune system wrecked by AIDS, he contracted a fatal case of toxoplasmosis from catshit deposited in his apartment by a neglected kitten he had bought for Lizzy, only to have her reject the gift. In the world of Trainspotting, if anything bad can happen, it probably will—which might be why Renton is initially so skeptical when Begbie, Sick Boy, and Spud try, while back in Edinburgh, to convince him to join them in a deal to buy two kilos of heroin from Forrester and then resell it at a huge profit.

Surprisingly, given the participants, this plan succeeds, and the four end up with £16,000 (roughly $20,000) in an athletic bag—which Renton promptly steals, making off with it while the others sleep. He deposits £4,000 in a station locker for Spud but feels no remorse where Begbie and Sick Boy are concerned. Then he makes off for parts unknown, resolved to start a new, respectable life. As the film ends, he essentially repeats his opening monologue, providing even more details concerning the new life, which he now resolves to choose instead of his former life with heroin:

I’m gonna be just like you. The job, the family, the fucking big television, the washing machine, the compact disc, and electrical tin opener, good health, low cholesterol, dental insurance, mortgage, starter home, leisure wear, luggage, three-piece suite, DIY, game shows, junk food children, walks in the park, nine-to-five, good at golf, washing the car, choice of sweaters, family Christmas, indexed pension, tax exemption, cleaning the gutters, getting by, looking ahead, the day you die.

This ending speech, of course, is entirely satirical, and it leaves little room to interpret this ending as a happy one. By deciding to join mainstream society, Renton is committing himself to a lifetime of mind-numbing conformity and senseless accumulation of empty material pleasures. He will be just like “you,” just like everybody.

Renton’s opening and closing monologues combine to make clear that Trainspotting is far more than an account of the lives of Edinburgh drug users. It is, in fact, a sweeping indictment of the capitalist society that drives the central characters to drug use by offering them so little in the way of meaningful alternatives. There is certainly some concern with the fact that the characters are specifically Scottish and with the depressed economic conditions in Scotland at the time (they have since improved somewhat), but the film’s satire is aimed more at capitalism in general than at England as Scotland’s oppressor and the source of Scotland’s depressed condition—a fact that might partly account for the critical and commercial success of the film in England itself.

This might be the place to comment on the title of the film, which refers to an old English middle-class hobby that involved jotting down and collecting locomotive numbers by observing the British Railway System—just as bored American kids sometimes collect license-plate numbers while on road trips. However, the English hobby can sometimes become quite an elaborate undertaking involving the detailed collection and exchange of information about the movement and distribution of trains—suggesting that it is particularly suited to those who have a great deal of time on their hands. Of course, in England, this sort of avocation might be undertaken by the idle rich; in this film, it is undertaken by the ideal poor, though here “trainspotting” is not so much a literal description of the activities of the characters as it is a metaphorical suggestion of the way they are just sitting back and doing nothing while the world passes them by.

Trains, of course, are a crucial symbol of modernization, an emblem of the Industrial Revolution and the subsequent growth of the capitalist system, dependent in nineteenth-century England on the developing railway system to move it goods and raw materials. The trainspotting metaphor in the film can thus be taken as a sign of the way the young characters of the film are merely bystanders, watching the capitalist system go through its motions without their participation. Renton’s resolution to “go straight” at the end of the film can thus be taken as a sign that he has decided to stop watching and to actually get on the train. The problem is that it is essentially a train to nowhere.

This same title symbol, however, functions somewhat differently in the original novel. At the literal level of the stories of the characters, the film version of Trainspotting tracks the original novel fairly closely. But the film delivers a somewhat different political message than does the novel, which is much more avowedly Scottish and concentrates much more on specifically Scottish concerns—particularly with concerns involving postcolonialism and globalization. Like the film, the novel is not much concerned with presenting glowing images of Scottish national greatness. But the novel is much more insistent in this sense, rejecting Scottish nationalist pride in no uncertain terms. While the title metaphor of the film can to an extent be taken as a critique of the English capitalist system for passing Scotland by, the criticism of the novel is aimed more at the Scottish themselves for sitting back and boasting about their greatness, while the world, in fact, passes them by. For Welsh, the Scottish have attempted (ineffectually) to deal with this situation by what he sees as outmoded declarations of Scottish national pride. As Farred puts it,

Trainspotting is the voice of the disaffected, the postmodern, postindustrial Scottish junkie-as-critic who rejects the romance of his nation’s history in favor of a scathing attack on Scotland’s historic anti-Englishness. No contemporary commentator has ridiculed his people’s desire to maintain their difference as much as Trainspotting’s chief protagonist, the heroin-using Mark Renton. (217)

For Frantz Fanon, nationalism was a problematic (but potentially useful) step through which most colonies would need to pass before gaining independence and then (hopefully) moving on to a post-nationalist phase. But, even at the beginning of the 1960s, Fanon was aware, in The Wretched of the Earth, that nationalist appeals to the past might impede the progressive movement into a better future. For Welsh, writing in the 1990s, when capitalist globalization is well underway and the older colonial system is essentially a thing of the past, Braveheart-style appeals to past Scottish glories are even more dangerous. For Farred, then, the political message of Trainspotting is that Scotland should skip the nationalist phase altogether and go straight to an internationalist participation in the European Union and the global capitalist system as a whole: “Welsh’s novel can be read as an implicit rejection of the postcolonial in favor of the transnational—or Europe as the much-desired cosmopolitan, the European ‘‘global’’ (Farred 225).

The ending of the novel, which differs substantially from the ending of the film, makes this point quite clearly. As in the film, Renton has just ripped off his mates and his headed out to use his lucre to finance the beginning of a new life. Here, however, instead of merely imagining a life of English-style suburban material comforts, he thinks more internationally. In the novel, he is, in fact, on his way to Amsterdam to seek a new beginning in the larger world of the continent, transcending the English-Scottish opposition altogether. Renton’s transformation at the end of the film is a rather cynical one: it’s a loss, a surrender of pleasure in favor of comfort.[196] Renton’s escape at the end of the novel is a hopeful one, by no means guaranteed to succeed, but at least offering more possibilities than he is left with at the end of the film.

In terms of these differing endings, it might be noted that both the novel and the film have sequels—in the form of Welsh’s 2002 novel Porno and Boyle’s 2017 film T2 Trainspotting. Porno is set ten years after the original novel and shows the characters still involved in subcultural activities, this time surrounding the underground pornography industry. T2, which draws some of its inspiration from Porno, is set twenty years after the original Trainspotting and features a return by Renton, Spud, Sick Boy, and Begbie, all still played by the original actors. T2 was, in general, positively received by critics, though some felt that it was largely a nostalgia piece that depended too heavily on fond memories of the original film.

In any case, it portrays an Edinburgh seemingly in the beginnings of an economic revival. Renton returns from a failed life in Edinburgh to rejoin Sick Boy and Spud to continue their adventures. The stakes are a bit higher, and at one point the principals manage to secure an EU Small Business Development Loan of £100,000 for an urban renewal project—which is really the conversion of Sick Boy’s inherited family pub into an upscale bordello. However, Veronika Kovach (Anjela Nedyalkova), a young Bulgarian prostitute who is Sick Boy’s girlfriend and partner in the bordello scheme, makes off with the cash and returns to Bulgaria and her young son. Oddly, though, Veronika is one of the more positively portrayed characters, and the fact that she winds up with the money seems a good thing. After all, the Scottish characters are still too self-destructive to take advantage of their new opportunities, which in any case come with most of the same soul-destroying strings attached as their old opportunities.

T2 is a clever film, with a number of twists, including the suggestion that Spud is writing their story in what will become the original novel of Trainspotting. Perhaps its central moment, however—one that literally occurs halfway through the film—is a simple reference back to the previous film, as Veronika asks Renton to explain the “Choose Life” slogan she has heard Sick Boy repeat numerous times. A quick cut to the 1984 music video of WHAM’s song “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,” with George Michael wearing his famous white “CHOOSE LIFE” T-shirt, helps to contextualize his answer. For Michael, the slogan was intended as support for the fight against AIDS, though it has been used for a variety of purposes.[197] Renton describes it to Veronika as “a well-meaning slogan from a 1980s anti-drug campaign,” that he and his mates used to add phrases to in order to satirize the mainstream values of bourgeois society. He then gives her examples, including contemporary ones that he assumes she might better understand, but that also update the film to include a critique of the world of the twenty-first century, and especially of social media:

Choose an iPhone made in China by a woman who jumped out of a window and stick it in the pocket of your jacket fresh from a South Asian fire trap. Choose Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, and a thousand other ways to spew your bile across people you’ve never met. Choose updating your profile; tell the world what you had for breakfast and hope that someone, somewhere cares. Choose looking up old flames, desperate to believe that you don’t look as bad as they do. Choose live-blogging from your first wank to your last breath. Human interaction reduced to nothing more than data.

Then, however, Renton’s diatribe takes a turn toward self-critique, as he bitterly begins to enumerate the choices he himself has made in his life:

Sit back and smother the pain with an unknown dose of an unknown drug made in somebody’s fucking kitchen. Choose unfulfilled promise and wishing you’d done it all differently. Choose never learning from your own mistakes. Choose watching history repeat itself. Choose the slow reconciliation towards what you can get rather than what you always hoped for. Settle for less and keep a brave face on it. Choose disappointment. And choose losing the ones you loved. And as they fall from you a piece of you dies with them. Until you can see that, one day in the future, piece by piece, they will all be gone, and there’ll be nothing left of you to call alive or dead.

T2 ends on what seem to be a number of upbeat moments, most of them are really just repetitions of the past, suggesting that the characters will continue going in circles. The most chilling of these is Renton’s return to his childhood home, where he is greeted by his now-widowed father. As the film ends, we see him dancing to “Lust for Life” in his old bedroom, still wallpapered with locomotives, as in his childhood. After all that has happened, he is a middle-aged man who has gotten nowhere. At one point in the film, Veronika complains to Sick Boy and Renton that they live too much in the past, while later Sick Boy himself accuses Renton of being a “tourist in your own youth.” They’re both probably right, though their criticisms of Renton’s nostalgia might well be aimed not just as these him (or Sick Boy) but at anyone (Scottish or otherwise) who prefers reliving past glories to undertaking the hard work of adapting to the present and building a future.

NOTES

EXEMPLARY TEXT

SHAUN OF THE DEAD (2004): DIRECTOR EDGAR WRIGHT

Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002), with its introduction of the concept of “fast” zombies (as opposed to the shambling, “slow” zombies made famous by the films of George Romero) ushered in a whole new era in the making of zombie films, marking both a thematic shift toward faster-moving, more ferocious zombies and a technical shift toward better special effects, enabling the exploration of new territory in the zombie film. It also marked an important step toward the internationalization of zombie films, as the making of such films spread beyond its American roots in the works of directors such as Romero. The subsequent global production of zombie films has also led to further thematic and technical innovations, as in the case of the ultra-violent (but somewhat tongue-in-cheek) Norwegian Nazi-zombie film Dead Snow (2009), or the fast-zombies-on-a-train motif of South Korea’s Train to Busan (2016)—something like Snowpiercer meets 28 Days Later.

28 Days Later also had important British successors, including its own sequel, 28 Weeks Later (2007). But perhaps its most important British successor was a film in a very different mode, Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead (2004), a film that looked back to the slow, shambling zombies of Romero and to “zom-com” (zombie comedy) predecessors such as the Return of the Living Dead sequence, which began in 1985, the same year that Romero completed his original zombie trilogy with Day of the Dead. That zombie comedies parodying the zombie genre would begin to appear almost as soon as the modern zombie film itself should come as no surprise: the zombie film genre is one that thrives on excess, and films that depend on such excessiveness always need only a slight nudge to tip over into parody. One of the secrets to the remarkable success of Shaun of the Dead, however, is that—despite the hilarity of its very British humor, it is also an effective zombie film in its own right, even without the comedy. Further, as in the case of Romero—whose zombie films comment on a range of issues, including racism, sexism, and consumerism—Shaun also manages some quite effective social satire in the midst of its rather broad comedy.

The stage is set for Shaun’s social commentary in its very opening moments, as we are first introduced to the personal life of the eponymous Shaun (played by Simon Pegg, who co-wrote the script with Wright), which turns out to be very much in a rut. In particular, the opening scene is set in Shaun’s favorite hangout, the Winchester pub, where we learn that the WIndchester is, in fact, Shaun’s only hangout. His relationship with his girlfriend Liz (Kate Ashfield) is very much in jeopardy because of the humdrum, zombie-like routine that their life together has become, most of their time together being spent in the Winchester with Shaun’s oafish friend Ed (Nick Frost) always hovering over them and Liz’s friends David (Dylan Moran) and Dianne (Lucy Davis) generally present as well. The film then immediately cuts to the opening title sequence, which is a series of shots of bored people going through the mind-numbing motions of their daily lives, standing in checkout lines, mechanically checking their cell phones, or just walking robotically in unison down the street. Many of the people seen in these opening shots will be seen later in the film as zombies, the clear implication being that becoming zombies has changed their lives relatively little. Then this opening sequence is topped off with a shot of the legs and feet of what appears to be a zombie, staggering along, followed by the revelation that we are merely seeing Shaun shambling sleepily through the house he shares with Ed and their more bourgeois friend Pete (Peter Serafinowicz), then settling down on the couch beside his friend to play video games. Ed (whose only income derives from low-level weed-dealing) and Shaun (who works as a salesman in an appliance store) are already zombies of a sort, staggering through their meaningless lives without direction or purpose, other than perhaps to manage to get enough food to live off of.[198] Indeed, the human characters of this film are so similar to the zombies that, when the zombie outbreak first occurs, it takes Shaun quite a while to realize it, because most of the zombies he encounters are not acting all that differently from the way they did as humans. Meanwhile, later, when Shaun, Ed, and their group must make their way through a horde of zombies to reach the supposed safety of the Winchester, they do so by pretending to be zombies themselves, a ruse that turns out to be quite successful, despite the fact that (with the exception of Shaun) they all seem to be really bad at the impersonation. Shaun’s mother doesn’t even manage to act at all—and still pulls it off.

Pegg explained the allegorical significance of Shaun of the Dead to interviewer Andrew Gronvall:

The thing about the zombie as a movie monster is that it’s an all-purpose allegory for ourselves. … The zombie is an enduring figure for uses in allegory. In Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, they are conceived as literally consumers. Romero took Descarte’s philosophy to the shopping mall: “I think therefore I am” becomes “I am, therefore I shop.” … In our film, if they’re anything, they stand in for apathy, and urban living, and becoming, as you said, an anonymous automaton in a collective, where you don’t have any identity other than as a member of a gang. They’re human beings who are just a little bit different. [Zombies are] just us. They’re us, reduced to our most basic. And also, of course, they are the literal, living embodiment of our greatest fear, which is death—they are walking death.

The observation that the zombies of the film are just literalized, defamiliarized versions of the walking dead that all of us already are every day contains nothing especially striking or new. One need only to recall T.S. Eliot’s vision of London as a city of the walking dead in The Waste Land (1922) to realize that this same insight has been applied to the modern consumer capitalist world ever since it sprang into being at the beginning of the twentieth century. What is special about Shaun of the Dead is not the originality or profundity of its insights into the modern world and its use of the zombie as a metaphor for life in that world. What is special is the fact that it is able to deliver that message in a way that is both striking and, at the same time, leavened with humor, thus potentially making audiences more receptive to the message.

There is, however, a serious point to be made by the humor itself. For one thing, the primary kind of humor that is employed is a form of postmodern pastiche. Shaun of the Dead has a great deal of fun with the conventions of the zombie genre. However, unlike pure genre spoofs such as Young Frankenstein (1974) or the recent What We Do in the Shadows (2014), which employ exaggerated versions of genre conventions strictly for laughs, Shaun maintains a much more complex relationship with its genre, as it seeks to be an effective zombie movie and a send-up of the zombie genre at the same time. In this sense, it is very much a postmodern nostalgia film, in the mode discussed by Jameson with regard to phenomena such as the resurrection of film noir in neo-noir films such as Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), which self-consciously call attention to their roots in the noir tradition while also going beyond that tradition. For Jameson, in such films

our awareness of the preexistence of other versions … is now a constitutive and essential part of the film’s structure; we are now, in other words, in “intertextuality” as a deliberate, built-in feature of the aesthetic effect and as the operator of a new connotation of “pastness” and pseudohistorical depth, in which the history of aesthetic styles displaces “real” history. (Postmodernism 20)

Shaun of the Dead repeatedly calls attention to the fact that it replicates many motifs from earlier zombie films, especially those of Romero. However, at first glance, the status of Shaun of the Dead as a stylized representation of a more general cultural and/or historical past is not immediately clear—at least not, for example, in the way that the recent zombie spoof Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016) resurrects the beginning of the nineteenth century in England, not through any attempt at historical authenticity but through a parody of Jane Austen’s original 1813 novel, used here precisely because it is a well-known classic of its period and because of the incongruity of its juxtaposition with the zombie genre. However, Shaun of the Dead does employ a very postmodern technique of referencing its predecessors not so much through directly naming them as through employing a variety of images and motifs the sources of which are well-enough known that the filmmakers can assume that their viewers will recognize these sources and take a certain pleasure in this recognition. This mode is, of course, precisely the one referred to by Jameson as pastiche, which is for him a kind of “blank” parody that consciously adopts the styles of various predecessors without any intention of commenting on those predecessors or revising our assessment of them (Postmodernism 17).

Pastiche is also a matter of replicating the conventions of previous genres, and Shaun is also very postmodern in the way it liberally intermixes the conventions of various well-known genres. Far from sticking to the typical zombie script, Shaun contains the elements of several other genres, including the buddy comedy, the slacker film, and the relationship comedy, any one of which might have developed into a successful film of its own, even without the zombie elements. Indeed, Shaun seems to pick elements from different genres as if off of a cafeteria menu, very much as I have elsewhere noted (drawing upon Jameson) the “tendency for contemporary artists to regard the styles of the past as a sort of aesthetic cafeteria from whose menu they can nostalgically pick and choose without concern for the historical context in which those styles originally arose” (Postmodern Hollywood xvi).

The stylistic similarity of Shaun’s zombies to those in Romero’s zombie films is quite striking—so much so that Romero had Pegg and Wright appear in cameo roles as zombies in Land of the Dead (2005), the relatively high-budget zombie film he made immediately after Shaun of the Dead.But Shaun calls attention to its predecessors in a variety of more subtle ways as well. As Shaun walks to work at his boring, dead-end job, the ambient sound includes a radio report announcing that a deep space probe returning to earth has unexpectedly entered the atmosphere over southeast England. The implication, in context, would seem to be that some sort of radiation or contagion carried by this spacecraft might be the source of the film’s zombie outbreak, though the actual cause is never determined (and the film goes out of its way to call attention to this fact). The reference here would seem to be to Romero’s breakthrough film Night of the Living Dead (1968), in which radiation from a spacecraft returning from Venus is suggested (but never verified) as the cause of the zombie outbreak in that film. Such nods to predecessors in the zombie genre are sprinkled throughout Shaun of the Dead—many of the them (such as this allusion to Night of the Living Dead) without any particular comedic or parodic intent. The film clearly wants to announce its participation in the zombie film tradition, though largely in the American Romero tradition, rather than the British tradition initiated by 28 Days Later. Indeed, the most sardonic allusion to earlier zombie films is to Boyle’s film: near the end of Shaun of the Dead, Shaun and Liz, now settled into post-zombie domestic bliss, watch a television report that announces that “claims that the virus was caused by rage-infected monkeys have now been dismissed as bol …” Liz switches off the set before the announcer can complete the word “bollocks,” but the playful suggestion that the idea of a zombie outbreak being triggered in such a way is nonsense is a clear reference to the then-recent 28 Days Later, in which the source of all the trouble is indeed a chimpanzee infected with a rage-inducing virus.

But Shaun derives almost as much from various comic traditions as from the zombie tradition. Roger Ebert notes that, instead of counting on the inherent comic potential of zombies, Shaun of the Dead derives its humor from treating “the living characters as sitcom regulars whose conflicts and arguments keep getting interrupted by annoying flesh-eaters.” Clearly, Ebert is onto something here, and one can easily imagine the comedy of Shaun of the Dead arising from the fact that the zombies of the film seem to have stumbled into another genre altogether, whether it be the slacker film, the buddy film, or the relationship film—elements of all of which can clearly be found in Shaun of the Dead. One can, indeed, imagine a similar comic effect occurring were zombies (actual zombies, not friends of the characters dressed in costumes) to wander into an episode of Cheers or Friends and then to start attacking the principals.

What Shaun of the Dead is really like, of course, is what might happen were zombies to wander into an episode of Spaced (1999–2001), the British television sitcom directed by Wright and created and written by Pegg and Jessica Stevenson (the latter two of whom also star in the series). The central characters of Spaced, Pegg’s Tim and Stevenson’s Daisy, are directionless, underachieving twenty-somethings who might fit in very well with Shaun and Ed and their crowd. Spaced also features Frost as the best friend of Pegg’s character, thus anticipating their relationship in Shaun. In the third episode of the first season of Spaced, Tim even become immersed in a video game in which he is killing zombies. Meanwhile, Shaun is particularly reminiscent of Spaced in the way both employ so many references to previous cultural artefacts, including films, television series, and video games, while drawing upon a variety of genres and employing a relatively intrusive editing style.

In their pitch for Spaced, Pegg and Stevenson reportedly described it as a cross between The Simpsons, The X-Files, and Northern Exposure (Lee). Spaced, in short, mixes genres very much in the way Shaun subsequently would do.This mixture of genres surely gives Shaun of the Dead much of its special flavor[199], but it also participates in a whole series of boundary-crossings in the film, the most important of which is the deconstruction of the polar opposition between the living and the undead. And this deconstruction itself serves multiple functions, in addition to the obvious one of pointing toward the walking death that life under modern consumer capitalism can entail. In particular, the hobbling, deformed, physically grotesque zombies would at first glance almost seem to be walking embodiments of disability, and one could certainly argue that zombie movies derive their emotional charge not just from a fear of death on the part of viewers, but also from a fear of becoming grotesquely disabled.

One could, of course, say the same thing about horror films in general. It is not for nothing that James Whale was so easily able to convince audiences of Frankenstein (1931) or Bride of Frankenstein (1935) to identify so completely with his misshapen monster (a sort of zombie in his own right)—or that the “one of us” chant of the eponymous characters in Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932) is so chilling and so well remembered. Zombie films, however, have a special significance in this regard in that it is generallylikely that viewers will identify with the zombies only in the negative sense of not wanting to be like them, rather than rooting for individual zombies, especially as zombies tend to exist as an undifferentiated mass with virtually no distinct individual identities. As Jamie McDaniel, has noted, zombie films are thus especially in danger of falling into “the horror genre’s tradition of reinforcing a cultural association between disability and deviance” (423). For McDaniel, however, Shaun of the Dead joins Romero’s Day of the Dead (1985) and Land of the Dead (2005) as films that use “the zombie figure to critique the ways that ableism becomes embedded in the cinematic language of the horror genre,” thereby examining “the process through which elements of abledness become normalized,” a process that “weakens negative stereotypes by shifting attention from the person with a disability or the disability itself and redirecting it toward the strategies defining the standards of an ideal, nondeviant, and ableist body” (425).

By aiming most of its humor at the human characters, rather than the zombies, Shaun of the Dead performs precisely the kind of shift in attention of which McDaniel speaks. Moreover, in conjunction with its dismantling of the traditional distinction between able and disabled, Shaun deconstructs a number of other cinematic stereotypes as well. In particular, Shaun redefines the notion of movie heroism. Shaun, very clearly the film’s central character, is anything but a conventional hero. Lynn Pifer, in fact, has described Shaun as “the anti-Rambo” (164). Shaun does, to an extent, transcend his initial status as slacker and underachiever when he assumes a leadership role—Ed accuses him of appointing himself “king of the zombies”—in trying to bring his circle of friends to safety. However, it is also worth pointing out that Shaun is largely unsuccessful, despite his own ultimate survival. He is largely ineffectual in his battle against the zombies and has essentially nothing to do with the ultimate victory of the humans. By the end of the film, meanwhile, all of the members of his group have been converted into zombies (some subsequently being destroyed by Shaun himself), except for Liz and Shaun.

As Isra Daraiseh and I have argued in Consumerist Orientalism (speaking specifically of Westerns) traditional movie heroism is fundamentally based on a binary logic of self vs. other, with the hero playing the role of “self” and his antagonists figured as “others.” One might say the same thing about monster films, where the humans occupy the “self” pole and the monsters occupy the “other” pole. Zombies, though, are often uncomfortably similar to humans, which destabilizes this opposition to some extent. This destabilization is especially clear in the case of Shaun of the Dead, as I have noted above. It should, therefore, come as no surprise that this film would deconstruct the usual logic of movie heroism as well. However, this phenomenon is more complex than it might first appear. Shaun is not merely an anti-hero, but he is an anti-hero in a particularly unconventional way. One might expect that, in the face of danger, Shaun would rise to the occasion, throw off his earlier slackerdom, and save the day. In point of fact (and this is the secret to much of the humor in the film), Shaun remains fairly consistent throughout the film, even as conditions around him change dramatically. As the film opens, Liz’s main complaints about Shaun are that he never wants to do anything but go to the Winchester and that he always takes Ed along with him. His reaction to the zombie outbreak? Head to the Winchester and take Ed along with him. As Pifer puts it, he comes up with “the ultimate slacker plan: gather those he loves and head to his favorite pub” (167).

Even at the end of the film, while Shaun might seem to have moved to a new stage in his new life with Liz (signaled by their redecorated and much more “civilized” home), we find that little has changed there as well. In the film’s final scene, Shaun goes out to the shed behind the house, where we discover that he is keeping zombie Ed, chained in place. (We might recall that earlier in the film, even before the zombie outbreak, Pete had suggested that Ed should probably live in the shed.) Ed is perfectly happy, though: he has a chair and a video game setup, so he can play video games all he wants—which is pretty much all he ever wanted to do in the first place. Shaun then settles in beside him and they begin to play video games together, just like old times. Indeed, while Ed now seems to have been marginalized and contained, Shaun’s obvious happiness at joining Ed in the shed suggests that this is still his favorite pastime. None of this, however, is figured as a loss. Shaun is going nowhere as the film begins and he has gotten nowhere as the film ends. And that is just how he likes it.

Importantly, though, it is not just Shaun and Ed who have essentially remained unchanged by all that has happened in the film. After Shaun and Liz are saved, the film cuts six months into the future as we are treated to clips from a television program entitled Zombies from Hell that looks back on what is now called “Z-Day.” For one thing, the very existence of this exploitative program comments on the postmodern tendency to convert any and all events into entertainment spectacles—and even to label them with catchy, media-oriented titles, or brand-names, such as “Z-Day.” The program is thus a key example of the phenomenon noted by Guy Debord and the situationist movement, in which contemporary life, according Jameson’s summation of the insights of Debord, is centrally informed by “a whole historically original consumers’ appetite for a world transformed into sheer images of itself and for pseudo-events and ‘spectacles’” (Jameson, Postmodernism 18). This program notes, among other things that “the fact that the mobile deceased retained their primal instincts makes them ideal recruitment for the service industry,” as we see “tamed” zombies working at jobs such as gathering shopping carts at the same supermarket we saw in the film’s opening moments. Then we see a clip from an exploitative game show which extends the spectacle effect of Z-Day by employing zombies as much-abusedcontestants for the entertainment of sadistic viewers, further illustrating their usefulness in the new post-outbreak world. But, of course, similar game shows were already popular before the outbreak, and mind-numbing jobs such as collecting shopping carts already existed as well. Again, nothing significant seems to have changed.

The zombie genre is, of course, perfect as an elaboration of Debord’s “society of the spectacle.” It is, after all, the most public of all horror genres, the propagation of zombies proceeding rapidly, like the outburst of a flash mob, from genesis to spectacle. Vampires, ghosts, and even slashers tend to operate in private, specializing in one-on-one attacks out of the public eye. Zombies, on the other hand, operate in crowds—in the streets and in shopping malls. The zombies of Shaun do very much the same, except that, by combining the zombie genre with more intimate and private genres such as the buddy film and the romantic comedy, Shaun at least gives us a tiny peek at aspects of life that are based on authentic interpersonal connections and not on public spectacles.

To an extent, one would expect this lack of change in a work that is as obviously postmodern as is Shaun of the Dead. After all, one of Jameson’s central points about the postmodern imagination is that it involves the loss of the kind of genuine historical sense that would enable one to envision a future that is fundamentally different from the present. Importantly, Jameson has specifically applied this insight to the recent prominence of the postapocalyptic genre, of which many zombie films can be seen to constitute an important subgenre. In his essay “Future City,” Jameson argues that the postmodern loss of historical sense makes it difficult to imagine a historical process that moves into a future that is fundamentally different from the present. As a result, the only way to imagine such fundamental change is through a vision of an apocalyptic event that wipes out civilization altogether. Or, as Jameson puts it, “Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world” (76).

Shaun of the Dead, of course, imagines neither the end of the world nor the end of capitalism, because the zombie outburst ends abruptly: just as Shaun and Liz seem hopelessly surrounded by zombies, the British military arrives with overwhelming force and easily smashes the relatively defenseless zombies. The film then immediately cuts to Zombies from Hell, which already looks back on the zombie event as a thing of the past.This deus ex machina ending should not, however, be taken as a conservative celebration of the military or of a demonstration of why strong military forces are needed in the postmodern world. If anything, it is the opposite: a suggestion that arguments for the maintenance of a strong military are based on the imagination of threats (such as the possibility of a zombie apocalypse) that do not actually exist. But this ending is not really about the military at all; it is about movie endings in general. Happy Hollywood endings, of course, have been widely critiqued, and the ending of Shaun—to the extent that it can be read as a conventional romantic comedy in which all obstacles are overcome so that the two lovers can wind up together—can be taken as a parodic recreation of such endings.

To the extent that Shaun is a zombie film, however, this ending functions rather differently. Zombie films quite often end either in uncertainty or in an apparent zombie triumph. One thinks of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, in which Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy seem to have overcome all obstacles to their romantic union, only to discover that they are walking into the teeth of a whole new zombie army as the film ends. Even more relevant is Train to Busan, in which most of the military forces called out to quell the zombie uprising become infected and thus join the zombies in their attacks on humans, apparently leaving the humans in charge of only one small much-embattled enclave. And, of course, Romero was able to make one zombie film after another precisely because the zombies were so difficult definitively to put down.

Shaun might thus be seen as an example of the final and total collapse of the postmodern historical imagination, in which it is impossible to imagine even an apocalypse leading to anything fundamentally different from the present. And that would be true if not for the fact that Shaun is such a self-conscious and self-parodic film, a fact that completely flips this meaning so that the film becomes not the ultimate example of loss of historical imagination but in fact a critique of that loss in general. That Shaun is perfectly aware of its own failure to envision a different future for its characters or for society in general would seem to be a positive step. That it fails to attempt to overcome this failure my creating its own vision of a genuinely different future might be attributed both to the difficulty of that task and to the fact that Shaun is simply not that kind of film—though of course those kinds of films are hard to find. Jameson goes on to note that certain works of science fiction[200] do seem to have the potential to “jumpstart the sense of history so that it begins again to transmit feeble signals of time, of otherness, of change, of Utopia” (“Future City” 76). It remains to be seen whether some as yet unimagined and unforeseen breakthrough in popular culture will perform that process of “jumpstarting” on a broader scale. Shaun of the Dead is not that breakthrough, yet it does more to delineate the barrier that needs to be broken through than almost any high-budget “serious” film one could name.

NOTES

WORKS CITED

Abraham, Taisha. “An Interview with Arundhati Roy.” Ariel 29.1 (1998): 89–92.

Abrams, M. H. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. New York: W. W. Norton, 1973.

Achebe, Chinua. “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” The Massachusetts Review 18 (1977): 782-94. Citations from the reprint in Kimbrough 251-62.

Achebe, Chinua. Morning Yet on Creation Day. London: Heinemann, 1975.

Achebe, Chinua. “Teaching Things Fall Apart.” Approaches to Teaching Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart.” Ed. Bernth Lindfors. New York: Modern Language Association, 1991. 20-24.

Ahmad, Aijaz. “Reading Arundhati Roy Politically.” Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.” Ed. Alex Tickell. New York: Routledge, 2007. 111–119.

Allen, Theodor W. The Invention of the White Race: Racial Oppression and Social Control. London: Verso, 1994.

Amadiume, Ifi. Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society. London: Zed, 1987.

Amis, Kingsley. New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction. London: Gollancz, 1960.

Anderson, Perry. The Origins of Postmodernity. London: Verson, 1998.

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1981.

Ball, F. C. One of the Damned: The Life and Times of Robert Tressell, Author of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1979.

Bedient, Calvin. He Do the Police in Different Voices: The Waste Land and Its Protagonist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.

Beebe, Maurice. “What Modernism Was.” Journal of Modern Literature 3 (1974): 1065-80.

Bellamy, Suzanne. “The Visual Arts in To the Lighthouse. The Cambridge Companion to To the Lighthouse.” Ed. Allison Pease. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 136–45.

Berryman, John. “Prufrock’s Dilemma.” The Freedom of the Poet. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1960. 270–78.

Blyden, E. W. Christianity, Islam, and the Negro Race. 1888. London: Edinburgh University Press, 1967.

Booker, M. Keith. The African Novel in English: An Introduction. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1998.

Booker, M. Keith, ed. The Chinua Achebe Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003.

Booker, M. Keith, ed. Critical Essays on Salman Rushdie. New York: G. K. Hall, 1999.

Booker, M. Keith. Film and the American Left: A Research Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Booker, M. Keith. Flann O’Brien, Bakhtin, and Menippean Satire. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995.

Booker, M. Keith. Joyce, Bakhtin, and the Literary Tradition: Toward a Comparative Cultural Poetics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996.

Booker, M. Keith. “Late Capitalism Comes to Dublin: ‘American’ Popular Culture in the Novels of Roddy Doyle.” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 28.3 (July 1997): 27–45.

Booker, M. Keith. Literature and Domination: Sex, Knowledge, and Power in Modern Fiction. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993.

Booker, M. Keith. “Midnight’s Children, History, and Complexity: Reading Rushdie after the Cold War.” Critical Essays on Salman Rushdie. Ed. M. Keith Booker. New York: G. K. Hall, 1999. 283–313.

Booker, M. Keith. The Modern British Novel of the Left: A Research Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998.

Booker, M. Keith. “The Other Side of History: Fantasy, Romance, Horror, and Science Fiction.” The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century English Novel. Ed. Robert L. Caserio. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2009. 251–66.

Booker, M. Keith. Postmodern Hollywood: What’s New in Film and Why It Makes Us Feel So Strange. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007.

Booker, M. Keith. A Practical Introduction to Literary Theory and Criticism. White Plains, NY: Longman, 1996.

Booker, M. Keith. “Things Fall Apart.” The Chinua Achebe Encyclopedia. Ed. M. Keith Booker. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003. 246–256.

Booker, M. Keith. “Thomas Mofolo’s Chaka.” The Novel, Vol. I: History, Geography, and Culture. Ed. Franco Moretti. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. 786–93.

Booker, M. Keith. Ulysses, Capitalism, and Colonialism: Reading Joyce after the Cold War. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000.

Booker, M. Keith, and Isra Daraiseh. Consumerist Orientalism: The Convergence of Arab and American Popular Culture in the Age of Global Capitalism. London: I. B. Tauris, forthcoming.

Bornstein, George. “Reading Yeats’s ‘September 13’ in Its Contexts.” Sewanee Review 122.2 (Spring 2014): 224–35.

Bose, Brinda. “In Desire and in Death: Exoticism as Politics in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.” Ariel 29.2 (April 1998): 59–72.

Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism 1830-1914. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1988.

Braun, Michele. “The Mouseness of the Mouse: The Competing Discourses of Genetics and History in White Teeth.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 48.2 (2013): 221–236.

Brennan, Timothy. “The National Longing for Form.” Nation and Narration. Ed. Homi K. Bhabha. London: Routledge, 1990. 44-70.

Brooks, Cleanth. “The Waste Land: Critique of the Myth.” A Collection of Critical Essays on “The Waste Land.” Ed. Jay Martin. Engelwood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968. 59–86.

Brown, Homer Obed. James Joyce’s Early Fiction. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1975.

Brown, Mitchell C. “Human Rights and Postwar Internationalism in The Third Man.” Around 1945: Literature, Citizenship, Rights. Ed. Allan Hepburn. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016. 197–215.

Burris, Sidney. The Poetry of Resistance: Seamus Heaney. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1990.

Byrne, Paul Johnson. “Heart of Darkness: The Dream-Sensation and Literary Impressionism Revisited.” Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society 35.2 (Autumn 2010): 13–29.

Carey, John. The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880–1939. Rev. ed. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2005.

Carroll, David. Chinua Achebe: Novelist, Poet, Critic. 2nd Ed. London: Macmillan, 1990.

Chrisafis, Angelique. “Overlong, overrated and unmoving: Roddy Doyle’s verdict on James Joyce’s Ulysses.” The Guardian (February 10, 2004). https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2004/feb/10/booksnews.ireland. Accessed November 19, 2018.

Christie, Ian. Arrows of Desire: The Films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. London: Faber & Faber, 1985.

Clissmann, Anne. Flann O’Brien: A Critical Introduction to His Writings. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1975.

Cobham, Rhonda. “Making Men and History: Achebe and the Politics of Revisionism.” Approaches to Teaching Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart.” Ed. Bernth Lindfors. New York: Modern Language Association, 1991. 91-100.

Connolly, James. Socialism and the Irish Rebellion: Writings from James Connolly. St. Petersburgh, FL: Red and Black Publishers, 2009.

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. 1899. New York: Penguin Random House, 2017.

Conrad, Joseph. Lord Jim. 1900. New York: Signet-New American Library, 1981.

Conrad, Joseph. The Nigger of the Narcissus. 1897. New York: Penguin, 1989.

Cope, Jackson. Joyce’s Cities: Archaeologies of the Soul. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981.

Craig, David. “David Storey’s Vision of the Working Class.” The Uses of Fiction: Essays on the Modern Novel in Honour of Arnold Kettle. Ed. Douglas Jefferson and Graham Martin. Milton Keynes, England: Open University Press, 1982. 125–38.

Croft, Andy. Red Letter Days: British Fiction in the 1930s. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990.

Curtis, L. Perry, Jr. Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature. Rev. ed. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997.

Daraiseh, Isra. “The Literary Unconscious: Ideology and Utopia in the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel in England and Russia.” Dissertation, University of Arkansas, 2015.

Davis, Lennard. Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.

Davison, Kate. “‘Choose Life’: A Short History.” Overland (Feb. 6. 2017). https://overland.org.au/2017/02/choose-life-a-short-history/comment-page-1/. Accessed September 30, 2018.

Dawson, Ashley. “Genetics, Biotechnology, and the Future of ‘Race’ in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth.” Mongrel Nation: Diasporic Culture and the Making of Postcolonial Britain. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007.149–73.

Deane, Seamus, ed. The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992.

Deane, Seamus, ed. Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990.

Doody, Margaret Anne. The True Story of the Novel. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996.

Doyle, Roddy. The Commitments. 1987. New York: Vintage-Random House, 1989.

Duffy, Enda. The Subaltern Ulysses. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.

Ebert, Roger. “Shaun of the Dead.” Roger Ebert.com (Sept. 24, 2004). https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/shaun-of-the-dead-2004. Accessed October 29, 2018.

Eliot, T. S. “The Metaphysical Poets.” Selected Prose. Ed. Frank Kermode. London: Faber and Faber, 1975. 59–67.

Eliot, T. S. “Ulysses, Order, and Myth.” The Dial 75 (1923): 480–83. Cited here from is reprint in The Modern Tradition. Eds. Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson, Jr. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965. 679–81.

Emenyonu, Ernest N. “Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: A Classic Study in Diplomatic Tactlessness.” Chinua Achebe: A Celebration. Ed. Kirsten Holst Petersen and Anna Rutherford. Oxford: Heinemann, 1990. 83-88.

Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844: With Appendix Written 1886, and Preface 1887. Trans. Florence Kelley. London: William Reeves, 1888.

Evans, Peter William. Carol Reed. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1968.

Farred, Grant. “Wankerdom: Trainspotting as a Rejection of the Postcolonial?” The South Atlantic Quarterly 103.1 (Winter 2004): 216–26.

Fernald, Anne E. “To the Lighthouse in the Context of Virginia Woolf’s Diaries and Life.” The Cambridge Companion to To the Lighthouse.” Ed. Allison Pease. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 6–18.

Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? London: Zero Books, 2009.

Fokkema, Douwe. Literary History, Modernism, and Postmodernism. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1984.

Foucault, Michel. The Care of the Self. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1988.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Volume I, An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage-Random House, 1980.

Fox, Pamela. Class Fictions: Shame and Resistance in the British Working-Class Novel, 1890–1945. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994.

Frank, Joseph. “Spatial Form in Modern Literature.” The Widening Gyre. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963. 3–62.

Gikandi, Simon. Reading the African Novel. London: James Currey, 1987.

Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.

Glenn, Ian. “Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: A Sociological Reading.” Literature and History 13.2 (1987): 238-56.

Graff, Gerald. Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education. New York: Norton, 1992.

Gronvall, Andrea. Interview with Simon Pegg. Movie City News (Sept. 13, 2004). http://moviecitynews.com/archived/Interviews/shaun_dead.html. Accessed October 29, 2018.

Harris, Wilson. “The Frontier on which Heart of Darkness Stands.” Research on African Literatures 12 (1981): 86-92. Citations from the reprint in Kimbrough 262-68.

Hassan, Ihab. “POSTmodernISM.” New Literary History 3 (1971): 5-30.

Hawkins, Hunt. “The Issue of Racism in Heart of Darkness.” Conradiana 14.3 (1982): 163-71.

Hawkins, Hunt. “Joseph Conrad, Roger Casement, and the Congo Reform Movement.” Journal of Modern Literature 9.1 (1981-82): 65-79.

Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. Rev. ed. London: Routledge, 1979.

Hegel, G. W. F. Lectures on the Philosophy of History. Trans. H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975.

Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Capital, 1848–1875. New York: Scribner, 1975.

Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Empire, 1875–1914. New York: Pantheon, 1987.

Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991. New York: Pantheon, 1994.

Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962.

Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Hoggert, Richard. The Uses of Literacy. 1957. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1992.

Hoskins, Katherine Bail. Today the Struggle: Literature and Politics in England during the Spanish Civil War. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969. Reprinted 2014.

Humm, Maggie. Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography, and Cinema. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003.

Humphries, Reynold. “The Discourse of Colonialism: The Meaning and Relevance for Conrad’s Fiction.” Conradiana 21.2 (1989): 107-133.

Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.

Innes, C. L. Chinua Achebe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Jameson, Fredric. “Future City.” New Left Review 21 (May-June, 2003): 65–79.

Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1981.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.

Jameson, Fredric. Signatures of the Visible. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Jameson, Fredric. “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” Social Text 15 (1986): 65-88.

JanMohamed, Abdul R. Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983.

JanMohamed, Abdul. “Sophisticated Primitivism: The Syncretism of Oral and Literate Modes in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.” Ariel 15.4 (1984): 19-39.

Jeyifo, Biodun.”For Chinua Achebe: The Resilience and the Predicament of Obierika.” Chinua Achebe: A Celebration. Oxford: Heinemann, 1991. 51-70.

Joyce, James. Dubliners: Text, Criticism, and Notes. Ed. Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz. New York: Viking Press, 1969.

Joyce, James. Ulysses: The Corrected Text. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior. New York: Random House, 1986.

Julien, Eileen. African Novels and the Question of Orality. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.

Kahf, Mohja. “The Image of the Muslim Woman in American Cinema: Two Orientalist Fantasy Films.” Cinefocus 3 (1995): 19–25.

Keay, John. The Honourable Company: A History of the English East India Company. Rev. Ed. New York: HarperCollins, 1993.

Kenner, Hugh. The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot. New York: MacDowell, Obolensky, 1959.

Kershner, R. B., Jr. “Degeneration: The Explanatory Nightmare.” Georgia Review 40 (1986): 416-44.

Kershner, R. B. Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Literature: Chronicles of Disorder. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.

Kiberd, Declan. Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.

Killam, G. D. The Writings of Chinua Achebe. London: Heinemann, 1977.

Kimbrough, Robert. ed. Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad. 1902. Norton Critical Edition. 3^rd ed. New York: Norton, 1988.

Klaus, H. Gustav, ed. The Socialist Novel in Britain: Towards the Recovery of a Tradition. New York: St. Martin’s, 1982.

Laurence, Patricia. Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes: Bloomsbury, Modernism, and China. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2013.

Lazarus, Neil. Resistance in Postcolonial African Fiction. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.

Leach, William. Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture. New York: Vintage-Random House, 1993.

Leavis, F. R. “The Waste Land.” T. S. Eliot: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Hugh Kenner. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962. 89–103.

Lee, Nick. “What Is Spaced?” Spaced Out (n.d.). https://web.archive.org/web/20080505031406/http://www.spaced-out.org.uk/about-spaced/whatisspaced.shtml. Accessed October 30, 2018.

Lloyd, David. Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993.

Luckhurst, Roger. Science Fiction. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005.

Lukács, Georg. The Historical Novel. Trans. Hannah Mitchell and Stanley Mitchell. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983.

Lukács, Georg. Realism in Our Time: Literature and the Class Struggle. Trans. John Mander and Necke

Lyons, R. H. To Wash an Aethiop White. New York: Teachers College Press, 1975.

Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

MacCabe, Colin. James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word. London: Macmillan, 1978.

MacLeod, Lewis. “Eliminating the Random, Ruling the World: Monologic Hybridity in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.” Reading Zadie Smith: The First Decade and Beyond. Ed. Philip Tew. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. 155–67.

Malcuit, William Q. “The Poetics of Political Failure: Eliot’s Antiliberalism in an American Context.” Twentieth-Century Literature 62.1 (March 2016): 75-95

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Literature and Art. New York: International Publishers, 1947.

Mathews, Roger. Fantasy: The Liberation of Imagination. London: Routledge, 2002.

Mayne, Brian. “The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists: An Appraisal of an Edwardian Novel of Social Protest.” Twentieth Century Literature 13.2 (1967): 73–83.

McDaniel, Jamie. “You can point a finger at a zombie. Sometimes they fall off.”: Contemporary Zombie Films, Embedded Ableism, and Disability as Metaphor.” Midwest Quarterly (June 2016): 423–46.

McKeon, Michael. The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.

Mead, Margaret. Culture and Commitment: The New Relationships between the Generations in the 1970s. Rev. and updated edition. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1978.

Miles, Peter. “The Painter’s Bible and the British Workman: Robert Tressell’s Literary Activism.” The British Working-Class Novel in the Twentieth Century. Ed. Jeremy Hawthorn. London: Edward Arnold, 1984. 1–17.

Miller, Christopher. Theories of Africans: Francophone Literature and Anthropology in Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

Miller, J. Hillis. “Narrative and History.” ELH 41 (1974): 455-73.

Minow-Pinkney, Makiko. Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987.

Moretti, Franco. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. London: Verso, 1987.

Moses, Michael Valdez. The Novel and the Globalization of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Mudimbe, V. Y. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.

Mukoma wa Ngũgĩ. The Rise of the African Novel: Politics of Language, Identity, and Ownership. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018.

Mullaney, Julie. Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. New York: Continuum, 2002.

Nagypal, Tamas. “The Subalterns Who Walked Themselves to the Neo-liberal Market.” Film International 13.3 (September 2015): 84–96.

Nairn, Tom. Faces of Nationalism: Janus Revisited. London: Verso, 1998.

Nänny, Max. “The Waste Land: A Menippean Satire?” English Studies 66 (1985): 526–35.

Naremore, James. More than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Navarette, Susan J. “The Anatomy of Failure in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 35.3 (1993): 279-315.

Neetens, Wim. “Politics, Poetics, and the Popular Text: The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.” Literature and History 14.1 (1988): 81–90.

Nesbit, Edith. The Enchanted Castle. London: Echo, 2006.

Ngara, Emmanuel. Art and Ideology in the African Novel: A Study of the Influence of Marxism on African Writing. London: Heinemann, 1985.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: James Currey, 1992.

Nolan, Emer. James Joyce and Nationalism. London: Routledge, 1995.

Obiechina, Emmanuel. Culture, Tradition and Society in the West African Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975.

Obiechina, Emmanuel. Language and Theme: Essays on African Literature. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1990.

O’Brien, Flann. At Swim-Two-Birds. 1939. New York: New American Library, 1976.

O’Brien, Flann. The Dalkey Archive. New York: MacMillan, 1965.

Ojinmah, Umelo. Chinua Achebe: New Perspectives. Ibadan: Spectrum, 1991.

Ortega y Gasset, José. The Revolt of the Masses. Trans. anon. London: Allen and Unwin, 1932.

Oyono, Ferdinand. Houseboy. Trans. John Reed. 1966. London: Heinemann, 1990.

Palmer, Eustace. An Introduction to the African Novel. New York: Africana, 1972.

Parrinder, Patrick. “Heart of Darkness: Geography as Apocalypse.” Fin de Siécle/Fin du Globe. Ed. John Stokes. New York: St. Martin’s, 1992. 85-101.

Parry, Benita. Conrad and Imperialism: Ideological Boundaries and Visionary Frontiers. London: Macmillan, 1983.

Paul, Ronald. “Tressell in International Perpsective.” The Rise of Socialist Fiction. Ed. H. Gustav Klaus. Sussex: Harvester, 1987. 231–50.

Pecora, Vincent P. “‘The Dead’ and the Generosity of the Word.” PMLA 101 (1986): 233-45.

Pecora, Vince. Self and Form in Modern Narrative. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.

Peters, Jonathan. “English-Language Fiction from West Africa.” A History of Twentieth-Century African Literatures. Ed. Oyekan Owomoyela. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993. 9–48.

Phillips, Gene D. Beyond the Epic: The Life & Films of David Lean. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2006..

Pifer, Lynn. “Slacker Bites Back: Shaun of the Dead Finds New Life for Deadbeats.” Better Off Dead : The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human. Eds. Deborah Christie and Sarah Juliet Lauro. New York: Fordham University Press, 2011. 163–174.

Podolsky, J. D. “He’s Green and He’s Proud.” People (September 30, 1991). https://people.com/archive/hes-green-and-hes-proud-vol-36-no-12/. Accessed November 18, 2018.

Rainey, Lawrence. “With Automatic Hand: The Waste Land.” The New Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot. Ed. Jason Harding. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 71–88.

Ravenscroft, Arthur. Chinua Achebe. Ed. Ian Scott-Kilvert. London: Longmans, 1969.

Riquelme, John Paul. Teller and Tale in Joyce’s Fiction: Oscillating Perspectives. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983.

Risam, Roopika. “A Blueprint of the Self: Architecture, Memory, and Politics in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.” Another Life (2012): 97–116.

Roberts, Adam. Fredric Jameson. London: Routledge, 2000.

Robins, Nick. The Corporation That Changed the World: How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational. 2^nd Ed. London: Pluto Press, 2012.

Ruotolo, Lucio. The Interrupted Moment: A View of Virginia Woolf’s Novels. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986.

Rushdie, Salman. “Damme, This Is the Oriental Scene for You!” The New Yorker (June 23 and 30, 1997): 50–61.

Rushdie, Salman. “The Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance.” London Times (July 3, 1982): 8.

Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage-Random House, 1979.

Sedlack, Valerie. “‘A World of Their Own’: Narrative Distortion and Fictive Exemplification in the Portrayal of Women in Heart of Darkness.” CLA Journal 32.4 (1989): 443–65.

Seshagiri, Urmila. “To the Lighthouse and the Art of Race.” The Cambridge Companion to To the Lighthouse.” Ed. Allison Pease. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 92–102.

Shaffer, Brian W. “‘Rebarbarizing Civilization’: Conrad’s African Fiction and Spencerian Sociology.” PMLA 108.1 (1993): 45-58.

Shippey, Tom. J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001.

Sicherman, Carol. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o: The Making of a Rebel. London: Hans Zell, 1990.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage-Random House, 1979.

Singh, Frances. “The Colonialistic Bias of Heart of Darkness.” Conradiana 10 (1978): 41-54. Citations from the reprint in Kimbrough 268-80.

Smith, David. Socialist Propaganda in the Twentieth-Century British Novel. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1979.

Smith, Johanna M. “‘Too Beautiful Altogether’: Patriarchal Ideology in Heart of Darkness.” “Heart of Darkness”: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism. Ed. Ross C. Murfin. New York: St. Martin’s, 1989. 179-95.

Smith, Murray. Trainspotting. London: British Film Institute, 2002.

Squires, Claire. Zadie Smith’s White Teeth: A Reader’s Guide. New York: Continuum, 2002.

Stillman, Anne. “Prufrock and Other Observations.” The New Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot. Ed. Jason Harding. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017.41–54.

Stratton, Florence. Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender. London: Routledge, 1994.

Sultan, Stanley. Ulysses, The Waste Land, and Modernism: A Jubilee Study. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1977.

Taiwo, Oladele. Culture and the Nigerian Novel. New York: St. Martin’s, 1976.

Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage-Random House, 1966.

Thompson, E. P. “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” Past and Present 38 (December 1967): 56–97. (Later included as a chapter in his 1991 book Customs in Common.)

Thornton, Weldon. Allusions in Ulysses: An Annotated List. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1961.

Totah, Karina M. “Trainspotting’s Playlist: A Compilation of Subcultural Struggles.” Bright Lights Film Journal (April 30, 2004). https://brightlightsfilm.com/wp-content/cache/all/trainspottings-playlist-a-compilation-of-subcultural-struggles/#.W7DvT5NKg_U. Accessed September 30, 2018.

Tracy, Robert. “Brian Friel’s Rituals of Memory.” The Irish University Review 37.2 (2007): 395–412.

Tressell, Robert. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1955.

Trotter, David. “T. S. Eliot and Cinema.” Modernism/Modernity 13.2 (April 2006): 237–65.

Turner, Margaret E. “Achebe, Hegel, and the New Colonialism.” Ed. Kirsten Holst Petersen and Anna Rutherford. Chinua Achebe: A Celebration. Oxford: Heinemann, 1990. 31-40.

Unger, Leonard. “Intertextual Eliot.” Southern Review 21 (1985): 1094–1109.

Viswanathan, Gauri. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.

Walsh, William. A Manifold Voice: Studies in Commonwealth Literature. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970.

Watt, Ian. Conrad in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979.

Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957.

Watts, Jarica Lynn. “‘We are divided people, aren’t we?’: The Politics of Multicultural Language and Dialect Crossing in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth.” Textual Practice 27.5 (2013): 851–874.

Watts, Jill. Mae West: An Icon in Black and White. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Weber, Alan S. “Michael Powell’s The Thief of Bagdad and Abbas Kiarostami’s A Taste of Cherry: Two Faces of Orientalism.” Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies 6 (2013) :91–108.

Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. 1904–1905. Trans. Talcott Parsons. 1930. London: Routledge, 1995.

Welsh, Irvine. Trainspotting. 1993. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996.

Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.

Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Williams, Raymond. Writing in Society. London: Verso, 1983.

Woolf, Virginia. “Modern Fiction.” The Common Reader. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1948. 207-218.

Woolf, Virginia. “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown.” Collected Essays, Vol 1. Ed. Leonard Woolf. London: Hogarth Press, 1968.

Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. 1927. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 1994.

Zwerdling, Alex. Virginia Woolf and the Real World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.

[1] Adapted from the discussion of this novel in my book The Modern British Novel of the Left.

[2] Parts of this section are adapted from my discussion of Heart of Darkness in my book A Practical Introduction to Literary Theory and Criticism.

[3] Malachi “Buck” Mulligan is based on Joyce’s friend Oliver St. John Gogarty. For all its literary extravagance, Ulysses is intensely rooted in the realities of 1904 Dublin.

[4] Mulligan lifts the bowl of water he is using to shave in mockery of the lifting of the chalice containing wine (symbolically, the blood of Christ) in the Catholic mass.

[5] Latin: “I will go up to the altar of God.” The traditional beginning of the Catholic mass. Mulligan is here being intentionally irreverent, perhaps even blasphemous—partly because he knows it will bother the somber Stephen, who takes Catholicism (and most other things) very seriously, despite the fact that he has lost his belief. Note that Joyce, in Ulysses and elsewhere, uses a leading dash (in the French style) to indicate spoken dialogue, rather than quotation marks.

[6] “Kinch” is Mulligan’s nickname for Stephen—and was apparently also a nickname that Gogarty gave to Joyce. No one knows why, though some have theorized, given Mulligan’s later reference to “Kinch, the knife-blade,” that it is an onomatopoeia suggesting the sound of a cutting knife. Ultimately, the nickname is one of the many mysteries of this enigmatic text.

[7] Jesuits are members of an order of Catholic priests, the Society of Jesus. They are particularly noted for their efforts in scholarship and education. Stephen, of course, is not a Jesuit, though he (like Joyce) has been educated in Jesuit-run schools.

[8] The mention of the gunrest provides a subtle reminder of the military origins of the tower—and of the violent background of British colonialism.

[9] “Christine” is a feminized version of “Christ.” Mulligan is making an irreverent allusion to the Black Mass conducted by Satan-worshippers, in which the body of a woman is used as an altar.

[10] “Ouns” = “Wounds.” “God’s blood and wounds” is a blasphemous oath.

[11] In the Catholic mass, red wine is used to represent the blood of Christ. Mulligan here is sarcastically suggesting that the red wine should perhaps be mixed with white wine to represent the white cells in Christ’s blood. His point is to make a mockery of the whole notion of symbolically drinking the blood of Christ in the sacrament of the Eucharist. A medical student (as was Gogarty), Mulligan would be aware of such problematic details.

[12] “Chrysostomos”: Greek, “Golden-mouthed.” A reference here to Mulligan’s dental work, but also typically used to indicate oratorical skill. Here, it is also a sly reference to John Chrysostom (349–407), an important founder of the early church. Honored as a saint, he was known for his oratorical skills.

[13] The source of these answering whistles in unknown, another of the mysteries of Ulysses. They are perhaps an echo. But, as Mulligan seems to be whistling to God, the suggestion is that he has received a reply, even though it presumably does not literally come from God.

[14] Mulligan here is addressing the “old chap” upstairs, suggesting that perhaps God zaps the wine with some sort of magical current to transubstantiate it into the blood of Christ—much in the way that lightning is used by Victor Frankenstein to animate his creature.

[15] The allusions in Ulysses are often a bit obscure. Here, the “prelate” to whom Mulligan is being compared would appear (based on a letter written by Joyce himself in 1912) to be Rodrigo Borgia (1432–1503), who in 1492 became Pope Alexander VI. Rodrigo and his illegitimate children, Cesare and Lucrezia, are regarded as quintessential examples of libertinism and corruption. Rodrigo here stands as an image of Mulligan’s sinfulness but also a reminder that the Catholic clergy has often been just as sinful, only more hypocritical.

[16] Mulligan refers here to the myth of Icarus and Daedalus. The latter, a master craftsman, made a pair of wings held together by wax so that the former, his son, could fly. But Icarus, becoming excited by the flight, soared too near to the sun, causing the wax to melt. Losing his wings, he plunged into the sea below. The myth is typically employed as a cautionary tale about excessive striving. Stephen, as a poet, is a craftsman of sorts, but the irony of Mulligan’s allusion is that Stephen functions throughout Ulysses as a son figure, with protagonist Leopold Bloom (introduced in Chapter 3) serving as a sort of father figure to him. Indeed, the first chapter of Ulysses is conventionally referred to by scholars as the “Telemachus” chapter, though that designation does not appear in the actual text. Telemachus was the son of Odysseus in Homer’s The Odyssey, a text to which Ulysses is related in important ways. (“Ulysses” is the roman name of the Greek “Odysseus.”) Bloom is an ironic modern figure of Odysseus, making Stephen, the dominant character in Chapter 1, a figure of Telemachus.

[17] A dactyl is a meter composed of a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables. Mulligan uses this figure from poetry to tease the poet Stephen.

[18] Mulligan’s name does not, in fact, have a Hellenic ring. Mulligan is a quintessentially Irish surname, and Malachi is a Hebrew name, the name of an Old Testament prophet. It is not, however, unheard of as a name in Ireland. Still, in Hebrew the name means “My Messenger,” so that the name would symbolically (and ironically) make Mulligan the Messenger of God.

[19] Stephen clearly resents the presence of the Englishman Haines in their midst, which he regards as a reminder of British control over Ireland. Haines, incidentally, is based on the Englishman Richard Samuel Chenevix Trench (1881-1909), whom Gogarty in fact hosted in his rented Martello Tower at the same time as Joyce.

[20] This reminder of the dirtiness of Stephen’s handkerchief begins a panoply of references to physical bodily functions that permeate the entire text of Ulysses, which openly acknowledges the status of human beings as biological creatures, in open defiance and mockery of the traditional Catholic horror of the body and its functions.

[21] Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909), English poet and novelist. Though a writer of only moderate importance, he was also known for advertising (and exaggerating) the decadence of his own lifestyle. He thus marks a fitting literary hero for Mulligan. The reference to Swinburne begins the cascade of literary allusions that are one of the most important hallmarks of Ulysses.

[22] In his poem “The Triumph of Time” (1866), Swinburne refers to “The sweet sea, mother of loves and hours.” The mother reference, of course, is calculated to get under Stephen’s skin, given that he is still brooding over the death of his mother.

[23] Mulligan produces his own parody of Swinburne’s florid poetic style. He is as irreverent toward poetry as he is toward religion, two things that Stephen, of course, takes very seriously.

[24] Greek: “upon the wine-colored sea.” The phrase appears several times in The Odyssey and thus here constitutes the first direct allusion to that key text.

[25] Greek: “The sea! The sea!” The quote is from Xenophon’s Anabasis, written early in the fourth century BC. It is the cry of a Greek army at having reached the Black Sea and thus having escaped what had appeared to be certain death.

[26] The reference to the artificial harbor that lies one mile to the northwest of the tower. Today, the very British name “Kingstown” has been changed to the very Irish “Dún Laoghaire.”

[27] Though this phrase appears simply to replicate Mulligan’s earlier allusion to Swinburne, it actually comes from the work of the Irish writer George Russell, known by the pen name of “A.E.” Russell himself appears in Chapter 9 of Ulysses (“Scylla and Charybdis”), when Stephen acknowledges that he owes Russell money with the memorable line “A.E.I.O.U.”

[28] Mulligan here rather brutally makes clear that all of his “mother” references have been intentionally aimed at Stephen’s personal situation. When Stephen’s dying mother asked him to pray with her, he refused, on the grounds that it would be inappropriate, given that he does not believe in God. Mulligan believes he should have faked it to spare his mother’s feelings.

[29] Stephen, of course, is thinking here of God, but in a sarcastic way, given that he is an unbeliever.

[30] The term “hyperborean” is used by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), whose thought exercised an influence on the modernists exceeded only by the influence of Marx and Freud. Nietzsche applied the term to his “Übermensch,” the superior human who has transcended what Nietzsche saw as the slave mentality of Christian ethics and metaphysics. Mulligan is simply saying that he is as much of an unbeliever as is Stephen but adding his special pedantic flair—and suggesting that he would be less pious in his unbelief, as the take nothing seriously.

[31] A mummer is a sort of clownlike street performer, often performing skits that involve death and resurrection. A mummer is the kind of figure with whom Mulligan would no doubt identify. Stephen, of course, is typically the very antithesis of a mummer, so Mulligan’s label here is clearly ironic.

[32] Joyce was a master of poetic phrasing, but his most poetic lines were typically ironic. Ulysses is a book that is very much about love, in the tradition of much of the literature that came before. Ulysses, however, is a departure in that it is primarily about sexual love. Joyce sets Ulysses onJune 16, 1904, because that was the date on which he first went out walking with Nora Barnacle, who would eventually become his life. Atypically, for Dublin dates, the evening ended with a sexual climax, as Nora pulled him off inside his pants. No such encounter seems to have occurred for Stephen at this point in his journey through life.

[33] “Dogsbody” is British slang for a lowly underling relegated to doing unpleasant tasks that no one else wants to do.

[34] Stephen is still officially in mourning, so he can only wear black. The irony is that Stephen is being so fastidious about observing the traditions of mourning for his mother but otherwise professes to be an iconoclast—up to an including his refusal to pray with his dying mother. Stephen’s excessive mourning for his mother parallels Hamlet’s reaction to the death of his father. Indeed, Stephen will be a figure of Hamlet throughout Ulysses.

[35] Mulligan calls Stephen out on the inconsistencies in his attitudes. He seems insensitive, but he has a point.

[36] The Ship is a pub on Lower Abbey Street.

[37] A reference to syphilis, though the actual term would be “general paresis of the insane.” Mulligan and his fellow medical students apparently like to deliver sarcastic diagnoses of their friends, without much regard for medical accuracy.

[38] Given to morbidity, Stephen converts Mulligan’s earlier “Dogsbody” reference into an image of an actual dog’s body. Despite his rejection of Catholicism, Stephen often displays a very Catholic horror of the physical body. He might have turned away from the specifics of Catholic doctrine, but many Catholic ideas and attitudes are deeply rooted in his psyche. As Stephen’s friend Cranly tells him in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,“It is a curious thing, do you know, … how your mind is supersaturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve.” Joyce seems to have understood well that ideological conditioning can be subtle, deep, and durable.

[39] “Skivvy” is a typical British slang term for a maid or other servant who does menial chores.

[40] Phrases such as this one from the Lord’s Prayer often pop up in Ulysses, indicating the extent to which the daily language even of unbelievers is permeated with Catholicism in 1904 Ireland.

[41] Ursula was a third century Christian martyr noted for her devotion to virginity.

[42] Caliban is, of course, the “savage” character in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, sometimes thought to be based on Elizabethan visions of Native Americans. Here, though, as Thornton notes, the direct reference is to the Irish writer Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), who, in the preface to his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), wrote: “The nineteenth century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass” (Thornton 14). Mulligan here overtly calls attention to the source of his quip in Wilde.

[43] Mirrors have long been used as symbols of the accurate representation of reality in art, as when Hamlet argues that the purpose of drama should be “to hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature.” Stephen here appears to suggest that Irish art tends to represent reality in a distorted form, though it might in fact be that it is reality itself that is distorted in Ireland—due to the impact of British colonialism and the Catholic Church. The usually dour Stephen definitely has his witty moments.

[44] Haines, who has come from Oxford University to study Irish culture and might, perhaps, be interested in collecting Irish witticisms such as Stephen’s.

[45] “Jalap” is a powerful purgative obtained from the dried tuberous root of a Mexican vine of the morning-glory family. Mulligan’s reference here is probably a facetious invention, but it does at least indicate his awareness of the British colonial enterprise in Africa and of the fact that this enterprise was far less altruistic than British propaganda would have us believe.

[46] Mulligan’s suggestion that Ireland could become more civilized by learning from ancient Greek civilization echoes the anti-Semitic writings of the prominent Victorian Matthew Arnold (1822–1888), who argued that English culture was far too “Hebraic” and needed to become more “Hellenic.” By 1904, however, Greek culture was coming to symbolize a sort of Bohemian freedom from conservative bourgeois morality, which is not what Arnold had in mind at all.

[47] Stephen here recalls a moment from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Stephen’s thoughts often draw upon his memories in ways that are only vaguely linked to what is actually going on in his life at the moment.

[48] Mulligan here appears to recall a moment of “ragging,” or hazing, that occurred while he was at Oxford with Haines.

[49] Apparently alludes to the popular song“Break the News to Mother” (1897). Stephen’s references are not always to lofty literary or philosophical texts, and Ulysses itself is pervaded with allusions to popular songs and other examples of contemporary popular culture.

[50] Magdalen College (pronounced “maudlin”) is one of the colleges that make up Oxford University.

[51] To have one’s pants pulled down as a playful joke. The equivalent American slang term would be “pantsed.”

[52] The reference here to Arnold suggests that Stephen understood Mulligan’s reference to “Hellenising” Ireland as a reference to Arnold.

[53] “Grasshalms” are simply blades of grass. In the two preceding paragraphs, Stephen (poet that he is) composes his own poetic description of Mulligan’s reference to the “ragging” of Kempthorpe. Stephen is given to such compositions.

[54] Joyce is the master of stream of consciousness. Here, Stephen runs through a sequence of seemingly unrelated thoughts, though all are reactions to Mulligan. “To ourselves” recalls the Irish Sinn Féin, and thus has nationalist and anticolonialist resonances. “New paganism” echoes Mulligan’s irreverence and suggests a new anti-bourgeois (and anti-Catholic) morality. “Omphalos,” which is Greek for “navel,” might partly suggest the appearance of the Martello Tower. It could also suggest Mulligan’s narcissistic sense of being at the center of the universe, as well as recalling the notion of “navel gazing,” which refers to an excessive concentration on oneself to the exclusion of everything else.

[55] Bray Head is a hill that is a prominent coastal landmark near Dublin. It would not, however, literally be visible from the tower.

[56] Mulligan here acknowledges his own insensitivity, suggesting that he remembers only empirical details, without emotion or any sense of moral judgment.

[57] The “Mater” is the Mater Misericordiae, a Dublin hospital run by the Catholic Sisters of Mercy. In 1904, it contained a hospice ward, so death would commonly be observed there. It is located on Eccles Street, as is the home of Leopold and Molly Bloom, two crucial characters in Ulysses.

[58] The Richmond Lunatic Asylum, now known as St. Brendan’s Hospital.

[59] Mulligan suggests that Stephen applies the same intellectual style to his unbelief that Jesuits apply to their belief.

[60] The medical student Mulligan views the death of Stephen’s mother in the most callously mechanistic of terms.

[61] Sir Peter Teazle is a character in School for Scandal (1777), a play by the Irish playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan. The implication of this entire sentence is that Stephen’s mother was out of touch with reality at the end and really didn’t understand what was going on around her. Mulligan suggests that it would have thus done no harm for Stephen to have prayed with her, but of course his argument also implies (inadvertently) that it did no harm for Stephen not to pray with her.

[62] Lalouette’s was a Dublin mortuary that, like many mortuaries of the time, employed professional mourners to help create the appropriate atmosphere of sadness and gloom. Wearing black mourning attire, they would simply stand around and look bereaved. Mulligan suggests that Stephen apparently wants him to act like one of these mourners; he also suggests that this would be ridiculous.

[63] Mulligan’s words are insensitive; but Stephen is clearly overreacting, as he often does.

[64] Saint Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1566) was the founder of the Society of Jesus. Mulligan is suggesting that Stephen should stop brooding like a Jesuit and get on with his day.

[65] “Sassenach” is derived from the Irish word sasanach (meaning “English”). Itis a resentful term applied by the Irish to their English conquerors.

[66] A “rasher” is a slice of bacon.

[67] Inspired by his own reference to Stephen’s brooding, Mulligan quotes from Yeats’s 1893 poem “Who Goes with Fergus” as he descends the stairs. The fact that a medical student can quote Yeats suggests that poetry and other forms of literature were a prominent part of Irish culture in 1904.

[68] The next line of Yeats’s poem reads “And rules the shadows of the wood.” Stephen appears to recall it here, continuing Mulligan’s quotation. Stephen knows the poem well, having sung it to his dying mother—as we learn in the following paragraph. Joyce also knew it well (and admired it), having attended the premiere of the play.

[69] Stephen’s thoughts continue to dwell on “Who Goes with Fergus?,” from which the phrase “White breast of the dim sea” is taken directly.

[70] Stephen often thinks in poems, as he here poetically describes (in his own mind) the sea outside the tower.

[71] Stephen recalls the keepsakes locked away in his mother’s drawer. This recollection triggers others, as Stephen begins to recall his mother’s memories as if they were his own, going back to her childhood.

[72] Edward William Royce was a well-known performer associated with London’s Gaiety Theatre. He played the title role in the Dublin premiere of Turko the Terrible.

[73] The pantomime was a popular theatrical form in late-nineteenth-century England and Ireland. This form should not be confused with the silent pantomimes performed by mimes; such pantomimes featured a sequence of various types of performances, held together by the vague context of a well-known story or theme.

[74] Turko the Terrible was a popular pantomime performed in Dublin throughout the late nineteenth century. Thornton notes that the version performed in Dublin would have been the adaptation by the Irish author Edwin Hamilton of William Brough’s original English pantomime Turko the Terrible; or, The Fairy Roses, first performed in 1868 at London’s Gaiety Theatre (17). The adaptation was first performed in Dublin in 1873. The allusion to the pantomime represents one of a number of vaguely Orientalist references in Ulysses. Later in the novel, for example, Bloom will think of Turko as he imagines himself wandering through the streets of an exotic Middle Eastern city.

[75] Lines from Turko the Terrible, in which King Turko imagines the advantages of gaining the magial power to become invisible.

[76] The sudden shift from Turko the Terrible back to Yeats indicates the free intermixture of “high” and “low” culture that is typical of the entire text of Ulysses.

[77] Stephen here might be thinking of the theosophical notion of a universal memory to which each person’s individual memories are added after death. Theosophy had a significant following in Ireland at the beginning of the twentieth century, with writers such as A.E. and Yeats showing a particular interest in the spiritualist movement.

[78] Stephen’s ruminations on his dead mother often recall the encounter of Hamlet with the ghost of his father.

[79] Latin: “May the troop of confessors, glowing like lilies, surround you. May the choir of virgins, jubilant, take you in.” The words are from a Catholic prayer for the dying, intended to be said by a layman in the absence of a priest. The prayer will be referenced at several points in Ulysses.

[80] In Stephen’s often lurid imagination, his dead mother has been transformed into a sort of supernatural monster.

[81] Stephen seems to be a bit heartened by this sunlight, which he “hears” in an example of the synesthesia that he experiences at several points in Joyce’s work. Many people experience this effect, in which a stimulus to one sense is experienced in a different sense, but it seems to be an especially valuable ability for a poet.

[82] “Quid” is a slang term for a British pound sterling, as represented by a paper note. It is worth 20 shillings. A “guinea” is also a pound, but it is represented by a coin; in the complex British monetary system, a guinea is actually worth 21 shillings. Mulligan is thus here suggesting that they should try to squeeze every possible shilling out of Haines. Money is mentioned quite often in Ulysses, providing a reminder of the centrality of capitalist economics to the phenomenon of modernity.

[83] Stephen is currently working as a teacher and is due to be paid on this day. We will see him on the job in Chapter 2, “Nestor.”

[84] In typical Irish slang, a “kip” is an unattractive or messy place. Mulligan appears to use the term here to indicate the unpleasantness of Stephen’s job. Mulligan also uses the term in a general negative sense, much as an “American” might use the term “crap.”

[85] Still another slang term for a British pound. A sovereign is equivalent to a quid.

[86] London’s working-class inhabitants, especially on the East End, are widely referred to as “cockneys.” They are known for their distinctive accents.

[87] Mulligan here quotes from “Coronation Day,” a popular song, widely sung in the streets of England in anticipation of the coronation of King Edward VII in 1902, following the death of his mother, Queen Victoria. Mulligan here jokingly equates Stephen’s payday to Edward’s coronation day, though the joke involves an appropriate pun, given that a “crown” is also a unit of English currency, worth 5 shillings.

[88] We know from Portrait that Stephen sometimes enjoys smells that others find unpleasant.

[89] Clongowes Wood College is a Jesuit boys’ boarding school attended by both Stephen and Joyce from ages 6–9, until declining family financial circumstances made it necessary to seek a less expensive school.

[90] Stephen often muses on the question of just what constitutes human identity. In “Scylla and Charybdis,” for example, he ponders the notion that all molecules in the body are periodically replaced, yet we maintain a consistent sense of identity.

[91] Stephen resents the notion of being in a subaltern position—as are all colonial subjects. In Portrait, he adopts the personal motto “non serviam” (Latin: “I will not serve.”) The phrase echoes that traditionally attribute to Lucifer as he begins his rebellion in heaven.

[92] In this context, a barbacan would appear to be a hole in the wall of the tower, through which those occupying it could look out or perhaps fire upon attackers.

[93] More poetic imagery forming in Stephen’s mind. The extended views we have of the interiors of the minds of Joyce’s characters tells us a great deal about what discourses (such as poetry and religion for Stephen or business and science for Bloom) have helped to shape their thinking.

[94] Mulligan’s reaction to the smoke is less poetic than Stephen’s.

[95] “Janey Mack” is a mild oath used in Ireland, roughly equivalent to “gosh.”

[96] Mulligan here coyly interrupts himself in the midst of an obscene joke about the use of candles as dildoes. Given the prominence of candles in Catholicism, the joke has special resonances in Ireland, where this sort of joke is often particularly made about nuns.

[97] Likely another oath. Mulligan probably here means “Jesus,” often pronounced in Ireland as “Jaysus.”

[98] “Pet” = a moment of anger or exasperation.

[99] Latin: “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” The Catholic invocation of the Holy Trinity.

[100] Mulligan here makes one of his typical scatological jokes. “To make water” is common slang for “to urinate.”

[101] Mulligan offers his joke to Haines for his collection of Irish folk culture. He does so, of course, in a way that mocks the entire Nationalist project of glorifying such culture.

[102] The Mabinogian is a medieval compendium of Celtic legend, though it is Welsh, rather than Irish. The Upanishads constitute a Sanskrit text that contains many of the central ideas of Hinduism. As usual, Mulligan is being facetious, though his target seems to be both the Irish Nationalist anticolonial project and Haines’ colonialist project of cultural appropriation.

[103] Mother Grogan, Stephen suggests, is a character who belongs not in lofty texts such as the Mabinogian, but in vulgar Irish street songs like the one Mulligan is about to sing, thanks to Stephen’s inspiration.

[104] In one version (probably the one Mulligan has in mind), the next line of the song, here judiciously omitted, is “She pisses like a man.”

[105] Mulligan speaks to Haines in mock anthropological jargon, referring to the Irish as “the islanders,” as if they are a primitive tribe on a remote Pacific island. In calling God the “collector of prepuces,” he refers to the Old Testament injunction that all Jewish men should be circumcised. “Prepuce” is a technical medical term for “foreskin,” again showing Mulligan’s status as a medical student.

[106] Stephen’s vision of the milk woman derives from the central role played by such country women in Irish folk culture.

[107] Mulligan complains about unhealthy living conditions in Ireland in such terms that even the old woman can tell he is a medical student.

[108] Feeling left out of Mulligan’s patter with the old woman, Stephen’s thoughts drift into a very Catholic misogynistic vision of women as inherently unclean and impure, as when Eve, tempted by Satan (the serpent) led Adam into trouble.

[109] In 1904, the only place one might find Irish routinely spoken was in isolated rural pockets in the western part of the island.

[110] Joyce here has some fun at the expense of the Irish Nationalist promotion of the Irish language by creating a scene in which, not only does the old country woman not speak Irish, but none of the Irish characters do. Only the Englishman, studying Ireland from a rather condescending perspective, can speak Irish.

[111] The old woman’s math is another example of the highlighting of financial transactions in Ulysses.

[112] A florin in a two-shilling coin.

[113] Mulligan again quotes Swinburne, this time from a poem called “The Oblation” (1871), which opens with this line.

[114] Mulligan continues to quote from Swinburne’s “The Oblation.” His knowledge of English poetry seems quite good.

[115] “Stony” = broke, lacking money.

[116] Mulligan mockingly adapts the famous call to battle of Great Britain’s great naval leader, Admiral Horatio Nelson, who will figure later in Ulysses as well. Mulligan, however, here suggests that the main duty of Irish men is the drink and “junket,” i.e., carouse.

[117] We know from Portrait that Stephen has an aversion to bathing.

[118] Apparently Haines is impressed by Stephen’s witticisms.

[119] “The again-biting of in-wit,” the inward turn of a mind gnawing on itself in guilt. Stephen here accuses Haines of being interested in studying Irish culture as a way of assuaging his sense of guilt over centuries of English oppression in England. But of course Stephen himself is wracked with guilt over his mother, giving the phrase an extra resonance.

[120] Stephen continues his rumination on guilt by invoking the “damned spot” of Shakespeare’s Lady MacBeth, one of the most famous images of guilt in all of literature.

[121] Readers of Ulysses will encounter Stephen’s full discourse on Hamlet in “Scylla and Charybdis,” where he argues that the play was inspired by events in Shakespeare’s own life.

[122] Stephen succinctly states the central problem of life under capitalism.

[123] His priestly garments. Mulligan is still playing the role of priest.

[124] Mulligan now quotes Walt Whitman to describe his choices in clothing. One of the ironies of Ulysses is that Mulligan openly quotes poetry more than does Stephen, who tends to think inwardly about poetry. Mulligan’s knowledge of poetry is broad, though superficial.

[125] Stephen’s hat is of a kind that one might find in the Latin Quarter in Paris, frequented by artsy types.

[126] Mulligan jokes on the Biblical passage “And going forth, he wept bitterly” (Matthew 26:75). Joyce himself was a master of such warped quotations, which are used to particularly good effect in Finnegans Wake.

[127] Walking stick.

[128] Stephen calls attention to the military/colonial background of the tower.

[129] The government of Prime Minister William Pitt (1759–1806) oversaw the building of the Martello towers in Ireland in 1803–1806 as a protection against possible French invasion.

[130] See note 52. Mulligan suggests that their tower is the center of the universe.

[131] Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) was a distinguished medieval Catholic scholar. Mulligan suggests that he can’t handle Stephen’s pedantry until he has had a few drinks.

[132] Oscar Wilde was known for his witticisms, which were often paradoxical.

[133] Mulligan lampoons Stephen’s theory, throwing in a jab at the Catholic notion of the oneness of God and His Son.

[134] Japhet in Search of a Father is the title of an 1836 novel by Capt. Frederick Marryat, an English naval officer. It involves the attempt of an abandoned child to locate his father. Throughout Ulysses, Stephen isrepresented as being in search of a father figure, his own father being a rather inadequate one. Bloom will ultimately fill that role, but largely in an ironic way.

[135] Elsinore Castle, home of Hamlet.

[136] Mulligan here cites a passage from Hamlet in which Horatio warns Hamlet against possible treachery on the part of the ghost. It is essentially a warning against false fathers.

[137] A rocky coastal landmark near Sandycove tower.

[138] Mulligan’s irreverent poem strives to be as offensive as possible to Catholic sensibilities. What he quotes here is the opening stanza of an actual ballad, “The Ballad of Japing Jesus,” composed by Gogarty. Stephen later gets the title slightly wrong.

[139] As Mulligan continues with the ballad, he seems to have promoted himself from a priest figure to a Christ figure.

[140] Mount Olivet is a ridge in East Jerusalem from which Christ is supposed to have ascended to heaven.

[141] Mulligan closes with the final stanza of the ballad, having skipped several others.

[142] Stephen apparently finds Mulligan’s performances as tiresome as Mulligan finds Stephen’s.

[143] For Stephen, Catholicism is a complete system. You either believe it or you don’t.

[144] Free thinkers believe that all questions should be approached with logic and reason, without limitations placed on thought by religious dogma.

[145] The metal tip on Stephen’s wooden walking stick.

[146] A familiar is an animal-like spirit that accompanies a magician or wizard, enhancing his power. Stephen here playfully imagines his walking stick having magical powers, like a magic wand.

[147] “Now I eat his salt bread.” From a passage in Dante’s Paradiso in which Dante learns from his ancestor Cacciaguida that he (Dante) will soon be exiled from his beloved Florence. Cacciaguida essentially warns Dante not to count on the hospitality of others, as Stephen feels he cannot count on the hospitality of Mulligan.

[148] In this famous line, Stephen complains of the domination of Ireland by both the British Empire and the Catholic Church (which is headquartered at the Vatican in Rome, Italy). Stephen will soon make this clear.

[149] Displaying a typical British attitude, Haines both expresses regret for the treatment of Ireland by England and refuses to accept responsibility, blaming it all on “history.” But men, Marx reminds us, make their own history.

[150] Stephen repeats his earlier identification of the Catholic Church as one of Ireland’s oppressors by citing the Nicene Creed of 325 AD in Latin: “et unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam ecclesiam”: one holy catholic and apostolic church.

[151] Stephen launches into a reverie on Church history, beginning with an evocation of. Famous piece of Renaissance music, Missa Papae Marcelli (Mass for Pope Marcellus, c. 1562), by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525-1594).

[152] Photius I of Constantinople (c. 810–883) is a great figure in Church history but was also known for his involvement in a number of controversies and conflicts. Ultimately, he was a key figure in splitting the Church into Western (Roman Catholic) and Eastern Orthodox segments. He was subsequently revered in the Eastern Church and condemned in the Western one.

[153] Stephen identifies Mulligan with the history of heresy in the Church

[154] Arius (c. 250-336) was an early religious thinker whose elevation of God the Father over Christ the Son ran contrary to the ultimately orthodox vision of the unity, or consubstantiality, of the two.

[155] Valentine (died c. 166) was an early gnostic thinker later regarded as a heretic by the Catholic Church for his views that the world was created not by God, but by a demon, and for his belief that Christ was pure spirit and had no physical (“terrene”) body.

[156] Sabellius, a famous third century thinker regarded as a heretic for his view that “Father,” “Son, and “Holy Spirit” were not three different entities but merely three different names for the same entity.

[157] The Archangel Michael leads God’s armies against the forces of Satan in the Book of Revelation. Stephen thus here aligns Mulligan with Satan, though he sometimes thinks of himself as a rebel in the mode of the Miltonic Satan as well.

[158] Stephen’s knowledge of the history of heresy is impressive, while his focus on relatively arcane issues of theology is also telling.

[159] French: “Damn! In the name of God!” Stephen imagines (with self-deprecating humor) a crowd reacting with enthusiasm to the mental performance he has just completed inside his head.

[160] Haines is virulently anti-Semitic, not a particularly unusual attitude in England at the time. (note that Haines’ name in French means “hate.”) The protagonist of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom, is the son of a Jewish father. He experiences considerable anti-Semitism in Ireland as well, even though he is not technically Jewish himself.

[161] A manmade harbor near Sandycove.

[162] Stephen’s imagination again turns morbid as he imagines a man who has recently drowned offshore.

[163] Alec Bannon will later appear as a minor character in the novel.

[164] We will learn later in Ulysses that the “sweet young thing” is Bloom’s daughter Milly, who has just turned fifteen. She has recently taken a job in a photographer’s shop in Mullingar, the main town in country Westmeath, forty miles or so from Dublin, where she is spending the summer.

[165] Mulligan continues his mock enactment of piety.

[166] Ireland was a key source of recruits for the British army, especially for its campaigns of conquest in Africa. Joyce, in Ulysses, is intensely aware of the irony of Irish soldiers, colonial subjects themselves, being used to help the English colonize others.

[167] “Stew” = “work,” especially at a menial job.

[168] Lily Carlisle does not appear again in Ulysses. This mention is all we know of her.

[169] Rotten.

[170] Pregnant.

[171] In popular legend, red-headed people are often associated with treachery and wantonness. One version of this particular superstition holds that red-headed women are sexually profligate and particularly wild during sex.

[172] Friedrich Nietzsche’s superman, envisioned as a new step in the evolution of humanity, overcoming the slave mentality that is the legacy of Christianity. Mulligan pretends to have suddenly discovers that he is the Übermensch.

[173] Money again. “Twopence” (pronounced “tuppence”) is a two-penny coin. Twelve pennies make a shilling, so a pound is worth 240 pence. Keep in mind that the sums mentioned in Ulysses are in terms of 1904 currency. The same amount of money in 1904 would be worth far more today. The exact conversion is complicated to calculate, but the difference would be more than two orders of magnitude.

[174] Mulligan’s parodies the Biblical language of Proverbs 19:17 (“He that hath pity upon the poor lendeth unto the Lord”), followed by a reference to Nietzsche’s key text on the Übermensch, Also Sprach Zarathustra (1883–1891).

[175] The English developed many racist stereotypes concerning the Irish over their long colonial occupation of the island, many of which emphasized the wild and uncivilized nature of the Irish.

[176] Stephen regards Haines and lists to himself things that should be avoided.

[177] Mulligan reminds Stephen that they are supposed to meet up at The Ship tavern at 12:30.

[178] Stephen again recalls the prayer. See note 77.

[179] Stephen resolves not to return either to the tower or to his family home after this day. He is often associated with the motif of exile in Joyce’s work.

[180] The swimming Mulligan calls to Stephen.

[181] Stephen responds, in his own mind, by calling Mulligan a “usurper.” Both Odysseus and Hamlet have problems with usurpers to the throne they consider rightfully theirs. The reasons why Stephen regards Mulligan as a usurper seem complex and a bit obscure, though it is clear that Mulligan regards himself as the lord of the tower. His frequent quotations from poetry also usurp Stephen’s authority in that realm.

[182] Adapted from my discussion of this film in Film and the American Left.

[183] This chapter draws heavily upon my 1998 book The African Novel in English.

[184] This section relies heavily on my article on Things Fall Apart in my Chinua Achebe Encyclopedia.

[1] The term “bourgeois” is often equated with “middle class,” the designation there referring to the class that lies in the middle (in terms of social standing) between the aristocracy and the working class. However, as capitalism evolves over time, the bourgeoisie become the owners of factories and other aspects of the means of production under the new system. They also often become much wealthier than the leftovers of the medieval aristocracy, so that the term “middle class” becomes increasingly problematic. The real class opposition under capitalism is that between the bourgeoisie and the working class, or proletariat. The aristocracy become increasingly irrelevant, while a new middle class of small business owners and professionals (such as doctors, lawyers, and professors) arises as well. This new middle class is more bourgeois than proletarian, but its members control a relatively small portion of the capitalist economy.

[2] Historians such as Jules Michelet and Jakob Burckhardt began using the term “Renaissance” at the end of the 1850s. But the idea of the bourgeois period as a recovery from the dark period of Catholic-aristocratic rule in Europe has its roots in the first true work of modern scientific historiography, Edward Gibbon’s (1737–1794) The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in six volumes between 1776 and 1789. Gibbon’s monumental work was the first history that attempted to explain, based on primary sources, the fundamental root causes of historical change, rather than simply to construct a narrative of events. It was also the first clearly to depict the Middle Ages as a decline from the former glories of the Roman Empire, glories to which the bourgeois world was now returning.

[3] Then again, capitalism itself did not suddenly arise out of nowhere in the early eighteenth century, which is why Michael McKeon, one of the more recent literary historians who has built upon Watt’s work, pushes his story of the birth of the English novel back to 1600. McKeon, however, still sees the rise of the novel as closely tied to the historical rise of capitalism. He concludes that “in the formation of novelistic narrative, the most important narrative model was not another ‘literary’ genre at all, but historical experience itself” (238). Another recent contribution, by Margaret Doody, draws upon the work of the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) in tracing the roots of the novel all the way back to ancient Greece.

[4] The classical description of the ways in which the regimentation of time required by capitalism led to new perceptions of time itself can be found in E. P. Thompson’s essay “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism.”

[5] Compare here Lennard Davis’s Factual Fictions (1983), which explores the rise of the novel as informed by nonfiction forms such as journalism and views the novel as a consolidation of journalism, history, and literature that arose out of anxieties over fictionality and as a response to censorship.

[6] These changes will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter. The best description of them can be found in Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Empire, which caps off a magisterial three-volume history of the nineteenth century that also includes The Age of Revolution and The Age of Capital. As there is no room in this chapter to discuss in detail the historical events of the nineteenth century, I refer those wishing more detail to Hobsbawm.

[7] In the phenomenon that M. H. Abrams has called the “secularization of the sublime,” Romanticism could be said to have displaced the worshipful energies formerly associated with religion onto a twin worship of nature and of the artist.

[8] Of course, essentially medieval political and economic structures continued to hold sway in most of Eastern and Western Europe until the Russian Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire were swept away in the upheavals of World War I.

[9] Compare here the description by the eminent critic Edward Said of the “lusterless world of the European bourgeoisie, whose ambience as every novelist of importance renders it reconfirms the debasement of contemporary life, the extinction of all dreams of passion, success, and exotic adventures” (Culture 157–58).

[10] The “proletariat” is the name given by Karl Marx to the new working-class that arose in conjunction with capitalism and that generated the labor that made capitalism possible.

[11] The American film Khartoum (1966) heroizes and sentimentalizes the defense of the city by Gordon, who is played in the film by Charlton Heston, then a major star probably best known for playing Moses in the Biblical epic The Ten Commandments (1956). The Mahdist forces are depicted largely as bloodthirsty killers in the film, though the Mahdi himself (played by the distinguished British actor Sir Laurence Olivier) is depicted as a surprisingly dignified figure.

[12] Nordau (1849–1923) was a Zionist from Budapest who spent most of his adult life living and working in Paris.

[13] See the volume edited by Hobsbawm and Ranger for a collection of essays dedicated to the ways in which the Victorians reacted to this situation by inventing a number of traditions (and, indeed, the very notion of “tradition” as we know it) that they hoped would restore a sense of historical stability and connectivity.

[14] Voting in Britain was still an all-male affair, however. Suffrage was not extended to British women until 1918, when women over 30 gained the right to vote. Ten years later, the voting age for women was lowered to 21. Some urban working-class men gained the right to vote in 1867, though full suffrage for working-class men would not be achieved until the reforms of 1918.

[15] For a succinct overview of the nonrealist strain in modern British fiction (including horror, fantasy, and science fiction, see my essay “The Other Side of History.”

[16] The Guinness Book of World Records lists Christie as the best-selling author of all time.

[17] The full text of the novel would not be published until 1955.

[18] Some accounts assert that Tressell returned to England just before the onset of the Boer War in 1899. Others claim that he in fact stayed in South Africa and fought alongside the Boers, after which he was captured and interned by the British until the end of the war.

[19] See Croft for a spirited discussion of the leftist literary scene in Britain in the 1930s.

[20] The Spanish Civil War began in 1936, after right-wing forces within the Spanish military revolted against a popularly-elected leftist Republican government in Spain. With General Francisco Franco at the helm, the rebel forces gained support from the German Nazis and the Italian fascists, while the Republicans gained support from the Soviet Union. Despite widespread pubic outcries, the governments of the United States and Britain stayed on the sidelines, despite reports of numerous atrocities being committed by the right-wing forces against Spain’s civilian population, which largely supported the Republicans. By 1939, Franco had secured control of Spain, where he remained in power as a military dictator (despite the loss by his allies in World War II) until his death in 1975.

[21] For more on leftist fiction in Britain, see Klaus, Pamela Fox, and my own The Modern British Novel of the Left.

[22] For more on the role of British volunteers in Spain, see Hoskins.

[23] Isherwood, like Auden and Aldous Huxley, would ultimately move to America, where his novels, strongly informed by his own experience as a gay man, have exerted an ongoing influence, partly through their film adaptations. His novellas Goodbye to Berlin (1935) and Mr Norris Changes Trains (1939)—ultimately published together as Berlin Stories in 1945—were the inspiration for the much-acclaimed musical film Cabaret (1972), which among other things documents the fall of Weimar Germany and the rise of the Nazis. His novel A Single Man (1964), set in Southern California, is a sensitive exploration of grief that was adapted into a much-admired film of the same title in 2009. Though it lacks the historical ramifications of the Berlin Stories, many consider A Single Man to be Isherwood’s finest literary achievement.

[24] The full text of this poem can be found at https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/memory-w-b-yeats.

[25] Born in Dublin, Shaw might rightly be considered an Irish dramatist. However, he lived and worked most of his life in England, and seldom visited Ireland after he left it in 1876; he tackled largely English topics in his drama. Most literary historians therefore treat him as a British dramatist, though he was sometimes highly critical of British policy toward Ireland. He also had extensive connections in Irish literary circles and was a close friend of W. B. Yeats.

[26] The Latin phrase “Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori” (“It is sweet and beautiful to die for one’s country”) is a conventional expression of patriotic zeal during wartime. The poem devotes itself to ironizing that expression through reminders of the true horrors of warfare.

[27] The Fabian society advocated a gradual evolution into socialism—as opposed to the sudden revolution envisioned by Marx. Founded in 1884, the society still exists today, though it reached the peak of its power and influence in the last years of the nineteenth and in the early years of the twentieth century, when figures such as Wells and Shaw saw its views as the path to building a new, more modern world. During its heyday, the society had many important members, though Sidney Webb (1859–1947) and Beatrice Webb (1858–1943)—who were among other things, founders (along with Shaw and others) of the London School of Economics in 1895—were its most important driving forces.

[28] There were actually six towns in the Staffordshire Potteries, but Bennett preferred “Five Towns” as a designation for his fictionalized version of the region, simply because he thought it had a better ring to it than “Six Towns.”

[29] The Bloomsbury Group was a key driver of modernist culture in England. It was composed of a group of influential artists, writers, and intellectuals who regularly met to discuss various issues related to modern culture. Their aesthetic sympathies were strongly in the direction of modernist innovation, while their social sympathies tended to be rather elitist, most of the members having come from upper-class backgrounds (and most having been educated at Cambridge). In addition to Woolf, key members included Woolf’s husband, the publisher and essay writer Leonard Woolf; the painter Vanessa Bell (Virginia Woolf’s sister); the art critic Clive Bell (Virginia Woolf’s brother-in-law and the husband of Vanessa); the novelist E. M. Forster; the art critic and painter Roger Fry; the painter Duncan Grant; the biographer Lytton Strachey; the noted economist John Maynard Keynes; and the literary journalist Desmond MacCarthy.

[30] Bell’s book “tries to justify the continued existence of an elite whose primary function is to preserve high art by cultivating taste among its members” (Zwerdling 102).

[31] The Second International, formed a meeting in Paris on July 14, 1889, remained the primary international organization for the promotion of socialism and workers’ rights until 1916. Among other things, the Second International marked the emergence of Marx as the leading thinker whose work drove the socialist movement. It also united workers around the globe in a concerted effort that, among other things, provided a central impetus for both governments and capitalists to institute reforms in areas such as public education and working-class suffrage, as well as the beginnings of modern social safety-net systems such as the kind that would grow into the Social Security system in the U.S. The Second International also established May 1 as International Workers’ Day and March 8 as International Women’s Day, holidays that are still observed around the world today. It finally fell apart in the midst of World War I, when rivalries among nations began to supersede international working-class solidarity.

[32] See, for example, Joseph Frank.

[33] Jameson has even suggested that Conrad might be read “not as an early modernist, but as an anticipation of that later and quite different thing we have come to call variously textuality, écriture, pos-modernism, or schizophrenic writing” (Political Unconscious 219).

[34] Pioneered in its modernist mode by Joyce, influenced by Freud, and anticipated by the indirect free style of Flaubert, stream-of-consciousness writing attempts to capture a sense of the flow of thoughts and impressions that passes through a character’s mind in response to external events. This flow is often presented in the form of interior monologues that reflect a character’s inner thoughts much as the soliloquy form is an outward reflection of a character’s thoughts in the work of dramatists such as Shakespeare.

[35] As of this writing, the book is now available as a free Kindle e-book from Amazon.com, as well as in an inexpensive audiobook edition from Amazon’s Audible.com.

[36] See, for example, the discussion of Heart of Darkness in Guerard for such a reading.

[37] See Johanna Smith for an excellent investigation of Marlow’s attitudes toward women. But see Sedlack for an argument that Heart of Darkness itself thoroughly undermines Marlow’s views in this regard.

[38] Ironically, Casement would be executed by the British government in 1916 for his participation in the Easter Rising against British rule in Ireland. See Chapter 3.

[39] It is because of this emphasis on conveying sense impressions (and on doing so via technique that go beyond simple direct description) that Conrad has often been described as an “impressionist” writer—after impressionist painters such as Claude Monet, who attempted to renew perception by painting objects and scenes from unusual angles and with unusual lighting, while trying to convey a sense of movement in a still painting. On Conrad as an impressionist, especially in Heart of Darkness, see Byrne.

[40] In addition, much feminist criticism of Heart of Darkness has focused on Marlow’s encounter with Kurtz’s “Intended,” in which he extensively misleads the woman by allowing her to gather false impressions of his relationship with an opinion of her former fiancé. See Johanna Smith.

[41] The full text of this lecture can currently be found on-line at https://polonistyka.amu.edu.pl/__data/assets/pdf_file/0007/259954/Chinua-Achebe,-An-Image-of-Africa.-Racism-in-Conrads-Heart-of-Darkness.pdf.

[42] The full text of this poem will be included here for discussion purposes. The full, uninterrupted text can be found many places on-line. One of the most interesting ways to read the poem on-line is via the graphic novel version produced by Julian Peters. Available at https://julianpeterscomics.com/page-1-the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock-by-t-s-eliot/.

[43] London is a city famous for both its fog and its pollution. Thus, while the setting of this poem is obviously intended to be a sort of generalized modern city, these lines do suggest that London is the model.

[44] In 1939, Eliot published a book of light verse entitled Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. This book eventually became the inspiration for the hit stage musical Cats, which premiered on London’s West End in 1981 and on Broadway in 1982.

[45] Time is a central concern of this poem, as it is of modernism in general. Prufrock mostly wastes time, almost as a sort of unconscious protest against the emphasis on efficient use of time in the modern world. Here, he would seem to be alluding to the line “Had we but world enough and time” from the poem “To His Coy Mistress,” written around 1650 by metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell, one of Eliot’s favorites. In Marvell’s poem, the speaker protests the fact that his loved one is resisting his advances, thus wasting time. Here, though, it is the speaker Prufrock who is himself wasting time.

[46] Apparently a reference to a long poem entitled “Works and Days,” written by the ancient Green poet Hesiod around 700 BC. This time addresses a time of agrarian crisis in ancient Greece, when crop failures necessitated a series of colonial adventures in search of new farmlands. Here, there is a suggestion that, in the modern world, time has become a commodity, managed and controlled for maximum economic output.

[47] Reminiscent of Hamlet’s “I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space,” but perhaps more likely another reference to “To His Coy Mistress,” in which Marvell’s speaker says, “Let us roll all our strength and all / Our sweetness up into one ball.”

[48] Hamlet is perhaps the one literary character best known for hesitating. One might therefore think of him as a model for Prufrock, but Prufrock himself realizes that he is nothing like Hamlet, who hesitates before taking monumental actions, while Prufrock’s contemplated actions are trivial.

[49] Deriving the term from the sometimes raucous celebrations of the medieval carnival, Bakhtin uses “carnivalesque” to designate energies associated with a joyously comic acceptance of the physical aspects of the human body (sex, food, excrement), as opposed to the stern, humorless attempts of the medieval Catholic Church to repress the physical.

[50] Eliot, in particular, thought that he and Joyce were employing a similar “mythic method,” drawing upon myths and other ancient cultural texts to provide order and structure for new works produced amid the chaos of the modern world. Eliot outlined his view of Ulysses in his highly laudatory essay “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” where he makes clear his view that Joyce has used Homer’s Odyssey to provide a structural model for Ulysses, just as some have seen Eliot as using The Golden Bough in a similar way in The Waste Land. Eliot argues that Joyce’s use of Homer is “simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history (“Ulysses” 681). This may well describe Eliot’s own use of the mythic method. But see my own extensive reading of Joyce’s engagement with Homer, which argues that Joyce in fact uses Homer parodically and subversively, as a way of rejecting the authority of the past and arguing that ancient texts such as The Odyssey are of little direct relevance to the modern world (Joyce 17–43).

[51] Leavis argues that these first few lines suggest the remoteness of modern civilization from nature and natural rhythms (90).

[52] One might compare here Pound’s suggestion in his poem “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly” that World War I had been fought in defense of cultures that were no longer worth fighting for. According to this poem, those who died in World War I lost their lives

For an old bitch gone in the teeth,

For a botched civilization.

…

For two gross of broken statues,

For a few thousand battered books.

We should not overestimate the extent to which the memory of World War I lingers over The Waste Land as well, accounting for some of its negative view of the state of modern civilization.

[53] Here Eliot supplies the note “Cf. Ezekial 2.7.” It is the first of several points in the poem at which Eliot identifies the source to which he is alluding but does not elaborate on the significance of the source. Cleanth Brooks, one of the leading New Critics, has noted that this allusion is important because this particular Biblical passage refers to a thoroughly secularized world that has lost all concern with God (62). The rebellious Israel of the passage is, of course, analogous to a modern world devoid of faith. The passage reads as follows:

And
he said unto me, Son of man, stand upon thy feet, and I will speak unto thee.
And
the spirit entered into me when he spake unto me, and set me upon my feet, that
I heard him that spake unto me.
And
he said unto me, Son of man, I send thee to the children of Israel, to a
rebellious nation that hath rebelled against me; they and their fathers have
transgressed against me, even unto this very day.

[54] Eliot’s notes here point us to Ecclesiastes 12:5 as a source. That verse and he ones that follow can be read in different ways, but one reading is that they describe a desiccated wasteland, which would make the reference highly appropriate. In addition, Stanley Sultan notes that Ecclesiastes 12:12 reads “And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.” He suggests that this verse can be taken as an ironic commentary on Eliot’s notes, one function of which is to parody “bogus scholarship” (53). If even Eliot’s Biblical references are playful and ironic (somewhat like the reference to Ecclesiastes 25:17 in the film Pulp Fiction), then the whole poem is potentially cast in a new light.

[55] The phrase “a handful of dust” has been attributed to a variety of sources, ranging from John Donne to Joseph Conrad. The exact reference is probably less important than the fact that, by now, readers are aware that many passages have sources in other works, literary or otherwise. Unger notes the multiple attributions of this line and suggests that his personal favorite is Conrad’s short story “The Return,” in which the husband in a failing marriage is described thusly: “He was afraid with that penetrating faltering fear that seems, in the very middle of a beat, to turn one’s heart into a handful of dust.” (1096).

[56] Eliot identifies these lines as coming from Tristan und Isolde, I, verses 5–8. This opera, written by Richard Wagner and premiering in 1865, is based on the story of Tristan and Iseult, a popular medieval romance derived from Celtic legend. It is a tragic tale of ill-fated, forbidden love. The German in these lines translates to “Fresh blows the wind to the homeland, my Irish child, where are you waiting?” This suggestion of a love that does not come to fruition thus reinforces the wasteland images that come directly before these lines.

[57] Another passage from Tristan und Isold: “Waste and empty is the sea.”

[58] Eliot apparently intended the name “Madame Sosostris” to sound Egyptian (and thus supposedly exotic)—but also fake. It was apparently suggested to him by “Sosostris, the Sorceress of Ecbatana,” a false name assumed by a (male) character in Aldous Huxley’s then-recent novel Crome Yellow (1921).

[59] A reference to Ariel’s song in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. This song about drowning of the father of Price Ferdinand echoes throughout The Waste Land and is also alluded to early in Ulysses:

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:

Hark! Now I hear them, —ding-dong bell.

[60] Eliot’s own rather dismissive footnote to this passage suggests that he sees fortune-telling via Tarot cards to be a somewhat debased modern practice, though the Tarot deck did originally have associations with the Grail legend, itself associated with the wounded king myths described by Frazer. Eliot: “I am not familiar with the exact constitution of the Tarot pack of cards, from which I have obviously departed to suit my own convenience. The Hanged Man, a member of the traditional pack, fits my purpose in two ways: because he is associated in my mind with the Hanged God of Frazer, and because I associate him with the hooded figure in the passage of the disciples to Emmaus in Part V. The Phoenician Sailor and the Merchant appear later; also the “crowds of people” and Death by Water is executed in Part IV. The Man with Three Staves (an authentic member of the Tarot pack) I associate, quite arbitrarily, with the Fisher King himself.”

[61] As Eliot himself suggests in his note to the first line, the “unreal city” image comes from the work of French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867). Eliot’s note:

Cf. Baudelaire:

“Formillante cite, cite pleine de reves,

Ou le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant.”

Characteristically, Eliot does not bother to supply a translation from the French or even to identify the source, which is “Les Sept Vieillards” (“The Seven Old Men’), which is poem XCIII of Baudelaire’s masterwork, the 1857 volume Les Fleurs du mal (“The Flowers of Evil”). The lines translate as “Swarming city, city full of of dreams, / Where the specter accosts the passerby in broad daylight.”

[62] Eliot now quotes from the preface to Les Fleurs du mal. The line is from the introductory poem “Au Lecteur” (“To the Reader”) in which humanity is described as sunken into stupidity, evil, and sin. Worst of all, the race is mired in boredom. The poem is clearly meant to shock and challenge readers, as is The Waste Land.

[63] Eliot’s note to this line refers us to the following lines from Antony and Cleopatra:

The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne

Burn’d on the water: the poop was beaten gold;

Purple the sails, and so perfumed that

The winds were love-sick with them …

[64] Brooks argues that Philomela is a key figure in the poem: “Lust drives forward urgently and scientifically to the immediate extirpation of the desire. Our contemporary waste land is in large part the result of our scientific attitude—of our complete secularization” (68). Note that the leading New Critics were largely conservative Southern Christians who were unremittingly hostile to science and to secularization.

[65] “Edmund Wilson has pointed out the rendition of the bird’s song here represents not merely the Elizabethans’ neutral notation of the bird’s song, but carries associations of the ugly and the coarse” (Brooks 68).

[66] “That Shakespearian Rag” was an actual popular song of 1912 (written by Herman Ruby and Gene Buck), here used to symbolize the tastelessness of modern popular culture. The chorus of the song goes as follows (the “Grizzly Bear” was a popular dance of the time):

That Shakespearian Rag, —

Most intelligent, very elegant,

That old classical drag,

Has the proper stuff, the line “Lay on Macduff,”

Desdemona was the colored pet,

Romeo loved his Juliet

And they were some lovers, you can bet, and yet,

I know if they were here today,

They’d Grizzly Bear in a diff’rent way,

And you’d hear old Hamlet say,

“To be or not to be,”

That Shakespearian Rag.

[67] The conventional call of the London barman as closing time approaches.

[68] The final drunken goodnight as the women leave the bar is here intermixed with the farewell of the mad Ophelia in Hamlet. Echoes of the cultural monuments of the past continue to appear within The Waste Land, but now in fallen contexts.

[69] Eliot’s note to this line points us to Edmund Spenser’s Prothalamion (1596), an Elizabethan wedding poem. “In Spenser’s ‘Prothalamion’ the scene described is also a river scene at London, and it is dominated by nymphs and their paramours, and the nymphs are preparing for a wedding. The contrast between Spenser’s scene and its twentieth century equivalent is jarring” (71).

[70] Another echo of Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”: “But at my back I always hear / Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.”

[71] Another reference to the drowning of Ferdinand’s father in The Tempest.

[72] Marvell again.

[73] C.I.F. is a common commercial term indicating that a price includes cost, insurance, and freight.

[74] The Cannon Street Hotel was located near the station that was the main departure point for travelers to the continent. It was thus a favorite meeting place for businessmen going abroad or coming from abroad.

[75] The Metropole: a luxury hotel in Brighton. Both it and the Cannon Street Hotel were luxury establishments, though both had reputations as popular sites for illicit sexual liaisons.

[76] Beginning at this point, Eliot slyly inserts two Shakespearean sonnets over the next twenty-eight lines. That they are virtually unrecognizable as such can be taken as a subtle suggestion of the way in which the works of the great artists of the past (such as Shakespeare) no longer function in a fallen modern world.

[77] In another sign of the dearth of true passion in the modern world, the woman is merely relieved that her just-completed sexual encounter is finally over. Sex in The Waste Land is never a source of fulfillment.

[78] Eliot suggests in his note to this song that it be compared to the song of the three Rhine-daughters in Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung (“The Twilight of the Gods,” 1876). Wagner’s Rhine-daughters lament the fact that, with the gold of the Nibelung stolen, their river has lost its beauty. Eliot’s Thames-daughters present the Thames as a polluted symbol of filth and lust, especially when (again) compared with its better days in the Elizabethan era.

[79] The sacking of Carthage by Rome in 146 BC is, of course, one of Western history’s central images of cultural destruction.

[80] In his note to this line, Eliot refers to Buddha’s Fire Sermon and compares it in importance to Christ’s Sermon on the Mount.

[81] Eliot identifies this line as originating with St. Augustine’s Confessions, which indicates a disavowal of worldly temptation in a passage that states “I entangle myself with these outward beauties, but Thou pluckest me out, O Lord, Thou pluckest me out.”

[82] Eliot associates this line with accounts of an Antarctic expedition during which the members reported a consistent feeling that there was an extra person with them. Critics have most commonly associated it with the journey of Christ’s disciples to Emmaus, when Christ accompanied them but arranged that they would not actually see him.

[83] “Datta, dayadhvam, damyatta” (“Give, sympathize, control”) is derived from a myth in the Hindu Upanishads which ascribes this meaning to the sound of thunder. The thunderstorm is apparently now fully underway.

[84] As Eliot notes, the reference here is to Dante’s Purgatorio. He includes the full passage in his note:

“Ara vos prec per aquella valor

que vos condus al som de l’escalina

‘sovegna vos a temps de ma dolor”

Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina.

Translation of the first three lines (spoken to Dante by the poet Arnaut Daniel): “Now, I pray you, by that virtue which guides you to the summit of the stairway, be mindful in due time of my pain.” Dante then responds with the line quoted by Eliot: “He is himself in the fire which refines them.” This Purgatorial fire, in short, has a potentially purifying and renewing effect, as opposed to the destructive fires of hell.

[85] Eliot identifies this Latin phrase as coming from the Pervigilium Veneris, a Latin poem of uncertain date and authorship. It translates as “When shall I be as the swallow?” This poem ends with a sad recollection of the story of Philomela and thus links back to the earlier references to this myth in The Waste Land. In the myth, Philomela’s sister Procne is transformed into a swallow.

[86] Quoted from a speech by the character Hieronymo in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (written between 1582 and 1592 and often seen as an important influence on Hamlet). Hieronyo loses his tongue in the course of the violent play, thus echoing Philomela.

[87] Much critical attention has been devoted to the process through which Woolf converted her personal experiences into fiction in this novel. See Fernald for an overview of that process, which is beyond the scope of this essay.

[88] Ramsay also has clear predecessors in English literature. For example, Minow-Pinkney argues that Mr. Ramsay “condenses into a single figure two illustrious literary predecessors, Casaubon and Lydgate, from Middlemarch” (88).

[89] This lighthouse is the Godrevy Lighthouse, which Woolf’s brother Adrian was once sorely disappointed not to be able to visit.

[90] It might be useful to compare here Richard Hoggert’s discussion of English “scholarship boys”—working class boys who were able to acquire high-level educations through the competitive scholarship system put in place in England at the beginning of the twentieth century. Hoggert notes that such boys often led troubled lives in adulthood, partly due to their sense of being “emotionally uprooted from their class” and yet unable to win the genuine respect of cultivated middle-class people: “at one boundary the group includes psychotics; at the other, people leading apparently normal lives but never without an underlying sense of some unease” (225).

[91] The figure of the “Angel of the House,” is a key stereotype of the nurturing, domestic Victorian wife and mother. The term derives from Coventry Patmore’s 1854 poem of the same title.

[92] See the discussion of Trainspotting in this volume for more on this historical relationship.

[93] Fry (whose biography Woolf would write in 1940) was an important influence on Woolf’s engagement with the arts, as was her sister, Vanessa Bell, an accomplished painter in her own right. On Woolf and the visual arts, especially in To the Lighthouse, see Bellamy. Much has, in fact, been written about this topic. See, for example, Humm, for a broad study that encompasses cinema and photography, as well as painting.

[94] There were, in fact, extensive interchanges between the Bloomsbury Group and Chinese artists. See Laurence.

[95] On the importance of Fanon in postcolonial studies, see Chapter 5.

[96] In addition to the work of Kiberd and Lloyd, many other readings of Irish literature as postcolonial have been conducted. See, for example, the books by Nolan and Duffy, as well as my own Ulysses, Capitalism, and Colonialism.

[97] By this time, the Irish Citizen Army counted Séan O’Casey among its members, though he did not participate in the Easter Rising.

[98] In Ken Loach’s much-admired 2006 film The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Irish insurgents involved in the War of Independence recite lines from “Socialism and Nationalism” to remind themselves of their ultimate goals, with which the film clearly sympathizes.

[99] Events surrounding the beginning of the Irish Civil War are dramatized in Neil Jordan’s 1996 film Michael Collins, the title character of which was the leader of the Irish Free State until his assassination in August, 1922.

[100] See, for example, my chapter on Joyce and Shakespeare in Joyce, Bakhtin, and the Literary Tradition for a discussion of the ways in which Joyce’s extensive allusions to the works of Shakespeare in Ulysses constitute a subversive assault on the cultural authority of the British Empire (139–170).

[101] On this aspect of Watt, see my chapter on the novel in Literature and Domination (20–41).

[102] The leading example of this kind of activity is probably the volume Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature, edited by Deane and including essays by Eagleton, Jameson, and Said.

[103] For more on the political dimensions of Heaney’s poetry, see Burris.

[104] The full text of this poem can be found at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50981/blackberry-picking.

[105] The full text of this poem can be found at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47555/digging.

[106] The Booker Prize, established in 1968 and now officially known as the “Man Booker Prize,” is one of Britain’s highest literary honors. For more on this award, see Chapter 8.

[107] Scholars traditionally cite the Gabler edition of Ulysses by chapter number followed by line number, rather than the page numbers used with most texts.

[108] For a useful discussion of this poem and its political context, see Bornstein.

[109] Yeats would later write an entire poem about Countess Markievicz and her sister Eva, entitled “In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz,” which describes the sisters as “two girls in silk kimonos, both beautiful,” further referring to Constance as a “gazelle.”

[110] Yeats, a Protestant who was in any case never very religious in the traditional sense, was, at this time, somewhat at odds with the Catholic Church due to its attempts to impose its will on the postcolonial Irish nation. One of his most famous acts as a senator was an impassioned (and, as it turned out, fruitless) speech against a proposed law banning divorce in Ireland, a law that would pass and then remain in effect for another seventy years.

[111].See Cope for a discussion of Joyce’s place in the modern movement toward depiction of urban wastelands, especially as this movement relates to the work of Dante (1-28).

[112] For more on this phenomenon, see the first chapter of Booker and Daraiseh.

[113].See Kershner for a fuller discussion of the relevance of this opera to the story (This was Font/Pitch 2,12 – On.JoyceThis was Font/Pitch 2,12 – Off.Note: The change to pitch (12) and font (1) must be converted manually. 63-5).

[114].Cope suggests that Little Chandler “envisions himself as an Ur-Eliot” (18). Thus, according to the argument with which I began this chapter, he is the antithesis of Joyce as a writer.

[115].The link between the Irish cult of self-sacrifice and Christ as a figure of sacrifice is quite direct. For example, note James Connolly’s pronouncement in the This was Font/Pitch 2,12 – On.Irish WorkerThis was Font/Pitch 2,12 – Off.Note: The change to pitch (12) and font (1) must be converted manually. of February 5, 1916: “Without the slightest trace of irreverence but in all due humility and awe, we recognise that of us, as of mankind before Calvary, it may truly be said ‘without the shedding of blood there is no redemption’” (quoted in MacCabe 169).

[116].Riquelme discusses the free indirect style of This was Font/Pitch 2,12 – On.DublinersThis was Font/Pitch 2,12 – Off.Note: The change to pitch (12) and font (1) must be converted manually. at some length, noting that character and narrator voices interact in varying ways in the different stories (92-129).

[117] Friel was born and grew up in Northern Ireland. However, his mother was from Country Donegal, near the town of Glenties. The setting of the play is based on her family home, just as the Mundy sisters in the play are based on her sisters.

[118] This aspect of the play is missing in the 1998 film adaptation, scripted by Irish playwright Frank McGuiness. Here, the action is simply presented in a straightforward manner, as it occurs, with only a brief bit of Michael’s voiceover narration (speaking from the perspective of many years later) appended to the action. Otherwise, the film is relatively faithful to the play, though many of the details concerning Irish politics in the 1930s have been removed.

[119] “Marconi” is taken from the brand name of the radio, which is itself derived from the name of Guglielmo Marconi (1874–1937), the founder of the company (Marconi’s Wireless Telegraph Company) that makes the radio. This company was one of the principal forces behind the founding of the BBC. Marconi is widely considered to be the inventor of the modern radio. His company also founded the world’s first radio factory in Chelmsford, England, in 1898. The Mundys set would have been manufactured in England.

[120] “The Isle of Capri” became popular in 1934, especially in Britain, where it was recorded by a number of English performers, including the bandleaders Lew Stone and Ray Noble and the very popular actress/singer Gracie Fields. Interestingly, the music to this song was composed by Austrian composer Wilhelm Grosz (who had fled to Britain because of the rise of a new fascist-leaning government in Austria), while the lyrics were composed by Northern Irish lyricist Jimmy Kennedy.

[121] In addition to Michael’s spoken narration, the play also includes stage directions that sometimes provide commentary on the action. These inserted comments are presented in italics.

[122] The African American activist Malcolm X famously used a version of this line in a speech that he gave at New York’s Audubon Ballroom on March 29, 1964. Referring to the way in which African Americans were originally brought to America on slave ships rather than in search of freedom, Malcolm noted that “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock. The rock landed on us.”

[123] Several American film stars are mentioned in the course of Dancing at Lughnasa, making it clear that the films seen by the Irish in the 1930s were largely American in origin. In addition to West, Sten, and Chaplin, the play refers to several actors who were best known for their performances in movie musicals, including child star Shirley Temple and the famous dance team of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

[124] For a survey of Lean’s films, see Phillips.

[125] BAFTA—the British Academy of Film and Television Arts—is roughly the British equivalent of America’s Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which gives out the Oscars. It was founded in 1947 (as the British Film Academy) by a number of leading figures in the British film industry, including Lean, Reed, Powell, Alexander Korda, and Laurence Olivier.

[126] For a survey of the films of Reed, see Evans.

[127] For a survey of the films of Powell and Pressburger, see Christie.

[128] As a testament to the technical sophistication of the film, it might be noted that it won Academy Awards for Cinematography (Georges Périnal), Art Direction (Vincent Korda), and Special Effects (Lawrence W. Butler and Jack Whitney).

[129] Indeed, the war erupted in the midst of the making of the film, causing the production to have to shift to Hollywood for the final stages in order to avoid German bombs.

[130] The film’s top-credited director, Ludwig Berger, was a German Jew, also in exile from the Nazis. Meanwhile, it might be noted that Veidt appeared as a Nazi in several anti-Nazi American films, including Casablanca (1942), one of the greatest classics in American film history.

[131] Powell, during his work on the film, had just returned from a stay in Burma, and his experience there seems to have influenced the depiction of the Arab cities of Baghdad and Basra in the film.

[132] See Naremore for a suggestion that Martins’ search for (and ultimate disillusionment with) Lime echoes Marlow’s quest to find Kurtz in Heart of Darkness (77).

[133] Greene’s later novel The Quiet American (1955) is something of a political cousin to The Third Man in the way it suggests that the United States often flexed its newfound military and political muscle around the world after World War II without really understanding the local situations in which it became involved. In particular, The Quiet Man suggests that it should have been obvious from the beginning that the American intervention in Vietnam would prove catastrophic.

[134] On this strategy of installing Shakespeare at the center of the British educational project in India, see Viswanathan.

[135] Egypt, of course, was a very different case, with a rich cultural tradition (including written culture) dating back thousands of years and with a rich modern literature (in Arabic) dating back to the second half of the nineteenth century. For that reason, the Egyptian novel will not be discussed in this chapter, though it might be noted that the twentieth century Arabic novel has flourished in Egypt, especially in the work of Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006), winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature.

[136] Much study has been done of the relationship between the African novel and African oral culture. See, for example, the book by Eileen Julien (1992).

[137] To a certain extent, the confrontation between oral and written culture that is often enacted in the African novel is a confrontation between indigenous African culture and the culture of Africa’s European colonizers. However, it is also important to recognize that in postcolonial Africa this confrontation is a matter of class, as well. Most upper-class Africans can now read and write; most lower-class Africans still cannot. Thus, as Christopher Miller notes, “the border between literate and illiterate is the most accurate indicator of class in Africa” (255).

[138] See my discussion of this novel in “Thomas Mofolo’s Chaka.” For a spirited argument that the early novels produced in South Africa are far more important than literary historians (including myself, though his description of my comments on the matter is misleading and unfair) have generally acknowledged, see Mukoma.

[139] In practice, Apartheid was in force even before independence, though it was the official policy of the South African government only from 1948 to 1990, when it began to be dismantled.

[140] The Négritude movement was animportant phenomenon in Francophone African literature, led by figures such as the Martinican poet, playwright, and critic Aimé Césaire (1913–2008) and Leopold Senghor (1906–2001), an important poet who became the first president of Senegal in 1960, holding that post for twenty years. Négritude drew upon techniques similar to those used by the French surrealists to try to develop a distinctively African mode of literary expression that would allow them to contribute to the development of a positive cultural identity for black Africans—and black people as a whole. Controversial and often-criticized, the Négritude movement nevertheless made major contributions to the development of African (especially French African) literature, though these contributions were more directly important in poetry than in fiction.

[141] The racist regime of apartheid South Africa categorized citizens according to strict racial designations. “Colored” South Africans are those of mixed race, generally part white and part black, though potentially part Asian.

[142] First given in 1953, the Hugo Awards are the most coveted awards given for science fiction writing. Named for pioneering sf editor Hugo Gernsback and administered by the World Science Fiction Society, the Hugo Awards are given at the annual World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon). Voted on by registrants at that convention, the Hugos thus are essentially a fan-based award, though many attendees at the convention are themselves science fiction professionals.

[143] Ato Quayson thus argues that much of the published criticism on Things Fall Apart is typical of criticism of African literature as a whole in that it treats the text as a transparent and direct representation of reality without paying sufficient attention to the book’s aesthetic dimensions, especially as those dimensions relate to African oral traditions.

[144] A similar motif occurs in Ferdinand Oyono’s Francophone African novel Houseboy, in which the Catholic missionary Father Vandermayer attempts to deliver his sermons in the Ndjem language, but with such poor pronunciation that virtually all of his words “had obscene meanings,” resulting in sermons “full of obscenities” (9, 35).

[145] It should be noted, though, that Achebe’s presentation of traditional Igbo society as entirely male-centered may not be entirely realistic. See, for example, Ifi Amadiume for a discussion of the ways that society placed far more weight on feminine values than Achebe indicates.

[146] India’s British colonizers, of course, attempted to assert their cultural superiority by denigrating indigenous Indian literary traditions. One might note the famous statement by Thomas Babington Macaulay, who—in his 1835 “Minute on Indian Education”—famously dismissed all “oriental” literature in support of a plan to make British literature (especially the work of Shakespeare) the linchpin of the British colonial school system in India. “I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic,” Macaualy modestly begins the work’s most famous passage. He then continues, much more haughtily: “But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit works. I have conversed, both here and at home, with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the oriental learning at the valuation of the orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is indeed fully admitted by those members of the committee who support the oriental plan of education.” On the processes that led to the establishment of Shakespeare at the center of colonial education in India, see Viswanathan.

[147] On the history of the East India Company, see John Keay. For an argument that the company was the forerunner of modern multinational corporations, see Nick Robins.

[148] The Mughal Empire, founded through military conquest in 1526, ruled much of the Indian subcontinent for more than two centuries. It was largely Persian in background, though I blended significantly with local cultural influences over time. Its rulers claimed direct descent from Genghis Khan (1162–1227). The empire disintegrated by the middle of the eighteenth century due to military losses both to indigenous Indian forces and to the forces of the British East India Company.

[149] See, for example, Jenny Sharpe for an account of British representations of the “Mutiny” in the second half of the nineteenth century, Sharpe emphasizes the lurid and sensationalist nature of these representations, as in their seeming obsession with (greatly exaggerated) stories of the rape of British women by Indian men during the rebellion. Also see my chapter on literature related to the mutiny in Colonial Power, Colonial Texts.

[150] For a study of British fiction about India, see my Colonial Power, Colonial Texts.

[151] For a sampling of criticism on Rushdie, see my edited collection Critical Essays on Salman Rushdie.

[152] Knighted by the British Empire, Tagore renounced his knighthood in 1919 in protest of the Jallianwallah Bagh massacre. Rushdie, incidentally, has called some attention to Tagore, by noting (with considerable surprise) in The Jaguar Smile (1987), a nonfiction account of his then-recent trip to Nicaragua, that Tagore was known and admired there.

[153] They are referred to as “Pappachi” and “Mammachi” throughout the text. These terms simply mean “grandfather” and “grandmother,” though neither is the prototypical kind grandparent.

[154] “Kochamma” is a Malayalam word indicating a respected lady. It can have connotations roughly equivalent to “aunt.” However, among Syrian Christians, the title “Kochamma” is often applied to the wife of a priest, which is particularly ironic in the case of Baby Kochamma.

[155] In this conflict, border disputes and other issues (including the fact that India granted asylum to the Dalai Lama after the failed 1959 Tibetan Uprising) led to all-out war between India and China, the world’s two most populous nations. The Chinese launched major offensives on October 20, 1962, in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis (which ensured that neither the U.S. nor the Soviets would intervene to provide aid to India). The Chinese declared a ceasefire on November 20, 1962, having achieved most of their military objectives, but tensions along the Chinese-Indian border remained high.

[156] For a powerful fictional representation of the hardships suffered by Dalits in the days when they were even more overtly despised and mistreated, see Mulk Raj Anand’s 1935 novel Untouchable, which, among other things, suggests that the sufferings of India’s untouchables were actual worsened by British colonization, even though certain other parts of Indian society were modernized in positive ways.

[157] “Sahib” is a polite form of address, typical used by Indian colonial subjects to address British men in India.

[158] A mundu, similar to a sarong or lungi, is a garment worn wrapped around the waist in Kerala. It is typically associated with informal lounging wear and can be worn by either men or women.

[159] On the other hand, for an attempt to argue that the transgressive sexuality depicted in The God of Small Things actually does have political possibilities, see Bose.

[160] For comparison, see my discussion of the ways in which Rushdie’s achievement in Midnight’s Children is sometimes undermined by his own inability to move beyond certain anticommunist prejudices (“Midnight’s Children, History, and Complexity”).

[161] Holi is a Hindu religious festival that celebrates, among other things, the coming of spring. It is a joyous celebration marked by the spraying of participants (and on-lookers) with a variety of bright colors. It has become popular around the world and is often celebrated by non-Hindus without specific religious connotations.

[162] The term “comprador,” or “comprador capitalist,” deriving from the Portuguese word for “buyer,” has been widely used in Marxist critiques of the postcolonial world. A comprador is a native agent who operates in the postcolonial world in the interest of Western corporations. The notion suggests the ongoing domination of much of the formerly colonized world by Western powers, even in the postcolonial era, with the complicity of an indigenous bourgeoisie.

[163] The British Commonwealth is an organization of loosely aligned states (currently numbering 53), most of which were formerly territories of the British Empire. The members of the Commonwealth have no specific legal obligations to one another but are united by their shared legacy dating back to the British Empire. Populations of Commonwealth nations constitute nearly one-third of the world’s population, though over half the population of the Commonwealth is in India alone. Advanced Western nations such as Australia and Canada are members, though the United States is not, and over 90% of the total population of the Commonwealth live in Africa or Asia.

[164] The Tiber is a river that flows through Rome.

[165] The quotation here is taken from a passage in Virgil’s Aeneid in which the Greek Delphic Apollo, via his priestess at the Greek colony of Cumae, near Naples. She told Aeneas, who was seeking to move into Italy, that such a foreign incursion into Italy would lead to much trouble: ‘I see wars, horrid wars, and the Tiber foaming with much blood’ (‘bella, horrida bella / et Thybrim multo spumantem sanguine cerno’ (Aeneid 6.86-7).

[166] For an excellent dramatization of the growing power of American music in Britain in the 1950s, see the BBC miniseries Lipstick on Your Collar (1993), written by Dennis Potter, one of the most creative voices in British television in the last decades of the twentieth century. Tellingly set in the time of the Suez Crisis of 1956, this miniseries—in its title and in its content—shows a Britain that is not only beginning to take a back seat to America in terms of global economic and military power but is also increasingly finding the texture of its daily life infiltrated by the sounds of American music.

[167] See also the 2009 American vampire-film version, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Undead. Hamlet is a very rich source of material.

[168] Merril’s anthology actually takes its title from a 1965 American pop song entitle “England Swings,’ by Roger Miller, which was a riff on the notion of “Swinging London,” a term popularly applied to the hip, youth-oriented English culture of the time.

[169] First given in 1953, the Hugo Awards are the most coveted awards given for science fiction writing. Named for pioneering sf editor Hugo Gernsback and administered by the World Science Fiction Society, the Hugo Awards are given at the annual World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon). Voted on by registrants at that convention, the Hugos thus are essentially a fan-based award, though many attendees at the convention are themselves science fiction professionals.

[170] Rhys was born on the Caribbean island of Dominica, but lived mostly in England from age 16 onward.

[171] The concept of metafiction is crucial to many accounts of the postmodern. Metafiction is fiction that not only calls attention to its fictional status but also to the literary techniques through which it was produced. Metafiction can be used to challenges the conventions of traditional fiction, though postmodernist metafiction is typically playful, employing its self-consciousness more for comic than for critical value.

[172] See my essay “Midnight’s Children, History, and Complexity: Reading Rushdie after the Cold War.”

[173] As with the texts of Joyce, there is no specific narrator in White Teeth, but merely a collection of diverse narrative voices, some of which can be associated with the points of view of specific characters, as in the technique of indirect free style, but some of which seem to come essentially out of nowhere. The latter can be vaguely identified with the attitudes of Smith herself, but one should be cautious about making assumptions with a text as complex as this one.

[174] Squires suggests that Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1989) is probably a more “legitimate comparison” with White Teeth than is Midnight’s Children, if only because The Satanic Verses deals with immigrants in London (17). More than any specific text, though, I would argue that Rushdie’s influence is a general one (and one that has certainly been exercised on Smith’s entire generation of British writers, especially those with roots in the former colonies.

[175] See MacLeod for an interesting discussion of the similarities between Midnight’s Children and White Teeth. MacLeod, in fact, thinks that the two books might be a bit too similar. For him, the success of Midnight’s Children might have established a new form of orthodox hybridity in British literature, while White Teeth was successful because it followed this new orthodoxy so directly, rather than breaking genuinely new ground.

[176] For more on this topic, see Jarica Watts, who also notes that language can be a limiting factor for immigrants in England as well.

[177] See, for example, Ashley Dawson’s chapter on White Teeth in his book Mongrel Nation, where he reads White Teeth within the context of the findings of the Human Genome Project.

[178] For a discussion of the some of the ethical problems associated with Chalfen’s tendency to think of this mouse as merely an experimental object, rather than a living creature, see Braun.

[179] This connection, of course, links Chalfen’s work directly with the notorious genetic experiments of the German Nazis, despite the fact that Chalfen is Jewish. This link clearly places Chalfen’s work in an even more negative light than it already was.

[180] The screenplay was drafted by Doyle himself, then reworked by experienced screenwriters Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais; all three received screenwriter credits for the film.

[181] Uilleann pipes are the Irish version of the better-known Scottish bagpipe.

[182] It should be noted, though, that Doyle’s play Brownbread (1987) features a military invasion of Ireland by the U.S., reminding us that, however multinational capitalism might be, it is still backed by the full force of the American military.

[183] Strong was still only seventeen when The Commitments premiered, though he looks somewhat older in the film. Described in People magazine as a cross between Joe Cocker and Meatloaf, he would go on to have a moderately successful solo career of his own (Podolsky). This characterization is an interesting one, though Strong is definitely closer to Cocker than to Meatloaf.

[184] This line is repeated almost verbatim from the novel, except there Jimmy uses the problematic word “niggers,” instead of “blacks” (Doyle 8–9).

[185] This list is lifted directly from the novel, except there it is Marvin Gaye who is to be studied for the whole lot, rather than Franklin (31).

[186] As a measure of the musical talent that Parker was able to assemble for the film, star Robert Arkins, who does not have a singing part in the film, delivers a rousing rendition of the 1965 soul classic “Treat Her Right” (originally recorded by Roy Head and the Traits) during the end credits of the film.

[187] Doyle is not, however, among the Irish writers who trace their lineage proudly back to Joyce. In 2004 (100 years after the setting of the action of Ulysses), Doyle expressed admiration for Dubliners, but declared that Joyce’s best-known work, Ulysses, is “overlong, overrated, and unmoving” and that it “could have done with a good editor” (Chrisafis). Doyle was speaking, by the way, at a celebration in honor of Joyce’s birthday, leading up to an extensive celebration In Dublin of the 100^th anniversary of Bloomsday.

[188] The novel’s version is as follows: “Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food intae yir mooth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yerself in a home, a total fucking embarrassment tae the selfish, fucked-up brats ye’ve produced. Choose Life” (187).

[189] Murray Smith notes that both of these figures are American, rather than British or Scottish, and suggests that American culture in general exerts a powerful influence on the film (18–20). “For all its ‘Scottishness,’” notes Smith, “the impact and appeal of America—its glamour and vitality—is [sic] everywhere in Trainspotting” (19).

[190] Then again, one could read the soundtrack of Trainspotting as having a more subversive function, it’s use of “underground” music expressing an opposition to mainstream bourgeois values and providing a sort of glue that hold together the subculture of the film’s youthful Scottish heroin-users. For an extended discussion of the role of music (and sound in general) in the film, see Totah.

[191] In some accounts, Bond is identified as having a Scottish father and a Swiss mother, but he grows up in various locations in Britain and on the continent and becoming a globe-hopping secret agent at a relatively young age. He has little in common with the working-class Edinburghers of the film.

[192] One might compare here Darren Aronofsky’s 2000 American film Requiem for a Dream, another successful postmodernist exploration of the topic of heroin addiction. Arnofsky’s film, however, is much darker in tone than is Trainspotting—though it does feature a number of clever postmodernist stylistic flourishes. It is also more overtly bitter in its denunciationof the hypocrisies of mainstream capitalist society and its own addictions to such things as diet pills and television game shows. See Booker (Postmodern Hollywood 42–46).

[193] This scene appears in the novel (p. 26), but there it is narrated in a more straightforwardly realistic fashion, as Renton merely feels about in the horrific toilet for the suppositories. The surreal addition of Renton diving down the drain appears to have been adapted from a scene in Thomas Pynchon’s key postmodernist novel Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), in which Tyrone Slothrop drops his harmonica down a toilet and then dives in to retrieve it.

[194] In the novel the speech is part of Renton’s first-person narration, delivered thusly, referring to his fellows, especially Begbie, whom he clearly despises: “Fuckin failures in a country ay failures. It’s nae good blamin it oan the English fir colonising us. They’re just wankers. We are colonised by wankers. We can’t even pick a decent, vibrant, healthy culture to be colonised by. No. We’re ruled by effete arseholes. What does that make us? The lowest of the fuckin low, the scum of the earth. The most wretched, servile, miserable, pathetic trash that was ever shat intae creation. Ah don’t hate the English. They just git oan wi the shite thuv goat. Ah hate the Scots” (Welsh 78).

[195] Since the 1706–1707 Act of Union, Scotland has been part of the United Kingdom with semi-autonomous status in many areas, though the UK has always been dominated by England and many in Scotland have continued to resent the Union. This resentment eventually led to a 2014 referendum on independence; however, 55% of Scottish voters voted to remain a part of the United Kingdom in the referendum.

[196] See Nagypal for a discussion of this ending as a surrender to the demands of neo-liberalism. Nagypal, interestingly, views the ending of Boyle’s seemingly much more upbeat Slumdog Millionaire in much the same terms, to the point that he describes Slumdog Millionaire as an “unofficial remake” of Trainspotting (84).

[197] See Davison for a concise review of these uses.

[198] It should be noted, however, that the social satire of Shaun of the Dead goes well beyond a send-up of the directionlessness of youthful slackers such as Shaun and Ed. For example, Shaun’s mother (Penelope Wilton) and stepfather (Bill Nighy), paragons of British bourgeois conformity, cluelessly maintain that stance even in the face of a zombie apocalypse, never wavering (until their final ends) from the devotion to the proper. It is as if they are running on automatic pilot, so programmed to obey certain social conventions that they are unable to deviate from their programming, even in an extreme crisis. Pete, Ed and Shaun’s more bourgeois friend, is similarly programmed.

[199] It should also be noted that Shaun of the Dead was the first in a three-film exercise in genre filmmaking directed by Wright and written by Wright and Pegg, the latter of whom stars in all three films. Collectively known as the “Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy”—because each film features a different flavor of Cornetto ice cream—each also features a different flavor of pop culture, as each belongs to a different popular genre. In addition to Shaun, these films include Hot Fuzz (2007), a cop film, and The World’s End (2013), an alien invasion film.

[200] Jameson mentions certain kinds of architecture—as well as the work of Ursula K. LeGuin, Philip K. Dick, and J. G. Ballard—as participating in this project, but—perhaps significantly—mentions no films.

Share this:

Like this: