• the impossibility to cognise life;

• the prevalence of intuition over reason, with the help of which reason was discredited and the way was widely open to mysticism;

  Secondly, one of the major concerns of the modernist art was the human being - man in its full sway and psychology - thus giving a psychological zest to the works of the modern art. Hence modernism was based on the psychologism offered by Freud. Then, Modernism posits itself very solidly on the two other philosophers' concepts - those of I. Kant and those of F. W. Nietzsche. Reactionists of the time praised and worshipped Kant's idea of man's mind being unlimited and his system of ethics as guided by the categorical imperative and they were a success when they joined these ideas with the Nitzschean conception of the superman and his rejection of traditional Christian values.

  Modernism developed in conscious opposition to classicism; it emphasised experimentation and the aim of finding an inner truth behind the surface appearance. The figures usually categorised as modernists include: Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, Proust, Kafka in novel writing, and Eliot and Pound in poetry. The basic features of modernism can be summarised as following:

• an aesthetic self-consciousness and reflexiveness;

• a rejection of narrative structure in favour of simultaneity and montage;

• an exploration of the paradoxical, ambiguous and uncertain, open-ended nature of reality;

• the rejection of the notion of an integrated personality in favour of an emphasis upon the Freudian split subject.

  Ezra Pound (1885-1972) and Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965), both Americans, made their homes in Europe, like their senior compatriot - Henry James. Both seemed concerned with trying to conserve what is best in European culture before European civilisation is finally destroyed. Pound followed Browning and various Italian and French poets of the Middle Ages, translated Chinese and Anglo-Saxon, looking for something to build on. He came to fruition of his talent in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, an autobiographical poem which sums up his position as a poet who detests the civilisation of Materialism, and is trying to build up a culture based on the past. Eliot, after satirising the puritanical world of New England and condemning its philistinism, produced in 1922 an epoch-making poem of some 400 lines, The Waste Land, which set out in a new poetical technique a picture of a materialistic age dying of lack of belief in anything: the solution to the problem of living in such an arid Waste Land of a civilisation to be to accept it as a kind of fiery purgation (Eliot quotes Dante: Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina - 'Then he hid in the fire which refines them') and to gather together such scraps of civilisation and faith as have not yet been destroyed ('These fragments I have shored against my ruins'). The Waste Land makes tough demands on the reader: it quotes frequently from the literatures of Europe and India (in the original), uses a rapidly shifting point-of-view (sometimes it is the poet speaking, sometimes a woman in a pub, sometimes a prostitute, sometimes the Greek mythical figure Tiresias, who is half-man and half-woman and thus contains in himself all the other characters), and uses verse which owes something to practically every English poet of the past, though Eliot's voice is always heard clearly enough. Eliot's distinctive verse-form is a kind of free verse derived from the blank verse of the late Elizabethan playwrights: it is supple and capable of much variety, also highly dramatic. The Waste Land is a closely organised poem, and not a word is wasted: it repays the trouble spent on it and is, in fact, a sort of door into European literature - a concise summary of a civilisation which is contrasted sharply with the present age.

  Pound spent much of the last part of his life on a very long poem, the Cantos. In it he ranges over the covilisations of the past - Eastern as well as Western - and fragments of Chinese appear, as well as Greek, Latin, and the modern European tongues. The general theme is the decline of civilisation. The Cantos can be read as a history of civilisation, in which time and place are not important and all ages are seen as one. Eliot's finest work after The Waste Land was the Four Quarters - four poems organised on the analogy of musical pieces, in which the old concern for European civilisation has been changed into a very Christian preoccupation with 'the intersection of time with the timeless' - the way in which eternity can redeem the mistakes of history. The technique is remarkable, though we notice clearly one characteristic of modern poetry which is frequently condemned - the tendency for verse to sound like prose. In our age the dividing-line between prose and poetry is very thin indeed.

  In 1922 there appeared an important work in prose which sometimes sounds like verse. This was Ulysses, by the Irishman James Joyce (1882-1941), a novel of enormous length dealing with the events of a single day in the life of a single town - the author's native Dublin. Joyce had previously published a volume of short stories called Dubliners, and a striking autobiographical novel - Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The hero of the novel - Stephen Dedalus - appears again in Ulysses, this time subordinated in a secondary role: the hero is Hungarian Jew, long-settled in Dublin, called Leopold Bloom. The novel has no real plot. Like the Greek hero whose name provides the title, Bloom wanders from place to place, but has very unheroic adventures, and finally meets Stephen, who then takes on the role of a sort of spiritual son. After this the book ends. Never was a novel written in conciser prose. we are allowed to enter the minds of the chief characters, are presented with their thoughts and feelings in a continuous stream (the technique is called 'interior monologue'). The book is mostly a never-ending stream of Bloom's half-articulate impressions of the day. Each chapter corresponds to an episode in Homer's Odyssey and has a distinct style of its own, and the prose imitates all the English literary styles from Beowulf to Carlyle and beyond. The skill of the book is amazing.

  One reaction against the Liberalism of Wells and Shaw was to be found in the novels and poems of the Englishman David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930), who in effect rejected civilisation and, like Blake, wanted men to go back to the 'natural world' of instinct. Lawrence's novels - Sons and Lovers, The Plummed Serpent, Aaron's Rod, and Lady Chatterly's Lover, to mention a few. - are much concerned with the relationship between man and woman, and he seems to regard this relationship as the great source of vitality and integration. Lawrence has nothing of science: instinct is more important; even religions are too rational, and if man wants a faith, he must worship the 'dark gods' of primitive peoples. Nobody has ever presented human passion, man's relationship to nature, the sense of the presence of life in all things, like Lawrence. His poems, which express with intimate knowledge the 'essences' of natural phenomena and of the human instincts, are also capable of bitter satire on the 'dehumanisation' of man in the twentieth century.

  Another notable British novelist of modernism is Virginia Woolf (1882-1941). She dispenses with plot and even characterisation, preferring to analyse in the closets possible detail a mood or thought as presented at a given moment in time. Like Joyce, she uses an interior monologue device to depict 'the stream of consciousness' of her characters. Her prose is careful, exquisitely light, approaching poetry in its power to evoke mood and sensation. Her view of the novel was a comprehensive one; she did not wish to limit herself to the mere story-telling, but wanted to see the novel absorb as many literary devices as possible, even, occasionally, to break away from prose and use verse instead. Her novels seem to be static, lacking in action and human interest - a kind of literary form which is neither true poetry nor true prose, neither completely dramatic nor completely lyrical. Her best works are Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves. Her Orlando is a curious work - it presents a picture of English history from the Renaissance to modern times, as seen through the eyes of a character who is, presumably, immortal and, moreover, changes from hero to heroine exactly half-way through the book. Her two books of literary criticism - The Common Reader 1 and 2 - show a penetrating intellect and great good taste.

  Often associated with Lawrence is Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), whose early novels - Antic Hay, Those Barren Leaves, and Point Counter Point - showed a world without aim or direction (artists, rich people, the Waste Land of post-war London) and offered no solution to the puzzle of a seemingly meaningless existence. Point Counter Point especially seemed to show that man is a creature too mixed, too divided by 'passion and reason' to find much happiness. In this book several stories going on at the same time, on the analogy of musical counterpoint; the employment of vast scientific knowledge in ironic descriptions of human actions - as though to say, 'Science has no solution either'. That book by Huxley was probably the last modernist novel in Britain.

  E. M. Forster (1879-1970) is another British novelists renowned for his novels Howard's End and Where Angels Fear to Tread, which are distinguished by very taut construction and the creation of suspense through incident. In them Forster does not think a plot very important.

  A Passage to India - perhaps the finest novel of his - deals with the East and West duality: can the two worlds really meet. After a long analysis of the differences, expressed in terms of a vividly realised India, against which the puppets of English rulers parade, Forster comes to the conclusion that they cannot - at least not yet. Forster's book, Aspects of the Novel, is admirable criticism and entertaining reading.

  The name of Evelyn Waugh (1903-66), who proved himself to be one of the best modern humorists (in his early essay Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies depicting the empty search for amusement which animated 'bright young people' of the leisured classes after the First World War), is usually associated with the theme of the Second World War. In Men at Ams and Officers and Gentlemen, Waugh chronicles the first years in the army of a rather pathetic Tietjens character, seemingly trying, though unsuccessfully, to find stability in the army myth. These books, admirably reporting the first years of the War, are often uproariously funny. Among other great novels we can distinguish A Handful of Dust, which tells us about the break-up of a marriage, and the consequent destruction of a stability symbolised by one of the old landed estates; it is significant that the hero leaves England, after his wife leaves him, to seek a lost city in the wilds of Brazil; The Loved One - a satire on American myth told heartlessly but brilliantly.

  Graham Greene was obsessed with the problem of good and evil, and his books are a curious compound of theology and stark modern realism. Greene sees the spiritual struggle of man against the background of 'seedy' town life (Brighton Rock) or in the Mexican jungle (The Power and the Glory), in wartime West Africa (The Heart of the Matter), in the segregated areas of Vietnam occupied by Americans (The Quiet American). The Quiet American, dealing with the Indo-China war, turns to a moral theme - how far are good intentions enough?

  Chapter 12. Literature of Britain after 1950. Literature of the Age of Postmodernism

  Part A.

  The British novel paved its way to a sort of dystopia - the most frightening forecast is to be found in Huxley's Brave New World, but a year before his death, he published a book called Island in which a feasible modern utopia is presented, though it is disrupted by human ambition and malice. The war novel is a distinct category of contemporary fiction, and perhaps the best evocations of World War II are to be found in the USA - with Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, Joseph Heller's Catch-22, Irwing Shaw's Young Lions, and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, but Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour was revealed as not only his finest work but as one of the fewest major British contributions to the category (the other great work about the Second World War is Martin Amis's Time's Arrow (1991). The trilogy which began with Men at Arms and Officers and Gentlemen was completed in 1961 with Unconditional Surrender, and the three novels, much revised, were eventually issued as a single volume called Sword of Honour.

  In the mid-fifties it was becoming clear that the new world promised in 1945 would not materialise. Despite the reduced importance Britain had in the world after the war, traditional institutions of the state seemed incapable of change and to have no sense of direction. The dissatisfaction and alienation felt by the young generation led to a reaction against middle-class values and a release of working class energies. The term 'Angry Young Men' was a journalistic phrase widely applied for about ten years to the writers of the time who vigorously expressed their disillusion without having many positive values to put in the place of those they opposed. One of the best works of the tendency was John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger.

  At the same time there developed several literary tendecies appearing one after another:

• 'new left' literature;

• teenagers' literature (the end of the 1950-60's);

• the working class novel;

• the new wave drama.

The novel with a philosophical tendency attained great power and traditional satirical trend was employed in the novel type, and satirical novel triumphed. Political and social motives rush to appear in the realistic fiction of the period. Charles Percy Snow, an ardent adherent of the classical tradition, James Aldridge and Graham Greene presented their varieties of works which are of political and social character, that touch upon numerous problems of individual and national depression, disillusionment, inward or outward conflicts. All this is entwined with a philosophical tendency to analyse and generalise.

Charles Percy Snow (1905 - 1980) dedicated himself to literature. His first novel was a detective narrative Death Under Sail (1932). Literary fame came to Snow in 1940 when he started publishing a series of novels under the general title of Strangers and Brothers. It took him more than a quarter of a century to finish his work, comprised of eleven novels, the most important ones being: The Light and the Dark (1947), Time of Hope (1949), The Conscience of the Rich (1958), The Affair (1960), Corridors of Power (1964). His last novel of the series was finished in 1970, it is called Last Things. The title of the series is highly symbolic. People are strangers if they live alone, isolated from their environment. But there is something uniting all of them: griefs and sorrows, happiness and joy, which make them all of them brothers. The limits of these notions are very frail, for today's strangers may become tomorrow's brothers and vice versa. Snow is a master of social portrait. Many writers of the time have revealed undercurrents of cynicism and nihilism, and a loss of faith in contemporary man.

Existentialism - is a new philosophy that appeared in France. As a philosophy it was modern before World War I and it remained popular after the war. It represents a theory which is derived from Kierkegaard and made popular by Sartre. The theory regards man as a unique and isolated individual in a meaningless, hostile world, responsible for his own actions and free to choose his destiny. Existentialism rejects the idea that external factors or general principles govern human behaviour as sincere and authentic if it results from an absolute inner conviction.. One's individual conscience is the very centre of the Universe. The life of society is the existence of an independent human being. It is characterised by very deep pessimism, because it concerns a miserable, solitary individual, who finds himself in the world of absurdity.

This individual thinks of his/her abandonment, neglect, depression, melancholy, anguish and anxiety. life itself is is being for death. The hero is an unhappy solitary individual, helpless to understand the existing absurd reality. This puts forth the theory of alienation from the rest of the world. Existentialism stresses strong disgust to the world of egoism and absurd things, and they put this disgust against life on the individual's shoulders. Basically, existentialism is hostile to realism in that it shows that in technical revolution and scientific achievements, enormous hidden power of man and the man himself are completely lost in the world - the world of neglect and fear. Sartre's idea: 'the world is dead when I die' has become the essential characteristic of existentialism.

The image of human nature in modern literature is Totalitarian Man, particularly exemplified in the works of Sartre and French existentialists. This man feels anguish, or 'Angst', in the face of an absurd or hostile universe. His highest value is his own will, his own assertion of his solitary self, against a society suffering from the absence of God in it and its own hypocrisy and pointlesness. Totalitarian Man's major virtue is sincerity, that is, a scrupulous attention to presenting himself as he sees himself. Iris Murdoch feels that this image of the human self is inadequate, partly because it is egoistic, partly because it does not allow for the variety of experience, men, language, which human beings in practice encounter. She attempts to reassure the implicit and explicit values of the great nineteenth century novelists who (because the nineteenth century was dynamic and interesting) were more interested in the precise detail of life, and the relation to complexities of thought. In her essay 'The Sublime and the Good', I. Murdoch attempts to be more precise about the processes by which we historically and personally, arrive at experiences of freedom, or virtue, or beauty. In her book on sartre she is much concerned with limiting and defining his notions of freedom, both in art and in politics. In 'The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited' she comes to define freedom and virtue as in some ways identical - they are related to beauty, because they are related to the kind of formal truth-seeking of the artist.

One of the moral and aesthetic terms to which I. Murdoch most frequently returns is 'attention'. 'Attention' is a word used by Simone Weil to describe the constantly renewed attempt to see things, objects, people, moral situations, truly, as they are, uncoloured by our own personal fantasies or needs for consolation. attention is in this sense a willed, thoughtful, selfless contemplation. In her thought, duch attention is connected with Kant's concept of 'Achtung' (attention) or respect for the moral law, which is a kind of suffering pride which accompanies, though it does not motivate the recognition of duty. It is an actual experience of freedom (akin to the existential 'Angst'), the realization that although swayed by passion we are also capable of rational conduct. It is such attention which causes Murdoch in 'On 'God' and 'Good'' to be able to write: 'Freedom is not strictly the exercise of the will; but rather the experience of accurate vision which, when this becomes appropriate, occasions action'. The concept of attention in her terms is closely related to the concept of good, goodness.

...One may start from the assertion that morality, goodness, is a form of realism. The idea of a really good man living in a private dream seems unacceptable. Of course, a good man may be infinitely eccentric, but he must know certain things about his surroundings, most obviously the existence of other people and their claims. the chief enemy of excellence in morality (and also in art) is personal fantasy... We can see in mediocre art ... the intrusion of fantasy, the assertion of self, the dimming of any reflection of the real world. Art and morals are with certain provisos ... one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality (Murdoch 1971, p. 165).

In her later essay, 'Existentialists and Mystics', Murdoch created another dichotomy - between the existential novel and the mystical one. The existential novel derives from Romanticism - especially the idea of the Totalitarian Man: it believes in the individual will and vision, in a society where there are no longer political or religious certainties to give automatic depth to a picture. It is 'the story of the lonely brave man defiant without optimism, proud without pretention, an exposer of shams, whose mode of being is a deep criticism of society. He is an adventurer. He is godless. He does not suffer from guilt. He thinks of himself as free'. These words can be characteristic of the works by D. H. Lawrence, Hemingway, Camus and Sartre. The mystical novel tries to return to the concept of God, or good, or virtue, and it has to invent its own religious images in an empty situation (Greene, Spark, Golding). She claims that the new generation concerned with human needs, now always present to our consciousness, for food, shelter, survival, is in fact utilitarian in that it works, morally, spiritually, up and out from biological survival. And this utilitarianism is a form of naturalism.

Literature is a battle between real people and images. Novels are individuals, about individuals, essentially comic, essentially sad, telling of the secret travail which ordinary life conceals, and formulating deep truths about human society and the human soul. They are also works of art (Murdoch 1971, p. 208).

The individual novels and the individuals within novels represent the gamut of human experience and human emotions; comedy and tragedy exist side by side and the extremes of behaviour and the intricacies of relationships serve only to highlight the actualities of ordinary life in which we strive towards fuller understanding of ourselves and consequently of the world around us. The novels are metaphors of life and consiously presented as art, so that the reality of life is subsumed into the realm of an invented world.

Bernard Bergonzi draws attention to the survival in the English life of the period of much that has vanished elsewhere. England can seem, he says, 'a living fragment of the nineteenth century' (Bergonzi 1976, p. 36). English novelists cannot simply copy Victorian novels but nor can they ignore them.

Daniel Martin in John Fowles's novel Daniel Martin (1977) remarks on the situation. He has had to escvape to California from his Victorian childhood in the 1930's: 'My contemporaries were all brought up in some degree of the nineteenth century, since the twentieth did not begin until 1945. That is why we are on the rack, forced into one of the longest and most abrupt cultural stretches in the history of mankind' (Fowles 1977, p. 14). Daniel Martin is conceived as an important novel, a seven-hundred-page opus, which recreates traditional procedures: international situation; detailed background; prolonged discussion of themes among the characters. It brings Victorian methods to bear on ways of life - at Oxford., on a farm, on a great estate - which are still partly Victorian. Fowles's earlier novel The French Leutenant's Woman (1969) tells a Victorian story from a contemporary point of view; and the disparity between content and method, which is so startling there, is present to some degree in most British novels. In the case of The French Leutenant's Woman, the result is a modern classic. The interest it has aroused is connected with what Malcolm Bradbury calls 'ann essential evolution of consciousness and society, from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, which has taken us across some essential divide in the matter of reality'.

While an intellectual avant-garde has developed in the way Bradbury suggests, many readers remain confused about 'the essential divide' between the two centuries, where the novel is concerned, and hence the hostility to experimentation here. What remains clear is the fact that V. Woolf, E. M. Forster, and J. Joyce, the first 'modernist generation' after the Victorians can be called classical modernists to distinguish them from the generation of the post-war writers. David Lodge in his Modes of Modern Writing (1977) in the chapter 'Postmodernist fiction' provides a clear account: he calls Beckett and writers who broke away from Joyce and Proust in the 40's and 50's a 'postmodernist', and a subsequent phase of innovations in the 60's and 70's he calls 'new post-modernistic' (they include John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, John Hawks in the USA, John Fowles, Muriel Spark, Martin Amis, Malcolm Bradbury, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, etc. in Britain).

Iris Murdoch herself wrote later that the 'philosophical self' that she had been a champion of for so long was vanishing ceding its place to the 'scientific self'. That transition presupposed weakening of moral thinking, philosophising, and enhancing playful problematising and theoretising. That marked the beginning of new thinking and rethinking of the state of the world and the position of man in that world in the 70's and later.

Part B. (from M. Bradbury, The Modern British Novel, chapter 7, pp. 394 –458)