Lecture 2

The canon of the Angry Young Men writers (John Osborne, Kingsley Amis, John Wain, John Braine). The rising of the middle class and the reflecting of its problems in literature.

Angry young men — a new trend in English literature appeared in the fifties of the XX century as a result of disillusionment in post-war bourgeois reality. The writers of the trend criticize contemporary society, but do not show the way out of the impasse.

They were not "angry" 'in the strict sense of the word, they were not all young and not all men either (Doris Lessing and Iris Murdoch are women), but all the members of the group shared a strong fresh viewpoint which had made them unquestionably a new and interesting literary phenomenon of the post-war years. These writers of the fifties, judging by their works and their manner of writing are widely different. At the same time these writers have also much in common. They all belong to the young writers who came into literature after World War II. In different ways and in many voices the younger generation of writers, critics, poets and intelligentsia in the age group of roughly 25 to 35 had been expressing irritation at the scene around them. With the production and immense success of J. Osborne's Look Back in Anger which was staged at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1956, they found a symbol of their dissatisfaction. The term derived from the play itself — "Angry Young Men" has by now passed into the language. The theatre was an important forum for the "angry young men" and for their more radical contemporaries. Harold Pinter (b.1930) with his works The Caretaker, the Homecoming, No Man's Land, and other dramatist of the time associated with the Theatre of the Absurd abandoned realism, plot and characterization in order to communicate a sense of emptiness and absurdity of modern existence.

The best known writers of the group are the novelists Kingsley Amis, John Wain and John Braine, Doris Lessing and Iris Murdoch, and playwright John Osborne.

All these writers pictured the life of young people dissatisfied with something in their surrounding life. Their works are full of irritation and confusion caused, on the one hand, by the bourgeois way of life and on the other, by their lack of purpose.

There were some concrete social factors which called forth the general discontent among the post-war younger generation. When World War II came to an end, many people in the Western countries expected democratic reforms. This expectation was especially strong in England where the Labour Party promised a free and prosperous life to millions of common people. Therefore many people supported the Labour Party which was going to carry out a social revolution. Years passed, however, and nothing changed for the better. Politicians are marvels of energy and principle when they are out of office, but when, they are in they simply run behind the machine. As soon as the British Labourists came to power they forgot to abide by their commitments. These social factors also determined the peculiarities of literary works by the young writers of the fifties.

The young people of the 50s can rightly be called “second lost generation”. The two generations lived in the alike time and conditions - the war and post-war time. They both lost their previous beliefs in the governments who promised them better life, they were disillusioned and disappointed, they did not enjoy real democracy and their bitterness and anger was endless.

But there is a great difference between the two generations. Lost generation actively fought for better life in the trenches of World War I, while angry young men were passive. They did not take part in the war; they were young people fresh from red-brick universities with the diplomas in their pockets. They could not use their knowledge. They spoke much about faithfulness but they were not devoted to their friends and beloved. Their disillusion concerns primarily their conditions and unsettledness. Daily routine sharpened their realization of being useless in the society - on which they laid their hopes. They cried out their hearts and souls undertaking no steps to make the life better. Angry young men declared that they were not only “lost” but also "betrayed" and directed their bitter abuses at everybody and everything.

They belong to the English postwar generation which has not found its place in life. They did not, however, have any noble cause in the name of which they would be ready to fight.

In general, the heroes of the "angry young men" writers are young: men who came from the lower quarters to upper decent society by either getting education or by marrying a girl from a rich family. The society was strange and hostile to the young men. Some of them fought tooth and nail against representatives of the upper class, others returned to their own folk. Many of them, in case they returned to their own class_, loathed the idea of suffering disabilities in all aspects of life. All these people had one common feeling - the aversion to the Establishment.

Look Back in Anger by J. Osborne as an iconic play about the problems of the second lost generation.

John Osborne 1929-1994

John Osborne was born on December 12, 1929 in Fulham, London. His father was an advertising copywriter. He died in 1941, leaving John Osborne an insurance settlement which gave the boy the possibility to enroll at Belmont College in Devon from which he was expelled after striking the headmaster at the age of sixteen. Later he spent about eight years as an actor in a provincial repertory theatre. After serving as actor-manager for some repertory companies he decided to try his hand at playwriting. When his first produced play Look Back in Anger appeared at the Royal Court theatre, its author was totally unknown. But immediately after the staging of the play Osborne became noted as a representative of a new generation of dramatists. His play is considered by many critics to be the turning point in post-war British theatre and his character Jimmy Porter came to represent the entire generation of young men of the period.

In 1957 The Entertainer was produced, at the Royal Court. Osborne continues to examine the society, showing the life of three iterations of entertainers which symbolizes the decline of England after World War II. Epitaph for George Dillon appeared in 1958. Since that time J. Osborne has written many other plays staged by both British theatres and theatres abroad, including The World of Paul Slickey (1959) and Luther (1961), Inadmissible Evidence (1965), well as numerous articles and autobiographical essays.

John Osborne died on December 24, 1994 due to complications caused by diabetes. His literary heritage is large. Besides his works for the stage he left several autobiographical works.

Look Back in Anger. In the years immediately after the war the best of the notably successful dramatists wrote mainly about the problems of the rich and well-to-do. Working-class characters rarely appeared and when they did, it was usually to supply comic relief.With the production of Look Back in Anger the whole situation changed.

It is a play about the rebellion of an educated young man of "the lower classes" against the contemporary society, and about loving and being loved. It was written by a young author about his own generation.

The most noticeable feature about this work is the presence of a dominating male hero - Jimmy Porter, an aggressive and unsuccessful university graduate. Jimmy Porter got married to Alison, a girl from a rich family whose world is alien to him. He lives in a tiny room with the pretty young woman, but he is appalled by the indifference and apathy around him.

Jimmy Porter is probably the best known manifestation of the angry spirit in Britain. He is also a very disagreeable hero — a self-centered bully filled with self pity, but pitiless with others. He is angry with his wife and with his mother-in-law, likewise with education, religion, love, the government and almost anything and everything that happens to come his way. He is in conflict with the world around him. People do not seem to be capable of dying for high principles and motives. Jimmy Porter's famous statement about the causes is as personally revealing as it is politically pointed: "I suppose people of our generation aren't able to die for good causes any longer. We had all that done for us, in the thirties and the forties, when we were still kids. There aren't any good, brave causes left. If the big bang does come, and we all get killed off, it won't be in aid of the old-fashioned, grand design. It'll just be for the Brave New-nothing-very-much-thank you. About as pointless and inglorious, as stepping in front of a bus." The statement expresses tooth political skepticism and personal frustration. It is a comment on society and a way for Jimmy to express his anger churning within hum. Causes are, and always were, too abstract for people like Jimmy.

Jimmy Porter comes from a worker's family, but has broken from his own class and become a cultural snob (he reads only the safe classics and the Sunday Paper, likes only traditional jazz), he lives in an attic flat in a drab Midland town and makes his living by keeping a sweet stall in the market. Everything in his life dissatisfies him, and the tone of his conversation being mainly monologue is one of complaint. Jimmy doesn't act but speaks much. He hates everything and everybody. "God. How I hate Sundays", he exclaims. "it's always so depressing, always the same. We never seem to get any further, do we? Always the same ritual. Reading the papers, drinking tea, ironing... Nobody thinks, nobody cares. No beliefs, no convictions and no enthusiasm. Just another Sunday evening." The principal sufferer from all this is his wife. Jimmy says that "She's moved long ago into a lovely little cottage of her soul, cut right off from the ugly problems of the 20^th century altogether. She prefers to be cut off from all the conveniences we've fought to get for centuries." When Alison's friend Helena, an actress, arrives she makes the situation intolerable by her presence and packs off Alison to her home and family. In the third act Jimmy turns out to be settled fairly happily with Helena because she stands up to him more and partly because he is not bound to her by anything. Having lost her baby, Alison comes back, and Helena leaves Jimmy. In his frustration Jimmy voices what is his indictment of society: 'They all want to escape from the pain of being alive. And, most of all, from love. I always knew something like this would turn up - some problem, like an ill wife - and it would be too much for those delicate, hot-house feelings of yours. It's no good trying to fool yourself about love. You can't fall into it like a soft job, without dirtying up your hands. It takes muscles and guts. And if you can't bear the thought of messing up your nice, clean soul, you'd better give up the whole idea of life."

Both Helena and Alison seem, to understand what Jimmy is saying. They love him, not because they agree with his attacks on religion, love or genteel society, but because they recognize and respond to his human energy.

The other characters of the play only help to reveal Jimmy's conflict with the society, the reasons of his anger, bitterness and solitude that runs through the whole play. Jimmy protests against his being inferior, against decency of the society, respectability of the middle class. He is a tragic figure: no ideals, no hope, no love. Jimmy is a rebel, having no programme and aim. He is dull - neither negative nor positive. We feel concerned with his irritative character as if everything got mixed in him, with his own jargon, his own mode of life, his brusque humour and bitter irony. His protest is typical for a definite age of 20 and 30 years. But at least he is honest: he protests against being inferior in the society. "Do you know - I have discovered what is wrong with Jimmy? says Helena. "It's very simple really. He was born out of his time. There's no place for people like that any longer — in sex, or politics, or anything... he thinks he's still in the middle of the French Revolution. He doesn't know where he is, or where he's going."

Although in Osborne's play the hero is at odds with the world around him, still he is deeply related to this society even when he is rebelling against it, rebelling without aim, for the world of today is not treating him according to his expectations.

All Osborne's heroes are young men, who have obtained a university education in some second-rate provincial university. After graduation they work, as a rule, at some modest post as librarians, office clerks, salesmen, etc. Their behaviour is often challenging and far from being correct. Their dull life depresses them and therefore they are "angry" with themselves and with the people they come, in touch with. But after having loudly* uttered their discontent, they all make, each in a different way, a compromise with the society they have been revolting against, they become easily satisfied with some material gain. They do not have any higher social ideals.

Among the other typical characters of the “Angry Young Men” are Jim Dickson in Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, Charles Lumley in Hurry On Down by John Wain, Joe Lampton in Room at the Top and its sequel Life at the Top by John Braine.

The philosophical works by Iris Murdoch: the way from existentialism to Platonism. The Bell.

Iris murdoch 1919-1999

Existentialism (atheistic, Sartrean variety): A very popular theory in the late 1940s through the 1960s. In Western religious views for some two thousand years, human beings live in a kind of Middle Earth between Heaven above and Hell beneath, connected with Nature and with each other if at all through God and/or God's love. Atheistic Existentialism gets rid of God, heaven, and hell, leaving Man on a great plane surface, with no God to define "human nature" for humans to fulfill or to specify what is allowed and what forbidden, what is good and what is bad and reward good actions or punish evil. Man is alone, outside of Nature, abandoned, cut off from his fellows, alienated, forlorn, in pain, despairing, and free, including free to define himself and will himself to be what he and (therefore) all people should be.

Platonism is the view that there exist abstract objects (universals), and again, an object is abstract just in case it is non-spatiotemporal, i.e., does not exist in space or time. Because abstract objects are wholly non-spatiotemporal, it follows that they are also entirely non-physical (they do not exist in the physical world and aren't made of physical stuff) and non-mental (they aren't minds and aren't ideas in minds, or brains, or disembodied souls, or Gods, or anything else along these lines). In addition, they are unchanging and entirely causally inert — that is, they cannot be involved in cause-and-effect relationships with other objects. All of this might be somewhat perplexing; for with all of these statements about what abstract objects are not, it might be unclear what they are. Three examples of things that are often taken to be abstract are (a) mathematical objects (most notably, numbers), (b) properties, and (c) propositions.

Iris Murdoch has written novels, drama, philosophical criticism, critical theory, poetry, a short story, a pamphlet but she is best known and most successful as a philosopher and a novelist. Although she claims not to be a philosophical novelist and does not want philosophy to intrude too openly into her novels, she is a Platonist, and moral philosophy, aesthetics, and characterization are clearly interrelated in her novels.

Murdoch began to write prose in 1953. She soon became very popular with the English readers. Her novels Under the Net, The Flight from the Enchanter, The Sandcastle, The Unicorn, The Red and the Green, The Time of the Angels, An Accidental Man, The Black Prince, and many others are characterized by the deep interest in philosophical problems and in the inner world of the man. Iris Murdoch shows the loneliness and sufferings of the human being in the hostile world.

Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin in 1919. She attended school in Bristol and studied philosophy at Cambridge and Oxford, the two oldest universities in England. Then for many years Murdoch was teaching philosophy at Oxford. French writers and philosophers, including Jean-Paul Sartre and Samuel Beckett influenced her early writing. By the time she began to write Murdoch was a convinced adherent of the existentialist trend in philosophy and these problems rule the focus of her attention in many of her novels. Her first novel, Under the Net (1954), has extensive existential derivations. She published two books on philosophy: Sartre, Romantic Rationalist and The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Conceptions.

She always strived to be a realist in her novels and mentioned that not once in her interviews and critical essays on literature and style. Although honest, intelligent, and well written, the novels of Iris Murdoch nevertheless lack clear definition. Her manner was that of intricate weavings, blending both reality and dreams, and all that enveloped in a complicated psychological "pudding". Under the Net fits into the humorous pattern set by Kingsley Amis in Lucky Jim (1954) and John Wain in Hurry on Down (1953). Her Jake Donaghue of this novel is akin to Amis's Jim Dixon and Wain's Charles Lumley, in that he maintains his own kind of somewhat dubious integrity and tries to make his way without forsaking his dignity, and increasingly difficult accomplishment in a world which offers devilish rewards for loss of integrity and dignity. Jake is an angry middle-aged man who mocks society and its respectability. He moves playfully around law and order; he does small things on the sly - swims in the Thames at night, steals a performing dog, sneaks in and out of locked apartments, steals food. His is a puerile existence in which he remains "pure" even while carrying on his adolescent activities.

Under the Net, The Flight from the Enchanter, The Sandcastle, and The Bell established Iris Murdoch's point of view and method, and set up the major themes of her career: her wish to preserve in fiction the sense of the contingent, the unpredictability of human nature, the contraries of ordinary character, the intractability of the world where we live.

Murdoch's novels written in the 60s and 70s of the twentieth century such as A Severed Head (1961), The Time of the Angels (1966), A Fairly Honorable Defeat (1970), The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974), The Black Prince (1973), Henry and Cato (1976) are full of senseless crimes, horrors and intricate love affairs. The extreme situations in which she places her characters spring from the synthesis of two contradictory propositions that underlie her works. These propositions run as follows: "Everything must happen in accordance with the laws of logic therefore nothing that happens is intrinsically surprising" and "Everything that happens is contingent, therefore it is free and involves a total response of the human personality, therefore it is always surprising." So the world of Iris Murdoch is a mixture of most of the elements of our everyday life and experience, and symbolic elements loaded with implications and puzzles. In her latest novels the writer's inlaid vision has become suppressed and obscured in a way by somewhat pessimistic approach to the individual and society.

Her characters are memorable primarily because they do have a realistic psychological and philosophical basis. Unlike those of many modern writers, Murdoch's characters exist independently, not as a reflection of their author, and she presents them, even demonic figures like Julius King in A Fairy Honourable Defeat, lovingly and without judgement. In keeping with her moral philosophy, few of Murdoch's characters possess correct vision, but many experience momentary enlightenment.

The Unicorn, one of Murdoch's best novels, gives a picture of different human passions and relationships. Marian Taylor, a young educated woman was asked as a private teacher to a family living in very lonely place. Very soon Marian begins to notice very strange, mysterious and unusual things about the place and the people.

Love is the dominant theme of Murdoch's later novels. They emphasize and aspire towards the truth-conveying capacity of art, for Murdoch believes that great art reveals truths for generations to come, and she insists on the artist's duty to tell truth as he sees it. Critics complain about unevenness, the need for editing, and intellectualism, but there is no denying the rich and varied texture of the Murdoch world, peopled with real and various characters.

The Bell. For Iris Murdoch, there are basically two kinds of people. There are those for whom life is desperate; they are deeply committed to whatever they are engaged in, and they can see nothing else. In their steadfastness, they may become grim and morbid. Then there are those for whom life has not settled into any fixed pattern; they are flexible and mobile, desirous of variety and willing to make changes. In the first group, we have Michael Meade, the leader of a lay religious community located near an Anglican Order of nuns. In the second group, there is Dora, an easily distracted young woman, who comes to the community with her youthful friend, Toby Gashe.

The conflict concerns the relations of the spirited, sensual, and unintellectual Dora with her husband and later with the community, whose spirit is so completely different from her own. The clash between the two is inevitable, and Iris Murdoch chooses to define the conflict in terms of burlesque - a practical joke demonstrates Dora's need for self-expression at the expense of the community. The joke centers around a bell, a bell that comes with a legend from the past. In the legend, the bell of the then Benedictine order of nuns fell into the lake, the result of the Bishop's curse. The curse itself derived from the infidelity of a nun and her refusal to confess. When the bell flew into the lake, the guilty nun, overwhelmed by the demonstration of God's power of punishment, flew from the Abbey and drowned herself in the lake.

The present community is planning to install a bell of its own, and it occurs to Dora and Toby Gashe that a bell they have located at the bottom of the lake should be substituted for the new one. The one at the bottom, they feel, is the bell of the legend; the substitution will provoke astonishment and also provide them with entertainment.

The parabolical novels by William Golding. The Lord of the Flies as a parable about the historical ways of the mankind.

WILLIAM GOLDING 1911-1993

A parable is a brief, succinct [sәk’siŋkt] story, in prose or verse, that illustrates a moral or religious lesson. It differs from a fable in excluding animals, plants, inanimate objects, and forces of nature as actors that assume speech and other powers of mankind.

The prominent place in modern English literature is taken by William Golding due to his philosophical and allegorical novels. He was educated at Grammar School and at Oxford. He was in the Navy during World War II. Golding is the author of a number of essays, radio plays, short stories, a good deal of poetry, but his name first became known to the general public when his novel Lord of the Flies was published in 1954. It appeared as a response to Robert Michael Ballantyne's novel Coral Island (1858). That novel irritated Golding by its vitality and romanticism when he read the book already after the war. The group of children who happened on an uninhabited island behaved themselves like real gentlemen. They were kind and humane; the fire they made united them. Golding's war experience installed him in the idea that evil and cruelty are inherent in man and can not be explained only by the pressure of social mechanisms. He said that the basis of evil is to be found inside the country and its people. The cruelty of fascism and the war horrors made the writer think over the fate of mankind and nature of man.

Lord of the Flies. His novel Lord of the Flies is written as a warning about the subsequences of fascism. This novel has been called a modern classic and has had great popularity. The story tells of how nice people can, under certain circumstances, become savages very quickly. It is a story about a group of boys who found themselves on a desert island when their plane was shot down, and all the grown-ups perished. The island is not a real island; it symbolizes everyone who tries to act with common sense: to keep order, to built huts on the beach, to keep a fire on the mountain top as a signal. They make the fire like Ballantyne's boys did, but the fire disunites them. Stealing fire is denying the very idea of democratic equality and the conception of self estimation of individuals. Intelligent and clever boys from respectable families turn into a tribe of savages with the ugly features of tribal consciousness. The image of the beast is materialization of fear which the boys experience because they feel defenseless not only before power of nature but before each other. The original group splits into two - united around Ralph and around Jack. Simon and Piggy are the only boys whom Ralph really trusts. Jack's group is called "savages". They paint their faces, hunt pigs, kill them and then in the evening dance around "The Dance of Death". They turn into savages forgetting all norms of civilized society they were born into. Jack is only interested in hunting and power. It was sort of a game at first. They hunted pigs, and enjoyed it. "Kill the pig. Cut her throat. Spill her blood!" But very soon hunting down the beast turns into hunting down a human being. "I cut the pig's throat," said Jack, proudly, and yet twitched as he said it. "Can I borrow yours, Ralph, to make a nick in the hilt?" The pig's head, covered by myriads of flies, is materialization of emanation of evil. It is stated by Ralph when he says, "I fear ourselves." The boys regress to savagery. Like real savages they tear Simon during their dance and then brutally and deliberately smash Piggy with a huge stone. In reversing the pattern of children's adventure stories and locating evil in the boys themselves, Golding reenergized the notion of original sin. Civilization regresses rapidly. Though Golding shows that not all boys turn into savages. Ralph, Piggy, Simon, Eric and-Sam still leave the hope of possibility to fight and conquer evil.

"Ralph looked at him dumbly. For a moment he had a fleeting picture of the strange glamour that had once invested the beaches. But the island was scorched up like dead wood - Simon was dead -and Jack had... The tears began to flow and sobs shook him. He gave himself up to them now for the first time on the island; great, shuddering spasms of grief that seemed to wrench his whole body. His voice rose under the black smoke before the burning wreckage of the island; and infected by that emotion, the other little boys began to shake and sob too. And in the middle of them, with filthy body, matted hair, and unwiped nose, Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man's heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy." This is a serious warning to the world of grown-ups whose inner cruelty and savageness showed up openly and disastrously in the war.

Other novels by William Golding are The Inheritors (1955), Pincher Martin (1956), Free Fall (1959), The Spire (1964), The Pyramid (1967) Envoy Extraordinary (1971), Darkness Visible (1979), Rites of Passage (1980), A Moving Target (1984) and others.

Facile fashionable doctrines of progress and evolution are upended in The Inheritors where we see a crucial stage in the rise of our species through the eyes of Neanderthal [niǽndətα:l] man (and hear a good deal of his utterance too). Neanderthal man is innocent, pious and amiable, while our own progenitor, Homo sapiens, who comes to displace him in the process of evolutionary development, is double-minded and capable of self-deception. The theme of the human fall is present again. In Pincher Martin a shipwrecked sailor imagines that he is clinging to a bare rock desperate to survive. His past is recalled; but at, the end we learn that he died in the Wreck and that the whole recollection has taken place at the point of drowning. Free Fall is the study of Sammy Mountjoy, a successful artist, how he loses his soul and is brought up against the consequences when the girl he has seduced goes insane. In The Spire Golding studies the moral and spiritual condition of Jocelin, dean of the cathedral, whose obsessive resolve to build a great cathedral spire regardless of the consequences has a dual motivation in faith and in sheer self' assertion, through which the powers of heaven and hell collide, Golding continued to produce novels in which he experiments boldly with substance and style.

William Golding is also the author of the play The Brass Butterfly (1958), a collection of verse Poems (1934), and the books of essays The Hot Gates (1965) and A Moving Target (1982).